Back in June of 2015, in “The Razor blade in the apple,” I speculated about the likely effects if passed of Mr. Rauner’s ballyhooed property tax freeze. Among its provisions, the Rauner tax freeze would exempt local governments from the Prevailing Wage Act and allow those governments to limit what is on the table when […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Where corn is god
I grew up within a block of a corn field on the east end of Springfield. Nearly every weekend of those years we’d visit the relatives on their farm outside Beardstown; over the potholes and through the corn, to grandmother’s house we’d go, with me entranced by the corn rows, like the spokes of a […]
Posted inOpinion
Thriving on disturbed ground
Common buckthorn PHOTO BY ED SUBA JR./TNS The dread of the invader runs deep in every human. The savage acts on it unthinkingly, by reaching for a club; the civilized man and woman is no less vulnerable to it but considers it disreputable, rooted as it is in ignorance and racism, and tries to calm […]
Posted inOpinion
Free-market games
In my 2013 column, “Throwing in the towel,” I talked about the several proposals then on the table to treat elite college athletes like the semi-pros they really are. New York‘s Jonathan Chait makes a valuable contribution to the discussion in this recent piece, in which he argues against the notion of marketizing our youthful […]
Posted inOpinion
Giving back
I touched on only only a fraction of the issues regarding recycling in my recent column on that topic. The market for recycled materials is down, which is putting private recyclers under financial strain. Cheap oil makes it more profitable to make new plastic than to recycle old. People read less news on paper. China, which […]
Posted inOpinion
To our credit
A few further thoughts triggered by my recent column about the hoped-for restoration to health of the Ferguson Building at 6th and Monroe in downtown Springfield: The federal taxpayer significantly subsidizes such projects, since the tax credit earned by rehabbing properties in officially designated historic districts, as this one is, reduces the flow of money […]
Posted inOpinion
Adieu to the Abe, again
In a recent column I described the razing in 1978 of the Hotel Abraham Lincoln. Readers interested to learn more about this consummate act of stupidity might enjoy this piece I wrote a few weeks before the building’s execution. It was published under the title “Adieu to the Abe,” and appeared in our paper that […]
Posted inOpinion
Imagining revolutions
PHOTO BY Anthony Souffle/TNS Drowsy after a heavy holiday meal, I settled in to finish Stefan Zweig’s classic 1934 biography of Marie Antoinette. As I drifted in and out of sleep, the Versailles in Zweig’s account of the final days of Louis XVI and his queen faded and was replaced in my imagination with the […]
Posted inOpinion
Going, going . . .
For years, sagacious observers have warned that the real threat to prosperity in Illinois is not high taxes or low politics but stagnant population growth. I addressed the issue in a 2014 column titled “Stuck in Illinois . . . “ Emily Badger at the Washington Post gives us the most recent demographic data about […]
Posted inOpinion
A shooting
Demolition of the President Lincoln Hotel at Fourth and Capitol. COURTESY OF THE LINCOLN LIBRARY SANGAMON VALLEY COLLECTION As part of our 40th anniversary observances, and in light of more recent events, we will revisit some of columns from James Krohe Jr.’s Prejudices series that ran from 1977 to 1994. Typos in the originals have […]
Posted inOpinion
The death of the Abe, in pictures
This is week in my print column I dusted off a column from my old Prejudices series that recalls the demolition in 1978 of the Hotel Abraham Lincoln. I was pleased therefore to learn that a series of still photos depicting that very event will be part of a new exhibition of more than 40 […]
Posted inOpinion
Childproofing culture
While visiting an old friend in Evanston last weekend, I attended a Ceremony of Lessons and Carols at Northwestern University’s Millar Chapel. It was typical of such performances – hard benches and good music, and this time a polite “says who?” delivered to the scare-mongers among us in the form of lessons delivered in Spanish […]
