Just in the past year, Trump’s documented whoppers rank him as the lyingest president in U.S. history. And that included Nixon. It’s not the volume of his fabrications that is so gross, but their enormity. Most damnable of all has been his masquerading as a golden-haired billionaire “populist” who’s standing up for America’s hard-hit middle […]
Editor’s Note
Posted inOpinion
Why the American majority despises Trump’s Washington
Donald Trump, never lacking in self-esteem, bragged in 2016: “I know words – I have the best words.”Well, sometimes he does put together a coherent sentence using some very fine words that convey great promise, such as this one: “I’m going to fight for every person in this country who believes government should serve the […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s Note 2/08/18
This is the moment for Daniel Biss, the unmonied egghead from Evanston who now has a good shot at the Democratic nomination for governor (see “A rise in polls could mean a rise in problems for Biss,” p. 9). Now that J. B. Pritzker has been taken down by his own telephone conversations, and Chris […]
Posted inOpinion
Fed up with corporate-rigged politics?
Last June, after Democratic candidates had lost four straight special Congressional elections, America’s purveyors of conventional political wisdom simultaneously jumped to the conclusion that the policies and message of Democrats were just too progressive for our nation of moderate-right voters. The Washington cognoscenti expressed dismay that, despite Trump’s dismal public approval ratings and the nationwide […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s note 2/1/18
Trump was pretty good – for Trump – in his State of the Union speech, but did you see the Democratic response from Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III? Could we bring that Kennedy to Illinois in exchange for his Uncle Chris? The 37-year-old grandson of Bobby sounds more like Bobby: “This administration isn’t just targeting […]
Posted inOpinion
Inequality is feeding America
Last year, Good Jobs First tracked the 386 incentive deals since 1976 that gave at least $50 million to a corporation, and then it tallied the number of jobs created. The average cost per job was $658,427. Each. That’s likely far more than cities and states can recover through sales, property, income, and all other […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s Note
This week Sen. Chuck Schumer said he is withdrawing his offer to fund President Donald Trump’s border wall as part of the upcoming deal on immigration and funding the government. But White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said he can’t do that. “Senator Schumer is trying to rescind an offer that he never made […]
Posted inOpinion
What’s killing America’s middle class?
Even in this country of grand egalitarian aspirations, the U.S. actually had no broad middle class until one was created in the 1930s and ‘40s. And, yes, “created” is the correct term for how our middle class came to be, with two historic forces of social transformation pushing it. First, the widespread economic devastation of […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s note 1/18/18
Even people who don’t like Donald Trump are breathing a sigh of relief that, although he’s not in very good shape, his doctor said he’s in “excellent health.” If the pres can get by with eating a bad diet, carrying too much weight and not exercising, they can too, they reason. “The good part is […]
Posted inOpinion
Inequality is feeding America
Inequality doesn’t just come out of the blue, it’s intentionally created by decisions that elites make – usually behind closed doors, so those knocked down don’t know what (or who) hit them. Take America’s 4 million fast-food workers, whose average pay hovers around a miserly $300 a week before taxes. With the labor market tightening, […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s note 1/11/18
This week we welcome our new journalism intern, Megan Swett, a student in University of Illinois Springfield’s Public Affairs Reporting master’s degree program. Megan, from O’Fallon, received her undergraduate degree from UIS, where she was editor-in-chief of The Journal, the student newspaper. For the next six months Megan will be reporting for IT from the […]
Posted inOpinion
Breakfast and beer
Let’s talk about two daily essentials: breakfast and, of course, beer. Mass marketers of breakfast cereals have been in a downward sales spiral for about a decade, so they’re getting back to their roots (sort of). Few folks know that some of the oldest and biggest brands of today’s artificially flavored, neon-colored, empty-calorie cereals started […]
