Archive for November, 2011

Dan Calabrese

Never content to leave well enough alone, Michigan legislators want to insert themselves into the decision of when your young child starts kindergarten. Under a bill sponsored by State Rep. Ray Franz (R-Onekama) and others, children who do not turn 5 before September 1 in a given school year cannot start kindergarten that year, unless parents formally request a waiver by May 1, and a committee assesses the child and approves the request.

For many years in Michigan, the cutoff date has been December 1.

The thinking is that kids who are three months younger are less prepared to start school, and that by holding them back an extra year, they are given more preparation time. The problem, of course, is that every kid is different. A one-size-fits-all requirement combined with a bureaucratic process ultimately takes the decision out of parents’ hands, and completely disregards the individual characteristics of particular kids.

I know. I’ve been through this.

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Robert Laurie

Officials with the Detroit Police Department are lobbying the City Council in an effort to install a $2.6 million crime-fighting network throughout the city. The system is called ShotSpotter Flex and it would cover 14 square miles of Detroit with listening devices designed to hear, and automatically report, gunshots. According to the company that created it, ShotSpotter is remarkably accurate. It can determine a shot’s location, the number of rounds fired, the type of firearms involved, and whether the shots were made on foot or from a moving vehicle. Within one minute, the information is processed and delivered to police.

Currently, the system has been deployed in Washington D.C, Minneapolis and that bastion of big city crime, Saginaw. According to Police Chief Ralph Godbee, Detroit needs it too.

“Quite frankly, we don’t get reported all the gunshots that happen because now it has become part of the city culture and expectation that you go to sleep with gunshots,” Godbee told the City Council on Tuesday. “This is an opportunity for us to change that paradigm. That is not normal. It’s not acceptable. It should not happen.”

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David Karki

I wish I understood the otherwise inexplicable lure of the Marxist class warfare the left embraces almost as a religion. Even if it were somehow correct, it would still represent a miserable way to life one’s life:  jealous, angry, covetous, and more importantly idle, irresponsible, and dependent, waiting to be taken care of by the false god of government.

This sort of approach is fundamentally incompatible with being a free person living in liberty. In order to have the freedom to make choices for oneself, one must accept full and sole responsibility for the consequences. By the same token, one should not be and indeed cannot be responsible for anyone else.

We are all individually endowed by our Creator with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and pursue happiness – though not necessarily to achieve it, since true freedom must allow for the possibility of failure as well as success, else success would have no meaning – but when another claims to have a right to a portion of your private property merely by drawing breath, you are effectively enslaved by that parasite. Your liberty is infringed upon and your life isn’t entirely your own.

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James Melton

If the Wayne County airport board thought firing Turkia Mullin would end the controversy surrounding the “severance” she received – and then gave back – after leaving her last job, it looks like they are wrong.

Unless the board finds a face-saving way to sever Mullin’s employment contract on terms acceptable for both sides, this circus is going to be in town for a long time. It’s a show nobody wants to see. And it has the potential – like the continuing Kwame Kilpatrick saga – to make the state’s most populous region look silly, backward and dysfunctional. Something has to change.

At this point, it is hard to make judgments about the merits of Mullin’s threatened lawsuit. Politically, the decision to fire her seemed unavoidable. It now will be up to the lawyers to decide whether the terms of her contract were violated and whether or not the board acted properly when it made its choice in a closed session.

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Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

Greyscale version for newspaper publication.

Eric Baerren

Two editorials sit ready in the clips file of every newspaper, editors waiting for the appropriate pre-election stars to align just right so they can dust them off.

The first informs readers that it is their duty to vote. Do not, if you value coherence, ask whether people so tuned out to civic matters that they are unaware that an election is upon them should be encouraged to vote.

The second, likely to be seen in one of the state’s legislative districts, is a solemn denunciation of the citizens’ recall. A recall, the editorial invariably says, should be a matter of last resort, something used only to bounce crooks from office. You can practically hear the sound of the editorialists patting themselves on the back for taking up the banner for civility and political sobriety.

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