News Progress

•August 15, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I have been reading a 2017 report, “Cycle of Risk: The Intersection of Poverty, Violence and Trauma” by a century-old social services organization in Chicago called the Heartland Alliance.
Since the stated objective of the organization is to end poverty, maybe it follows that the 43-page report seems to hammer away on the theme that poverty is the fount of all social pathologies.
I beg to differ. Doing so will put these scribblings in the middle of an intense, on-going, half-century old debate about the roles of culture and poverty in shaping our society. The Left tends to agree with the Heartland Alliance, while the Right tends to see dysfunctional culture at the family and community level as the root of poverty, not the poverty itself.
As I read the report, two families from my post World War II childhood in rural central Illinois came immediately to mind. Please indulge me.
Bertha Hughes of LaFayette, Illinois (pop. 300) lost her young husband to a fatal heart attack in 1945, when her four children ranged in age from 13 down to 6. She was left with nothing but the family’s $500 home, which had no plumbing. Read More

•August 8, 2018•

By Steve Tarter
Of the Journal Star of Peoria

FDR used the radio, JFK scored on TV and Donald Trump expouses on Twitter. But the first president to make effective use of electronic communications was Abraham Lincoln.
His use of the telegraph, a tool used extensively during the Civil War, was one of the things that made Lincoln a unique communicator in tumultuous times.
“Two things set Lincoln apart in terms of his relationship with, and mastery of, the press,” said Harold Holzer, author of “Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion,” published in 2015. “His language was simple and direct enough to make press reprints of his speeches especially compelling. Second, he courted journalists from the beginning of his career.”
Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York City, added two more things: “(Lincoln) drafted editorials for his Whig and Republican newspapers and owned a newspaper, himself (as did his arch-rival, Stephen A. Douglas),” he said. Read More

•August 1, 2018•

By David Porter
Of the Arcola Record-Herald and the Tuscola Review

At the end of 2016-17 school year, there were only four schools in Illinois that had won more than 700 football games in their team’s history. And two of them are small-school rivals just 8 miles apart.
Tuscola, population 4,391, and Arcola, population 2,864, have been battling it out on the gridiron since the 1890s. At times, including present day, their conferences have kept them apart, but the “Cola Wars” are set to resume Aug. 31, 2018, during the Illinois’ Bicentennial.
They narrowly missed facing off in 2017, as both teams climbed the brackets in the state Class 1A playoffs. Arcola, which has four championship titles, was eliminated in the first round while Tuscola was runner-up in the Final.
The Arcola Purple Riders have title bragging rights with four championships — the most recent was 2015. They also won the state title in 1978, 1985 and 1988. The Tuscola Warriors won in 2006 and 2009. Read More

•July 25, 2018•

By Mike Koziatek
Of the Belleville News-Democrat

A gaggle of rambunctious fifth-graders scrambled to the top of the 100-foot-high Monks Mound to get a great view of the Gateway Arch in downtown St. Louis and burn off energy at the end of their class field trip to the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.
Before climbing Monks Mound, the Gardner Elementary students from Waterloo, Illinois, toured the historic site’s spacious interpretive center in Collinsville, Illinois, and learned how Native Americans based at the mounds conducted trade with people in other regions, including the Great Lakes for copper and the Gulf of Mexico for seashells.
“People from around the world come here to see the Cahokia Mounds, and it’s right in our backyard,” said Amy Wagenknecht, one of the students’ teachers.
The students were among the estimated 300,000 people who visit the state historic site each year.
Monks Mound was built by Native Americans, who are now known as members of the Mississippian culture. It is the largest pre-Columbian, earthen structure in all of North and South America, said Bill Iseminger, the assistant site manager who has worked at the Cahokia Mounds site since 1971. Read More

•July 18, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I have a friend who is among 10 candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in the August primary election in Wisconsin. Political observers in cheese-head country say the winner might receive as few as 25 percent of the votes cast. In effect, the preferences of three-quarters of the voters will be disregarded.
Because of situations like this, a flurry of interest has developed around a voting system called “ranked voting.”
Some background. In Illinois, Wisconsin and most places in the U.S., you and I vote for one candidate for each office on the ballot, in both the spring primaries and November general elections. The candidate receiving the most votes, even if only 25 percent, wins.
In contrast, for the past century Australia has used a voting system that results in a winner who is preferred by a majority of voters. It is called “ranked voting” (also known as “instant run-off” and “preferential voting”). Recently, Maine used the system in its statewide primary election.
Under ranked voting, a voter ranks candidates from first to last on his ballot, if he wishes. Read More