· Check out this at the bottom of today’s Sun-Times endorsement of Judy Baar Topinka:

This endorsement represents the view of the Sun-Times News Group of 100 newspapers in the Chicago metro area.

That’s a lot of papers. The Southtown, all of the Star papers and the Pioneer Press papers, as well as the Joliet Herald News, Aurora Beacon News, Elgin Courier News, Waukegan News Sun and the Naperville Sun.

Jim Ryan has also endorsed JBT.

When he was attorney general, Ryan blocked a plan Topinka supported that would have let two hotel companies with political connections settle more than $40 million in debt to the state for just $10 million.

Ryan now said that was “an honest disagreement.”

It’s a sign of Topinka’s independence, he said, that they disagreed about the 1995 debt settlement for the hotels in Springfield and Collinsville.

· As promised yesterday, here’s the Tribune’s endorsement of Ron Gidwitz.

· Daily Herald endorses Blagojevich, Giannoulias, and runs a play to play story.

· Champaign News-Gazette endorses Bill Brady and Edwin Eisendrath.

· Tribune and Sun-Times both have profiles of Edwin Eisendrath. Sun-Times has a profile of Gov. Blagojevich, which asks if he is a team player. Heh.

· Kristen McQueary discovers whom the governor really blames for not knowing that The Daily Show is a comedy thing.

“I’m not so sure I would have done the interview. The deputy governor (Bradley Tusk) takes responsibility, as well he should, because he’s the one who didn’t tell me.”

· Somebody has snatched three James Meeks for Governor-related website addresses and pointed them all to a Meeks-related blog. (Hat tip: OneMan)

· Oberweis capitulates, changes controversial TV ads. From Bernie’s column:

In a column last week, I quoted DOUG BOHRINGER, president of Springfield-based Omni Communications Group, about ads for JIM OBERWEIS that referred to newspaper stories but included headlines that actually didn’t appear in the newspapers cited. But Bohringer now admits he wasn’t clear enough.

Bohringer, whose company produced the ads, had told me the images “weren’t intended to be taken as true headlines.” To back that up, he said, there was no attempt to include “the date and all the little doodads that go with the masthead” to make the pages look real.

However, it was later pointed out to me that images from the ads posted on the Capitol Fax blog, thecapitolfaxblog.com, showed that dates and other “doodads” were included.

“What I should have said with more clarity is, we used elements that were illegible so it would not be mistaken as the actual content,” Bohringer said Friday. “I do apologize for any misleading comments I made concerning the doodads. I just considered them graphic elements.”

The Oberweis ads, which attack state Treasurer JUDY BAAR TOPINKA, have been modified, Bohringer said, to only use headlines that actually appeared.

UPDATE: More on Meeks, from a longtime reader:

…by the way reading your meeks stuff, [redacted] and I watched his service this morning which is broadcast on local cable, I tell you from his sermon that guy is running, it was quite a bashing of both GOP and DEMs, he really had the place rocking […]

He said by his calculations the black man would not have parity with the white man until something like 3086 and he wasn’t going to wait, he wanted to bring the black community with him to fight for what they deserve and bashed the War in Iraq and the money spent, bashed Springfield