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.

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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.