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by Fran Eaton
It’s fairly unusual for the Chicago Sun Times, Teamsters, Illinois Education Association, Illinois Federation for Right to Life and the Illinois State Rifle Association to agree on anything, but each have endorsed Will County Commissioner Terri Ann Wintermute to fill the 42nd District vacancy State Senator Ed Petka is leaving behind.
By Mark Rhoads
If you are in any way connected with the farming business in the USA, the voice of Orion Samuelson has been an important part of your day for as long as you have been farming. For more than forty-five years so far, Orion has been the radio voice of agriculture in America.
He has been broadcasting since the 1950s on Wisconsin radio stations and started at WGN radio as director of farm news in 1960. In 2006 he is heard on a syndicate of 260 American radio stations that carry his National Farm Report program. He also has a TV audience of more than thirty million viewers on 190 cable, satellite, and broadcast TV stations for different shows on his own and with his colleague Max Armstrong.
In his lecture called "From Reaper to Satellite," Orion, a resident of Northbrook, Illinois, shares his entusiasm for farmers and their vital work with millions each week. He exudes good will for the two percent of Americans who raise food from the ground and take care of the livestock that feeds three hundred million Americans and millions more overseas. He both reports on the market news of agribusiness and also is an advocate for farmers who understands their professional challenges.
His awards are almost countless but among some of the most significant are the 4-H Hall of Fame, the 1998 Distringuished Service Award of the American Farm Bureau Federation, the 2001 Lincoln Medal--the highest award from the State of Illinois, and his 2003 induction into the Radio Hall of Fame.
From Michael J. Fox's interview yesterday with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week:
Stephanopoulos: In the ad now running in Missouri, Jim Caviezel speaks in Aramaic. It means, "You betray me with a kiss." And his position, his point, is that actually even though down in Missouri they say the initiative is against cloning, it's actually going to allow human cloning.
Fox: Well, I don't think that's true. You know, I campaigned for Claire McCaskill. And so I have to qualify it by saying I'm not qualified to speak on the page-to-page content of the initiative. Although, I am quite sure that I'll agree with it in spirit, I don't know, I— On full disclosure, I haven't read it and that's why I didn't put myself up for it distinctly.
Fox doesn't "think that's true," although he hasn't read the language of the amendment? Fox was apparently on the t.v. show Spin City too long. He's been spun.
And yes he has "put himself up for it distinctly." When he stated in his McCaskill ad, "Senator Talent even wanted to criminalize the science that gives us a chance for hope," he was speaking about Talent's opposition to human cloning, whether he understood what he was saying or not.
With all these famous people entering into the embryonic stem cell debate, I thought it only fitting that Jesse Jackson insert himself into the mêlée. Here is a quote from an essay he wrote several years ago:
Anything growing is living. Therefore human life begins when the sperm and egg join and drop into the fallopian tube and the pulsation of life take place. From that point, life may be described differently (as an egg, embryo, fetus, baby, child, teenager, adult), but the essence is the same. The name has changed but the game remains the same.
By Mark Rhoads
Ruth Hanna McCormick was a suffragist and advocate for the rights of women and children. She actively campaigned for the vote for women from 1913 until the amendment was ratifed by the states in 1920. In 1913, Illinois women won the right to vote in municipal elections and for presidential electors and on bond issues. But oddly enough they did not win the right to vote for Congress, Governor, other statewide offices, or members of the General Assembly, until the 19th Amendment was ratified by three-quarters of the states in 1920. Illinois was one of the first three states to ratify the national vote for women amendment on June 10, 1919 and tied with the legisaltures of Michigan and Wisconsin on that day.
Continue reading "Illinois Hall of Fame: Ruth Hanna McCormick" »
By Mark Rhoads
Bing Crosby as Father O'Malley in "The Bells of St. Mary's" tells the mother of a student how he located the girl's father who was a pianist. "He's a musician, so he must be in the union. I went right to the top, Petrillo!"
In the middle of the 20th Century, the name "Petrillo" was well known in America. He was a labor leader who was often in the news because of so many battles he fought on behalf of his members in a rapidly changing world for musicians. Jimmy Petrillo was President of Local 10 of the Chicago Federation of Musicians for forty years from 1922 to 1962. He also served as president of the American Federation of Musicians for 18 years from 1940 to 1958. The Petrillo Band Shell in Grant Park was named in his honor in 1976.
James Caesar Petrillo was born near the corner of DeKoven and Taylor Street in Chicago on March 16, 1892. He loved to play the trumpet but he concluded in his early twenties that he did not have enough talent to make his living as a trumpet player. So starting in 1919, James devoted his life to organizing musicians into effective union locals. Petrillo once said many years later, 'If I was a good trumpet player I wouldn’t be here. I got desperate. I hadda look for a job. I went in the union business."
Continue reading "Illinois Hall of Fame: James C. Petrillo" »
By Mark Rhoads
Cyrus Hall McCormick was the inventor of the first working mechanical reaper for harvesting grain. He is considered by many historians to be "the father of modern agriculture." Although he was a Virginian by birth, McCormick became a global agribusiness pioneer who founded and grew an industrial empire in Chicago where he lived and worked for 37 years.
McCormick was born on Feb. 15, 1809 in Rockbride County, Virginia, about 150 miles south-west of Washington, DC. His parents were Robert McCormick and Mary Ann Hall McCormick. His father was also a tinkerer and inventor.
When he was 15 in 1824, Cyrus made a lightweight cradle for harvesting grain. In 1831, Cyrus Hall McCormick was only 22 years old when he followed up on his father's work and constructed a working mechanical grain reaper in the blacksmith shop on the family farm. He received a patent in 1834. Prior to this invention, every farmer in the world had to use either a sickle or a scythe to harvest grain by hand. Workers could harvest between one-half and a maximum of three acres per day depending on different factors. The mechanical reaper enabled one man to harvest 40 acres in a day and do the work that twenty could do before. It was the start of a world-wide revolution in productivity for farmers. In the 1850s, about ninety percent of Americans lived and worked on farms. Today, only two percent of Americans do work directly involved with farming.
Once again, because of its key geographic location and the railroad hub, McCormick moved his factory from Virginia to Chicago in 1847 when he was 38. The company he founded in 1847 was known as McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. In 1851, the invention of the reaper won the Gold Medal at London's Crystal Palace Exposition, the most prestigious award of that era.
Lincoln's Secretary of State William H. Seward once said that because of the reaper, "the line of civilization moves west by thirty miles each year."
By 1858, the company was the largest manufacturer of farm equipment in the country. That company merged with another to become International Harvester in 1902. Late in the 20th Century the parent holding company went by the name Navistar for a few years and was based in Warrenville, Illinois. In 2004, the operating company name changed again to International Truck and Engine and is still based in Illinois.
Continue reading "Illinois Hall of Fame: Cyrus Hall McCormick" »
Shhh. . . it's a secret. Don't tell anybody. Things just may not be as bad as they seem. . .
Newt Gingrich says today that the momentum is now turning toward the Republicans retaining control of the U.S. Senate and possibly the U.S. House.
Crediting bloggers for changing the tide, Gingrich says the mainstream media's onslaught of negatives toward Republicans is wearing thin, and the facts Democratic liberals were trying to cloud are beginning to emerge again.
Continue reading "Shh . . . we could actually pull this thing off . . . Shh . . ." »
By Mark Rhoads
Illinois-native actor Tom Berenger has played diverse roles from an aging catcher for the Cleveland Indians to Col. Theodore Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. He played a crazoid sergeant in Platoon, a confederate general in Gettysburg, and one of the college classmate mourners in The Big Chill. He has been a western lawman, a high school teacher, a police detective, and a plumber on Cheers. The fact that he is always believable in each different role is a tribute to his acting abilities.
Tom Berenger's birth name was Thomas Michael Moore when he was born into an Irish-Catholic family in Chicago on May 31, 1949. Tom played football at Rich East Township High School in Park Forest but he also acted in school plays and was a member of the Spanish National Honor Society. Tom graduated from Rich East in 1967 and attended the University of Missouri as a journalism major. His goal was to be a sport's writer. But during college, Tom appeared in a stage production of "Who Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" and caught the acting bug in a more serious way.
by Cal Skinner
Just to make sure that my sick 9-year old, who missed four days of school and an entire weekend, didn’t have a bacterial infection, we were off to one of his pediatricians Monday.
He didn’t have strep throat and is now back in school, but I did pick up something of interest at the doctors’ office.
It was this notice.
by Fran Eaton
So, let's follow the campaign money a little more today . . .
The Illinois Republican Party has raised about $1.5 million since July.
Almost $1 million was from Minority Senate Leader Frank Watson's Republican Senate Campaign Committee and $180,000 was from Minority House Leader Tom Cross' own campaign chest.
One major GOP donation from a political action committee was the D.C.-based Institute for Legal Reform, which gave a single donation of $575,000 in October. The ILR promotes tort reform.
In comparison, the Democratic Party of Illinois raised $2,801,450 this reporting period. Most of the party's funds came from individual lawmakers' war chests.
Over the past few weeks, Mike Madigan, who is House Speaker as well as chairman of the state's Democratic Party, has spent almost $700,000 on House and Senate races.
If you follow the money as an indicator of where the Dems feel they need to invest their largesse, as of October 8, State Rep. Mike Boland received $100K, State Rep Bob Flider $110K, Careen Gordon $70K, Kurt Granberg $60K and Mike Smith $300K. More is likely to be on the way.
It is portentous, and a thing of state
That here at midnight, in our little town
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,
Near the old court-house pacing up and down,
From Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight by Vachel Lindsay.
Vachel Linday was an American poet, writer, mystic, public speaker, and artist whose work was particularly admired in some religious revival circles early in the Twntieth Century.
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois on Nov. 10, 1879. His father was Dr. Vachel Thomas Lindsay, a physician, and his mother was Caterhine Frazee. His parents were Cambellites, a church founded in 1830 by the Scotch-Irish clergyman Alexander Campbell. The Cambellites emphasized education, individual spiritual life, and the missionary role of American democracy. The Cambellites also hopes for one nondemoniational Christian Church. These beliefs had a great influence on Vachel's career as a poet, pamphleteer, and lecturer.
Vachel graduated from Springfield High School in 1897 and began to study medicine at a Cambellite school, Hiram College in Ohio. He was a student at Hiram until 1899 but did not get a degree and left college to return to Springfield.
In 2004, former high school administrator and popular basketball coach John Cavaletto came within single digits of winning the 107th House seat for the Republicans. Once again, Cavaletto and his wife Connie are tirelessly knocking on doors and visiting with groups in the area, asking that the voters of the district fifty miles east of St. Louis to send him to Springfield. This time they could make it.
Connie, Cavaletto’s wife of 40 years, is his campaign partner and biggest fan. But that’s nothing new, she says. “For years, I would pack up our three boys and we would climb on the bus with the team and be right there to root for John’s team."
John’s basketball coaching days listed him in Illinois Athletic Directors' Hall of Fame. He likes to tease about how his teams beat now-Senator David Luechtefeld's (R-Okawville) teams when they were both coaches.
The 37 years Cavaletto spent working with the young people of the 107th House district drew him into those families’ lives. Seeing young people grow up just to move away because good paying jobs left the area is a key reason Cavaletto wants to represent the district at the Capitol.
Continue reading "SPOTLIGHT on Salem's John Cavaletto (R-107th House District)" »
While the rest of the nation debates whether embryo experimentation should be paid for by taxpayer dollars, thanks to Governor Rod Blagojevich, the discussion is off the table in Illinois.
Continue reading "Should taxpayers pay for stem cell research involving embryos?" »
