Smarternysun finds it amazing that for all the support Lord Black and the Manhattan Institute throw at the Sun, the paper ends up relying on its own reporters for opinion copy. Today Bill "Our Man in Albany" Hammond, who just last week covered the new state budget, writes a lengthy critique of that very budget. It's more than desperate; it's unethical, and it will hurt the Sun in the long run by exposing its supposedly objective reporters as heavily opinionated (oh, wait, that's already been done). What's more, Hammond leads his piece with talk of "watchdogs" who "have derided the new state budget so bitterly," an angle conspicuously absent from his news piece (To learn about these critics, you'd have to read the Times). The opinion doesn't elucidate on them; we're supposed to take it for granted that Hammond, who chose not even to mention anti-budget criticism in his reporting, knows what he's talking about.

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The Sun staff must have partied pretty hard over the weekend, because today's paper is embarrassingly bereft of original content. Of 22 news stories, only three are penned by Sun writers. The lead story, Cheney predicting further terrorist attacks, is an wire piece, as is Joe Concha's bit on the Mets, which inexplicably jumps not to the on-again-off-again sports section, but to Page 4, with the rest of the news jumps (Concha writes for MSNBC; the Sun forgot to give him attribution). Speaking of the wire, Smarternysun has a correction of its own to make: Last week we wrote that the paper ran a story without a byline; it turns out that we didn't look close enough — wire stories, even the 15 inchers, now have their bylines stuck at the bottom of the copy. The authors' names, when available, remain at the top. We don't know for sure, but it looks like the Sun is trying to downplay its AP addiction. Remember, Seth, the first step is to admit you have a problem. Coming to grips with the fact that today's news section contains only 13 percent original material is a good place to start.

And the three Sun originals are hardly news, either. Ben Smith's above-the-fold story on one café owner's struggle with the bureaucracy of getting a license for outside seating makes for gripping copy, but despite the wordy headline ("Summer's Near, but Café Owners Sit and Wait as Mayor Makes Them Fill Out 17-Page Forms"), Smith forgets to tell us whether this one owner's experience is at all average, let alone get the other side of the story. The same problem afflicts the story directly below it, Caroline Waxler's "How a Tax on Cigarettes Will Devastate a Store." We feel sorry for Ramon Murphy, who claims Bloomberg's proposed cigarette tax will cut his income in half, but as readers we demand at least a little more than 20-plus inches on one man's plight — is he typical of the city's bodega owners? Is the city taking steps to help them out? What do other owners think? And the third piece, a beaut of an anti-Castro screed by R.H. Sager, portends to cover a Cuban Independence Day celebration held yesterday. But what starts out as a report about the event quickly becomes a soapbox for Rep. Robert Menendez (Dem.-N.Y.) and Sonia Puente of the Center for Cuban-Related Information. As to how many people attended, where it was or even quotations from the crowd (God forbid; that would mean actually talking to strangers), we're left hanging.

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SMARTERNYSUN SETS: All good things must come to an end, and while we're pretty sure our favorite punching bag will soon follow, we've decided to make this the last week of Smarternysun coverage. It's been fun, and frankly pretty easy, but there's only so much you can say about a non-starter that doesn't learn from its own mistakes and that few people read anyway. Look forward to a grand sendoff/sendup of the paper on Friday, our last day.