Christine Barry of Blogging for Michigan (BFM) reports on how she hired us to be a surrogate FOIA requester to the Shiawassee County Sheriff's department.  The local news - the Argus - seems to be taking recognition of the value of the local story. We have no opinion on whether the Sheriff's actions were inappropriate, but have no problem helping anyone get public records to draw conclusions for themselves. But the questions Barry asked were specific, and specific enough to get good FOIA results. And the response of the Sheriff publicly in the newspapers suggests some nerve was touched.

Sometimes the "surrogate FOIA" is an appropriate tool for credibility reasons, and will get a job done faster than other methods.  If you need similar work, contact us.

Cross-posted at OutsideLansing.com.

The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MoCRI) has won at least one battle over language in the Cole County Circuit Court, according to this Missourinet article.

We've opined here before about how the Missouri Secretary of State, Robin Carnahan, perverted the language to make MoCRI seem like it was actually giving preferences to individuals. The judge agreed:

Judge Callahan writes, "It is this second bullet point the Court finds troubling because it suggests that the proposed amendment is first going to do away with one class of preferential treatment programs, i.e. affirmative action programs, and then replace the affirmative action programs with some other kind of preferential treatment programs." "The purpose and effect of the proposed amendment," writes Callahan, "Is to ban certain preferential programs unless a particular program is necessary to qualify for federal funding."

A victory for common-sense, although I don't believe it went far enough in denoting that even the term "affirmative action" is nebulous, even here in Michigan the MCRI didn't challenge that issue so long as the phrase preferences was included and used in a balanced way. The sad thing is that the left and "diversity" industry spinsters have so misused the term "affirmative action" that they have devalued its positive meanings. Having learned that they've destroyed their own word from the Michigan results, now they're going to try to push the language even farther.