Merle Widmer sent me the following opinion piece from the Washington Post implying that learning Spanish in school might not be as essential to coping with the “browning” of America as I stated earlier:
Despite claims to the contrary, census data show that most Latino immigrants learn and speak English quite well. Only about 2.5 percent [...]

The Journal Star’s Paul Gordon reports that Caterpillar thinks it’s just wonderful that Peoria School District 150 is contemplating offering Chinese. Well, the Great Yellow God has spoken, I suppose. Perhaps they can foot the bill for teaching it here.
Forgive me for being cynical, but I don’t think the number-one purpose of a public education [...]

Back on March 12, I posted an article about JMP Media firing the entire staff of 104.9. irked because it meant some folks I knew and liked were without work. (I briefly was a part-time employee there). I also found the new name they had given the station — “The Wolf” — to be hokey. [...]

Radley Balko at Cato at Liberty notes:
Back in 2004, when Kelo was pending before the Supreme Court, the Bush administration not only refused to file an amicus brief on behalf of the property owners, but was actually on the verge of filing a brief on behalf of the land-seizing local governments.
My two cents: Feh. Executive [...]

Blogger recovered his posts and Good Year for the Outlaw is up and running again. May the @$$hole who hijacked him wake up one morning with festering boils on his private parts.

The issue of libel came up in the comment section to a recent post about the protesters who never showed up at Caterpillar headquarters. Whenever that’s about to happen, I mention Rachel Corrie, the flag-burning terrorist sympathizer who usefully idiotic behavior made her a martyr for those who favor Hamas over the Israeli Defence Force.
Some [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court — in its infamous Kelo vs.. City of New London decision — said it was perfectly acceptable for the government to use eminent domain to seize private property for economic development projects, including completely for-profit ventures owned by private developers. This is exactly what the City of Peoria did to help [...]

Allow me, dear readers, to step out of character for a moment and defend the Journal Star. The group “Not Dead Yet” has criticizing the local media, including the JS, for the tone coverage of two recent cases in Tazewell County. In both cases, a mother tried harmed a severely handicapped child, and in one [...]

UPDATE: Jennifer Davis has more details — actually, a full-blown article — about the proposed sale of city-owned land in Southtown. Turns out Methodist and OSF are cooperating on a jointly-owned long-term care facility now that plans to build on the top of Main Street hill have fallen through. It’s just as well, because the [...]

Kudos to Scott Reeder, Illinois Capitol bureau chief for the Small Newspaper Group, news series “The Hidden Costs of Tenure,” won the $10,000 Clark Mollenhoff Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting. The series used information from more than 1,500 Freedom of Information Act requests to discover that just two teachers out of about 95,500 [...]

Wacko homeless dude Paul Sherwood got his sorry ass arrested yesterday and I’m supposed to be outraged. Bull. The guy is a loon who makes a habit of inflicting himself on normal, job-holding people. The guy makes a pest out of himself all over town, he shows up at city council meetings and talks about [...]

I am in awe of C.J. Summers. He deserves the title of Peoria’s Blogfather, not me.
That’s because of well-researched posts like this one about a school in Seattle, WA, that has done what the lesser minds at Peoria School District 150 say that cannot: Build a school on a 3-acre site that meets and exceeds [...]

The Peoria City Clerk’s office has released the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, and it’s shock full of fun stuff for those of us who watch the council like a hawk.
Among the items (warning: Most of these links open up long PDF files):
• Cullinan Medical wants to buy that last parcel of land the city owns [...]

William Powers of the National Journal discusses how it seems that journalists aren’t having a lot of fun anymore. He blames in declining readership and viewership, and the pink slips that result.
[Journalism is] about playing around, doing mischief, having adventures, taking risks, undermining the powerful, and chortling darkly the whole time.
[snip]
The “fun list” I [...]

Alas, the blog’s not called “Pekin Pundit.” It’s called “Pekin, My Home” and the focus seems to be politics and media in that city, According to it’s first postt:
Time for Pekin People to have a voice……one not modified by the local media….one not controlled by a group of folks who seem to think Pekin can [...]