Here's how it works: First, they get the population excited and fearful about the prospect of Great Lakes water diversions to places like Arizona (or Atlanta). But then comes the "pivot": They redefine "diversion" to mean any use of groundwater in Michigan by commerce and industry located right here. Best of all, they enlist people like Sen. Patti Birkholz, R-Saugatuck - who is either a useful idiot or unscrupulously ambitious - to "carry the water" for them in the legislature.

Under current law federal law, which embodies the existing Great Lakes Compact, Michigan's governor has a total veto over any water diversion from the lakes by another Great Lakes state - including to portions of those other states that are outside the Great Lakes basin. That's the real diversion threat, BTW - fast-growing places like Akron or Madison - not places like Arizona or Atlanta (because the chances of ever getting permits for a water pipeline crossing multiple states is about as likely as young workers getting all the social security promised to them).

Michigan is the only state that's entirely within the basin, so we don't have to worry that other states might veto our water use decisions. That makes the other states jealous and angry.

What Russ Harding has pointed out is that under the legislation Birkholz reported out of her committee yesterday we would give up that veto. Instead, water diversions could be approved by a "committee" of several of the states. And here's where it gets ugly for Michigan's economy - back to "the pivot": "Diversion" is now defined as any use of water by users located entirely within the basin, including residences, municipalities, commerce and industry.

Get it? Michigan will hand over control of economic development within our own state - because you can't have development without water - to states that are in competition with us. One of the few comparative advantages this state has left - groundwater so abundant that most people have to pump it out of their basements - will be given up to flatter the vanity and further the ambitions of our legislators.

What a coup for anti-development environmentalists! Nothing they have ever accomplished is more likely to depopulate Michigan. In 30 years it's very possible that this state's population will have fallen from the current 10 million to six or seven million. The whole state will come to look like Detroit - empty neighborhoods populated by a hopeless, alienated remainder. If you're feeling the pain of falling property values right now, you ain't seen nothing, yet!