Turns out the election was rigged, after all. Voters were asked to chose from among four candidates, and the one who was awarded the most votes was – Illinoisan Hillary Clinton. She lost, however, in the only tally that counts, the Electoral College. The college was set up by the Founders as a political hedge. […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Of the women, for the women and by the women
I just voted a few minutes ago, with pleasure and relief. Just visible n spite of the smoke and mirrors was the fact that this was an election of the women, for the women and by the women. I fully expect by end of day that they will have saved the country, and finally realized […]
Posted inOpinion
Women’s place
Some further observation on, and from, Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln’s Country: The Dumville Family Letters from the University of Illinois Press, which I review this week in “Old letters.” The book’s editors, Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz, offer the letters as lessons in American social, political, and cultural history, as essays […]
Posted inOpinion
Lucky charm
In 2002 I moved to the Chicago area and became a White Sox fan; they won the World Series in 2005. In 2010 I moved to the Bay Area and started following the Giants; they won baseball’s top prize that year and again in 2012 and 2014. I moved back to the Chicago area in […]
Posted inOpinion
Old letters
Hepzibah was a young woman of a sort we’ve all known – smart, full of gumption and eager for a little bit more from life than life was prepared to give her. “It does seem to me that any one who thinks me either pritty or remarkably inteligent must err greatly. I often complain of […]
Posted inOpinion
Keeping what’s ours
All that banging and buzzing you might have heard coming from the Springfield city council chambers in September was the council and mayor building a wall along the city’s border with Sangamon County and the world beyond. That’s when alderpersons approved an ordinance requiring that contractors make good-faith efforts to ensure that Springfield residents work […]
Posted inOpinion
Looking backward
Next summer, if things go well, I will become an historian, to the extent that the published author of a book-length history of mid-Illinois can be called an historian. In truth, I am untrained in the arts of the rigors of scholarship and don’t write history so much as I write about history. But I […]
Posted inOpinion
A little knowledge . . . . No. 9 in a series
The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute down Carbondale way continues to bravely explore the treacherous pathways of public opinion in Illinois. Among the 1,000 Illinois registered voters surveyed in a recent poll, 57 percent said they have at least a somewhat favorable view of labor unions. Those same people said they favored anti-union right-to-work or […]
Posted inOpinion
Where the redbuds are always in bloom
If its citizens struggle to see anything new in a landscape with which they have become too familiar, what is the poor landscape photographer to do? In Larry Kanfer’s case, he does nothing much at all, to judge from the evidence of his new collection of Midwestern landscape photographs, A Prairie State of Mind, from […]
Posted inOpinion
Who’s rigging elections?
“You cheated!” is the lament of sore losers everywhere. Donald Trump warns – ominously, ludicrously – that the November election will be rigged too, presumably because the Democrats will flood the polls with phony voters. This is a nightmare from the Chicago of the 1950s that Republicans can’t get out of their heads. Things aren’t […]
Posted inOpinion
The youth vote
In this week’s Dyspepsiana, I take up the question of election-rigging. Which got me to thinking . . . . The principle—that those subject to the state’s laws ought to be able to shape those laws through the vote—applies even more compellingly to citizens under 18. Among other sins the over-18s commit against the next […]
Posted inOpinion
Men in power
Donald Trump has run for the presidency before. He ran in 1968 disguised as George Wallace and again in 1996 as Patrick Buchanan. He also ran in 1992, as my excerpted column from Oct. 29 of that year recalls. Perot’s defeat – by a Clinton – did not still the authoritarian impulse among our countrymen, […]
