Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

DC Madam who ran a prostitution ring? Shamed, sentence to decades in prison, and now dead by apparent suicide.

David Vitter, Republican Senator who used said prostitution ring? Still a US Senator.

-- EZRA KLEIN

Baby boomers are leaving California because it's too expensive to retire here and Hispanics prefer Texas to California because it's too expensive to live here. Proving that other regions of the country don't have a lock on prejudice, the commenters want to blame the Hispanics for the state's financial woes. Oh, and the taxes that they have to pay. I remember the seventies and the taxes were higher. Of course we had good roads and even better schools. Hmm, do you suppose there's a connection?

-- DEB

Former U.S. baseball star Jose Canseco said he had lost his California mansion to foreclosure -- one of the first celebrities to publicly admit being a statistic in the U.S. housing crisis.

Canseco, 43, one of the most flamboyant U.S. baseball players until his retirement from the major leagues in 2001, told the celebrity TV show Inside Edition that it did not make financial sense to keep his 7,300 square-foot (678.2 sq-metro) home in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino.

Inside Edition said it had foreclosure documents showing Canseco owed a bank more than $2.5 million on the house.

-- REUTERS

Northwestern University has withdrawn its offer of an honorary degree to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright "in light of the controversy around" him.

-- SHAMUS TOOMEY

Given recent media narratives, it’s easy to lose sight of just how irrelevant the Indiana primary is to the overall nomination. It seems at times that Clinton is just an Indiana victory from storming back into contention. But she's not. Regardless of the ultimate outcome in Indiana, the delegates will essentially be split — and so a 5-6 point Clinton win actually sets her back, mathematically speaking.

But that said, Indiana is important in a different respect in that it may significantly delay Clinton’s ultimate — and largely inevitable — concession.

-- PUBLIUS

A pro-Obama union has ponied up $1.5 million for TV ads to begin softening up McCain in Ohio.

-- DAVID KURTZ

Behold the candidate as he tries to perform pirouettes with a dead weight chained to his ankle. . . . no, this is not about Barack Obama and his former pastor.

This is about John McCain and the Republican president who five years ago appeared beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner and assured the American people that major combat in Iraq was over (at a cost of 138 military deaths). This would be the same McCain compadre who, just last week, set a new record for failure by posting the highest presidential disapproval rating in the 70-year history of the Gallup poll.

-- DICK POLMAN

The Democrats' domestic policies are an incoherent jumble: they want lower gasoline and heating oil prices, but they block the very things, oil drilling and the construction of new refineries, that would actually reduce them. At the same time, for reasons of 'climate change,' they want less consumption of oil and gas, which implies higher, not lower, prices." I think they want higher prices, but without taking responsibility for that outcome. In which case there's nothing incoherent about the approach at all.

-- JOHN HINDERAKER

If these solutions don't stop the tides of illegal flow in and out of our borders, a friend of mine has a Texas-tough alternative and answer to replace the government's virtual fence failure. In fact, he says, we don't need a security fence at all. All we need to do is to post signs and position manned trucks at key points, just like our government does at Area 51, the top secret military airfield in remote central Nevada, around which there are no fences or walls. There is never a breach or unwanted border crossing there, at least that we hear about! And why? Because the boundary sign reads and is never questioned, "Warning: Use of deadly force authorized.

-- CHUCK NORRIS

Cartoon by Mike Lester/Rome (N.Y.) News-Tribune