Jack Lessenberry from Michigan Radio

Yesterday, the most widely read newspaper in Michigan wrote this about Rick Snyder:“The governor’s record of protecting Michigan’s natural assets is pretty sorry, and represents a misguided attempt to placate free-market forces at any cost.”The Detroit Free Press added:“When it comes to education, Snyder just doesn’t seem to get it,” and added “Michigan, during Snyder’s tenure, has become a less tolerant state, with more restrictions on reproductive rights and fewer labor protections.”They said that the governor’s “self-fashioned profile as a champion of transparency has become a joke,” and that Snyder resists taking principled stances, something that the newspaper said “spoke volumes about his character.”Harsh words. But now here’s the shocking part: The newspaper then endorsed Snyder’s reelection!They did this because they said in spite of all that, the governor had shown leadership skills, and felt Democrat Mark Schauer had failed to show he could lead anywhere.  What the paper is saying, whether it realizes it or not, is that our system just isn't working. What’s most stunning about that is not who the newspaper is supporting. Anyone reading their full endorsement article might be more inclined to apply for asylum in Canada than vote at all. What the paper is saying, whether it realizes it or not, is that our system just isn’t working. Not for you; not for me. Not for our state.And that may just be the biggest story of all. Nor am I talking about just our race for governor. Citizens I talk with seem to feel an increasing sense of helplessness to do anything about it.Voters who want the roads fixed, for example, elect politicians who vow to fix the roads. Then they don’t do it.According to our classic American myth, what’s supposed to happen then is that Mr. or Ms. Smith rallies their neighbors and gets sent to Washington, or in this case Lansing, to fix things.That may have happened once upon a time, but today Mr. Smith couldn’t do it without impoverishing his neighbors. Ellen Cogen Lipton, a state representative who lives in my neighborhood, ran in a primary for state Senator this year.She raised and spent more than a quarter of a million dollars and finished third.Eight years ago, Congressman Sandy Levin’s son spent nearly a million dollars to run for a state Senate seat. He too lost. So, how can normal, decent, non-wealthy people run for office without selling their souls to special interests? Increasingly they can't, and don't. So, how can normal, decent, non-wealthy people run for office without selling their souls to special interests?Increasingly they can’t, and don’t.Nor is this only our state’s problem.Fifty miles to the south, the Toledo Blade editorial board assessed Ohio’s race for governor and told the citizens it could not in good conscience recommend voting for either candidate.Term limits are clearly part of the problem. Bob Latta, a very conservative Ohio congressman, told me when he was in the Ohio Legislature one bureaucrat told him he didn’t care much what Latta thought because “you’ll be gone in a couple years.”Eight days from now, we’ll have a national election in which a majority of those eligible to vote won’t even bother.History has many examples of societies where citizens felt helpless before a system they felt powerless to change.Usually, what eventually happens isn’t pretty.Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio’s political analyst. Views expressed in the essays by Lessenberry are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

On Tuesday, The Detroit Free Press came out with a poll showing Gov. Rick Snyder eight points ahead of his challenger, Mark Schauer. That was the widest margin we’ve seen in a while. Most polls have had it much closer.But within a day after that poll, news stories started matter-of-factly referring to the “fact” that Snyder was eight points ahead, as if these were actual, counted votes, or bushels of grain.The sheer silliness of that wouldn’t matter much, except that polls drive pretty much everything in a campaign these days: Nobody wants to give money to a loser. Nobody wants to stand in line in the rain to vote for one, either. Polls can be self-fulfilling prophecies. Except … those of us who have been around a while remember the governor’s race in 1990, which seemed like a one-sided affair. Going into the final weekend of the campaign, the last poll showed Jim Blanchard, the incumbent, ahead of challenger John Engler, 54% to 40%.But in the upset of all upsets, Engler won. Stunned, one pollster went back and took another post-election poll.Voila – it once again indicated Blanchard had won, when he had, in fact, lost. Usually the polls are more or less right, but when they are wrong, they are sometimes catastrophically wrong. If predicting the wrong winner was the only bad thing about them, it wouldn’t matter much. But again, the polls badly distort our election campaigns and how we cover those campaigns as well.This isn’t just the case in Michigan, it’s everywhere. Earlier this week I interviewed Ed FitzGerald, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, on a half-hour TV program I host in Toledo.FitzGerald has little money and is given next to no chance to win. But I mostly ignored that. Instead, I focused on what he would do and what kind of governor he would be if he did win.I asked tough and hard questions. Afterwards, he told one of the producers that I was not only fair, but almost uniquely relevant. That is, I asked him questions about how he’d do the job.Most of the time, FitzGerald said, all he was asked about was polls, campaign fundraising, and two minor scandals.Few journalists had asked much about what he’d do as governor – which I think is sort of dereliction of our right-to-inform duty. Thirty-five years ago, I worked as a reporter for a newspaper publisher who was also a scientist. He would not publish any head-to-head candidate poll results in his newspaper.He told me that was because he believed the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics applied to politics.Roughly, this means that to observe a phenomenon is to affect it. That’s bad enough; what he thought was even worse was taking a momentary snapshot of a tiny fraction of voters that might or might not be a representative sample, and indicating this was reality.At the time I thought not publishing polls was horribly backward. Today, I tend to think he may have been absolutely right.Of course, I’ll have to wait for a poll to show what percentage of the voters feel the same way.   Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio’s political analyst. Views expressed in the essays by Lessenberry are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

I seldom laugh out loud at anything I read, but I did at story in the Detroit News yesterday. The headline said:Snyder: Michigan has 1,000 isolation beds for Ebola. That’s all the proof I needed that, sure enough, we are all going to die. But before you put on your hazmat suit to walk the dog, I want to let you in on a little secret. We are indeed all going to die, but not of Ebola. I am frightened of many things, but I am not worried about Ebola in the least. If over the air gambling was legal, I’d happily bet anyone that nobody in Michigan is going to die of Ebola, ever. That is, unless they go to West Africa and come in contact with the body fluids of an infected person, and I’m not planning on that this weekend.However, there is something that is hazardous to our emotional and mental health, and that is the appearance of any frightening disease close to an election. There are some people who like to be scared, but in a tame sort of way. Now, I do not mean to make light of Ebola. It is a horrible disease that has killed thousands of people. The governor’s oral response was actually more sensible than that headline indicated.What he said was: “Ebola is hopefully a low-threat, low risk problem in the state of Michigan, but it’s a serious one.”Now, it makes perfect sense to have a plan in place just in case. But there is no hidden hospital with a thousand beds for Ebola victims. Nor is there a facility designated for the treatment of such patients. Here’s where the number in that headline comes from:All the hospitals in Michigan put together have a thousand isolation beds that could theoretically be used to treat Ebola. Which pretty much means nothing.  Wally Hopp, a professor and dean at the University of Michigan, has sensibly argued that the state ought to designate one facility to receive any patient who might carry the virus. But consider this. While highly dangerous and infectious, Ebola is not very contagious. You apparently have to come in direct contact with the bodily fluids of a human or animal that has it.We’ve had precisely three cases in this country and one death, that of a man who was infected in Liberia and then traveled here.Nevertheless, we have had irrational panic. Universities have been disinviting speakers who have been in Africa, in some cases months ago, even though this is clearly irrational behavior.Yes, we should take precautions against Ebola. But if you want to worry about danger and increasing deaths, consider this:According to Carol King, a researcher at the University of Michigan’s transportation research institute, 26 more people died in one recent year because the Legislature passed and Governor Snyder signed a bill repealing the motorcycle helmet law.And our unwillingness to pass any kind of sane gun control means Michigan has more than a thousand shooting deaths a year.Those are real problems. Something could be done about them.However, it’s a lot easier for our leaders to pretend they are saving us from Ebola.

Four years ago, it looked as if efforts to build a badly needed new bridge over the Detroit River were doomed to failure.Matty Moroun, the now 87-year-old owner of the Ambassador Bridge, had managed to corrupt the Legislature through that form of legalized bribery known as campaign contributions.He poured hundreds of thousands into the campaigns and causes of influential legislators, most notably former Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop.In fact, as Jim Blanchard, the former governor and ambassador to Canada told me, Bishop broke his promise to the people. He had promised to allow a vote in the state Senate on whether or not to allow a partnership with Canada to build the bridge.This is a bridge, by the way, that just about every business and corporate leader in Michigan agrees we need to stay competitive. It is a project that would create tens of thousands of jobs, and not cost our state government one cent. But Bishop went back on his word, and refused to allow a vote. Soon, it was reported by the Gongwer News Service that in just a few months Moroun had given more than $150,000 in political contributions, many to committees under Bishop’s control. It looked like our entire political system had been successfully corrupted by a greedy billionaire, who was sabotaging Michigan's economic future. The government of Canada was stunned. It looked like our entire political system had been successfully corrupted by a greedy billionaire, who was sabotaging Michigan’s economic future.But then Rick Snyder was elected governor. He found a legal way to make a deal with Canada that would allow the new bridge to be built. About all that remains to make the bridge reality is for Washington to approve funds for the customs plaza any international border crossing requires.  Politically, these were also bad years for Mike Bishop. After he was term-limited out of the legislature, the Republican Party denied him its nomination for attorney general.The Snyder administration had no place for him. He ran for Oakland County prosecutor and was badly defeated.  Yet this year his career was suddenly resurrected, thanks to Congressman Mike Rogers’ decision to leave office to host a radio talk show. Bishop won the Republican nomination to replace him. His opponent, Ingham County treasurer Eric Schertzing, is a moderate Democrat committed to middle class tax reform.But it is a mostly Republican district, and the odds favor Bishop. And he has made it clear that he will be the congressman for Matty Moroun. Bishop has said he will do what he can to stop federal funding for the new bridge’s customs plaza.According to the Federal Election Commission, the Moroun family and that of his top aide, Dan Stamper, have personally given at least $18,000 to Bishop’s congressional race.In return, Bishop is repeating the canard that Moroun should be allowed to build a second bridge next to his own instead.That’s something that sounds good only to the ignorant. Twinning the second bridge would be an environmental, logistical and traffic-snarling nightmare. Canada would never allow it.Nor should they. Voters in the 8th Congressional District seem to be about to elect a congressman who is in the pocket of a family bent on killing a project needed for Michigan’s economic future.I wonder how many of them know. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio’s political analyst. Views expressed in the essays by Lessenberry are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

For more than a century now, Detroit has been the Motor City: Home of the auto industry; the place that put the world on wheels.You know that. You also probably know that as a result, Detroit utterly failed to build any kind of decent mass transit.Other, that is, than a system of badly serviced city buses that don’t even coordinate with the suburban ones. The city is paying for that now, as thousands of adults who lack cars have no easy way to get to jobs in the suburbs. Belatedly, there are efforts to get a rapid transit bus system. There’s also the M1 light-rail project in the city, but these are partial solutions at best. Now that Detroit is getting close to the end of the bankruptcy process, it makes sense to be thinking about transportation needs for the future. And there’s nothing that makes environmentalists and mass transit enthusiasts crazier than suggesting widening our existing freeways. There’s a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Groupthat indicates a proposal to widen I-94 in Detroit is a “boondoggle” which might actually hurt the city’s recovery by further separating some of the city’s most vibrant areas.Emotionally, it is easy to agree to be aghast at the thought of turning even more land into concrete ribbons. Paving over paradise. as Joni Mitchell might have sung.Yet there’s another side to this, which is that the city and state have present and future urgent transportation needs. Jeff Cranson, a spokesman for MDOT, the Michigan Department of Transportation, told me that in Detroit, there are many segments of the freeways and bridges in severe need of rebuilding. Actually, he didn’t need to tell me that.I see it every time I drive to Ann Arbor. Cranson added, “If they are to be rebuilt, it only makes sense to plan for future needs. To qualify for federal funds, the projects must meet modern "Federal Highway Administration safety standards."That, in turn, sometimes means adding things like service lanes and wider shoulders. Cranson, himself a former reporter, agrees we need more mass transit. However, he notes that “there is nothing to indicate that freeways will not remain an important part of metro Detroit’s transportation system,” for the foreseeable future.Which is obvious, like it or not. However, there is a bill in the state House of Representatives, HB 5883, which would require that I-94 and I-75 stay three lanes forever. State transportation experts told me that this was crazy.“These are museum-piece freeways,” one said, adding that the House bill, sponsored by Rep. Jim Townsend, D-Royal Oak, would require the state to keep rebuilding designs that made sense decades ago, but are outdated today. In fact, I-94 is narrower than it ought to have been in one place because it was built when the Packard plant was still in business.Nobody thinks paving over the globe is a brilliant idea. But we are going to depend on cars and trucks for a long time to come.And we need to do the best we can with the world we have, without losing sight of the way we might want it to be.Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio’s political analyst. Views expressed in the essays by Lessenberry are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

Michael Ryan is like a lot of us. He doesn’t think the health care system works very well, and as a self-employed dentist, he should know. He has problems with the Affordable Care Act. He thinks it needs to be a lot simpler and have better cost controls.    But he isn’t happy with the Republican failure to come up with any alternative either. What makes Ryan different, however, is that he is a Republican, and is running for the state legislature. You’ve probably never heard of him, but don’t feel bad.Many people in his district haven’t either. And here’s why I admire this man: Ryan, who has a wife and four kids, married relatively late in life, and is not wealthy.He’s put his heart, soul and about four thousand dollars into this race. He’s talking about the issues, going door to door. But what’s most remarkable is that he knows he has little chance to win. He’s the Republican nominee in the twenty-seventh district.That’s a collection of Detroit suburbs that are heavily Democratic – the Jewish and black city of Oak Park; liberal Ferndale and Huntington Woods; blue-collar Berkley and Hazel Park.Two years ago, the last GOP nominee here lost almost four to one. There’s no incumbent this year, but the Democratic nominee, Robert Wittenberg, is seen as an automatic winner. But Mike Ryan thinks the people deserve a choice.He’s anything but rigid, ideological and doctrinaire. Even his campaign literature admits he doesn’t always vote Republican. “Being exposed to my wife’s even more independent voting patterns forces me to think about how public laws affect ordinary people.”When it comes to health care, what he would like to do is have Michigan come up with its own system. He would fund it partly by raising the sales tax. But he is open to suggestions. “That’s how you get somewhere, you know?” he told me. He said as a dentist, he said he learned how to deal with difficult patients with opinions that often were at odds with reality. He told me, “by engaging them in telling me why they feel the way they do, we could often find a way of proceeding that would work for everyone.” By the way, he doesn’t exactly have a silk-stocking practice. He works part of the time with Medicaid patients in Detroit.Though he has been lambasting Democratic waste during this campaign, Ryan told me he didn’t have much patience with his fellow Republicans who refuse to fix the roads, and don’t recognize that charter schools need more regulation.So – if he got to Lansing, how would he get anything done? He told me, he’d try to function like a lobbyist, educating lawmakers on issues he knew and cared about.The Michigan Republican Party hasn’t contributed in any way to his campaign, he told me. He said his family is strongly supportive – except about the money he’s had to spend. I asked him this.If you lose, but your campaign gets people talking about your health care plan, will it have been worth it?“Yes, it would,” he told me. My guess is that when the Founding Fathers were thinking about representative democracy, they had guys a lot like Mike Ryan in mind.Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio’s political analyst. Views expressed in the essays by Lessenberry are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

When you look back at the long history of Detroit, yesterday may not have been quite as significant as July 24, 1701.That was the day Cadillac and his men beached their canoes, scrambled up the riverbank near where the Cobo Center now stands, and started building a fort. But yesterday comes somewhat close.Yesterday was the day the last major holdout creditor came to terms with the city, in a way that should help improve the city’s chances to make it after the bankruptcy process ends.This also seems to remove the last threat facing the Detroit Institute of Arts. Financial Guaranty Insurance Company will get the land where Joe Louis Arena now sits, the place where the Red Wings play and where, 34 years ago, I saw Ronald Reagan nominated for President. Eventually, when a new hockey arena opens, this will be torn down and a gleaming new luxury riverfront hotel built here, surrounded by condos and some new retail. Detroit had owed Financial Guaranty more than a billion dollars. For a long while, a deal seemed unlikely. But the insurer feared that a judge-imposed settlement, called by the lovely name of a “cramdown,” would be worse.This settlement seems to be tailor-made for both the creditor and the city, which, if all goes according to plan, will have a new convention-attracting and tax revenue generating property.One note of caution: We’ve seen a few grand riverfront development schemes come to considerably less than advertised. More than 30 years ago, Toledo bet its future on a similar combination of offerings on its attractive downtown riverfront. They called it the Portside Festival Marketplace, and it soon failed.But Detroit has far more going on. This anticipated hotel is years away, however. The trial is still not quite over, and the judge’s final ruling may not come for weeks. And he may well want some changes in the city’s proposed “plan of adjustment.”But still, all signs are that things are proceeding almost astonishingly smoothly. There’s one bit of legal limbo: Now that the elected officials have regained most of their power, City Council has to approve this deal. But Kevyn Orr still has something like emergency manager powers for bankruptcy issues, so if the Council should reject this, he would probably ask the state to overrule them.There are statues of Cadillac and other founders of Detroit outside my office at Wayne State. We don’t build statues to civic leaders much anymore. The ones we have are mainly visited only by the pigeons.But if there are two men who deserve statues, they are Kevyn Orr and Steven Rhodes, who together, have led Detroit through what really was a terrifying financial wilderness.  They made each other better. Early on, Rhodes made it clear to Orr that he expected the emergency manager to get more concessions from the creditors than Orr first seemed to believe possible. In turn, Orr’s dazzling negotiating skills resulted in the city gaining much more than I once believed possible, and likely will make the judge’s final job easier too.The bankruptcy may soon be over. And then, of course, the really hard part, Detroit’s future, begins. Stay tuned.

Our Legislature’s refusal to do what’s needed to fix the roads made me remember a brilliant political move many years ago.President Harry Truman was running for reelection, and his chances didn’t look good.He was a Democrat, and had a Republican Congress that didn’t want to cooperate on anything he wanted. So he called them back for a special session during the campaign. He challenged Congress to pass laws the nation needed.They totally refused, as he knew they would. Most commentators thought that made him look weak. Truman knew better. He campaigned hard against the “do-nothing Congress.”In the end, he won the biggest upset of all time, and Republicans lost a whopping 84 seats in Congress.Governor Rick Snyder also could, if he wanted, call a special session of the Michigan Legislature and ask them to get it done and come up with the money to fix the roads.But that’s not going to happen. ... we should all realize that we will be living in a highly dangerous world if the public becomes convinced that democracy just doesn't work, and believe there is no way they can make their representatives respond to their needs. For one thing, this time the governor’s party controls the Legislature. For another, they’d plainly resent the executive branch telling them what to do, and if this still failed to produce new money for the roads, everyone would look bad.However, what the leaders of the Legislature need to be doing this very minute is talking to each other – and the governor — and figuring out an agreement, getting the lawmakers back in session for a day or two and pass laws to fix the roads.It has long been clear that Michigan badly needs to pour billions of dollars into the roads as soon as possible. To not do so not only endangers our axles, but damages efforts to attract new business.However, there is another reason it is essential that the Legislature do this: To restore faith in government. People don’t have a lot of it today, and Lansing is making that worse.Beyond any doubt, the citizens’ top priority is road repair.But Michigan’s Legislature not only ignored the voters and refused to pass a plan to fix the roads, they stopped trying and went on a two-month vacation mainly to campaign for reelection.This prompted all sorts of cries, some of them from the state’s major newspapers, to just vote all the rascals out in November.But here’s why that mostly won’t work. Thanks to outrageous gerrymandering, most lawmakers are in utterly safe one-party districts. They will get reelected no matter what they do.They can only be threatened by a challenge in the August primary, and it is too late to put new candidates on the ballot. The few lawmakers who do face primary challenges are mainly running against anti-tax fanatics who would be even worse for the roads.However, we should all realize that we will be living in a highly dangerous world if the public becomes convinced that democracy just doesn’t work, and believe there is no way they can make their representatives respond to their needs.The grownups I talk with understand the roads need to be fixed, and that this will cost money.Now we need lawmakers who are willing to be adults as well. And just come back and fix the roads.     

It is not exactly true that the Michigan Legislature can’t get anything done.For example, our lawmakers did pass a bill to allow a fur dealer to hold a license to trap beaver.Don’t you feel better about that? The governor signed it yesterday.  On the down side, they completely failed to get done the voters' most important priority, fixing our terrible roads.You see, fixing the roads would cost money.It would also require making hard choices, which many elected officials seem allergic to, especially in an election year.   Some of our lawmakers seem dead set against raising any taxes, even though polls have shown this is the one thing voters are willing to pay for. Some can’t see past their narrow ideological blinders enough to simply get the job done. Some seem more interested in making the other side look bad, and some may have sold out to special interests.Take State Senator Tom Casperson, R-Escanaba, for example. His district is in the Upper Peninsula. He happens to be the proud author of the beaver trapping bill. However, what he was willing to do for the fur traders, he wasn’t willing to do for Michigan roads.Casperson helped kill a bill that would have increased registration fees on those huge overweight trucks that have been doing the most damage. Casperson helped kill a bill that would have increased registration fees on those huge overweight trucks that have been doing the most damage. As Sen. Morris Hood, D-Detroit, said, “our constituents are tired of big trucks tearing up their roads. Addressing this has to be part of the equation.”But to that, Casperson made the astonishingly irrelevant comment:“I don’t know anyone out there trying to destroy anything.”He added:“We are not going to fix this by singling out one single industry.”I wonder if he feels that way about illegal drug cartels.You do have to give some credit to Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville, R-Monroe, who does seem to have discovered that there is such a thing as the public good.He proposed a road funding plan which, while not perfect, would have come up with most of the money the roads desperately need, mainly by increasing the tax on gasoline.However, common sense is extremely uncommon in his caucus, and some Democrats didn’t seem to have a lot either.In the end, after vote after vote, they accomplished nothing, and the night ended in the wee hours with Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing, ranting away at the governor.Now, the lawmakers still could accomplish something today.Sometimes, as I was reminded by a blog post this week, everybody thinks a bill is dead, and then the corpse winks.By the way, this is apparently the last day our lawmakers could get this done, because they need to go on vacation and campaign for the reelection so many don’t deserve.If I was hopelessly naïve, I might suggest they stay on the job until they get the people’s business, what they are being paid to do, done. But that would be so unsophisticated.By the way, if you don’t like the way this all works, I have worse news for you. They’ve called off the petition drive to move to a part-time legislature. For the foreseeable future, our allegedly full-time, frequently dysfunctional Legislature is here to stay.Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio’s political analyst. Views expressed in the essays by Lessenberry are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan. 

Over the years, people have asked me why I haven’t taken a position on the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana. One man told me it was my patriotic duty as a baby boomer to do so.I should have told him that all my patriotic fervor was invested in making sure that the music of Bob Seger and Mitch Ryder would never be forgotten. But unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough.But I do feel that there are a couple aspects of the marijuana issue that deserve more thought. Personally, I don’t have any particular feeling about it one way or another.I don’t use it, and I don’t plan to. I tried it long ago, and didn’t like it, or the way it made me feel. I don’t like not feeling mentally sharp. I realize lots of people, including many of my friends do enjoy pot, and in theory I have absolutely no problem with that.Nor do I think anyone who has a medical condition should be denied anything that relieves their suffering. I voted enthusiastically in favor of medical marijuana, and think the main flaw in the legislation was that it didn’t provide for the state to supply and regulate the drug so that patients could be assured of proper quality control.Society is also moving closer to general acceptance of recreational marijuana use. This has already happened in Colorado, and last I looked, Michigan activists were trying to get symbolic decriminalization proposals on the ballot in a dozen communities.I don’t live in any of those towns, and don’t face a choice. But there are two things we need to think more about. First of all, based on what I’ve seen, we don’t know how carcinogenic marijuana is.Different studies have indicated contradictory things, but there is no reason to think that taking smoke into your lungs is ever harmless. Whether you love Obamacare or hate it, our health system doesn’t need a flood of new lung cancer cases.But one thing is clear: Driving a car while high is a bad idea. Thanks largely to safer cars and social pressure against drunk driving, the number of highway fatalities has fallen dramatically from more than 50,000 a year in 1980 to barely 30,000.However, there were still more than ten thousand drunk driving deaths two years ago. That’s nearly twice as many dead Americans than in our entire 10 year war in Iraq.And there’s new research that indicates medical marijuana may be making this problem worse. Columbia University researchers have been studying traffic fatalities, and concluded that marijuana played a role in one out of every eight traffic deaths four years ago. That’s triple the rate it was ten years earlier. There’s been a significant jump in marijuana-involved traffic fatalities in Colorado.My instincts here are purely selfish. I drive a lot, and don’t want to be badly injured or killed by some pothead.My guess is that I am not alone in this. NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is close to finishing a three-year study to determine the impact of marijuana on driving performance.I think we ought to carefully consider their results.

Last week it seemed anything but certain that the package of bills authorizing state money for the Detroit “Grand Bargain” would pass. And nobody expected they would pass by margins as high, in one case, as 105 to 5.Which just shows once again that real life is usually stranger than fiction. There is lingering bitterness over one bill, however: The one that prevents the Detroit Institute of Arts from asking for a renewal of its millage when it expires.Less than two years ago, voters in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties voted to enact a very tiny tax to help the DIA. This is a millage that costs the owner of a $200,000 house a mere $20 a year. The tax lasts until 2023, when it expires.Yesterday, the state House of Representatives voted to prohibit the DIA from asking voters to renew the millage, which gives the museum just over $20 million a year.  Every Republican in the House voted to prevent the museum from seeking more money.Six of the 50 Democrats went along with them. This left supporters of the museum indignant. State Representative Jon Switalski called it petty “political retribution.”Well, don’t worry. The anti-DIA bill is mostly meaningless, and was just a way for Detroit bailout bashers to vent their spleens.My guess is that this won’t pass the state senate. Majority Leader Randy Richardville may not be in love with the DIA, but says he doesn’t support telling local units of government what kind of mileages they can or cannot support. Even if the senate passes and the governor signs this bill, consider three things before you freak out. First, not one person in office today is going to be there when this millage expires.We have no idea what things are going to be like politically nine years from now. Nine years ago, most business leaders thought Kwame Kilpatrick was great, and Jennifer Granholm was hugely popular. Some future legislature could easily repeal this bill.Second, you should realize that if they put this on the ballot today, it would be defeated badly. Two years ago, this millage barely passed in Macomb County. It would go down in a landslide today.Finally, the DIA itself more or less hinted two years ago that they didn’t intend to seek a millage renewal. They sold it as sort of a temporary funding mechanism that would enable the museum to concentrate on building their endowment, instead of constantly scratching for money to keep the lights on.This bill could even hurt the Republicans more than the museum, by adding evidence to the charge that the state GOP is for local control, except when they’re not.Meaning, when local voters or local units of government want to do something to which they are ideologically opposed.However, my guess is that this will all be soon forgotten. The point is that the Grand Bargain to save Detroit and its world-class museum is just a senate vote and the governor’s pen from reality.And the politics of getting there were a real work of art. 

I think the low point in my faith in democracy came late this winter, soon after I had lost one tire to a pothole. I got home after nearly losing another on the lunar surface of a suburban Detroit mile road, just in time to hear a state senator claiming we needed another tax cut.Well, I thought, I am now living in a Third World country. But guess what? That senator heard from his constituents, big-time. Before long, he was retreating from his tax-cut talk, legislative tail between his legs. Why?To quote the leader of his caucus, Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville R- Monroe,“I’ve heard the message loud and clear that the roads are messed up, and I think the most common phrase I’m hearing from back home is “just fix the damn roads.”Well, what do you know, a Legislature responsive to the desires of its constituents! I have been critical of Sen. Richardville in the past, but I have to say that he is beginning to sound like a practical statesman.This winter, I talked to a couple of Republican lawmakers and noted that there is no way to come up with enough money to fix the roads properly out of existing revenues.One of them absurdly refused to admit that. The other said the only thing he would consider is a ballot initiative that would ask voters to agree to raise the sales tax to fix the roads, something any sane economist will tell you is a pretty lousy idea.Yesterday, however, Sen. Richardville said a ballot initiative was not the way to go. He told the Gongwer News Service “you are talking about a two-thirds vote through the Legislature and then something you don’t even know could happen until November. That uncertainty I can’t deal with, so there are few options left.” What he is hinting at here is breaking the most powerful taboo in politics today. If taking openly about sex was once taboo, there’s a word today that Republicans consider far more obscene: Taxes. The shock waves that resulted two years when a couple of women said the word “vagina” in the Legislature would be nothing in comparison to what the words “need to raise revenues” would do.Yet they are edging closer and closer to saying just that to save the roads. Not to mention, themselves.State Sen. Mark Jansen, R-Grand Rapids, is the only current legislator to have ever voted to raise the gas tax. He is now admitting he lived to tell the tale.“I want people to understand I was not thrown out of office, I was not recalled,” he said, adding, with Churchillian dignity, “it’s not the end of the world if you support our infrastructure.”Moving his big toe toward the water, Randy Richardville said, “I think if we’re going to take a bite, we should fix the problem altogether and not take a step toward it.”He knows that means billions. He also knows there’s only one way to get it. Sooner rather than later, his caucus will have to surrender their anti-tax virginities.And when they do, we will all be much better off.

There are several things to note about the astonishing developments yesterday in the battle over the minimum wage. Most importantly, it is important to remember that it ain’t over till it’s over.The state Senate took everyone by surprise yesterday when Republicans agreed to gradually raise the minimum wage by nearly$2 an hour and partly index it to the inflation rate.Barely a week ago, Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville was adamantly claiming he wanted absolutely no rise in the present state minimum wage of $7.40 an hour.Then, he introduced a bill that would have increased it to by 75 cents an hour, but one that contained a poison pill. His bill would have not only changed the rate, but would have repealed and replaced the old statute.There’s a reason for that. There’s petition drive to change the old law and raise the minimum to $10.10 an hour.Richardville reasoned this would short-circuit the petition drive. You can’t amend a law that doesn’t exist. But there were dangers for Republicans in that approach, too. It is pretty clear there is considerable sentiment for raising the minimum wage. And after the enactment of right to work and a pension tax, this would have been one more indication that the governor and Legislature are against the working class and even the middle class.The last thing Republicans want are hundreds of thousands of angry voters determined to get even. So Richardville came up with what looks like a brilliant compromise. It resulted in an unlikely front-page photograph today of Richardville and Mark Schauer, the Democratic candidate for governor, looking like best buddies.As things stand now, Democrats have gotten most of what they wanted on minimum wage. Republicans, the political credit.But once again, it ain’t over till it is over.The House of Representatives hasn’t even taken up this bill. So far, the most strident voice against a minimum wage hike has been that of Ari Adler, spokesperson for Speaker of the House Jase Bolger. Yesterday, he said that his boss has “grave concerns,” about the Senate bill. He added: “We will not make any decisions about what to do … until we have a chance to get a better understanding of the potential negative impact of this proposal on Michigan’s working families and job providers.”Not exactly a ringing endorsement.Of course, Adler is just a mouthpiece, and Speaker Bolger could change his mind just as quickly as Richardville did.Or the House may well try to roll back the increase to something much less, or even kill it entirely. There are also indications that those behind the petition drive aren’t going to meekly accept they are off the ballot, no matter what.This may all end up in court.For this part, the governor has been sphinxlike about where he stands. So to summarize, right now, the GOP is ahead on points. But this battle is by no means done. And a long and bitter fight might be the last thing Gov. Snyder and the Republicans need.

I have a confession to make. I really am not very interested in your sex life, and see no reason you should be interested in mine. However, I am very interested in not being killed by a giant pothole, or concrete falling off an overpass. And somehow, I’d guess you feel the same way. I just wish our lawmakers did.Today, the University of Michigan is releasing a new study showing that our model of funding road repairs based on how much gas is sold is out of date.Cars get much better mileage today. Besides, I could drive 10,000 miles in my tiny little Fiat, and do far less damage to the roads than an overloaded, gravel-hauling tractor-trailer would do covering half that distance.You don’t need to be Isaac Newton to figure that out. The report suggests getting money to fix the roads by setting a mileage fee.That, to quote it directly, "Could more fairly allocate costs based on the number of miles driven, the time of day, the route taken and the weight of the vehicle.”That seems straightforward enough. So let’s do it.You might think the greatest problem would be the trucking interests, who won’t want to pay their fair share for pounding our roads into rubble. But you’d be wrong.Oh, that would be a problem. But the bigger one would be inertia.One of the authors of this report told the Detroit Free Press said she hopes we might move to such a system in five or ten years. By that time, a standard pickup line may be, “Hey, that’s a nice-looking broken axle.”Sadly, our legislative leaders don’t want to be bothered with the roads right now, partly because they just discovered the budget surplus they thought they had has largely gone up in smoke. They now have to figure out how to pay for the small amount of road repairs they promised. You have to realize that in today’s nutty ideological world, asking voters to pay extra for the rising costs of a service everyone desperately needs would be seen as treason.Lawmakers can’t ask voters to pay their fair share, or concentrate on anything real and controversial. So, instead, they’ve turned to sex. A state senate committee congratulated itself yesterday after unanimously approving some bills to protect minors from human trafficking, and more severely punishing their clients.One of Bill Schuette’s assistant attorney generals said, “If you are going to buy sex from someone under 18, you need to be prepared to pay a price,” as in, a felony conviction.That gave one state senator from Battle Creek pause. Mike Nofs said, ah, what about “the 17-year-old who looks like a 22 or 23-year-old.”  No doubt about it; this could be a problem for some men.Glad to know our lawmakers are worried about it. No one defends sex trafficking or the exploitation of children. However, being against these things is politically easy.Our lawmakers find making the necessary decision to ask for more taxes for the roads too hard. That’s something you might think about when you are deciding how to vote this year. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio’s political analyst. Views expressed in the essays by Lessenberry are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

There’s an old saying that conservative lawmakers are for local control, except when they’re not.Meaning, whenever local units of government want to do something that they don’t like.Now, we’ve learned that Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville R- Monroe, believes in democracy, except when he doesn’t.In the past, Richardville has staunchly supported Michigan voters’ decisions to outlaw gay marriage and affirmative action.But he doesn’t want to allow voters to vote to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.It now seems likely that supporters of the higher minimum will collect enough signatures to put a proposition doing so on the November ballot.Now, it would be one thing to campaign against this amendment, and encourage people to vote it down.That would be perfectly legitimate, regardless of whether you agree.But what Richardville wants to do instead is sabotage the referendum, and here’s how:When the issue of raising Michigan’s minimum wage from the current $7.40 first came up, another Republican senator suggested raising it by a smaller amount.Richardville, a former minor furniture company executive, said flatly he didn’t want to raise it at all. But now he has come up with a bill that would raise it 75 cents an hour. That, in fact, is what State Senator Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge, suggested last month.But Richardville’s new bill contains a poison pill.Instead of amending the old minimum wage law, it would repeal and replace it.This would supposedly have the effect of rending the hundreds of thousands of signatures now being collected to put the higher minimum on the ballot null and void.Richardville admits openly that this is what he is doing.Clearly, he doesn’t think much of the people’s ability to decide.He told the Gongwer News Service:“To put a ballot proposal out without having a public hearing, without talking about it to elected officials, I think could have caused major problems in our economy.”And he added:“All we’re doing is taking an issue people say is important and we’re going to deal with it in a reasonable way.”In other words, Big Brother, or Big Randy, knows best.What is particularly hilarious, or contemptible, is that Richardville doesn’t want much of a hearing on his bill either. Instead of referring it to a committee, he is keeping it on the floor.The guess is that he will try to wait for an opportune moment, and then shove it through both houses in a few hours, as the Republicans did with right-to-work.He may well be able to get away with it.Richardville’s political career will likely be over for good in January. He will be term-limited out of the Legislature for life. He lives in Monroe County, in John and Debbie Dingell’s district, so he can forget about going to Congress.His future is likely to involve lobbying, or perhaps going back to La-Z-Boy, the lounge chair firm where he used to work. My guess is that some in the business community will be happy if Richardville ends his career by thwarting a vote of the people.But is that the kind of legacy anyone should be proud to leave?