UPDATE: It was No. 3! According to the New York Daily News, Giuliani intends to run for Kirsten Gillibrand's Senate seat next year. That news comes just hours after Hakim's report that he'd opted not to run for governor. Hakim is probably pretty pissed right now.

It certainly seems strange that Giuliani would bow out now; he's been open about his interest in the job since August, and the path to nomination appears to be clear if he wants it. Plus, Bernard Kerik just pleaded guilty, eliminating the likelihood that unpleasant and distracting disclosures about their relationship would come out at trial. Here's some baseless speculation on why he bailed:

• Governing New York would be a shit-show, and could only be a liability for a 2012 presidential run. This is undoubtedly true—who wants to wrestle with a Democratic legislature for two years and preside over devastating budget cuts? But Giuliani knew this back in August, when he launched the whisper campaign, so it doesn't explain the sudden withdrawal. And the upsides in positioning himself for a run against Obama in 2012 are considerable: His governorship would be presented against the backdrop of a massive terror trial in New York City that he could nitpick on a daily basis as a shameful spectacle and hang around Obama's neck.
• He doesn't think he can beat Andrew Cuomo. According to Pollster.com, the most recent public poll around the time Giuliani started nosing around the governor's desk had Cuomo—New York's popular attorney general, who is likely to challenge Gov. David Paterson for the Democratic nomination—beating him by five points with 11 percent undecided, which amounts to a toss-up this far out from election day. A poll taken last week had Cuomo up by 12 points, with 6 percent undecided. And while 49% of New Yorkers say they want Cuomo to run for governor, only 32% say they want to see Giuliani's name on the ballot. Those are much less hospitable numbers, but still close to meaningless a year from election day. And Giuliani has amply demonstrated that he's a cruel dick who delights in destroying people, so it's certainly not like him to shrink from a chance to rough up Cuomo.
• He wants to run for Senate instead. The Senate was Giuliani's initial job choice after mayor, before God gave him prostate cancer and he had to bow out. And Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, who was appointed by Paterson to replace Hillary Clinton, is a weak incumbent with just a two-year track record to tout. Giuliani's close adviser Tony Carbonetti ruled out a Senate bid back in September, but maybe he's changed his mind. He's crushing Gillibrand in the polls right now, and the Senate could be a better place from which to prepare a 2012 presidential bid, lacking as it does all the unpleasantness associated with actually governing a nearly ungovernable state.
• He would prefer to secretly make millions of dollars from former cocaine smugglers and Arab dictators through Giuliani Partners, his consulting firm. Sounds like a plan, although most of those clients only pay those millions of dollars as a bet that one day he'll be governor of New York, or president.
• He doesn't want to run for president in 2012 against Sarah Palin, so why bother? He lost his first bid for the Replublican nomination for a reason: He's a gay-loving abortionist whose name ends in a vowel and whose children hate him. The ever-diminishing number of angry people who describe themselves as Republicans are going to flock to Palin over him. And maybe he's betting that terrorism—the only thing that he can flog on his resume, despite the fact that his role in the 9/11 attacks is more properly described as disaster management than anything to do with combating terrorism—won't be as ripe an issue on which to base a campaign in 2012.
• He's about to be indicted. Please?

Gaspard, who is besties with Cuomo, had a little meeting with Paterson last week. Paterson apparently neglected to decide on the spot to hand the the governor's mansion over to a legacy admission, and so, a week later, the White House arranged a front-page New York Times story on how the White House did not support this stupid incompetent unpopular Democratic governor of New York (half of whose staff is currently made up of Hillary Clinton vets).

And that was stupid. Because this is not Chicago and people do not take kindly to Rahm Emanuel muscling in on local matters. And Paterson would have to be an incredibly weak-willed and self-loathing politician to decide to step aside now. It's incredible to imagine that no one in the White House foresaw the Times gambit making the Governor dig in, but that appears to be what happened. And there is precedent:

Lloyd Grove, who's been around, remembers when Rahm tried this exact same tactic with a conservative Democratic senator in 1993. That little Senator grew up to be Richard Shelby, still a senator from Alabama, but now a Republican. (This tone-deaf approach to political hardball also suggests that Rahm is much better at whipping up support in the House than in the incredibly self-important and thin-skinned Senate.)

The five directors haven't been named, but Cuomo wants to know whether they misled shareholders in the weeks leading up to its merger with Merrill Lynch, especially about the $36 million in extra losses that were posted after the deal was complete. But Cuomo's not stopping there:

Cuomo plans to subpoena most, if not all, of the directors over the next several weeks, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. Bank of America chief executive Kenneth D. Lewis has already testified.

These subpoenas, sources say, could be part of a game plan to bring charges against some Bank officials. And, even if that's not true, this will make great campaign fodder should Cuomo run for governor next year.

In an effort to test the waters, Giuliani has been meeting with Republican leaders and even convinced the state's Republican Party chairman Joseph N. Mondello to resign so that his friend, Henry F. Wojtaszek, can take the position. In addition, Giuliani held a meeting with leaders in Buffalo and told them that he will decide his fate over the course of the next 30-60 days. It shouldn't take that long.

There's very little chance that current Governor David Paterson will run, because only 32% of New York voters view him in a favorable light. And, more importantly, he's trailing 65-23% when pitted against his most-likely challenger, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. It's unlikely the state's Democratic party would pick Paterson over Cuomo. It's just common sense. So, let's assume Cuomo runs... Giuliani's people insist he's not thinking about the competition, but you know that's just talk. How could he not be eyeing Cuomo, who's approval ratings are sky high: 67% of Empire State residents gave him the thumbs up at the end of June, only a slight dip from his personal high of 71% in March.

Even if Giuliani's not worried about current polls, he should remember the presidential primary. In January of last year, about 40% of New Yorkers said they would likely vote for John McCain, Giuliani's then-rival. That's not very inspiring for Giuliani, who liked to highlight his post-9/11 leadership abilities, which inspired his ridiculous "America's Mayor" projection.

As if that's not enough, there's another Cuomo-related hurdle: the Clintons. Cuomo worked as President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Then, during last year's primaries, Cuomo was a voracious Hillary Clinton supporter.

The Clintons remember their friends (and their enemies), so we're assuming the power couple would throw their weight behind Cuomo. Yes, Giuliani has become tight with Sarah Palin, but even the former Alaska Governor is no match for the Clinton machine. And that machine which will no doubt be handy when it comes to raising campaign for Cuomo, who as of last month had $5.1 million on hand.

Giuliani would be much better off remaining in the private sector, where he can lord over his two companies — both of which he would have to abandon should he choose to run — and make thousands giving motivational and policy speeches. Of course, this is politics and things could change at any moment, especially if Giuliani asks current NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg to be his running mate, as many believe he will.

Still, we're not convinced Giuliani should run. But he probably will, because he's a cocky kind of guy and if he's delusional enough to think he could be president, he's absolutely convinced the Governor's mansion has his name on it.

Via a Page Six item, the joke in question came during a talk on climate change moderated by Charlie Rose: Gore was discussing the discovery of small pockets of oil (probably something about the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, a favorite topic of his), relating such events to "the way junkies find things between their toes."

Funny? Not so much, (A) because drug arrests kinda run in the family and (B) as reported this morning, Laura Ling and Euna Lee - the two journalists under his employ at Current.TV who were detained by the North Korean government for enterting the country illegally - are going to be facing further trials this week, with no definitive end or positive resolution in sight.

'I don't think North Korea is holding back the trial results, but is actually continuing the trial,' said an unnamed source described by South Korea's Yonhap news agency as being 'familiar' with the case.

Gore has been silent on the issue, Current.TV told their people to not say a word about it. It's no less disconcerting that Gore was, according to the Page Six item, at a fundraiser for Andrew Cuomo earlier in the day, instead of working - doing something, anything - to free his employees from what's probably the worst work-related trip of all time. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's now threatening to put North Korea back on our country's list of "Terror States" as of this morning, and President Obama just told them that we're not playin' when it comes to nuclear proliferation as of yesterday. Things are absolutely getting worse, and it's pretty clear that if North Korea views Ling and Lee as diplomatic pawns, our government sure as hell doesn't.

Gore's got several points of entry he can make: among the few political issues Pyongyang takes "public" is climate change. The North Korean government loves to have their asses kissed, and the Department of State hasn't ruled out Gore's involvement, so him coming simply as a diplomat couldn't be a bad thing.

So what's Gore waiting for? Our government's approval? A PR angle? Whatever it is, it better come quick. There's virtually no idea out there of what Ling and Lee are going through, or how they're being treated. Ling and Lee could be fine. They could simply get deported, get off scot-free. But Lee's got family in South Korea. Who, you know, North Korea doesn't really like. Which is besides Americans, which Ling and Lee both are.

And this thing just continues to get worse by the second.

Al Gore Has Foot-In-Mouth [Page Six]
2 US journalists still on trial [The Straits Times]

....Which is not something you'd find out by reading the NYT's story on the matter. It does a great job explaining how Andrew Cuomo just filed a civil suit against Merkin alleging "fraud and deception," for collecting $470 million in fees just for handing billions over to Madoff. But it doesn't say anything about Daphne Merkin, J. Ezra's sister, who's a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. And who wrote a piece on Madoff with a grossly inadequate disclosure just last month!

When Daphne wrote her breezy op-ed about how Madoff's victims aren't really victims, the totality of her disclosure was a parenthetical statement that "I did not know Mr. Madoff nor did I invest with his firm, but have a sibling who did business with him." That pissed off lots of people, including the Times' public editor. But since then, the paper has not appended any more disclosure to the piece, nor have they run any sort of correction, apparently. Here are the three most recent Merkin-related corrections from the NYT:

February 21, 2009 Saturday
Late Edition - Final
CORRECTIONS

An article last Saturday about an adviser to the money manager J. Ezra Merkin, who invested $2 billion of his clients' money with Bernard L. Madoff, overstated action taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the early 1990s against the adviser. Although the adviser, Victor Teicher, who provided investment advice to Mr. Merkin while Mr. Teicher was in prison for securities fraud, was barred by the S.E.C. from providing investment advice to registered securities advisers, he was not barred from advising unregistered advisers like Mr. Merkin.

The article also may have left the incorrect impression that Mr. Teicher was required to disclose his arrangement with Mr. Merkin in two unsuccessful applications to the S.E.C. in 2007 and 2008 in his effort to re-enter the securities business. The terms of his agreement with the S.E.C. did not require such a disclosure.

January 17, 2009 Saturday
Late Edition - Final
CORRECTION

An article on Friday about J. Ezra Merkin, a New York financier under investigation in the Bernard Madoff fraud,
Enhanced Coverage Linking
Madoff fraud, misstated the losses of Bard College, whose money Mr. Merkin invested with Mr. Madoff. It lost $3 million of its $11 million investment, not the entire investment. The article also referred incorrectly to the role of the late Leon Levy in Mr. Merkin's appointment to the board of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. While Mr. Levy introduced Mr. Merkin to Bard officials, he did not recommend him for the board.

December 18, 2008 Thursday
Late Edition - Final
CORRECTIONS

Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about the effect on several charities of a fraud involving a Wall Street investment fund run by Bernard L. Madoff misidentified an investment concern that worked with Mr. Madoff's fund on behalf of the SAR Academy, a Jewish school in the Bronx. It is Ascot Partners, an investment fund operated by J. Ezra Merkin — not the Ascot Fund, which is a charity affiliated with the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.

Also because of an editing error, the article misstated the effect of the closing of the JEHT Foundation, whose money was invested in Mr. Madoff's fund, on the Center for Investigative Reporting. The center has received significant grants over the years from the foundation and its budget this year includes money from previous JEHT grants, but the center is not ''losing revenue.''

Nitpicky! But not when it comes to his sister. So anyhow, J. Ezra Merkin has been sued by the AG for his Madoff-related activities, and his sister writes for the New York Times, sometimes about Madoff-related activities, but their relationship is not worth discussing much.

"At this moment, with emotions running high, it is important that we proceed diligently, with care, reflection, and sober judgment," Cuomo said in a statement. Oh, now, after whipping the mob into a froth that has AIG employees fearing for their lives, the politician is concerned about care and judgment. Or maybe he's afraid for his own safety — now that he has that list of names he's been promising the public he'd extract from an unwilling AIG, and he's keeping it from them.

Cuomo sent a letter to AIG's CEO demanding the names of everyone in the insurance company's Financial Product unit—you may know them as "the credit-default swaps guys" or possibly "those motherfucking cocksuckers who broke the global economy"—who got "retention pay," because yeah you really want to hold on to those guys.

Clearly the best part of this is the 4 p.m. deadline, like Cuomo is a damn gunfighter or something. If this is the sort of stuff he's going to pull before running for governor and then resigning in disgrace after a year because he slept with a hooker, than more power to Andrew Cuomo, we say. (IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN.)

Yes, a man identifying himself as "an official of NAMBLA," the punchline organization of out and proud pedophiles, announced on some unnamed Bronx-based message board that his organization raised "$10,000 to shoot Andrew Cuomo in the face." Law enforcement is taking this threat almost as seriously as the Post is!

The shocking death threat by the infamous organization of pederasts was posted three weeks ago on an Internet news-group bulletin board that originated in The Bronx, law-enforcement sources said.

The threat, described by a source as "unprecedented" because it is believed to come from an organization, prompted a sweeping and ongoing criminal probe by the Attorney General's Office and at least one other law-enforcement organization, and subpoenas were issued, sources said.

In addition, investigators have "linked" the message to "an imprisoned pervert with strong NAMBLA ties." And now New York's attorney general is traveling with armed guards. The entire organization of NAMBLA consists nowadays of a website and a P.O. box, so we wouldn't be inclined to take their fundraising claims seriously, but this is why no one asks us to protect public officials.

Cops "tracked the message" to some woman in the Bronx who maintains a "news group," but they won't tell us which newsgroup. But we all know 4Chan comes from that kid in Long Island, so... we're just gonna guess it was this one.

Dowd's Kennedy column

Dowd wrote that Kennedy has no qualifications, and can't talk properly. When confronted with these deficiencies in Sarah Palin, Dowd referred to the Republican vice presidential nominee's "thin résumé," called her "underqualified," a "bantamweight," and "the two-year governor of an oversized igloo."

Kennedy's government work is far thinner, but, hey, inexperience is a plus these days (four months later):

People complain that the 51-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School grad and author is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to artfully market herself, and is someone who hasn’t spent her life glad-handing, backstabbing and logrolling. I say, thank God.

But Kennedy sucks just enough at politics: There are senators who sucked worse!.

People are suddenly awfully choosy about who gets to go to the former home of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Robert Torricelli.

Right, probably because New Yorkers would never have voted for those first two guys, or re-elected the third. But, hey, let's have Kennedy, because who cares about the senate, right??

None of this necessarily constitutes institutional bias on the part the paper; Dowd reserves the right to be batshit illogical about basically anyone, anytime, for any reason, such as "I know Caroline Kennedy. She’s smart, cultivated, serious and unpretentious."

Confessore on Kennedy's rival

Moving on to the Times' other Kennedy item today, Nick Confessore found anonymous sources to say an aide of Kennedy rival Andrew Cuomo strongly "suggested" to vaious labor leaders and upstate officials that they not endorse Kennedy. Cuomo isn't officially campaigning for the senate seat even though he totally wants it.

The paper did something similar a few weeks ago on Bloomberg's aide politicking for Kennedy. Balance!

Any California customer of the five ISPs already signed on in New York is included in the restrictions. For customers, the initiative's inability to target porn-serving newsgroups means the loss of access to many innocent newsgroups. But there are countless workarounds for Usenet users, a demographic dominated by technical types, to get access. For Cuomo et al., the initiative sounds so good on paper that they don't have to even bother making it work.

“You can’t help but look at this material and not be disturbed,” Cuomo told the New York Times. Double negatives aside, we wouldn't argue with Cuomo — except that most of Usenet, no matter how offensive or value-lacking, does not contain child pornography. As journalist Debbie Nathan reported from The Academy of Forensic Sciences conference on child porn, even the feds are having a hard time deciding what's real and not out there. In this case, Cuomo's office is armed with software that compares this "established" child porn with possible child porn, an application that sounds a lot like the one YouTube offered up to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children earlier this year. They say their database of searchable child porn contains 11,000 images. If anyone wants to know where to find some "disturbing material", at least they know where to start.

This is apparently the first time these ISPs have agreed to censor certain web content. (AOL, whose user base is shrinking, has already blocked certain content, according to the Times.) And once that line is crossed, theoretically it could be pushed to block more and more porn. The first iteration of this filter will probably block just this universally illegal and dangerous content. But with this tool in place nationwide, another federal A.G. like Alberto Gonzales would find it much easier to enforce draconian obscenity laws. (A relevant concern: Just last week a federal jury convicted pornographer Max Hardcore of criminal obscenity for his consensual of-age extreme pornography.)

A filter doesn't stop child porn; it just moves the problem somewhere else. The distributors will just find new ways to pass the porn along, new ways to disguise it, ways to get around the cataloging system that Cuomo's office uses to search for child porn. (Since only law enforcement is allowed to view child porn so they can make sure no one else ever does, one can only speculate what leads a person to land a job on the child porn task force and how much Cuomo's description of child porn — "These are 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, assault victims, there are animals in the pictures" — comes from direct experience.)

The decision also turns the country into Cuomo's de facto jurisdiction. If the content is coming from inside New York, why hasn't Cuomo's office shut down and prosecuted the source? If it's not from New York, how does Cuomo have authority? He argues that ISPs are responsible, and it is hard to refute the logic that no one should knowingly allow someone else to view child pornography. But isn't stopping it his job in the first place?

Photo of Andrew Cuomo by Getty

UPDATE: A Time Warner spokesperson says the Times was wrong, and the company does not plan to block any web sites, but it will access to all newsgroups.

Never mind that according to research, only 7 percent of arrests for statutory rape are Internet-related. And that experts say the best way to keep sex-offender recidivism rates low is to allow the criminal to live in a stable environment where he can get a job and live a normal life. This bill will pass. Facebook will have cover from litigation. Cuomo will have his Eliot-Spitzer moment. And nothing, really, will have been accomplished.