Intellectual Bankruptcy: There's much to find disreputable about the analysis contained here and here (obviously, taking a "blame the bitch" attitude is almost always the wrong tactic when trying to understand why people have been unable to make sub-prime mortgage payments, much less claiming that a bankruptcy filed when the spouse was married to another is "material information" that needs to be disclosed when discussing one's personal debt situation), but the notion that filing bankruptcy twice in ten years is tantamount to "serial bankruptcy" is, safe to say, just a little bit nuts. The serial filing that was meant to be discouraged by the 2005 BARF act, as well as 11 U.S.C. Section 109(g), concerns multiple filings in the same year, not two filings nine years apart. In other words, restrictions on "serial filings" are meant to dissuade people from filing one case after another, thereby using the automatic stay even when there is no hope for discharge or reorganization, not to label people who hit bad streaks during different decades as sleazebags.

As I recall, Ms. McArdle was the same person who rejected the notion that a high number of bankruptcy filings are related to medical woes because actual medical debts (that is, invoices sent out by hospitals and doctors) constitute a relatively small percentage of scheduled claims in bankruptcy court, apparently unaware that most medical debts (at least among my clients) are actually paid for with credit cards or are sold to collection agencies. Since she also makes the claim that tax debts are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, a patently false notion, it would perhaps be best if she left future discussions of the topic to people who actually know what they're talking about, like, say, someone with an actual law degree (link via Matt Welch).

Did you know that we had an election in California yesterday? In an odd-numbered year, yet?

Well, I didn't vote, nor did anyone I know, but there was an election, of sorts, mostly concerning the matter of budgeting processes in Sacramento, which no one outside of the editorial pages, the septuagenarian listeners of talk-radio, and the odd Chamber of Commerce broadsheet cares about. It was mostly hyped as a way of giving the finger to the Governator, with Democrats particularly gleeful about avenging The Recall (which also occurred in an odd-numbered year, albeit one where a statistically significant number of people voted), while Republicans, comfortable in the stability they possess as a permanent non-governing minority, were happy to stick in their shivs at the one member of their party who actually has to play a role in the state's future.

Right now, the state legislature is talking about making deep, deeeeeeeep cuts, which is mainly designed to scare up support for either floating a series of bonds, in order to prevent school shutdowns and prison closures, or even better, to actually default on bond payments that are coming due, sort of a "bankruptcy" for sovereign entities. It's the sort of thing that would be a big deal if federalism itself wasn't so outdated. If politics is Hollywood for ugly people, than state governments are its Z-List.

Whatever Sacramento shall deny its citizens, Obama will provide. The few (the happy few) who voted yesterday know all too well that those services that state and local governments have traditionally provided are going to be provided by the federal government in the future, and they are not unhappy about that prospect. You don't see the voters trying to pass referenda abolishing schools or prisons; they just don't want the inefficiency of fifty state bureaucracies having to administer these functions any more. They may not die as quickly as the newspaper and the motion picture industries have, but the concept of "state governments" is every bit the dinosaur.

"It was the big cop, Calahan, that did this to me. I have rights !! I have rights !!"

I think that's how the line went in Dirty Harry. That scene, where the serial killer is being wheeled into a hospital after having just been beat up, comes to mind when I hear the whining coming from the dissenting creditors in the Chrysler bankruptcy. As it turns out, the speculators are going to make out like bandits anyway (come to think of it, the Scorpio Killer hired a third party to beat him up), and now that the judge has all but validated the sale, telling the dissenters to put up or shut up by matching or bettering the deal made by Fiat, it's impossible to say that they're "getting screwed."

Lastly, arguments that this is somehow contra to precedent or some sacred analysis of holy bankruptcy text are forgetting two essential points: first, minority interests in a class get the short end of the stick all the time; and second, even if the sale were to be defeated, and Chrysler was forced to propose a Chapter 11 plan rather than a quickie sale, the speculators would likely have their secured liens stripped (ie, treated as unsecured debt), since the corporate assets are almost certainly insufficient to repay all the secured claimants. For the speculators to get more than what they are being offered right now, the bankruptcy would have to be converted to Chapter 7, and the assets of Chrysler liquidated. Filing a bankruptcy, then selling the company to a third party right off the bat, happens all the time, and its up to the legal system to determine whether its in the best interest of the company and its shareholders.

Liquidation of the company may, in the long run, be the optimal result. But with the Chapter 11 process only now beginning, our legal system is going to allow Chrysler some time to see if it can reorganize. Contrary to what many on the right may have thought, bankruptcy is not automatically a system designed to screw uppity workers and their pensions; it is a set of rules and procedures geared to allow people and companies a fresh start. As libertarian editor Matt Welch puts it, better to give the "controlled force of bankruptcy" a chance, and let Fiat try to sell Jeeps for awhile.

UPDATE [5/7]: Mickey Kaus responds, asking why it was necessary for the government to allegedly "strongarm" the creditors into accepting the sale to Fiat without letting the bankruptcy run its course and simply let the judge do the strongarming. Perhaps the best answer to that is that there is well and truly a new sheriff in town, one who is not going to bend over for the interests of Wall Street. Indeed, Presidents make decisions to intervene (or not intervene, which would have the same effect on the parties) in corporate reorganizing all the time, but usually, its the union and its worker that feel the pressure to surrender their position. The law hasn't changed, it's the scales of justice that are tipped differently.

With this President, any resolution that keeps the company afloat is going to be less-disadvantageous to the workers, and the major creditors (as opposed to the small-time speculators who are challenging the sale) saw the writing on the wall: either give up some of their position, or prepare to see the company liquidated, and their position completely wiped out. Quickly resolving the Chrysler situation allows the company to get back to selling cars quickly, and allows the creditors of the company a chance to recoup some of their losses. And since the judge has (so far) approved of the procedure to quickly sell the company to Fiat, any allegations of "strongarming" by the President should be viewed skeptically, even if "strongarming" was in and of itself a bad thing.

American Royalty:

On Thursday, the Senate took up the issue of whether to eliminate the exception in the Bankruptcy Code which allows mortgage lenders to prevent the bifurcation of certain of their loans into secured and unsecured portions in bankruptcy, or in plainer language, the “cramdown” legislation. It was defeated, 51-45, with a dozen Democrats voting to preserve the Carter Era Valentine to the nation’s bankers. Ironically, it was the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the Senate who came out most passionately for the principles of Free Market capitalism, whilst their conservative counterparts on both sides of the aisle voted to maintain the subsidy.

Inevitably, the cramdown legislation voted down will pass, if not in this Congress, then at some future time, since the current law represents governmental protectionism at its most illogical and nonsensical, a business subsidy without rhyme or reason. To understand why, it is helpful to examine the absurdity through an example.

Let’s say an individual buys five identical properties. Each property is the same acreage, contains the same square footage, rooms, and looks exactly the same. Each property looks exactly the same, in fact, and is able to obtain identical mortgages for each property, a thirty-year adjustable-rate mortgage for $200,000.

However, the purchaser decides to use each of the properties differently. One property is going to be his home, where he and his newlywed bride will live out their days, surrounded by their 2.5 children and a lifetime of memories (they hope). As his family grows, he desires to build an extension to his home, so he takes out a second mortgage for $50,000. The second property will be rented out to tenants. His mother-in-law will live, rent-free, in the third home, while the fourth home, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, will be used as a vacation home for his family. Lastly, the fifth property will be used as his office.

Hard times ensue. His wife’s last pregnancy was a difficult one, and her hospitalization lasted longer than normal. Moreover, she had to take longer maternity leave than before, so the family income went down significantly. Not surprisingly, her HMO didn’t cover much of the costs, so he had to max out their credit cards to pay for her hospitalization. To make matters worse, his largest client went to a competitor, and now his business in drowning. He falls behind on each of the mortgages, and a foreclosure date is set. The value of each of his properties falls 40% in two years, leaving him unable to use his investments’ equity to cover his bills. Finally, after trying to scramble, scrimp, save and borrow for a year or so, he has to bite the bullet, and see a bankruptcy attorney.

After reviewing his assets and debts, his attorney sees a potential way out for his new client. In Chapter 13, a debtor may reorganize his position by repaying certain debts over a period of time. The procedure is relatively simple and quick, provided he is able to restructure his secured debts (ie., his mortgage) in such a way that he can repay the amount he has fallen behind. He is confident that his business will recover; he just needs a little breathing space. To make it work, however, he will have to seek a complete discharge of his unsecured debt, such as his credit card bills.

The reason why bankruptcy courts treat secured debt differently from unsecured debt is obvious. A secured creditor gets a lien on the property purchased by the consumer so as to make a loan in which only a small percentage of the overall principal is advanced by the borrower viable; if the borrower defaults, the lender gets the physical asset, which it can resell and thereby recoup its losses. In bankruptcy, the lender’s security interest in the physical property is protected, while anything above the value of the actual property (ie., the unsecured portion of the debt) is discharged, along with the other unsecured debts. In short, it is the free market’s way of ensuring that both the borrower and lender bear an equivalent risk. Bankruptcy lawyers call it a “cramdown.”

When the real estate market is stable, lenders rarely have anything to complain about. Since the value of property has historically gone up, the amount of the loan is usually at or below the appraised value of the property, so even if the borrower defaults, the lender doesn’t lose anything on his investment. Bankruptcy courts have traditionally honored the free market tradition of bifurcating claims from lenders into secured and unsecured portions, and explicitly give debtors the right to modify said claims in the context of reorganization of debts in Chapters 11 and 13, with one exception.

For our friend, his attorney proposes that he bifurcate the secured claims on his real properties. Concerning the property that he lets his mother-in-law live rent-free, the property his business operates out of, the property he rents out, and the property where his family summers every year, he can propose a plan in which he will repay the loans at the secured level, based upon an appraisal for each property. He keeps each of the properties he wants to keep, so long as he repays the secured portion over a five-year period. The one property he cannot do that for, and for which he will still owe the entire amount of the mortgage, secured and unsecured alike, is the property he lives at, his “principal residence.”

But even that’s not entirely true. Remember when he obtained a second mortgage on the property a few years before things went south for his family. He can get rid of that debt easily enough, simply by showing that the appraised value of the home is less than what he owes on the first mortgage, making the second completely unsecured. Many courts permit the vanquishing of such a debt to be accomplished with no more than a motion to the court, seeking declaratory relief that the value of the property makes the second lien totally unsecured. It’s only the first mortgage that receives privileged status in the bankruptcy court.

It is hard to justify giving certain loans special treatment in our courts. In the case of our friend, the lenders had no idea which property he was going to declare, on the eve of bankruptcy, was his “principal residence.” They simply loaned him the money, making what were presumably sound judgments based on his credit history, his ability to repay, the long-term predictability of the value of the properties, and other factors. In fact, had he and his family simply moved in with his mother-in-law’s estranged husband, they could cramdown all five properties under the existing Bankruptcy Code. Such are the advantages of property ownership and wealth in this society.

But of course, most people aren’t able to purchase five properties. For the ordinary Joe Schmoe, it’s hard enough to come up with one payment, much less five or six. Unless he is willing and able to move out of his home on the eve of bankruptcy, thereby allowing him to claim that his “principal residence” is somewhere other than the property he’s paying a mortgage on, he, and he alone out of all real estate purchasers, must repay the entire mortgage in bankruptcy, thereby defeating the purpose of “reorganization.”

Twenty-Five Days That Shook the World: While much of the Beltway focus was on trivia about his Cabinet nominees and "conventional wisdom" about government spending which was stale during the first Reagan term, our new President was busy remaking the country. Frank Rich observes:

For (David) Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.

(snip)

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.

This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus’s popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.

The Rasmussen poll, incidentally, samples what it determines are "likely voters," ephemera which could hardly be less relevant some twenty-one months until the next election. If the GOP continues to rely on a coalition of fanatical Christianists and New Deal Denialists, its journey into the political wilderness may well be a long one.

The Mortgage Industry Responds: Prof. Todd Zywicki, the legal craftsman behind the 2005 BARF Act, reviews the consequences resulting from his handiwork, and punts:

The nation faces a foreclosure crisis of historic proportions, and there is an understandable desire on the part of the federal government to "do something" to help. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers's bill, which is moving swiftly through Congress (and companion legislation introduced by Sen. Richard Durbin) would allow bankruptcy judges to modify home mortgages by reducing both the interest rate and principal amount on the loan. This would be a profound mistake.

Since the other alternatives would be to do nothing, let the "Free Market" do its thing, and allow hundreds of thousands of people to lose their homes, or for Congress to intervene in some other way, like, say, a foreclosure freeze, thereby removing any incentive to repay a mortgage, I think the answer is simple. Give homeowners the same rights as owners of commercial property, apartments, and vacation homes, and pass the strip-down bill.

100-0: As expected, the a-hole coach who elected to have his players rainbow treys in the fourth quarter of a 100-nothing blowout over a school for handicapped girls was canned this week. Blow-outs and routs are a part of sports, and where there is often a large discrepancy in talent, such as youth and high school competition, they are inevitable. When I played AYSO back in the day, one of the teams I played for, "The Rookies," shook up Balboa Park in Encino by losing 0ne week, 12-1, only to come back the next week and win, 12-0. But when the entire strategy of the winning team is designed not to optimize victory, but to humiliate a helpless opponent, that's really an issue of character.

Miracle of the Loaves? A video to make even an unreconstructed Obama fan like myself cringe, featuring a "journalist" and a former Sport Illustrated swimsuit model. For crissakes, ladies, he's a pol who came along at the right time, not the freaking Messiah. After all is said and done, we're still going to be in a recession tomorrow night, no matter how spectacular Arianna's or Oprah's parties are.

Hathaway's Norbit: The critics rave:

"The most lamentable thing about the dismal Bride Wars is the total absence of fatalities."

Actually, I blame Kate Hudson for this debacle. No other actress this side of Zooey Deschanel has a worse track record in consistently appearing in turkeys than the former step-daughter of TV's Shirley.

Franken wins ?!? It would appear so, although the incumbent can probably keep him out of the Senate for awhile. Although Air America has had a reputation for being something of a dud, I think it's safe to say that there is no way Franken could have become a viable Senate candidate without the exposure his morning radio show gave him, and Rachel Maddow has been able to parley her exposure on AA to a rather successful prime time gig at MSNBC. I guess sometimes it's not the quantity of the audience that matters, but the quality.

The Marriage Counselor: As I read this, I thought it was a spoof of some sort, like Swift's "A Modest Proposal." But no, Dennis Prager is serious about this. Kinda reminds me of a story told about the late USC and Tampa Bay football coach John McKay, who once explained to reporters that he hadn't actually made a certain derogatory comment about his longtime coaching rival from Stanford (and the Denver Broncos), John Ralston, after he had run up the score against McKay's winless '76 Buccaneers: "I would have called him a prick, but a prick has a head." [link via Mark Kleiman]

A good primer on what motivates the New Deal Denialists, here. One nice thing to remember is that most of the stimulus package that will come out of Congress will not be subject to a filibuster in the Senate, since it's a budgetary matter. So by all means, GOP, oppose away....

Matthew Yglesias seems bemused that Amity Shlaes, the David Irving of New Deal Denialism, is a "senior fellow in economic history from the Council on Foreign Relations," even though she is as qualified to dish on economic history as Heidi Montag. Indeed, one of the great joys in the coming Liberal Age will be the growing marginalization for the recipients of what has come to be known as "wingnut welfare." A thinktank like the CFR is going to be less-inclined in the future to give out goodies to ideological hacks like Ms. Shlaes when all the action is likely going to be on the other side of the spectrum.

It had been my hope to go on vacation from the blog until our new President was sworn in, and start afresh in what I hope to be the beginning of a new liberal era in American politics. But I couldn't let the opportunity go without recommending one of the best political blogs out there, ArchPundit, which specializes in Illinois politics, and which has been the one go-to sight since the Blagojevich Follies started. He's been right on this subject from the start, as this post from the week before the scandal broke nationally shows.

O !!!!!!!!

Election Eve News: Besides the favorable polls, and the bellweather result of the final Redskin home game, there's Dixville Notch and Pete Carroll, both for Obama. Also, Luc Robataille....

The Bradley Effect:

There should be a support group for all those beleaguered progressives who over the years anxiously awaited elections in the futile hope that the polls showing their candidate behind would turn out to be wrong -- but who this year are fretting just as much that the polls showing their candidate ahead are wrong.

--David Kurtz, TPM

In 1982, Tom Bradley led in the polls from the start of the California governor's race up to election day. The exit polls showed him winning a clear victory over the GOP nominee, George Deukmejian, and seemed to be on the verge of becoming the nation's first black governor since Reconstruction.

And in the end, he lost. Since then, every time an African-American politician underperforms his poll numbers, the phenomenum known as the "Bradley Effect." It happened when Douglas Wilder actually became the nation's first black governor in 1989 by a margin much smaller than his projected total from exit polls, and then when Harvey Gantt was beaten by Jesse Helms in 1990 for the US Senate, and even more recently, when Barack Obama was unexpectedly defeated in the New Hampshire primary by Hillary Clinton at the beginning of the year.

The "Bradley Effect," the notion that there is a hidden racist vote that doesn't appear in the polls, is an anchor that every African-American politician has to carry when seeking office before a predominantly white electorate. And it is the chief reason why even four days before the election, with a larger lead in the polls than anything Bradley or Gantt had at this time in their losing efforts, there is still some skepticism among liberals that Senator Obama really has this one in the bag.

Clearly, the Bradley Effect is something that has diminshed over time; as political historian Sherry Bebitch Jeffe points out, Tom Bradley was really screwed by a hidden racist vote in his first, unsuccessful campaign to be Mayor of Los Angeles, when Sam Yorty, one of the last vestiges of the pre-Depression Democratic Party in California that was more allied with William McAdoo and the South, painted the former cop as a secret Black Panther, and turned a sixteen-point Bradley lead into a six-point deficit on election day. Four years later, Bradley decisively defeated Yorty in the rematch, and went on to win a record five terms as Mayor.

Still, there is some reason for discomfort. Obama consistently underperformed his polling numbers when it actually came time to vote during the primaries; first in New Hampshire, then on Super Tuesday in states like Massachusetts and California, then later in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. He ultimately won his party's nomination because he was better organized, state-by-state, than his opponent, allowing him to survive some early defeats and take charge of the race after Super Tuesday, when Hillary Clinton's campaign ran out of money.

And there's the original Bradley Effect, in 1982. There has been quite a bit of revisionist claims that even in 1982, there was no hidden racist vote. Both Lance Tarrance, who polled for the winner, and William Bradley (no relation), who worked for the loser, as well as Prof. Jeffe, point to other factors in Deukmejian's win, including a gun control measure on the ballot that pulled in a lot of conservative voters, as well as a first-rate absentee voter drive that year by the GOP. In particular, William Bradley focuses on the flawed sample of voters polled by Mervyn Field on Election Day, a sample that also caused his outfit to project a victory for Jerry Brown in his losing Senate race against Pete Wilson; anyone who remembers the 2004 Presidential Election knows to take exit polling with a grain of salt when it comes to projecting elections.

But there was a Bradley Effect in 1982, and it can be found not in the exit polls, but in the final polling Mervyn Field did before election day. The link is to every major statewide race Field polled since 1948, when he, like the rest of his brethren, blew the Truman-Dewey election. Since then, Field's final polls have correctly predicted the winner in all but three races, and two of those races involved picks that held tiny pre-election leads and lost by slim margins. The outlier was the 1982 governor's race: Field's last poll showed Bradley with a comfortable eight-point lead, whereas the actual vote showed a two-point margin, a 10-point switch.

OK, so maybe his sample wasn't an accurate cross-section of California voters, as his exit-polling on Election Day would indicate, and as Tarrance, Jeffe and the other would concur. But the real problem with that argument is Field's final poll of the aforementioned US Senate race, showing then-Governor Brown losing by six points to Pete Wilson. As the chart shows, that was the exact margin Brown lost to Wilson. And it was a concurrent poll, taken in the final week of the campaign.

So the same polling sample, conducted concurrently, correctly predicted not only the win by the Republican Senate candidate, but the ultimate margin as well, while blowing the governor's race by ten points. I find it hard to believe that Field nailed the race that involved two white candidates, but somehow didn't pick up some trend having nothing to do with racism that would have skewed the same polling sample when it came to the governor's race.

A Critical Retraction:

From British theatre critic Mark Shenton: Critics are only human - we all make mistakes. And no one beats me up more for mine than me! So today it’s time to fess up, as they say Stateside, to one of mine: I’ve already admitted here to attending Waste at the Almeida (not so) fresh from a transatlantic return journey, and now I’ve discovered that I must have written my review, too, in an advanced state of jetlag, too.

In my Sunday Express notice, I referred to a fine ensemble cast that includes “Will Keen as the politician and the superb, graceful Phoebe Nicholls as his long-suffering wife. ” Except, of course, that Phoebe Nicholls is playing his sister, not wife.

(snip)

But at least I am not alone: I did a quick trawl of other reviews, and discovered that the identical mistake was perpetrated by two other colleagues! In his Tribune notice, Aleks Sierz even draws the conclusion that it reveals that the play suggests that the English are not much good at love: “When his wife, Frances, finally confronts him at the end of the story, Henry shows a sublime indifference which makes you wonder why the couple haven’t gone their separate ways long ago. No, the chief erotic drive in the play - and the only thing that makes it bearable to watch- is its boys’ club politics: not sex, but power. When the men talk affairs of state, the pulse quickens. Directed stolidly by Samuel West, Waste is a perfect example of the ghastly lack of warmth between the sexes among the English upper classes during the first part of the last century.”

And in the Jewish Chronicle, John Nathan writes, “Phoebe Nicholls as Trebell’s loving but sexually uninterested wife outshines even Keen’s excellent performance.” Those two further wrongs, of course, don’t make it right that I got it so wrong, too - and of course our common mistake is now embedded for posterity in the pages of Theatre Record and/or the internet. So I apologise unreservedly and publicly to Ms Nicholls....

His blunder was apparently the result of his having fallen asleep in the middle of the play, which I assume is a common West End malady, much like heading to the exits in the seventh inning is at Dodger Stadium. And of course, some of the responsibility for that snafu has to be shouldered by Phoebe Nicholls, an actress of such refined skill and classic beauty that she possesses the power to cloud the minds of even the most hardened critic into confusing filial devotion with marital ennui. Nevertheless, I may be making a quick, post-election trip to London to see Waste, so long as I can find lodging of some sort; before I die, I have to see the Phoenician on stage at least once.

Ad of the Year:



link via Andrew Sullivan

The Dowd Report: Christendom's most obnoxious corporate lawyer weighs in on behalf of his client, the Senior Senator from Arizona, in a letter to the editor of the New York Times:

I am advised that you have assigned two of your top reporters to spend an extensive amount of time in Arizona and around the country investigating Cindy (McCain)'s life including her charity, her addiction and her marriage to Senator McCain. None of these subjects are news.

(snip)

These allegations and efforts to hurt Cindy have been a matter of public record for sixteen years. Cindy has been quite open and frank anbert her issues for all these years. Any further attempts to harass and injure based on the information from Gosinski and Clark will be met with an appropriate response. While she may be in the public eye, she is not public property nor the property of the press to abuse and defame.

It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama’s drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father. Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescured them. Thus there is a terrific lack of balance here.

The reference to Obama's "poor relatives in Kenya" is a nice touch. This is the same John Dowd who spent a good deal of the late-eighties conducting a fatwa against Pete Rose, investigating his private life over a subject that had a good deal less importance than the behavior of the life-partner of a potential future President. More recently, Dowd had a very different attitude when it came to the private life of past and present major league baseball players.

So stay classy, John.