Jack Lessenberry

Democrats did something unusual yesterday. They came out with some new ideas and announced a package of things and innovative reforms they are for, rather than against.

The subject was mainly women’s health care, and for once, the party seems united around a well-thought out package of bills. Tim Griemel, who is still finding his voice as House Minority Leader, told a press conference “when a woman doesn’t get the health care she needs when she is pregnant, it isn’t just her own health that’s at stake. When a woman can’t get the care she needs after a violent attack, everyone who loves and supports her suffers along with her.”

I had dinner recently with Elaine Stritch, the Broadway legend who in later years, won new television audiences with her work on everything from The Cosby Show to 30 Rock.

She is 88 now and after living in New York and London since World War II, moved back to her hometown recently, back to greater Detroit. And I was curious about why. Yes, she has some family here, but as Stritch candidly said, she has enough money that she could live anywhere. She told me, it was the sun.

Detroit sunshine is like that of nowhere else in the world, she said, inviting, bright and warm even on chilly days. “In New York, well, the sun is a cold and distant thing,” she said.

This week in review, Rina Miller and Jack Lessenberry discuss a bill to expand Medicaid, how school districts will no longer collect union dues from teachers, and the financial trouble with Buena Vista and Pontiac schools.

How much do you know about Mark Schauer? Well, unless you are from Battle Creek, the answer is: Probably not nearly as much as you are going to know a year and a half from now. That’s because he is going to be the Democrats’ nominee for governor next year. That may surprise you.

Most normal humans aren’t thinking about next year’s elections. They are thinking about finally getting their lawn furniture out now that they are finally convinced it isn’t going to snow anymore.

But the Democrats are thinking about those elections. This has been a terrible last two years for them. They hate much of what Governor Rick Snyder and the Republican legislature has done, most of all, making this a right-to-work state.

They also hate the fact that they are utterly irrelevant in Lansing. The battles going on in state government these days are mainly between the Republican governor and his fellow Republicans who control both houses of the legislature.

If you want to see a perfect example of irrationality, go to Saginaw County’s Buena Vista School District’s website.

There, it says this:

“Buena Vista School District and its community of parents and stakeholders has (sic) a long tradition of pride and excellence. We pride ourselves on the caring and committed staff with which we are blessed and consider it our highest calling to be entrusted with the care and education of the community’s children.”

On a pleasant spring day in Lansing, exactly 100 years ago today, then-Governor Woodbridge Ferris struck a blow for history. He signed a bill creating the Michigan Historical Commission.

Today, the current commissioners are celebrating the commission’s 100th anniversary. Governor Ferris is long forgotten and the original commissioners are all long dead.

But the commission is still hanging in there, trying to make us conscious of our state’s fascinating past. They are the folks, by the way, behind the Michigan Historical Marker Program. Nearly everyone has seen some of the more than 1,700 green and gold markers in front of buildings from the old Model T plant in Highland Park to the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.

You might say it‘s been quite a century. When the historical commission first got going, there were still people living who had been alive when Michigan was just a territory.

This week in Michigan politics, Christina Shockley and Jack Lessenberry discuss possible changes to the Michigan Merit Curriculum, finances and teacher layoffs at Buena Vista schools, the possibility of Michigan Representative Mike Rogers being the next FBI director, and Governor Rick Snyder's declaring that nearly a quarter of Michigan is in a state of disaster from flooding.

Last week I went to Springfield, Illinois to do some workshops for a program called NewsTrain, which is sponsored by a number of journalism organizations and foundations.

The idea was to provide reporters and editors, a fair number of them from Michigan, with tools to do their jobs in what was described as a “rapidly changing media setting.” Translated, that means a world where fewer reporters are supposed to do more work on multiple media platforms at the same time. 

Newspapers always have been a backbone of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson once said that he’d prefer newspapers without government to a government without newspapers.

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, the longtime bad boy of Michigan Republican politics, stirred things up again last Friday. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last.

If you don’t already know this, Patterson went on "Off the Record," the public affairs TV show, and referred to the Speaker of the House as “Adolf” Bolger.

There wasn’t any doubt who he meant. Brooks has never been subtle. In fact, he pulled out a pocket comb and held it up to his face in an imitation of a Hitler mustache.

That sparked a tremendous outcry. Before the day was over, the state Anti-Defamation League was denouncing Brooks Patterson for what they called trivializing the Holocaust by comparing his fellow Republican, Jase Bolger, to Adolf Hitler.

This "week in review," Rina Miller and Jack Lessenberry discuss the U.S. Senate race, allowing health coverage for live-in partners and the retirement of the emergency manager for Detroit Public Schools.

Roy Roberts, emergency manager of the Detroit Public schools for the last two years, is leaving. His contract ends in two weeks, and he says he isn’t interested in extending it.

You can hardly blame him. He is 74 and thanks to a successful career at General Motors, doesn‘t need the money. Roberts especially doesn‘t need more aggravation.

Being emergency manager of what is, in effect, a dying school system has meant 14 hour days and many angry people. There’s no way it could have meant anything else. His predecessor, Robert Bobb, was roundly hated, and whoever the governor appoints next will be too.

For many years, it was far more common for Democrats to have brawling, bruising primary fights than Republicans.

The Democratic Party, after all, was a coalition of sometimes very different factions – African-Americans and Jews; labor and ethnic groups; factory workers and elegant, highly educated liberals in places like Ann Arbor.

They often had little in common except the fact that they were all more opposed to the Republicans.

Republicans, on the other hand, were more homogenous, more like an extended family that was largely business-oriented, largely white Protestant, and didn’t like fighting in public.

They even used to have what they called the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” Well, times have changed.

This week in Michigan politics, Christina Shockley and Jack Lessenberry discuss the race for the Senate seat left vacant by Carl Levin, legislation that would allow a wolf hunt despite a petition against it, and Governor Snyder's call for businesses to become more directly involved in schools.

As you may know, the federal government has offered to expand Medicaid coverage to families whose incomes are less than one hundred and thirty three percent of the poverty level.

If you wonder how much money that is, I looked it up for you – slightly less than $26,000 a year for a family of three. The answer to the question: How do you support three people on that and afford health insurance? is that you don’t.

If Michigan accepts, an estimated 320,000 people who now have no health insurance would be immediately covered. That would rise to nearly half a million people within a few years. The cost to the state government would initially be zero.

After the year 2020, Michigan would have to pay 10 percent of the cost. This would still, health care experts say, be a mere fraction of what all these uninsured people currently cost the state.

I was mildly startled last week to learn that Detroit Mayor Dave Bing had picked up petitions he’ll need if he files to run as a candidate for another four-year term as mayor. 

Now this doesn’t mean he is going to run. He has to decide, one way or another, by May 14, two weeks from today.

For months, I had assumed the mayor was not going to run. He’s had a battered and bruising four years. Thanks to Detroit’s crazy system, he had to win four elections in nine months four years ago.