Nelly Bly's Blog | Talking Points Memo |

Larry Johnson Unhinged: Obama's Terrorists Ties

February 16, 2008, 11:32AM

TPM's own Larry Johnson really, really does not like Barack Obama but his latest post at his No Quarter is so over the top, I couldn't help posting about it:

"As Democrats and Independents weigh who they want to run against John McCain in the fall, answer this question. Can you support a candidate who is friends with terrorists? Can you support a candidate who takes money from terrorists? Well, if Obama is your man you have some problems..."

Read the rest.

Giuliani Opposes the Common Good

August 18, 2007, 9:53AM

From the New Yorker:

"..Focussing on the differences between him and the Democrats, he assailed Hillary Clinton, criticizing her as a redistributionist and an enemy of the free market. “Now, these are scary thoughts, they really are—that she, or some Democrat, can take your money and they’re going to use it for the common good,” he said..."

Me, I have always thought that I had an obligation as a member of civil society to contribute to the common good and I do. I don't have children but I pay school taxes. I pay those taxes willingly because education contributes to the common good.

On the other hand, Rudy and his rich friends are cheap fucks who can't be shamed into paying their fair share of the common good. They will weasel out of paying anything at all, given half a chance.

Giuliani Reiterates Support For Abortion

August 17, 2007, 3:47PM

From the AP via Yahoo:

"Also Friday, Giuliani reiterated his support for abortion rights: "I believe we should reduce abortion and increase adoption, but in a society in which we don't want government running people's lives ... we should keep the government out of it. We should allow the mother ultimately to make those kinds of decisions."

Here is the rest of the story:

A day after urging people to "leave my family alone," Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani on Friday said he'll talk about his family — on his terms.

"Sure I will," Giuliani told reporters outside a cafe where he visited with voters. "But I'll talk about it appropriately, and in a way to preserve as much as I can the privacy of my family and my children, which I think any decent person would."

Giuliani asked again — as he did Thursday — that people judge him on his record as New York City mayor and a federal prosecutor.

"I think the best thing to do is to concentrate on the public things that I accomplished," he said. "Measure that, take a look at that, and then see how much do newspapers really have to probe into these things, or how much of it is being done really for reasons that have nothing to do with measuring public performance."

"And I think that's the only way in which we can kind of create an appropriate balance, given the kind of scrutiny that now goes on," Giuliani said.

On Thursday, Giuliani was asked by a voter in Derry, N.H., why he should expect loyalty from GOP voters when his children aren't backing him. His daughter has indicated support for Democrat Barack Obama, and his son has said he didn't speak to his father for some time. Giuliani and their mother, Donna Hanover, had a nasty and public divorce while Giuliani was New York's mayor, and he has since remarried.

"I love my family very, very much and will do anything for them. There are complexities in every family in America," Giuliani told the voter. "The best thing I can say is kind of, 'Leave my family alone, just like I'll leave your family alone.'"

Giuliani also reiterated that his faith is private. Last week, asked in Iowa if he is a traditional, practicing Catholic, Giuliani insisted his faith should be private. Giuliani is at odds with church teaching because of his support for abortion rights and because he remarried without obtaining an annulment.

"I've talked about my faith, and even parts of that are personal," Giuliani said Friday.

Giuliani, a leading Republican candidate for president, was on a two-day swing through the early primary state of New Hampshire.

At a town hall meeting Friday in Merrimack, he argued for taxpayer-funded vouchers for private elementary and secondary schools, saying school choice works for the nation's colleges and universities.

People come from all over the world to attend college in the United States, Giuliani said at a town hall meeting in Merrimack, N.H.

"How is it that we have the best higher education in the world and a weaker K-through-12 system?" Giuliani said. "What's the difference? Why does one operate so well and the other not nearly as well? American higher education is based on a quintessential American principle — choice."

As mayor of New York, Giuliani backed vouchers for private and parochial schools in the face of opposition from his own schools chancellor. He changed his mind on the issue, after initially opposing vouchers, after becoming mayor of New York, and he also tried unsuccessfully to take control of New York public schools.

"I'd give parents control over their children's education," Giuliani told the audience of about 150 people at a solar power products plant. "We've got to have competition operating. If we don't do that, our education system is going to deteriorate."

Giuliani stressed his desire to have private forces shape the country's economy in education as well as in health care and Social Security. He said he supported President Bush's unsuccessful proposal to allow people to invest some of their Social Security taxes in private accounts.

"I would have preferred, over my lifetime, if I could have invested some of that Social Security money myself," said Giuliani, 63. "I think I would have done much better than the government did. I believe young people today, a lot of them feel that way. I think people who want a private option should be entitled to have it."

He said people who want traditional Social Security with no private accounts should be allowed to have that, too. And he allowed that the issue "is going to have to be compromised out" because Democrats who control Congress oppose it.

Also Friday, Giuliani reiterated his support for abortion rights: "I believe we should reduce abortion and increase adoption, but in a society in which we don't want government running people's lives ... we should keep the government out of it. We should allow the mother ultimately to make those kinds of decisions."

"Public Displays of Disaffection" - Wayne Barrett on Giuliani's Kids

August 15, 2007, 10:49PM

From an 8/14/07 Village Voice story by Wayne Barrett:

Public Displays of Disaffection

Now Rudy begs for privacy for his kids? Recalling his very public humiliation of his family.

When it was revealed last week that Rudy Giuliani's 17-year-old daughter, Caroline, had described herself as a member of "One Million Strong for Barack" in a Facebook profile, a family spokeswoman quickly issued a statement claiming that the posting was merely "an expression of interest in certain principles," not an endorsement of Obama. After she grew up for eight years in the Giuliani war zone that was Gracie Mansion, it's hardly surprising that Harvard-bound Caroline might now be interested in another presidential candidate's "principles." The question is: Should we be interested in any of this family intrigue?

Rudy has given us his answer.

On the stump in Iowa, he said he wants "to give the maximum degree of privacy" to his children. "If you want the press to leave the children alone," Giuliani said, "the best way to do it is not to comment." What he meant was that if a candidate wants the press to ignore his messy personal life—including facts that might shock even the 50 percent of Americans who are divorced—the way to do it is to label any examination of it an "out-of-bounds" intrusion. And if using the vulnerability of his children will help insulate him from examination, this father is ready to show that he really does know best, especially when it comes to protecting himself.

That’s why he’s said: “Judge me by my public performance—whatever mistakes I’ve made in my personal life, I’m sorry for them.” It’s a laughable dichotomy, as if one’s personal and professional lives are wholly separable, as if blowing up an 18-year marriage rather than finding a way to end it reasonably says nothing about how a presidential prospect might handle a squabble with Congress. New Yorkers, of course, know that Rudy’s self-absorbed humiliation of his wife Donna Hanover—informing her that he wanted a divorce on television, inviting the press to a “walking my baby back home” stroll over Mother’s Day weekend with newly announced girlfriend Judi Nathan—was utterly consistent with the in-your-face way he governed. His lawyer and friend Raoul Felder called Donna an “uncaring mother” over that Mother’s Day weekend in 2000, said she was “howling like a stuck pig,” and accused her of “clinging to the chandeliers” in Gracie Mansion. For those used to the tone that Giuliani applied to enemies large and small at City Hall, it was clear that Felder was merely a bullhorn for his client.

Why are the following samples from the Caroline grievance list irrelevant to the character test we apply to our presidential candidates?

Giuliani brought her to City Hall for Take Your Daughter to Work Day in 1994 and 1995, the first two years of his mayoral term, and never brought her again. By 1996, the relationship between Giuliani and his twentysomething press secretary had so poisoned the marriage that all such family events were impossible. In fact, Giuliani took a family vacation in November 1993, shortly after his election, and never took another one in his life. His family was so invisible in his public life that neither Donna nor the kids attended his victory party when he won re-election in 1997, and Donna refused to tell reporters at the polls if she voted for him. On the night of the millennium, with a billion people watching Giuliani drop the ball on a new century, Caroline, son Andrew, and Donna had their own small party in an office tower overlooking Times Square. Though Giuliani was still months away from publicly revealing his relationship with Nathan, he squired her around all evening—to the city facility at the square, the new emergency-command center, and a party he hosted at a nearby café.

Once Giuliani filed for divorce, he brought Nathan to a Gracie Mansion event, which sparked a court ruling barring her from the premises in the interests of the children. The judge branded his lawyer's public tirades "embarrassing and no doubt painful for these children." Giuliani complained in court that he wanted to introduce Nathan to the kids on Father's Day in 2001 and that Donna had blocked it. She might have still have been smarting from Father's Day in 1995—a day of revelation for her—when Rudy told reporters after a morning event that he was going back to the mansion to play ball with Andrew, but instead went to a deserted City Hall and headed for a basement suite with his ever-present press secretary. An enraged Donna arrived three hours later, only to be stopped from entering the suite by a Giuliani aide.

The breakup was so botched that everyone is still scarred. The kids aren't listed on Giuliani's website bio. Donna wasn't acknowledged in a four-page list of the hundreds of important people in Giuliani's life at the end of his bestseller Leadership, though the dog Goalie did get a thank-you. Giuliani didn't go to Andrew's high-school graduation, and, just a couple of months ago, he insisted on bringing Nathan to Caroline's. He and Judi wound up sitting in the balcony and leaving without speaking to her. No wonder Caroline told reporters at the graduation: "I am celebrating with my mom, my stepfather, my brother, and our other family members."

That wasn't a presidential endorsement either.

"Rudy Unzipped" - Wayne Barrett on Giuliani's Love Life

August 15, 2007, 7:32AM

From a 5/17/00 Village Voice story by Wayne Barrett:

Rudy Unzipped

His Private Matters are Daily Fodder for Consumption

A campaign launched with a defense of the Virgin Mary is now threatened by personal revelations that would embarrass Mary Magdalene.

If the premise of Rudy Giuliani's Senate run was that he was the designated Catholic candidate in a very Catholic state, as his Brooklyn Museum inquisition suggested, it's a premise that, after a week of marital tumult, lacks promise. If there was a money-back guarantee with the eight-page "Ten Commandments" mailing he did to Christian Coalition types right around the time he was first taking Judith Nathan to a Gracie Mansion reception, the campaign might wind up as broke as it is wounded. Eliot Spitzer might well be checking out those false-advertising statutes he's charged with enforcing.

When Rudy Giuliani decided to disclose Donna Hanover's previously sealed domestic record at a press conference last week, he set off a predictable chain of events. She disclosed his.

As usual, there were only unproven quality-of-life charges on the Hanover record that Rudy revealed. But when Donna was finished unveiling his, most of the city, and maybe most of the nation, knew he was a felonious fraud.

He said she was a "wonderful" mother and a "very, very fine person."

But it was the other "very, very fine person"—Judith Nathan—who he "relies on" and who "helps me a great deal." He made it clear that the reliance began before he was hit with prostate cancer. By saying he was "going to need" Nathan "more now than maybe I did before," he completed the attempt to implicitly indict coldhearted Donna. She was obviously not a comparable consolation in his hour of need.

Three hours later, it was her turn. She said that for "several years," it was "difficult to participate in Rudy's public life because of his relationship with one staff member." Her mouthpiece then identified the staff member, Cristyne Lategano, and specified the nature of the relationship: "intimate." At first, Lategano and Giuliani tried an identical game, referring reporters to their prior statements about this old allegation. They used to compose press responses together over a shared slice of pizza and they knew that their old answers were more rant than denial.

Then Lategano with New Husband Nick-Nick called the Times back from Yankee Stadium—where Rudy and "Crissy" once helped engineer World titles—and for the first time, she really did deny the hot stuff. Apparently too distracted at the park to see next season's deposition coming, Lategano declared: "What needs to be clear is that the only relationship I ever had with the mayor was a professional one." The handful of Yankee fans within earshot of Lategano could be heard in the Times newsroom booing this Rudy defense—another first in this era of mayoral-mandated championships.

When Lategano insisted that "there is nothing to prove other than a very close friendship," memories of George Brett's pine-tar home run filled the row. Too much stickum for that shot in the dark to fly. (It was no coincidence that Judi's first reported visit to the mansion was for a Yankee party.)

The talking heads on television were now the only people left in the metropolitan area who talked about the Lategano liaison as if it might not have happened. A wife who loved the limelight, exulting in her First Ladydom at the start of the first term, sunk behind a stonewall for years and was now saying she did so because the affair happened. Everyone in New York knew the wife would only say it happened because Rudy admitted to her that it had. Unlike Lategano, the ex-prosecutor was certainly not handcuffing himself with explicit denials before he was put under oath.

Giuliani was asked at a press conference if his securing of Lategano's current post atop the city-subsidized Convention & Visitors Bureau was a "crime" in view of their relationship and he flipped out. "Oh, get out of here," he told the reporter. "Get lost. Get lost. That's a sneaky way of trying to invade somebody's personal life."

Of course, his friend and onetime associate at the Justice Department, Ken Starr, spent millions investigating Vernon Jordan's efforts to get Monica Lewinsky a silencing sinecure. Having already paid Lategano's predecessor a $300,000 severance to make way for her, the tourism bureau refuses to divulge the term of Lategano's contract, making it impossible to calculate how much of a buyout she's entitled to collect. With the mayor's wife accusing the city's official greeter of delivering more than a welcoming buss, the tourism bureau just might one day wake up to its own embarrassing accommodation and look for a president who actually has experience in the industry.

As damning as Donna's porn-on-the-payroll charge was, she leveled a second count in her felony indictment. The lady whose four-member, city-financed, personal staff has refused to supply reporters with copies of her résumé, much less answer legitimate questions, announced that she and Rudy had "reestablished some of our personal intimacy through the fall." Coital positions were promised as part of the next budget release.

This revelation was designed to make her grand finale all the more climactic, as it were. "At that point," she said, meaning the fall, "he chose another path." The path, Judi Nathan, registered to vote from her new apartment at 200 East 94th Street on November 2, 1999, having moved there in the months immediately before. Her registration record indicates that as much as Rudy leans on her for advice now—medical, political, and otherwise—she never voted for him, having last bothered to vote at all in 1988, at least in New York. While she did live in California in the early '90s, she was a city resident during his three mayoral campaigns.

The Nathan story started out in the tabloids as an October romance, but each story has pushed the launch date back, until the Post reported that sightings of the two at her Hamptons condo began in May (that sun-chaser Rudy has never been one to miss the earliest spring ray). May was also the pivotal month in Donna's chronology. "Beginning last May," she said, "I made a major effort to bring us back together." Since intimacy followed, she presumably thought it was working.

Of course, the other May event was the visible demise of Cristyne Lategano. She was being driven out of City Hall by slights and leaks, the same method of forced departure she'd mastered at her mentor's knee. Before she announced her leave in June, she got the gentlest of "time's up" messages, reserved for those with an insider's edge who've overstayed their welcome: an unsolicited job offer from PR king and lobbyist Howard Rubenstein, as permanent as any pillar at City Hall. Donna apparently thought Rudy was dispensing with Lategano for her. So did Judith. That's why Rudy thought all year he could get both the Conservative and Liberal lines.

As soon as Lategano was out the door, albeit she may have thought temporarily, she got the Bratton treatment. A Sunday Times magazine article by James Traub collected blind City Hall quotes gutting Lategano like the glossy was flypaper. Traub's lowest blow was that the jettisoned princess was "considered transparently opportunistic rather than bright." In South Carolina with golf clubs and a new caddie, Lategano must have recognized a sanctioned assassination when she read one. Soon afterwards, she got the carrot, her $150,000-a-year "I Love New York" perch.

Donna's account of the recent calendar, juxtaposed with the news stories about Rudy's summerlong sallies to Southampton, left Rudy looking like any one of the Godfather characters he mimics and invokes: fully entitled to his public goumada on the side. Stir-crazy reporters from the Post and News assigned to weekend duty at City Hall were pressing his office about why there was never anything on his weekend schedule last spring, summer, and early fall. That's when they started using 14-year-old Andrew as the beard, claiming Rudy was back to being papa, taking the kid to the links. Rudy sure knew how to turn a minus into a plus.

Nathan missed her morning photo op and disappeared for 24 hours prior to Rudy's abrupt announcement of his separation on Wednesday morning, suggesting that while Donna didn't know precisely when the other shoe would drop, Judi did. He even explained that what "motivated" him to make the announcement was "the tremendous invasion of privacy that's taken place in everyone's life—my family's, Judith Nathan's family."

Since no reporter has penetrated the cop-engulfed life at the mansion, the precipitating "invasion of privacy" was apparently Tuesday's tour of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, where Judi's great-aunts were interviewed about adultery by the Post. As his recent upstate pandering on milk prices and watershed wetlands demonstrated, Rudy is as compulsively enthralled with the next constituent as he is with the next woman, to the detriment of the discarded in both categories. So he rushed to the ramparts at Bryant Park to salvage the honor of his new lady, indifferent to setting the stage with the ex.

The day after the separation was announced, the Post discovered a ring on Nathan's finger that it speculated was an "unofficial" engagement sparkler. A close-up shot of the hand and ring suggested this was a Post observation, but inside the story, "a source close to Nathan" was cited for pointing it out. In record speed, Judi has become such a part of the New York scene she already has sprouted "close sources," the indispensable companion of all those who seek gossip clout in the Apple. Nathan only had to wait until Friday night for the stroll and the dinner to complement the ring. She has clearly forced much of these contretemps to the surface, putting herself in public play for months and now using her discomfort over some of the public attention to compel him to act.

Rudy's separation announcement was also part of a game of chicken with Donna. It was she who summoned reporters to the sidewalk outside Saint Pat's while on her way to the cardinal's wake five days earlier. Her message, which she certainly did not clear with Rudy, was that "this marriage and this man have been very precious to me" but that there were "decisions that have to be made."

Donna was furious that he would not bring her to the funeral of the priest who'd helped for years to keep their marriage together. Rudy's "close sources" are now saying he's been telling her he wanted a separation for months, but that she was ignoring him. The rancor over the cardinal's funeral, and her statement at the wake, may have pushed him to make a preemptive strike.

Giuliani seemed so stricken the day before the announcement he had to reassure people he wasn't going to collapse. The day after the announcement, he was his feisty old self. In between, he talked to his shoes at a press conference drenched in shame. The oscillations went off the chart by the weekend, when he went on a public date while his family huddled without him in California. With all the doctors he's been seeing lately, it might be time to stop in on Dr. Melfi. As Tony Soprano can attest, she understands the need for a goumada.

Jimmy Breslin's Famous And Very Funny Column About Mayor Rudy Giuliani

August 11, 2007, 12:36PM

Jimmy Breslin's 10/19/00 Newsday column about Rudy Giuliani and his love life should be mandatory reading for every fan of America's Mayor!

Mayor's Drivers Have No Easy Pass

The dispatchers had a bad time of it Tuesday night in police headquarters. They were handling the special radio band for the Mayor's cars and squad and not doing it all that well.

This had one driver nervous. Some time back, he had been driving the girl friend, Judi, to Gracie Mansion and he pulled into the driveway with Judi the Girlfriend just as the car was pulling out with Donna Hanover, the Mayor's wife.

The two cars nearly hit each other.

Somehow the two women did not see each other, or pretended not to.

But thereafter the driver became known as Wrong Way.

They had five units operating. One took the Mayor to Yankee Stadium. Another took his son to the stadium. The other car was supposed to take his girlfriend Judi to the Stadium where they would place her in a seat belonging to some big corporation. There was a fourth car, driven by Wrong Way and holding another girlfriend of the Mayor's. He had picked her up somewhere in the 30s. She is know as the Other Girl. They had a corporation seat for her, too.

The fifth and last car had the Mayor's wife and was being discussed on the special radio band right now.

If this seems to be a lot of cars and opportunities for confusion, be advised that it is a precise count of the pool of cars and people required to keep these Tobacco Road romances of Giuliani's in motion, all of it on your money, thousands and thousands of dollars for one baseball game.

"Where are you now?" the dispatcher from police headquarters is saying to the car with the Mayor's wife. You could hear it here, in the car taking the girlfriend from the 30s to the game.

"On my way to the Virginia Monologues," the Donna Hanover driver said.

"Oh, the play. The Virginia Monologues."

"Don't make me say it again."

"Say what?"

"Say Virginia Monologues."

"Ten four."

And now in the car taking her to Yankee Stadium, the other girlfriend said, "What are we doing going this way for?" She was in the back seat of a car that was taking what she thought was a strange route to Yankee Stadium.

The driver, Wrong Way, good and nervous, was following a printout map of the route he was to take.

"You're trying to hide me," she said. "I hate when they do that to me."

"That's not happening," one of the security men said.

"It did at the parade."

"Which parade?"

"Just the other day. Columbus Day. When we came up to St. Patrick's, they whisk me away and the next thing I know I'm hiding on the side street while he goes up the steps to shake hands with the Archbishop. Why I couldn't go with him I don't know. I don't care if that Judi was hiding, too. I wanted to be in front.

The Mayor and his people know. The late Cardinal of St. Patrick's, John O'Connor, criticized Geraldine Ferraro Zaccaro by name on the subject of abortion while she was running for vice president. O'Connor then wrote an article about Mario Cuomo in which he used the word excommunication.

So far, however, there have been no remarks or statements from the new Archbishop about the Mayor's behavior.

The Mayor tells the city every day he is the official Keeper of the Morals for the city. And he goes on parade with his girl friend and lets two kids at home see him on television. It's nice. The Irish call it the Mortaler. That is his notion of the quality of life.

Since the new Archbishop, Egan, says nothing, why upset the guy by bringing the woman right up the steps? Let her hide on the side of the building.

All this has made her suspicious. "Wait and see. It'll be the same thing at the first game of the World Series. He's supposed to throw out the first ball. Why can't I do that? What does he care? He's done it before. I want to stand up in the box seat and throw out the first ball. Standing next to him. It's my turn to get known. I want to hear the whole crowd cheer for me."

There was ignorance of history there. The writer who was taking all these notes down from the girl for you once sat in a box at a big Mets final playoff game in 1969 with John Lindsay, the Mayor. He was up for re-election. Somebody handed him a baseball, he stood, the public address system bellowed that the Mayor would throw out the first ball.

The Mayor? A freaking politician! At our sport!

From every seat there came the loudest boos Lindsay ever had heard. How can I win an election if this what they think about me?

Seated in the same box, with a little smile on his face, was Robert Wagner, the former mayor. He said quietly, "Heh heh. You never throw out the first ball at a game. The people hate politicians around their sports. Only the President can throw out the first ball. Never a Mayor."

"Did you tell Lindsay?"

Wagner smiled. Of course not. He was exactly what the crowd thought of politicians, a cheap sneak.

Now, the other night, ostensibly en route to the game at Yankee Stadium, city driver Wrong Way burst into lights, bright white lights, but they were not coming from the top of a grandstand. They were on the ground. The theater district.

"Where are we?" the girlfriend shrieked.

In front of Wrong Way was the city car for Donna Hanover parked in front of her show.

Wrong Way froze. He shook his head. I could lose my job over this, he said to himself.

In the back seat, the girlfriend was ferociously mad. On the special band for the mayor's cars and squad came the demanding voice:

"Wrong Way. The Mayor is asking. What is your location now?"

"At the Virginia Monologues!"