For several weeks now, the Illinois General Assembly's spring session has been a slow-motion train wreck. Those of us who work at the Statehouse are moving around in real time watching it happen all around us, saying to ourselves, "Oh, this is gonna hurt."

Bike Lanes The week of May 12 through 18 is "Bike to Work Week," but if you're a casual cyclist, good luck.

The Quad Cities have a great trail system along both sides of the Mississippi River - which one day is expected to form a loop on each side of the river. Yet that system is geared more toward recreation than transportation - getting you from home to work. And very few drivers are good at sharing the road with bicyclists in a way that makes both feel safe.

Enter "complete streets."

Be forewarned the following commentary is a shameless effort to provide publicity for the River Cities Rumble Disc Golf Tournament, a sporting event the Reader co-founded last year with the Quad City Disc Golf Club (QCDGC).BarretWhite.gif

Just over a year later the QCDGC (started in 1999), led by tournament director Chad Eng, has succeeded in securing a couple significant milestones for the second-annual River Cities Rumble.

Federal prosecutors have recently been handed a couple of big setbacks in their ceaseless pursuit of government corruption. But you would hardly know it considering the lack of press coverage the cases have received here.

Justin Logan As political tides continue to turn against the Iraq war, Hillary Clinton's opponents have highlighted her refusal to apologize for supporting it. It's a fair critique, because the next American president will face a host of foreign-policy challenges while attempting to repair our post-Bush position in the world.

We're coming up on graduation season, and high-school seniors and their parents will be addressing the tough question about how to pay for higher education.

Although there is no simple solution to resolving this problem, options are available to ease the burden. One is Dollars for Scholars, a national network of community-based scholarship foundations that mobilize communities.

It may be no surprise to some, but new polling shows Barack Obama is doing better with hardcore Illinois primary voters than Hillary Clinton is doing with voters in her own home state of New York. Also, voters are split over whether Obama should be more critical of Chicago corruption, and the Republican presidential primary appears wide-open here.

I reread the editorial I wrote on October 2, 2002, Malin Breaks the Mold, critiquing Davenport City Administrator Craig Malin's performance after one year on the job. All I could think was: What on Earth happened?!

"We must operate in the public trust, which means we do things in an open, agile, and purposeful manner to accomplish this," he [Malin] said. "If we do this, even if people don't agree with something the city is doing, they will almost always respect it if it is done openly. If we are to become the best place to live in Iowa, we must be relentless in maintaining an open responsiveness to the community and to each other."

I was appalled to read your article lauding The Seven Project. (See "The Seven Project Means Hope for Teens," River Cities' Reader Issue 627, April 4-10, 2007.)

This is a church-sponsored program, an evangelical effort of the Assemblies of God church. However, your article (and the resource you quoted) made no mention of that fact.

The real electoral surprise last week was not in Chicago, where five tired, old incumbent hack aldermen went down to defeat. The big shocker was the Carbondale mayor's race, in which Sheila Simon - the daughter of the late U.S. Senator Paul Simon - was trounced by Republican incumbent Brad Cole.

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