Budding herpetologists take note. On a recent field trip to Spears Woods in the south suburban Palos area, a group of grade-school children found an unusual creature: a Graham’s crayfish snake. Asked how they could have found the rare prairie-wetland snake, the Chicago Herpetological Society’s Ken Mierzwa said, “Because kids are low to the ground and because they look in stupid places.”
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“If every fetus is a fully human being, a woman who procures an abortion is exactly like someone who hires a gunman to murder her child,” writes Michael Kinsley in the New Republic (July 15 and 22). Of course, Kinsley knows that “even abortion’s strongest opponents turn logical somersaults to avoid punishing women abortion customers. What this reveals is that they don’t really think abortion is the equivalent of murder….If abortion opponents would abandon their false claim to moral clarity, we could have a useful debate about what reasons for abortion are better than others and when in its development the fetus acquires claims that can override the various reasons a woman might have for wishing to terminate her pregnancy. But abandoning abortion-is-baby-killing would mean giving up the best weapon in the propaganda battle. And admitting that the moral issue is inherently muddled might dangerously incline an honest person to the pro-choicers’ conclusion: that, in most circumstances at least, the decision should be left to the woman who has to live with the consequences.”
A travel alternative for the state with two capitals is the state government’s new $500,000 “videoconferencing” link between Springfield and Chicago. “We use the videoconference system for two hours every Friday morning for management staff meetings,” Tom Green, public information officer for the Department of Alcohol and Substance Abuse, tells the Comptroller’s Monthly Fiscal Report (June). “Our travel expenses have dropped by about $1,000 a week.”
Try beating these odds. Campaign funds raised by U.S. House seat challengers and incumbents, in 1980: $36.5 million versus $72 million. In 1990: $37.5 million versus $181 million (Common Cause).
