Endangered. Photo BY DAVID HINE Bruce Rauner’s campaign to destroy the Illinois State Museum risks losing tourist income, the services of top scientists and administrators and priceless artifacts, not to mention any claim Illinois might make to being a civilized commonwealth. Might there be yet one more loss – the loss of the museum building […]
Bruce Rauner
Posted inOpinion
Off the rack
PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE I took in two things during lunch the other day. One was bean soup. The other was Goethe’s observation that the nobleman “tells us everything through the person he presents, but . . . the burgher simply is, and when he tries to put on an appearance, the effect is ludicrous […]
Posted inOpinion
Bruce Rauner, progressive
PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE Daydreaming the other day, I ran through my head some scenes from my imagined movie remake, Mr. Potter Goes to Springfield, in which Capra’s naïve do-gooder Jefferson Smith is replaced by Henry F. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. However, our own Mr. Potter, Bruce Rauner, also brings to mind real […]
Posted inNews
Black behind bars
In 2013, one out of every 266 people in Illinois was in prison. For African-American residents, it was one in every 68 people. That’s just one of the shocking facts illustrating the serious racial disparity in Illinois’ criminal justice system. About 60 percent of the state’s prison population is black, despite African-American people making up […]
Posted inOpinion
Imagining revolutions
PHOTO BY Anthony Souffle/TNS Drowsy after a heavy holiday meal, I settled in to finish Stefan Zweig’s classic 1934 biography of Marie Antoinette. As I drifted in and out of sleep, the Versailles in Zweig’s account of the final days of Louis XVI and his queen faded and was replaced in my imagination with the […]
Posted inOpinion
Unhappy days are here again
Photo by G. Kunz/ Tribune News Service The news media, as their name suggests, focus on what is new in the world. Journalism’s only subject is current events – “current” having been defined of late to mean “within the past 10 minutes.” Yesterday is barely mentioned, last year is nearly forgotten, a century ago does […]
Posted inOpinion
Closing a deal
Bruce and Diana Rauner PHOTO BY ZBIGNIEW BZDAK/TNS Trust me, readers, I am no more eager to write another column about the closing of the Illinois State Museum than you are to read it. I have been moved to do it because the most important aspect of the story is the one that remains the […]
Posted inOpinion
Home is where the boss is
Well, looks like we got taken again by a big out-of-town jasper. The Omaha-based processed food giant Con-Agra – parent of Chef Boyardee, Swiss Miss and other take-in fast foods – is moving its 700-person corporate headquarters to downtown Chicago. The Tribune parroted the company line that leaving the firm’s suburban-style campus in Nebraska to […]
Posted inOpinion
The razor blade in the apple
The interesting debate about property taxes in Illinois was the one they didn’t have last week at the Statehouse. Under consideration were various versions of a proposal, first made last year by candidate Bruce Rauner, to freeze local property taxes statewide. It was a loony idea, and thus enthusiastically embraced. “Property taxes are out of […]
Posted inOpinion
Last rights
Balancing a budget on the backs of poor people who are on their backs seems cold even for a member of the New Republican Party. In early April, Mr. Bruce Rauner suspended reimbursements paid by the state to funeral homes that bury dead public-aid recipients. The current reimbursements (up to $1,103 in funeral expenses and […]
Posted inNews
Pension tension
The Illinois Supreme Court will hear arguments on a lawsuit over public pension benefits next week, bringing to a head fundamental disagreements over the rights conferred by Illinois’ constitution and whether an emergency justifies overriding the constitution. If state employees and retirees are successful, they’ll see a law which undisputedly reduces the value of their […]
Posted inOpinion
Of the people and for the people – but never like them
“What thrilled the people who stood before Abraham Lincoln,” wrote novelist Francis Grierson in The Valley of Shadows, “was the sight of a being who, in all his actions and habits, resembled themselves, gentle as he was strong, fearless as he was honest, who towered above them all in that psychic radiance that penetrates in […]
