† The Media Love Obama, But He Didn't Respect Them In The Morning: Saturday night was date night for President Barack Hussein Obama and the media, but neither is expecting the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner will rekindle their rocky romance: White House adviser David Axelrod said the evening was just “a one-night stand," while and FOX News president Roger Ailes called it "a fling." The Washington Post reports that Obama made “cutting” remarks about the media losing its looks ("I may not have the star power I once had, but … neither do all of you") but added that he cherishes the work they do. A smooth operator, Obama knows just what to say to keep stringing the media along.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: According to BankruptcyData.com, 10 of the 20 largest corporate bankruptcies have occurred over the last three years - including, Lehman, General Motors, Chrysler and Washington Mutual – and the task of unwinding or restructuring these failed behemoths is “orders of magnitude larger than most bankruptcies in the past,” notes The New York Times, which has “created a feeding frenzy” amongst bankruptcy specialists, who are “enjoying an unprecedented boom”:

Analysts, lawyers and others involved in the larger bankruptcy boom say that some fees are legitimate - and that others are, at a minimum, highly questionable. …

Lawyers and restructuring pros who are picking up the pieces of companies swamped by the bankruptcy wave say that their fees are well deserved and that their services help make the bankruptcy process more efficient. And they say the pay is more than made up for by a tidier resolution of a financial debacle - or, as in G.M.’s case, the revivification of a wounded company. …

Others, however, have a distinctly different perception about the fees that advisers are harvesting in bankruptcies.

“It violates any sense of proportion,” says Kenneth Feinberg, the Washington lawyer who serves as the “pay czar” for banks bailed out by the government and whom the court appointed last June to monitor fees associated with the Lehman bankruptcy. The court asked him to participate after concerns were raised in the news media about the soaring fees in the Lehman case.

“Unemployment is over 9 percent, and to be paying first-year associates $500 an hour angers the public,” he observes. “People read about all of this and say that lawyers and the legal system are one more example of Wall Street out of control.” …

If Mr. Feinberg and others succeed in reining in certain fees and expenses, the outcome could reverberate through the bankruptcy universe. …

In particular, Mr. Feinberg is perplexed by why fees keep rising in the Lehman case, even though it’s no longer the chaotic affair it was in the weeks and months after the bankruptcy filing. “Now the emergency is over; it is more like a traditional bankruptcy,” he says. “Yet the fees are higher than ever.”

† Sometimes, Nanny Knows Best: In a Washington Post op-ed financial journalist Heidi Moore takes issue with the “classic Wall Street defense” that bank and brokerages are not responsible for losses incurred by "sophisticated investors" because "informational asymmetry" - misleading institutional investors, by “withhold[ing] information that buyers need in order to make decisions” has become endemic:

[B]uyers, beware - this is just how the big boys roll. It's a high-stakes game for experienced players; they all know the real rules; the public shouldn't care. Don't fret over the higher workings of the princes of finance, because it's not as though Mom and Pop lost money in their deals. Goldman's Fabrice Tourre told the Senate on Monday: "I was an intermediary between highly sophisticated professional investors - all of which were institutions. None of my clients were individual, retail investors."

Wall Street loves the "sophisticated investors" argument, and little wonder: It could generate infinite financial fees if only the populace could be convinced that it's okay to fool some of the people all of the time. The problem is that even when only some of the people get fooled, all of us are paying all of the time. …

What Wall Street would like to ignore when it is taking bets in its casino is that a big pile of chips on the table come from regular consumers - from their bank deposits, retirement accounts, credit-card balances, car loans and mortgages. That's why the distinction between these sophisticated investors and everyone else is nonexistent. When Wall Street banks omit information and draw profits from "institutional investors," that means they are taking money from your pension funds, your school endowments, and your city and state governments. Other sophisticated investors include hedge funds, which take money from those pension funds, or private-equity funds, which own companies that employ 10 percent of all Americans. …

The truth is, there are no real lines dividing Wall Street and Main Street and Washington. They are all interconnected.

† What It’s Like To Be Rep. Bart Stupak: This erratum caught The Stiletto’s eye: “In an April 25 story about White House counsel Bob Bauer, The Associated Press misspelled the first name of a Michigan Democratic congressman. His name is Rep. Bart Stupak, not Bark.” AP should have added, “And he's got no bite, either.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race): The Washington Times notes that “[t]he president's decision to check only the "black, African-American or negro" box seemed a throwback to an earlier era, when the ‘one-drop rule’ - one drop of black blood in your ancestry and you're considered black - prevailed in the U.S.”:

"The obvious question - perhaps not to an American, but certainly to a visitor from another planet - is why if someone's ancestry is predominantly white, they are not identified as 'white' rather than 'black,'" New Republic senior editor John Judis wrote in an article on Mr. Obama's census choice.

By checking the single box and identifying himself only as black, "Obama probably did what was expected of him, but he also confirmed an enduring legacy of American racism," Mr. Judis wrote. …

There is no question that Mr. Obama's decision complies with the goals of U.S. census officials; the answer to Question 9 about race is exclusively about "self-identification in which respondents choose the race or races with which they most closely identify." …

[T]he president's decision to check only "black" on his census form makes complete sense to Charles W. Mills, a researcher on race and a professor at Northwestern University.

"Race is a social convention. For him to claim whiteness would be rejected by the social convention of the country. The way I see it, his decision was a perfectly reasonable one, given that this is how the American rules have been," Mr. Mills said.

Changing that perception "would require a national rethinking of race, a national self-examination. You'd need a national debate," the professor said.

Yeah, but then Obama is either the first amongst equals in what Attorney General Eric Holder famously characterized as “a nation of cowards” who avoid the topic of race, or is just another in a long line of cynical racialist Dems (see next item).

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, The Uniter: Part II): Jeffrey Kuhner, president of Washington think tank the Edmund Burke Institute, and host of "The Kuhner Show" (WTNT 570-AM, noon to 3 p.m.), fears that President Barack Hussein Obama is “inciting racial division” because “his party's grip on power is threatened - and with it, Mr. Obama's radical socialist agenda.”He makes his case in this Washington Times op-ed:

Fear breeds desperation. Hence, Mr. Obama is resorting to the worst kind of demagoguery: playing the race card. In a video to Democrats, the president embraced identity politics; black, Hispanic and female voters are to be courted at the expense of white middle-class America. …

In recent memory, no president has so deliberately and publicly sought to pit racial and gender groups against each other. The president is not simply the titular head of a party or the leader of government. He is the head of state and embodies the collective will of the American people. He is the president of all Americans - not just certain segments of his electoral coalition. Mr. Obama's rhetoric is reckless. It is fostering civil strife and racial animosity. …

Mr. Obama is fracturing America. He is calling on the primacy of race and gender in order to perpetuate his national socialist revolution. He is championing a revanchist tribalism - the politics of grievance and racial victimology that undermines our common national identity. Just like his old pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Mr. Obama is an anti-American, virulent race-baiter. …

Mr. Obama is fueling greater ideological, political and racial polarization. Not since the Civil War have Americans been so divided. He is laying the groundwork for a possible race war. Welcome to Mr. Obama's fascist America.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Nagin Has A Chocolate Chip On His Shoulder): Now that the curtain has descended on New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s troubled tenure, “hundreds of damaged city buildings including police stations and fire houses sit unrepaired more than four years after Hurricane Katrina,” The Associated Press reports. “

Only seven percent of 283 city-owned structures slated to be rebuilt have been completed or are under construction, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. Those figures back up an impression many residents have had for more than a year - the Nagin administration has failed to renew much of New Orleans. …

Besides missteps by the Nagin administration, rebuilding has been complicated because of the extent of damage, FEMA's paralyzing bureaucracy as well as loss of population, which has hurt revenues and made it hard for city officials to determine where to put its limited resources.

Other towns and rural areas around the state were able to overcome these hurdles and repair or replace hundreds of damaged structures, which leaves Nagin as the only point of differentiation between helping constituents and failing them.

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, Obama’s Judgment On Judges): A Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that Americans think that it’s a bad idea for President Barack Hussein Obama to choose someone without legal experience to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens:

Seven in 10 say service as a judge is a positive quality for a Supreme Court nominee, while only 5 percent see it as a negative. In contrast, 35 percent view experience outside the legal world as a positive. …

The public appears mostly unconcerned with diversity and other characteristics that have been mentioned as Obama narrows his search for a nominee, expected to be named in the next couple of weeks.

Eight in 10 say it is not important to them whether the nominee is a woman, an African American or a Protestant. Stevens is the lone Protestant on the court, serving with six Catholics and two Jews, and a Fox News poll finds that 70 percent of voters say it would not matter to them if there were no Protestants on the bench.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Take The Veil Off, Or Go Home): Belgian lawmakers voted unanimously to prohibit women from wearing full-face Islamic veils in public places, with violators being fined $18 to $28 and imprisoned from one to seven days, reports The Washintgon Post:

The vote in the lower house of Parliament came in response to growing irritation in Belgium and other West European countries over the increasing numbers and visibility of Muslims whose customs and attitudes often present a challenge to the continent's largely Christian heritage.

The French government, after months of rancorous debate, has pledged to pass a similar nationwide ban by September, a promise denounced by Muslims as "stigmatization" of their religion. President Nicolas Sarkozy decided last week to introduce the bill despite a warning from the country's constitutional court that a blanket prohibition would probably be unconstitutional. …

Similar bills have been introduced in the parliaments of Italy and the Netherlands, where local jurisdictions have already imposed more-limited anti-veil measures. Two dozen communities in Belgium also have decreed local bans, including Brussels, the capital. …

The full veil has been condemned by European politicians of the right and left as an affront to the dignity of women and, because it hides a woman's face, as a security risk in schools, banks and government offices. André Gerin, a member of Parliament who led a nine-month inquiry into the full-face veil in France, also qualified it as the tip of an iceberg behind which lurk radical Islamic preachers seeking to impose a fundamentalist and politicized vision of their religion on French Muslims.

The WaPo calls such legislation “an ugly European trend”:

Some supporters claim it is an anti-crime measure, but its chief sponsor, Daniel Bacquelaine, hasn't hesitated to describe it as an act of cultural warfare. "The burqa," he was quoted by Reuters as saying, "is the affirmation of a number of values that are contrary to fundamental values and universal values."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is promoting a similar ban in his country, is equally blunt: "The burqa has no place in France," he has said. Fundamentalist Muslim rulers must have been pleased to hear those words: Paris will now have no cause for complaint when countries with Christian or Jewish minorities ban the nun's habit or the yarmulke.

The WaPo seems unaware that in Muslim countries – from “secular” Turkey to fundamentalist Saudi Arabia - female infidels (that is to say, Christians and Jews), are forced to wear burqas without regard to their religious beliefs or cultural norms; Christians visiting or living in Saudi Arabia cannot wear a cross; and Christians are being driven from the Holy Land and from other Muslim nations (seventh item) through a sustained campaign of violence and intimidation – even in Iraq, where the U.S. still has a military presence.

In any case, with The WaPo insisting that “[t]hose who say they are defending women's rights have it exactly backward,” it’s no wonder that Iran was elected to a four-year stint seat on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. That would be the same Iran where, as FOX News points out, “stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged ‘immodest’ …  and “one of its senior clerics declared that women who wear revealing clothing are to blame for earthquakes” - which did not deter the U.N. from allowing the Islamic republic to become “an international arbiter of women's rights.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (Look Before You Leap: Part II): Like The Stiletto, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker believes that the  intent of recently passed legislation in several state requiring women to have an untrasound before aborting an unborn baby is to allow them to exercise informed consent, which will inevitably make the procedure rarer:

A well-informed patient should always be our route to safe and legal. Is it unacceptable that a life-preserving decision might result from greater knowledge?

Anyone considering, say, gall bladder removal will be told each and every detail of what will happen, what is likely to be the result, what consequences might be expected and so on. Doesn't it make as much sense to provide women with a view of what's going on inside their bodies before they take the leap that can't be undone? …

Shouldn't pregnant women also know what their healthy fetuses look like before they hit delete?

This is a question lacking in sinister intent. What is sinister is the proposition that ignorance is better -- and the implied hope that women won't choose to reconsider.

I can't speak to the efficacy of these bills. Let the doctors and lawyers hash that out. But as an advocate for informed choice, I can't rationalize ignorance or denial as preferable options for women in need of sound counseling.

Editorial Note: It took two tries, but the Kansas state House mustered the votes to override Governor Mark Parkinson's (D) of HB 2115, a bill that requires abortionists to report the diagnosis necessitating a late-term abortion. The bill will not become law unless the state Senate – which passed the original measure on a 24-15 vote - also overrides the governor’s veto.