National Editorials & Columns

What’s billed as America’s biggest car show just wrapped up in Chicago Boy, American concept cars sure aren’t what they used to be. USA Today reports that “in a more cynical age of downsized dreams and tight development budgets, the wild concept car — auto show eye candy — is becoming rarer.”

To anyone watching the Republican presidential debates with no prior knowledge of the candidates, Rick Santorum would have a natural appeal. He’s telegenic, good on his feet, well-versed in issues, personable in manner and adept at dismantling his opponents without sounding mean.

For the record, the priest who married my wife and me in 1967 advised us that we could in good faith practice birth control. He reasoned that as Pope Paul VI was then preparing an encyclical regarding faith and sexuality, young Catholics could reasonably assume that church dogma regarding contraception would soon change to reflect contemporary realities: specifically that a couple intending to bring children into their marriage might legitimately seek to do so in their own time.

Don’t mean to overreact and risk boosting everybody’s blood pressure higher than opening offers on Facebook’s upcoming IPO, but this might be a halfway decent time to seek out a nice, safe steel bunker to hunker down in or behind, because it’s awards season and heavy metal statuettes are being tossed around like dimes at a county fair.

Bob Flider’s appointment as chief of the Illinois Department of Agriculture should leave most folks in Central Illinois with mixed feelings.

Part of being a Democrat is acting like you’re losing even when you’re winning. Part of being a Republican is acting like you’re winning even when you’re losing. The phrase “silent majority,” that brilliant bit of Nixonian rhetoric, is a way to augment Republican numbers and voices. “Nearly all people agree with me and they’re not only in my imagination ... you just can’t hear them.”

I am an adopted son. I am a very lucky adopted son. And as an adopted son I want all adoptees like me to have the same wonderful adoptive parents I was lucky enough to have.

Primary? What primary? Go ahead. This is a safe zone. You’re in like company here, so you can admit that you’ve given more thought lately to Adele and McDonald’s hogs than you have to the upcoming Illinois presidential primary.

Consider this the classic Catch-22: To get meaningful reforms, Illinoisans should be able to bypass the legislature to enact ethics measures. But before voters can get that power, the legislature has to approve placing the proposed amendment on the ballot.

The city sticker controversy that has made Chicago a national laughingstock is now, finally and mercifully, over. Here’s your new city sticker, Chicago. Take it. It’s “free.”

The continued wrangling between the Obama administration and the Roman Catholic Church over federally mandated insurance coverage for family planning services illustrates another reason why employer-provided health insurance is a less than optimal model. It seems wrong to require employers to provide coverage they find morally reprehensible, but equally wrong to let them make moral decisions for employees.

Grocery and liquor stores in my neighborhood are much more strict about asking for IDs than they were just a few years ago. Of course, if you live near a college campus, you know that checking IDs really hasn’t done much to curb underage drinking. Sometimes I think fake IDs are included in the kids’ orientation packets.