Blogs: Author Archive

Detroit should save some room in its jock psyche this week for Jordyn Wieber. Don’t worry, the Michigan teen doesn’t need much space. At about half the size of an average Tiger or Lions player, the still-mighty Wieber, of DeWitt near Lansing, is leading the team of U.S. women gymnasts at the World Championships...
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The day after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in his client’s case, Bingham Farms attorney James Roach was touring Washington D.C., strolling on the national mall and admiring the glorious architecture. But Roach stopped to discuss by phone his case: The dispute that is forcing clarification from the high court about how...
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The equivalent at a nurses’ convention would be having Florence Nightingale in attendance. For an auto show, perhaps Henry Ford. It was Grace Lee Boggs for hundreds of environmental justice advocates gathered in Detroit on Thursday for the Environmental Protection Agency’s annual Environmental Justice conference. Workshops have dealt with the federal  efforts to ensure...
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No one who knows is saying what, but Gov. Rick Snyder’s quiet appointment of a longtime political adviser and administrator Dennis Schornack to work on southeast Michigan transportation seems to indicate — as one federal source put it — that the guv wants to see something done. Schornack, most recently the executive director of...
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If the owners of El Guapo Fresh Mexican Grill could visit City Hall a reported 60 times to secure their permits and persuade the city powers that a downtown taco truck was a good idea, I could walk four blocks in searing heat, wait in line for 15 minutes and another, oh, 10 to...
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The Woodward Light Rail train line won’t open until 2015 — two years after the 2013 date that city and federal officials have touted. But when it runs, it will carry riders all the way from Jefferson Avenue to the city limits at Eight Mile Road, and construction will still begin in earnest next...
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Nearly eight years ago, the nation’s media were focused on a federal courtroom where the first post-Sept. 11 terror trial was prosecuted by an aggressive, hard-driving prosecutor named Richard Convertino. It seems like the litigation in the wake of that trial will never end … A federal judge today in Washington, D.C., dismissed a...
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It should have been called a commitment ceremony. Hosted at southwest Detroit’s Greater Apostolic Faith Temple Church by a coalition of Detroit advocacy groups, some of Detroit’s leaders responded to requests to address education, youth violence, abandoned and dangerous buildings near schools and harassment of racial minorities and immigrants. The audience, numbering several hundred,...
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If you want to hear it without (much of) a media filter, a lively discussion about Michigan’s budget, tax plans and film credits is available for viewing on YouTube. Uploaded by CMN-TV, the public access cable station based in Troy that hosted the town hall-style program this week, the program includes questions from the...
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The oft-repeated “fact” that Detroit lacks a grocery store owned or operated by a national chain reminds me of something a wise source once told me: “Statistics are like a bikini. They reveal what’s appealing but hide what’s relevant.” Thanks to Detroit blogger James Griffioen’s article at the Urbanophile website, the world has a...
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