Question: What do you get when you mix together a barrel of fables, a sack of mendacity, a gross of hyperboles, a bucket of spite and a jar of venomous vituperation – all covered with a thick layer of subterfuge? Answer: the fiasco called Trumpcare. With the GOP now in control of the whole national […]
Editor’s Note
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s Note 3/30/17
Other than that, Jackie, how was the conference? If you tried to email Springfield Housing Authority executive director Jackie Newman earlier this week, you received this automatic reply: “I am currently out of the office at the NAHRO Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C. listening to HUD Secretary Dr. Ben Carson explain why this administration is […]
Posted inOpinion
Real news
A decade ago, some barons of the media establishment designated themselves America’s official arbiters of political truth. One of their tools is PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times and several other major newspapers, which issues an award for the year’s most outrageous falsehood. Last year’s election was infested with so much disinformation and […]
Posted inOpinion
How magical is Donald Trump?
Trump & Company claim they have a sweeping mandate from voters to remake America –but wait, it is just a magic trick – almost half of the electorate chose not to vote in last November’s presidential election. Here’s another fact: Those of us fighting for populist justice are stronger than we’ve been in decades. But […]
Posted inOpinion
Editors Note 3/23/17
It gave us a shudder to hear the new secretary of state rattling his saber this week about Korea. The policy of “strategic patience” with North Korea is over, he said, and “all options are on the table” – presumably including a preemptive military strike – to respond if North Korea threatens South Korea. Did […]
Posted inOpinion
What to do about a mentally ill president?
It’s time to face up to the obvious: The President of the United States is deranged. I don’t mean that he’s merely idiosyncratic or pushing policies that I think are crazy, nor do I say this as just another political jab. I mean that Donald J. Trump literally is mentally ill. I’m no doctor, but […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s Note 3/16/17
Dr. Jerry Kruse, dean and provost of Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, has weighed in against the current Republican legislation to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. His is an important voice reflecting SIU’s efforts to improve health care for low-income residents of this region. Now we need to hear from Gov. Bruce […]
Posted inOpinion
The chicken and the egg
Those who say that we ordinary people can’t have any effect on today’s corporate behemoths should check out two breakthroughs last year by a group the establishment has long derided as somewhere between wacko and criminal: animal rights activists. Members of groups like the Humane Society get demonized, outlawed, sued and jailed by agribusiness interests […]
Posted inOpinion
Editors Note 3/9/17
It is now looking increasingly unlikely that Gov. Bruce Rauner and the General Assembly will come up with a budget for the upcoming fiscal year. After Gov. Bruce Rauner withdrew his support from Senate negotiations on a “grand bargain,” the governor has called on Democrats to propose more spending cuts, after proposing none of his […]
Posted inOpinion
Wall Street plowboys
Every decade or so, the public is shocked by yet another discovery that migrant farmworkers are being horribly abused by the wealthy masters of the corporate food system. And here we go again. Last November, the New York Times reported that the workers who grow and harvest the cornucopia of fruit and veggies in the […]
Posted inOpinion
Editor’s Note 3/2/17
There is room for hope that the state Senate will do the right thing and pass the package of “grand bargain” bills over to the House, where there will be more bargaining and eventually, finally, a budget. But any deal that allows Gov. Bruce Rauner to force a strike by AFSCME workers won’t feel like […]
Posted inOpinion
It’s time to put food policy back on the table
Remember last year’s presidential debates? Trump and Clinton talked about the needs of hard-hit working-class families, veterans and coal miners among others. But, hellloooo, where were farmers? All went unmentioned, even though economic and emotional depression is spreading through their communities, thanks to bankruptcy-level prices paid by corporate middlemen. In the past three years, farm […]
