Photo BY MARK ADAMS/MYRTLE BEACH SUN-NEWS/TNS Across the South, Confederate battle flags, long regarded with pride as the symbol of a newly risen South, have been coming down from atop statehouses and courthouses. Hyperbolic commentators see the removal as the final act of the Civil War, but I see it as mere circumspection, not a […]
Illinois – James Krohe Jr
Posted inOpinion
Cowboy Joe
These days, a man who stands at the edge of Springfield and gazes at the wide open spaces to the west and imagines herds grazing contentedly is a shopping center developer. A century and a half ago, he was a cattle man looking for grass. Mid-Illinois once was America’s wide open spaces, and the landscape […]
Posted inOpinion
Doing development right
One of Bluffstone’s numerous apartment properties. They could just put trailers on it, I suppose. An Iowa firm, Bluffstone LLC, hoped to build a five-story, 70-unit apartment complex on a downtown Springfield parking lot. Because the apartments would be marketed to older local college students, the town’s two public universities wanted it. Downtown interests wanted […]
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
Voter reform
ILLUSTRATION BY Rick Nease/TNS As a nation we are split into two camps along familiar populist/progressive lines, with one believing that government doesn’t work because the people running our governments don’t understand the voters and the other believing that government doesn’t work because voters don’t understand government. Members of the General Assembly in the latter […]
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A good life well recalled
The dewy-eyed farm memoir is by now a discredited genre but nostalgic farm folk and wannabe urbanites apparently eat these stories with a big spoon. Countryfarm Lifestyles (“a country living website for homesteading, self sufficient living and the good life”) offers compilations of such trifles as “Aunt Ruth and the Ginger Snap Cookie Incident.” Other […]
Posted inOpinion
Making Mr. McGregors
Moving west to California some years ago, I was commanded to pull off the interstate at the state line in the Sierra Nevada. A young man in uniform asked me to open the car so he could inspect what I was carrying. A narc? DHS goon? Nope. He wore the uniform of the California Department […]
Posted inOpinion
Implementing planning
ILLUSTRATION BY SW PARRA/TNS Usually no one pays attention to what the losers in a mayoral contest had to say. The recent city hall election was a happy exception. The un-preferred Paul Palazollo said repeatedly during the campaign that the city of Springfield needs a “planner/implementer” to, well, plan and implement. After the election, the […]
Posted inOpinion
Land of drinkin’
“It’s time we started cashing in.” So sayeth Richard C. Longworth in the Chicago Tribune recently. Longworth, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, was talking about Illinois’ abundant water. He noted that factories of all kinds located in water-short places such as California and the Southwest need most what Illinois has a […]
Posted inOpinion
Sustainable agriculture
PHOTO BY ERICKA HINE It’s farmers market time. I’ve washed and starched my reusable shopping bag and hope to be first in line to buy a fine lettuce that reliably voted for the Green Party until the day it was plucked from the soil and carefully strapped with a seat belt into the pickup for […]
Posted inOpinion
The encouragement of competent teachers
Reading Phil Bradley’s fine remembrance of Elizabeth Graham the other day (see “Before the university we had Elizabeth Graham,” April 9, 2015) I was moved to reflect again on teachers and teaching. As Bradley recalls Miss Graham, she was the schoolmarm personified. Though long retired, she treated indifferent or unruly visitors to the Vachel Lindsay […]
Posted inOpinion
Making dead hyenas come alive
How much would you give so a dead hyena could have a new home? The Field Museum of Natural History is hoping you’ll give something. The museum – a world institution that, happily, happens to be in Chicago – is raising $170,000 via crowdfunding to build a classic animal diorama featuring striped hyenas in the […]
