Lansing State Journal. April 20.
MDOT trouble could have been avoided
The Michigan Department of Transportation has disappointed taxpayers by repeatedly failing to follow through on audit recommendations made over 13 years.
That’s unfortunate, especially as the most recent audit, released in February, will be top-of-mind as voters head to the polls on May 5 to consider Proposal 1. The complex ballot question will ask voters to raise the state’s sales tax to 7 percent, which in turn will allow other parts of a legislative plan to raise gas taxes and expand road funding to go into effect.
Proposal 1 is already struggling, and MDOT’s blemished record of monitoring quality through its warranty program does not help. The shame is, this is a problem that need not exist.
In the 18 years MDOT has overseen the warranty program, there have been four state audits. Those reports, spaced roughly four years apart, repeatedly call for improved record keeping and monitoring - sometimes on the same issues that were raised in previous audits but remain unaddressed.
Now MDOT leadership is trying to explain why, after 18 years, the agency is still learning how to manage its warranties.
Lawmakers, who have taken a beating over the deals made to craft a road funding package, are eager to criticize. Shortly after the latest audit was released, they called a mega-meeting of three state Legislative committees to grill MDOT officials.
Director Kirk Steudle is a career staffer at MDOT, elevated to the top job by former Gov. Jennifer Granholm nearly a decade ago and retained by Gov. Rick Snyder.
While Snyder told the LSJ Editorial Board in a meeting last month that he was satisfied that MDOT is addressing the issues raised in the latest audit, he said the ultimate responsibility falls to him as the head of the executive branch.
The governor is known for his extensive business experience, which includes working as a certified public accountant and partner at a major accounting firm. Snyder noted that he also has served as an auditor and suggested the agency would not fail to address recommendations on his watch.
Still, some voters will find this another reason to defeat Proposal 1 - and that is tragic. Michigan desperately needs to fix its road funding shortfall. Proposal 1 isn’t perfect, but the compromise was years in the making. It’s the best option and should be passed.
No matter what voters decide on May 5, MDOT staffers who didn’t take those audits seriously enough in the past had best rethink that attitude.
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MLive Media Group. April 16.
Lawmakers must close the open carry loophole for gun-free zones
Michigan lawmakers must act swiftly to ban the open carrying of firearms in gun-free zones, before efforts by brazen open carry advocates go any further.
Guns do not belong in sensitive places. Schools, colleges, day cares, churches, hospitals, courts, entertainment and sports venues, and taverns are all deemed gun-free zones by Michigan law, and the U.S. Supreme Court has noted the right of states to set these restrictions. However, Michigan’s “shall issue” law of 2001 created a loophole effectively allowing concealed pistol license holders to openly carry guns in these areas.
A small but increasingly vocal group of gun owners have begun exploiting this loophole to seek confrontations in gun-free zones in an attempt to “desensitize” the public. These open carry advocates would like to live in a world where it’s normal and accepted for people to openly carry guns anywhere and everywhere.
However, it’s not normal to see civilians openly carrying guns in public, nor do we hope it will ever be. Given the abhorrent number of mass shootings in our country, it is natural for people to feel tense or even scared and call the police when they see an ordinary citizen openly carrying a gun.
Now open carry advocates are exposing children to these feelings of insecurity and fear, in the one place they should feel absolutely safe - their schools. Most recently, an uproar ensued after a man attended an Ann Arbor school concert with a holstered gun on his hip. Similar incidents have occurred in Clio, Madison Heights, and elsewhere.
Tactics by open carry provocateurs are disruptive to the school environment, as schools go on lockdown until authorities can determine the intentions and legal standing of the person carrying the gun. This causes students and staff undue stress and anxiety, and takes away from valuable learning time.
We commend the Ann Arbor and Clio school districts for addressing this matter seriously and putting protocols in place to remove anyone possessing a dangerous weapon from school grounds. But it shouldn’t be the responsibility of individual districts to devise ways to keep guns out of schools. It’s already the law, and it’s high time for legislators to do their job and close the loophole.
A bill being drafted by state Sen. Mike Green that would allow CPL holders to carry a concealed weapon in gun-free zones is not the solution, unless it allowed public places to exempt themselves. A survey of Michigan voters in 2012 found that a majority strongly oppose allowing concealed guns in schools and other sensitive areas.
Some gun advocates argue that they can protect the public from a “bad guy with a gun.” This thinking is fanciful at best, and outright dangerous at worst. Gun owners must go through a mere eight hours of training to obtain a CPL. They are not required to be trained to handle active shooter situations, which is extraordinarily difficult even for highly trained police officers.
Just as troubling, CPL holders could inadvertently leave their weapons unattended in a gun-free zone, as evidenced recently when a Macomb County assistant prosecutor left his jacket, containing his pistol, in the bathroom of his kids’ elementary school. And finally, the risk of an accidental shooting by a “good guy with a gun” is as real as is the threat of a school shooter.
Restrictions on open carry would not, despite any claims to the contrary, be an assault on gun owners’ Second Amendment rights. In a 2008 ruling, the Supreme Court noted the government is allowed to restrict the carrying of firearms in “sensitive” places like schools and government buildings. In that ruling, which the court reaffirmed and broadened to include state governments in 2010, the court held that the Second Amendment “is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” Indeed, many private employers ban weapons in their workplaces.
It is time for our elected officials to end the unnecessary distractions created by fringe activists hoping to provoke civil unrest. The matter will go unresolved until Lansing acts. Banning all firearms in sensitive places would keep guns out of our schools, put an end to an overwrought debate and still preserve the constitutional rights of all of their constituents.
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Traverse City Record-Eagle. April 22.
State politicians can easily find role models
Gerald Ford, Robert P. Griffin and William Milliken were Michigan’s Big Three. They represented the apex of the state’s political clout on the national stage and, much to Michigan’s credit, were also known and respected for the way they did the public’s business. They had integrity and principles and stuck to them.
Robert Paul Griffin, who moved to Traverse City to practice law after passing the state bar in 1950, died last week at his home here. He was 91.
Griffin was longtime friends with former Michigan Gov. William Milliken, and their service overlapped with that of former President Gerald R. Ford. Griffin’s nine years in the U.S. House, from 1956 to 1966, coincided with Ford’s 25-year tenure (1949 to 1973). Griffin was a U.S. Senator from Michigan from 1966 to 1979. Milliken served as governor from 1969 to January 1, 1983.
Griffin resigned from the House in 1966 to accept appointment to the U.S. Senate, where he served until he lost his bid for re-election to Democrat Carl Levin in 1978.
After Griffin’s death, Milliken recalled how decades ago he and Griffin made the trip from Traverse City to Washington, D.C., to see if Griffin would be interested in running for Congress.
“From that moment on we became warm personal friends,” Milliken said. “I admired and respected him greatly. He will be greatly missed by all who knew him.”
That theme of respect and admiration was a hallmark of Griffin’s public service. He could be a fierce partisan, and was widely disliked by organized labor for his role in creating and passing the Landrum-Griffin Act, which requires unions to hold secret elections for local union offices.
Griffin was perhaps best known for his non-partisan role in President Richard Nixon’s decision to resign rather than face an impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, where Griffin was serving.
Griffin, who was close friends with Nixon, had been publicly defending the president, but things changed when Nixon refused to hand over to the House tapes of Oval Office conversations that showed he had approved a cover-up of the Watergate break-in.
Griffin wrote a strongly worded letter to Nixon that said, in part, “… I want you to know that if you should defy such a (Senate) subpoena (for the tapes) I shall regard that as an impeachable offense and shall vote accordingly.”
That was powerful stuff, and Nixon resigned days later, sparing the country the agonies of an impeachment trial that would have been broadcast across the country and the globe.
It’s hard to imagine a U.S. Senator working today to take down a president of his own party, unless it was to advance his or her own political career. Griffin did it because it was the right thing to do; the country desperately needed someone to stand up and Bob Griffin did the heavy lifting. In 1968 Griffin led a successful filibuster against the nomination of Supreme Court Associate Justice Abe Fortas to be elevated to Chief Justice. Fortas resigned just a year later after it was revealed he had been taking a $20,000-a-year “retainer” by a close friend and former client.
Griffin went on to serve on the Michigan Supreme Court from 1987 to 1994. His son, Richard Allen Griffin, a former Michigan Court of Appeals judge, was appointed by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 2005.
Griffin, Milliken and Ford came from the moderate wing of the Republican Party, which essentially doesn’t exist today. For that matter, both major parties have become more extreme and, sadly, less able to do the people’s business.
Those men got things done and kept it civil. Politicians today could learn a lot from all three.
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The Holland Sentinel. April 16.
When outrage goes awry
In America, it’s quite easy to be outraged. Heck, it’s practically the national pastime. Our country has a deep-rooted history of rage. We broke away from a repressive government and have fought for social justice within our own borders and abroad. The Revolutionary War, Civil War, both world wars and the civil rights movement are all testaments to us channeling our collective outrage to effect meaningful change.
Let’s face it, sitting on the sidelines just isn’t our thing.
But the outrage machine seems to have taken on a life of its own. With the ever-increasing global grip of the Internet and social media tools, one errant tweet has the potential to go from offending a few people to creating a flashpan of viral intensity the world over.
It used to be that an honest-to-goodness scandal was what got the outrage machine grinding its gears (Bill Clinton and Jerry Sandusky come to mind). And no one feels guilty for weighing in on these issues - after all, these are public figures and it’s long been acceptable to lob our angst their way when they spark the national ire.
But now everything seems to honk us off.
Recently, Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” announced a new host in comedian Trevor Noah. It didn’t take long for Noah’s old tweets to pop up, sparking critics to accuse the South African comic of being a racist and sexist over off-color jokes he posted as long ago as 2009.
Comedians often have been given a wide berth in the political correctness realm, as it is in their job description to push social boundaries in order to get us to see the humor in life. Now what once were deemed “acceptable topics” for humor and criticism are slowly morphing into sacred topics, where any whiff of reproach provokes irascibility of a most vicious kind.
Think about it: Would the humor of the comic giants of the 1980s - Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy or George Carlin - fly in today’s world?
Even businesses have to be careful when crafting marketing campaigns, lest they offend the country’s overly sensitive teeter-totter of political correctness.
Does anyone remember the Cheerios television commercial in summer 2014? The spot promoted the cereal titan as a heart-healthy product. The only problem was it also featured a biracial family and the backlash actually caused the company to pull the spot because the online comments about the ad had become not-so-family-friendly.
When did we get to a point where bigoted outrage was allowed to control and direct our discourse?
Just this month, Clorox found itself embroiled in a marketing dilemma of its own after it released a compilation of emoji icons that resembled one of its well-known bleach products. The icons included images of wine glasses, toilets and shower/tubs, so the cleaning brand thought the imagery would be clever - what it didn’t realize was that the new batch of emoji icons also included racially diverse icons.
The Twitter-mongers took to the Internet faster than you can say “hashtag,” accusing Clorox of trying to “white out” the color of customers’ skin. Really? Does anyone believe this was an intentional message to the American populace to purposefully offend?
Writer Amanda Hess, whose essay appeared in Slate.com’s ode to outrage, worries that the Internet has helped create a situation in which the “media order . is at risk of calcifying into a staid landscape where original thought is muffled by the wet blanket of political correctness.”
Looking at the national landscape of issues and topics that require discussion, there are many opportunities to voice our opinions in an effort to further our evolution as a society. There are controversial topics - think police use of force, the vaccination of our children and curbing gun violence to name a few - that are affecting thousands if not millions of people every day. Yet we continue to expend our emotional and political wrath on topics that are forgotten to the annals of history within a week.
Yes, democracy requires - demands even - a healthy exchange in the marketplace of ideas. But the mob mentality of angst and destruction doesn’t promote any sort of constructive dialogue and basically renders the entire exercise meaningless. Trying to advocate for change for the betterment of all is one thing. Rage for the sake of rage is something else.
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