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.

The '56 Conundrum: In every close Presidential election, some notice is usually paid to the uncanny record of Missouri in picking the winning candidate. Since 1900, the Show Me State has backed the next President in all but one election, with the exception being the narrow vote for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. With its location, just about dead-center of the country, and its urban-rural split, it should be inevitable that it would play such a role historically.

But the one thing that never gets explained is what the hell happened in '56. Why did Adlai Stevenson, who was essentially a sacrificial lamb going up against perhaps the most popular man of the 20th Century, who failed to win any other electoral votes outside the Deep South (and even there, he did poorly for a pre-Civil Rights Era Democratic nominee, losing Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, as well as several border states), capture the state that year, when he failed to do so four years earlier, when he ran a more competitive campaign?

In the context of this election, it is usually pointed out that Stevenson, like Obama, was a popular politician from the neighboring state of Illinois. But in '52, Stevenson was an incumbent governor, whereas in '56, he had been out of office for four years, with no recent record to allure Missouri voters. And Stevenson was crushed both times in his home state. Do you think there's any chance Obama will do worse in Illinois than he does in Missouri this time around?

And it wasn't as if some local trend was pushing Missouri into the Democratic column at that time. Four years later, the state went for JFK, but by a margin barely greater than Stevenson's win in '56; in other words, it went back to reflecting the national mood.

So what was it? Was there some local issue in Missouri that swung the ultimate Swing State towards the Man from Libertyville in a year when he was losing by 20 points to Ike everywhere else? Did they feel some degree of kinship to former corporate lawyers from Chicago? Or did they just wake up on election morning and decide they liked the only Presidential nominee in history to have been born in Los Angeles? Your guess is as good as mine....

Where we were eight years ago: The last time two non-incumbants battled for the Presidency, Bush had a lead similar to the margin now enjoyed by Obama. Of course, Gore not only closed the gap, he won the popular vote, and only through some legal machinations in the Supreme Court was Bush able to hoist the Presidency.

A couple of points should be made from reviewing those numbers. Bush had a much larger lead throughout the summer than Obama had, but like Obama, lost all of it and then some after the other party's convention. Without a market crash or a boneheaded Veep pick, Gore maintained the lead through early October, when a series of poor debate performances allowed Bush to surge into the lead.

Second, the perception that Bush was headed into a decisive victory seems to have been shaped by two really awful tracking polls, by USA Today-Gallup and by an outfit called Voter.com. Both gave the Texas Governor sizeable, double-digit leads, while other polling outfits showed a much closer race. Voter.com doesn't seem to have done much more damage to the Republic since 2000, but USA Today-Gallup has been the consistent outlier showing a dead-even race this time. [link via Volokh]

Bigots for Barack: It's mostly anecdotal, but Politico has an interesting piece on a trend involving an oft-misunderstood group of swing voters. In the end, I still doubt Obama will capture a majority of those voters....

Although I agree, generally, with Prof. Warren's advocacy against the 2005 BARF Act, there seems to be a real world perspective missing from her analysis, at least as it applies to the actual practice of bankruptcy law, that causes a blind spot in her writing. Here, she seems to argue that the 2005 law has exacerbated the meltdown of the housing market by making it harder for debtors to file Chapter 7, which enables a person to get a quick discharge of his unsecured debts (ie., credit cards).

I haven't seen much a decline, frankly; most of the people who want to file under Chapter 7 do so anyway, even if their income exceeds the state median, and most of the potential clients I meet who happen to own homes are looking to do a Chapter 13 repayment, not a straight Chapter 7. The reason why there was an initial precipitous decline in bankruptcy filings was due to the YBK panic on the eve of the new law in October, 2005. Everyone who ever thought about filing bankruptcy did so because they were led to believe that the new law would handicap them at the expense of their creditors. If anything impacted the currect credit crunch, it was the panic caused by the pending new law causing tens of thousands of people to file bankruptcy, and discharge debt, at the same time, not that those people can't file Chapter 7 cases now.

Of course, debtors have to jump through more hoops nowadays, thanks to the new law. If a filer's income exceeds the state median income, he is viewed as having presumptively filed in bad faith, which typically means...nothing. In some instances, the attorney will be sent an audit letter from the US Trustee, requiring him to produce certain financial statements and tax returns, as well as justifying certain monthly expenditures. But in most cases, debtors who make more than the median income who need to file Chapter 7 don't have a surplus income, once reasonable expenses are taken into account, and the present-day nightmare of skyrocketing adjustable rate mortgages is making the whole issue moot. According to the local US Trustee, less than one percent of all Chapter 7 filings that fall into this category are ultimately dismissed.

Moreover, Chapter 13 cases have become more routine, in large part because it is a more effective way to deal with secured debt, such as mortgages and car payments. Under Chapter 13, if the value of the home is less than the amount owed on the first trust deed, all deeds of trust that are junior to the first can be treated as unsecured debts, and potentially discharged completely at the end of the plan. Where I practice, this can be done with little more than a motion to the court seeking declaratory relief as to the value of the property; at a time when the housing market has been in free fall, such motions are infrequently opposed by lenders.

And that aspect of bankruptcy was unaffected by the passage of the 2005 BARF Act. That law has proved nothing more than an inconvenience to the experienced practitioner, since it only tangentially impacts a fraction of cases. In large part, that is due to the fact that it was drafted by lobbyists for the credit card industry, not attorneys with actual hands-on experience in the trenches of consumer bankruptcy.

Sure, there are more forms to fill out, but almost every practitioner has electronic forms that can be prepared within minutes. Potential filers have to take a pre-petition credit counseling course, but this step has proved to be ineffectual at providing debtors with non-bankruptcy alternatives, and the suspicion that many of these outfits have a conflict of interest in remaining on the good side of consumer attorneys is not unwarranted. And due to incompetent drafting, some of the more worthwhile provisions of the 2005 legislation, such as the attempt to terminate the automatic stay for repeat filers (which has proved to be illusory in Chapter 7 cases, since the law only halts the stay against debtors, not against the estate itself, which means that creditors still have to waste time seeking judicial relief), have been nullified.

The big winners of the 2005 BARF act, were, not surprisingly, bankruptcy lawyers. Its convoluted provisions took what was one of the few areas of the law that a smart, cost-conscious layperson could do by himself, and necessitated the hiring of licensed professionals at a much higher cost (try to fill out a Statement of Current Monthly Income at home if you don't believe me). And as I noted above, it hasn't done much to stem abusive filings, or check any of the shady abuses that existed before. But one thing the 2005 law didn't do was change how people could use Chapter 7 filings to save their homes, since it simply isn't an effective legal strategy, either before or after the law went into effect.

L.A. Is Burning: In fact, the fire shown here is about seven miles from my office, in the same vicinity as that train collision last month that killed several dozen. If you don't have to be outdoors for any reason, stay inside....

It seems I was the only sentient person in the blogosphere who blew off the Veep debate last night (I saw the Dodger playoff game at the local tavern instead), so all this talk about whether Gov. Palin exceeded the low expectations given her means little to me. In fact, televised campaign debates aren't that meaningful to me, insofar as I made up my mind on whom to vote for in this election as soon as the Democratic nominee was determined. As a partisan, it is unlikely I would be swayed by anything McCain or Palin might argue in one of these staged debates, so the only purpose to watch one of these things is to see if someone screws up, which I guess isn't much different from people who watch Formula 1 or NASCAR because of the possibility someone might crash. I just have better things to do.

Still, this bit of spin is pretty lame, even by the standards of modern political campaigns. No wonder McCain has lost ten points to Obama in two weeks.

Best Title of a Blogpost Ever: "The Successful Failure of the Angels' Strategy" by Matt Welch, who's spinning the Halos' tenth straight playoff loss (yawn) to the Boston Red Sox the way Reason Mag has been spinning the failure of free market policies on Wall Street the past two weeks. Give it up, Matt: '02 was a fluke, and the Rally Monkey is as dead as Dale Earnhardt !!!

There really very little to add to this:

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

--Kathleen Parker, National Review

Not the first time: As with Captain Queeg and the strawberries, McCain has resorted to the old "I must suspend my campaign to deal with the important issue facing the country" excuse before, as Matt Welch points out.

A Heartbeat Away? I believe this has something to do with "energy":

Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It's got to flow into our domestic markets first.

--Sarah Palin, sans teleprompter, at a McCain-staged "town-hall" meeting yesterday.



Remember when we thought the Republic was doomed because Dan Quayle was next-in-line....

Although I practice bankruptcy law, the type of filing that Lehman Brothers initiated this morning is way out of my league. Although Chapter 11 filings have become more popular for individuals in recent years, mainly due to the archaic secured debt limitations of Chapter 13 cases, there tends to be very little overlap between practitioners of consumer and business bankruptcies. Business bankruptcies are almost always filed by large, corporate law firms with a huge support staff, whilst consumer cases are typically handled by humble country lawyers like myself.

For those of you who are interested, here is a copy of the Voluntary Petition filed by Lehman, and the supporting affidavit by its CFO describing how Lehman got into this position. More to come....

Princess Sarah: I come back from a lovely half-month in the Old World, only to find out that the usual suspects are playing the same game. When I first heard Governor Palin use the line about lipstick and pit bulls, my first reaction was to darkly note that "it was more like putting lipstick on a pig," but that it was a shame the Democrats couldn't use that line without seeming sexist. Little did I realize that Obama didn't have to, since the McCain camp would do the dirty work for them. I don't know if Barack Obama deliberately used that hoary cliche to rattle the McCain campaign (since he's used that line about a dozen times before McCain picked his running-mate, I would tend to doubt it), but McCain's reaction to the line seems so overblown as to enter a realm of imbecility not seen in Presidential elections since the Goldwater campaign complained about the once-aired Daisy Ad.

Think about the ways the McCain campaign has bulloxed this. First, they publicized an unfavorable image of the best thing it has going right now. I suspect one of the big reasons why Sarah Palin has struck a nerve among white voters is her attitude: tough, sassy, one-of-the-guys, a "pitbull with lipstick," to use her memorable phrase. By equating that phrase with the line, "lipstick on a pig," they have now created a counter-image that will float in the subconscious of every voter from now until Election Day, foe and supporter alike. They've taken a favorable metaphor about their candidate and turned it into an albatross.

The second thing they botched is much more in the tradition of the modern Republican Party, something that inevitably arises out of the fact that the GOP is the nation's white male party. Whenever the Republican Party tries to hype a non-white or non-male as a potential leader, it has attempted to create a narrative about how that person doesn't perceive him or herself as a "victim," unlike those pesky Democrats who are always trying to fight racism or sexism in whichever form it takes.

Their work in trying to portray Palin as a qualified candidate for the Presidency was always going to be difficult, but her cutting speech at last week's convention seemed to offer a way forward. Even the media seemed sold on the notion that she was a tough partisan who was unafraid to mix it up. By playing the sexism card, and creating the appearance that Palin is willing to dish out the sarcasm but has a case of the vapors when a joke is aimed at her, they've made her into a female version of Clarence Thomas, a bully who resorts to the same cliches of victimization that conservatives have long accused others of doing.

Lastly, in exchange for a couple of hours of media hype, the McCain camp has drawn the scorn of many of the same pundits who had placed on an Olympian pedastal in the past. They not only change the narrative about their Veep selection, but they also manage to erode McCain's support among his most loyal constituency, the Beltway Punditocracy. In the future, it will be more difficult to gin up "crocodile tears," as conservative Mark Halperin so aptly put it, at attacks from the Obama campaign because they went so overboard on this one.

But for now, I'm going to say that the first f***-up was the most important. You don't want to have potential voters look at a candidate's cosmetics during a debate and think of an animal that cavorts in its own excrement. And that's an image that's not Barack Obama's fault.

Spiro: Since the apparent goal of the GOP is to utilize their Veep-nominee as a smug attack dog, I think it bears noting the somewhat eerie similarities between Gov. Palin and a previous Republican nominee for that position, Spiro Agnew. Both were governors of small states for less than two years when they were tapped by their party's standard bearer for the number two spot on the ticket, and both had spent most of their adult life in politics holding down local political offices. And apparently after tonight, both were adept at using code to disparage their political adversaries (as if there is any doubt as to who "cosmopolitan elites" are).

But Agnew presents an even more fruitful point of comparison, for two reasons. First, the consensus about the pick at the time it was made was almost completely wrong. At the time, Agnew was viewed as an attempt by Nixon to appeal to the liberal, "Rockefeller Wing" of the Republican Party. Agnew had been elected governor in 1966 running to the left of his Democratic opponent, who was a Zell Miller-type States Rights segregationist. '66 was a very good year for the Republican Party, and the mid-term elections turned out to be the last hurrah for the Eastern, liberal wing of the party: not only did it's symbolic leader, Nelson Rockefeller, win reelection as governor of New York for a third term, but his brother Winthrop defeated a racist Democrat to become the first Republican governor of a Deep South state, Arkansas, since Reconstruction, and men such as Edward Brooke, Clifford Case and Charles Percy also won terms to the Senate. Agnew's victory that year was seen in that context, and he was, not surprisingly, an early supporter of Rockefeller's expected run for the White House in 1968.

According to Gerry Wills, whose Nixon Agonistes was the Myth of a Maverick of its era, Agnew had expected an important role in any Rockefeller Administration, and was shocked to learn that Rocky didn't think so highly of him. When Rockefeller made the decision not to run for the Presidency, he failed to consult with his backer, causing Agnew considerable embarrassment. And his performance in office gave clues to anyone who was interested what his true politics were: partisan, vicious, smug, and contemptous of "elites."

Thus, anyone looking for clues as to Palin's true priorities should look not to either her banal obeisance to far right positions on social issues, or to her recent flip-flopping on the "Bridge to Nowhere" and pork barrell spending in general, or even on her willingness to raise taxes on Big Oil (a position which, more than anything, has ensured that most of her deadliest political foes in Alaska are from her own party), but instead on that ever-present chip on her shoulder, a chip that she has borrowed from every small town and suburban hack who has been made to feel like a hick every time she visits the Big City.

And of course, the second important point of comparison with Agnew was in their shared careers in local politics, and all the small-time corruption that has traditionally entailed. Since the media has already begun looking down that avenue, whether she is as big a crook as Spiro Agnew remains to be seen.

Obama by Eight: Since it's too late to use the "Juno Alaska" reference, let me say that concerning McCain's Palin-drome, that ain't no etch-a-sketch: This is one doodle that can't be un-did, homeskillet. A bad Veep pick, and the subsequent delay in rectifying the problem, is how the Nixon-McGovern race transformed suddenly into an historic rout.

And yes, the Governor not only praised her daughter for choosing to keep the child, an option she would deprive every other woman, but she also mandated "abstinence only" sex-ed for Alaska's children. Phuket, Thailand !!!

Needless to say, Europe seems to be having a blast with the creationist-spouting, ex-in-law firing, Pat Buchanan in 2000-supporting Veep nominee of the GOP. I fear they may be laughing at us, since the assumption has been over here that there is no way America will elect a black man to the Presidency....

Mile High: Understanding, of course, that I was watching the speech at 4 in the morning (en route to Marseille), it was the best performance at a political convention that I've ever seen. Obama is the Sinatra of politics.

For the poli-blogs, the Conventions are our Summer Olympics, a four-day excuse to pretend that what we do is important, and thereby obsess over every speech for the four days. In that spirit, I would like to remind everyone that, concerning the event that the blogosphere will be liveblogging over the next two weeks, there is one big difference between, say, the Democratic Convention and the Olympics: people at least give a rat's ass about the Olympics.

Anyone who believes that George Bush won the last two elections because the GOP threw a better, more partisan convention each time is too retarded to be allowed near machinery as sophisticated as a computer. No one is watching that which you care so much about. No one changed their vote from Kerry to Bush in 2004 because of Zell Miller, just as no one jumped on the Kerry bandwagon because they liked Obama's Keynote. As far as the voters are concerned, the only thing that mattered last night was that Ted Kennedy pulled a Lou Gehrig, and that Michelle Obama may not, in fact, be a dragon lady. Beyond that, anything else written about last night is waste of brain activity.

A tip for the traveler: Do not order the BBQ ribs at the diner in the international terminal in Toronto. The meat does not exactly "fall off the bone."

Meanwhile, I'm in Barcelona, celebrating the start of a cruise in the Mediterranean for the next two weeks. Hopefully, this will be the first of many such indulgences, now that Obama has assured the nation's bankruptcy lawyers a continuation of this Administration's policies in that area through his nomination of the Democrat who helped design them.

When you have a very common name, this sort of thing happens a lot. My late father and namesake was also a bankruptcy lawyer, and we happened to share the same moniker ("Steven E. Smith") as another bankruptcy lawyer in Century City. I remember appearing in court representing my dad on a matter in which he was the Chapter 7 Trustee, and the other Steven E. Smith represented an objecting creditor on a disbursement motion. We made our appearances, and hilarity and hijinks ensued.

During the 2004 election, John Kerry had a bit of an embarrassment when it turned out that a story he had told years before about listening to Richard Nixon lie about Americans not fighting in Cambodia, when he happened to be in Cambodia at the time, turned out to have some discrepancies. In what was supposedly "seared" into his memory, he claimed to be on the border on Christmas, 1968, listening to South Vietnamese shooting off rockets to celebrate the holiday, when his own diary placed him hundreds of miles away that day, and it's as likely that the disproportionately Buddhist demography of the Vietnamese would have permitted a raucous Yuletide celebration as it would be for an American unit in Iraq to go overboard celebrating Purim. Also, Nixon wasn't President, yet, in December 1968.

It turns out the candidate had confused his big holidays. He was in Cambodia, but six weeks after Christmas, during the Tet Holiday, when it is common for celebrants to shoot off rockets and go crazy. By then, Nixon had already been President for about a month, so the story rang true in most of its particulars. But the damage had been done. No matter how many times the addled memories of the "Swift Boaters" were shown to be false or fabricated about other aspects of Kerry's wartime accomplishments, the Right could always point to this and proclaim that Kerry could not be trusted, since he wasn't in Cambodia at Christmas.

I wonder how much slack the American people will give John McCain about his likely-aprocryphal "Cross Story." Making up an anecdote about faith, like George Bush pretending to have been brought to Jesus by Billy Graham, isn't really judged harshly by the true believers; what's important is the Pander, and secondarily the possibility that the candidate might be one of the them. In McCain's case, stealing an anecdote from Alexander Solzhenitzen Charles Colsen has the added benefit of tying his experience with that of one of the most famous prisoners of the 20th Century; even if the story was false (and I wouldn't be surprised if the late Russian writer and virulent anti-Semite had copped the story himself; it sounds like something that might have appeared in one of the stories of the early Christian martyrs), the important thing is that McCain was still in a POW camp for five years, and suffered brutal torture almost every day.

But it's still embarassing to have been caught embellishing one's past with a clearly plagiarized anecdote. The human memory is a tricky and unreliable thing, geared mainly towards validating our own importance. We tend to place ourself more in the center of things than the facts can justify, and it's not hard to catch us out when it turns our memories are faulty, as any good criminal lawyer will tell you.

For most of my life, I had a vivid memory of meeting Robert Kennedy when I was four years old. It was in San Francisco, and he was already putting out feelers for his crusade for the Presidency in 1968. My father, who worked for RFK's major backer in the state, Jesse Unruh, was in town to strategize, and my mother and I went up to the Bay Area to be with him. One afternoon, my nanny, Mary Jane, came in and excitedly told me that we could go meet the Senator, who was already my hero. I felt like I was meeting a god; I even told him that his brother was my favorite President, because he had died in 1963, the year I was born. He smiled at what must have been a very painful and callous thing to say, and said something nice to me.

It was, as I said, a very vivid and powerful memory for me, and most of the particulars are true, especially my father's role in the California campaign, and the fact that I went with him and my mother to San Francisco when I was four. What wasn't true, though, was the fact that I ever met Robert Kennedy. It never happened. I had picked up enough details over the years, from my parents, the aforementioned nanny, and from what little I remembered of my early childhood, to piece together an incident that I thought had actually happened, and even now the incident is still quite vivid and real. But it wasn't.

So I'm going to be a bit hesitant about calling John McCain a "liar" about this story. He may not have started using this story until after reading The Gulag Archipelago, and the exact details may not be true, but it wouldn't surprise me if he thought that an incident like that had happened to him at the Hanoi Hilton, even if he wasn't simply confusing some other random act of kindness by a prison guard with SolzhenitzenColsen's religious story.

UPDATE [8/18]: The story originated with Charles Colsen, Nixon's former hatchet-man, who had erroneously attributed it to Solzhenitzen years ago. In fact, McCain isn't even the first ex-POW U.S. Senator to have told a similar tale. Apparently, the "guard drawing a cross in the dirt" is a hardy chestnut that probably predates the Crucifixion.

Hit&Run, the blog run under the aegis of Reason Magazine, usually posts contrarian bullshit about how sweatshops and slave labor are kinda cool, or why anabolic steroids are fun for the whole family, so it's not surprising that they've taken the pro-dictatorship position on why the President was right to slouch his way through the Opening Ceremonies in Beijing last week:

Carter's boycott, done in the name of human rights, accomplished absolutely nothing. I'm willing to say that Bush is a worse president than Carter (who at least deregulated airline ticket pricing and interstate trucking, and invited Willie Nelson to the White House), but it's Bush who has gotten it right when it comes to superpower-charged Olympics.

To have Bush out there, saying what he's saying where he's saying it—and pursuing a larger policy of engagement via trade and other forms of exchange—is absolutely the best way to pull China into something approaching Western-style democracy, complete with robust individual rights and the sort of economy that will ultimately force governments to loosen up. Milton Friedman famously said that as people get richer, they demand the ability to live however they want—that economic freedom, which increases prosperity, helps create the conditions for political freedom. It seems clear that the Chinese government, like all governments, doesn't want to yield power if it can avoid doing so. It's also clear that the more a country trades with the world—for goods, services, and even cultural identities—the less its government can control its people. Here's hoping that the Beijing Olympics, regardless of the predictable and bizarre repressions going on right now to ensure a "stain-free" event, push that process along.

My take on boycotting the Olympics can be found here; there are plenty of good reasons to send a team to China, although we could have saved a lot of money and just sent Michael Phelps for all the medals we're going to win. The canard that unrestricted trade leads inexorably to "freedom" (which is belied, obviously, by the fact that our liberalized dealings with Russia and China don't seem to have done much to make those societies "free") clearly isn't one of them. And far from accomplishing nothing, the 1980 boycott effectively diminished that event in the eyes of the world; without the U.S. (and West Germany, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc.), those Olympics were little more than an Iron Curtain track meet, and the enormous propaganda benefit that Hitler received in 1936, and that the Chinese are getting this year, was denied the Soviet Union.

It's safe to say that the 2008 Olympics will bring as much positive change to China as the '36 Games brought to Germany.

The Elephant in the Room: Josh Marshall, on what the Edwards Admission on Friday really means:

I have a very hard time seeing how Edwards' affair reflects on Obama. What I do know is that this is another of those cases where there is a tacit but uniform agreement among pretty much all reporters and close campaign watchers not to publicly state the obvious: that this is a perilous development for John McCain. Just as Bill Clinton's public undressing in the Lewinsky scandal led indirectly to the exposure of several high-profile Republican affairs, Edwards' revelation will inevitably put pressure on the press in general to scrutinize John McCain under something more searching than the JFK rules they've applied to date. I assure you that this dimension of the story occurred to every reporter even tangentially involved in reporting this race soon after the Edwards story hit yesterday afternoon.

What he's talking about, of course, is this incident, where the presumptive nominee dumped his ailing first wife in favor of a much younger (and richer) woman in 1979. It's hard to imagine an incident occurring thirty years ago to be particularly relevant in determining who should be Commander-in-Chief, but there it is.

Let the closure commence...Edwards admits he did have sexual relations with that woman, but was not the baby-daddy...if true, the Democrats can slot him just before Elvis, Wednesday night at the Convention. As far as days to leak the story, the day the Olympics starts is almost as good as Super Bowl Sunday.

The Panty-Sniffers Manifesto: Mickey Kaus gamefully tries to provide an ex post justification for obsessing about the comings and goings of a former Senator from North Carolina, and some of what he says bears true. Edwards remains an important figure in American politics, and even if the recent rumors about him are correct, stands to play an important role in any future Democratic Administration (fortunately for Edwards, the "scandal" is coming out almost a half-year before any future Obama Cabinet is selected, more than enough time for the public to come to terms with the issue). If he's been cheating on his dying wife (the woman whom Kaus sarcastically has named, "St. Elizabeth"), he's disgusting.

But he doesn't quite explain why he's so obsessed with the issue, why he has spent almost the last two weeks writing about nothing but this story, which so far hasn't progressed much beyond the charge that Edwards was in the same thousand-room hotel as his alleged mistress in the wee hours of the morning, or Kaus' demand that other organs of the "MSM," particularly the Los Angeles Times, should drop every other story they're working on to focus on this tawdry episode. Kaus didn't spend two weeks hectoring others when another newspaper made some rather similarly-vague allegations about John McCain and a blonde lobbyist, or even when the National Enquirer identified a woman who was Bill Clinton's mistress last month.

I mean, it's not like there's a Presidential campaign going on, or an Olympic Games about to start. It's no wonder that the Times is losing readers, when it insists on breaking stories about the identity of the real Anthrax Terrorist and other such trivia, rather than letting its bloggers regurgitate this week's Enquirer headline.

There is a good reason why the National Enquirer, in spite of its rather lame record in defending libel suits, still enjoys one of the largest circulations in the country. People who are interested in gossip, who enjoy panty-sniffing and everything that comes with it, who can't get through the week without a crotch-shot of Britney or Lindsey, can have their interests sated through the Enquirer. If the Enquirer wants to send two reporters to stalk a failed Presidential candidate with an interesting personal life, then let them. That sort of reporting is a different skill set from the type of reporting that breaks the Anthrax story.

But there should be newspapers for those of us who aren't focused on that sort of thing, who think a pol's proclivity for adultery is not the most important thing in the world. For us, we expect that a newspaper is going to be cautious when it reports, that it doesn't simply repeat hearsay, particularly from gossip rags. If the Times (or, more appropriately, one of Edwards' home state newspapers, where he continues to be an important public figure in spite of his unsuccessful role on the national stage), does pursue this story, or better yet, any such story involving McCain or Obama, then it should apply the same investigative standards it applies to any other story it covers.

Andrew Sullivan, on the "Aragula Card":

For all McCain's personal qualities, we're learning that the machine behind the GOP simply re-makes the campaign in its own Coulterite image. Instead of actually fighting on the core questions - how do we get out of Iraq with the least damage? how do we get past carbon-based energy? how do we tackle al Qaeda's new base in Pakistan and within the nuclear-armed Pakistani government? how will we reduce the massive debt bequeathed us by the Bush-Rove GOP? how do we restore the Geneva Conventions? - we are debating people's cultural insecurities and food choices.

I suspect that McCain's recent improvement in the polls has come at a cost: the perception that he was a different type of Republican politician, one who campaigned with a sense of honor and integrity, is gone. Something like this happened in the summer of 1980, when Jimmy Carter overturned a double-digit lead by Ronald Reagan to pull even in the polls, by going hard negative against his opponent. That turned out to be a short-term palliative: once the American people were reminded of how crappy the economy was, and discovered that Ronald Reagan wasn't as much of an ogre as he had been portrayed by Carter, the jig was up. But it did make that race closer for most of the campaign than it had any right to be.

UPDATE: And one of Senator McCain's more famous contributors agrees.

One of the scummier sidelights to the Presidential campaign has been the whispering campaign against former candidate John Edwards. Sex scandals have always been a favorite way to target political figures who threaten the status quo, from Charles Parnell to Martin Luther King, so it shouldn't surprise that John Edwards has been the focus of one such fatwa. Mickey Kaus has hyped this story since it began (in fact, I think he might have actually dreamt this one up by his lonesome), and hasn't stopped since, even after Edwards dropped out of the race in February. Since Kaus hates Democrats, and liberal Democrats especially, his prudishness may blind him to the fact that sex scandals, so long as they involve two consenting adults engaged in legal activity, don't actually do much to derail the political fortunes of progressive pols (in fact, it's money scandals that usually derail the good guys; having a mistress is disproportionately harmful to conservative pols).

Much of the original dirt came from Ann Coulter, who attempted to float the meme that the former Senator from North Carolina was a "faggot." Needless to say, when NaziPundit speaks, few listen, and the Edwards-as-a-closeted-gay-candidate rumor didn't catch fire. Subsequent efforts to nickname the candidate the "Breck Girl" were confined to the habitats of her homophobic ilk, and like the "Barack Hussein Osama" meme, was considered to be part of that dark corner of the political sphere that viewed Jesse Helms as a "patriot," and used the word "illegal" as a noun and "jew" as a verb.

Then, some months ago, Mickey Kaus began hyping the rumor that Edwards had an affair with a staffer. The story was denied by all concerned, and seemed to have died a natural death until last week, when the National Enquirer "broke" the story that the former candidate had visited said staffer at an hotel in Los Angeles, along with several other parties. Frustrated that most of the organs of the "MSM" did not pass along the story, unfiltered from a source known for making up stories whole cloth, to the masses, Kaus began targeting his favorite bete noire, the Los Angeles Times.

This morning, Kaus chose to publish an e-mail sent by the LA Times internet supremo, Tony Pierce, which broached the controversy in the following manner:

In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers, including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don't-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce. [I've excised the recipient list and omitted Pierce's email address]:

From: "Pierce, Tony"

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal. ...

It's hard to guess what's more pathetic: Kaus' obsession with the private life of a former political office seeker, or Kaus' disingenuous summary of Pierce's e-mail. To put it simply, an editor instructing his minions that the Times would prefer that they not use their unmediated blogspace to comment on a story in which the only source is one of the few American publications that actually loses defamation actions brought by public figures, is not the same thing as a newspaper "forbidding" or "banning" discussion of same. Since Kaus admits that another Times blogger went ahead and wrote about the controversy anyway, it can hardly be said that Tony Pierce "silenced" anybody.

I guess it must have been a slow day on the immigrant-bashing front. Pierce is one of the true gentlemen of the blogosphere, a nice, friendly mensch who is as good to his friends as he is generous to strangers, as I found out the first night I met him. It is thanks to Pierce that the Times has one of the liveliest blogging sections of any major newspaper; that he chose to remind his staff that the obligations of posting at one of the country's most important newspapers means being careful with the facts is a tribute to his journalistic integrity, and should not be used to settle old scores. Whatever the reason for his hatred of John Edwards (Kaus later cruelly derides the Senator's wife, who suffers from terminal cancer, as "Saint Elizabeth"), he should leave good people out of it.

Those of us who support the legal recognition of gay marriage can be cautiously optimistic from this poll, which shows the initiative to outlaw such ceremonies already trailing by a significant margin. The Field Poll, which conducted the survey, has an uncommonly eerie track record of accuracy in California, and historically, ballot initiatives are much like golfers who find themselves trailing Tiger Woods going into the final day of a major: they are doomed to defeat.

Just on the off chance he wins, I've been torn by whether Obama should begin the process of assuring that a debacle like the last eight years never happens again by creating an American version of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or simply deporting Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld, and their enablers in the punditocracy to the Hague. Here, Andrew Sullivan eloquently lays out the case for the latter option:

These people knew full well what they were doing; there is a growing documentary record of their criminality; and their own "subjective views" that they were only doing it to save the state are what every war criminal has always claimed. Yoo's memo, drawing on Serbian fascist precedents, cannot conceivably be understood as anything but a candid backing for torture. The man has said he'd be fine if the president crushed the testicles of a terror suspect's child to get a confession, true or not.

Rumsfeld's own hand-writing is on a memo fiddling with techniques devised by the Gestapo. And what does Stu think Cheney meant by "the dark side", for Pete's sake? That we know these people, that they are part of the Washington elite, even friends, should not render us indifferent to the most basic principles of decency and the rule of law.

Cheney and Addington and Bush actively, relentlessly and surreptitiously broke the law, rescinded the Geneva Conventions, approved memos that are laughable hack work in retrospect, used false confessions procured by torture as rationales to go to war, and destroyed the moral reputation of the US, the honor of the armed services and the rule of law. They are immensely powerful, privileged, wealthy men. And they are war criminals, under the strictest interpretation of that term. They have shifted blame on the lowest of the low, while fixing the system to protect them from accountability.

America doesn't pardon war criminals. It prosecutes and, in the past, has even executed them for the same techniques that Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney endorsed.

BTW, the "Stu" referenced above is Stuart Taylor, a writer who first came to prominence with his fatwa against former President Clinton, when lying under oath about an affair was considered an impeachable offense. No doubt, Taylor can ably perform the role of defense attorney in Belgium.

Kudos to the Washington Post for re-running this 2001 piece by, of all people, David Broder, on the true legacy of the late Jesse Helms. One should be respectful of the friends and family members of the deceased Senator during their time of mourning, and still not shirk the truth, that for most of his public life, Jesse Helms was a blight on American politics, a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot, a man whose politics may finally be getting their final repudiation by the voters in this election.

The fact that he was an unwavering foe of the Soviet Empire gets no credit at this end, no more than I would give Franco or Duvalier or Pinochet such credit; his anti-Communism was based not on a love of freedom and civil liberties, but on his belief that Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and other stalwarts of the fight to end apartheid on this planet were Communists too. That he became more humane at the end of his life has more to do with Bono than any core principles he held. Having lived much of his life in the public sphere, it does a disservice to Helms not to acknowledge the accuracy of what the New Yorker said about him at the time of retirement:

But Helms never bothered with the soft bigotry of low expectations. He has always preferred the hard stuff, undiluted by the branch water of euphemism.

The math may be difficult to follow, but at least as it concerns the movies of 2007, there was a direct correlation between successful box office and good reviews, according to Slate.

For those people who, like myself, so enjoyed taking the California Bar Exam that we just had to do it a second time, this documentary is for you.

Guess which Presidential candidate was right from the start on Robert Mugabe.