BREAKING - Obama resigns

Birth certificate a forgery. "Obama" really born Antuanique Robinson on the South Side of Chicago.

"It wasn't a cool enough life story to write books about. Since my father was in prison, I made up the Kenya story, but no, I didn't murder my mom and grandmother to keep them quiet," said the chagrined former gang member.

Tony Rezko denies knowledge, "Ya think I woulda hung around with a punk from the South Side?"

Real reason? Obama paid all his taxes - not qualified to serve in his own administration.

Joe Biden to take oath of office. "My first act as President will be a Hair Club for Men stimulus package."

In other news: Ann Coulter aborts love child with Matt Drudge. "After he broke my jaw, I only let him sleep with me because he told me he was gay."

Wingnut Supreme Court

What's the likelihood that 88-year-old John Paul Stevens will still be on the Court four years from now? He's as close as the Court gets to a real liberal.

Contrary to the press's conventional story that the Court has conservative and liberal wings, it really divides like this from right to center:

• Scalia, Thomas, Alito - hard right, no apologies, screw you
  
• Roberts - hard right pretending to be merely conservative
• Kennedy - conservative
• Breyer - centrist, pro-corporate
• Souter - centrist
  
• Stevens, Ginsburg - liberal, sort of

There's not the slightest populist leaning anywhere in sight.

As Bill Mears says rather more elliptically, if McCain wins one term, expect a hard-right majority of at least five and probably six, which Kennedy is likely to follow to avoid irrelevancy. This would probably remain the case more or less for at least twenty years. Two terms would mean no centrist or tepid liberal wing at all.

If Obama wins, he probably cannot move the median of the Court at all. Instead, he can extend the current conservative balance and merely prevent it from lurching further to the extreme right. In a second term, he might possibly replace a conservative. Might.

(Yeah, and I won't bring the irrelevancy of Tony Rezko into this story even if someone else does me the favor of providing a canned non sequitur about him. This was bad journalism on Mears's part. It didn't belong in this story just because someone with no reputation said it.)