There is no shame in quitting a race you know you can’t win. Lance Armstrong’s shame is the many races he perhaps should have quit rather than win. It was apparently to prevent unsavory facts about his long-rumored doping from coming out into the open that the seven-time Tour de France winner abandoned his years-long […]
Illinois – James Krohe Jr
Posted inOpinion
Endangered repose
Ever notice that there is only two letters’ difference between dog and blog? The dog and blogger are kin to the extent that too many of each are noisily eager to share their ignorance with everyone else. I have had dog owners patiently explain to me that their animals’ incessant shouting is really “talking.” Jeff […]
Posted inOpinion
It’s Springfield’s fault
A few weeks ago the nation was briefly distracted from the work of buying, stealing and subverting this year’s elections by the release of a report from researchers at the Kennedy School of Government. “Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability and Corruption: Evidence From U.S. States” by political economists Filipe R. Campante and Quoc-Anh Do offered an […]
Posted inOpinion
Just what the doctor ordered
When it comes to their health – and eventually, everything does – Americans’ motto is, “Too much is never enough.” That phrase ought to be printed on every test report, every insurance form, every hospital receipt generated by a national health care system that spends more and gets less for it than more advanced nations […]
Posted inOpinion
Bus-age wonders
While I was coming of age in central Illinois in the 1960s, the motor vehicle that figured daily in my life was not a car – I didn’t have one – but the bus. I rode buses to school, I rode buses to visit friends away at college, I rode buses to and from an […]
Posted inOpinion
Carp diem
The two Old Friends (I am told) were sitting at breakfast. Old Friend No. 1 recalled the summer nights of her youth when she would join her beau on the banks of Lake Springfield, there to mix Wheaties and water and garlic salt into a dough that was affixed to a treble hook and cast […]
Posted inOpinion
Criminal injustice
The feds want Bill Cellini to get at least six and a half years in a steel box when he is sentenced in October in Chicago. His lawyers have argued that the feds seem to forget that Cellini was not convicted of all the crimes they charged him with, only two minor ones. Whatever they […]
Posted inOpinion
Fiscalizing land use policy
“People,” goes an old political adage, “vote their pocketbooks.” That goes for people in elected office too. A diligent reader attended a Springfield Park Board meeting at which the Griffin Woods decision was discussed. She noted that none of the officials involved seemed to want to stand in the way of the new Schnucks store […]
Posted inOpinion
The message from the graves
The other day a passing canoeist (who else?) found an unusual pottery fragment on a sandbar in the Sangamon between Springfield and Petersburg. The find prompted the usual questions? How old is it? Who made it? How did it get there? Having some knowledge of Illinois anthropology, the boater reported the find to Michael Wiant, […]
Posted inOpinion
The twenty acre wood
Few of our readers know the words and music to “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” a mawkish ballad that was a hit in the 1830s. Instead they are singing the blues about the destruction of Griffin Woods. The Springfield City Council recently decided that those 20 acres of trees at Washington and North Bruns Lane may […]
Posted inOpinion
Kumbaya around the campfire
Jim Edgar is the closest thing the Illinois Republican Party has to a sage. His long career in elective office made him wise – wise enough anyway to retire from elective office – and he generously dispenses that wisdom from the mountaintop of the University of Illinois’ Institute for Government and Public Affairs. In June, […]
Posted inOpinion
How zoning works
If a woods fall and eight aldermen are not listening, does it make a sound? A few days ago the Springfield city council voted 8-2 to replace Griffin Woods, the 20-acre patch of forest at Bruns Lane and Washington, with a parking lot with a building on it. The building will house yet another Schnucks […]
