As I understand it, the Republican position on gasoline prices is to save drivers money by refusing to raise the excise tax on gasoline that pays the federal share of building roads and bridges. As th]]> I left one question unanswered when I wrote recently that the Horace Mann Educators Corp. building in downtown Springfield was one of four in the capital city designed by a world-famous architecture f]]> A few years ago, the executive director of the National School Boards Association said, “In a democracy, school boards are the closest thing to the ground.” “Like dandelions in a law]]> How did that song go again? I had it right on the tip of – oh yeah. “I hope I die before I get old.” Apparently you have a good chance to doing just that if you live in Sangamon Coun]]> Central Illinois farmland doesn’t usually return a fat harvest until the fall. These days it’s doing so all year long. Sales prices for prime farm acreage around Springfield rose roughly o]]> At my age, “constitutional issues” usually involve medicine, not the law, if only because the other kind are so complex that thinking about them makes my head hurt. A boyhood reading of Th]]> Facing nearly half a billion dollars of unpaid bills from the State of Illinois, the University of Illinois says it will probably have to raise tuition nearly 20 percent over the next four years. Taki]]> You wouldn’t think it was possible for a soldier to shoot himself in the back while marching toward the front line, but Congressman Mark “Don’t Get Fooled Again” Kirk has manag]]> Our lives and our politics are dominated by money, yet our thinking about the most basic number of them all – how much we earn – doesn’t add up. You’d think that people would a]]> Writers of newspaper columns, it turns out, are not the only people who have trouble getting sentences right. Eyebrows, if not voices, were raised when federal judge James Zagel set 14 years in prison]]> Road crews, I see, will be spending the summer making the intersection of Dirksen Parkway and Clear Lake Avenue safe for the out of sorts. It’s been years since I’ve driven through it on a]]> Buildings are like people. Even when they get too old and decrepit to work, their examples can still teach. Something like 100 buildings from the Lincoln era are thought to still stand in Springfield.]]> I suppose the question to the Springfield City Council ought to be phrased this way: If they come, will you build it? “It” is a multimodal transit center, a nice plan for which was unveile]]> The Greater Springfield Chamber of Commerce is talking industrial parks as the way to make Greater Springfield – which I prefer to think of as Bigger Springfield – a Great Place to Do Busi]]> A while back, I remarked on the spreading use of the so-called year-round school calendar to remedy so-called summer learning loss. (See “The Pause that Regresses,” Aug. 13.) The start of ]]> The vandalism being perpetrated in Washington, D.C., it turns out, is not confined to the nation’s finances. Perhaps you read of the House subcommittee that met in March to hear arguments agains]]> No doubt some members of the of the Springfield Diocesan Council of Catholic Women settled into their seats at the Centennial Auditorium in March 1949 looking forward to being instructed by their invi]]> Maybe it was the recent election of Richard Nixon to the White House that left me looking to the past rather than to the future in 1974. That was the year I published Honest Abe’s Honest Almanac]]> To build or not to build, that is the question. The answer will depend not on the review of high school facilities needs underway at School District 186. It will be determined by the voters — appropriately, if you are concerned about democracy, inappropriately if you are concerned about education.]]> The day after Veterans Day, we were reminded of another long-running war of attrition, in which clueless elected officials have been squandering resources in ways that threaten our security over the l]]>