Make sure you're sitting down and if you've got a trash can anywhere nearby you might want to bring it close... if you don't start this article on an empty stomach you may end it on one.

You've been warned.

The rumor machine is in overdrive this morning and they all end with a bit of mixed news... Jennifer Granholm may be leaving the state of Michigan and sooner rather than later.  I know, I know, now muffle those cheers.  

You think the last six years have been frustrating?  Don't much like what the woman has done to our home state... the way she's crippled our economy, sent members of our families to either the unemployment agency or the nearest border and grown the state government bureaucracy by billions of dollars at the same time?

Do you comfort yourself with the knowledge that Republican or Democrat, the next governor of the state of Michigan won't be named Jennifer Granholm?  Then how'd you like this... a Granholm in government for the rest of her life.  

The AP rumor-mongers with a headline that made my blood run cold:

Granholm mentioned as possibility to fill ailing Ginsburg's seat on Supreme Court

Because six years of Granholm in charge of one state just wasn't enough, apparently someone somewhere thinks she's done such a wiz-bang job in the executive branch that a woman who has NEVER sat on ANY judicial bench is qualified to become one of the nine most powerful judges in the world.

Still, I take solace in the knowledge that whoever dropped her name in that particular conversation is just plain off his nut.  The list of even hyper-liberal candidates more qualified than the governor is longer than the unemployment line in Michigan.

It's the Todd Cook rumbling that's really frustrating.

According to the liberal operative, there's a chance that Debbie Stabenow could be tabbed to join Health and Human Services, creating an open Senate seat here in Michigan.  The thinking is that Jennifer Granholm would conduct a faux search for a replacement, then name herself to the post.

She'd get nearly four years of incumbency before facing her first Senate election and she'd enable John Cherry to assume the incumbent label in his effort to win the governor's office in 2010.  That could effectively clear the field of serious Democratic competition and give him a leg up with Michigan voters who've shown a frustrating penchant in recent years for supporting the status quo locally, no matter how disastrous.

And you'll just have to ignore the irony of a woman appointing herself a replacement for a United States Senate vacancy when she still refuses to so much as call a special election for the t9th District Michigan State Senate vacancy created when Mark Schauer went to Washington.  Something about avoiding a Republican pick-up opportunity and taxation without representation getting a bad rap?

The temptation, though, to embrace any opportunity to rid the state of this woman is understandable.  She's wrought single-state economic devastation on a scale rarely seen before in the history of the United States.  Some measurements indicate 450,000 fewer net jobs than when she first took the oath.  One can't be blamed for considering the bright side of bidding her adieu.  

But the destruction this woman would inflict on the nation as a whole if set loose upon it...

The damage is done here in Michigan.  We can't descend any further.  There isn't a 51st state we can pass on the way to the economic cellar.  There's a sense that our lot for the next two years has been cast.  The only question left is whether or not we're brave enough to do what Ripley did... keep the queen close to our hearts, so to speak, and do everything in our power to ensure she isn't unleashed on the rest of the world.