She is rubbing people the wrong way with her micromanaging of personnel decisions as she tries to get more minority representation into the workforce, but Rodgers isn’t running a one-woman crusade. And change for the better doesn’t come without upsetting the applecart.

Only six months ago, the names of possible replacements for termlimited state Rep. Joan Bauer, D-Lansing, next year in the Lansing-based 68th House District looked like a grocery list.

Quinney, an AFL-CIO official, won his second term despite crap from the chamber that questioned whether he was a political ladder climber and a shill for medical marijuana interests, among other things. He took criticism for being a no vote on some Bernero initiatives and then fired back against the mayor in his own ads.

Lansing is known as "The City in the Forest," having been designated a Tree City 23 times. But now the city’s forestry chief tells me his depleted ranks can hardly keep up with the demands of chopping down dead ones, let alone replacing them one-for-one as they did in the past.

He’s aware of HB 4770, which passed the state House last month 64-44. It would ban the state or any other public employer from offering benefits to same-sex or opposite-sex live-in couples who are not married. The bill now sits in the Senate, where its passage in the Republican-controlled body is likely.

I heard the same courtesy claps only hours earlier at a "welcome forum," where Snyder defended to a theater full of rightwingers why he favors taxing Internet purchases, creating a body mass index for children and building second bridge to compete with a private bridge to Canada ' oh, and why he’s not crazy about "Right To Work.

Why can’t I get excited about this pending land swap in which Davenport University gets that prime piece of land across the street from Lansing Community College in exchange for property a block down the river for the "boondoggle site" of the Michigan State Police?.

A "job." It’s something about every adult needs to scratch out a living. It’s been retooled from rhetorical overuse into a cheap political hammer. It’s been used so many times by so many well-meaning politicians, it’s become a plastic shell that looks good when presented right, but has no functional use.

Since late spring, progressive types angry about the public school cuts and the anti-union stuff coming out of Republican-led Lansing have been passing around recall petitions. They want Gov. Rick Snyder out. They want at least 26 legislative lawmakers, too.

Is anything about those four sentences unclear to you? It was for the Ingham County Elections Commission. They ruled last week that the wording was so unclear, it wasn’t fit to put on the top of Holt man Robert Walter’s recall petitions against both Whitmer and Byrum.