That’s what someone named Dave Johnson is wondering over at Seeing the Forest: July 21, 2008 Racist? Is this headline, Obama’s moneywoman was a subprime mortgage queen, racist? Just asking. I’m thinking it evokes the older “welfare queen” image. Because, you know, calling Penny Pritzker a subprime mortgage queen is like calling her a welfare queen. I guess. If by welfare you mean hundreds of millions in government tax breaks.

The Politico’s Carrie Anne Budoff tucked this nugget into her dispatch from Amman, Jordan: At a morning background briefing, reporters parried with senior advisers on the characterization of [Barack] Obama’s speech Thursday in Berlin as a campaign rally. The outdoor speech at the Victory Column could draw thousands of people, similar to the size of Obama events in the United States. “It is not going to be a political speech,”

O, most baleful Christian! Batman star Christian Bale was arrested Tuesday over allegations of assaulting his mother and sister, police and British media said. British media had reported that Bale’s mother and sister complained they were assaulted by the 34-year-old actor at the Dorchester Hotel in London on Sunday night, a day before the European premiere of his latest film, “The Dark Knight.” Probably jealous of Heath Ledger. UPDATE: Per

Two dead Israelis worth 200 dead Palestinians and five live ones: In an UN-brokered and decidedly unbalanced trade, Israel turned over the remains of 199 terrorists, the living Kantar and four others in exchange for the mutilated bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Captured by Hezb’allah inside Israel in 2006, the young Israelis did not long survive capture by Hezb’allah, certainly not long enough to be

“You see the activity taking place, the people in the shops, the traffic on the streets, clearly there’s been an enormous improvement,” he said. Oh, wait: that’s Baghdad.

Shelby Steele on Jesse Jackson and Obama: And Mr. Obama is so successful at winning gratitude from whites precisely because Mr. Jackson was so successful at inflaming and exploiting white guilt. Mr. Jackson must now see his own oblivion in the very features of Mr. Obama’s face. Thus the on-camera threat of castration, followed by the little jab of his fist as if to deliver a stiletto of his own.

When will enough be enough? If just one life is saved by outlawing heavy machinery, won’t it be worth it? How many more, Mr. Speaker?

It turns out that the denizens of the Daily Kos are just as humorless as the presidential candidate they support.  Newsbusters notes that the Kos Kidz were able to bully the Austin American-Statesman into pulling a mildly satirical article on the Netroots Nation conclave in Austin.  Apparently, some could not find the humor in a piece referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “arguably so left-leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing.”  Or

Or, ink is gauche if it’s not in newspapers, and besides, Americans, unlike newspapers, are financially strapped. Sonnet 111: O for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in,

and just because The Surge turned out right, that doesn’t mean that the way that the administration saw things then was the right way to see things, because it wasn’t, because I was the one who was seeing things right: In an exclusive interview, Obama told “Nightline” that if elected president, “we’re going to begin to phase out our troops.” Obama is seeing a vastly different Iraq than the one