THE DAILY BLADE: NY Races Roiled By Marital Issues
Traditionally, the role of a politician’s spouse is to look on approvingly and adoringly as (s)he listens to the same speech 100 times in as many days, or to occasionally pinch-hit for the office-seeker so that donors can be hit up at two fund-raising events simultaneously. That’s not how it’s working out in New York, where the spouses have stolen the spotlight from the candidates:
† Let’s start with Bill Clinton’s hyper-aggressive defensiveness on "Fox News Sunday." New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin thinks it’s time for Hillary to get "out from under The Big Creep’s shadow" if she wants to make a credible run for the presidency:
Lefty hearts are fluttering over Bill Clinton's finger-wagging, fist-face tantrum on Fox television. Party boss Howard Dean, a noted rage-aholic, sees Clinton's fury as a model for "what Democrats need to do in this election."
Dean's approval is one way to know you're in trouble with moderate voters. …
Given his political gifts and baggage, his shadow makes her look tiny and weak - attributes that don't get you into the Oval Office during a war, except as a spouse.
To get there as President, she's got to move on her own steam, be the star of her own show. She never will be as long as he keeps stealing the show, for better and worse.
The Fox interview showed him at his worst. Asked a tough, fair question about his efforts as President to get Al Qaeda strongman Osama Bin Laden, Clinton erupted, accusing reporter Chris Wallace of having a "smirk" and doing a "conservative hit job" for Fox. The bizarre scene is the top political story of the week and clips of it light up the Internet.
At first, You Tube had clips of the actual interview. Then, people got, um, creative and really had fun with it. See for yourself. Bonus clip: Clinton Game (Warning: explicit animation).
† Comptroller Alan Hevesi, running for a second four-year term, publicly apologized for not reimbursing taxpayers for using a state employee to chauffeur his wife for the past three years. A few days ago, Hevesi said he repaid the state $82,688. J. Christopher Callaghan, Hevesi's Republican challenger, urged Hevesi to resign and asked the Albany County district attorney's office to investigate whether a crime was committed. Even The New York Times opined that it is "unlikely" Hevesi would have coughed up the dough "if his opponent, a little-known Republican … had not raised the issue." The paper adds:
Mr. Hevesi has apologized, and asked the public to remember that his wife has been seriously ill. But the issue is not whether Mrs. Hevesi should have had a driver. It is whether Mr. Hevesi should have been paying for it.
[N]ow he is going to have to explain to the voters how he can continue telling officials around the state that there is no tolerance for mishandling public money when he has broken the rules so egregiously himself.
† Jeanine Pirro, running for attorney general against Democrat Andrew Cuomo revealed that she is under investigation for allegedly conspiring with disgraced former city police commissioner, Bernard Kerik – a private eye, at the time – to wiretap her husband, Albert, whom she suspected of cheating on her – yet again. The New York Sun reports:
Ms. Pirro fired off a letter to the U.S. attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, demanding he remove the prosecutor investigating her, saying the prosecutor has ties to her opponent, Andrew Cuomo, and a history of investigating her husband, who was convicted of tax fraud. …
Ms. Pirro's letter draws Mr. Cuomo into the fray. It notes that he worked with the assistant district attorney on the case, Elliot Jacobson, in the mid-1980s.
"A federal investigation whose purpose can only be to undermine the democratic process in New York State is repugnant to everything the Department of Justice stands for," she wrote.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo, Wendy Katz, said via e-mail: "Ms. Pirro should direct any questions to the Republican Westchester District Attorney, the Republican US Attorney and the Republican head of the FBI investigating this matter."
† And speaking of Cuomo, who could forget his own marriage to Kerry Kennedy imploding with charges and counter-charges of mutual infidelity traded in the tabloids? Though Mark Green, his opponent in the Dem primary, was too nice to make an issue of Cuomo’s unseemly behavior as his marriage was unraveling, The Village Voice is wagering that Pirro won’t be as circumspect:
A 2004 follow-up story in the Daily News asserted that Kennedy Cuomo had been forced to go to court to collect child support payments from her ex-husband, a claim Cuomo's lawyers chalked up to a quickly resolved "misunderstanding." No one breathed a word about that, either. (Any bets that Kieran Mahoney, the rough-and-tumble political adviser to Republican attorney general candidate Jeanine Pirro—who has her own heavy marital baggage to overcome—won't find a way to get that subject rehashed in the general election?)
The Stiletto Is Not Above Scatological Humor
Let’s just say The Stiletto’s inner child is alive and well, and she still finds fart jokes very funny. Not to mention anything to do with poop. So today, The Stiletto has a round-up of humorous bathroom-related items that she has been collecting all week for your enjoyment:
† "Scooter" Libby’s trial in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle was unexpectedly delayed when the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington, D.C. was evacuated for three hours after a police dog sniffing for explosives reacted to a suspicious package found outside the federal courthouse. The Associated Press reports that the package turned out to be "discarded clothing believed to belong to one of the homeless people who sleep in the nearby park. Soiled clothing can give off a scent similar to some nitrogen-based explosives, authorities said." AP was too delicate to specify the manner in which the clothing was soiled (ketchup? red wine?), but The Stiletto is not: For those of you who snored through chemistry, nitrogen fertilizer – massive quantities of which were used to make a bomb powerful enough to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City – is often derived from such organic sources as pee-pee and poo-poo.
† Diners eat under umbrellas at the Schooner or Later restaurant at the Alamitos Bay Marina in Southern California. Not because the sun is too hot, but to protect them bombardment by what The Associated Press calls "industrial-size bird droppings" from the flock of great blue herons nesting in the trees nearby. "Business owners in the marina have tried various methods to get the birds to leave, including a sonic repeller called Bird-X."
† TMZ.com offers this snarkilicious review of just the first 15 minutes of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show debut on her very own XM Radio channel:
The talk-show queen gabbed with her best pal Gayle King (who called her, inexplicably, "Mommy") …
Among many, many other things, Oprah talked about her humble beginnings in Mississippi, and particularly about how her mother's highest aspiration for her was that she might end up cleaning white people's houses, because "they give away nice clothes." And then Oprah pointed out that now … she has "all these white people" working for her, and that in fact there's only one black person on the staff. Way to turn the tables, girl.
Finally … Oprah … assured Gayle that the reason she doesn't have children wasn't that she can't deal with poo, or "pooty," as the pair called it. For this - and whatever follows - is what XM is paying Oprah $55 million over the next three years.
† This last item from The Washington Times involves a bathroom, but The Stiletto isn’t quite sure what is going on in there:
Bulgarian chess grandmaster Veselin Topalov yesterday threatened to pull out of his $1.27 million world championship match if his Russian rival did not stop going to the bathroom so many times during play. …
Vladimir Kramnik had visited the restroom more than 50 times, on average, in the course of each of the first four games.
The bathroom Mr. Kramnik frequented, said Mr. Topalov's manager, Silvio Danailov, "is the only place without video or audio surveillance" in the playing hall.
"In our opinion, these facts are strange, if not suspicious," Mr. Danailov said. Mr. Topalov, he added, has averaged four bathroom breaks per game. A grandmaster game can last nearly seven hours in a single session. …
During Tuesday's third game, which ended in a draw, the Bulgarian team said a "short statistical sample" based on video recordings produced the following timeline:
"3:54 p.m. -- Kramnik plays Move 15.
"3:55 p.m. -- Goes into the bathroom.
"3:56 p.m. -- Goes out of the bathroom.
"3:57 p.m. -- Goes into the bathroom.
"3:59 p.m. -- Goes out of the bathroom.
"4:03 p.m. -- Goes into the bathroom.
"4:04 p.m. -- Goes out of the bathroom.
"4:07 p.m. -- Comes out for Move 16."
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April 8, 2007
The Stiletto wrote:
Readers of this blog know that a post involving doo-doo just has to be followed by one involving pee-pee. You heard of rhetorical parallelism? This is scatological parallelism (second item). So here goes: A medical tribunal found British dentist Alan Hutchinson, 51, guilty of repeatedly peeing in his surgery sink, using dental tools meant for patients to clean his fingernails and ears and neither wearing gloves nor washing his hands, thus risking the health of "himself, staff and patients" for more than 28 years. Reuters reports that another hearing will determine whether the dentist’s "unhygienic ...
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