August 17, 2010

Who’s Buried in Roland Burris’s Tomb?

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Chicago, Illinois—The most ridiculous thing about Sen. Roland Burris’s tomb at Oak Woods Cemetery on the South Side isn’t the fact that it already exists, even though he still does too. It’s not the inscription, loaded with trail-blazing factoids like “First African-American in Illinois to become SIU exchange student to University of Hamburg, Germany.” It’s not even the scale—it’s big enough to have its own bench inside, convenient for taking a break from the heat or, depending on how you feel about the Senator’s legacy, leaving political offerings.

No, the most ridiculous thing about Roland Burris’s tomb is that it’s right next to this guy.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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