After his star turn on the op-ed page, Bill Hammond is back to reporting, though today's "Big Labor Levies 'Tax' on Unions" might fall into either category. The article reports on an increase by the AFL-CIO in the dues owed by its member unions, a move that was approved by all but the Teamsters and machinists' union yesterday. But the article quickly veers into an "are unions on the out?" tangent, with quotes from anonymous "insiders" about not the tax but the leadership skills of AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and the ability of his organization to rally the troops. Never mind that the vote to increase the "tax" passed overwhelmingly, or that support for Sweeney is strong across the board. Hammond does let a few such alternative viewpoints get in, but he counterposes them as "downplaying" the fact that "union members seem to have lost the enthusiasm they once had for his leadership," an opinion expressed not by any union member but by the conservative writer Arch Puddington (and, most likely, the Sun's sugardaddies at the Manhattan Institute). Does Sweeney get to comment? Are you kidding? There's not even a "no comment" here, which makes Smarternysun wonder if Hammond isn't trying to relive his glory day as a columnist.

---

Poor Tim Starks. Just as he's getting his feet wet as the Sun's man in Washington, he's given a tough assignment — cover Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who is waging a one-man battle to block aid to the Palestinians. Getting a fair and accurate picture of anything related to the Middle East would be difficult, and wading into the morass of Washington politics to do so makes it that much harder. Fortunately, his editors are Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll, so he doesn't have to worry about pesky things like objectivity. His piece, "Weiner Wages Battle on Hill," is steeped in anti-Palestinian rhetoric, going so far as to get the Zionist Organization of America's opinion on Palestinian aid, as if it mattered (of course, the ZOA has long been the Sun's go-to source on the subject). The front page even has an above-the-fold table showing Weiner's assertion of a correlation between "levels of aid and terror," prominently displaying Weiner-provided information divided into "US Palestinian Aid" and "Israelis Killed by Terrorists" columns. Weiner, a self-professed "backbencher in the minority party," never clearly explains a link between humanitarian aid and suicide bombers, but the Sun swallows his ridiculous graph whole-hog anyway. Starks never mentions whether anyone else in Congress supports Weiner's crusade, though they also let him get away with the unexplained claim that, were his bill to stand on its own, he "could win 300 votes in the House," or virtually every single member. Of course, Starks is still a newbie, and his attempt at objectivity must have seemed quaint to the boys in the backroom. They let him get away with a comment by the director of the Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange, Claudette Shwiry. who calls the relatively low levels of Palestinian aid "almost insulting." More insulting, though, is that her comment comes at the very end of the story, where few readers are likely to see it.