Former President Bill Clinton was in Chicago yesterday, speaking at a fundraiser on the subject of the current health insurance overhaul.

Somehow, some way, Clinton wound up talking about ethnic diversity, the Fort Hood murders, and – most bizarrely – the AMC network’s “Mad Men.”

Clinton began his descent with the following, quoted from Lynn Sweet’s Chicago Sun-Times blog:

Last month it was school children merrily singing the praises of Barack Hussein Obama.  Mmm. Mmm.  Mm!  Today it's a Chicago Sun-Times article by writer Mary Houlihan headlined, "Political junkie still 7 years from voting, calls for Obama: Lorenzo's calls for Obama land him on HBO."  Begins Houlihan:

Lorenzo Rivera may be only 11 years old, but he knows more about politics than many adults.

The Chicago fifth-grader proves just how much in the new documentary "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama," where he is filmed making campaign calls on Obama's behalf in 2008.

In the movie, debuting at 8 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, filmmakers Amy Rice and Alicia Sams capture Lorenzo, only 9 at the time, handling a call to a confused voter with a calm and grace belying his young age.

Later in the article, Houlihan reports that the calm and graceful Lorenzo's father just happens to work for U. S. Senator Roland Burris (D-IL).  Quite a coincidence there.

This won't surprise anyone who reads this blog regularly, but it needs to get on the record nonetheless: The airing of a June video showing interim White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Mao and Mother Teresa as "two of my favorite philosophers" to a group of high school students is barely news in the establishment press.

In an August 2008 report on the Obama campaign, Anne E. Kornblut of the Washington Post also described Dunn as "as senior adviser" who had joined the campaign "in the spring."

Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media has the video of Dunn's speech. NB's Jeff Poor (covering Glenn Beck's original broadcast that broke the story) and P.J. Gladnick (on Dunn's pathetic attempt to excuse herself) have previously dealt with Dunn's speech.

Here are the Mao-relevant portions of the speech excerpt:

"President Obama could not undo in one year the resentment against America that President Bush and others built up for years."

So claim some famous and some notso famous Chicagoans is the reason the Windy City lost its bid for the 2016 Olympics Friday.

And the Chicago Sun-Times was more than willing to quote them all on Saturday:

In his latest opinion piece, Roger Ebert proved that he is very skilled at one thing and one thing only - movie reviews. 

Ebert penned a piece in his Journal for the Chicago Sun-Times today; a scathing critique which detests the overt melodrama, the wretched dialogue, and the lack of a plot line.  What was he reviewing?  The Republican base.

Ebert hammers the party's base with such sensationalistic rhetoric that it is difficult to believe he withheld laughter while typing away on the keyboard.  And the work is wrought with such falsehoods, inaccuracies, and sweeping generalizations, that it is difficult to fathom that this work could have passed by the desk of anyone having the word ‘Editor' following their name.  Yet somehow, it did.

The list of vitriol and insults follows...

In yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times, columnist Mary Mitchell lauds Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader killed 40 years ago by police.  In "Hampton's forgotten legacy:  Today's youth can learn something from Black Panther leader's humanitarian deeds," Mitchell soft-pedals the Panthers' extensive history of violence and radical politics in favor of citing some of Hampton's alleged good works:

He stood up for disadvantaged
People in Chicago are still so divided over Hampton that, a couple of years ago, efforts to erect a street sign in his honor caused an uproar.
Hampton will always be remembered by some for advocating violence.
But for many others -- those who benefitted from his courage -- he will always be remembered for giving hungry children a hot breakfast.
Or for opening a free walk-in health clinic on the West Side.
Or for trying to open a swimming pool, so poor black children could get relief from the heat.
Or for being a bold advocate for justice.

The Panthers' breakfast program for children has long been applauded, even by some conservatives, as a worthwhile endeavor.  Ignored are the severe problems associated with that program across the country.  Chicago was hardly an exception.

The liberal media meme on conservative protesters at health care town halls is that they are full of vitriol, but lacking in substance. So how does Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg take on critics of ObamaCare?

You guessed it.

"At any given moment, 40 percent of Americans are dead wrong," Steinberg insisted in the lead sentence of his August 10 column, "Scary how a lot of bitter McCain backers oppose Obama at every turn."

But not only are opponents of ObamaCare "dead wrong," argues Steinberg, they're an un-American, if not outright traitorous "fifth column" dedicated to stopping President Obama's agenda at any cost (emphasis mine):

Little has been made about yesterday's "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam" conference that was held at the Hilton Hotel Grand Ballroom in Oak Lawn, IL. The conference was held by the group Hizb Ut Tahrir; a group that has been banned in Germany, Russia, Pakistan and several other Middle Eastern countries. Yet most mainstream media organizations in the United States didn't even bother to mention the event.

Indeed. Although the story did appear in Chicago's suburban Southtown Star, the paper's sister publication, the Chicago Sun Times penned it as an "ecomonic session" and homogenized the coverage as follows.

The estimated 800 attending the conference discussed issues related to the global capitalist economic system and Islamic alternatives to that system, said spokesman Mohammad Malkawi. Opinions about Hizb ut-Tahrir varied widely. Outside the hotel, protesters said the organization is simply another terrorist group. - Chicago Sun Times, Muslim group's economic session draws opponents

You have to dig pretty deep into the book of varied reality to classify this event as an economic session. The video accompanying this article is a direct promotional video for the event. If the video alone doesn't convince you of the group's aim then perhaps the reasons other countries have banned the group will.

Leave it to the British press to once again do the job of real reporting that U.S. journalists apparently won't do.

This time, it's Tom Leonard at the UK Telegraph. From Flint, Michigan, he tells us of a "pioneering scheme" that involves tearing down entire neighborhoods and simply abandoning them -- oops, I'm sorry, I meant to say, "returning them to nature."

This is apparently what passes for sophisticated urban planning these days.

Here are key paragraphs from Leonard's story. Especially note the breathtaking anti-progress hostility of the idea's champion (bolds are mine; Getty picture at top right is from that story):

Maybe it should be put to music:

Blago and Burris,
Sitting in a tree,
But they'd rather we not know their political party.

There has been yet another revelation about contacts between Democratic President Barack Obama's U.S. Senate successor, Democrat Roland Burris and former Illinois Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich over Blago's pre-Senate appointment, uh, deliberations. A released FBI audio recording reveals that Burris offered to make a campaign contribution to Blago as he lobbied to be selected.

This news has brought on yet another wave of stories that fail to tell us what party Blago and Burris belong to.

The Washington Post is the only publication that identified the party of both men in the course of reporting their story. The Post's Peter Slevin and Perry Bacon Jr. also identified the Democratic Party affiliation of the Senate Ethics Committee's Barbara Boxer:

From Editor & Publisher yesterday (bold is mine):

The Audit Bureau of Circulations released this morning the spring figures for the six months ending March 31, 2009, showing that the largest metros continue to shed daily and Sunday circulation -- now at a record rate.

According to ABC, for 395 newspapers reporting this spring, daily circulation fell 7% to 34,439,713 copies, compared with the same March period in 2008. On Sunday, for 557 newspapers, circulation was down 5.3% to 42,082,707. These averages do not include 84 newspapers with circulations below 50,000 due to a change in publishing frequency.

Below is a chart showing the specifics for the top 25, including percentage losses for the past four years and during the past year (current year source: Editor & Publisher):

If former President George W. Bush made a spelling error in a written reply to a piece of fan mail, would press outlets have covered for him or pointed it out?

This question is raised by a letter published at the Chicago Sun-Times Tuesday in which President Barack Obama thanked a concerned citizen for giving him advice on stopping smoking.

The only problem is it appears Obama wrote "advise" not advice (images right and below courtesy Chicago Sun-Times, h/t NBer Pross):

In an outrageous calumny, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg has decided that the nearly one million Americans that attended the tax day tea party protests all across the country must not care about our military veterans. Considering a large number of these very same protesters were military vets, I'd bet that Steinberg's blinkered figuring would come as quite a surprise to them.

In his April 17 column Steinberg insists that tax protesters are in reality "speaking out against our military and our vets." Ridiculously, he also tries to make it seem like our founding fathers would be unhappy with the tea party movement because he thinks the founders were big government folks. The backflips, illogic, and the obviously illiterate historical analysis by which he arrives at these absurd notions is an act of liberal pretzel logic that is a wonder to behold.

The Associated Press's determination to keep the identity of Democrats in trouble or under investigation hidden is indeed strong and persistent.

Its report (as of 11:03 p.m.; a copy is saved here at my web host for future reference) on the launch of an ethics probe into Democrat Jesse Jackson Jr.'s relationship with ousted former Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich, particularly relating to Jackson’s bid to be appointed to the Senate seat left vacant by President Barack Obama, does not refer to Jackson or Blago as a Democrat. Any more, that's relatively unremarkable.

What is a bit more remarkable is that the underlying Chicago Sun-Times story on the impending probe refers to Jackson twice as a "D-Ill," once in the report's very first sentence and once in the picture caption copied at the top right (which, of all things, is apparently an AP file photo).

This means that AP had to proactively scrub the Democratic Party references already present in its underlying source.

Here's how the Sun-Times's story began:

Today's Chicago Sun-Times features the column "Obama speech tests Notre Dame's strength" by Carol Marin.  She begins:

It takes courage to be a Catholic educator. In America's culture wars, abortion is the trump card of every moral discussion. Or so the righteous right requires us to believe.

At Notre Dame, the most Catholic of Catholic universities, a national protest is building over the decision by the school's president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, to invite President Obama to give the commencement address on May 17.

Marin then goes on to write that Obama's done much more than advancing abortion and embryonic stem cell research.  For example, he's "trying to stop the economy from going over a cliff."  She approvingly quotes a former Catholic university administrator saying the role of those institutions is to "espouse academic freedom where people are allowed to research, teach and hear many voices on campus . . ."  And what would an article mentioning the Catholic Church be without at least one reference to pedophilia?  Marin doesn't disappoint in that regard.

You'd think Marin, who prides herself on journalistic professionalism, would at least have started the column with the facts.  Obama was not merely invited to give a commencement address.  Notre Dame's own Web site acknowledges he will also be "the recipient of an honorary doctor of laws degree."

We all know that Barack Obama, if he isn't actually divine, at least qualifies as a Superman.  So I guess it's fitting that he's married to a Superwoman.  Or at least that's the impression we get in today's Chicago Sun-Times article "Michelle: Her first month as first lady  THE EAST WING | In just a month, Michelle Obama has put her mark on her new domain, as she embraces an activist agenda."  Authored by Washington Bureau chief Lynn Sweet, the gushing appraisal begins:

It's Friday in the East Wing of the Obama White House, the realm of first lady Michelle Obama.

Many of the cream-colored walls are still bare. The Obama administration, after all, is just one month old.

But there is a growing photo collection in the hallways that charts the increasing activity of the first lady in the last two weeks as she settles in to her new role and starts expanding her portfolio of issues.

The newest item on her non-controversial agenda is healthy living. That's in addition to assisting military families, pushing work-family balance, national service, women's concerns and opening up the White House to the community.

Wow!  Can you imagine one woman accomplishing so very much so quickly?  But the fawning has just begun as Sweet moves on:

This made my weekend.  Yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times reported "Obama beats out Jesus as America's hero."  The article starts:

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Americans named President Obama as their No. 1 hero, followed by Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King, in a new Harris poll.

Others in the top 10, in descending order, were Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Abraham Lincoln, John McCain, John F. Kennedy, Chesley Sullenberger and Mother Teresa.

People were asked whom they admired enough to call their heroes. Those surveyed were not shown a list of people to choose from. The Harris Poll was conducted online among a sample of 2,634 U.S. adults by Harris Interactive.

This question was first asked in a Harris Poll in 2001. In that survey Jesus Christ was the hero mentioned most often, followed by Martin Luther King, Colin Powell, John F. Kennedy and Mother Teresa.

In a news story not covered by other major media, the Chicago Sun-Times today reported that the Democratic National Committee still hasn't paid Chicago for November's Obama victory celebration.  "Obama victory bash owes city $1.74 mil." begins:

Chicago has yet to recoup the $1.74 million cost of President Obama's victory celebration in Grant Park -- despite a burgeoning $50.5 million budget shortfall that threatens more layoffs and union concessions.

"The Democratic National Committee has not yet paid us,'' Peter Scales, a spokesman for the city's Office of Budget and Management, said Thursday after questions from the Chicago Sun-Times. "We're reaching out to them this week."

Stacie Paxton, a spokeswoman for the Obama-controlled DNC, explained the reimbursement delay by saying, "We are still looking at various costs and bills.'' She would not say whether parts of the bill are disputed.

Former Chicago Democratic Alderman Arenda Troutman was sentenced today to four years in prison for mail and tax fraud. In covering her sentencing, both the Chicago Sun-Times article (picture at right is cropped from that article) and Jeff Coen's Breaking News piece at the Chicago Tribune failed to mention that Troutman is a Democrat.

Now it would be easy to say, "But of course she's a Democrat; she's from Chicago." Okay, but the Sun-Times, in five other reports spread over almost two years, mentioned her party only once. What's more, the Tribune's coverage quoted Assistant U.S. Atty. Joseph Alesia saying that Troutman had been on "a five-year crime spree. .... Even by Chicago standards, it's (what she did is) no small crime."  Logically, this would mean that even by Chicago Democratic Party standards, what Troutman did stood out.

Troutman's "obvious" Democratic Party affiliation also doesn't exonerate the Associated Press, whose stories go national and worldwide, And yes, there are plenty of people around the country and in the rest of the world who do not know that Democrats own Windy City politics (a little reminder every once in a while to those who do know wouldn't hurt either).

Here's most of the short unbylined AP item: