More than a century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory vaccination is a permissible exercise of governmental authority in response to a public health crisis. more

The sultry heat of August will soon give way to a different kind of heat as the mercury rises in the Lansing mayor’s race. more

The story of former Shawn Deprez — how alleged harassment pushed her to take an early retirement from the Lansing Fire Department in 2019 — has mayoral candidate Kathie Dunbar’s blood boiling. more

One of Andy Schor’s first official acts as the newly elected mayor of Lansing was creating a Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board to guide his administration on matters of consequence to the city’s communities of color. more

Republican leaders would love to turn the heads of grassroots activists. more

The light on my landline telephone answering machine was blinking.  more

Who in a potential 10-person Republican gubernatorial field should Democrats be most concerned about? Probably not the person you think. more

About mid-semester, this person showed up in my writing class at Lansing Community College. He was in 20’s, and he sat in the front row, the traditional place for smart students. But I did not know him. “Who are you?” I asked. more

Money stirs the drink in politics. And until we get around to voting next year on a host of state-level contests, the horse race over who is raising what motivates us political types. more

It’s a sad and sobering reflection on the state of our nation that equal rights for all Americans remains an elusive goal. The idea that we are all created equal and possess the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has yet to translate into lived equality that includes people of every race, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, disability and all the other characteristics that define us as humans. more

Michigan’s experiment with plucking random people off the street to run an important government function took, yet, another public relations blow last week. more

The act of naming a thing gives it a firmer reality. The thing becomes knowable in a way that can be easily communicated and repeated. Inevitably, naming also reduces the possibilities of what a thing might be. The word “define” literally means to set limits on something. more

Last year’s murder toll in Lansing — 22 lives lost to senseless violence — hasn’t been seen in this town in three decades. One might think that such an epidemic of killing would have given city leaders a compelling reason to get as many police officers on the street as possible. Yet we’ve recently come to learn that Mayor Andy Schor and former Lansing Police Department Chief Daryl Green allowed 14 fully funded police positions to go vacant (now 15 with Green’s recent retirement). As a result, LPD has had as few as eight officers on patrol across the entire city. That’s not enough. more

When I taught writing to college freshmen, I would remind students the key to success was steady work. “This isn’t a class you can cram for,” I warned students at the beginning of each semester.  more

In May of this year, I wrote an email to President Samuel L. Stanley and Provost Teresa Woodruff of Michigan State University asking them to speak out against the rise in anti-Semitic attacks occurring in the United States. The outbreak of hostilities in Israel and Gaza became an excuse for desecrating synagogues and attacking Jews in the United States. I mentioned in my email that President Biden had called the attacks “despicable,” as they were. Yet MSU stayed silent and I received no response to my request. A month later, a friend and former writing professor at MSU sent Stanley an email with a link to a New York Times opinion piece by Matthew Bronfman. Bronfman urged university leaders to speak out against the rise in anti-Semitic activity on campus and to acknowledge the cost to Jewish students. Stanley did not respond to this email request, either. more

Leading a city as its mayor isn’t for the faint of heart. It takes courage, resolve and a knack for bringing people together around a shared vision for the community’s future. Sadly, our current mayor doesn’t appear to embody any of these qualities. Virtually invisible during much of the pandemic, Mayor Andy Schor’s first term has been marked by a troubled, tone deaf relationship with Lansing’s Black community and an egregious lack of honesty and transparency that breeds deep distrust of City Hall. That’s why we think it’s time for a change. more

In 1999, a moderate Republican (like a real moderate) named Patricia “Pan” Godchaux from Oakland County first proposed a bill in Michigan to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. more

Having apparently learned nothing from the last election, Republicans in the Michigan Legislature continue to push the false Trumpian narrative that the election was stolen amid widespread voter fraud. To “fix” this imaginary problem, they’ve introduced a ridiculous package of 39 bills that are explicitly designed to frustrate the ability of voters to exercise their electoral franchise. One of the bills would have required making a copy of your photo ID and sending it in with your absentee ballot. That bit of nonsense has since been watered down, but the intent is clear: disenfranchising as many voters as possible, especially if they vote by absentee ballot and are from predominantly Democratic areas with a high proportion of minority voters. Should lawmakers get enough votes to send these malformed voter suppression bills to the governor, we expect she will veto them without hesitation. more

Michigan Democrats are beaming that Republicans are not concocting the new legislative and congressional lines this year.  more

The candidates’ ability to repair longstanding racial inequities, reform public safety and help curb the city’s skyrocketing levels of gun violence are undoubtedly key issues in this year’s election cycle. We asked the candidates directly: How do you plan to use your position, if elected, to drive forward some meaningful social equity and/or public safety reforms in Lansing? more