News

Features Rick Coates

This weekend the largest picnic in Northern Michigan will take place. Northwestern Michigan College will hold its 57th Annual Barbecue, Sunday, May 20, on the main campus “under the pines” from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Just how large is the NMC BBQ? It takes 500 volunteers to coordinate all the activities and to feed the 10,000+ expected to attend.

Letters

Tuttle right on Time

That article was 100 percent spot-on!

My uniquely effective high school English composition instructor directed his students, with each assignment of a paper that required citations of source material, “If you decide to include Time Magazine in your bibliography, please save me the trouble and go ahead and put a red ‘F’ at the top of your paper.”

His disdain for their editorial standards was total, and appropriately so.

I have my personal nominee for “Time Magazine Nonsensical Cover Hyperbole”...

Features Patrick Sullivan Marijuana advocates turn to grassroots campaign

Part two of a two-part story. Last week, the Express examined the case of Walter Sbresny, a medical marijuana patient who faces felony marijuana charges in Kalkaska County and might not be able to use his medical marijuana card-holder status as a defense at trial. This week’s story looks at the case of Archie Kiel, and the grassroots political efforts of Kiel and Sbresny.

Letters

Citizens vs. PACs

I believe American citizens, not superpacs and billionaires, have the constitutional right to elect our President, Congress, and Judges. The Citizens United vs. FEC ruling by the Supreme Court gives corporations including multinationals, foreign entities, and unions the constitutional right to spend unlimited funds to oppose or support a candidate without disclosing who is giving, how much, and to whom.

Because Citizens United says money is the same as speech, superpacs allow individuals to do the same. Those who donate the most money win the votes of the politicians. This is destroying our democracy!

Average citizens across Northern Michigan trying to voice their concerns to their legislators can be overwhelmed by the corrupting influence of outside billionaires and corporations who donate unlimited amounts of money.

As a citizen of this country that I love, as a mother and grandmother, I believe we have a right and a responsibility to elect the best legislators who will safeguard and advocate for our family, community and country...

Features Erin Crowell

Troy and Erin Curet are living the American dream. They own a four-bedroom home, have two cars, two children – a boy and a girl – and one chocolate Labrador. Both are employed: Troy, a manager at Red Mesa Grill, and Erin, a stylist at Epiphany Salon. It’s a good life, but they don’t want it.

Features Patrick Sullivan Walter Sbresny is waiting to learn whether he can use a medical marijuana defense at trial.

Part one of a two-part story. Next week, the Express will look at the case of Archie Kiel, who is appealing a 2010 marijuana conviction, and the efforts of Kiel and Sbresny to make Kalkaska County more hospitable for medical marijuana patients through a grassroots political effort.

Features Erin Crowell Suttons Bay mother donates kidney to two-year-old son

Lori Matthews had heard it once before: the unmistakable sound of a mother who had just lost her baby.

“I’ve heard the wailing sound one time and knew immediately what it was. I knew because that sound was now coming out of me,” recalled Matthews, the day her six-month-old son became limp in her arms.

Letters

Give Gitmo back

In last week’s issue Mr. Tuttle called for ending our fruitless blockade of Cuba. This is laudable and sensible.

The blockade has been an abject failure. Fidel Castro has outlasted now nine presidents. More importantly, had our blockade been ended decades ago, communism in Cuba would have been long gone and Cuba would now be a major trading partner and American vacation destination.

It was disappointing, however, that an editorial calling for an end to the blockade didn’t have a word about “Gitmo.” You know, the prison nickname for our Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...

Features Patrick Sullivan How a cigarette butt led police to a group of burglars suspected of selling weapons to Detroit gang. The first person to notice something awry was neighbor Philip Halbritter, who suspected trouble the day before a burglary even took place.

Features Erin Crowell Dean Karnazes has a lot of numbers in his life.  In 2006, he ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days (that’s 26.2 miles per run). In 2011, he ran from California to New York City, or approximately 3,000 miles, averaging 40 to 50 miles per day.

Features Patrick Sullivan

The last time Ernest Hemingway came to Northern Michigan, as far as anyone knows, was in 1947, when he visited a friend in Petoskey and checked on his cottage on Walloon Lake, on his way from Florida to Idaho.

That visit was commemorated in a small news item in the Sept. 27 edition of the Petoskey Evening News, which was reprinted in Michael Federspiel’s book, Picturing Hemingway’s Michigan.

Letters

Jesters insulted

As a peace-loving jester, I am insulted by Stephen Tuttle, who wrote, “Jesters have taken over the court.” For in the past, the jester was the only one who wouldn’t die if insulting the King about stupid wars, payoffs, corrupt policies, and poor leadership.

Today it is money that buys everyone off, even the courts, for judges and lawyers (our last resort) are needy too, and pass the buck to get in on being an elitist or rich. The rich now run everything and peasants can only dream of being an elitist/rich...

Features Erin Crowell David Milarch, the subject of a new book, uses intuition and science in an attempt to save the planet: “Did you know that 98% of our old growth forest is gone?” he asks, a rhetorical question that seems to hang in the air with the puff of cigarette smoke. As we talk in the the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive (AATA) office—a small building located in the village of Copemish—new age music streams from the office speakers.

Letters

No medical marijuana?

When I read Patrick Sullivan’s April 9th article about Lori Montroy, I was shocked to learn that a new landlord was trying to evict this woman for the second time in two years for using medical marijuana to cope with her brain cancer.

Hasn’t she been through enough in the past two years? When I called Steven Wright, Lori’s new landlord on the phone to ask him why he would allow an oxycontin addict or an alcoholic to live in his apartments but not a medical marijuana patient, he said, “Oxycontin and alcohol aren’t against federal law. I promise my tenants a drug free, family environment...

Features Ross Boisonneau “There’s so much to the food industry,” said Brown. “The next weekend (after that fateful family meeting), we went to the farm market at Building 50. The weekend after that the Department of Agriculture showed up. We had no idea you needed to be (licensed).