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So it's the holidays, and you've decided voluntarily to spend them in Manhattan for some obscure reason that reason knows not of, and maybe it's started to filter through the misty fogs that surround you that people are kind of looking at you funny. Naturally this is because we New Yorkers all suck immoderately and just don't have that holiday spirit you brought with you (the elves set up the decorations while we're skipping the Thanksgiving parade). Still, we have our little folkways, and it makes us as close to cheerful as we get, miserable bastards that we are, if you observe them. It has become clear to me this past week that nobody is providing you guys with the list. 5. We keep to the right when we're walking. It's just like driving, but with feet. This makes it far less likely that someone is going to collide with you when you stop dead in the middle of the flow of traffic to look at the shiny electronic equipment, which, I agree, is much more exciting than the identical electronic equipment in the branch of the same store in your local mall. 4. It's touching, it really is, how much you guys want to be together, and better people than we would just smile and enjoy the sight of you walking four across with your arms linked and taking up the entire sidewalk. Unfortunately, they don't live here. 3. Aw, you finally got to Century 21, and there was a sale on inflatable toolsheds in the basement, and now you have to get them back to your hotel. Amongst the places on public transportation you might want to consider not resting them: the seat next to you, and between the door a carful of people are trying to use to get on and off the train for work-related reasons and that big empty middle part where most of the space is. 2. Look up, and then to your left and right. Can the space you're standing in be described as a portal of some kind? Perhaps there are stairs leading to it, or a turnstile, or some form of delineation between the space you started in and the space you're heading toward? This often serves as a source of inspiration for our visiting brethren from elsewhere. Maybe it's the heady sense of endless possibility. All the same, we'd really, really appreciate it if you could summon up the continence to take a few steps out of the direct portal area before you come to a screeching halt and share your shining epiphany with the group. and in first place, it's a tie between 1a. I swear to you with all my heart, still in the original wrapping, it's truly not the last elevator out of Saigon. and 1b. Point B is a fixed point, and the shortest distance to it is not a sine wave. Happy holidays. Enjoy the tree. 
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 Howard Kurtz, of the Washington PostOur boy Howie is shocked to discover that there are people who might not have been completely truthful about leaving the Bush administration to spend more time with their families When Tom Ridge left his Homeland Security post nearly five years ago, he said he wanted to spend more time with his family.
But in a forthcoming book, Ridge says he decided to quit after two of President George W. Bush's top lieutenants pressed Ridge to raise the terror-alert level to a scarier color for what he suspected were political reasons.
Now he tells us? Well, no. Then he told us.Posted 5/10/2005 11:21 PM
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.
Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.
His comments at a Washington forum describe spirited debates over terrorist intelligence and provide rare insight into the inner workings of the nation's homeland security apparatus.
Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.
"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' ".. but cut Howie some slack, kids. He's got serious moral issues with not telling the truth to the american people about politicians for anything but the very best reasonsBy Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 9, 2007 We all sort of knew that Gingrich was having an affair back in the late '90s--and not just with anyone, but with a woman on the House payroll. After all, he ended up marrying the woman after breaking up with his second wife, Marianne. Since he was leading the impeachment charge against Bill over Monica at the time, this might be seen as an example of . . . how shall I put it? . . . a flexible morality? But Newt kind of got a pass because he was out of office when this came out and yesterday's news. Unlike today, when he is contemplating a run for president. (Possible slogans: I'll return fun to the Oval Office? My mistress was better looking than Clinton's?) Of course, Howie's memory serves him ill here. Vanity Fair actually outed the relationship between Newt and the current Mrs. Gingrich as common knowledge three years before the impeachment and four years before he announced the end of his time in Congress and his divorce. On the other hand, getting back to Howie's current analysis, exposing Republican politicians is kind of icky By charging that fellow Cabinet members Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft pushed the move, without specific evidence of a threat, the weekend before the 2004 election, Ridge is joining a growing list of former insiders who spill sensitive secrets once they are in a position to cash in.
"It's smarmy," says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "Most people view individuals like that as traitors. I think they have a price to pay. Who's going to trust them in the future?" Presumably no-one, unless they realize Ridge actually said all this when he resigned and then waited over four years to "cash in" Which, I'll admit, isn't quite as long as Howie waited.
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if you haven't yet, watch the long version of Jon Stewart's interview with Betsy McCaughey, the woman who injected Sarah Palin's famous imaginary "death panel" into the health care debate (part one here, part two here). Most of you probably know that we, as a nation, were gifted Ms. McCaughey by Martin Peretz of the New Republic when they published a piece she wrote on the Clinton healthcare reform package which was mined for talking points by the press and the Republicans (the New Republic has since both debunked and apologized for the shoddiness and dishonesty of her work). She was then asked to join George Pataki as his Lieutenant Governor in his successful campaign against Mario Cuomo. What you may not know about Ms. McCaughey: when she was replaced on the ballot in the next election by another candidate for Lite Gov,* she left the Republican party to run for Governor on the Democratic and Liberal lines. That wasn't the reason she gave, though. The reason she gave was much more interesting (emphasis mine) She complained that she was forced to turn to Democrats in the Legislature when Republicans rebuffed her efforts to expand pre-kindergarten programs in the state and to restrict the ability of health maintenance organizations to refuse to pay for experimental cancer treatments. '''It showed me which party puts patients ahead of politics and campaign contributions,'' she said. ''It's the Democratic Party.'' so it wasn't really that the Republicans kicked her to the curb. She just couldn't live with their unprincipled opposition to government healthcare mandates. As a not-Republican in the Democratic primaries, the then-Betsy Ross (yeah, I know, I always enjoyed that myself) had a number of positions which might surprise you. She was a crusader for unrestricted late-term abortion, a fan of gay rights and increased welfare spending, and someone who said she'd grown up and changed her mind about her opposition to the Clinton plan Whether she ever was an ideological conservative or just made quite a career of seeming that way, she is now selling herself as a liberal's liberal-sorry, make that "the most socially progressive of the Democratic candidates." Ms. McCaughey Ross is not pro-choice, she is "unequivocally pro-choice." She registers horror at recent calls by both Mr. Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to cut welfare benefits to the children of workfare no-shows ("I don't think children should suffer for the failures or oversights of their parents"). Last St. Patrick's Day, when Mr. Pataki would have been thrilled for her to stay home, Ms. McCaughey Ross marched in the parade, anyway. This year she abstained, as the "champion of gay and lesbian rights" that her literature now advertises her to be. Not, of course, that everybody's buying. "There's a series of questions that I think she has to answer," said Richard Kahan, the gubernatorial hopeful responsible for the recent spate of anti-Betsy ads. "Why did she support Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court? Why did she write Op-Eds supporting big tobacco? Why did she pull apart Clinton's health care bill?" Ms. McCaughey Ross answers such charges in one of two ways: They are not true (She contends, for instance, that she never supported Mr. Thomas, but simply wrote a piece in The New York Times defending his method of judicial review) or not true anymore. "If you don't eat vegetables as a kid, you should never eat them?" she asked. "Where is the sense of human progress?"
...
Asked about Mr. Vallone's view that late-term abortion should be banned except when necessary to save the life of the mother, Ms. McCaughey Ross gave a preview of how she plans to wow the women. "The decision about an abortion should be made by a woman and her doctor, certainly not by those dark-suited senators strutting on the Senate floor," she said, denouncing the State Legislature's "very uninformed debate" on the subject, during which "several of the male members of the Republican majority were unable to even pronounce the various parts of a woman's body, but nevertheless felt fully equipped to make a decision about when a woman should or should not have an abortion." a fan of blocking protests outside abortion clinics whose opposition to parental notification laws also evolved Lieut. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross made her harshest attack to date yesterday on her chief rival in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Peter F. Vallone, calling his position on abortion rights ''a farce'' and questioning why he had not pressured New York City to enforce its law protecting women from harassment outside abortion clinics...
Abortion has not been a central issue in the race, since all four Democratic gubernatorial candidates support a woman's right to have the procedure. But in the final weeks of the campaign, Ms. McCaughey Ross has worked hard to emphasize that she is the only woman in the race. Her attack on Mr. Vallone yesterday seemed to be part of a broader strategy to prove that among the four candidates, she was the strongest champion of women's rights.
... [Vallone's press secretary] Ms. Rubey pointed out that Ms. McCaughey Ross wrote an article in 1992 praising a Supreme Court decision that allowed states to restrict access to abortions, a ruling that Ms. Ireland and other abortion rights advocates vehemently protested. ''The Supreme Court has provided the nation with common sense and common ground,'' Ms. McCaughey Ross wrote in the article, which was published in USA Today. ''Most Americans support a woman's right to an abortion but also believe that, except in unusual circumstances, a young girl's mother or father should be consulted.''
Ms. McCaughey Ross said yesterday that her article had only analyzed the court's decision, not sided with it. She said that she has always supported abortion rights, and that she never favored provisions that require parental consent for girls under 18 who seek abortions. ''I have always opposed those restrictions on a woman's right to choose,'' she said. ''I am unequivocally pro-choice.''
and, as the Liberal Party candidate in the general (she lost the primary 4 to one), a candidate whose " single issue" was her pro-choice stance on abortion. If you've been holding your nose and trying to give her the benefit of the doubt that she actually believes what she's saying about the proposed healthcare legislation, let me relieve you. You really don't have to. *Ms. McCaughey-as-politician was a gift to us from Al D'Amato (the then-"Senator Pothole" and the fixer who invented both Rudy Giuliani - although I wouldn't bring it up with either of them - and George Pataki) who thought the barbielike Clinton-killer would make a decorative, and female, addition to Mr. Pataki on a Republican gubernatorial ticket (decorative and female have always been at a bit of a premium in NYS Republican politics — see Pirro, Jeanine). Once she was in office, though, she disobliged both Pataki and D'Amato by numerous means. The straw that broke the camel's back appeared to be when she confirmed to the press that D'Amato suggested at a private dinner that she bring Giuliani, with whom D'Amato was feuding, back to the fold by offering him sex. Pataki was forced to demand an apology, and D'Amato was forced to issue one, and McCaughey was (melba) toast, at least on the elephant side of the aisle, where she declined to stay. It wasn't until her marriage to an affluent Democratic businessman who financed her political endeavors ended that Ms. McCaughey came back to the right-wing fold by taking a job with a conservative think tank which opposes healthcare reform. Go figure.
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