Michigan: It starts with changing the way we vote

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Tuesday December 11, 2012 · 10:47 PM PST

2012/12/11 · 22:47

There has been much discussion over what we can do to affect change for the next election. It's time for Michigan to join the majority of the other states in making changes to the way we vote. Specifically, I am calling for the following changes:

* Early voting
* No excuse absentee voting
* Permanent absentee voters
* Making election day a state holiday

victoryleft

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Monday December 10, 2012 · 12:26 PM PST

2012/12/10 · 12:26

Michigan is my home. My great grandparents immigrated to the United States, searching for a better life. They fought in World War I. Their children survived the great depression with harrowing stories that would horrify anyone that would listen -- except for the fact that the hardships they faced at the age of 8 or 10 or 12 would be so unimaginable to someone that is alive today. They followed Henry Ford to Detroit to work for $5 day, to escape the copper mines of the beautiful Upper Peninsula (a land even today, so beautiful that if heaven existed on earth, it would be there). I have the time sheets, and the pictures that paint a view of their world; one in which there was no such thing as worker safety, nor of the concept of overtime. There were no lawyers to fight for their rights (of which there were not many). OSHA didn't exist. Social Security or health insurance didn't exist. There was no social safety net. Nothing to prevent corporations from chewing up and spitting out the carcases of workers and replacing them with bodies, willing to do anything for a chance to put food on their families' table. I have the original bank statements that showed their account balances as the Great Depression set in. And then, after all of that, their draft notices to call them away from their homes at the ages of 18, 19, 20, to fight another battle, to fight another war for their country.

And that's what troubles me now...

victoryleft

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Wednesday February 25, 2009 · 6:13 PM PST

2009/02/25 · 18:13

In response to Jindal's address last night, I was in NOLA. The people of NOLA are friends of mine, along with many others I met down there. Unlike Jindal, I didn't do a fly over. My plane actually landed on the ground in Baton Rouge, and I was all over, helping people wherever I could.

For some background, I watched in horror, the tsunami in 2004 and yearned to go and help the people affected. But I was working and didn't have the time off to go. I swore to myself that nothing would prevent me from helping in the next disaster and when I watched the news in August 2005 and saw masses of people dying, suffering, drowning, and waiting to be rescued from their rooftops I was again horrified. This time not only for what I was seeing, but that something like this could happen in the United States.

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Michigan: It starts with changing the way we vote

UPDATE x2 So goes Michigan, so goes America...

Jindal - Small things, big difference