This Tribune fellow earns his spurs as a card-carrying NYT imitator with this page one piece about Indiana, in which he kisses Palin off with a paragraph or so.

Contrast it — Glory be! — with this p-1 blaster in Sun-Times that seems to do her justice.  To do the story justice, that is.  She’s still news, isn’t she?  Not for Chi Trib.

Pallasch and Byrne do it right, getting the other side’s position along the way, which is how it’s done among professionals, I have long understood. 

“ACORN is under investigation for rampant voter fraud in 13 states. ACORN received over $800,000 from the Obama campaign,” Palin said. All 13 are swing states like Indiana.

Then the opposite position:

Obama has said the $800,000 was for voter canvassing during the primary election, not for voter registration during the general election.

“We have not worked with ACORN at all in the general election,” Obama spokesman Ben Labolt said. “Rather than make these false, desperate attacks, . . .

. . . Blah, blah, blah.

But the $800,000 is fungible, is it not?  Nothing left over for ACORN in the general?  How do we know that?

Moreover, ACORN has severe internal-honesty problems of its own, having fired the founder’s brother for making off with a million of its hard-begged money.  The founder, a campus radical in the ‘60s, himself had to quit, though it’s doubtful he’s not still in their pitchin’ for ACORN and Obama.  Here he is:

Wade Rathke is seen in a Tuesday Feb. 26, 2002 file photo, in New Orleans. A lawsuit filed in August by two ACORN board members accuses ACORN founder and former chief organizer Wade Rathke of either concealing or failing to properly report that his brother Dale embezzled around $948,000 from New Orleans-based ACORN and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000. (AP Photo/Bill Haber, File)

Some of the dirty, from AP yesterday:

Leaders of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now are locked in a legal dispute stemming from allegations that the brother of the group’s founder misappropriated nearly $1 million of the nonprofit’s money several years ago.

The embezzlement case, a recent revelation to some board members, has spawned a lawsuit and set off a power struggle inside ACORN at a time when the liberal group’s voter registration practices are the subject of fraud investigations and fodder for presidential campaign attacks.

I know I should be spelling out the McCain health care package, not mooning over Reform Now in its more virulent aspects, but with money siphoned hand over fist by an insider, doesn’t ACORN look like an embarrassing support group for O., who lawyered for and trained them and gave them lots a bucks — also hard–begged, by the way?

Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s interim chief organizer, called the lawsuit “a distraction from us marshaling our forces to deal with the Republican right-wing attacks” over ACORN’s voter registration.

When in doubt, changed the subject.

Balance of power

is what more people want (48%) than want one-party rule (41%). This is a big, big issue. Dems will probably add to their majorities in both houses, even gain a supermajority in the senate, making their plans filibuster-proof. So McCain presents himself as “a buffer” between the people and the Reid-Pelosi combo. Congress limps along with 13% approval rating, vs. Bush’s 29%, and 23% like Pelosi, vs. 30% who like Bush.

So hang her around Obama’s neck:

“Were my opponent elected with a Democratic Congress in power, not only would there be no check on my opponent’s reckless economic policies, there would be considerable pressure on him to tax and spend even more,” [McCain] said earlier this week in Blue Bell, Pa.

That’s the idea. Tell your friends.

Voting early, often:

Tell them about vote fraud too, if they haven’t heard. It’s spelled A-C-O-R-N this season.

“It remains our belief that American citizens should be guaranteed that their legitimate votes are not wiped away by illegally cast ballots,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a statement Friday.

Such a good point. Yowling Dems speak of disenfranchisement — of felons, etc. — as if that’s the issue. But every fraudulent vote for their man or woman negates a legal vote for the other. It’s like jobs for precinct door-knocking. They are jobs of which someone else is deprived.

And sometimes the piper has to be paid.