Opinion

Jack grew up in Springfield, graduated from high school, joined the Marines, and became a military police officer. After being honorably discharged, he enrolled in college, got a degree in criminal justice, and found a job with the state. In 2001, when he saw a chance to join the Springfield Fire Department, Jack applied, partly […]

It’s been said that you don’t know what hell is until you’ve had an insurance salesman in your living room, prattling on eternally about term-life annuities. But I’ve recently learned about a deeper level of hell reserved for insurance-company hucksters who — get this — are ripping off America’s young soldiers. Companies such as American […]

Something major is taking place in our country that corporate chieftains don’t want us talking about: jobless creep. It’s no longer blue-collar families who are seeing their jobs hauled offshore to faraway havens of low-wage production. Now it’s hundreds of thousands (and soon to be millions) of well-paying white-collar and high-tech jobs that are being […]

Conventional wisdom in Illinois says that politicians who take politically difficult positions are doomed to defeat, but the late Paul Simon always challenged that. “It is not true,” he boomed back to me not so long ago, after I had voiced the cynical view. He said if you’re honest with voters and make a case […]

What do Kalamazoo, Evansville, Albuquerque, Stockton, Trenton, Phoenix, Columbia, St. Louis, Knoxville, and Charleston have in common? All are cities where people have been jailed for displaying anti-Bush signs during public appearances by King George the W. Is this America, the land of the free? That’s what Nicole and Jeff Rank asked this July 4th […]

When the federal district court issued its Springfield consent decree in 1974, it aimed at the achievement gap but missed. Because racially segregated schools were unequal, integration was proposed as a remedy. Busing was the blunt instrument employed to equal things up, and it helped. School buildings were integrated and resources were improved, but the […]

See George. See George in our national parks. George knows that parks are popular. George likes to go to parks and have the media take his picture. See George run for president. In his 2000 presidential run, George W. dressed up in khakis and held a photo op in a national park, where he decried […]

“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. . . . This process of continual alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political […]