Blogs: News Blawg

Anyone interested in a concise summary of the lengths Manuel “Matty” Moroun and the Detroit International Bridge Co. have gone to in order to prevent a publicly owned bridge from being constructed downriver should read Troubled Crossing, a report just issued by the good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The...
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Pro-marijuana activists won a great victory in the Michigan Supreme Court today when the high court ruled that Detroit voters should be allowed to decide whether they want to liberalize the city’s marijuana law. It is been a long fight. Two years ago the Coalition for a Safer Detroit gathered enough signatures to place...
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A couple weeks ago, Curt Guyette‘s News Hits column took aim at the widely discussed and totally bogus crisis of voter fraud — and the less-discussed but all too real crisis of looming voter suppression. “Mess of suppression: Why voter ID laws are solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist” was our headline.” Today...
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With the Kandahar, Jalalabad, Kabul and the Afghanistan experiences behind me now, and in hindsight – most of these visits had elements of serious danger sometimes for members of the audiences, for the military who assisted us at each location, and, dare I say, for me. But I was warmly welcomed in a very...
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In a sort of fever-dream burlesque with a radical chorus chiming in, Detroit attorney Thomas Stephens channels, among others, Crazy Horse, Emma  Goldman, Harriet Tubman and Coleman A. Young to provide a distinctly lefty take on Detroit’s “consent agreement” and, as he describes it, the corporate power-structure’s plans to keep sucking blood from the...
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A just-released report titled “Basic Decency: Protecting the human rights of children” is both heart breaking and infuriating. The study looks at the way Michigan treats juveniles found guilty of first-degree murder. It is grim reading. As noted in the introduction: To date, 376 young people have been sentenced to life without the possibility...
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I met some very hip writers Kabul filmmakers, painters and musicians at the Afghan Cultural House (the MOCAD of Kabul) http://ach.af/. I performed a few poems for them, which they said, “We like! We Like!” I did some “Blood in the Moon” (they seem very biggly on both blood and the moon over here)....
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Hey Ya Detroit! M. L. Liebler has officially left The Stan & the Barracks. Let the blogging continue: I traveled out to Orange Blossom country in beautiful Jalalabad in Nangarhar Province. Jalalabad is a stone’s through from the famous Kyber Pass which is the gateway to Pakistan. We helicoptered in from Kabul passing over...
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For security reason, I am going to temporarily  suspend my Blogging until I leave Afghanistan. I have some MT Blogs stored up that I can post soon. Stand by…. I have some interesting  and very cool literary arts stories to share with my friends and interested folks. I just did a gig at The...
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Yesterday was a productive and very interesting day. I spent Sunday morning with the wonderful women writers of The Afghan Women Writers’ Project. We met in an undisclosed location in a neighborhood in Kabul as the women are all writing poetry about their life experiences anonymously. They shared some of their writing with me...
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