Don Rose, Political Columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer has been name the winner of the Chicago Journalists Association annual “Sarah Brown Boyden” journalism contest in the commentary category for his columns published here.

Don Rose will be honored by the Chicago Journalists Association at an awards dinner October 1.
Congratulations to Don on his award, and for a lifetime of journalistic excellence.

There’s no publication that exceeds thecapitolfaxblog.com in touchy-touchy race sanctimony (it groaned in fear that the stonewalling juror in the Blago trial might just be black: she was and so what?). As a wondrously comprehensive publication (and I must salute it for candidly saying something Richard M. Daley does not want to hear: Chicago is bankrupt)

Yet it’s often marvelously blind-sided on political correctness. Seemingly, to it the mere mention of race being used as a political cudgel is a no-no. Certainly for Republicans. It went after …

From the BBC
If Rod Blagojevich serves jail time, he will be the fourth Illinois governor since 1960 to be sent to prison on corruption charges. Why are officials from Illinois and its largest city, Chicago, so often shady?

Political corruption and Chicago go together like fashion and Milan or surfers and Sydney: the association is deep, and it has shaped the city.
Most Illinois historians date the corruption back to 1869, when three county commissioners were convicted of fraudulently awarding a contract to paint City Hall with expensive long-lasting paint.
The contractor instead …

Illinois’s premier political info warehouse Capitol Fax Blog is managed by Rich Miller who has a column for the Chicago Sun Times. Today Mr. Miller laments the lack of statesmen in politics – well there are statesmen but they are all too often crooks like Charley Rangel, the late Dan Rostenkowski, and so many other talented ‘sharp’ guys and gals.
Miller weeps -
“It’s tragic for Illinois that true statesmen such as Ryan and Rostenkowski turned out to be crooked. Their nefarious behavior led directly to Rod Blagojevich’s rise to …

The other day I mentioned that three major league media players here were warning Republican conservatives to stay away from ultra-conservatives whom they described as Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart. It prompted me to ask these media types if they could ever name ultra-liberals.

There’s been no response, of course, because to them…most reportorial denizens in Illinois…there is no such thing as an ultra-liberal. But they ought to pay attention to Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary who just called out a number of them who are dissatisfied with the president despite …

Folksy liberal Edward McClelland who writes the Channel 5 NBC blog Ward Room is filled with unsolicited sucker advice for the Illinois GOP. My question: Ed, anent your helpful suggestions to the GOP, when was the last time you voted for one of its candidates? Was it 2008 for McCain? 2004 for Bush? 2000 for Bush? I thought not.

Anyhow he just got up yesterday morning and decided to give the party a lot of gratuitous and unsolicited advice. This is from the same outfit that …

Tribune (as it calls itself, not The Tribune) is the latest publication to feature an angry woman railing at the boys in Rome for blocking feminine access to the Roman Catholic priesthood. Knowing the caution of Tribune, I presume it studied the response Carol Marin got in her column the other week in the Sun-Times and gingerly put a toe into the pool. Only a few letters to the editor and one octogenarian blogger objected—so why not? The marketing advantage is self-evident. American women are taking…not …

Last night on my talk radio show I decided to take a plebiscite to see how many people are going against the odds and supporting Blago. There are 10 phone lines in the studio and within seconds of my announcing this informal and non-scientific survey, all lines were burning and all the callers were supporting Blago. I couldn’t take all of them but as I read their comments on the screen they took on the same coloration: Nobody proved he stole any money and when compared to those …

In a circle of lame journalism only challenged by the Tribune’s breathless expose of Mark Kirk’s boating skills,  Edward McLelland at The Channel 5 Ward Room stokes up trivial story about *gasp* a date that didn’t go very well for a low level Young Republican in town.  Big Stuff (as Rich Miller says)?  Or a story that bores most everyone (as Tom Roeser says)?
McLelland did type in one interesting part of the story, a group of the usual suspects Sara Feigenholtz, Karen Yarborough and Iris Martinez in this case, are trying …

The Chicago Sun-Times is the number one Catholic-basher among U.S. urban newspapers…running on regular basis columnists Carol Marin, Neil Steinberg and Christopher Hitchens all of whom repeatedly slug the Church, the paper not bothering to run any defense of the Church…despite the fact that Catholics comprise 40% of the population of Cook and Lake counties.

Marin, a strident liberal who is a one-person oligopoly in commentary (newspaper columnist, NBC-TV and WTTW-TV public television commentator) on occasion calls herself Catholic but rabidly disagrees with the Church’s basic theological fundamentals—abortion, gay rights (she …