Auchtoon!

We Michiganders are already well-versed in expensive auto insurance, what with our history with unique no-fault laws and personal injury protection. We continue to wrestle with finding the proper balance for the Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association.

We also continue to penalize people based on their credit scores rather than driving records, which tends to price poor people out of car insurance so more go uninsured, which in turn boosts prices for everybody.

Good news! We are not the only state experiencing auto insurance rate increases significantly outpacing inflation. The bad news, it’s an “in addition to” situation, not an “instead of” situation.

NPR had a story this week: 4 reasons why your car insurance premium is soaring. Alas, all of them simply pile onto what we are already suffering from.

Is there any solace to be found? Well, some of those Progressive commercials with Dr. Rick are pretty funny. (Unfortunately, most of the other insurance ads are ubiquitous and annoying.)

To all of you who yearn for days of yore, nostalgic for the past when things were great and life was so much better — consider time officially turned back! The Big Three and the UAW are at each other’s throats, and an auto worker strike again threatens to tank the Michigan economy. Hooray! America is great again!

Or is this not what you were talking about?

Spoiler Alert: If you have never seen the television series, The Good Place, consider reading no further. It’s best to watch it from the very beginning, and the reveal I’m about to, well, reveal is so much better experienced as intended.

So there are four main characters, modern-day human beings who have died and think they have gone to the good place (heaven). They haven’t. It’s a massively arranged hoax to torture them in a unique way (not exactly the bad place but a satellite operation). For three of the characters, it’s pretty clear why they are not in the good place — they were objectively terrible people on earth. For the fourth one, Chidi, it’s not so obvious.

Chidi was a professor of ethics. He is kind and earnest and giving. But it’s his striving for perfect morality that is his undoing. He overthinks every choice to the point of incapacitation and ultimately drives away loved ones and fails his friends. He is not at all evil. Just super, super annoying.

I’m trying not to be a Chidi with college football. I recognize that there is LOTS wrong with it, particularly the big D1 version. And, yes, recent developments have accelerated it toward awfulness. But, God help me, I still occasionally enjoy watching a game.

So, there were two PFAS-related stories this past week in Michigan — one positive, one less than positive.

The first story:

The U.S. military has agreed to install groundwater treatment systems to stop the flow of PFAS contamination around the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda — a move hailed by politicians and local advocates.

The decision, first announced in Oscoda Wednesday, is seen as a first-in-the-nation step by the U.S. Defense Department to take quicker action to contain the compound from spreading, and follows years of criticism from local and state officials about the commitment and pace of military efforts to address the environmental harm.

Hey, you don’t hear this often, but, “Good on ya, Defense Department! We appreciate you stepping up to do the right thing.”

Naturally, as an editorial cartoonist, I decided to address the second story:

A new state appeals court ruling would kill Michigan’s restrictions on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) levels in drinking water, if left standing.

The 2-1 ruling stems from a 2021 lawsuit by Minneapolis-based chemical manufacturer 3M, which argued Michigan’s process to develop drinking water standards was “rushed and invalid.”

To which 3M stockholders not living in Michigan say, “Good on ya, 3M! We appreciate you stepping up to do the right thing.”

Full disclosure: I am not a Detroit Lions supporter. My team has always been the San Francisco 49ers. Or at least since I was 6 years old and I arbitrarily decided I liked their helmet the best on the side panel of my electric football game. (There is a deeper discussion here about the just how capricious tribalism can be, but that’s for another day).

However, if not all, most Michiganders are Lions fans, and there is definitely a positive vibe going on this year. Some of it is measurable — season tickets sold out this year for the first time in Ford Field history! But mostly what I’ve detected is an underlying current. It’s optimism, but an optimism that’s unique to Lions fans. Cautious optimism is much too mild. It’s more like hopefulness but without even a trace of positive expectations. (It comes from suffering a LOT of disappointment).

In any case, there are lots of terrible things going on in the world. There always are, of course. Still, the news of war, floods, fires, indictments, etc., seem to be hitting especially hard of late. You can’t blame Lions fans for allowing themselves to be hopeful about something.

It’s a natural impulse for individuals to band together to defend themselves from a common, more powerful foe. Actually, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a foe — just a group or a person (the Supreme Court says corporations are people) who will not otherwise keep the best interests of individuals in mind in their decisions.

It is this natural impulse that drives the creation of both labor unions and boycotts, both as means of negotiating with and defending against corporate decision-making. It’s curious to me that this is often where similarities end.

As the United Auto Workers begins contract negotiations with automakers, they are seeking a better deal, especially for workers manufacturing batteries for EVs. As groups of conservatives continue to prosecute their battles with so-called woke businesses, they are seeking …a reason to quit drinking crappy beer?

On one hand, we have Governor Gretchen Whitmer, state politicians of all stripes, business leaders, educators, and community activists all brooding over Michigan’s population stagnation and what can be done to keep our youth from moving out of state.

On the other hand, we have a state that more or less requires young people to own a reliable automobile to functionally live here and then burdens them with sky-high insurance rates.

Adding insult (and potential bankruptcy) to injury, those rates no longer provide protection to survivors of catastrophic crashes, although this week’s Michigan Supreme Court decision did at least protect those injured before the 2019 no-fault reform was put into effect. But that’s not gonna help young people just starting out in Michigan.

Perhaps it’s time for the one hand to figure out what the other hand is doing.

Best wishes to all for taking a summertime break from the algorithms!

I am super excited about the World Cup, and I’ll be cheering on the U.S. team no matter whatever odd Eastern Time Zone hour they will be playing. As four-time winners and defending champs, it’s easy to be a fan of the U.S. Women. But this year will be a significantly more difficult challenge. So many other countries have vastly improved their play. So I’m enthusiastic, but certainly not over-confident.

I hesitate to draw a parallel here, because bringing people up on felony charges should never be considered a sport. However, in both athletic competition and governance the goals are similar: to work within a system with rules that provide for a fair competition.

This week, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced felony changes against 16 people who allegedly posed as electoral college members after the 2020 election. The charges are clearly targeted to actual evidence of breaking of election laws. Of course it’s political. (Everything is.) But that should never stop prosecution of broken laws. I’m looking forward to the healthy competition.

An incident at a recent Michigan Republican Party meeting in Claire featured a fight between two ardent party supporters in which one kicked the other in the groin. It was remarkable mostly in that it wasn’t so remarkable — it fully fit a pattern within the Michigan GOP of late.

Now history has clearly demonstrated that it’s better for everyone in general for a political party to have some level of dysfunction than to be a well-oiled machine. So I’m fine with dysfunction. Being preached to about family values and acting in decidedly un-family values ways… not so much.