Traverse City Record-Eagle

Forum: Motorcyclists are at your mercy
We are Michigan's road and street motorcyclists, and we are at your mercy.
Forum: Health care workers don't have benefits
For the uninsured, lack of access to health care isn't something they have to deal with just one week a year -- it's a year-round struggle to literally stay alive. Michiganders would no doubt be shocked to learn that many of the 1 million residents of our state without access to health care are themselves health care workers.
Forum: Diabetes program needs your help
Type 2 diabetes is one of the most prevalent, dangerous, yet preventable diseases in Michigan. It is estimated that nearly 8 percent of Michigan residents over the age of 18 have this disease, making it the state's sixth leading cause of death.
Forum: The passing of a farming way of life
Recently the taxes here at the farm increased greatly -- most of the farmers in Leelanau County are facing this. They are taking farms that have always been agricultural and rezoning them 401 Residential, even if the land is a "swamp." But don't try to build there or fence it, because the state Department of Environmental Quality says you can't!
Forum: Level the playing field
The fight for equity in school funding is about to get much more difficult as schools around the state that have never experienced the drastic budget cuts to which we have become accustomed, start having to trim their budgets. As evidence of this fight, you need only read a recent forum written by a Birmingham School Board member
Forum: Time to fix business tax
There is no need to re-hash all the machinations about how we ended up with the new Michigan Business Tax (MBT). It's time to focus on how to fix a tax that desperately needs fixing.
Forum: Was it suicide? Don't ask, don't tell
"He died after a long battle with a chronic illness," someone suggested as an obituary for my 46-year-old son, who committed suicide in a New Mexico desert last fall. It was his fifth attempt. While it was essentially accurate, I found it so understated as to be offensive. As his mother and a mental health educator I must expose, not cover up, the invisible disease that took his life.
Forum: Argument is over table scraps
A recent Traverse City Record-Eagle editorial incorrectly states that Birmingham Schools get $12,303 per student in state funding. That statement is so blatantly incorrect that it's either an exhibition of astonishing ignorance or purposeful manipulation.
Forum: Celebrate river's revival
When I was a child, my father took me fishing on the Detroit River, where we caught plenty of perch and silver bass, but no whitefish. I might catch one in 2008 because whitefish are reproducing in the Detroit River for the first time since 1916.