G-Rod has inked the Mayor Daley Cronies Full Employment Act of 2003, aka the O’Hare expansion deal (not to imply that G-Rod would ever serve up pork, because I don’t mean to imply it but rather state it directly.)

“Thank God this day has arrived,” Da Mare said. Yeah, I think God felt the ledger was a little uneven down here. After all Da Mare has given Chicago, didn’t all of us and our God owe him a little in return?

Still, is the last word on expansion? Not likely. The FAA has already sent back the plan based on its severe flaws.

And then there is the matter of who will fit the bill. As Sen. Fitzgerald points out in the same story linked above, United’s pension is underfunded by $6.4 billion but the bankrupted firm plans to stretch out its payments to the fund in order to make the necessary payments to get O’Hare expansion done.

There’s also the matter of the price tag, which the city says is $6.6 billion. These are the same folks who underestimated the cost of the disastrous Millennium Park project by a factor of three. We may be well into the next millennium before the damn thing’s finished.

Worse yet, the additional taxes the city is forcing airlines serving O’Hare to pay to finance its bonds on the expansion deal will make the airport an even less attractive for upcoming competitors like JetBlue to do business there. Instead, more than 80 percent of O’Hare’s gates will continue to be controlled by the aviation industry’s tweedle dum and tweedle dee, United and American.

Welcome to Chicago, Richard M. Daley, Mayor.

First they shut down an Iraqi newspaper “because of an article that U.S. occupation authorities and Iraqi officials considered an incitement to violence and a threat to human rights in Iraq,” and now 500 Iraqi detainees have been held incommunicado from families and 90 percent of them have not been allowed to consult a lawyer.

Best of all, they are being housed in one of Iraq’s most notorious prisons.

Iraq’s desaparecidos may simply be a cost of maintaining order before the civil justice system is up and running, U.S. authorities say.

Good thing Dubya’s against nation building.

Be prepared for TSA screeners to begin cluelessly examining your cell phone, PDA, digital camera, etc. the way the apes at the beginning of “2001” investigated the mysterious monolith.

Sure, Homeland Annoyance boss Tom Ridge admits, “there’s no indication” Al Qaeda has actually used any electronic devices to smuggle weapons onto airplanes.

Still, he adds helpfully, “if you have these electronic devices in your carry-on baggage, pull them out, because if we find them in the X-ray machines, we’ll pull you aside and take a look.”

Sigh. If airport screening is going to continue to focus on detecting weapons instead of terrorists, on disarming everyone instead of arming pilots, flight attenders and employing air marshals, then it was only inevitable that our electronic necessities would eventually join the parade of passenger possessions to be prodded and poked.

Andy Martin is an excellent journalist. For a long time, he worked for the Chicago Tribune’s investigative team and broke some major stories, including several about corruption at City Hall, before moving on to the paper’s Washington bureau. I learned a lot from him in the investigative reporting class he taught at Columbia. In many ways, he’s the perfect example of a very hardworking, nose-to-the-ground type of journalist.

And he’s also, apparently, wearing ideological blinders. I posted earlier about a story of his on the anti-fast food crusade. In that story, he featured several of the usual anti-choice suspects, and I noted that he didn’t speak with anyone from the Center for Consumer Freedom . Martin’s story more or less left all the contentions made by the anti-choice crowd unchallenged.

But yesterday, he finally got around to it. His quick and dirty profile of the Center for Consumer Freedom’s executive director, Richard Berman, ran under the headline, “Flinging mud in the nation’s food fight.”

Gee, I’m sure this story will be very fair. The story goes on to give Berman’s critics the most space, as they charge that he’s unfair and hits below the belt, that he exaggerates and is just a paid shill of the food and beverage (and formerly, gasp, the tobacco) industries.

I suppose the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s extreme and bizarre agenda is measured and reasonable by comparison, right Andy? Come on.

And so it goes. Any old busybody who puts on his scientist lab coat can tell us how to live our lives, but if a targeted industry tries to defend itself — and, oh yeah, its consumers — then they’re just a bunch of self-interest mudslingers. Talk about your hoary journalistic cliches.

That’s the nut of the problem, though. If a really good journalist like Martin goes slants the stories this way, what’s the barely competent journalist doing? I’d like to think good journalism is good journalism, but many times it’s untrue. Journalists make critical evaluations about how to describe the subjects of their stories, who to quote, etc., and by so doing reveal their biases. Martin has revealed his.