Flint on Fox

This Fox Business Exclusive interviews Flint, MI Mayor Dayne Walling and efforts to solve the city's financial bind. The Mayor says he's already auctioned off his car.

If a wind farm is built in Lake Erie ...

... this is what the view could like from the Cleveland coast, according to the Ohio Office of Coastal Management, which has gathered an enormous amount of information on turbine siting in the area.


Thanks to David Beach at GreenLakeBlueCity for the informative post sharing this info.

Birthing batteries

Andy Grove recently pointed out that the U.S. lost its competitive advantage in lithium ion battery production 30 years ago.

Now Jason Plautz blogs over at NYTimes about how America finally is birthing the industry with fantastic tax incentives.

Michigan and Ohio are sited as leading indicators of the trend.

Improving the Rust Belt jurisdiction

Writer Alexis Madrigal sat down with Braddock, PA Mayor John Fetterman and produced this vignette for the Atlantic on How to Bring Back the Rust Belt.

Around the 7:50 mark Mayor Fetterman joins the growing chorus of Midwesterners who aspire to reclaim and save the meaning of Rust Belt:

"I want to reach a point where the term "Rust Belt" loses it's pejorative status and actually becomes synonymous with opportunity."

Dear Cleveland,

This Reason series is interesting. But let's not read too much into LeBron's leaving. His circumstances are a bit different than "half of Cleveland's population."

Chicago's (Not) Sanitary and Ship Canal

According to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Reporter Dan Egan's latest investigative piece Chicago's water strategy is to siphon off Lake Michigan and shit in the Gulf Coast:

Chicago has been treating Lake Michigan like a giant toilet tank since it engineered a crude sewer system to suck from the lake about 6 billion gallons of water per day, a flow big enough to drain a body of water the size of Lake Winnebago in a single summer.

You can think of that colossal water grab as a super-size flush, inside a continent-sized commode. Chicagoland's raw sewage once plunged into the man-made Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, and that canal whooshed the Windy City stew into the Mississippi River and down to the Gulf of Mexico, Chicago's toilet bowl.


Production = prosperity

In this recent Hardball segment, MSNBC's Chris Matthews says America must become a nation that builds things again. He seizes on high speed rail around the 1:20 mark.

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