"I don't think I have one off the top of my head. But there is no part of this government that should be sacred." -- New U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) when asked to name a government program we could do without

To paraphrase former GOP Michigan...

Former U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) is taking birtherism to a new extreme. Walberg, who's running for his old seat, said at a town hall event this week that President Obama could be impeached for not showing his birth certificate to a group of people including Rush Limbaugh.

Everyone knows the Tea Party brought Bart Stupak down.

I know this, because the (mostly out-of-state) activists storming through Michigan this week have declared it to be true. And I make it a point to always believe angry mobs.

Incidentally, I have always thought Jon & Kate Plus...

Somebody is going to get shot.

If I am wrong - and I hope desperately that I am - we will be extremely lucky. Because there is a suffocating, sweltering mood brewing in our country, like that of the anxious early 1960s.

Consider the all-too-ubiquitous racist Tea Party...

"I hope you bleed... [get] cancer and die," said an erudite caller in a message for U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) after he voted in favor of health care reform.

Throughout the hot-blooded debate over health care, one man has dominated the news almost as much as President Obama.

That...

Government, in the view of the vast majority of Americans, is a necessary evil.

We believe that a nation of 304 million people needs an apparatus for national defense, law and order and a social safety net. And we're kind of fond of the more than 233 tyranny-free years we've...

Say what you will about Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith, but the lady has guts.

She would almost have to, having been born in segregated South Carolina in 1941 and being the daughter of the first (and only) African-American mayor of Ann Arbor. Her parents were community organizers who "didn't believe...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Sarah Palin blew in here Wednesday with all the stagecraft (and subtlety) of Lady Gaga, pulling up in a luxury tour bus ensconced with the cover photo from her book, right down to her glossy lips and heavenward gaze.

Camera-waving paparazzi were there to capture...

"We are the champions, my friends," crooned Michigan Senate President Pro-Tem Randy Richardville (R-Monroe) the day after the Nov. 3 election.

Former state Rep. Mike Nofs (R-Battle Creek) had won a landslide victory for an open Senate seat, giving Republicans a firm 22-16 majority. It wasn't unexpected, nor...

Wingnuts of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but election ... after election ... after election.

That's the lesson from the far right's stinging defeat in yet another Republican congressional district this week. Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman harangued GOP Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava into dropping out --...

So here we are in Michigan with a half-baked budget at best, staring at another government shutdown on Halloween.

Why? As with many states stumbling in this economy, there's plenty of political gamesmanship at work and yes, some rank stupidity. But there are bigger questions that have gone...

By now, everyone's heard that President Barack Obama (unsuccessfully) asked New York Gov. David Paterson to step aside because the White House doesn't feel he can win. There's a fear that he'll drag the party down with him in 2010, especially in down-ballot congressional races.

So the question in...

Right now, Republicans are feeling pretty good about themselves.

President Obama's poll numbers have tumbled, health care reform has withered and raucous town hall protests have been even better summer teevee than blood-bathed shark attacks. The Politico is forecasting double-digit Democratic losses in the U.S....

I am a hopeless romantic. Give me a glass of wine, a fireplace and a little Lord Byron, and I'm a happy woman.

I have been known to reread certain works, silently cheering for Catherine and Heathcliff, Gatsby and Daisy, even Henry Miller and Anais Nin to surprise me...

In a breathless, rambling press conference outside Lake Lansing today, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm announced she wouldn't be "taking the quitter's way out" and that's why she was quittin.'

"Only dead fish go with the flow," the gov. said sagely, which observers took as some oblique reference to lutefisk, a...