Metro Times: News Blawg

Still Smokin’: Detroit incinerator town hall meeting

A coalition of environmental groups and others advocating for curbside recycling in Detroit and an end to the incinerator that burns the city’s trash to produce steam and electricity will hold a town hall meeting on Saturday, Nov. 21, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at St. Elizabeth Church, 3138 Canfield (at McDougall) in Detroit.
The meeting, which will include both experts and area residents, will focus on the economic and health aspects of the incinerator. Childcare will be provided. For more information call Margaret Weber of the Coalition for a New Business Model for Detroit Solid Waste at 313-938-1133 or email mmgweber@gmail.com. ...

Acorn fights back

If you are like me, you probably don’t know what a “bill of attainder” is. At least I didn’t know until I began looking at the lawsuit the Center for Constitutional Rights just filed against the U.S. Government on behalf of the group Acorn.

Turns out a bill of attainder refers to a legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial — an act prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in a Brooklyn, New York federal court, alleges that when Congress cut off all funding to Acorn (an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) beginning Oct. 1 without first conducting an investigation or holding a hearing, the group was unfairly targeted for the type of punitive action the Constitut ...

ONIONS & TANGOS: STEFANI’S REVEALING TESTIMONY

Think of the events that led to Kwame Kilpatrick’s undoing as an onion whose layers are still being peeled away.

Last month, during proceedings before the Attorney Disciplinary Board, attorney Mike Stefani, who represented former cops Gary Brown, Harold Nelthrope and Walt Harris in their whistleblower lawsuit, disclosed that he provided the Detroit Free Press’ Jim Schaefer with copies of the now-infamous test messages between Kilpatrick and his paramour and chief of staff, C ...

HOW BADLY IS MICHIGAN SCREWED? READ THIS!

Here's something the Pew Center on the States does not say in its new report on troubled state economies:

Michigan, once a world technological leader, will settle slowly into the ooze. We will become Mississippi with ice storms, or maybe Haiti without sugar cane.

That was from a 2007 Politics and Prejudices column in Metro Times, one of a number columnist Jack Lessenberry has penned warning of the long-term consequences of Michigan's failure to confront its budget crisis. Recent weeks' columns have focused on the current mess in Lansing and the Dwayne Provience will ask a Wayne County judge to release him from prison at a hearing on Tuesday after Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy on Friday dropped opposition to having his conviction overturned.

Provience, convicted in 2001 of murdering Rene Hunter, is serving a 32- to 62-year sentence. In a separate but related murder trial with a different victim and defendant two years later, Wayne County prosecutors argued someone else killed Hunter. (See “Tale of two homicides,” in this week’s Metro Times.)

Provience, represented by the Innocence Clinic at th ...

River talk with Bill Milliken