Second Thoughts

This morning Rich Miller over at Capital Fax.com responded to a recent report comparing Chicago charter schools outcomes to those at the city’s neighborhood schools.  [The] over-emphasis on taking tests (with the resultant uproar over what are likely quite meaningless results) and driving kids to attend college is philosophically wrong-headed, whether in Chicago or the […]

Thinking about epistolary romancing for last week’s column (Please mister postman), I wondered, Do romantic emails excite the same kind of response as the old-fashioned love letter? I used to think that they could not. Yes, the process of composing one is letter-like, but the speed of their transmission puts them into a different category. The […]

 Whatever one thinks of him – and I made clear in Price of Demagogues that I think that his ambition consistently outran his judgment – Stephen A. Douglas was a singular character. John Mason Peck writes, “His political commitments were by no means purely selfish. Identifying his fate with that of the Union, Douglas struggled […]

Good news. The Chicago district of the National Labor Relations Board recently decided  that Northwestern football players qualify as employees of the university and thus can unionize if they choose. The ruling noted that the amount of a student’s time he is expected to devote to the game, and the fact that his scholarship is […]

 My column about drummer jokes in December made significant mention of Springfield native son and drummer, Barrett Deems.   I am informed by UIS Auditorium Director Bob Vaughn that the jazz performance on March 30 by the SF Jazz Collective will be dedicated to Deems, who turned 100 the first of that month. The concert is Sunday […]

About a year ago, in a column titled, “What was that again?” I noted that people who learn words solely from books are prey to pronouncing them the way they look — which, unfortunately, is not always the way they sound.  Some linguist coined a term for it: “eggcorn,” created when you substitute a word or […]

In the 19th century, votes were bought not by money but by whiskey. A keg would be set up outside each polling place on election day, and the more generous a candidates was with the ladle the better he was likely to do. Not everyone approved. Paul Angle in Here I Have Lived recalled a […]

The tax-reform proposal recently unveiled by Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been praised by even Democratic-leaning commentators such as Jonathan Chait as “maybe the most impressive and ambitious domestic policy proposal crafted by a major Republican in a generation.” Camp proposed reducing tax rates without increasing government borrowing by […]

More on the politics of water rate increases. (See also “Demanding answers.”) I addressed the issue in this paper back in 1988, when Springfield also was suffering through a protracted dry spell. In that piece, I noted that you can make more water available by providing more water, or you can do it by using […]

 In a 2013 piece that was harder to write than it is to read, I remembered my good friend and long-time I contributor Rich Shereikis, who died of advanced pancreatic cancer at the age of 75. By all accounts his final days, spent under treatment at a well-known cancer clinic at a major US city,  were […]

 In my recent babbling about which collective noun best describes residents of Springfield, I explored which of the word endings “-ian” or “-er” was most appropriate to attach to the word Springfield. The Brits seem to have settled on “-ian,” but opt for making it part of a wholly new word. Thus Oxonian, Glaswegian and […]

A couple of week ago Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan announced his intention to introduce legislation to cut the corporate state income tax rate – that is, the rate applied to business profits — from 7% to 3.5%. Madigan said on announcing his plan, “I am hopeful this legislation will encourage CEOs to grow their […]