Colors are a part of us before we enter the Earth. Gender reveals tag us “pink” or “blue,” and an army of colored clothes, toys and puzzles come our way. At some point, we adopt a “favorite” color, or at least make one up to answer one of small talk’s silliest ...
The News missed critical points in its headline story on Aug. 4 when they announced total signatures for three school board members did not meet the threshold number necessary to trigger a recall? The front page story that day surely should have made mention that school board members Sarah Costain, Monica Dziesinski, and Eric Lawson retained the services of an out-of-town law firm, Butzel, to challenge the legitimacy of the recall effort based on the weakest claim imaginable. Butzel claimed dozens of petitions, in their entirety, needed to be disqualified because the petition ...
Representative Cam Cavitt is a proponent of a House bill that would give commercial fishers a chunk of the walleye and lake trout in Lake Huron. Is this a good idea? House Bill 5801 would require the Fisheries Division of the DNR to allow commercial harvest of lake trout, walleye, and yellow ...
I begin with a principle: the proper role of law and government is limited and specific. Law exists to protect the equal rights that every person already possesses—rights to life, liberty, and property. These rights existed before, and beyond, government. The law’s only legitimate function is to organize the individual right of self-defense on a collective scale, so that no person may harm another’s person or property with impunity. Beyond that protective purpose, using law becomes a violation of the rights it was meant to secure. When government uses its taxing power to take from ...
The grassroots effort to recall three Alpena Public Schools Board of Education members was not certified, not because we lacked support, not because we were unable to gather signatures, and not because voters didn’t participate. It was stopped because the Alpena county clerk accepted a ...
It was a meeting-heavy week. They were mostly one-on-one, which I like best, but those tend to take the most effort. The morning of day three, bracing for more meetings and sitting outside a cafe with the creeping heat starting, I watched a mother and son walk past me into the shop. Cute, I thought. Then, a continuation: Even though those two likely loved each other and were sharing an easy morning, both of them would die. One of them would carry the grief of the other. My brain wanders into strange neighborhoods when left unsupervised. While other people are noticing the weather or ...
