The May 4th meeting of the Ludington City Council expanded the two-year-old Firewater-gate scandal to new proportions and made the council's complicity in the cover-up clearer than ever.  If it wasn't already made clear by their continued silence in regard to the second part of the scandal.  Let's clarify what the Firewater-gate scandal is and why it is a two-part scandal and two separate cover-ups all in one.…See More

There was a mildly surreal feel as the 100-minute meeting of the Ludington City Council on April 27th (agenda packet here) progressed and city officials showed themselves to be in an unexpectedly agreeable mood with citizens.  The surreal part is that they wouldn't come close to admitting…See More

Pere Marquette Charter Township (PMCT) has avoided the spotlight over controversies ever since the successful recall election of former Treasurer Karie Bleau in November 2023 following the resignation of her husband, former Supervisor Jerry Bleau, also facing recall at the time.  At their board of trustees meeting this week, controversies arose over a couple of different topics on the agenda.The first occurred as the board of five trustees (Treasurer Sarah Iteen was absent) considered the three…See More

Some may look at the title of this article and wonder if the shadow government to be discussed is the various individuals and business entities in the private sector who have an inordinate pull over local governments and enjoy immunities therefrom.  While these puppet masters are worth discussing, most are cautious enough to have a defense based on their own plausible deniability upon most any allegation.  This article instead is looking at the usual target of those described above, a small…See More

Magicians and politicians have the same goal, which is to use their skills to draw our attention away from what trickery they are actually performing.  These red herrings are only seen and captured by professional anglers.It's been hard to have a lot of confidence in elections in Michigan since 2020.  In that year, it's not really debatable that there was the potential for voting fraud to take place, and it's always been hard to figure out the truth of whether fraud did happen.  The party that…See More

In part one of our recap of this exciting April 13 meeting of the Ludington City Council we discussed what happened with the proposed PACE program and with a FOIA appeal that was never addressed.  As a follow-up, the local newspaper printed its own article the day after and chose to print most of this reporter's…See More