Our lives and our politics are dominated by money, yet our thinking about the most basic number of them all – how much we earn – doesn’t add up. You’d think that people would at least know how much they are paid on the job, but most people underestimate how much they are compensated by […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
All history is personal
The Sangamon County Historical Society turns 50 years old this year. Judged by such new initiatives as a Web-based encyclopedia of area history, the Society is – it pains me to say this – more spry than most of its members who, like me, were already well out of diapers when the Society was founded […]
Posted inOpinion
Here are better ideas than a casino
Recently I was a panelist for a meeting of the Constitutional Rights Foundation of Chicago youth summit on the question of casino expansion. The premise was that gambling expansion would bring more money for Illinois education services. One reason the high school students called for new money was because their sports teams may disappear. They […]
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
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
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
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 […]
Posted inOpinion
Honorable ancestors
Thomas Schwartz has been the Illinois State Historian since 1993. Asked how he got into the racket in a 2008 interview, Mr. Schwartz recalled that he grew up surrounded by an extended family whose members like to get together, eat, drink and tell stories. “History was easier for me,” he said, “because it was transmitted in […]
