It’s tax time, and as I write, last-minute filers across Springfield are huddled over dining tables, poring through store receipts and bank books looking for deductions that might reduce the cost of being a citizen. One of the most popular is the deduction of money paid in interest on one’s house mortgage. Back in 2009, […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
The right combination of sensibilities
Richard Shereikis died in Evanston on March 29. He was 75. A spot on the staff of Illinois Times in its very early years was an entry-level position – anyone who walked up the steps and through the front door had a chance to become a contributor. One of the many people who took that […]
Posted inOpinion
Faulty deductions
It’s tax time, and the hunt for deductions is on. Back in 2009, I griped about the folly of the federal tax subsidy to home owners in my column, “Just extra money.” The deduction for home mortgage interest favors families spending more money on more house, because the more they pay in interest, the more […]
Posted inOpinion
Pedestrian design
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company that runs stores called Country Markets built a new one in the middle of Springfield that sits on the street like a roadside vegetable stand. In March, Steve Patterson, a St. Louis architect who blogged about the project at UrbanDesignSTL, criticized the indifference the new store […]
Posted inOpinion
Empty chairs
The nation laughed when Clint Eastwood debated an empty chair at the Republicans’ national convention, but it wasn’t funny in Illinois. More and more of the seats on Illinois’ town councils and school boards, its sewage and water districts and road commissions – that cumbersome, clanking apparatus that is democratic self-government in Illinois – have […]
Posted inOpinion
Unplugged
We all live in a brave new world, but the future is happening sooner in some places than in others. As you might expect, the planet is home to many nations where connections to the Internet, the highway to that future, are slow or costly compared to the advanced nations, if they are available at […]
Posted inOpinion
Nurse! Nurse!
Illinois faces two challenges in providing decent medical care for the many among us who stubbornly refuse to follow the example of our social betters by getting rich. One, endlessly “debated,” is the cost. In February, the Illinois Senate took a step toward dealing with that by handily approving the expansion of Medicaid called for […]
Posted inOpinion
A penny here, a penny there…
I read with dismay – I always read with dismay, like some people always sleep with their cat – that the president would like the federal government to stop minting pennies. They can buy virtually nothing and cost more than twice their value to make, indeed are worth so little than even freelance writers don’t […]
Posted inOpinion
Hearing loss
I am told that radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi believed that sounds never die, and that if one could somehow catch up with old sound waves one could hear sounds made years, even centuries, ago. As The Atlantic’s Rebecca Rosen (whom I owe for that fact) rightly observed that an Earth littered with lost sounds, just […]
Posted inOpinion
Board games
The most accident-prone intersection in Springfield is at 1900 West Monroe Street where the corridor to the boardroom crosses the corridor to the superintendent’s office. There was yet another pileup at that spot when the District 186 board bought out the final year of Superintendent Walter Milton’s contract. Bought out? Bought off is probably a more apt […]
Posted inOpinion
Hat trick
Nothing – save perhaps a shredded writ of habeas corpus – says “Lincoln” like a stovepipe hat. Abe World relies on his hats as a graphical motif – I count four of them on the home page alone – and the innermost room of the Treasures Gallery is a sanctum sanctorum described by the museum […]
Posted inOpinion
History by the book
Springfield has seen two Lincoln movies recently – Saving Lincoln, which retells the White House years from the perspective of his close friend and bodyguard and which the Abraham Lincoln Association screened on Feb. 11 at Abe World, and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. That left moviegoers asking the question, Which one is worth seeing? I’m more […]
