While Rome burns ...

As election fever (a little known variant of Dengue, also referred to as Gingrich's Syndrome or Trumps) sweeps the nation, attention has drifted away from the trial of Kwame Kilpatrick, ex-Mayor of Detroit. Yesterday, his long-time water and sewage czar associate, Victor Mercado, copped a plea and admitted that he'd helped Kilpatrick violate the Hobbs Act. Read: commit extortion. Mercado, whose name means "Market" in Spanish (not kidding -- look it up) was in charge of water and sewage during Kilpatrick's administration (much of the alleged corruption was about sludge, in case you'd forgotten. Classy.)

While some might see this as a setback for Kilpatrick's "I didn't do nothin'!" defense, at least the attorneys for his other old pal, Bobby Ferguson, say not so. In a strange echo of Newt's reaction when his campaign dropped a stitch and failed to get on the Virginia primary, they say it "doesn't affect anything." Newt, as you'll recall, called the Virginia thing his Pearl Harbor, but claimed he could recover.

The prosecutor, explaining why they agreed to a plea deal for Mr. Mercado, said that he didn't make any money out of the whole thing, but that he did "compromise himself." At press time, there were rumors that the Guinness Book of World Records was seeking to verify this claim, since it would put Mercado in the running for the title of only person in the entire Kilpatrick regime who didn't get paid off.

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Update: Noting that he's in the market for a new job, the Michigan Republican Party is reported to be heavily recruiting Russian ex-Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. "He'd fit right in," said a party member who spoke on condition of anonymity.