Auchtoon!

A gentle reminder (especially to myself) that just because Christmas is over doesn’t mean it’s over. The story continues.

Happy holidays, a very Merry Christmas, and peace to all in the New Year!

I’ve seen where right-wing folks have been opining and conjecturing and outright accusing Governor Whitmer of corruption. That she’s on the take from big tech and their billionaires to build their data centers. There doesn’t seem to be actual evidence of that. It’s projection. The Trump administration is absolutely grifting at every turn, and — right from the demagogue playbook — they accuse anybody not 100% with them of doing the very thing that they are actively doing.

But what I believe to be the cause of Whitmer’s increasingly blind passion for pushing data centers in Michigan is her politician instincts to land the big fish. Nothing better than a contract signing or ribbon cutting ceremony for a big facility. Jobs! Prosperity! And all because of me!

The truth is, those big fish often end up to be a big regret. Remember a few years ago and the Foxconn project that Wisconsin reeled in (or thought that they reeled in)? It started as a $10 billion plan for a massive display-panel factory promising 13,000 jobs, and then failed to materialize, leaving taxpayers on the hook. Michigan should be more focused on growing the smaller fish that we have.

I hate to be cynical. But sometimes there are pretty good reasons. Unfortunately, in these United States of America, efforts to resolve the gun violence epidemic offers one of those pretty good reasons.

After incidents at Oxford High School and Michigan State University, Governor Whitmer formed a task force to determine how to avoid future disasters. The recommendations were announced at the end of last month, and they barely made a blip on the news radar. And why would they? It will soon be 13 years since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and if that didn’t… well, currently firearm-related injuries are the leading cause of death in children and adolescents (ages 1–19) in the U.S., so obviously it didn’t.

It’s no secret what must be done — we must collectively admit that we have a problem and then pass, fund, and enforce meaningful laws. Not necessarily the exact same laws that, say, the UK passed after the Dunblane massacre in 1996, but certainly reasonable ones like many the Whitmer task force have presented.

Let me be clear: doing nothing is still the worst option. So I will continue to applaud and support efforts to reduce gun violence. But cynically speaking, joining Canada may just be the best option for Michigan.