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

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

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

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

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

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

Greatest Sentence Ever:

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

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