Billy Ray Cyrus speaks a paragraph of strangeness and sadness.

"One more thing about Kurt—Kurt was one of those guys. That's why I'm concerned about Miley. I think that his world was just spinning so fast and he had so many people around him that didn't help him. Like Anna Nicole Smith—you could see that train wreck coming. I was actually trying to reach out to Anna Nicole Smith, because I kept telling Tish and everybody around me, going, 'This is a disaster.' Michael Jackson—I was trying to reach out to Michael Jackson. I knew he had kids, and I was going to invite his kids down to a taping of Hannah—I just felt it would be good for Michael. I don't know why. I met Michael one time at the Grammys. He sat in front of me, in the front row, and a dime rolled out from under and hit my boot—this very boot I've got on—and I reached down and picked up this dime, and looked, he was going through his pockets, and I said, 'Are you looking for this?' 'Thank you.' And he took that dime and put it back in his pocket. I looked at my manager, I just said, 'Why did Michael Jackson have a dime?...' Nobody could tell me."

(Link. "Kurt" is Kurt Cobain.)

When John McCain met Anna Nicole Smith...

... and told her he liked her TV show:



(Via Ben Smith.)

On the radio.

I'm on "Week In Review" on Wisconsin Public Radio this morning. If you go here, you can find the button at the top left to stream on line from 8 to 9 Central Time or look for the word "archive" to listen to the recorded version later. If you listen live, consider calling in. You can get me and my co-guest Professor Georgia Duerst-Lahti to address some issue that was in the news in the last 7 days.

I've done the show with Georgia before. It was back on February 9th, and you can listen to streaming audio here. We began with the big story of the week: the death of Anna Nicole Smith. It's a point-counterpoint style of presentation, and Georgia gets to be the Left, while I'm supposed to be the Right. And I'll come across as a right-winger of course, because the subject of the war will come up, and nothing else will affect perceptions enough to move the political sensor dial.

What, you're actually in Wisconsin and want to listen on a real radio radio? We're on all the "Ideas Network" stations, like WHA in Madison and WHAD in Milwaukee.

UPDATE: I'm on now. Able to blog while broadcasting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, so much for blogging during the show! I could have done it, but I forgot to. Now, I'm listening to the recorded show. I think it was pretty lively, with some callers quite hostile to me.

MORE: At around 7 minutes, a caller asserts that 50% of Americans see their country as the equivalent of the Third Reich.

"Anna Nicole Smith embodied America... its overabundance; its exploitability, and its propensity to exploit."

Tunku Varadarajan writes:

And to many foreigners--particularly foreign men--she embodied America in a literal way, too: in a brassy blondeness that people in repressed cultures marvel at. It is no coincidence that the places in the world where women such as Ms. Smith are the most popular are typically those with which the U.S. has the worst diplomatic relations.

For all her gaudy excesses, there is in some of us--or there ought to be--the urge to treat Ms. Smith gently. Hers is a pathetic story, of ersatz celebrity, dead children and the pursuit of money, sex, drugs, weight loss and validation-through-litigation. That this pursuit was so thoroughly unembarrassed is a comment not so much on Ms. Smith's personal aesthetics as it is on human folly, U.S.-style, taken to its logical extreme.

She is us?

Too sad to watch?

We talk about Anna Nicole at the beginning of today's radio show -- listen here -- and I say I watched her reality show. I recommend it.

"With Anna Nicole, she was pathetic but at the same time you thought, 'Gosh, if I could just scoop you up and fix things, it would be OK...."

"You wouldn't want to scoop up Paris Hilton.'"

Ah, yes. The classic two types of hyper-sexualized women -- the kind you think you can help, who just really need you, and the ones who seem ready to crush you if you came anywhere near. Anna Nicole is to Paris Hilton as Marilyn Monroe is to Madonna.

"Just a moment's pleasure."

UPDATE: YouTube has deleted this video, which was Bryan Ferry singing the song "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" (The song was written by Carole King and made popular in the early 60s by the great "girl group" The Shirelles.) In the Ferry video, Anna Nicole Smith appears.

Anna.

R.I.P.

ADDED: I was just checking my archives to see if I'd ever written about Anna Nicole Smith. I'm sure I wrote about her Supreme Court case a couple times. (You can see at the link that she was involved in many legal controversies.) But a search for "Anna Nicole" only led me to one post, less than three months ago, titled "6,666,666":

Some people wanted to know who was the 6,666,666th visitor to this blog. Here's some info from Site Meter:

Zekstra-Informacione Tehnologije
Country : Serbia and Montenegro
City : Beograd
Referring URL http://www.google.co...n&q=ann nicole smith
Search Engine google.com
Search Words ann nicole smith
Visit Entry Page http://althouse.blog...cole-smith-case.html
Visit Exit Page http://althouse.blog...cole-smith-case.html

It does seem a little evil... just a little.

A search for just "Nicole" gets me to this post about her 20-year-old son's death and four posts about her Supreme Court case (1, 2, 3, 4). I always liked Anna Nicole. I used to watch her TV show. She was a little odd, but not evil, and really beautiful:



Goodbye, Anna.

MORE: How long do you think before the biopic goes into production? And what are the chances that the role will be played by Jessica Simpson?

Podcast time!

Time for the big podcast! Podcast #7, full of talk about bras and Right Wing Bob Dylan... and all my trials as I am dogged by lefty bloggers and commenters who think I've misdefined "right wing" and outrageously accused lefties of being irresponsible. The squid is there too and the sandcastles and John Roberts and the meat slurry and Anna Nicole Smith and, yeah, even Justice Scalia. You don't want to miss this podcast. This is by far the longest one -- over 53 minutes of rich podcasty goodness!

Anna Nicole Smith takes her case to the Supreme Court.

And they grant cert! I wonder if she will benefit -- as she tries to get to the fortune her very elderly husband left -- from the having her case heard by our rather elderly Justices.

At issue for the court is a relatively mundane technical issue: when federal courts may hear claims that are also involved state probate proceedings....

The appellate ruling that federal courts in California never had jurisdiction, erased a lower court finding that Smith was entitled to compensatory and punitive damages because Marshall's son tried to keep her from receiving money from his father's estate.

The Supreme Court filings included only a hint of the nastiness and sleaze from the family fight. The dispute has involved a "a bizarre set of events," justices were told in a filing by G. Eric Brunstad Jr., a Yale Law School professor who represents Marshall's son.

Smith, whose real name is Vickie Lynn Marshall, had received more than $6 million in gifts from her late husband, but was not included in his will, justices were told.

Brunstad said that Smith began her legal fight for her husband's money even before his death.

Smith's attorney, Kent Richland, told justices that Marshall's son "devotes nearly half his brief to manipulating the record to cast (Vickie) in a bad light." Richland said that J. Howard Marshall intended to provide for his wife throughout her life.

"His efforts failed, however, because -- as both lower courts found -- Pierce suppressed or destroyed the trust instrument and stripped Howard of all his assets before his death," Richland wrote.

Two jurisidiction posts in a row for me. Did you know the topic could be so entrancing?! Or is it just me, doing my usual thing of getting excited about jurisdiction when everyone around me thinks it's mind-numbingly dull?

UPDATE: I gave "The Daily Show" another chance last night and was quite amused to see Jon Stewart run with the idea that the old Justices took the case because ,like the ancient guy Vickie married, they really liked her.