After a lot of debate and controversy about Florida and Michigan’s delegates, the DNC decided to reinstate the delegates to the party convention, but at half-vote as penalty for moving their primaries. Here’s the breakdown:

→ Clinton receives 105 pledged delegates from Florida and 69 pledged delegates from Michigan, giving her 87 votes. 

→ Obama receives 67 pledged delegates from Florida and 59 pledged delegates from Michigan, giving him 63. This lessens his lead over Clinton from 202 to 174.

As Michigan is in a full-blown budget crisis, the Department of Corrections and Governor Granholm proposed yesterday that Camp Manistique, a prison labor camp in the Upper Peninsula, be shut down.  Closing Camp Manistique, which is a minimum-security facility, would save the state $4.5 million per year.  It would also cost 45 prison employees their jobs (although according to The Mining Journal, both prisoners and employees would be transferred to other facilities).

The prison employees are unionized, and they tend to vote Democrat, therefore the Dems have undertaken a full-blown campaign to keep the prison open.  Prisoners currently incarcerated in Michigan, of course, cannot vote.  Although shutting down Camp Manistique would not actually reduce the number of prisoners in the state, Michigan, like other states, has a detention and corrections budget spiraling out of control.  Michigan’s annual prison budget is $1.9 billion, a fifth of the state’s general fund.  Tom Clay from Citizens Research Council of Michigan says that if Michigan didn’t have such high rates of incarceration compared to other Great Lakes states, the prison budget would be closer to $1.4 billion.  According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, “States such as Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania have more residents than Michigan but incarcerate fewer inmates. Michigan's per-capita incarceration rate is the country's 11th-highest, ranks higher than seven other Great Lakes states and is fourth-highest among the 11 most populous states.”

Right now, University of Michigan students are staging a sit-in to end the use of sweatshop labor for university licensed apparel.  The students are demanding that the administration accept a Designated Suppliers Program and Code of Conduct for its licensees, that will actually reward factories for adopting fair and humane labor standards for its workers—thus reversing the “race to the bottom” trend, into a “race to the top.”  The best part of this plan, developed largely by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), is that the Workers’ Rights Consortium, in cooperation with the local union or union-like entity, monitors and evaluates their places of employment for compliance with the Code of Conduct.  Workers can request that the factory be taken off the list of Code-compliant factories if violations occur.

Call, e-mail or fax the University of Michigan president, Mary Sue Coleman, now!  Tell her that you support the students sitting in and want the University of Michigan to be an example to other schools committed to the dignity of workers everywhere.  College apparel is a multi-billion dollar industry, and this plan has the potential to make real change.

Before the state of Michigan set back civil rights with the passage of Proposal 2, the affirmative action ban, in November 2006, it set back civil rights with the other Proposal 2, which banned gay marriage, in 2004. Almost 3 years later, we are dealing with the aftermath.  Last week, the Michigan Court of Appeals declared that under the marriage ban, same-sex domestic partners are ineligible for benefits from public employers.  This reversed an earlier decision by a lower court, which affirmed the right of same-sex couples to continue to receive benefits post-Prop 2.  Countless government, public college and university employees now have their futures hanging in limbo.

Things are getting rough out in my home state...I wish I could say I didn't run away from it all, but I did.