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Obama: "What Rev. Wright said yesterday directly contradicts everything that I have done during my life. It contradicts how I was raised, and the setting in which I was raised. It contradicts my decisions to pursue a career of public service. It contradicts the issues that I have worked on politically. It contradicts what I have said in my books. It contradicts what I said in my conventions speech in 2004. It contradicts my announcement. It contradicts everything I have been saying on this campaign trail."

I've been worried about how this whole thing would play out, but not anymore. I have no idea what Rev. Wright's motivations were, but he just handed Obama an enormous gift. When the history of this campaign is written, this will be remembered as Obama's Sista Souljah moment. Except that this time around, it wasn't just political posturing. It was personal.

Obama was pissed (watch the second clip from about 10 minutes in and see for yourself), and he has a right to be. When he gave his speech on race a few weeks back in Philadelphia, the politically safe and expedient thing to do would have been to disown Wright. But Obama didn't do that. In fact, he did precisely the opposite. He called Wright part of his family, explaining that no matter how offensive his remarks he couldn't possibly disown him. And this is what he gets in return? I had thought Wright's appearance on Bill Moyers was defensible, and in some ways even admirable, but yesterday's "performance" (Obama's words, not mine) at the National Press Club was absurd. It was so ridiculous that many, including Andrew Sullivan and Rush Limbaugh, concluded that Wright was deliberately trying to sabotage Obama's campaign. Whatever Wright's motivations, they have forced Obama to break in a very public way from his former pastor.

Why describe this as his Sista Souljah moment? When this campaign first began, the big question in the media was, is Obama "black enough" to win the black vote. Once he won big in SC, the issue became, is Obama "too black" to win the white vote. (Never mind the contradiction.) The first was an attempt to minimize the potential of his candidacy before he gained any momentum, and the second was an attempt to dampen the actual momentum that his campaign had managed to create. But because the second question played directly into the political narratives conservatives have been using since the late 1960s, it was far, far more dangerous to his campaign than the first question had been.

Obama tried carefully to thread the needle in his Philadelphia speech, and by virtually every measure he was successful. Every measure but one: it didn't end the controversy. Why? Precisely because Obama didn't do what was expected of him - repudiate Wright - it left an opening for his opponents to continue to use this against him. Now to be perfectly clear, I'm not suggesting that Obama should have repudiated Wright back then. It may have been the politically smart thing to do, but it wouldn't have been the right thing to do. Wright was like family to him, and if we cannot forgive members of our family, who can we forgive? But by doing the right thing, Obama left room for the controversy to linger. And linger it did - until this weekend, when thanks to Wright's actions it exploded once again. Obama defend Wright, and for his troubles Wright turned around and stabbed him in the back. The out of context snippets deserved a defense from Obama because it wasn't personal. But this? This had to be the end.

Forget denouncing out of context snippets; this was Obama denouncing Wright and just about everything he now apparently stands for. Are there some who will still try to tie Wright to Obama? Of course. Will it work? I doubt it? Why? Take a look at this:

Barack Obama made a call for nonviolence in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict - infuriating the Rev. Al Sharpton, who accused the presidential candidate of trying to "grandstand in front of white people," sources told The Post.

Combined with today's reaction to Wright, this should begin to end the power of that \ "too black" question. Because let's be honest, at bottom what those questions were really about was black radicalism. No doubt for some people it was just racism, pure and simple, but for most Americans I have long suspected it was something more complex. From the start of this campaign, I've always doubted that the "Obama is a secret Muslim" angle would catch hold in respectable society. But the "Obama is a secret radical" narrative was far more dangerous, because although Muslim paranoia is a relatively new strain of American politics, paranoia about radical liberalism is as old as the modern conservative movement itself. And so whereas most mainstream media organizations would only barely touch the secret Muslim meme, they wouldn't stop to think twice about repeating the secret radical one. After all, after nearly 60 years of repetition, its almost become second nature! (Exhibit One: ABC's performance at the last debate)

Obama has now clearly, forcefully, and unequivocally stated what we who support him already know he believes: that the conspiracy theories of Wright, Farrakhan, and at times even Sharpton are nonsense. And that in the end is why I think this will be seen as Obama's Sista Souljah moment: forced by Wright's rants, he has powerfully repudiated the statements of a group to which many falsely believed he belonged. He's not a secret Muslim, nor is he a secret black nationalist. It's beyond ridiculous that he needed to do this, but things are what they are!

Want some other interpretations? Here you go:

Washington Independent and NBC's FirstRead have a good summaries for those who don't have time to watch the clips.

Andrew Sullivan echoes NBC's Andrea Mitchell in calling it a "divorce," proclaiming: "today, we found that he can fight back, and take a stand, without calculation and in what is clearly a great amount of personal difficulty and political pain. It's what anyone should want in a president."

Steve Benen calls it Obama getting "pissed," while John Cole describes it as "Obama Kicks Wright in the Junk."

Will Bunch thinks Obama was too reserved, but after watching Chris Matthews compare Obama to Richard II (I'm assuming Tweety means the Shakespeare version?) suggests he may have misread things.

Marc Ambinder worries that this will all descend into "psychological pornography," with the media "scrutinizing the thoughts behind the thinking." Weird though, because earlier in the post he described Obama as feeling "aggrieved and disrespected." I'm not sure what the line between the two is, I guess. (And then he follows up with even more hidden meaning analysis here)

Ana Marie Cox, who I normally love, completely misses the point here. In his Moyer's interview, the only truly outrageous thing Wright said was that Obama was only doing what he had to do as a politician. Obama had all weekend to respond to that but didn't. It was yesterday's Press Club event, and in particular the after-speech Q+A, that clearly set Obama off. And that was full, despite what Cox writes here, of all kinds of insane rants. But don't take my word for it: Ambinder has the full chronology here.

Andrew Romano had written over the weekend that Wright wouldn't matter one way or the other long term, and although today he largely sticks with that view, he also wonders if some in the media won't compare Obama's two Wright-related speeches and charge hypocrisy. Me? I don't see it. There was an intervening event here - Wright's Press Club appearance - that changed everything, so unless you are willing to willfully misrepresent things...

TNR's Noam Scheiber asks a key question: What is Wright's next move? If I'm right that this is Obama's Sistah Souljah moment, then an escalation by Wright isn't likely to hurt him. Moreover, at this point I'd expect Wright's responses to grow increasingly less rational, including perhaps an attack on the press. That would then put Obama and the media on the same side in this fight, which for Obama would be the best possible outcome of all this. And as Noam later points out, the worst case here is that this freezes everyone in place, preventing any defections from Obama's camp between now and next week.

Chris Bowers, having not actually watched Wright's comments for himself, declares that this is Obama "caving to right-wing attacks it once parried and refused to back down against." Why he thinks he is qualified to comment on this when he hasn't even bothered to read the comments by Wright that Obama was responding to is beyond me. Chris Bowers loves to write about the importance of context, but here he declares himself above all that? Really? Chris, I'm sorry, but that's just stupid.

And last but not least, Sarah Posner tracks a series of very bizarre reactions from conservatives.

Roger Lowenstein's piece in this weekend's NY Times Magazine is one of the single best explanations I've yet read for how our nation's financial service industry got itself into the mortgage mess. Its an example of journalism at its finest, and is a perfect example of the type of work that we as a society cannot do without. It really is that good.

The bond-rating agencies like Moody's and S+P exist in a corner of the world of finance that until I read this article I simply did not understand. How Lowenstein was able to take such a complex subject and explain it in so simple and straightforward a way is really quite amazing.

Take this short section, for example:

In April 2007, Moody's announced it was revising the model it used to evaluate subprime mortgages. It noted that the model "was first introduced in 2002. Since then, the mortgage market has evolved considerably." This was a rather stunning admission; its model had been based on a world that no longer existed.

Poring over the data, Moody's discovered that the size of people's first mortgages was no longer a good predictor of whether they would default; rather, it was the size of their first and second loans -- that is, their total debt -- combined. This was rather intuitive; Moody's simply hadn't reckoned on it. Similarly, credit scores, long a mainstay of its analyses, had not proved to be a "strong predictor" of defaults this time. Translation: even people with good credit scores were defaulting. Amy Tobey, leader of the team that monitored XYZ, told me, "It seems there was a shift in mentality; people are treating homes as investment assets." Indeed. And homeowners without equity were making what economists call a rational choice; they were abandoning properties rather than make payments on them. Homeowners' equity had never been as high as believed because appraisals had been inflated.

Moody's assumed that past behavior was a good predictor of future behavior. It wasn't. Investing 101, and yet...

Between 2002 and 2006 the psychology of borrowers had changed dramatically. Instead of viewing a home as a place to live and a source of financial security, borrowers embraced a new vision of a house as a virtual ATM. When their perceptions changed, so too did their behavior. And shifting perceptions is something that most economic models simply cannot handle.

Markets may be rational, but people aren't. And given that people create markets, well... Unless we understand human psychology, we cannot understand the long-term behavior of markets. The past can only predict the future so long as the people in the future view the world in the same ways as the people in the past. Sometimes perceptions of reality matter more than reality itself. Traditional economics, with its insistence on a stable and rational human nature, cannot account for this. And that, I would argue, more than anything else is what creates bubbles.

The dot.com bubble was created because for a brief moment investors believed that the Internet had rewritten the rules of the economy. In retrospect that was irrational, but it didn't seem that way at the time. The mortgage security bubble was created because for a brief moment homeowners believed that the rules of the housing market had changed, and institutional investors largely agreed. That was irrational, but to a large majority of people it didn't seem so at the time. That's human nature. We love to believe that we have outsmarted the system, and hey, sometimes it is even true.

Until we learn to account for the psychology of bubbles, they will continue to occur. Even once we learn to account for them, it may turn out that they are something we are powerless to prevent. Perhaps bubble minimization is the best we will be able to do.

Anyway, please read the entire article. And when you are done, head over to Kevin Drum (here and here), Brad DeLong (here and here), and Jon Taplin for much, much more.

UPDATE: Also, this from Washington Independent:

So is the worst over? Not by a long shot. We still have a long way to go.

A single number tells most of the story. Between 2000 and 2007, Americans withdrew $4.2 trillion in free cash flow from their homes - in other words, $4.2 trillion in new mortgage debt that was not invested in new housing or in paying down old mortgages. Instead, it was spent on other stuff, like new cars and plasma TVs. For the three years through 2006, the free cash flow from mortgages was more than 7 percent of disposable personal income. That's why personal consumption could break all records at a time when real wages were falling.

But when house prices suddenly tipped into free-fall in mid-2007, home mortgage financing dried up. By the end of the year, mortgage finance flows were about half the average for the previous several years. Pathetically, credit card borrowing jumped to an all-time high in the third quarter of 2007, but dropped right back by year end, as card companies quickly tightened the screws.

In the last half of 2007, households also began a major sell-off of financial assets, like stocks and bonds. Much of that must have come from already-paltry retirement savings...

House prices fell about 10 percent last year. A growing number of analysts expect another 15 percent - 20 percent price drop will be necessary to bring housing costs back in line with incomes. Some 8 million homeowners are stuck with mortgages worth more than the their homes' market value, even as consumers are increasingly squeezed by flat wages, soft employment and back-breaking price increases for gasoline and food.

What's happened so far, in other words, is just prologue for when recession really bites.

As Atrios would say: Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!

John Edwards may have for the moment stepped off of the political stage, but his wife Elizabeth has done nothing of the sort. First she announced that she had joined the Center for American Progress as a senior fellow, and now she's taken to the pages of the Sunday NYT to launch an attack on the paper's coverage of the campaign.

No surprise here: her critique is dead on.

FOR the last month, news media attention was focused on Pennsylvania and its Democratic primary. Given the gargantuan effort, what did we learn?

Well, the rancor of the campaign was covered. The amount of money spent was covered. But in Pennsylvania, as in the rest of the country this political season, the information about the candidates' priorities, policies and principles -- information that voters will need to choose the next president -- too often did not make the cut. After having spent more than a year on the campaign trail with my husband, John Edwards, I'm not surprised.

Why? Here's my guess: The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country's inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments.

But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture....

Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden's health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama's bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.

What's more, the news media cut candidates like Joe Biden out of the process even before they got started. Just to be clear: I'm not talking about my husband. I'm referring to other worthy Democratic contenders. Few people even had the chance to find out about Joe Biden's health care plan before he was literally forced from the race by the news blackout that depressed his poll numbers, which in turn depressed his fund-raising.

And it's not as if people didn't want this information. In focus groups that I attended or followed after debates, Joe Biden would regularly be the object of praise and interest: "I want to know more about Senator Biden," participants would say.

But it was not to be. Indeed, the Biden campaign was covered more for its missteps than anything else. Chris Dodd, also a serious candidate with a distinguished record, received much the same treatment. I suspect that there was more coverage of the burglary at his campaign office in Hartford than of any other single event during his run other than his entering and leaving the campaign....

Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn't fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

Lots of talk about Obama's appearance on Fox this weekend. One of Obama's advisors had promised on Friday that he was going there "to take Fox on," and the consensus seems to be that he did not deliver.

TPM has put together the highlights. Judge for yourself:

My reaction? I wish he had confronted Fox directly about their role in debasing our public discourse. He had a huge opportunity here to galvanize the Democratic Party's base, and he missed it. That's unfortunate.

Moreover, if his goal was to use the appearance to reach out to independents and Reagan Democrats, and thus felt the need to take a less confrontational approach, I wish he had waited until the fall to do so.

But... there is a reason I run a blog and Plouffe and Axelrod run Obama's campaign, and this piece in Sunday's NYT was clearly a signal from the campaign that they are going to begin a major effort to reach out to working class voters now, and not wait until September. Its unfortunate that they felt the need to legitimize Fox News in the process, but given the remaining primary states - WV, KY, IN, NC, SD, MT, and PR - it might have been unavoidable.

Nevertheless, this leaves me uneasy. One of the things we haven't seen enough of from Barack is his willingness to fight, and this interview was a perfect opportunity to fight cleanly.

UPDATE: Josh Patashnik highlights part of the interview that I didn't consider carefully enough:

Obama pushed back against "top-down, command-and-control" regulation that was popular with the left in the '60s and '70s. He credited the GOP with pushing market-oriented solutions and cited his support of a cap-and-trade system for controlling carbon emissions.

"I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the markets came up with the notion that, you know, what if you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives for businesses, let them figure out how they're going to, for example, reduce pollution. It's a smarter way of doing it,"

This is very clearly part of Obama's attempt to drive a full scale political realignment through. America is ready to leave conservatism behind, but they are not yet convinced that liberalism is safe enough to return to. Conservatives have spent more than 30 years convincing the public that their caricature of liberalism is the real thing, and its going to take some hard work to undo that. We won't be able to change minds if we don't reach out to the voters whose minds are changeable, and sadly that is going at times to mean reaching out through Fox News.

But it is also, as I mentioned above, going to at times mean taking on Fox News directly., something Obama did not do enough of here. It is possible to do both simultaneously. Here's hoping that in the future Obama will remember that.

If you care at all about the intersection of religion and politics, this show was an absolute must-watch.

I don't care what you thought about the man before, because whatever it was, it was wrong.

It's impossible to excerpt much without losing the meaning - although PastorDan has tried admirably here - so I implore you to either watch the video or read through the transcript. And to convince, I'll offer up the conclusion of the show, the one part I think truly does stand on its own:

BILL MOYERS: Our denomination, the United Church of Christ has called for a sacred conversation on race in America. What are the steps that you think from all of your experience can be taken to move race relations forward?

REVEREND WRIGHT: I think there are many - to start using Bill Jones' paradigm, about how one sees God. Your theology determines one's anthropology. And how you see humans determines your sociology. To look at how we've come to see race, and in others of other races, based on our understanding of God who sees others as less than important. Less than my people. And where in our religious traditions are there passages in our sacred scriptures that are racist? They're in the Vedas, the Babylonian Talmud, they're in the Koran, they're in the Bible. How do we grapple with these passages in our sacred texts? The same way you grapple with Judges:19, where it's alright for a preacher to have a concubine and cut her up into 12 pieces. We gotta argue with our texts that are, as we've been struggling with, battling with, wrestling with, anti-Semitic. The Christian, "The Jews killed Jesus." No, we gotta come to grips with, you know, these texts were written by certain people at certain times with certain racist understandings of others who are different. That different meant deficient. That doing that with adults and starting with kids. that begins the conversation that Senator Obama talked about that we need to have. And re-writing the curriculum in our schools to tell the truth in our schools.

UPDATE: The reaction from O'Reilly and Gingrich to this interview is even for them quite shocking. Leaving aside the fact that the show hadn't even yet aired, thus meaning that they couldn't have seen more than a few out takes, the idea that Moyers "dislikes America" is so absurd that I hardly know what to say.

Does this sound like someone who hates his country?

It's just a fact: Democracy doesn't work without citizen activism and participation, starting at the community. Trickle down politics doesn't work much better than trickle down economics. It's also a fact that civilization happens because we don't leave things to other people. What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as there's one candle in your hand.

Just because I disagree with your vision for the country does not mean I hate I the country. I shouldn't even need to say that, should I? Why do I need to say that?

When the pundits and media pros wax poetic about Sen. McCain's honor and virtue, is this what they mean?

Yes, the man would make a better president than Bush. But so too would an inanimate object, so I hardly see how that is relevant.

UPDATE: More here. And here.

UPDATE II: And what about this? McCain will "do everything," unless that everything includes him getting personally involved?

UPDATE III: And have I mentioned recently that he has an astonishingly ability to be simultaneously ignorant and condescending, too?

I expect idiotic statements from the man, but still... calling for riots in a major American city? Isn't that an incitement to violence and therefore, well... illegal?

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh is sparking controversy again after he made comments calling for riots in Denver during the Democratic National Convention this summer.

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

"Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don't elect Democrats," Limbaugh said during Wednesday's radio broadcast. He then went on to say that's the best thing that could happen to the country.

Steve Benen continued:

When callers suggested it's probably inappropriate for a radio host to call for violence at a political convention, Limbaugh clarified: "I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver."

He kept going. "There won't be riots at our convention," Limbaugh said of the Republican National Convention. "We don't riot. We don't burn our cars. We don't burn down our houses. We don't kill our children. We don't do half the things the American left does."

He concluded, "[R]iots in Denver, at the Democratic Convention, will see to it we don't elect Democrats. And that's the best damn thing that can happen to this country, as far as I can think."

Limbaugh's website told visitors: "Screw the world! Riot in Denver!"

I get that the man is the PT Barnum of conservatism, but given that he is treated quite seriously by his fellow conservatives - the Vice President often appears on his show, as just one example - shouldn't there be consequences when he crosses the line like this? Why is it OK to simply laugh it off as "Rush being Rush." Rev. Wright says "God Damn America" and Limbaugh goes apoplectic. Imagine what Rush would have said had Rev. Wright done what Limbaugh himself just did?

Why do we allow this sort of double standard to continue? I don't get it.