After Hillary Clinton's statement to USA Today on March 7 that she was more electable than Barack Obama among "white voters," from The Politico:

The statement was “the dumbest thing she could have said,” Rangel told reporters before a Clinton fundraiser in a midtown hotel ballroom Saturday.

The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and the 82 Days that Inspired America
By Thurston Clarke
Henry Holt, 321 pages, $25

For a people whom Tocqueville described as living eternally in the future, we Americans do quite a lot of remembering. Eight weeks ago, it was Martin Luther King Jr., who has been gone longer than he was alive. Now we enter the season of remembrance for a former New York senator, Robert F. Kennedy, a season made all the more poignant by the depressing news that the Liberal Lion, Ted Kennedy, is suddenly and unexpectedly a lion in winter.  read more »

In an editorial board discussion this afternoon with the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, Hillary Clinton mentioned Bobby Kennedy’s mid-June assassination as a reminder that past primaries have carried on well into summer, and promptly got Drudged.  read more »

Nothing is original in late-capitalist America!

Before Pamela Anderson, Rob Lowe, and Paris Hilton paved the way for sex tapes, apparently, there was a black and white video of Marilyn Monroe performing oral sex, which just sold to "a New York businessman" for $1.5 million, The New York Post reports.

The silent, 15-minute reel of 16 mm footage "appears" to have been shot in the 50's and shows Ms. Monroe performing the act on an unidentified man, who for a long time the F.B.I. tried to prove was John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy.

In the tape, Ms. Monroe is on her knees and never looks at the lens, while the man’s face is out of the shot, according to the Post.  read more »

After studying the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, linguist Mark Liberman found that their speaking styles are “radically different.”

Then there’s Barack Obama.  read more »

Paris in the springtime is lovely, but for the blossoming female members of the world’s most famous families, autumn will do just fine. After all, that’s when the famed Le Bal Crillon des Debutantes is held, and the singer Phil Collins was among the celebrities in the French capital—17-year-old daughter Lily in tow—to attend the extravagant affair. “Tonight I'm no-one, not a singer, just an emotional dad," Mr. Collins told the AFP. “This great ball is a wonderful tradition."

Among the other young ladies with good heels and better names who “came out” at the Hotel Crillon were Kathleen Kennedy, the granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy; Olivia Pei, granddaughter of architect I.M. Pei; Brazilian soccer phenom Pelé’s goddaughter Gemima MacMahon; Tatiana Mountbatten, great grandniece of the deceased viceroy of India; and Maria Abou Nader, the neice of former Lebanese presidents Amine and Bachir Gemayel. (Last year, as reported by Page Six, the daughters of James Mellon III, real estate maven Janna Bullock and actress Kristin Scott Thomas made their debuts at the same event.)