Month: November 2007
As Mayor, Giuliani Used Police as Limo Service for Mistress
Yesterday, we learned that when he was mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani played a shell game to hide from taxpayers — and his scornful wife — the cost of dragging his security details along when he traveled out to Long Island to visit his then-girlfriend, Judith Nathan. Now comes news that he assigned a car and driver from the NYPD to Nathan during their affair:
Well before it was publicly known he was seeing her, then-married New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided a police driver and city car for his mistress Judith Nathan, former senior city officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.
“She used the PD as her personal taxi service,” said one former city official who worked for Giuliani.
The former city officials said Giuliani expanded the budget for his security detail at the time. Politico.com reported yesterday that many of the security expenses were initially billed to obscure city agencies, effectively hiding them from oversight.
Last December, Alan G. Hevesi, the New York State Comptroller, pleaded guilty to defrauding the government and resigned his position after it was revealed that he had detailed a state employee to attend his wife, who was an invalid:
Mr. Hevesi, the state’s top fiscal watchdog, told the court in a hoarse voice that one of the state workers he had assigned as a driver for his wife, Carol, had done much more than provide security for her. Prosecutors filed court papers revealing that the worker had also watered her plants, driven her to Bloomingdale’s and dropped off her dry cleaning.
In addtion to pleading guilty to a felony, Hevesi paid a fine of $5,000 and reimbursed the state for $206,000.
No word as of yet whether New York’s Democratic governor, Eliot Spitzer, will look into allegations that Giuliani used public employees to carry out personal services for him and his girlfriend.
Phonecards for Hospitalized Veterans
CREDO Action from Working Assets and Veterans For Peace have teamed up again this year to provide phone cards to veterans recuperating in V.A. hospitals so they can call their families during the holiday season. Last year they raised more than $90,000, which, thanks to a sweetheart 2.9-cents-per-minute deal with Sprint, was enough to ship more than 24,000 cards loaded with 3,180,000 minutes to V.A. hospitals all over the United States. A tax-deductible $10.50 donation will provide 120-minute phone cards to three veterans; a $35 donation will get two-hour cards to 10 veterans.
So how about helping out a needy veteran or two by enabling them reach out to family and friends during the holiday season. Go here to make a donation.
War On Xmas Breaks Out In Arizona
Janet Napolitano, governor of Arizona, this week lighted a large piece of green vegetation festooned with shiny things in a ceremony in the lobby of the Capitol Tower in Phoenix. She called it a “holiday tree.” But unlike most people who think such things should be called by another name, Napolitano is accepting of differing points of view:
“I think we’re celebrating a number of holidays,” the governor responded Wednesday, while acknowledging that only one religion — Christianity — has a holiday associated with a tree.
“You can call it whatever you want,” she responded.
As you might well imagine, the 150 comments on the Arizona Star article were, for the most part, much less tolerant.
California GOP Faces Debt, Layoffs, While Rudy Backers Pour Money into Initiative That Could Hand Him the Presidency
Fundraising is down dramatically nationwide for the Republican Party, but things are especially bad here in California, where the state GOP is in such dire straits that its ability to compete in both state and federal races could be affected.
If it passes, this last-minute, unilateral change to the rules will almost undoubtedly hand the presidency to the Republican nominee next year.
But while the state party is cutting programs and considering layoffs, hundreds of thousands of dollars are flowing in from out-of-state fatcat supporters of Rudy Giuliani — funds the state GOP can’t touch because they are earmarked specifically to promote a ballot initiative that would, if passed, give Rudy 20 or so of the state’s 55 Electoral College Votes, even if he loses the state to the Democratic candidate.
The California GOP has been in a death spiral since the 1990s when, under former Gov. Pete Wilson, the decision was made to make illegal immigration its signature issue. It’s way too soon to send for the embalmers but the current crisis couldn’t be worse:
According to state records, the California GOP was $1.7 million in debt at the end of October, the most recent figures available. Its federal committee was nearly $430,000 in the red, records show.
An e-mail sent by regional vice chairman Jon Fleischman to other party officials, which was obtained by AP, pointed to a shortage of cash.
“I don’t know how to sugarcoat this,” Fleischman wrote in the e-mail. The party “is going through a very fiscally challenging period.”
Warned by the party’s chief operating officer that state GOP layoffs could follow if the county funding was continued, “I was forced to vote to end a program that I believe is a good one, simply because we are faced with a situation of limited resources,” Fleischman wrote. He later predicted finances would improve.
And:
General Who Asked ‘Gay Question’ at Debates a Clinton Supporter
During last night’s CNN/YouTube Republican debate, retired Army Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr asked the candidates a question about the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the U.S. armed forces. Seems Kerr neglected to tell CNN that he is one of nearly 50 co-chairs of a group called Veterans and Military Retirees for Hillary. Doh!
‘Today, don’t ask, don’t tell is destructive to our military policy.’
— retired Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr
According to The Politico, Kerr asked: “Why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians?â€
Here’s how the candidates (predictably) responded:
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, got first crack at Kerr’s question. He said he thought having openly gay men and lesbian women in the military “would be bad for unit cohesion.â€
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, answering next, basically agreed.
Cooper then singled out former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who in 1994 said he looked forward to the day gays and lesbians could serve openly in the military.
Romney said times have changed. Though he said he laughed when he first heard talk of the don’t ask, don’t tell policy, and didn’t think it would work, he said: “You know what? It’s been there now for 15 years, and it seems to have worked.â€
[moderator Anderson] Cooper then turned to Kerr and asked whether he felt he got an answer to his question.
Kerr responded: “With all due respect, I did not get an answer from the candidates. American men and women in the military are professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians. … Today, don’t ask, don’t tell is destructive to our military policy.â€
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam veteran, got the last word on the subject.
He said, “almost unanimously, they [high-ranking military officials] tell me that this present policy is working, that we have the best military in history, we have the bravest, most professional, best-prepared, and that this policy ought to be continued because it’s working.â€
CNN and the Clinton campaigns scrambled to apologize and/or disavow, as the case may be, but apparently Kerr passed the network’s vetting process, despite being a member of the Clinton support group and having been a supporter of Sen. John Kerry in his run for the presidency.
Quote du Jour
All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
— Alfred E. Smith (1873-1944) governor of New York, Presidential candidate 1928
Rudy’s Adultery Problem Raises Its Ugly Head
During his term as mayor of New York, which coincided with his 16-year marriage to Donna Hanover, a local television personality, Rudolph Giuliani reportedly had at least two extramarital affairs. The first of these, as alleged by Hanover and a Vanity Fair article from the time, was with his press spokeswoman, Cristyne Lategano. Their affair apparently ended around 1999.
Mayor Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during his affair with Judith Nathan.
Soon afterwards, the mayor began seeing Judith Nathan, a pharmaceutical sales executive. In May 2000, Giuliani famously called a news conference to announce he was seeking a divorce from Donna Hanover — who learned about his plan to divorce her while watching his announcement on television.
The divorce proceedings were messy and played out like a reality show version of “Dynasty” or “Dallas” in the local news. Hanover and the Giuliani children remained at the mayor’s official residence while the mayor decamped to the apartment of a gay couple. His affair with Nathan was an open secret — she was barred by court order from visiting the mayor’s residence — but unacknowledged publicly.
Yesterday, news reports suggested that during this period, Giuliani may have cooked the books to hide expenses related to his visits to Nathan at her home in Southampton, in the Long Island suburbs:
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.
The documents … show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”
The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.
The alleged billing shell game went on for three summers, from 1999 through the first weekend in September 2001, just days before the attack by al Qaeda that brought down the World Trade Center towers.
Giuliani and Nathan were married in 2003.
Rove’s Latest Outrageous Lie: Says Congress Rushed Bush into War
First some ancient history: In the fall of 2002, the Bush administration was preoccupied with ramming its Iraq war resolution through Congress. It wasn’t that they needed the resolution to go to war. Not hardly.
What the Bush team wanted was to get the Congress on the record about the war before the midterm elections that November — in particular the resolution was intended to cause a rift between bloodthirsty voters back home and antiwar Democrats in the House. They also hoped to use votes for the resolution by Democratic senators who might run against Bush in 2004, including Sens. Kerry, Clinton, Edwards and Lieberman, to name a few, as a wedge issue to separate them from their liberal base.
The war resolution was part of a “marketing campaign,” as Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, referred to it, that had been put together by the Iraq Study Group, an elite corps inside the West Wing that included, among others, Karl Rove.
Last Wednesday, a mere five years after helping ram the war resolution through Congress, Karl Rove went on Charlie Rose and rewrote history as brazenly as it has ever been done:
