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PACHYDERMSAND JACKASSES
OK, our adopted son Barack
Obama handily beat our native daughter Hillary Clinton in the
Illinois Democratic primary. Predictable though the outcome may have
been in the Land of Lincoln, the presidential campaigns on the whole have
had all the suspense of this year’s Super Bowl — complete with
coaching controversies and lead changes and maybe, just maybe, will
conclude with an upset. A pair of political prognosticators —
Republican National Committeeman Bob
Kjellander and Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick
Durbin’s downstate director, Bill
Houlihan — provide commentary on
this year’s primaries at 8 a.m. Friday, Feb. 15, at the Hoogland
Center for the Arts.
THEBETTERBUSH
Maybe Honest Abe’s shoes are just too big to
fill, or maybe national milestones just aren’t that important.
Whatever the reason, President George W. Bush declined to attend Tuesday’s Abraham Lincoln
Bicentennial Inaugural Ceremony in Hodgenville, Ky. Instead, he asked first
lady Laura Bush to
represent him. We’re guessing the Great Emancipator was displeased,
because he sent stormy weather that forced a cancellation of the
bicentennial launch.
IS THIS ZERO-BASE BUDGETING?
With only two weeks left until the March 1 deadline,
Springfield aldermen have yet to pass the fiscal year 2009 budget or even
pin down the much-needed changes they have been clamoring about for months.
Apparently Springfield residents are slightly flighty, too — the city
held a public budget hearing on Monday and no one showed up except aldermen
and some members of the press.
FRIENDS — HOW MANY OF US HAVE THEM?
Brad Will has
plenty of friends, and his are a dedicated posse hellbent on making sure
that their homeboy, an Illinois-born freelance videojournalist who was
murdered in Mexico in 2006, didn’t die in vain. Last week, for the
second time since December, members of Friends of Brad Will performed a
Whodiniesque disappearing act when several of them were arrested for
disrupting a meeting on Capitol Hill. The hearing was on President Bush’s so-called
Merida Initiative, also called Plan Mexico, which would provide Latin
American governments with $1.4 billion in aid to fight terrorism, drug
trafficking, and political corruption. Critics such as the FOBW fear that
the money will have the opposite effect, leading to further human-rights
abuses of citizens — a subject Will was documenting when he was shot
to death by plainclothes Mexican police. Will’s murder was the
subject last year of a lengthy news story in Illinois
Times [see John Ross, “The killing
of Brad Will,” Aug. 9].
GATEHOUSE’S GATEKEEPERS
To borrow a line from Triumph
the Insult Comic Dog, “It’s like
booing at the Special Olympics.” But, dang, sometimes you just
can’t ignore the State Journal-Register. The paper’s ballyhooed “first annual”
Readers’ Choice Awards hit the streets on Sunday, Feb. 10. We think
it’s that paper’s version of our “Best of
Springfield” edition, but there’s a big twist: The paper told
advertisers who won before it told its readers. At the SJ-R, folks have a right to know,
but folks who are likely to buy self-congratulatory ads apparently have a
right to know first.
This article appears in Feb 7-13, 2008.
