... add it back to the bill when they think nobody's looking.

Right?

Assholes. Pardon my French.

He knows he's on most people's shit lists as it is, but we'll see. I don't trust him as far as I could throw the Ren Cen, though.

There's so much to fight we're all burned out. The latest I read about was two bills for eliminating the foreign language credits in high school.

...thank God someone came to their fucking senses up there.

His ass must still be smoldering from it...........

and it seems rare to even do that well.

We couldn't deal with the social repression in west michigan back then. I remember the shools in Allendale arguing over whether the district should be the ones paying for the bibles for prayers. (That would be the public schools.) And people putting up flyers for alternate religion get-togethers (neo-pagans, etc) to lure people to have the shit kicked out of them.

By today's standards, that seems quaint. Now the whole place seems to have gone off the deep end.

Being surrounded by the Dutch Mafia and everything in the Grand Rapids area being named after DeVos & VanAndel is beyond tiresome, but I've been fortunate enough to not have kids and to live in a bright blue section of GR that has allowed me to largely ignore the oppressive "Dutch Reformedness" of the area. I still won't read the Grand Rapids Press though, because that is the biggest conservative rag around and isn't even fit to wrap dead fish in or line a bird cage. Actually, it's not quite as oppressive as it seemed in the 1990's, but that's probably due to the ability to take refuge in the Internet and surrounding myself with like-minded friends.

and yes, GR was the place where "going dutch meant nobody pays"

when I would tour friends visiting from out of town, I would show them fours things:
- Meijers
- The Fish Ladder
- The GRFord museum
- The Hall of Free Enterprise (in Ada)

That pretty much summed up GR for me.

It's off of the East Beltline just north of I-96. It is very beautiful and well done. And not a DeVos or VanAndel in sight. The Hall of Free Enterprise is a real trip, isn't it? I used to work at Eastern Floral and we did the indoor plants for Amway. I remember going in an entry way with portraits of Richard DeVos & Jay VanAndel on opposite walls. There were candle sconces framing the pictures like it was some sort of a shrine or something. It was both creepy and hilarious at the same time. It's something I'd expect to see in a Scientology Center of L. Ron Hubbard or Reverend Moon's place, LOL.

BTW, the GRFord Museum is still around and so is that riveting "Mayaguez Incident" display and timeline on the wall.

and I was able to play on campus as a child in the 70s, when it was still "collegeS", before Seidman School of Business was even named -- he hadn't died yet, so the money wasn't in the bank, and there was no way his name was going on the place before the check cleared. She taught at William James back then -- in what is now Lake Superior hall? I never remember which lake was her building. Students and some of the faculty built a big plywood geodesic dome in the parking lot, supposedly they would drop acid in there. One year they made a huge tinkeytoy structure out of 4" PVC piping and huge wooden wheels, and installed it in Eastbrook Mall (!) for the holidays. It was quite the hippy college back then. Nothing like it is today -- current students would be shocked and horrified to learn of the history of the place.

I was only there as a student in 86 and 87 as a commuter, and got my BS. Despite my mom teaching there for decades, Lubbers still mangled the reading of my name at graduation. What a tool.

Let's see, what else. Oh, the athletic building was still a dome -- some students in the 70s painted the nipple pink one year, I think.

No, we left GR before Meijer Gardens opened. I used to work down that way, near 4 mile, I think. Before all of the re-construction in that area.

Where do you work there?

Snyder announced the budget today, which will include a huge hike in the gas tax and auto reg fees. Methinks the timing of this is just to convenient.

for the mob. It seems like a lot of these bills that border on the ridiculous are for show and to pander to their fringe group support.