When U. S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu met with the FutureGen Alliance on Monday to discuss whether to proceed with a large-scale coal gasification demonstration plant near Mattoon, he fa]]> When I first heard about the new Crime Stoppers drug dumpster, I found it amusing. A trash dumpster, welded shut, painted orange, is stenciled with, “A suspected drug house is in thi]]> Untitled Document The governor’s proposed gross-receipts tax isn’t as gross as you think. Ohio, Texas, Washington, and other states have each implemented a version of]]> I love the New York Times. I quote it so often my kids think I don’t know anything I didn’t read there. So naturally I was drawn to the long piece in May’s Vanity Fair on NYT publish]]> The visiting architects and city planners who made up the Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team said over and over that Springfield is poised on the edge of greatness. ]]> At this business meeting of homeless people, some of the speeches are long and rambling, but that’s no different from many of the church and professional meetings I sit through regu]]> Untitled Document At a breakfast meeting with about 100 business leaders at the University of Illinois at Springfield last week the Springfield Chamber of Commerce gave its inaug]]> Though I knew how the story turned out, as I read I kept hoping that one of the safety inspection reports on Centralia Coal Co. Mine No. 5 would move somebody to action before it was too late. In the ]]> Georgina Blair died last week at 92. When I visited in her home on the family farm in Virden a few years ago, she showed me this picture of her and her father with one of his prize mules,]]> When I saw Newsweek on my caller ID a couple weeks ago I thought my subscription must have expired. Instead it was Michael Isikoff, the veteran investigative reporter. Isikoff had written articles f]]> As America looks around for someone to blame for the current economic mess, bankers are the easiest target in sight. “No one wants to hug a banker,” reads a recent Newsweek hea]]> Nobody likes deals done in secret, or under the threat of a lawsuit, but the substance of the Sierra Club deal with City Water, Light & Power is excellent. It gets Springfield involved in wind ene]]> Untitled Document Rwanda is known as a place of death, but I wish that everyone could see the life in the faces of some of its orphans. It was 14 years ago this month that the sl]]> “The greatest thing about not being president anymore,” Bill Clinton told our crowd at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies gathering in Little Rock last weekend, “i]]> Untitled Document Not long after Dan Walker took office as governor, in 1973, I interviewed him in his office in the Capitol. I was finishing a journalism degree at Northwestern ]]> Untitled Document One reason Barack Obama chose the Old State Capitol as the site where he would launch his presidential campaign is the reason it was built there in the first pl]]> I know parents who wish they had half as much information about the boys their daughters bring home as cattle breeders have about today’s purebred bulls. The 38th Annua]]> Let’s keep working on this Salvation Army issue. There has to be a better location for a homeless shelter than the site the Army has picked, out by the airport. The ]]> Untitled Document They say that time behind bars makes criminals better at what they went in for. A gangbanger makes more gang connections, and a small-time bank robber learns fr]]> It is a sad and sickening sound, that of another good reputation gurgling down the drain. Only a few weeks ago, Roland Burris was remembered as a trailblazer in Illinois politics, who had]]>