Central Illinois farmland doesn’t usually return a fat harvest until the fall. These days it’s doing so all year long. Sales prices for prime farm acreage around Springfield rose roughly one fifth in 2010, to as much as $9,000 an acre for the best stuff, and they’re still rising. That’s faster than since the 1970s, […]
Illinois – James Krohe Jr
Posted inOpinion
Celebrating success
Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s modern pharaoh, and his two sons were “detained” in mid-April for questioning about corruption and abuse of power by Egyptian prosecutors. No one knows how much the longtime Egyptian strongman and his family have skimmed from the Egyptian economy during his rule. Estimates of $40-$70 billion appear absurdly high, but even $5 […]
Posted inOpinion
The bridges of Sangamon County
Usually, making a Top 10 list is cause for congratulation, but not when it’s Landmarks Illinois’ annual list of most endangered historic sites. In March, the preservationist group named to this year’s list the 110-year-old bridge that carries Bolivia Road from near Lanesville in Sangamon County south across the Sangamon River to the hamlet of […]
Posted inOpinion
Undercount
Forget one-person-one vote; we are moving toward a one election-one vote future. The turnout of registered voters in Peoria for April’s municipal elections — and remember that not all qualified voters are registered — was a bit more than 17 percent. In Chicago’s collar counties, turnout ranged from around 12 percent to 16.4 percent. In […]
Posted inOpinion
Relying on Senator Santa
The prospect of free money leaves even a Republican Chamber of Commerce stalwart like Mike Houston sounding like a spoils-oriented ward alderman. “Sen. [Dick] Durbin is a very powerful senator,” said former mayor Houston to the State Journal-Register the other day. “I think that he will eventually be able to provide the federal funds to […]
Posted inOpinion
Big deals about little games
Finally. The Springfield High girls beat Glenwood at soccer the other night, after nearly a decade during which Chatham girls played Mike Madigan to the conference’s legislative rank and file. The win was especially good news to your favorite columnist, who is a proud uncle of the goal-scorer and a nearly proud alum of SHS. […]
Posted inOpinion
‘I’m all right, Jack.’
Years ago, when I kept an office downtown, prurient curiosity caused me to drop by the PO every once in a while to check out the creeps on the FBI’s latest Ten Most Wanted list posted in the lobby. These days I look forward to the release of Forbes magazine’s annual list of the world’s […]
Posted inOpinion
Chicagoland, Chicagoland
While the pundits debate whether Illinois is leaning to the left or the right, the U.S. Census Bureau, deciding on better evidence supplied by the 2010 population count, has concluded that Illinois is leaning toward the northeast. Yes, some Downstaters were cheered to learn that the City of Chicago, their ancient nemesis, lost some 200,000 […]
Posted inOpinion
A school by any other name
The good people of Chatham have built themselves a second public elementary school, to give their young the skills they will need to someday leave Chatham. The usual sorts of names for the new school were submitted to the school board by townspeople and students and staff – those of local landmarks, of a local […]
Posted inOpinion
Living too high off the hog
Springfield has become to sick people what Decatur is to soybeans, a major regional processing center in which raw materials are processed by the latest in high-tech machinery into novel products such as tennis-playing octogenarians and bankers with a 60-year-old’s bank account and a 30-year-old’s heart. According to published reports, this year the local medico-insurance […]
Posted inOpinion
‘A neat and appropriate address’
When I lived on the east side in the 1980s, I often walked past the building now called the Lincoln Depot on my way to and from downtown. Many’s the time I found myself having to wait while a freight train ambled down the track, and to kill time in that pre-Kindle age I read […]
Posted inOpinion
Sacred documents
At my age, “constitutional issues” usually involve medicine, not the law, if only because the other kind are so complex that thinking about them makes my head hurt. A boyhood reading of The Great Rehearsal: The Story of Making and Ratifying the Constitution of the United States first suggested why. Author Carl Van Doren took […]
