Opinion

Ralph Laughery’s eyes light up when he remembers his neighborhood the way it used to be. “Everybody knew everybody,” he says. “It was an extremely friendly place.” After he was born, in 1932, his parents brought him home from the hospital to the house at 800 N. Seventh St., at the corner of Seventh and […]

Credit-card giants such as Citibank, Chase Manhattan, and MBNA fill our mailboxes with little love letters, wooing us to accept their cards. But — as in so many love affairs — once you’ve signed up, the companies suddenly show an ugly, grasping, selfish side. They actually seem to enjoy penalizing their customers. For example, I […]

Imagine for a moment that you can’t breathe. You have asthma, but it’s been more than a year since your last real attack, so you’ve left your inhaler at home. You’re at the police academy, running a drill, learning all about discipline, integrity, teamwork, brotherhood in blue, yadda yadda, and, sure enough, when you suddenly […]

When U.S. Sen. Barack Obama was in Springfield last weekend for a town meeting with military veterans about the sorry state of veterans’ benefits, he missed a good chance to talk to the vets about the war in Iraq. He had passed up an earlier chance to address the issue when Newsweek interviewed him for […]

At President George W. Bush’s recent “National Economic Conference,” an entire session was devoted to bashing trial lawyers — and what a rollicking good time it was! A panel of corporate interests wowed the handpicked audience of Bush partisans with jabs at the lawyers who try to hold wrongdoing corporations accountable. Bush nodded and chuckled […]

Sometimes it seems I spend half my time fixing toilet paper. Nobody around here hangs it properly, with the paper rolling away from the wall. Instead, everybody hangs it with the paper rolling toward the wall, which makes no sense whatsoever — at least that’s my opinion. Another problem is double doors. There must be […]

Gosh, it’s sad that the Bush administration hasn’t been able to provide protective armor for all of our troops in Iraq, but it has other priorities — such as playing with its Star Wars toys. There was recently another test of this boondoggle missile-defense system. The scheme, first hatched under President Ronald Reagan, calls for […]

Am I the only one who thinks it’s a bit ironic that a visit to the Statue of Liberty — a symbol of America’s freedoms — now requires visitors to surrender a piece of freedom? The founders knew from hard experience that the protection of individual privacy from the prying eye of the authorities was […]

To Ted Smith, East Jackson Street is more than a street — it’s the backbone of the neighborhood he’s lived in for 57 years. Abraham Lincoln lived on Jackson, 20 blocks west of here, so it’s the backbone of America, too. And the barricade that blocks cars from using the street east of Livingston is […]