Putting her on the court without a screening committee would send a terrible message about the integrity of Michigan’s Supreme Court and about democracy. It would, however, say a lot about who Rick Snyder really is.

Saving Detroit:  Last week, to a fair amount of fanfare, the Detroit Works Project finally released its book-length Detroit Future City Plan. Much of it looked almost too unbelievably good to be true. Whereas today the city has only one job for every four residents, by 2030, it envisioned a Detroit where there are two or three jobs for every person here.

That’s only seventeen years from now, and the only way I can imagine that happening is for Henry Ford to re-emerge and put us all back to work making Model T’s. However, the plan seems realistic enough for the Kresge Foundation to commit $150 million to it. There are all sorts of reasons I could give you as to why something like this can’t work.

Which is a good reason that we should all try hard to make it work. It will take a lot of money at all levels — federal, state, local, NGO and sweat equity partnerships.

But why not try? What’s the alternative? Sit in the rubble and wait to die? Big Brother isn’t going to save us.

If we are really lucky, he might give us a hand. But we’re the ones who need to rebuild and reinvent Detroit.

So we might as well start.

> Email Jack Lessenberry