Bill Knight

A handsome two-year-old British lab barreled his way into my heart after I resisted our getting another dog. It was a relationship made in heaven.

The April explosion at the West, Texas, fertilizer plant that killed 14 people, injured about 200 others and destroyed dozens of homes was so powerful it could be felt 50 miles away, registering as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake. The blast should continue to rumble throughout the country since its owner apparently didn’t disclose the dangers there, and the government agencies responsible for protecting the area also failed.

In the last 30 years, CEOs have gone from being well-paid (more than 40 times the pay of everyday workers) to being ridiculously enriched. CEO compensation now averages hundreds of times the pay of regular working people.  

Is it worth it? To their companies and shareholders? To their industry and the economy?  To the country?

The week of the Boston Marathon bombing and the workplace explosion in West, Texas, it was impossible not to feel guilty about a nagging sense of loss from flooding. Even there, many people in west-central Illinois were hit far harder, losing everything short of their lives.

I was a youngster when the first funeral I ever attended was a schoolmate who’d died in a grain storage bin, where he’d slipped and suffocated. I went to the open-casket services with buddies, and we were shocked and silenced by the appearance of a kid like us who’d essentially drowned in corn.

Superficial reforms are failing, I reckon.

U.S. employers in March hired at the slowest rate since last June, adding just 88,000 jobs to non-farm payrolls, with steep job cuts in retail and government sectors, including 12,000 at the U.S. Postal Service, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s monthly report released April 5.

Economists had forecast the month’s gain to be about 190,000.

B-r-r-r-r-r.

A year ago this week, I’d already partially tore an Achilles tendon playing softball, but this spring has been so wintry my back still aches from shoveling wet snow off the driveway and sidewalk.

So, I’m still coping with the delayed change of seasons by retreating to springs of my youth:

Do 21st century kids still have wonderful crap marketed to them when the weather warms?

Kites!

Days after April Fools Day, we still look over our shoulders, and one political prank breathing down our necks is the “new” GOP.

President Obama’s 5-million vote victory over Republican Mitt Romney showed the country’s shifting demographics – more voters who are younger, better educated, more likely to be women, and more diverse in religion and race. That supposedly signaled to some GOP leaders that they should be less extremist and more open to the actual makeup of the nation.

A couple of weeks ago a couple of harbingers of Spring came and went, and each acknowledges how we depend on sunshine.

One was Daylight Savings Time, letting us think about spring and more sunlight, and the other was “Sunshine Week,” a time to promote and praise transparency in government: open government.

Effective representative government depends on transparency through open meetings, open records and public notices. If any of those three is absent, government collapses into secrecy and darkness.

Most Illinois House members recently backed a measure to limit the salary on which public employees’ retirement benefits could be based. One of a few proposals to address the state’s $96 billion pension shortfall, it was seen as a test vote as lawmakers grapple with some way to make good on years of the legislature failing to make its payments.