I know only two lawyer jokes. One is Rod Blagojevich. The other one is this: In a nation that already has more lawyers per capita than any other nation on earth, U.S. law schools are churning out many more lawyers than the economy needs. A consulting company that specializes in such things recently compared the […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Temples in ruins
I left one question unanswered when I wrote recently that the Horace Mann Educators Corp. building in downtown Springfield was one of four in the capital city designed by a world-famous architecture firm. (“Architectural dreams,” Aug. 4, 2011.) Why did a growing but still small insurance company in a not-growing and small Midwestern city hire […]
Posted inOpinion
Modern minstrels
Poets, we are reliably told, once were creatures of the street and the court, not the study, and poetry was sung, or at least recited. That past lives again every year when Springfield area schoolkids take the stage during the Poetry Out Loud recitation competition, whose winners have a chance to go on, if not […]
Posted inOpinion
Going against the flow
My advice is, don’t ever invite the executive director of the Springfield Metro Sanitary District and a carp to the same party. Springfield, you see, is one of dozens of Illinois cities and towns that have a combined sewage system in which the same pipes that carry untreated sewage to the treatment plant also are […]
Posted inOpinion
Architectural dreams
Springfield’s Trivial Pursuit is not a party game that is much played these days, except by candidates for state representative seats. Several different versions were released over the years in an attempt to broaden the market by narrowing the appeal to, variously, science buffs, movie obsessives or nostalgists. High time, perhaps, for a Springfield version. […]
Posted inOpinion
Anti-urban urban renewal
The downtown headquarters building of the Horace Mann Educators Corp. is getting its first major fix-up since it opened in 1972. Whatever its merits as a work of design, the building certainly was well built. In the years since it opened, Springfield’s city government has had to be remodeled after courts found it suffered from […]
Posted inOpinion
It’s not the heat, it’s the corn
Here it is July again, and the General Assembly still hasn’t done anything about summer. Summers in the Midwest have never been pleasant, unless you own stock in a water park, but lately they have gotten worse – not just more unpleasant but more unpleasant in ominous ways. Windstorms have become so common that people […]
Posted inOpinion
Devoid of life
Illinois has long been content to be a C-minus kind of state. That’s about the grade the 2010 census gave the state for its performance during the Oughts, when the number of people living in Illinois grew by only 3.3 percent while the nation as a whole increased its numbers by 9.7 percent. The performance […]
Posted inOpinion
Mr. Bureaucracy
The life of an opinion-monger is filled with idle moments that more diligent commentators spend in study and reflection. I prefer to wonder rather than ponder. And one of the things I wonder about is, Why aren’t there more songs about government? I wanted songs that are about the process of government, not the effects. […]
Posted inOpinion
Put voters on trial next
At last, we have a verdict on the governor. Within hours of its announcement, deliberations began in the press to decide the guilt or innocence of the people who elected him twice as Illinois’s chief executive officer. The verdict? The voters are guilty of apathy, ignorance, scandal fatigue and an insensitivity to manipulation that rivals […]
Posted inOpinion
Tangible rights
As I write, the jury is still out on Rod Blagojevich. The coming verdict in his second trial for behaving like an Illinois governor will settle for now the question of his criminal culpability. Other questions of perhaps more moment to Illinois are likely to remain unaddressed, much less answered. Blagojevich was tried a second […]
Posted inOpinion
No stickers
I will not be able to take Western religions seriously until they explain the sand burr. The plant’s very existence suggests that the universe is a creation of malevolent design. Even devout Christians come close to agreeing with me. While enjoying a balmy day, one believer writes, “And I thought, Father, this is so amazing, […]
