Guest Opinion

 It seems there’s a whole bunch of serious women making a serious leap this election year, giving new meaning to the phrase “a march on Washington.” Most political pundits declare this midterm season The Year of the Woman. That title was coined in 1992. It was minted after Anita Hill’s ungracious grilling by the Senate […]

Tell me: What does it actually mean to be an American? In the press of day-to-day events and amid the ongoing tumult of politics, we don’t think about this much. Yet it’s a crucial question, one that each generation in this country is called upon to answer for itself. Despite our differences, there are some […]

I like to write about issues to inform people who can then write letters to try to influence legislator votes. However, in an election year it is important to look at how those who represent us voted on those issues to decide if a change is needed or not. Rodney Davis represents Springfield in the […]

On Jan. 1, 1937, Social Security became effective, which meant workers and employers began making payments into a special U.S. Treasury account. The Republican Party, seeing an opportunity to siphon off labor support from President Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election began a political fear campaign. In the weeks preceding the election, workers’ pay envelopes were stuffed with […]

Is there a more despised word among Republicans than “environmentalist”? For many GOP voters, the term conjures up a mental image of tree-hugging socialists hell-bent on regulating our country back to the Stone Age. That’s a shame. The GOP boasts a proud history of environmental activism, one grounded in the fundamentally conservative notion that natural […]

 “Do most women wait 40 years to claim someone tried to rape them? Or is that just liberal women?” –A meme posted on my Facebook news feed by a high school friend. When I read those words, I sighed. Last December I wrote about being assaulted when I was 12. And it took me 40 years […]

 If you take a dim view of our political parties, you’re in sterling company. So did George Washington. In his famous Farewell Address, he warned us against “the baneful effects of the spirit of [political] party.” A political party, he wrote, “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one […]

Diversity in the doctor’s office saves lives. That’s the finding of a recent study from Harvard. Researchers at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health examined outcomes for over 1.2 million Medicare patients treated by 44,000 internists at American hospitals. Patients treated by foreign medical graduates had better 30-day survival rates than patients treated by […]

 Imagine there are a lot of people who have heart disease hanging out at Lincoln Library – and every day patrons have to walk by people having heart attacks and strokes, or wheezing and coughing from congestive heart failure. They won’t – or can’t – go to the hospital and no one knows where else […]

It’s no secret to my family and friends how troubled I’ve been by the devastation wrought by the Trump administration. The NATO summit and Trump’s meeting with Putin was outrageous. And he lies about seven times a day just for good measure. To keep sane, I’ve been following the developments of the Democratic “Blue Wave,” […]

 Whose word is less reliable, a jailhouse snitch’s or Gov. Bruce Rauner’s? That’s a question I have been asking myself these past two weeks. You’ll remember that the governor ran four years ago on a platform of free-market capitalism and criminal justice reform. Some cynics, at the time, questioned his sincerity. Was he just trying […]

 You know these words, but how often do you stop to think about them? “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…” They […]