This is repulsive

It's hard to know where to begin with the problems in the "reporting" in this article. I'll try, though. It starts nicely enough:

For 11-year-old Nathan Dombrowski, the weed-eaten ballfield in his Morgan Park neighborhood was a second home.

So after the well-liked, speedy second baseman for the Merrionette Park Red Sox died in a freak accident last month, his parents accepted a state lawmaker's offer to try to overhaul the field and name it in Nate's honor.

Little Liam Bonner's story is tragically similar. The 4-year-old from West Morgan Park loved to ride his training-wheel bike to a playground a block from his house.

So when Liam died from a form of brain cancer last month after a struggle that included surgery on his 3rd birthday, his parents sought to refurbish the Kennedy Park playground near 113th and Western and name it after him.

Nice, right? Hey, let's hold a fundraiser or find a few wealthy backers or something for the project, but that's not quite what everyone involved had in mind:

State Rep. Kevin Joyce (D-Chicago) spearheaded both endeavors, earmarking money for them in the state budget and setting up matching dollars from the Chicago Park District.

But the projects have been put on hold by Gov. Blagojevich -- a casualty of the governor's decision last week to veto hundreds of community initiatives from the budget, projects he characterized as non-essential "pork."

"From a budget perspective, I can see cuts have to be made. But what's insulting is to call it pork," said Amy Bonner, Liam's mother. "To me that insinuates something that's a wasteful program or money that wasn't spent wisely."

Unless a spending project is for themselves, people always think it's pork. Of course, the governor isn't exactly against taking taxpayer money from downstate and blowing it on a baseball field in Chicago:

Blagojevich spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff said the governor isn't opposed to financing park projects in Joyce's district. But she said the money should come from a multibillion-dollar construction program the governor wants -- not from the state's day-to-day operating budget.

"Hundreds of similar projects that were already promised to communities around the state . . . were completely left out of the budget lawmakers passed," Ottenhoff said. "New local projects like these should be part of a statewide capital budget that focuses on construction and infrastructure needs, not in the operating budget.

However, I'll give him some credit for trying to stop this type of earmarking. The final paragraph will really jerk a tear:

Both the Dombrowskis and the Bonners, Joyce said, are "attempting to honor their child's memory, and this governor is trying to take that away by calling it pork. This is completely unacceptable to me."

...unless you're a cold-hearted SOB like me, I guess.

Again, how is the governor stopping them from honoring their child's memory? He's not even preventing them from fixing up the park and naming it after him. He's not going to have the National Guard at the entrance to the field pointing rifles at volunteers who just want to mow the lawn and pick up garbage. This kind of entitlement philosophy makes me sick. The state should not be in the business of someone using their dead kid to force taxpayers from other parts of Illinois to fix a park for the rest of the neighborhood.

Dave McKinney and Chris Fusco, the reporters who wrote this story, should be ashamed of themselves for writing an opinion piece and disguising it as a straight news story. It's this kind of thing that's the reason people are continually turning away from the mainstream media's product.