Jack Lessenberry

Well, it’s Friday, and I thought I’d mark the end of the week with a particularly absurd joke. Did you know there is something in Lansing called the School Reform Office which can actually close down failing public schools. Get it? Well, there is, in fact, something named that. And, for the second year in a row, it indicated it was thinking about closing a group of schools statewide, only to have to beat a hasty retreat and say the equivalent of “Ah, just kidding, we really didn’t mean it.”

Nobody can deny that Governor Rick Snyder is an intelligent and hard-working man. He came from very modest circumstances to earn three degrees, including an MBA and a law degree, from the University of Michigan by the time he was 24.

Well, Happy Valentine’s Day. I hope you've gotten far more important greetings from someone close to you. Love is important. But sometimes, you have to learn how and when to let someone, or something go. I’ve finally accepted that Laura Ingalls Wilder is not going to come back from the dead and marry me. And in the same vein, it's time for those who think the last presidential election was stolen to give it up. That may sound like an odd thing to say at this point. But I still hear regularly

Mike Ilitch certainly left his mark on downtown Detroit, beginning with the major renovation of the Fox Theatre in 1988 and continuing to this day with the ongoing construction of Little Caesars Arena for the Red Wings and the Pistons. There are those who found a lot to criticize in the way the Ilitch family acquired downtown property, maintained that property, and financed its arenas. Michigan Radio's senior news analyst Jack Lessenberry joined Stateside to talk about Ilitch's legacy when it

You have to admire many things about Mike Ilitch. The son of Macedonian immigrants, in the classic American success story, failed to become a major league baseball player, but instead became a true player on a much bigger stage. He grew up with essentially nothing. When he died Friday he was worth more than $5 billion, owned a major league hockey and baseball team, a massive national fast food pizza empire, stadiums, theaters, and lots of other stuff.

The Michigan Library Association has asked me to talk to their annual convention about “fake news.” I don’t blame them for being especially concerned about it. I’ve always seen librarians as sort of secular high priests of our culture. They are concerned with assembling and guarding over our storehouses of information. In the pre-internet age, we went to them to find out things and to learn how to find them out ourselves.

Back in a more sincerely religious era, people used to say “Man proposes; God disposes.” But when it comes to state budgets, it’s more a case of “the governor proposes; the legislature disposes.” The governor proposed his budget for the next fiscal year yesterday, and as of now, members of his own party in the Legislature don’t seem to like it very much. Now budgets are not the sexiest things in the world. Nobody goes to a singles bar and says to some attractive person, “you won’t believe what’s

Imagine that you got into politics, won a few local elections, and before you knew it were your party’s leader in the Michigan Senate. That’s how things worked out for State Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich, D-Flint, a former high school social studies teacher who, at age 39, got that job a little over two years ago.

It isn’t exactly a secret that a lot of people have lost faith in politicians. Polls show approval of and trust in Congress and the state Legislature has fallen to where it is barely ahead of Athlete’s foot. Men like Rep. Brian Banks, D-Harper Woods, are a good part of the reason why. Banks has previously been convicted of eight felonies, mostly for things like bad checks and credit card fraud. He has been evicted for nonpayment of rent at least seven times, and has left a long trail of unpaid

There are a lot of things that Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof doesn’t like. They include unions, especially teachers’ unions. The state’s rule requiring the payment of decent, prevailing wages to workers on state construction jobs. Meekhof is also very much against anything making it easier for people to vote, including making it easier to get absentee ballots.