Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Unsung Heroes - 12/21/07

For the next few weeks we’re going to see a lot of these men: Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee; John McCain and Ron Paul and Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani. If we are lucky, we’ll just barely get Christmas day off from the non-stop campaigning

For the week between the New Hampshire primary and our Jan. 15 primary, they are likely to virtually live in Michigan. Each wants to get some momentum going by winning what will be the first major industrial state to choose.

The stakes are pretty high for most of them.  Mitt Romney has to win here, period. This is his home state; he grew up here, his father was a famous governor. If he can’t win here, he might as well hang it up. Rudy Giuliani needs to win here too. His campaign has been slipping lately. Michigan is the kind of state he has to win.

We’re also likely to find out in Michigan if Mike Huckabee is an unstoppable force, or a mere comet shooting across the sky.  Last week I talked with a prominent Republican pollster who is not favorably inclined towards Huckabee. However, he said that if the man from Hope won Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan, he’d be unstoppable.  My own hunch is that Ron Paul, the libertarian in GOP clothing, just might do better than expected. Certainly his supporters have more and bigger signs and more fervor than any of the rest.

On the now-meaningless Democratic side, Hillary Clinton ought to romp to victory over Mike Gravel, Chis Dodd and Dennis the Menace Kucinich. The question is how many will come out to vote for uncommitted instead.

But if you ask me, the real heroes of this election are not the candidates, but the citizens who make it possible.  Primarily, I mean the election workers, the mostly retired people who voluntarily give up their day to help us vote and the process work. I also mean people like Chris Thomas, who has spent a lifetime behind the scenes making sure the process is as well-oiled as possible. Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land is also something of an elections and elections technology junkie.  She has improved the equipment and the vote-counting process, which were in pretty good shape to start.

Few remember now, but in 2000, while the nation was mesmerized by the hanging chad mess in Florida, Michigan had a Congressional election that was just as close. They did a recount there, too.  But the loser threw in the towel before it was over, because it was clear that almost nothing was changing, and there was no doubt about the integrity of the process.

Finally, if you want to show a little integrity, here’s what you have to do: Vote. I don’t care how inconvenient it is, or whether you are enthralled with the candidates. Vote the best way you know how.  Too many people, white and black, some even in my lifetime, have died so that we could do so.                                 

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Interview: Chris Thomas - 12/21/07

There’s been a lot of attention paid to the fighting over whether to have a presidential primary and who would participate in it.  When the courts had finally spoken, the state found itself suddenly charged with putting on a major election in the dead of winter, with little notice and some new rules and procedures.  The question is: will we be ready?  Chris Thomas has been Director of Elections since 1981.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.   

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Essay: Stem Cells - 12/20/07

Nearly nineteen years ago I was an editor at a newspaper in Tennessee when an astounding news bulletin moved over the wires.

Two scientists had achieved cold fusion in a jar of water. Breathless blow-dried TV reporters explained that this promised an endless source of cheap, perhaps virtually free, energy.

The politicians reacted predictably. Moscow proclaimed that Soviet scientists had done the same thing at least twenty times. Washington immediately coughed up $25 million to start a National Cold Fusion Institute at the University of Utah. And then it turned out it was all nonsense, or as one documentary called it, “confusion in a jar.”

So when I heard the other day that science had made a breakthrough so that we could just use plain old ordinary skin cells instead of embryonic stem cells ...

I thought, yep, fusion in a jar. To be fair, the skin cell breakthrough does seem legitimate and promising. After all, two teams of scientists did it on two different continents at the same time.

Yet to say that we can now drop embryonic stem cell research is silly. The religious right seems to have seized on the stem cell issue with surprising fervor. It is unclear to me why this is, except perhaps as a way of taking on abortion sideways. The right-to-life crowd seems especially hysterical about this, spewing out half-truths and distortions.

I have seen them tell people embryos are being killed for this purpose, which is not true, or that the stem cell researchers want to use aborted fetuses, which isn’t true either, especially since a fetus isn’t an embryo. What the scientists who do this work are using are clumps of cells from fertility clinics, which otherwise would be thrown away.

Right-to-Life of Michigan would probably outlaw fertility clinics if they could, as one of their officials told me in a rare moment of candor. They think any meddling with biology is wrong.

That is, except if they want a tummy tuck. They have, of course, a perfect right to their beliefs, and to live the way they want to.

Unfortunately, they have had too much success imposing their beliefs on us, with the result that science is stunted and the already feeble Michigan economy is being further damaged. Right to Life of Michigan wants you to fear that babies will be ripped from the womb for human cloning experiments. That’s not going to happen.

What could happen instead are cures for macular degeneration, Parkinson’s Disease and spinal cord injuries. Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch are anti-abortion. They are also totally in favor of embryonic stem-cell research, as is Nancy Reagan.

State Rep. Paul Condino has a package of bills before the House Judiciary committee that would lift restrictions on this work in Michigan. But Right to Life is determined to intimidate the legislature into rejecting these bills. You might want to let your lawmakers know what you think.

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Interview: Sean Morrison - 12/20/07

Last month, an amazing discovery was announced that some believe might end the controversy over embryonic stem cell research. Teams of scientists in Japan and Wisconsin had genetically reprogrammed human skin cells to make them behave like embryonic stem cells. But does this mean that embryonic stem cell research which is now outlawed in Michigan is no longer necessary? Sean Morrison is director of the University of Michigan‘s Center for Stem Cell Biology. Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Farm Bill - 12/19/07

Years ago, in my relentless search for sensual pleasure, I read a few of the farm bills that Congress passed back in the 19th century. The fascinating parts for me were not the bills themselves, which were mostly written in highly arcane language, but the riders attached by individual members to take care of constituent concerns.

The entire congress would pass bills to reimburse Jedidiah Chandler for three pigs that were carried off by the Indians, or a cow that wandered onto the train tracks, that sort of thing.

Well, I didn’t come across any individual cow amendments in the current farm bill. I should add that I haven’t read the whole thing. But I have read enough to know that it has about as much stuff in it as a Meijer’s store which is getting ready for the holidays.

There is $120 million in this bill for tree removal and replacement, which I guess would apply if you are a cherry grower near Traverse City and a vigorous wind knocks your trees down.

There’s $15 million to compensate our asparagus growers, who have been hurt by competition from South America. The U.S. government has been trying hard to get peasants in places like Bolivia and Peru to stop growing drugs and start growing asparagus instead. Works for me, if there’s enough melted butter.

The farm bill contains more than a billion dollars for a healthy school snack program and twenty million for a National Clean Plant Network, which has something to do with botanical viruses.

There’s money to fight pests and prevent disease, something we should be happy to pay for. There are portions I’m skeptical of.

Those include money spent on ethanol, which seems to me likely to be a boondoggle that’s apt to enrich corn producers and drive up the price of food. But I’ll keep an open mind.

What does strike me is a real sense that agriculture is gaining visibility and importance in Michigan. When was the last time you can remember a Democratic senator from this state being so excited about a farm bill? Once when I was covering President Carter during his ill-fated 1980 campaign, a piece of paper blew off the podium.

“Well, there goes my entire farm program,” he quipped. Farmers didn’t find that funny in November, when the voted against him by huge margins, but the fact is he felt free to make such a joke.

You wouldn’t hear anything like that in Michigan today. It strikes me that agriculture is sort of like the girl next door who we grew up with before running off to the big city a century ago with the glamorous new auto industry. The auto industry’s glamour has faded a bit in recent years. If we aren’t exactly ready to go back to the farm, we are at least thinking more fondly about where we came from.

Asparagus, anyone?

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Interview: Debbie Stabenow - 12/19/07

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed a five-year, $300 billion farm bill. It contains billions of dollars in subsidies and new grants for Michigan crops like blueberries, cherries and asparagus. Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow is the state’s first member to sit on the Senate agriculture committee in 45 years. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her.

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Essay: Unofficial Emissions - 12/18/07

I was a freshman in college during the first Earth Day in April 1970. Nobody was talking about climate change and global warming then. The main concerns were standard chemical and industrial pollution. Somewhere that week I saw a cartoon in which a balding executive in a suit poked his head out of a factory that was pouring toxic sludge into a river. “You say the planet has 30 to 40 years?

Told that was right, he breaks into a smile. “Thank God! I thought you said three to four years. That would mean we‘d have to change the way we do business!”

I have thought of that cartoon many times since. Too often, that attitude has seemed to me a perfect metaphor for how Michigan does business. For decades, the auto companies have had to be bludgeoned into making less polluting cars.

And when the environment was mentioned, there was also a chorus of corporate voices that anticipated the idiocies now pouring out of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

“We can’t afford to be more environmentally conscious. Businesses will leave the state or go broke if you try to impose higher energy costs on them.” Same old songs we were hearing in 1970. My favorite is “none of that stuff is really proven. It’s all just speculation.”

Saying that climate change is an unproven hypothesis is a little like saying representatives of the flat earth society should be given equal time at meetings of geographers. If you still think global warning is a theory, try this. Watch Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth with the sound turned off, so you don’t hear a thing.

Just look at the pictures. If you have any doubt after that, go sunbathing in Saginaw tomorrow. The fact that is appears to be cold out is just an unproven theory, after all.

What bothers me is that too often, journalists think that being fair and balanced means giving distorted propaganda equal billing with reasoned discourse. In an otherwise nuanced story, The Detroit News Friday quoted a lobbyist for the Mackinac Center, who said “The climate change forecasts are extremely ambiguous at best.” Trying to use them to craft rules to slow our planet’s destruction would be bad public policy.

We know about bad public policy, having had a lot of it recently. What was most interesting about Bali was that a host of political figures, many of them Republicans, went to Indonesia or sent messages that said essentially this:

Not all of us are this bad, and these fools will be gone in a year. Even Harlan Watson, Bush’s chief climate negotiator, seemed tolerant, saying the dissent “gives the world the opportunity to see our diversity of views.”

Regardless of who the next president is or what the policies are, the problem will remain, and Michigan has long been too much a part of it. Charity begins at home, and trying to do what we can to fix the climate is probably the best, and most selfish, thing we could do.

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Interview: Barry Rabe - 12/18/07

Last week, countries from around the world sent representatives to the United Nation’s climate conference in Bali, Indonesia. However, climate change is not simply a global issue. States can play a part in global emissions and climate control as well. Barry Rabe is an expert on the environment and public policy at the University of Michigan. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Kennecott's Mine - 12/17/07

The Upper Peninsula is represented in Congress by Bart Stupak, a conservative Democrat from Menominee. He knows how much his region needs economic development, but he also knows how badly exploited the UP has been in the past, by the lumber barons and copper mine owners.

And he knows exactly how he stands on what Kennecott is calling its “Eagle” mine. He thinks it is a horrible idea.

"Sulfide mining, like that of the Yellow Dog mining project, may create potentially irreversible environmental damage to the region and lasting health ailments to area residents," he said.

Stupak is nobody’s idea of a flaming liberal. He’s a devout Catholic; a former policeman and Michigan state trooper.  He opposes embryonic stem cell research of any kind. But he cares about the environment; he led the successful charge to ban gas and oil drilling in the Great Lakes. And he worries about this mine.

He’s not out there by himself on this, either.

Ann Woiwode, the Sierra Club state president, said Michigan has granted Kennecott a permit that “clearly doesn’t even meet the intent, let alone the letter of the law.” The Sierra Club and six other environmental groups have pledged to fight the decision.

Native American tribes in the UP also vow to continue fighting what they normally refer to as an “acid mine,” after the residue that is left when the copper and nickel are gone. They contend that there have been lingering water pollution issues surrounding a similar type of mine Kennecott operated in Wisconsin. Indeed, water sample reports from there are troubling, though the company has not been cited or fined in connection with the Wisconsin mine.

Frankly, while I share these concerns, I am skeptical as to whether the opponents can get the mine permits reversed or delayed at this late date. To be fair, the Kennecott people have done their homework and research, and worked hard at it.

The state has also paid more than average attention to the entire permitting process. According to Steven Chester, who heads the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the state’s review of the application was one of the most thorough reviews ever.

He concluded that, “In the end, Kennecott’s proposal met the high standard set by Michigan’s environmental laws.”

That’s good news, I suppose. But here‘s my proposal for any type of proposed business that could threaten the environment.

Michigan should require Kennecott to agree to pay the full cost of restoring the environment should anything go wrong, plus fines and agreed-upon damages if something cannot be easily fixed. 

Some would say that might have a chilling effect on business. I don’t think so. I do know what kind of effect sulfuric acid in the stream would have on the coaster brook trout. There are 500 million pounds of copper and nickel under a mere six acres of land up there.

My guess is that with that kind of bonanza at stake, any company would happily agree to pay to be extra careful.

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Interview: John Flesher - 12/17/07

Last week, Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality approved permits for a new nickel and copper mine in the Upper Peninsula. However, Kennecott Minerals, the company that wants to build the mine, will have to meet stricter requirements than first proposed. John Flesher has been covering the story for the Associated Press. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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