Jack Lessenberry

This may strike you as silly, but a little, relatively insignificant thing happened today that put a lump in my throat. It has to do with The Newspaper Association of America, the group that has represented major newspaper publishers since Grover

I am sorry I didn’t go to downtown Detroit yesterday morning for the annual Labor Day parade. Bill Clinton showed up in a casual shirt, and walked for a mile mingling with regular folks as well as politicians. I didn’t need to see the former president,

Well, it now seems almost certain that on November 8th, Michigan voters will be able to fill in one little oval and cast what’s called a straight ticket vote for a political party’s entire list of candidates for all offices. Michigan Republicans have

Perhaps the most horrific story of the summer was the Detroit News’s revelations of unsanitary conditions at the now for-profit group of hospitals known as the Detroit Medical Center. These included dirty instruments, old blood and bone fragments in tubes

The greatest scandal in American political history was, of course, Watergate. Reporters began investigating corruption in the Nixon Administration. Congressional committees and the courts got involved, and the existence of a secret White House taping

There are those who think that Governor Rick Snyder has been made to bear too much of the blame for the mess in Flint. There may be some truth in that. The governor certainly didn’t set out to poison the water, though, as Harry Truman said the buck stops

Michigan Democrats and Republicans held their state conventions last weekend, mainly to nominate candidates for the education boards. That includes the state board of education, plus two seats each for the three major universities – Wayne State, Michigan

When I was three years old, a little girl in my neighborhood was snatched off the street, raped and murdered. Her body was found a week later in a garbage dump, and the crime never solved. This traumatized my mother, who instilled in me a lifelong fear of

Donald Trump is coming to Michigan again early next month, this time specifically to court black voters in Detroit. My guess is that the Clinton campaign is thrilled by this. In fact, they probably wish Trump would spend every day until November 8 in

I met a former student of mine for an early lunch Tuesday, in a little café in the bustling, cosmopolitan suburb of West Bloomfield. Anasie Tayyen has three children, who are seven, nine and 12, and has her hands full running after them and managing her