Today's retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor promises to provide all of us with a fun-filled, action-packed Summer of Love, so if I might offer my two cents on the issue to those of us (and I include myself) who anticipate opposing whomever is nominated by Bush: let's try to emphasize some issue other than his/her position on Roe v. Wade. Even without O'Connor, we've got five votes on the Court (since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the last major case to challenge Roe, was decided, pro-life White has been replaced by pro-choice Ginsburg). There are plenty of other issues, pocketbook issues, that will be dealt with by the next Supreme Court, and which the replacement for O'Connor will be the swing vote. So let's focus on those, rather than frivolously refighting a battle that doesn't need to be fought this time around, and will only serve to once again piss off a significant portion of the electorate. It might work to our advantage.

Three Women and a Piano Tuner: I could hardly claim to be a fan of the lady at the top right of the screen without mentioning at least one good review she's received. Well done, Mrs. Sturridge...UPDATE: more raves about the PhoeNix, from the Guardian and the Times.

A somewhat minor issue, compared with his home sale and yacht rental, but The Dukester now seems to have run afoul of a different ethical bylaw: a set of knives that were sold by his "Top Gun" business were imprinted with the Congressional Seal, which is a no-no...I'm thunderstuck by how anyone could be this ethically obtuse.

Absolute proof of the non-existence of a wise and merciful deity....

Youngest Future HuffPost Contributor: It's not quite there yet, but those of us who've been waiting for The Great Blog by an athete or actor might want to look at this contribution, by LA Lakers' first round pick Andrew Bynum...UPDATE: Mr. Bynum (or his agent) has thrown the page down the memory hole, apparently out of fear that making him seem good-natured and funny is bad for P.R. Here's the cached version on Google.

California Earthquake: For the first time, both of the announced candidates for the Democratic nomination for governor are beating Ahnold Ziffel, head-to-head, according to the Field Poll. [link via Daily Kos]

I've fixed my Atom feed problem...so syndicate away.

The Constitution Works: An oldie but a goody from the Onion, back when it was still funny....

Before reading Mr. Samgrass' rant on why our Hawks have no moral obligation to do anything more than send others to die in their stead, it is important to remember that he happens to have two children of fighting age. Apparently their asses ain't dogproof, either.

Implicit in Hitchens' argument is an arrogant, contemptuous slighting of the military; it's a vocation like any other. It is the opposite side of the coin to the claim made during the debate over Senator Durbin's remarks on the Senate floor, that anyone who holds soldiers responsible for their actions is, in fact, denigrating the entire military. It must have been quite a surprise to soldiers serving in the Middle East and elsewhere that so many chickenhawks back home now considered torture and war crimes committed in their name to be so routine that anyone who dares focus on such abuses is, in fact, slurring the brave men and women at the Front.

Far from being shamed by the courage others have shown in fighting for his ideological crusade, Hitchens offers a convenient explanation:

Did I send my children to rescue the victims of the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center? No, I expected the police and fire departments to accept the risk of gruesome death on my behalf. All of them were volunteers (many of them needlessly thrown away, as we now know, because of poor communications), and one knew that their depleted ranks would soon be filled by equally tough and heroic citizens who would volunteer in their turn. We would certainly face a grave societal crisis if that expectation turned out to be false.

In other words, they had jobs they were paid to do, just like soldiers are paid to protect us, and people like him are paid to drum up the ideological rationale for their wars. So enough talk about the "sacrifice" of others. Who wouldn't kill for those death benefits....

YBK [Part 8]: Some good news, mixed in with the bad. In May, bankruptcy filings rose 5% nationally, the third straight month the number of filings were up significantly from the year before. However, the raw totals were sharply down from March and April, which, although historically not unusual, is a sign that the initial interest in the new bankruptcy law may be cooling, at least for the time being. In the meantime, keep watching those foreclosure numbers in Massachusetts and California....

Los Angeles [N.L.] 5, San Diego 4: Dodgers snap their two-game-with-Smythe-in-attendance losing streak, thanks to some timely power hitting by Jeff Kent and some solid pitching from rookie D.J. Houlton. The evening was marred by the theft of three commemorative Sandy Koufax statues (now selling for +$26 on E-Bay !!), belonging to me and my seatmates, Howard Owens and Rob Barrett, by a group of scofflaws who waited til the three of us temporarily left our seats on a beer run; those punks must have seen us coming a mile away. For those of you interested in the esoterica of MSM internet sites, word has it that the LA Times, in the wake of the "wikitorial" experiment, is planning to set up an unmoderated photoblog to prove its web bonafides, whilst the Ventura County Star should soon have its on-line "tweener" section going....

Not even trying...If I'm a shareholder at Time-Warner, my scrotum just shriveled into nothingness after reading the last sentence of this article.

The Dukester's former neighbors weigh in with their two cents on the 2003 transaction, and share their warm memories of the Congressman:

Neighbors got their first inkling that something was going on at Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's Del Mar-area home when they saw him packing.

Next door neighbor Kent Greene asked: "Are you selling your house?"

"Already sold," Cunningham answered.

When neighbors later learned the $1,675,000 price, they were even more astonished.

"There was something fishy with the whole thing," said Mark Konopacke, who had bought his home across the street six months before for $700,000 less [ed.-see here].

(snip)

Some have dubbed the controversy "Mansiongate," but the house's original owner, Barbara Casino-Mizer, laughs when she sees the house in the papers. She and her husband, Corky Mizer, bought the ocean-view home from the builder in April 1987 for $385,000.

Casino-Mizer loved the big kitchen, the mosaic-tiled bathtub and the mauve carpet that was all the rage in the late '80s. However, when the couple found another home with acreage nine months later, they put the Mercado home on the market. Cunningham, who had been teaching at the Navy's Top Gun flight school, bought it for $435,000.

(snip)

The decorative bars Cunningham put over the windows gave the stylish home an ominous prison-like look, some neighbors said. They called it an eyesore. The neighborhood, though, was desirable. Many homes have ocean views, and each has its own style. Values shot up.

Mark and Victoria Konopacke purchased their 2,806-square-foot home across the street in May 2003 for $905,000. In November 2003, Cunningham – a member of the House's defense appropriations subcommittee – sold his house to Wade.

Neighbors say they never saw Wade. Some heard the house had been purchased by a government employee with tax dollars. Others heard a friend bought it. The house went on the market again almost immediately for $1,680,000.

"When I saw the price, I said, 'Thank you for raising my property values,' " Kipnis said.

Many neighbors peeked in during the open house.

"We all knew it wasn't market value," said Victoria Konopacke. "It was a dump. The place needed to be gutted."

Her husband, Mark, added: "I'm not surprised at all people are asking questions."

(snip)

Next door to the congressman's old place, Kent Greene has a for-sale sign posted in front of his house. He's asking $1,650,000.

Greene said that while the price may have been "ridiculous" for Cunningham's house in 2003, his home is highly upgraded and the market has moved up.

"It's a good neighborhood," he said, "an improved house, and, let me put it this way, it's better without him here."

The article actually has some good news for the saleslady who provided the comps now in dispute: the house across the street that sold for $900k a few months earlier was about 3/4 the size of the Cunningham condo, so an argument could be made that a significantly higher price would have been justifiable. Still, the lack of any sort of independent investigation by the purchaser just gives this whole deal a bad odor, since it would have revealed why this was not a $1.7 million home in the 2003 market.

Some interesting takes on RoveGate, from Kevin Drum and Michael Totten. Both seem to get the truly outrageous part of his speech, where he accused liberals of treasonous conduct in opposing torture at G-mo and elsewhere. The part that seems to have everyone else exorcised (about how the liberal solution to the 9/11 strikes was based on "law enforcement" and "empathy") seems to me to be standard knuckle-dragging rhetoric from the far right, too banal to be taken as a credible attack, and as a criticism, unintentionally ironic: does Bush's Brain really want to go on record attacking the other side for its commitment to law enforcement and due process at a time when Osama bin Laden and other top leaders of Al Qaeda are celebrating their fourth year of freedom since the WTC fell, when the conservative solution to terrorism is to participate in an endless stalemate against arbitrary adversaries disconnected to the original attacks, and when the only justification that the soft-on-torture crowd seems to offer in defense of Abu Ghraib, G-mo and elsewhere is that we're not yet as bad as Stalin.

Exactly where does Karl Rove get his reputation for being a great genius anyways? This is the guy who had Bush sit on the ball with a double-digit lead in late-October, 2000, even going so far as to take days off from the campaign trail, only to see the lead collapse in the final two weeks; only a rigged vote count and some voting abuses in Florida that would have made Bull Connor proud saved his boss from a more embarrassing loss than Tom Dewey. Republicans maintained their majorities in Congress in both 2002 and 2004, due almost entirely to gerrymandering and the rural, small-state bias that dictates Senate elections (the dirty little secret of that "majority" right now is that Democratic candidates consistently receive more votes than their GOP counterparts in both the House and Senate). In spite of those majorities, they can still do little more than hit at New Deal and Great Society programs at the margins.

Even with a country at war and an improving economy last year, two factors which historically guarantee victory at the polls, Bush won by the narrowest reelection margin in history, against an unlikeable, politically-inept opponent (and a Massachusetts liberal, to boot), and managed to carry only one more state than he did last time, before 9/11. He has built the current Republican base on the least-productive, most-government dependent regions in the country, while pursuing a political strategy based on social wedge issues, particularly gay civil rights, that are heavily dependent on aging, reactionary voters who will have less sway as time passes.

Looking at the long term, color me unimpressed.

YBK [Part 7]: The official May figures for the Central District of California are now out, and they show a 22% jump in total filings over last year. Chapter 7 petitions were up by over 26% from the previous May, while Chapter 13 filings, where a debtor proposes to repay some or all of his debt over a 3-5 year period, continue to slide. The only thing stopping a full-fledged bankruptcy panic is the housing market.

Finally, a webpage dedicated entirely to Randy "Duke" Cunningham. If you want to see the actual deeds from the transactions in question, or view photos of the now-historic Cunningham estate in Del Mar, that is the place to visit.

Randy Cunningham speaks, finally, but won't answer any questions. Clearly, he's the victim here, and all the blame rests on the friend who gave him inflated comps and the other friend who believed them (and what does that say about Mr. Wade, whose company gets multi-million dollar top-secret contracts from the military but who won't perform due diligence when purchasing a house). It's hard to see how The Duke can explain away living at his benefactor's yacht for less than $1200 a month; if dockside living is that cheap, I'm surprised we don't see more slackers wasting their lives away on houseboats parked in San Pedro.

A reader comments on my comparison of brokers and salespersons:

While I agree that the Cunningham real estate deal sounds... corrupt as hell... you are mistaken on one point. A real estate salesperson is in no way comparable to a clerk or a paralegal in a law office.

Other than having their contracts reviewed and signed off on by their broker, they have all the rights and responsiblites as a broker. And even licensed brokers who work in an office usually get their contracts reviewed and signed off by the head broker in the office, or their assistant manager.

For that reason, many of the top selling and most experienced agents do NOT have a broker's license (I didn't and I was a top agent for almost 30 years off and on) since unless you own your own firm and need one, it really doesn't serve any real world purpose to have one.

The commenter is a salesperson who has both personal and professional experience with law offices, so I will of course yield to his expertise in this matter. It is an oversimplification to say that the responsibilities of a broker are similar to that of a lawyer, or that a salesperson does not have a good deal more independence in operating than a law clerk is allowed. When I've bought and sold property in the past, my aunt, a licensed salesperson, usually handles the transaction at my end; I couldn't even tell you the name of the broker, except that it was handled by Coldwell Banker.

However, I should point out that clerks and paralegals have taken on an increasingly important role in law offices, one that he perhaps underestimates. I happen to practice in an area of law, bankruptcy, in which most of the heavy lifting in representing a client is done by paralegals. That area of law is particularly paper-intensive, so the responsibilities of obtaining information from clients, filling out forms, and arranging pleadings for filing are almost entirely done by non-professionals. The attorney's job has become focused on reviewing (and signing off on) the paperwork, meeting with the client at the initial stages of the case, and appearing in court when necessary.

In fact, in larger firms, some paralegals and clerks become even more important than the associates they assist. Because of the fact that, as far as clients are concerned, there is no distinction between lawyer and clerk, it is especially important for the lawyer to perform his supervisorial responsibilities. I believe that the earlier analogy remains apt, at least in this limited way.

An interesting factoid: the house just across the street from Rep. and Mrs. Cunningham was dumped for $905,000 in April, 2003, less than seven months before the San Diego-Area Congressman sold his condo for $1,675 million. What a market !!

War Crimes: Whom we are fighting. [link via Suburban Guerilla]