Letters to the editor
We welcome letters, but please include your full name, address, and daytime telephone number. We edit all letters for libel, length, and clarity. Send letters to Letters, Illinois Times, P.O. Box 5256, Springfield, IL 62705; fax 217-753-3958; e-mail editor@illinoistimes.com. BRING THE TROOPS HOME More than 2,300 U.S. military personnel have died in Iraq. Our only…
V is for violence
There is no gray in James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta, only characters who are truly reprehensible and those who are persecuted. The result is a simplistic, overwrought tale of revenge rather than a thoughtful examination of the mind of a revolutionary. A more mature attempt would have given us a hero a bit more conflicted…
Take the last train home
As I speak with Eric Brace, founding member and driving force behind alt-country standard-bearers Last Train Home, he is celebrating his 46th birthday by relaxing in the St. Thomas Islands. The guitar-playing singer and former music journalist is on a working vacation: He and the rest of the band are making their annual February tour…
Our wild American
Rhodes scholar. Army pilot. Janitor. Singer/songwriter. Drunkard. Movie star. Kris Kristofferson, who turns 70 this year, has lived enough for 20 men, and he’s not done yet. This Old Road, his first album in 11 years, finds the grizzled troubadour taking stock of a life led well, if not always wisely, and paying tribute to the…
The milkman’s progeny
After reading the sworn statement by Marty Kovarik for the Jim Oberweis campaign last week, I came to the conclusion that his story has more holes in it than Dick Cheney’s hunting buddy. Kovarik was deputy treasurer to Judy Baar Topinka in 1995. Before that, he was her Senate-office chief of staff for several years.…
Three years and counting
On March 19, 2003, the Bush administration launched what has become one of the longest-running wars in U.S. history. Now, on the third anniversary of the start of the war, we are just beginning to feel the full effects of the greatest catastrophe in American foreign policy since the Vietnam War. We are all familiar…
Jacqueline Jackson
featherspoem #3 middle of the night I used to run outside bare feet on snow gazing up in breathless wonder straining to see before the scudding clouds the gibbous moon that invisible wedge its presence pledged by cacophonous gabble filling the sky I drank in the promise of spring winds snowdrops tawny grass turning green…
A history of Cronenberg
Martin Scorsese praised David Cronenberg back when Cronenberg was generally dismissed as just a horror director. His penchant for biological horror set Cronenberg apart from his contemporaries, but most critics still ignored Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977). Now, with A History of Violence, others are waking up to his brilliance. Violence topped the 2005 Village…
All good politics are local
What an embarrassment our national government is. Mired in the sickening muck of corrupt corporate money and right-wing ideology, our so-called leaders continue to divert our public treasury and our nation’s unlimited potential for good into war, into the pockets of the super-rich, into the self-serving whims of greedheaded corporate executives, into a rising police…
The Hype
A DIFFERENT MARCH MADNESS I asked Christopher Z. Mooney, professor at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Springfield, to point out a few things to look for in Tuesday’s general primary. Here goes. The race for treasurer, Mooney says, may be the one to watch because it pits…
Earth Talk
Dear “Earth Talk”: Did the car companies really conspire to kill the trolleys and streetcars of bygone days to force us to become dependent on automobiles instead? — Taylor Howe, San Francisco Indeed, in the 1920s automaker General Motors began a covert campaign to undermine the popular rail-based public-transit systems that were ubiquitous in and…
American Life in Poetry
This fine poem by Rodney Torreson, of Grand Rapids, Mich., looks into the world of boys arriving at the edge of manhood, and compares their natural wildness to that of dogs, with whom they feel a kinship. On A Moonstruck Gravel Road The sheep-killing dogs saunter home, wool scraps in their teeth. From the den…
Greenland is melting
George W’s mind seems to operate in a bass-ackward fashion. When there is zero evidence to warrant a presidential rush to action, he plunges dead ahead, facts be damned. Yet when there is an abundance of evidence on an issue crying out for presidential action, he does nothing. As we now know, Iraq had no…
How to buy a bull
I know parents who wish they had half as much information about the boys their daughters bring home as cattle breeders have about today’s purebred bulls. The 38th Annual Illinois Performance Tested Bull Sale, held Feb. 23 at the state fairgrounds, was a showcase of animal genetics. Most of the 111 boys sold that day…
To the wire
Chuck Redpath and Sam Cahnman — Democratic candidates for the 99th House District seat — have similar strategies going into the last leg of a race that no one thought would even be close. Voter lists in hand, Cahnman, a lawyer and member of the Sangamon County Board, is going from door to Democratic door,…
Utility futility
Since 2002, when plans for a new Springfield power plant began in earnest, there’s been a lot discussion — at times escalating to heated debate — about the project’s half-billion-dollar price tag. However, too little dialogue has taken place on the new plant’s environmental impact, according to officials from the Illinois Sierra Club. From that…
Who’s going to win?
Rich Miller is a smart guy. That’s why he’s a pundit. Miller, whose sage discourses appear in these pages, as well as in the political newsletter Capitol Fax, waved garlic and ran for his shotgun when we called the other day asking who he thinks will win come Election Day, March 21. “I don’t make…
To the bank
Next week the drama will unfold as all eyes inevitably turn toward the city of Chicago, where it will be decided, once and for all, who will be the next . . . Illinois state treasurer. At least it’s something to do on a Tuesday night. Banker Alexi Giannoulias and Knox County State’s Attorney Paul…
CAP CITY
A MIGHTY WIND The tornadoes that raked Springfield from one end to the other late Sunday and early Monday wrecked dozens of homes and businesses, stranded hundreds of theater patrons at Kerasotes, left thousands of residents without power in the cold, and decapitated Paul Bunyan at Lauterbach Tire. For more than 13 hours, WMAY (970…
