Intern extraordinaire Bharat Ayyar listened to NPR's Michael Martin interview David Paterson,who waxed poetic on NPR about his speech to the N.A.A.C.P. yesterday (where he was uncharacteristically outspoken about that New Yorker cover).

Today, Paterson talked about African-American leadership. Of the civil rights leaders, he said, “These people had to invest their energy on the abolition of slavery, preempting of segregation and the establishment of civil rights when they should have been spending their God-given talents finding new inventions for manufacturing, creating new transportation ideas, medical and scientific research, and perhaps nuclear physics.

"We have just wasted so much of our talent forcing African-Americans, Hispanics and women to invest their great ability in trying to make the Constitution valid and the Declaration of Independence read true," he said.  read more »

If creating and reveling in controversy is one of the more coveted forms of currency for cable news shows, the 2008 political season has provided Fox News’ morning show Fox & Friends with an embarrassment of riches. See here and here and here.  

On Sunday morning, Jesse Jackson helped keep the momentum going. While waiting to make a live appearance on Fox & Friends, Mr. Jackson—apparently thinking his microphone was turned off—leaned over to a fellow guest and suggested that he would like to turn Barack Obama into a, um, late-in-life castrato.  

Mr. Jackson has since apologized.

Last night, Bill O’Reilly aired some of the footage on the O’Reilly Factor. And the clip—like other Fox & Friends-related controversies before it—is now spreading rapidly across the Web.  read more »

On a Sunday afternoon 21 Junes ago, James Worthy dove for an impossible loose ball and somehow swatted it to a streaking Magic Johnson, whose early third quarter lay-up ignited the crowd and signaled a decisive shift in momentum. From there, the home-standing Lakers, who had trailed the Celtics by five at halftime, breezed to a 106-93 victory that sealed their 10th N.B.A. championship.

In Los Angeles, there was celebration, and three thousand miles east in Boston, where “Beat L.A.!” served in the 1980’s as the unofficial motto that “Yankees suck!” became earlier this decade, there was dejection.

But not in all of Boston. In the city’s black neighborhoods, whose children had been pelted by rocks just 12 years earlier when court-ordered busing had transported them to white South Boston, the Lakers tended to be treated like the home team. Boston, after all, was the town that Bill Russell once labeled “a flea market of racism.”  read more »

When Bill Clinton pointed out yesterday, while talking about Barack Obama's South Carolina victory, that Jesse Jackson won the state in 1984 and 1988, the former President got plenty of attention.

Clinton seemed to be encouraging the perception that Obama won because of support from black voters, and that his victory was more about racial allegiances than substance.

He was also misrepresenting history.

It's true that Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. But Clinton failed to mention several key points. For one, the state held caucuses back in those days, not primaries, and they attracted only a fraction of the participation that yesterday's primary did. Also, Jackson is a native of Greenville, South Carolina, which gave him an extra advantage. Finally, and most importantly, no one campaigned against Jackson either time, and the contests had nowhere near the same significance to the race.  read more »

Despite Jesse Jackson’s warning of an impending “economic tsunami” from the subprime mortgage crisis, the only people marching on Wall Street on Monday afternoon were the business people whizzing past the few dozen protestors chanting “Restructure Loans—Don’t Repossess Homes” on the corner of Broad and Exchange streets.

Most business people strode past picket-wielding demonstrators, nonplussed by the accusations of “predatory lending” and “white-collar crime” being lobbed from the podium inside the metal barricades one block south of the New York Stock Exchange. As one speaker called on “Wall Street to help out the main street," a suited passerby shook his head and muttered, “Yeah, well, don’t buy something you can’t afford.”

Some spectators, like lawyer Angelo A. Paparelli, agreed that the government needs to do more to stem the two million mortgage foreclosures that are expected in the next two years.  read more »

Jesse Jackson's march on Wall Street to draw attention to the national foreclosure wave starts today at noon, according to Mr. Jackson's office.  read more »

Jesse Jackson plans a Monday march on Wall Street to pressure mortgage lenders to help stem the tide of foreclosures washing over the nation. Crain's reports that the rally is meant to lean on lenders to restructure loans and set aside more money for their "victims," instead of waiting for more foreclosures.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both have strong Chicago support stemming from their deep roots in the city. So it only makes sense that some of Chicago's most powerful families are torn when it comes to choosing between a presidential candidate.

First, the warring and wealthy Pritzker family projected their fued onto presidential politics. And as a prominent donor to Barack Obama pointed out to me, the family of Rev. Jesse Jackson, while not bickering, has also distributed its support between the two Democrats.

Rev. Jackson, as we first reported here, is endorsing Obama, despite his long relationship with the Clintons. His son, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. has been one of Obama's earliest and most vocal boosters. His other son, Yusef, who owns one of the major beer distributors in the Chicago area, was one of the chairs for a big Hillary fund-raiser on June 25th at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. (Yusef, of course, is the investor behind the latest incarnation of the magazine Radar; his "silent" partner, it's been widely rumored, is California billionaire Ron Burkle, Bill Clinton's private plane pal.) Earlier this year, Sandi Jackson, the wife of Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr, successfully ran for alderman in the 7th Ward with Obama's endorsement. Her finance chair in that winning effort was Coety Wyse. Wyse now works as Hillary's deputy finance chair for Chicago.

That said, the donor made the case that, generally speaking, Chicago is still Obama town.

On June 8 alone, the donor said, Obama raised nearly three million dollars. He attended two major donor events that brought in $1 million each and spoke at another that raised about $500,000. Later in the day, Obama drew a crowd of about 1,000 young professionals for a $100 event at Union Station.

Not a bad day's work.

Sewell Chan goes into the history of congestion pricing.

Eliot Spitzer wants to ban flavored cigarettes.

More--and video of Rev. Jesse Jackson reading Rolling Stones lyrics at Al Sharpton's convention this afternoon--after the jump.  read more »