"44 Henry"

Ben Smith:

I'm getting a slightly late start blogging this morning because I detoured on the way to the office past East Broadway and over to Henry Street in New York's Chinatown, a few blocks from here. The neighborhood is the source of donations about which the L.A. Times is raising questions this morning.

The LAT has been doing great stuff this cycle, and much of the reporting -- contributions from dishwashers, etc. -- is eyebrow raising. And while donors at all levels lean on employees, suppliers, and partners to give to politicians, it's harder to justify away when the people don't have much money.

Stuff like this, though, doesn't seem uniquely Chinese:

Many, on the other hand, said they gave for reasons having more to do with the Chinese community than with Clinton. He Duan Zheng, who gave $1,000, said of the Fujianese community: "They informed us to go, so I went.

"Everybody was making a donation, so I did too," he said. "Otherwise I would lose face."

And some of the writing, inadvertently, seems a little off from a New York perspective. That "grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls" above may, in fact, be packed above its legal occupancy with people who don't make much money. But it's not, superficially, an unusually bad-looking building by New York standards, and one-bedrooms in the neighborhood go for about $1,750 -- if you're lucky -- according to a Craigslist search for Chinatown rentals.

The piece also notes somewhat mysteriously that "a key figure helping to secure Asian support for Clinton is a woman named Chung Seto, who came to this country as a child from Canton province and has supported Bill and Hillary Clinton since the 1990s."

That's accurate; but it's odd not to note that Seto's main political identity here isn't as an immigrant; it's as a former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party who has close political ties to Harlem, and who ran the campaign of the Harlem candidate for mayor in 2005.

Howie P.S.: Ben has been accused in the past of being a Clinton-lover.