Last week it was public school employee unions who got a less-than-lucrative early retirement plan. Next week state government employees could be staring down the barrel of the same half-carrot, half-stick scheme . . . and that’s only if the House Speaker Andy Dillon sees enough hair on the scalp to bring out the knife.

But whether its Robinson, Council Vice President Kathie Dunbar or At-Large Councilwoman Carol Wood (the likely suspects), they’re only going to hold the position for 11 months before they’ll need to go to voters to keep the job for the rest of Bernero’s four-year term.

By and large, you can pick these kids out of the crowd. They’re dressed in outdated handme-downs that don’t fit. Their hair is rumpled and they’re socially awkward. They’re the last child picked in gym class and don’t have a lot of friends, if they have any at all.

Assistant Lansing city attorney Billie Jo O'Berry is at it again. She's on the Ingham County ballot for 2010.She's running for the Ingham County Circuit Court this go around, marking the fifth time in the last six election cycles she's put her hat in the ring for some local judicial post. ...

The clash between Bernero, the city’s chief executive, and Wood, his chief critic on the Lansing City Council, has been well chronicled, with the political tug-ofwar coming to a head in 2009 when Wood challenged Bernero for mayor, a race which Bernero won walking away.

Name the Michigan Democratic Party's last attorney general nominee in 2006 and win a prize. Shoot, I covered the guy and still needed Google to come up with the name: Amos Williams. That's kind of the problem. Nobody but real political junkies remember Mary Lou Parks, Butch Hollowell and ...

Thirty-five years later, Okemos author and former Ingham County judge Larry Glazer writes in a soon-to-be-published book that he believes the jury got it wrong. Swainson, Michigan’s governor from 1961 to 1962, was pinned with a crime he didn’t commit, Glazer concludes in "John Swainson: The Rise and Fall of a Wounded Warrior.

But running for county commissioner can inject the ambitious with a little extra ho, ho, ho. The 30-year-old Tsernoglou had that. Even if only seven souls out of 1,659 registered voters from East Lansing’s Precinct No. 1 voted in the 2008 August primary for county commission.

Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher was speaking, sure. But over 5,000 people? Many of whom carrying signs sporting such antigovernment messages as "Wake Up America - Stop The Insanity," "B.O. (Barack Obama) Stinks," "Not Change I Can Believe In?" Weren’t these the fringe whackos who push nonsensical pamphlets on street corners?.