I lived in Kalamazoo for two years, having been lured there with a very nice job at a Big Phrma company called Pharmacia. One year after I got there, Pharmacia was taken over by Pfizer, and 9 month after that, they fired everybody.

Kalamazoo had had a GM plant, paper mills and a drug company, and that kept that very nice sized town comfortable for over a hundred years. The drug company had been Upjohn before Monsanto and Searle and Pharmacia took it over and over and over again.

In two years I came to LOVE Michigan. I have lived jsut about everywhere for at least a couple of years at a time---Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Pacific Northwest, Urbana, IL..... and I have to say Michigan was as beautiful as any of the rest (as beautiful as atlanta in the spring, and as beautiful as Oregon in the summer). It has autumns right out of photography books, it has unbelievably rich agriculture, with farm ripened fruits everywhere.... it has abundant supplies of water, and wildlife, and it is truly a nature's wonderland. I would have been happy living there for the rest of my life.

But the paper mills closed when they Kalamazoo River goot too polluted. It is still polluted. The GM plant shut down years ago and remains a vast empty wasteland. Pfizer finally killed Upjohn. Jennifer Granholm is trying her best to support BIotech development initiatives, and tourism, but those are small cures for a large problem.

Michigan's universities (aside from UM Ann Arbor) are actually not particularly competitive. All due respect to Michigan State, but it and Western Michigan and CVSU and all of the rest mentioned in this thread do not provide training for their students to graduate as qualified competitors with similar universities elsewhere.

I think the answer has to be education. But that is an answer that requires patience. It won't turn overburdened economies around over night. The poster from New Orleans had it right---they are very much similar in that their problems are conveniently ignored by a government that considers them dispensalbe. So rather than worry about buying American cars, or tourism or even Biotech startups, I think I would put every cent, every ounce of manpower into building up education in that state. Since I left Kalamazoo, anonymous (and no doubt liberal!) philanthropists have enacted a remarkable initiative: Every kid who completes high school in the Kalamazoo school system gets a free college education!

That, I think, is the kind of answer we are looking for......

My mother supports Hillary. I think her friends do too. And the reason? Because she is a woman. It doesn't matter that she is an unethical opportunist who supports appalling things and has sold her soul to special interests. What matters to them is that she is a woman. To women who were raised in the 50's, this is just too mind-boggling for words---that before they die, they might be able to cast a vote for a woman. And so to all of those people asking, "WHAT women support Hillary? Everyone I know loathes her --- there you have the answer. It's the older demographic.

However, I don't think she has anywhere near enough support elsewhere to carry her through. She has sold her soul to the insurance companies and the M-I complex; she voted to support the war and is backpedaling in a classic Clintonian way now; she makes Obama look like a man of conviction (as opposed to the opportunist HE is).

I am just hoping that if Gore DOES get back in (and let's check back after the Nobel Prizes are announced)----the dems have enough sense to count their blessings and not fuck it up.

Finally, Maureen Dowd, aside from all of the problems with eher being an idiot, and negative and destructive and a kiss-ass to all of the wrong people, is the absolute worst thing imagineable---she is a terrible writer! How the woman EVER got a Pulitzer is beyond me. If you have ever read her compilation books (Like the awful, "Are men necessary?")-----it becomes evident that she has got to have been sleeping with all the right people and doing it really well, because there is absolutely no other way for her to have gotten to her lofty position on her pathetically meager talents.

It is all just too depressing. Please Salon, it's Monday. Must we face our miserable situation all at once on a MONDAY for god's sake?