Where's the John Edwards news?

The National Enquirer said last fall that John Edwards fathered a love child with a woman who isn't his wife. They reported this week that they caught him exiting the woman's hotel room in the wee hours of the morning. Haven't heard about all this?

Jack Shafer wonders why, especially compared to what Larry Craig and his wide stance went through. (He even throws out Jesse Jackson and his bastard child.) He thinks this:

Or are they observing a double standard that says homo-hypocrisy is indefensible but that hetero-hypocrisy deserves an automatic bye?

Or could it be that Craig is a Republican and Edwards and Jackson are Democrats? Methinks that's the much more obvious explanation.

As an aside, it's easy to laugh at this and say that the Enquirer is just a bunch of fake news. If so, why doesn't Edwards sue the crap out of them rather than just try to ignore it and change the subject when asked about it? He IS a trial lawyer, and a very successful one at that.

The ultimate Obama profile

The Onion is in on the joke:

NEW YORK—Hailed by media critics as the fluffiest, most toothless, and softest-hitting coverage of the presidential candidate to date, a story in this week's Time magazine is being called the definitive Barack Obama puff piece.

"No news publication has dared to barely scratch the surface like this before," columnist and campaign reporter Michael King wrote in The Washington Post Tuesday. "This profile sets a benchmark for mindless filler by which all other features about Sen. Obama will now be judged. Just impressive puff-journalism all around."

The 24-page profile, entitled "Boogyin' With Barack," hit newsstands Monday and contains photos of the candidate as a baby, graduating from Columbia University, standing and laughing, holding hands with his wife and best friend, Michelle, greeting a crowd of blue-collar autoworkers, eating breakfast with diner patrons, and staring pensively out of an airplane window while a pen and legal pad rest comfortably on his lowered tray table.

This is just funny

I like the conclusion to this short blog post, undearneath the picture.

Everyone should have the DirecTV sports pack

After ESPN SportsCenter's "Who's Now?" fiasco last summer, I swore off the show. It had become bloated with commentary and slim of actual highlights, along with spending too much time on crap that no one cares about (Olympics, NASCAR, WNBA, NHL, etc.). Then there are all of the human interest stories, interviews, and various Salisbury-laced analysis segments. All I want are highlights of the prior night and straight news of trades, you fools! Do you think I give two poops about John Kruk thinks about a free-agent signing? I know more about baseball transaction analysis than he does.

All of that isn't even getting into how self-congratulatory the show had become. The anchors were all about themselves and the network. And the show is 1 hour long, 1.5 hours on Sunday night/Monday morning. That's just not necessary, and it leads to much of the bloat.

Anyway, I quickly found ESPN News as a nice alternative last summer. It is kind of SportsCenter light since they only have a half-hour to work with. As a result, they just don't have time to unload most of the useless stuff on us. It still has its flaws (such as spending too much time on sports no one cares about and analysis), but it is good enough. Plus, I can wrap it up in half an hour without missing anything.

The flaw in the channel is that they still have too much of the junk in the show, so there are whole baseball games (keep in mind there is NOTHING ELSE GOING ON right now) they completely ignore. Since the White Sox aren't exactly a media darling, they often are in those games. I can only imagine being a Royals fan...

I guess ESPN management has gotten pissed about people bailing on SportsCenter (the network's flagship show, mind you) in the morning to watch ESPN News, because they have started showing a live video broadcast of their ESPN Radio show Mike and Mike.

Setting aside the merits of the show, which I have never heard, why would they possibly do a video broadcast of it? Everyone in the country gets it on the radio, and people are free to listen to it at home. Anyone can do so with an old AM radio stolen from one's grandparents' house. My only guess (as I wrote above) is that the ratings differential between SportsCenter and ESPN News in the morning has become embarrassing. (I have not seen any ratings, so it's just conjecture.)

What was I to do? Watching 2 minutes of SportsCenter reminded me why I hated it. We do have Comcast Sports Channel here, but since they have no national affiliation the sports highlight show is all Chicago stuff. Jeez, I don't need 15 minutes of highlights, interviews, and analysis of a Sox game I watched half of the night before. So that was out. A solution appeared before me...

Last spring I purchased the sports pack on DirecTV, which gives access to all of the regional sports channels (blacking out games on the MLB, NBA, and NHL packages, of course). I always thought most of the channels were useless other than having ESPNU for college basketball and Fox Soccer Channel for EPL games.

Given my dilemma a few weeks ago, I hoped that the array of local Fox Sports Channels had a national highlight show. And it did! It's called The Final Score. Here are my favorite things about it:

It's only a half hour long.

They show highlights to every game.

There is NO analysis by so-called "experts".

Interviews clips are brief.

There is a crawler on screen showing what the next few topics are.

There are TWO score crawlers at the bottom. One is just scores (and it moves fast) and the other has some news mixed in, like Bobby Jenks going on the DL yesterday.

There is only one anchor, at a time, so there is no stupid banter between them.

They only show things that a regular sports fan cares about. NASCAR, golf, tennis, Olympics, and whatnot are all brief. They know the reason for their existence is to show highlights of games we care about.

Here are the downsides:

I am nitpicking here, but I could do without the highlight of the day at the end of the show, or whatever it's called. But that only takes about 10 seconds, so it's no big deal.

That's it. No other negatives!

Best of all, they actually showed a WNBA highlight today, and the anchor was making fun of it! First, it was the last highlight of the show (which is good because NO ONE CARES). Second, he starts off with saying, "How about a WNBA highlight?" is a fake serious voice. Third, he said something about the game and followed it with, "in front of dozens!" with the camera showing a sea of empty seats behind the court.

(Now, as a digression, this is fantastic. The mainstream sports media is as liberal as any other aspect of the media. [A cursory viewing of SportsCenter would make this clear to anyone.] They are deathly afraid of making fun of the WNBA, even though it is clearly deserving of ridicule. No one attends the games, the ratings are horrible, and the action sucks. Example #1: Check out how newspaper articles/columns will rip MLS or NHL TV ratings, without ever mentioning that the WNBA does even worse. Example #2: Remember the XFL? The MSM hates Vince McMahon, so they loved hammering him and the league for any failing of it, be it ratings, level of play, etc. Some of that was brought on by Vince himself, but how come the WNBA never faces that kind of scrutiny? Why does the media never make fun of David Stern for standing behind it so ferociously?)

Clearly, this show is for regular sports fans. They aren't out to win any reporting awards for their lame-ass stories about blind cyclists or whatever, and they certainly aren't full of political-correctness.

I highly recommend this show to every sports fan tired of the ESPN culture. If you can, order the sports pack. If you don't have DirecTV, I am sorry. No joke.

(Here's an article mentioning everything above! It's too bad we are stuck here in Chicago without FSN, though it may be on cable.)

UPDATE: I see that Comcast Chicago does show it, but only the live version at 12:30 AM. Since I need it in the morning, I always use MSG+, which is channel 624 on DirecTV.

More on Helms, Republicans, and civil rights

From an excellent post by Kevin D. Williamson on Nation Review Online:

Helms and Thurmond were contemporaries in that their careers overlapped, but Thurmond had been in the Senate for decades before Helms ever held office, and Thurmond had — again, let's point it out, since the AP surely won't, as a Democrat — staged the longest filibuster in Senate history to block the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which was proposed by a Republican president, Eisenhower, and passed on Republican support in Congress. How a reporter can write about Helms and Thurmond and the civil rights era without at least noting the institutional hostility of the Democratic party toward these bills is mysterious. (Someday, somebody will figure out that Republicans have been responsible for the most important civil rights actions, starting with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Klan Act, the 1957 and 1960 acts, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. But this isn't the place for that discussion.) And why isn't Helm's precessor as alleged "standard-bearer for civil rights opponents" Sen. Robert K. Byrd, a Democrat who is still in the Senate and who was launched into his political career by serving as Exhalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan?

The whole post is worth reading to fight through the contemporary spin that Republicans have been traditionally against civil rights. Also note this a little earlier:

On the subject of Helm's life before the Senate, you'd be hard pressed to take away from Margasak's piece anything about Helms's career as a Democratic operative or the role of the Democratic party in trying to block the civil rights acts that were passed, after all, on Republican support. Instead, we get this:

No to civil rights. No to abortion. No to communism. No to the United Nations. No to gay rights. No to arts funding with nakedness. No to school busing. No to the U.S. giving up the Panama Canal. No to a nuclear arms reduction treaty called Salt II.

One of these things is not like the others, no? Helms wasn't even in the Senate until 1973, after the major civil rights legislation had been passed. It is true that Helms worked against those bills — as a supporter of Democrats such as Beverly Lake. On the issues where Helms actually had a Senate vote — the NEA, the abortion, school busing, &c. — Helms's record is pretty good. But Helms was a conservative and a Southerner, so it is essential that he be tarred as an unreconstructed racist.

UPDATE: Here is an interesting counterargument (of sorts) made by a liberal e-mailer to Jonah Goldberg. Here's his conclusion:

Many of us liberals have discussions with conservatives all the time, respect them, and don't assume conservatives are racists, but this circle the wagons defense of Helms is just odd. I realize that times are tough for Republicans at the moment, but I think it is counterproductive to take this line on Helms, as well as intellectually specious, craven even. It wouldn't be throwing him under the bus to make a differentiated argument about the good and bad (from a conservative point of view) that he has done. I'm sorry you don't see that.

Spot the media whitewash

I shouldn't expect much from his hometown paper, but could they at least pretend to have some objectivity when it comes to covering Barack Obama? I don't think I have to spell out out how ridiculous this article is.

Post-mortem on that Iowa immigration raid

Cry me a river:

"I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa," said Escobedo, 38, an illegal immigrant from Yescas, Mexico, who has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville. "Are they mad because I'm working?"

I bet he does like it in Iowa, since it's got to be better than the third-world crap-hole from whence he came. (Although since it's Iowa, not much. Heh.) He doesn't realize that our country is better than just about every other one in the world, though, so should we let them all in?

And yeah, dumbass, they are mad because you are working. It has nothing to do with being here illegally and likely extensive Social Security and document fraud.

Also, how about this for a cultural shift in a small town in Iowa, of all places:

Half of the school system's 600 students were absent Tuesday, including 90 percent of Hispanic children, because their parents were arrested or in hiding.

The most appalling part of this piece of propaganda disguised as straight news is the absence of a single pro-enforcement voice in the article (I don't count the administration, since they are just doing their job, however weakly and sporadically). I am amazed that the country is still overwhelmingly for enforcement after the media's continual browbeating of us into submitting into open borders and amnesty.

They tricked me because I'm old and stupid

That's the theme of this article claiming that some mortgage broker schooled some geezers out of their house.

First, the article is being deceptive. It's starts with this:

Retirees Ozell and J.W. McBee are in disbelief. They never expected to be forced out of the home where they have lived with their three teen grandchildren for years, and they're left clinging to hope that an Illinois attorney general office's lawsuit will help restore their shattered world.

For years? My first thought was why a couple of old people needed to refinance the house they've owned forever. Of course, here comes the only really tricky thing in the article (buried at the end by the liberal reporter Francine Knowles), not anything done by the mortgage broker:

The couple said they had to use money from their credit cards to make the two payments on their 4½-bedroom, two-bath home, where they had lived since 1999.

1999? Oh my, they go way back. The woman moved in as a youngster at the age of 77. Such an emotional attachment they must have.

Second, the type of loan they got is so common I wonder how these two ever fell for it. From what I understand, everybody and their brother was getting ARM's (except me) to "save money". I could have too, but I knew those rates were eventually go up. These two don't have anyone they could talk to about this? You'd think people who have lived this long would have built up a certain amount of skepticism about things.

Anyway, it's too bad they couldn't pay for their house. One other thing is bothering me, though. They live with multiple teen grandchildren, none of whom apparently work to help pay for things. Um, why not? There are jobs out there if they want them. My guess is they are too busy playing XBox 360 and telling their grandparents they are soooooo busy with schoolwork that they can't. Either that or they are social rejects who are unhirable (to invent a term).

As for me, I've been busy drinking and studying lately, thus the weak posting. One of those things is ending, but the other is increasing. I can't guarantee how much will be coming, but as you can read here, my misanthropy only builds like a volcano between postings.

Obama's speech yesterday

The mainstream media is falling all over themselves to praise Barack Obama's speech yesterday on race in America (or so the media says it was about). And that's sort of true, in that Obama talked mostly about that.

However, everyone seems to be trying to forget that his recent problems stem from the racist and anti-American pastor at his church, Jeremiah Wright. Saying that he made a few goofy statements that he doesn't agree with, then seguing into blaming white people for making blacks think like that, doesn't cut it. Obama knowingly joined that church and has been a member for over 20 years. Obama calls Wright his "spiritual mentor". Wright married the Obamas and baptized their children. There's no doubt that Obama knew about Wright's insane views and did nothing about it.

In the speech he could have denounced Wright, but he clearly did not, regardless of the sugar-coating being done by the mainstream media. Michelle Malkin has lots of actual speech excerpts you can read on your own and decide. In addition, Investors Business Daily has a good editorial on the speech:

But Obama's recent troubles, which this much-hyped speech was supposed to put past him, are not about race relations. They're about one churchman who happens to be black, whose views from the pulpit are repugnant and from whom Obama doesn't seem to have the guts to distance himself.

Reacting to being linked with a bigoted conspiracy theorist by lecturing the nation on race is like disgraced ex-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer responding to his getting caught patronizing an international prostitution ring by giving a speech on the female physique.

The supposed divide between black and white is not the issue here; Obama's longtime association with Jeremiah Wright is.

This is a man who believes the U.S. government formulated the HIV virus to commit genocide against blacks and that it is also responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Yes, Obama claimed in his speech to have "condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy." But he quickly proceeded to equivocate regarding them.

Do you think I am making too much of this? Here's a thought exercise: what if a white Republican attended for 20 years a church where the preacher, during service, regularly said that black people caused all kinds of problems in the world. Don't you think the media would do everything in their power to destroy him? Does Obama get a break because not only he's a Democrat, not only because he's black, but maybe also because the media is so condescending of blacks that they think it's OK for them have these insane ideas (rather than rational ones)?

I'm not bringing up a hypothetical. Let Peter Wehner take you back to the 2000 presidential race:

We actually have an example of how the MSM plays the “guilt by association” card when it comes to certain political and religious figures. In the 2000 campaign George W. Bush spoke once at Bob Jones University; it was an event used to bludgeon Bush with for the rest of the campaign and into his presidency. And, of course, Bush did not attend Bob Jones University, financially support it, or consider Bob Jones to be his spiritual mentor or close friend for 25 years. Yet these things mattered not at all. Bush spoke at Bob Jones University — and so to many in the press, he was joined at the hip with it. The association between Reverend Wright and Senator Obama is far deeper in every respect.

If Obama were truly the post-racial presidential candidate, shouldn't we hold him to the same standards as any other candidate?

UPDATE: I had written earlier about Obama that while I agreed with him on very little, he'd be preferable to Hillary because at least he's a good person. After the last week or so, I no longer think that. I'm not the only one.

The media and Muslims

This was too good of a point to not post, I thought. Here's the whole thing from Jamie Sneider over at The Blog at The Weekly Standard:

One thought about the Jerusalem massacre: the lack of moral outrage about the fact that the gunman disguised himself as a rabbinical student.

Although the media frequently covers protests by outraged Muslims throwing temper tantrums at any perceived disrespect to their religion, Reuters and other news outlets fail to focus on the transparent hypocrisy when writing about terrorist attacks against Jews and Catholics. Not only do the terrorist sympathizers celebrate attacks against other religions with street-parties, prayers, and sweets, they fail to condemn al Qaeda’s bombing of mosques, which presumably contain an abundant supply of oh so sacred Korans.

Newsflash: Old people don't like change

Well gee, if some old guy who is going to die soon doesn't want the name of Wrigley Field to change, I guess to the press he's got absolute moral authority to reject it:

At 99, Johnson has a hard time summoning some long-buried memories. But he's certain about this: He doesn't want Cubs owner Sam Zell to sell the Wrigley Field name to the highest bidder.

"I don't like the idea," Johnson says during a bedside chat this week. "It's been Wrigley all these years. Why change it? It would be a terrible mistake."

In other news, he then complained about these damn kids today.

Welcome to the party, pal!

A Hillary supporter is complaining about the media bias toward Obama. Gee not so much fun when it doesn't help your gal for once, is it?

"There is too much on the line for the media to ignore important issues while they obsess about Hillary's hairdo or Barack's baritone," Shorenstein continued. "Is it in the country's best interest that voters received far more information about Hillary's laugh than Obama's legislative record? Is it good for our nation that more attention is paid to the differences in their speaking style than their health care plans?"

Welcome to the world of being a conservative!

That is softening me...

Media Matters is a website that, well, here is their mission in their own words (bolding is mine):

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

OK, now that we are all done laughing at that thought, here is something pointed out by Greg Pollowitz regarding MM and John McCain. His opening sentence is the best:

Media Matters continues its quest to unite the Republican party behind John McCain:

And then he quotes MM as it points out how far to the right McCain has moved on immigration.

I tell you, MM is definitely helping to get conservatives like me behind him!

Sun-Times vs. Tribune

The Sun-Times is ratcheting up its efforts to overtake the Tribune (in their own paper, of course):

Communications conglomerate Tribune Co. has an unusual way of practicing communications in the Chicago area.

Tribune stifles it.

Tribune Co. recently ordered WGN-AM (720) radio staffers to re-record the voice-over for a Chicago Sun-Times commercial that highlighted the Sun-Times' readership edge over the Chicago Tribune in Chicago. The 30-second spot initially was voiced by Dean Richards, the high-profile TV and radio personality whose distinctive voice is easily recognized at Tribune-owned WGN.

Obviously too easily recognized for Tribune Co. brass, and a week after the spot first aired, they ordered the re-recording.

The article goes on:

Then just last week, the Trib advertising sales department rejected a Sun-Times print ad that also said the Chicago Sun-Times enjoys greater readership than the Tribune in the city. The Sun-Times ad was based on data from Scarborough Research that compared readership of the Sun-Times and the Tribune for five daily editions plus Sunday, and showed the Sun-Times with a clear edge in readers.

Anyone who has ever read the two papers knows why this is true. The Sun-Times is a city paper, with a focus on city news and reporting. They are the ones that always break corruption stories, for example. The Tribune is a regional paper, which is why its overall circulation is much larger. (The Tribune dominates the Sun-Times in the suburbs.)

The Tribune's laughable response is that when it is combined with Red Eye, then the circulation is higher. For those that don't know, Red Eye is a free little daily paper read on the buses and trains by people who don't read a newspaper. It's not a fair comparison.

I'm not trying to rip the Tribune here, but I just think this kind of thing is amusing and interesting. I especially like the way the Sun-Times is using its own paper to publish these "news" stories.

Fox News is killing me

First, Mike Huckabee was on Fox and Friends getting his ass kissed. Rush Limbaugh has been hammering him lately for not being a conservative (and Rush is right), and Huckabee says he'd love to talk to Rush but can't get a hold of him. Yeah right! Rush would put him on his show for an hour if he wanted to be on, but he doesn't want to take the beating.

Now John McCain is getting the same treatment and flat-out lying about his record on taxes.

The worst part is the way the entire network craps all over Fred Thompson on a consistent basis. Right-wing network, indeed.

My theory is that anyone anyone who wants to crack down on illegal immigration gets hammered, and they kiss ass of any Republican who's for amnesty. It's been that way ever since they showed themselves to be for the Senate amnesty bill last summer. So if anyone out there thinks Fox is some bastion of conservatism, think again. It's just not as liberal as CNN or, God forbid, MSNBC. I anticipate more on this as the morning goes on.

UPDATE: Oh jeepers, now Jesse Jackson (ugh) is on. He just said that MLK was qualified to be Secretary of State. That's beyond silly.

UPDATE 2: Reporter Carl Cameron was just on to give some analysis from Iowa, and everything he said was basically wrong. I'll cut him some slack since he pulled an all-nighter, but he's still part of Fox's unrelenting negativity toward Romney and Thompson and ass-kissing of Huckabee and McCain.

UPDATE 3: As much as I complain, I still love the network because of all the hot chicks who work there. That says nothing about the new Fox Business Network.

MLB wrap-up for Thursday, October 4

The Cubs are on the brink of losing their series. What a surprise. After giving up 8 runs last night, now the media can start ripping on the pitching staff. ONE HUN DRED!

The Indians pounded the Yankees last night, 12-3, in the first game of their series. The Yankees didn't have much working, clearly, but what does the anchor on ESPN News mention this morning? Of course, he says that A-Rod went 0-2 with 2 walks (as if he could have stopped the pitching staff from coughing up a dozen runs). He mentioned nothing about the Messiah (Jeter), who did even worse, going 0-4. Wait a second, I thought Jeter was one of the best players in playoff history. How could he go 0-4? You'd think the way the media gets down to suck his popsicle that he'd have gone 4-4 with 4 HR's and even pitched 5 scoreless innings to carry them to victory. That's what separates winners like him from chokers like A-Rod, right?

The Phillies-Rockies series is also about to end, with the Rox up 2-0. I would have liked to see those poor slobs in Philly do well, but I have no animous towards Colorado, either. It's a fun series to watch.

Colts 41 Saints 10

What a shellacking. I went to bed at halftime (no WAY I'm sitting through Olberman) when it was 10-10. Then the Colts O pounded the Saints. The more amazing thing was that the Colts D held the Saints to no offensive touchdowns. That's quite remarkable, considering the Saints were 5th in the NFL in offensive DVOA last year and the Colts were 27th in defensive DVOA.

KUBIAK predicted a decline for the Saints this year, but Aaron Shatz wrote it off as the system's 2-year projection being screwed up by the hurricane-wracked season in 2005. My thought is that the system is more right than wrong, and we (as fans) should take its results seriously.

I espcially am thinking about Tampa Bay's positive projection this year. The Bucs have a lot of young talent that may mature this year, and we shouldn't dismiss that just because the mainstream sports media goes by last year's record to predict this year's. These variables that KUBIAK looks at are exactly the kinds of things the MSSM misses.

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.

MS-13 is made up of some bad dudes

Michelle Malkin has been all over the murders in Newark of the three college kids. More news is coming out all the time. None of my inflammatory anti-illegal alien commentary is necessary when she posts stuff like this.

Needless to say, the mainstream media thinks it's not an important story (based on their lack of interest so far, at least).

Unfair headline

Don't get me wrong, I have lots of problems with the CTA. However, this headline is blatantly unfair. Anybody who has ever walked a street in the city of Chicago knows anywhere on and near EVERY decently-sized street is near a CTA bus stop.