Jack Lessenberry

As far as I know, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan isn’t a gambler, but if he were, you probably wouldn’t want to bet against a horse he was backing. Yesterday, when he endorsed Gretchen Whitmer at her headquarters in his city, it was a clear indication that the Democratic nomination for governor is now hers, unless she makes some kind of cataclysmic mistake. Though the primary is still five months away, Duggan, to an extent, was ratifying the obvious. Whitmer, a former minority leader in the state

Governor Rick Snyder said something remarkably sane earlier this week. Actually, the fact that people noticed it is a sad indication of how sick our society is. “I don’t think having more guns is a good thing,” he said, meaning guns in schools. This remark ought to be in a class with “the sky is blue.” Or, “if you are caught in a thunderstorm, you may get wet.” Guns in schools are a bad idea, period.

Last weekend, Ohio Governor John Kasich became the latest to say it: “We may be beginning to see the end of a two-party system,” he said on an ABC public affairs program, adding “I’m starting to wonder if we are going to see a multi-party system at some point … because I don’t think either party is answering people’s deepest concerns and needs.” Those remarks might have been self-serving. Kasich, who two decades ago was seen as just another conservative congressman, has become the symbol of a

Back in the late 1850s, a handful of farm boys were taken to the woods outside Lansing and told to cut down some trees and build themselves classrooms and a dorm. That was the beginning of what became Michigan State University. Last month may have been the worst in that school’s long history.

Today would have been George Washington’s 286th birthday, and when I was a child we celebrated his birthday in school, as we did Abraham Lincoln’s ten days before. Teachers used both as opportunities to teach us about the good semi-myths that helped bind us together; Washington chopping down the cherry tree and Honest Abe splitting rails. Today, of course, both birthdays are lumped together as a generic Presidents’ Day, which basically means a day when the banks are closed and there isn’t any

I have always been attracted to women with dark hair. If you find that statement utterly irrelevant to anything I do professionally, that’s because it is.

When I was a child growing up in the Detroit area in the 1960s, all the kids knew what happened if you became mentally ill, or as we so nicely put it, went nuts. You would be taken to Eloise, which we vaguely knew of as a huge mental institution somewhere.

It’s been five days since the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Florida; the 17 dead are being buried, and the story is easing out of the headlines. This weekend, writing a newspaper column, I started to refer to this as “our nation’s latest school shooting,” and caught myself. Better not say that, I realized.

Someday, a shooter will walk into a school, probably a suburban school, somewhere in Michigan, and blow teachers and students away, most likely with a weapon no civilian should be allowed to own. When that happens, don’t give me any credit for prophecy.

Both houses of the legislature collaborated to pass bills yesterday that will put chump change in your pocket and damage our state’s ability to educate children and have a future. What’s more, they don’t care. The architects of this plan will be out of office soon. Most of the state senate is term-limited, and so voters, even if they figure out what happened, will be unable to punish them. By then, many will be working as lobbyists for the special interests who told them how to vote.