John McCain ceded Michigan yesterday in a move that looked defeating to both Democrat and Republican voters.

Apparently it looked defeatist to Palin too:

In an interview with Fox News Friday the Republican vice presidential candidate appeared to be disappointed with the decision and said she still wants to take a stab at wining the state that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate in two decades.

She also said she made her disagreement known to top campaign officials:

“I fired a quick e-mail and said, ‘oh, come on! Do we have to call it there?’ she said. ” Todd and I would [be] happy to get to Michigan and walk through those plants [with] car manufacturers.

“We’d be so happy to get to speak with the people there in Michigan, who are hurting because the economy is hurting,” she added. “Whatever we can do and whatever Todd and I can do in realizing what their challenges in that state are, as we can relate to them and connect with them and promise them that we won’t let them down in the administration.”

Are McCain and Palin communicating at all?  This can’t possibly be another campaign stunt… can it?

Popularity: 2% [?]

The American people sure do love a quitter.  Especially the blue collar folks in Michigan who’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation at 8.9%.  America really needs a president who turns his back on one of the neediest states in the union:

Senator John McCain is giving up on his efforts to win the state of Michigan, his campaign said Thursday, in the latest sign that the faltering economy has reshaped the presidential race and cost McCain support in crucial states.

The McCain campaign has spent nearly $8 million on ads in Michigan, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, a company that monitors political advertising, and now it has no more plans to advertise there, campaign officials said. And McCain canceled a visit he had planned to make to Michigan next week.

McCain had long made it clear that the state was central to his presidential hopes, returning there to campaign again and again and bluntly telling a crowd at a factory in Belleville this July that “the state of Michigan, as it has in many elections in the past, will determine who the next president of the United States is.” His campaign announced its retreat on a day that the news of his ceding the state was almost sure to be drowned out by the buzz created by the much-anticipated vice-presidential debate.

You said it, McCain, not me.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Residents of Flint, Michigan are saying no.  So far.

Along the lines of the “Adopt a Highway” programs that many towns run, where individuals or businesses donate funds towards the upkeep of roads, the city of Flint is looking for folks to pony up $30,000 to put their corporate logos on police surveillance cameras so the city can afford the $420,000 it will have to pay for the planned 14 more cameras it would like to put up.

To date no one has taken them up on the offer.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Just when you thought politics couldn’t get any weirder, Jack Kevorkian is running for Congress.  That’s right.  The man jailed for 8 years for assisting the suicides of over 100 individuals is running for a seat in Michigan’s 9th district.

In the 1990s Kevorkian became one of the most prominent and polarizing figures in the debate over euthanasia by assisting in some 130 suicides and for his outspoken advocacy of the “right to die.”

Kevorkian, who was paroled in 2007, said he will run as an independent for a congressional seat representing the Detroit suburbs, near the area where he presided at dozens of suicides in cheap hotel rooms and the back of his rusty van.

He was convicted after a CBS news program aired a video showing Kevorkian administering lethal drugs to a 52-year-old man suffering from debilitating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

His candidacy will pit Kevorkian against Republican incumbent Joe Knollenberg and Democrat Gary Peters in Michigan’s 9th District, which includes the upscale suburbs of Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham. Political analysts rate the race between the two main candidates could be close.

Kevorkian had been required to gather 3,000 voter signatures on a petition in order to qualify for the ballot.

As a condition of his parole, Kevorkian vowed not to assist with any suicides although he said he would continue to lobby for the legalization of assisted suicide in the United States.

His run is a long shot to say the least… but who knows?  Stranger things have happened.

Popularity: 3% [?]