Annette Summersett Speaks: America's Number 1 Yooper Singer-Songwriter breaks her silence on Brett Favre:



Hilarious !!!

The Other:

Does anyone believe a long association with Jerry Falwell's church would have done anything but help McCain in the Republican primary, and gotten Democrats tagged as anti-religion when they tried to point out Falwell's nuttiness in the general? It's fine to be a Christian extremist in America. It's fine to believe, and say publicly, that everyone who hasn't accepted Jesus Christ into their heart will roast in eternal hellfire, fine to believe that the homosexuals caused Hurricane Katrina and the feminists contributed to 9/11, fine to believe we must support Israel so the Jews can be largely annihilated in a war that will trigger the End Times, fine to believe we're in a holy battle with the barbaric hordes of Islam, fine to believe that we went to the Middle East to prove "our God is bigger than your God." What you can't believe is that blacks have suffered a long history of oppression in this country, that they're still face deep institutional discrimination, and that a country where 100 percent of the presidents have been rich white guys is actually run by rich white guys. More to the point, even if you do believe those things, you certainly can't be angry about it!

Ezra Klein, on what he describes as the "normalized extremism" of white religion in America, whether it be Christian or Jewish. The stalinoid ritual of denouncing and disavowing the non-p.c. (whether it be politically, or patriotically, correct) remarks of an ally seems to be in full bloom right around now; first it was Geraldine Ferraro (and until last week, who even knew she was still alive?!?), now it's the septagenarian retired former pastor of Sen. Obama's church, Rev. Wright.

Let's face it: if you spend any time inside a house of worship, you're frequently going to hear some crazy shit coming from the pulpit, stuff that's uncomfortable to listen to, both because (like much of what Rev. Wright has said) it's uncomfortably true, if worded in an extreme manner, and because the sort of person who makes a livelihood as a Man of God is somewhat eccentric to begin with. But because it now fits the campaign strategies of his opponents to make Obama (and African Americans in general) seem un-American, we will now get to enjoy several weeks of stories about what spooky places the churches in the black communities are. And in a nation that once conducted experiments on African American males to study how untreated syphillis effected its subjects, and has facilitated the spread of AIDS in the Third World by defunding family planning and birth control programs, we can denounce someone for having the wrongheaded audacity for believing the same thing happened here.

UPDATE: This story has now officially jumped the shark.

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There are going to be some who spot mere rank partisanship in the Spitzer investigation, but I could really care less. There is a much higher standard we set for holders of power in any executive branch, be they President or governor, since that person is charged with ensuring that the law is enforced equitably and fairly. David Vitter or Barney Frank might violate the same laws, but as legislators, they are mere political actors, charged with debating and enacting the laws that go into effect. Spitzer's duties were different, so the consequences that follow are exponentially changed.

My favorite attempt at rationalizing this debacle within familiar blogospheric parameters has to be Jane Hamsher, who innocently asks:

Why would the bank tell the IRS and not Spitzer himself if there was a suspicious transfer? Spitzer is a longtime client, a rich guy and the governor. We're talking thousands of dollars here, not millions. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they spotted a "suspicious transfer" made by the governor, and that this is how things began. It's possible it was just ordinary paperwork the bank had to file with the government whenever some particular flag was raised, but if that's the case, why did the DoJ go to DefCon 3?

Why, indeed? If the bank had just asked the Governor why so much money seemed to be floating around from shell company to shell company under various pseudonyms that were connected to him, I'm sure he would have just told them not to worry, these weren't bribes or kickbacks he was hiding, just payments for concubinage. It's not like Spitzer wouldn't have given the same benefit of a doubt to any Wall Street honcho back when he was the A.G. of the state of New York. Nothing to see here....

Let's not treat this as being on the same level as the persecution of Dan Siegelman. If you want to argue that prostitution should be legalized, or that what Spitzer does outside of marriage is a personal matter, fine, but you still have the matter that he is charged with executing the laws, all of the laws, even those he disagrees with. If Spitzer had libertarian leanings on this issue, he could have simply asserted that the state wasn't going to be in the business of prosecuting victimless crimes anymore, and urged the legislature to change the law. Former Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican, took much the same approach to the death penalty a few years, and helped change the public debate on that issue. Unfortunately for Spitzer, he chose to prosecute others for what he was doing privately. He deserves what he's going to get.

The Tribute Vice Pays to Virtue: Did you know the federal law the Justice Department will use to prosecute Governor Spitzer was the same law used to incarcerate former heavyweight champ Jack Johnson? And in both cases, it involved the purchase of train tickets for la belle...Charlie Chaplin also ran afoul of the same law, leading to his exile from America for over twenty years.

It turns out that the "little girl" in Hillary Clinton's now-infamous, "It's 3:00 a.m." ad, is actually a month shy of her eighteenth birthday, and an avowed Obama supporter. [link via TPM]

From Allison Hope Weiner's sassy, hilarious coverage of the Anthony Pellicano trial over at HuffPost:

The key thing that Ms. [Tarita] Virtue explained today in only an hour on the stand (she's set to return on Tuesday) was that Mr. Pellicano had the ability to have five computers running at the same time, recording calls in the office, as well as computers running at off-site locations. The office computers could only listen in on calls in the 310 area code--a code that covers most of West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. If you wanted to wiretap someone in the valley, it was going to cost you more because according to Tarita, Mr. Pellicano would have to rent out an apartment and set up computers near his target phone. So, finally a good reason to actually live in the valley.

She doesn't say which "valley" she's referring to, and I don't wish to speak for the residents of the San Gabriel, Antelope or Simi Valleys, but up here in the 818, being relatively safe from the machinations of the "Detective to the Stars" is something that every homeowner took into account at the time he purchased his home. No doubt the incarceration of the wiretapping detectice has reduced the "Pellicano Edge" that San Fernando Valley residents had come to rely on, leading to the current wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies. Damn you, Anita Busch !!!

Yet another reason why the Pellicano Trial should matter, contrary to this vapid piece in the local paper of record on Saturday. The "insider" voice that comes forth in that article is reminiscent of the Beltway mentality that excused the crimes of Scooter Libby during his trial, and is probably Exhibit 1 as to why the new media, especially the blogosphere, may be the best journalistic method for covering trials of this sort. Having a knowledgeable and opinionated writer, like Ms. Weiner, Jeralyn Merritt or Marcy Wheeler at Firedoglake, take on the task of sifting through the testimony and evidence each day and putting it all into perspective, removes the story-killing mentality of a newspaper editor or TV producer who is only interested in whether a celebrity is named who can sell newspapers or garner ratings. Freeing good writers from that constraint leads to better journalism.

Spens-Black Rules the World: Former Unit 3 resident (and NBA great) Kevin Johnson tosses his hat into the ring up to become the next mayor of CowTown. FWIW, KJ is an Obama supporter, and, as I recall from our days at Berkeley, a fan of Camus. Our rise to prominence continues inexorably....

The de la Hoya Candidate: Remember the first time Oscar de la Hoya lost? It was to Felix Trinidad in 1999, when both men were undefeated; it was boxing's last "Battle of the Century" of the 20th Century. Most observers, including myself, felt that the Golden Boy was an easy winner, and by almost any objective criteria, such as punches landed, he should have won. But the ringside judges didn't agree, and gave a split decision to Trinidad, who was the aggressor from start to finish. It was a disputed outcome, but not, truth be told, a surprising one: judges have always preferred the boxer who carries the fight to his opponent over the one who dances and piles up the points. And it certainly didn't hurt that Trinidad was managed by Don King.

I thought of that today in the context of the Wednesday post-mortems of the Ohio and Texas primaries yesterday. The Golden Boy of the Democratic Party has built up a comfortable lead through a series of decisive victories last month, but now discovers that he still has a few rounds to fight. His campaigning in the week before was sluggish, and he got clocked by his opponent on some nondescript punches. So his first instinct is to rest on his laurels, dance out the final rounds of the fight, and win on points.

Bad idea. For one thing, like de la Hoya after the ninth round of the Trinidad fight, he's not up by as much as he thinks he is. Thanks to the ridiculous distribution of delegates in states like Texas, the meme that the nominating process is not particularly democratic is starting to catch on. Just being ahead slightly in what have come to be known as "elected delegates" isn't going to win the nomination, particularly if Obama closes on a losing streak that includes Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina (and, Kobe willing, any revotes in Michigan and Florida).

SuperDelegates are not an amorphous mass that can be bullied or cajoled into supporting a nominee in August just because he did well in February. The entire reason they exist is that the rank-and-file Democratic primary and caucus participant does not have an astute track record in choosing nominees. They will look to what their constituents want, as reflected in the actual voter preference of their states and districts, and that math is not unfavorable to Ms. Clinton.

Obama needs to close strong. A win in Pennsylvania would help, but bagging North Carolina and either Michigan or Florida would be just as good. There is no reason to believe that party insiders and pols overwhelmingly favor Clinton; in fact, the opposite is probably true.

But most of all, he has to start acting like he has a pair. Only a string of defeats to close out the primaries will convince the Supers that he isn't a viable nominee, so he should stop coasting, and finish off his opponent, the way de la Hoya didn't do against Trinidad.

Requiem for February:

An average of 3,960 bankruptcy petitions were filed per day nationwide last month, up 18 percent from January and up 28 percent from a year earlier, according to Automated Access to Court Electronic Records, a bankruptcy data and management company.

February was the busiest month for filings since Congress overhauled the bankruptcy law in 2005. Bankruptcy experts said the rise was particularly worrisome because those changes made filing for bankruptcy more complicated and expensive.

“This number of bankruptcies may be under-representative of the true financial distress consumers are feeling because of the steps Congress has taken,” said Jack Williams, a scholar in residence at the American Bankruptcy Institute and a professor at Georgia State University.

The latest figures show the financial pain is spreading from states like California and Florida, which exemplified the housing boom and subsequent bust, to those along the Eastern Seaboard like Maryland, Virginia and Delaware, which were among the 10 states with the largest percentage increase in filings in January and February. “You are seeing a good-size uptick everywhere,” said Mike Bickford, president of Automated Access.

Bankruptcy experts caution, however, that data from just one or two months can be misleading.

“The monthly bankruptcy filing rate has a lot of cyclicality,” Robert M. Lawless, a professor of law at the University of Illinois College of Law, wrote on Tuesday on the widely read bankruptcy blog, Creditslips.org. Some experts, for example, say bankruptcies often seem to rise in February as debts from the holiday season come due. Even so, the trend is definitely upward, Mr. Lawless wrote. States as disparate as Kentucky and Rhode Island joined the top 10 list, and the absolute number of filings rose significantly.

--N.Y. Times (3/5/2008). In fact, the cyclicality mentioned above normally increases even more in March, April and May, with the X-mas holiday and summer months being the slow time for filings. People like to hang on through the holiday season, max out their credit cards to insure that a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year is had by all, then file after they get one or two bills behind (something like that also happens during the summer, when it's vacations and weddings for which debtors go all-in).

On the other hand (you knew that was coming), the fact that the number of filings reached a post-YBK peak last month is not particularly interesting. Almost every month since BARF went into effect in October, 2005, has seen an increase; the most noticeable thing YBK accomplished was that it created a panic before the new law went into effect, leading many people who hadn't planned on filing, or even desired filing, to head to the Bankruptcy Court to get their bankruptcy done before the change occurred. In the twenty-eight months since, it has taken the toxic combo of a collapsing real estate market and a massive credit crunch (brought on, in no small part, by YBK) leading to recession that has returned the monthly level of filings to its historic, pre-BARF norms.

My Two Cents: Hillary has to win Ohio and Texas tomorrow. Losses in either state, and Barack is the presumptive nominee. That's obvious, and I don't think there's any credible way the junior Senator from New York can maintain a viable campaign without a sweep.

That said, what happens if Clinton does win the Buckeye and Lone Star States, along with Rhode Island, where she has a clear lead in the polls? It's unlikely she will make much of a gain in the pledged delegate gap, regardless of how well she does tomorrow night. Moreover, due to the byzantine structure of the Texas delegate selection, it is almost certain that Obama will win a majority of delegates in that state, even if he loses the primary. Aren't we talking about a race that is already a foregone conclusion in favor of Barack Obama?

My counterintuitive take is that a pair of primary wins tomorrow trumps any delegate math, and for that reason, Clinton still has a shot if she wins. It's already pretty certain she isn't going to catch Obama in terms of the delegates elected in primaries and caucuses, no matter how well she does tomorrow or in the remaining contests. When all is said and done, Obama will have won more delegates in the contested battles after the last primary on June 2, but will not likely have a majority unless he has a breakthrough win in one of the four large states left, in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. So it then goes to the SuperDelegates.

Since she won't have the mandate of the voters in Democratic contests, she has to have another argument. And I think that argument is going to be that the arcane rules the party has for delegate selection are undemocratic and anti-majoritarian, and that the SuperDelegates have to intervene to ensure that the true interests of the party are served.

That's where the potential for mischief in Texas will enter into the equation. If, as I suspect, Hillary Clinton wins the primary but fails to capture the lion's share of delegates tomorrow night in Texas, she has a perfect argument to illustrate the screwy manner in which the delegates have been chosen in this campaign. If the will of the Democratic voters in Texas isn't reflected in the delegate allocation, how can it be less fair for SuperDelegates, many of whom actually have to win a majority of votes to earn public office, to craft a more equitable solution? Since, in all likelihood, Hillary will not significantly reduce Barack's lead in the delegates even if she somehow wins a plurality of delegates from Texas, winning the vote but losing the delegates tomorrow night may be win-win for her, since it underlines the one good argument she has left.

But she has to win both states....

Charlotte Allen, the columnist whose WaPo piece yesterday on "Why Women Act so Dumb" has managed to unite both Atrios and Captain Ed in astonished rancor, was also the lady who recently penned this idiotic column in the LA Times.

On why acting skill and political awareness are not shared attributes:

In the interview, given to French TV show Paris Premiere, [Marion] Cotillard appears to suggest the attacks on the World Trade Center were staged to avoid the expense of refurbishing them.

"We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes, are they burned?" she asks. "There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burned for 24 hours.

"It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed."

The Twin Towers, she claims, were a "money sucker" that would have cost much more to modernise than to destroy.

The actress goes on to cast doubt on the Moon landing of 1969. "Did a man really walk on the moon?" she asks.

"I saw plenty of documentaries on it and I really wondered. In any case I don't believe all they tell me."

Okay, so this year's Oscar winner for Best Actress is dumber than a bag of hammers. What of it? I'm resigned to expecting my favorite golfer or baseball player to have reactionary political views; what's important is what he does between the lines. Were it to turn out that Phoebe Nicholls is a Trotskyite or a Tory, I'd still scan IMDB every day for updates. Athletes and actors aren't paid to be policy wonks, so anyone who takes their political views seriously is playing a fool's game.

David Leonhardt has a good analysis of the history of immigration as a political issue in the United States. An excerpt:

Immigration has a fantastically complicated political history in the United States. It has produced enough populist anger to elect Know Nothing mayors of Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington and San Francisco, all in the 1850s and, more recently, to help Lou Dobbs reinvent his television career and become a best-selling author. But when national politicians have tried to seize on such anger, they have usually failed — and failed quickly. “While immigration has always roiled large sections of the electorate,” said Eric Rauchway, a historian at the University of California, Davis, “it has never been the basis for a national election, one way or the other.”

That appears to be truer than ever in 2008. Mr. McCain will all but clinch the Republican nomination on Tuesday with victories in the Ohio and Texas primaries. In the Texas campaign, except for a couple of obligatory questions about a border fence during a Democratic debate, immigration has been the dog that didn’t bark. The candidates who would have made an issue of it exited the race long ago.

There is, however, one more historical parallel to consider: as a political matter, immigration probably won’t go away on its own. The anti-immigration movements of the past may not have created presidents, but they did change the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act helped cut the immigration rate by more than 40 percent at the close of the 19th century. The Nativist movement of the 1910s and 1920s had even more success passing laws to reduce the flow.

I think the reason it fails as a political issue, but not as a matter of policy, has always been about the inherent decency of the American voter. The bigots and xenophobes who are most obsessed by the "illegals" can stir up a hornet's nest for awhile, but as with the issue of welfare reform thirty years ago, it's hard to get a voting majority behind candidates motivated to do something about it. It wasn't Ronald Reagan and his racist talk of "welfare queens" driving Cadillacs that changed the system; it was Bill Clinton and a generation of neo-liberals who approached the issue pragmatically, disassociating the debate from its genesis as a wedge issue.

The same thing, I believe, will ultimately happen with immigration. The nation is entitled to have control over its own borders, and to establish a policy concerning who may enter the country. But voters tend to recoil from the ugly language that is often used in the debate, with "illegals" replacing "wetbacks" as the code term du jour. Immigration reform will only come when the wonks make their voices predominant on this issue.

Josh Marshall reverts to his pre-9/11 form, when a high percentage of his posts were about Chandra Levy and Gary Condit, with this bit o' snark. Seems to me if you're going to summarize a column in that fashion, it would have helped if the columnist had actually made Joe Lieberman the point of comparison. I guess we all have bad days.

West End Girl: Phoebe Nicholls is on stage again !!!! Boo-yah !!!!

Well, thank Kobe we still have brave Senators looking out for the interest of the sub-prime loansharks lenders....

Worth reading: Prof. Elizabeth Warren, on the changing nature of the bankruptcy debate since 2005. It's worth noting again that the measure before the Senate right now, which would permit the modification of mortgage terms on homes by the Bankruptcy Court, is not related to the 2005 BARF Act, which mainly dealt with eligibility. The public revulsion against the earlier measure is almost entirely due to other factors, which the professor spells out in her post.

Sometimes it helps to have basic reading comprehension skills, the kind that were supposed to have been honed when you were taking the SAT. Witness the reaction to this Mark Halperin piece in Time, which lists a number of ways John McCain will be more free to go after Barack Obama in the general election than Hillary Clinton (or other Dems, for that matter) was in the primaries.

To suggest that we are more likely to see Obama's race and ethnicity become the subject of coded attacks after the Conventions is a point so banal I'm surprised it needs to be made. The Clintons, remember, had a lot of black supporters at one point, so even engaging in the rather coy attacks in South Carolina proved to be risky and damaging. That's not a problem McCain needs to worry about. Anyone so naive as to believe the Republicans won't do that by November has clearly not followed American politics since 1964. Grow up.

To predict a line of attack is not the same as suggesting one. By refusing to sugarcoat what Obama will face this fall, Halperin has done the candidate an enormous favor in publicly, and in cold-blooded fashion, elucidating that battle after the nomination will be much nastier than what he's faced so far.

Greatest Sentence Ever:

More troubling, however, is the issue of whether McCain's letter may have led some people to worry that other people might conclude that McCain's letter created the appearance of a conflict of interest, as well as the issue of whether the New York Times, in digging up this eight-year-old letter, was creating the possibility that some people might think there was a possibility of an appearance that the Times was suggesting the possibility of an appearance of a potential conflict of interest in McCain's behavior, along with the most distressing possibility of all: that in this very article I may be creating the possibility that some people might worry that other people might think that I have created the appearance of suggesting that the New York Times has created the possibility that some people might worry that other people might think that McCain has created the appearance that some people might worry that other people might think that there could be an appearance that McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist.

--Michael Kinsley, Slate (2/25/2008), explaining why it has nothing to do with sex.