Illinois legislators and governors have a soft spot for heroes. I know that because they do so much to create them. The administrators of adoption agencies that find ways to keep going when the state doesn’t pay its bills are heroes. So are schoolteachers who must buy their kids books with their own money because […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Positive spillovers
Illinois legislators aren’t the only people who have to borrow money to pay for services whose value they sometimes question. Tuition and fees at four-year public institutions in the U.S. rose nearly 400 percent in the 30 years after 1981 – after adjusting for inflation – and student debt is rising faster than the salaries […]
Posted inOpinion
A new Jerusalem
My Christmas shopping being done, I curled up in front of a glowing space heater to catch up on my reading. At the top of the pile was the official 2012 visitors guide to Springfield, “your not so far away getaway.” Published by the Convention and Visitors Bureau, the 56-page guide must have left many […]
Posted inOpinion
Arts of the patron
Mary Lee Leahy died Dec. 12, after a busy life working for good causes as an attorney and public servant. Perhaps unfairly, she is remembered mainly as a Holy Warrior against patronage in public employment. This alone made her passing notable in Springfield, where patronage has been a way of life since they unloaded the […]
Posted inOpinion
Pilgrim’s progress
I hear you’re mad about BrubeckI like your eyes, I like him tooHe’s an artist, a pioneerWe’ve got to have some music on the new frontier– “New Frontier” by Donald Fagen When I was in high school I had a taste for jazz that, like every else about me at that age, consisted of enthusiasm […]
Posted inOpinion
Lousy socialists
“The word ‘socialism,’” said Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld in a speech 115 years ago, “is used as a term of derision only by the ignorant or the servile.” Springfield has been the scene of an experiment in the public ownership and management of the means of production of a vital product since the days […]
Posted inOpinion
Go east, young man!
I don’t know about you, but I love to hear people talk about their interesting trips to foreign places. You learn the most interesting things. What fun it would be therefore to sit down with Mike Madigan – a man who, however far he roams, never really leaves the Southwest side of Chicago – and […]
Posted inOpinion
Crowdsourcing presidential choice
Remember Election Night? All those colored maps on TV, intended to make clear what a jumble of numbers could not. But the maps, unlike the numbers, did not add up. Such massive swaths of red on the map, such a massive pile of blue electoral votes in the graphs. How could the Democrat have won, […]
Posted inOpinion
Flatland into flatscapes
Earlier this year, a young English woman named Jennifer Bradley undertook, with friends, to run across the U.S. in 80 days. She thus became the first British woman (we are told) to cross the country on foot, which is the sort of thing that the Brits tend to do with their time now that they […]
Posted inOpinion
Draining the pool
Making one’s address a condition of employment is one of those latent viruses that reside in the American body politic, and which flares up in full-blown symptoms every few decades. Residency requirements were first imposed by big-city political machines; if you wanted the alderman to give you a city job, you and your family had […]
Posted inOpinion
Diagnosing the cost disease
Find a cure for Baumol’s Disease and you will be hailed as the benefactor of millions, even though the only people it harms are politicians. Baumol’s Disease strikes the body politic, specifically the tendency of government costs to so outpace the cost of everything else. Right-thinking commentators liken them to a cancer, in spite of […]
Posted inOpinion
They’re b-a-a-a-c-k
Everybody read about it – a high-tech hunter got video evidence that confirmed the presence in a Morgan County woods of an adult cougar, only the fourth known to have been sighted in Illinois since the 1870s, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. The DNR staff are good scientists who don’t let their […]
