Bruce and Diana Rauner PHOTO BY ZBIGNIEW BZDAK/TNS Trust me, readers, I am no more eager to write another column about the closing of the Illinois State Museum than you are to read it. I have been moved to do it because the most important aspect of the story is the one that remains the […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Home is where the boss is
Well, looks like we got taken again by a big out-of-town jasper. The Omaha-based processed food giant Con-Agra – parent of Chef Boyardee, Swiss Miss and other take-in fast foods – is moving its 700-person corporate headquarters to downtown Chicago. The Tribune parroted the company line that leaving the firm’s suburban-style campus in Nebraska to […]
Posted inOpinion
Trumped-up charges
Photo by Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/TNS Brother Trump is the savior come to rescue America, in the opinion of a majority of self-identified Republicans. On the stump he works crowds into a fever with his perorations against immigrants (how he spells “Mexicans”) who are surging across our borders without papers or prospects, taking “our” jobs […]
Posted inOpinion
Off the menu
Marquette Inn in Chicago, IL. A few years ago, I met an old pal from Springfield in Chicago. We grabbed a bite at the Marquette Inn, the ground-floor diner named after the magnificent 1895 Loop building of that name which housed it, a place sentimental for both of us for different reasons. It was just […]
Posted inOpinion
Lincoln’s Union problem
The Quartet by Joseph Ellis Bells in Springfield – church bells, hand bells, even cell phone ringers – rang at 2:15 p.m. on April 9 to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of major Civil War fighting. Except, as I explored in part in “Naming rights and wrongs” (July 9, 2015), the Civil War […]
Posted inOpinion
The light that turns people on
Everybody’s very happy’Cause the sun is shining all the timeLooks like another perfect dayI love L.A. – “I Love L.A.” by Randy Newman For years, people measured the deficiencies of life in Springfield in terms of lifestyle emporia or ethnic eateries. The city’s gloominess was thought to be cultural, not meteorological. But according to NASA […]
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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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
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
Last rights
Balancing a budget on the backs of poor people who are on their backs seems cold even for a member of the New Republican Party. In early April, Mr. Bruce Rauner suspended reimbursements paid by the state to funeral homes that bury dead public-aid recipients. The current reimbursements (up to $1,103 in funeral expenses and […]
