Find a cure for Baumol’s Disease and you will be hailed as the benefactor of millions, even though the only people it harms are politicians. Baumol’s Disease strikes the body politic, specifically the tendency of government costs to so outpace the cost of everything else. Right-thinking commentators liken them to a cancer, in spite of […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
They’re b-a-a-a-c-k
Everybody read about it – a high-tech hunter got video evidence that confirmed the presence in a Morgan County woods of an adult cougar, only the fourth known to have been sighted in Illinois since the 1870s, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. The DNR staff are good scientists who don’t let their […]
Posted inOpinion
The perils of premature morality
A lot of people, I suppose, thought that George McGovern had died a long time ago when they heard in October that he had passed away. Some of them could even have put a date on his demise – election night 1972, when he lost his presidential campaign to the incumbent Richard Nixon in a […]
Posted inOpinion
The needle and the records won
San Francisco, city and club, are famously tolerant of people who don’t play by the book, but Major League Baseball tolerates it only among its umpires. The game’s poobahs have ruled that a player who uses the same sort of methods to win a job on a big-league club that its owners used to acquire […]
Posted inOpinion
Getting there from there
South MacArthur Boulevard is a lot like a heart attack patient. It might recover its former vigor, but it will never thrive in the ways it did before it got sick. It will be able to survive at all only if it makes a whole bunch of smallish changes – the urbanist equivalent of quitting […]
Posted inOpinion
Has another public project gone off the rails?
We’ve all seen it dozens of times in movies. A railroad train is barreling down the tracks. There might be enough time – just – to bring the lumbering machine to a halt before it crashes, but that’s the only way to avoid disaster, because it’s a train, and trains can’t change direction once they […]
Posted inOpinion
The short arm of the law
At last, we can all feel safe when we take our credit cards out in public again. In September, a federal judge in San Francisco fined a Taiwanese company $500 million and sentenced its former president and executive vice president to three years in prison for cooking up a global LCD screen price-fixing conspiracy. The […]
Posted inOpinion
Missing the bus
In late August the Springfield Mass Transit District Board chose as its new executive director a retired Corrections Department internal affairs investigator. The new hire’s qualifications to run a public transit agency seem to be that 1) he is from Springfield and 2) is the son of a former Sangamon County board chairman. Karen Hasara […]
Posted inOpinion
Invisible walls
I was a newspaper publisher at the age of 24. My aptitude for the job can be judged by the fact that the column you are reading appears in a newspaper that is not published by me. I published two newspapers by the age of 30 and both failed. New newspapers usually do. Hooper Warren, […]
Posted inOpinion
Cheating is the American way
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 […]
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 […]
