The ACLU is joining the appeal of a man convicted for seeking to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge who wants his conviction overturned because he was “illegally” spied on by NSA.

Back in December, Iyman Faris, the only named American target of the National Security Agency’s secret warrantless wiretap program announced his consideration of a lawsuit against the president of the United States. To accomplish this goal, his lawyer David Smith issued an all points bulletin for civil liberties attorneys and constitutional scholars interested in taking up his client’s case.

“There has to be a real plaintiff with a real injury,” explained  Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty program, one of many civil libertarians who

Despite Faris’ admitted guilt, . . . were chomping at the bit to get him off the hook,

says StopTheACLU.com.  What did the man say about liberalism?  Yes, James Burnham: “Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.”  I think of Chill Wills riding the a-bomb with a cowboy whoop in “Dr. Strangelove.”  That’s ACLU riding its ideology.

What do we think of this kind of talk?

[Prominent public figure] delivered a blistering partisan speech at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina last night, equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and characterizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, as “tokens.”

“The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side,” he charged.

Calling President Bush a liar, [he] told the audience at the historically black institution that this White House’s lies are more serious than the lies of his predecessor’s because Clinton’s lies didn’t kill people. . . .

He referred to former Attorney General John Ashcroft as J. Edgar Ashcroft. He compared Bush’s judicial nominees to the Taliban.

Pretty extreme, huh?  Worthy of slapping into a newspaper, right?  Not necessarily.  That was Civil rights activist and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond speaking, and the coverage is in World Net Daily, an Internet publication.  Where else?  Not in Chi Trib or Sun-Times or in any other MSM outlet, unless you count Fayetteville’s News 14 TV show.

James Taranto calls it “whitewashing a black leader” and likens it to coverage of the late Yasser Arafat,

talking peace in English while inciting hatred in Arabic–except that in this case Bond is speaking a language everyone understands, and reporters, whose job is to report the facts, are instead concealing them. [Italics added]  Bond’s mostly black audience at Fayetteville hears his message of division and resentment, while the broader public is told that he has a “positive attitude” and is engaged in a “fight for equal rights.”

Let’s hear it for freedom of the press.

We’ve had quite the circus . . . in Cook County over the past few days.

. . . another indictment was handed down from US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s office, charging a subsidiary of technology giant Siemens AG with defrauding Cook County. The company and two of its executives are accused of entered into a phony partnership with a minority owned business to win a $49 million contract with Stroger Hospital.

Only a few days later, the Chicago Sun-Times revealed the county’s corruption watchdogs, the inspector general, auditor and ethics director and members of those offices, had made numerous contributions to President Stroger’s campaign fund. It’s little wonder that scams that defraud the taxpayers of Cook County like the Siemens scam at Stroger Hospital seem to slip through the cracks.

President Stroger . . . promised not to accept [any more] campaign contributions from these . . . officials, whose primary task is to investigate claims of corruption in Cook County government or other “sensitive officials”.

. . . finally, there’s the strange story of Vincent Jones, a relative of President Stroger and a member of Cook County Recorder of Deeds Eugene Moore’s political organization. Mr. Jones is accused of roughing up a Forest Park man who declined to have political campaign signs placed his yard. Police report that Mr. Jones became belligerent and threatened to have the arresting officers “politically taken care of”.

That’s from the web site of Tony Peraica, the star of last Saturday’s Republican beauty show at Oak Park library, where he made the top of the (ballot) program, gave a crisp, intelligent, easy-listening talk, answered qq, and then had to run.  (He had an easy act to follow, it’s true: acting OP GOP chairman Richard Willis, who, apparently conscious of Oak Parkers’ reading problems, was kind enough not only to flash sentences on the overhead but also to read them to us, word for word.)

Peraica is an immigrant (from Croatia), having arrived here 34 years ago at 13 after losing both parents, speaking no English.  He’s a Cook County commissioner, since 2002, when he took 53% of the vote over a 14–year incumbent.  He’s going after John Stroger’s county board chairmanship and playing anti-corruption melodies to a fare-thee-well.  His www.votetony06.com web site is a winner.  It includes “Tony’s blog” http://www.votetony06.com/blogs/, which makes good reading.

Jesse White, he’s a Democrat, right?  Running again?  Let’s keep watch.

The former director of Secretary of State Jesse White’s physical services division and three janitors were charged Friday with scheming to let the janitors collect full pay– more than $150,000 in all– for only minimal work.

West Virignia Senator Jay Rockefeller is the leaker who illegally supplied the New York Times with the details of the NSA program

Jed Babbin of The American Spectator said on a radio show yesterday, reports Hugh Hewitt, via Instapundit.  It’s the blogosphere at work, as it was in the Dan Rather, Trent Lott, and other affairs.

Given that the CIA’s Porter J. Goss stated emphatically that the leak had done very serious damage to the United States, if Rockefeller is a suspect, he should be hauled before a Grand Jury asap

continues Hewitt.

Meanwhile, Chi Trib’s Mark Silva had something cute but inconsequential yesterday about Bush saying “good” too often.  It’s the G-word, says a head.  Silva is resting up for a shot at Jay Rockefeller, I bet.

Bush was “clearly taken aback” when someone asked him what he thought of the gay-cowboy movie “Brokeback Mountain,” says Carol Marin today in S-T.  He “looked like his skin itched.”  It’s “a start anyway” that he had heard about it.

Stop.  I can stand so much droll and no more.  So what, state of union speech last night.  Let’s talk about this delicious “Mountain” story.  The gals and guys at Ric’s (wherever) had such a fun time with it Saturday night.  It told us soooooo much about Dubya, as if we didn’t know already.

He don’t know s—t about unions anyway, gay or any other kind.  Hey.  People Mag — I said People, did you hear me? — says this movie is huge in Waco.  Oh my.  “Bar’s boy [?] needs a lot of help right now.”  Polls, you know.

Switch to thin-lipped, no-nonsense, I’m-not-kidding statement of cold fact:

George W. Bush is an isolated man living in an insular, hermetically sealed world of advisers who don’t challenge him, receiving advice born of lethally bad intelligence.

There.  Carol feels better already.

Read the rest for yourself.  It’s damn good moveon.org-the-world-can’t-wait stuff.  Carol has encapsulated beautifully what the gang is saying at Ric’s (wherever).  It’s the base, stupid.

Chi Trib has come through with another in its series on hard times in America, rubbing raw the sores of discontent in Saul Alinsky style — hey, why be a newsman if you can’t rub sores?

Today’s is Mark Silva’s “Bush touts it, jobless doubt it: President’s talk of strong economy hard for some in St. Louis to believe.”  This is hard-copy page-one stuff, though run as a business story on-line.  It’s a nice prep for listening to Bush’s State of Union speech tomorrow, meaning don’t believe the s.o.b. when he reports on the economy:

The president will trumpet the nation’s economic successes, with unemployment down and productivity up, crediting his tax cuts and calling on Congress to make them permanent. But the gap between the president’s view and that of many working Americans is a yawning one and quite apparent in this once proud but dramatically shrunken middle-American city where good-paying work is hard to find,

says Silva, who has a nose for bad news.  Is this not what Dems and other leftists want to hear?  Does not Chi Trib deliver it neatly and on time?  Hey, Bush lied, what’s a mainstream newsie to do?  Rather, “Bush touts.”  “Tout” is a favorite here.  It used to refer to the guy at the track tipping you to a winner.

Bush and his chief economic advisor are quoted with simple statements, no arguing their case.  Touts.  A Democrat state senator complained?  No, she just “said.”  No colorful language here.  Why would there be?  Trib takes her seriously.  A St. Louis U. political science (not even economics) professor gets a paragraph, supporting Trib’s angle — which no man dare call slant.  Another, who teaches “American studies” (?), agrees. 

And, of course, so does Angie Totten, who just got laid off.  This is a business story?  It’s Job Losses Under Bush for Dummies.  That’s us, who read Chi Trib and others of the antique media to find out what’s happening.

========================

All is not leftist in Trib news coverage, however.  Its 2/2/04 article, part of a series, on Bridgeview Islamicists — “Struggle for the soul of Islam,” has star billing at Power Line, where Scott Johnson calls it “outstanding” and quotes it at length, including this:

Among the leaders at the Bridgeview mosque are men who have condemned Western culture, praised Palestinian suicide bombers and encouraged members to view society in stark terms: Muslims against the world. Federal authorities for years have investigated some mosque officials for possible links to terrorism financing, but no criminal charges have been filed.

The issue is not dead, says Johnson, referring to Friday’s Wall Street Journal piece by Joel Mowbray, “Reign of the Radicals: One man fights to take back his mosque from Islamists” — in light of which “the Tribune article deserves a second look,” says Johnson.  Mowbray writes about Omar Najib’s 20–plus-year fight to save the Bridgeview mosque from fundamentalists, concluding that

Notwithstanding Mr. Najib’s protests, the current leadership seems quite popular. An estimated 2,000 people attend Friday prayers, a 20-fold increase from 1983. The ever-expanding contingent of mosque-goers appears to consist largely of fundamentalists in sync with the leadership’s worldview, which seeks a return to “pure Islam” and preaches withdrawal from secular society. By Mr. Najib’s count, the overwhelming majority of men at the mosque have religious beards and almost every woman is covered from head-to-toe. Stepping foot through the door, he says, “is like walking inside the Taliban.”

While most Americans believe–or, at least, hope–that all but a handful of their Muslim countrymen find radical Islam noxious, Mr. Najib’s tale is not encouraging. Not only has no one at the mosque publicly backed his reform efforts but “you can count on less than two hands the number of people who have supported me privately,” Mr. Najib laments. “It’s been a lonely fight.”

Since the Spanish Civil War, such people have been called Fifth Columnists.  Or as Bobby Kennedy titled his book about labor-union corruption, the enemy within.  Is that too strong?

Is bad news, like money, driving out good as regards the economy?  Republicans think so, as the gopusa.com site has it.

Despite the fact that the economy continues to grow at a healthy rate and the country has had thirty-one straight months of positive job growth, you wouldn’t know it from watching your network nightly news. The economic picture, according to the spin from ABC, NBC, and CBS, is more about job losses and outsourcing than it is about real economic growth and job gains.

This complaint unfortunately gains credibility from last Sunday’s Chi Trib page-one story about hard times in Decatur, though admittedly the Trib flies under the radar of most mainstream media criticism.

While returning to this story, however, it’s good to repeat the question, maybe to be answered in future stories, about how many jobs are lost to China vs. those lost to Tennessee and other low-taxes states.  Jobs, the answer to welfare problems, flee taxes, we must remember.

They also flee Chicago city council’s anti-Wal-Mart bias, to nearby Evergreen Park, Sun-Times tells us today.  Wal-Mart, the free-enterprise success that liberals love to hate, was rejected for 83rd & Stewart with its 325 jobs and tax revenues for the city.  So it got itself to a suburb a block away from Western Ave. city limits with its 325 jobs and tax revenues for Evergreen Park.  Too bad, aldermen, with your allegiance to labor unions, who, Samson-like, blinded but with a good grip on the pillars, would rather screw things up than give an inch.

You were wondering where Greek Town is, you thought on Halsted south of Eisenhower or thereabouts?  You should have asked Chi Trib’s Pamela Sherrod, who locates “Chicago’s predominantly Greek neighborhood near Oak Park.”  Kidding you not, am I.  It’s in an article, “Living lean in a ‘stuffaholic’ world” as it ran in the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times 1/21/06.

Later, from Len:

Well, it’s only 10 minutes on the Ike..

and then there’s papaspiros… a neighborhood in itself.
(Not to mention George’s, Thyme and Honey, Maple Leaf…)

OR maybe she is thinking about the neighborhood around Assumption Greek Orthodox
Church on [Central] next to Loretto Hospital.., must have been a Greek
neighborhood onceuponatime.

True.