Mark Mahoney, city public works director, at the April 21 open house to show off IDOT’s alternatives for MacArthur Boulevard. PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE You wouldn’t ask a carpenter how to build a happy marriage. The residents and business owners along MacArthur Boulevard between South Grand and Wabash did something similar when they asked traffic […]
Opinion
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Is daily fantasy sports illegal?
Virtually a nonentity in 2012, by 2015 Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) was the largest advertiser in the United States. But by the end of 2015, DFS was the subject of investigations by the U.S. Attorney offices in New York, Boston and Tampa. Other criminal justice authorities, including two dozen state attorneys general, were reviewing various […]
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Guelzo on Blumenthal on Lincoln
I am grateful to the Washington Monthly — not for the first time — for alerting me to the release of a new biography of Lincoln that focuses on his Springfield years. Allen Guelzo, the Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, reviewed Sidney BLumenthal’s A Self-Made Man: The Political Life […]
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Picking up the check
ILLUSTRATION BY JASON BENAVIDES/TNS The memory of it lingers after 50 years. Lunchtimes when I was a student in District 186 schools meant mock pizza pie. While that dish was an awful eating experience, it was a valuable learning experience, because pondering what was in it made me realize that not everything I was being […]
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Eating real
Before McDonalds came to town after the Second World War, in the late ’40s and the ’50s, we ate differently than today. In fact we got our food in different ways. At my grandparents’ farm in Menard County there was a large vegetable garden outside the back door. As you left the house you walked […]
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Thank you, Governor
I appreciate the governor of Illinois confirming a point that I made in my drafts of “Graduation exercise” but which I couldn’t squeeze into the finished piece. From Doug Finke: Rauner, speaking at an event in Springfield Monday, said a graduated state income tax would be a bad idea for Illinois, especially for small […]
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Modern spirit
In “More jet-age wonders” I praised the jet-age barn on the state fairgrounds known as the Illinois Building, which was completed in 1950 to plans drawn up by the Chicago firm of Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett. I wouldn’t want you to take just my word for it. Here is Emil Smith, then the editor and publisher […]
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Job-killers
Samuel Scott III, the retired chairman and CEO of Corn Products International, which now calls itself Ingredion. He gave a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in which he examined the crisis in Chicago’s African-American community, which was excerpted recently in Crain’s Chicago Business. Among his remarks, which were otherwise unremarkable, was this remarkable fact. […]
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Graduation exercise
Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie Everyone who cares enough to have an opinion agrees that revenue is at the heart of the State of Illinois’ present distress. Some say that’s because the state doesn’t raise enough of it, others that it raises it inefficiently or unfairly, yet others that it spends what it raises foolishly. They’re […]
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Showing my heart to the world
My name is Thomas J. Bestudik and I am currently an inmate at Taylorville Correctional center serving three years. My world revolves around my nearly 9-year-old daughter, and I wrote a poem to express how I feel for her and if published, to show she does not have to worry what others think. Showing your […]
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Motorola revisited
A drearily familiar story came briefly back to mind in today’s Trib. The campus in Harvard in northern Illinois that Motorola opened in 1997 to make cellphones. and which had been closed since 2003, was sold to a Chinese investor. Motorola played Illinois against Wisconsin against each other to bid up the subsidies it demanded […]
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Booby-trapping the tax system
This week I take up, and just as quickly put down, the question of a graduated income tax for Illinois. Not many states have a flat rate tax on incomes. Illinois does so for reasons that have nothing to do with economic efficiency or philosophical principle. The flat rate was a constraint of 1870 constitution. […]
