Democrat Bill Owens originally had a 5,000 vote lead over Hoffman. That vote shrank to 3,000. There are 5,800 of absentee votes left to count! And though Hoffman would need to win 75% of those votes, and though presumably many of those votes were cast before Republican Dede Scozzafava withdrew from the race (and endorsed Owens), Hoffman has decided that his concession was premature. Well, Glenn Beck decided that Hoffman's concession was premature. And Hoffman just does whatever Glenn Beck says. Because he is a true conservative.

The AP got a copy of Goin' Rogue, Also: Modern Warfare 2 and they totally read it even, which is probably more than Sarah can say.

"... [S]he says that most of her legal bills were generated defending what she called frivolous ethics complaints, but she reveals that about one-tenth of the $500,000 was a bill she received to pay for the McCain campaign vetting her for the VP nod.

She said when she asked the McCain campaign if it would help her financially, she was told McCain's camp would have paid all the bills if he'd won; since he lost, the vetting legal bills were her responsibility."

You may be shocked to learn that this is not a thing that happens, ever, "billing" someone for their own "vetting." The McCain campaign paid for its own vetting. Maybe Sarah Palin paid her own lawyer for lawyering work during that process? In that case, her lawyer would've been billing her for his services, to her, and that is not a thing John McCain made her pay for.

And the other thing, where the McCain campaign did not pay her legal bills for her own legal problems related to Troopergate and other ethics investigations? In addition to not being his responsibility, the McCain campaign thought it would probably violate the law to pay her legal bills with campaign money.

(Oh, Sarah Palin Facebooked about this:

As you probably have heard, the AP snagged a copy of my memoir, 'Going Rogue,' before its Tuesday release. And as is expected, the AP and a number of subsequent media outlets are erroneously reporting the contents of the book.

To be fair, the AP originally reported that McCain handed her a $500,000 bill. The real price on the imaginary bill that Palin made up for her book of lies and hate was $50,000. So she is totally right.)

The scorched earth style of opposition does indeed work at dragging down Obama and the Democrats' numbers. But it also keeps approval of Republicans down, and "generic Republicans" still do not poll better than Democrats. They're probably poised to pick up 15 to 25 House seats next year, especially if Democrats again don't bother to get the youth vote out and if the "recovery" continues to be jobless. But the Republican were also supposed to hold on to an upstate New York district they've represented for 150 years, until the tea parties, Sarah Palin, and the Club for Growth got involved.

Maybe the excommunication of moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava was an aberration, and the grownups will rein in the activists and run electable Chris Christie types. But if they do, the disgruntled anti-authoritarian Glenn Beck acolytes will rebel.

Already, the Club for Growth—which threw a lot of money at NY-23 and in doing so gave the seat to the Democrats—has endorsed Marco Rubio for Senate in Florida. Rubio is the conservative challenging popular moderate governor Charlie Crist. As governor, Crist enjoys approval ratings in the high 60s among Democrats, independents, and Republicans. But Marco Rubio enjoys the support of George Will, The National Review, and the aforementioned very wealthy Club for Growth.

Rubio is, at the moment, polling below the likely Democratic nominee, which is a feat, because no one knows who the Democratic nominee is, as a race against Crist was not expected to be winnable.

Meanwhile, out in broken California, the Republicans have decided to launch a real challenge to Senator Barbara Boxer for the first time since she took office. With Boxer facing rising unfavorable numbers, former Hewlett-Packard executive McCain campaign insider Carly Fiorina decided to throw her hat in the ring. Fiorina has a lot of money, good name recognition, and might appeal to moderates and women who are tired of Boxer. So, of course, True Conservatives are beginning to rally behind a crazy man named Chuck DeVore, an Assemblyman who is currently tied with Fiorina in the polls.

What sort of Republican is this DeVore character? Let's look at something he wrote last week in an Amazon review.

American Progressives and European fascist theorists admired each other and exchanged ideas. From William James to Georges Sorel, from eugenics to the militarization of society ("War on Poverty" anyone? It was William James who penned the "Moral Equivalent of War" in 1906), both the American left and European fascists sought to remake society using crises to urge action to justify bigger government at the expense of individual liberty.

Ronald Reagan had it right in 1981, when he remarked that Roosevelt's New Deal had much in common with Mussolini's fascism, including frequent words of praise from Roosevelt's brain trust directed towards Italy in the 1930s.

Good luck becoming a Senator from California, sir!

This is all sort of like if Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy had been to run clones of himself in all 50 states, instead of diverting money to Democrats who actually had chances to win. So there are basically two end games:

• Republican infighting leads to unelectable candidates losing what should've been easy pickups across the board.
• Apocalyptic death cult masquerading as Republican party makes the usual midterm gains, Congress promptly shuts down federal government again, Obama impeached for lying under oath about where he was born.

It's a good thing none of the tangible benefits of health care reform are scheduled to go into effect until 2013! Otherwise the Death Panel lines would be unbearable come 2011.

Ben Smith followed Mike Huckabee around for a while as he sold his new Christmas book.

Huckabee was the governor of Arkansas. He used to be fat, and then he got skinny, and now he is getting fat again. He's also basically as crazy Christian as they come, but he masks this with a genuinely likable sense of humor, which is why he has a TV program on Fox now.

He won Iowa in 2008. He is raising a lot of money. He just won a Gallup poll of potential 2012 Republican candidates. But he has two problems: Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney.

Palin is the more marketable and exciting version of him, both because she says much dumber and insane things and also she is an attractive lady. Romney is the guy who will almost certainly actually win the nomination, because the sensible money guys in the party like him, despite the fact that he is Mormon Robot.

Here is Huckabee being totally not bitter about Sarah Palin stealing his gimmick:

"Some of the people who had excoriated me and really been very dismissive of me for views that I had taken, and labeled me anything from a populist to an ignoramus - the same people have been very defensive [of] and laudatory to Sarah Palin," Huckabee noted, adding that he'd invited her to appear on his weekly Fox show but "could never get any contact."

"I'm glad she's getting the props - I know I'm not nearly as attractive," he said with a guileless grin.

Now Huckabee is just eating his way across America, trying to get people excited about his book, insulting all the other Republicans who were and are mean to him. Pat Toomey and the Club for Growth—the Wall Street wing of the activist conservative movement—still hate him, which will make fundraising hard. And he still openly hates and ridicules Romney, which will probably prevent him from getting the VP slot.

You don't really need to worry about the Republicans in 2012. Unlike solar flares and earthquakes and volcanoes and stuff.

And then they lied about it to John Aravosis. (Sort of.) Which is just fucking stupid. It's one thing to not bother to support your gay constituency, it's another to insult them.

We're told OFA is organizing an effective health care lobbying campaign, but it still looks like the DNC is neutering OFA's progressive tendencies and OFA is still distracting the DNC from organizing for non-Obama-related local campaigns.

First of all: two awesome TV ads. Governor Paterson looks so much more professional clean-shaven, right? We miss the mustache though. The first ad is all "I never asked to be governor and also I have too won some political victories" and the second one is mostly "look, you don't actually know anything about this man, so we will tell you that he was very smart and went to Columbia and stuff."

But why TV ads, now? Because he would like to raise money. And you have to spend campaign money to make money.

Ickes was, maybe, the most reality-based of the triumvirate of assholes who destroyed Hillary Clinton's dreams, but he was also the guy still running around in June of 2008 crowing about how superdelegates and his magical maps of Michigan meant certain victory for the White Lady of Experience.

Still: he was and is not Mark Penn. For the most part, Paterson has hired the Good Clinton People, leaving the Bad Clinton People to Bloomberg and evil PR firms and the Wall Street Journal and little talking head boxes on Fox News.

Meanwhile, the Governor is preparing to push for gay marriage again. And it will fail, spectacularly. This is maybe a smart way to point out how evil and useless everyone else in Albany is, and how that is not even the governor's fault, or it is maybe just him trying to fuck with the State Senate because he hates them.

As we mentioned on Monday, Dan Halloran is a member of a pre-Christian pagan religion that worships the Norse gods. There were actual photos of him performing rituals and stuff. He is the "First Atheling" of his "theod."

And he is a now a Republican City Council member from Queens. So, hey, let's all hoist our horns of mead, in his honor.

(Obviously voters across the nation are sick of Barack Obama's liberal monotheism, and this bodes il for Abrahamic Democrats in 2010.)

Sure, if you live in New Jersey or Virginia you might've thought the gubernatorial campaigns in those two states were mostly about taxes and jobs (and weight), but that is wrong. These were shadow reelection campaigns for Barack Obama, and he lost both of them, because he is a failure.

Republican Bob McDonnell won in Virginia by a huge margin against Democrat Creigh Deeds, who was a white, conservative Democrat from southern Virginia, thus ensuring that not a single member of the coalition that won VA for Obama in 2008 would turn out to vote.

In Jersey, Republican Chris Christie squeaked by incumbent Jon Corzine. Corzine's was the campaign Obama belatedly lent his support to, once Corzine's double-digit polling deficit shrank to a couple points. This campaign was entirely about property taxes, basically, and so a Republican who campaigned entirely on cutting proptery taxes won.

Once again, gubernatorial elections have almost nothing to do with national politics. They are not House and Senate races. Meanwhile, in the nation's only two House races yesterday, Democrats won. They won handily in a California race that no one paid attention to, because a safe Democratic seat staying Democratic is not as newsworthy as a safe Republican seat that almost went to a Republican until national movement conservatives freaked out and excommunicated Dede Scozzafava from the Church of Teabagging. And then a Democrat won in New York's 23rd. He won a seat that's been a gimme for Republicans since a 1992 redistricting. (Before it was redistricted, this area of the state has been Republican since the 19th century. In 2002 the Republican ran unopposed.)

Please keep in mind that Obama picked up a new Democratic vote in the House of Representatives while you read some analysis piece on how Obama has just been crushed, politically.

As we said before, the special election in New York's 23rd was the only race yesterday that had anything to do with national politics, because movement conservatives inserted themselves into the race and promptly lost. In what could easily actually be a preview of next year's midterms, teabaggers and the conservative Club for Growth and Sarah Palin all threw their support behind a candidate they found more acceptable than the Republican, and their guy lost. As activists from out of town flooded the district, shouting nonsense about ACORN and waving "Don't Tread on Me" flags, imagining they'd already won, the Democrat turned out the vote and rode to victory on the back of union support and the president's popularity in the region.

And look at that: unions and GOTV made the difference! Hell, some of that might've won New York for Bill Thompson, even without Obama's support!

Here is the real lesson about and for Obama, though, and it touches on every single race yesterday: in 2008, Obama borrowed Howard Dean's 50-state strategy for the Democrats—open and staff DNC offices in every state to organize and run campaigns at every level—and applied it to the presidential primaries and general elections. He raised a ridiculous amount of money and compiled an amazing email list and organized a huge number of volunteers and won the presidency.

After the election, Obama turned those campaign resources into Organizing For America, "a grassroots network wielding some 13 million email addresses to mobilize former volunteers on behalf of the administration's agenda." And then they folded it into the DNC and they didn't do anything with it for months. And then it turned out that this massive organization couldn't be utilized to do much besides fundraise and canvass, and furthermore its ties to the DNC and the White House mean it can't actually be used to push progressive causes, which are the causes that this massive volunteer army cares about.

This means, basically, that the DNC has neutered Obama's progressive volunteer army and that massive volunteer army has consumed the DNC. The whole operation is now a 2012 reelection campaign already in progress, and if you are a local Democrat looking for organizing and canvassing and fundraising support of the kind Howard Dean promised to create for you back when he was in charge, you are shit out of luck.

This is the most worrying indicator for 2010. They need to fix this.

NOM raised a zillion dollars or so from hateful bigots across the nation whose names they refuse to disclose, which is, of course, a violation of state campaign finance law. But if it works, who gives a shit? 53% of Maine voters agreed that if the gays get married, they will attempt to force the children to learn, in public schools, that gay people exist, and that they should not be beaten to death for crimes against God.

Once again we learn the shocking truth that putting the civil rights of minority groups to a popular vote does not work very well. Crazy, right?

Here is a classic sketch from The Dana Carvey Show that is more relevant than ever, again:

Thanks to his brilliant campaign maneuvering, Bloomberg earned a landslide just-over-50% victory over Bill Thompson, a local man who is notable for not being Mike Bloomberg.

It was a slimy, scorched earth campaign. Bloomberg didn't campaign for a third term of Mike Bloomberg, he campaigned on the utter pointlessness of bothering to show up to vote for anyone else. Bloomberg won 50,342 more votes than Bill Thompson. Again, we remind you, because no one else bothers to: every night, 40,000 people sleep in New York city homeless shelters. (At the peak of the '80s homelessness crisis, that number was 29,000. It was around 30,000 when Bloomberg began his first term. Thousands more sleep on the streets.)

All the papers have done the math, pointing out that Bloomberg spent $151.27 on each vote. That's not really accurate. He spent that $100 million convincing people not to vote. And it worked.

To sum up our feelings this morning: fuck the New York Democratic Party, fuck Christine Quinn, fuck Barack Obama, fuck Valerie Jarrett, fuck Anthony Weiner, hard, and, in closing, fuck Howard Wolfson and his fucking Cosby sweaters and his fucking boring taste in fucking terrible indie music. (And fuck Jimmy Fallon.)

The Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races have nothing to do with Obama or national politics, at all, except in that Obama did not do as much campaigning and organizing in those two races as the Democratic candidates would've liked. Otherwise, they are strictly local races and the results will reflect only the material concerns of the residents of those states. Still! They have been in the news a lot, so let us talk about them.

New Jersey: Incumbent Governor Jon Corzine is a very rich former Goldman Sachs executive. Despite that, he was a pretty good liberal Senator, for a couple years (he voted against the war!). But then, like a moron, he decided to govern the ungovernable state of New Jersey. He was promptly met with a government shutdown and huge budget problems and a populace that enjoyed the various programs the government provided but did not want to pay so many taxes all the time, or at all. And so he has had to cut spending, which makes everyone mad, and raise some taxes, which made everyone mad.

So waddling in comes Republican Chris "The Big Man" Christie, who has a brilliant plan: he will cut taxes! And cut wasteful government spending! Sounds wonderful! Christie was initially kicking Corzine's ass in the polls, and Democrats wrote off Corzine. But Corzine, who is very rich, remember, launched a hilariously negative ad campaign against Christie. Now, because Christie is fat and also because he's refused to give any details at all on what he would do as governor besides "not be Jon Corzine" (but mostly because he is fat), he is neck-and-neck with Corzine.

That tie is also thanks to this guy named Steve Chris Daggett, who is running as an independent, which means "the guy you vote for if you hate Corzine but don't want to vote for a fat Republican." Daggett is running on a platform of cutting everyone's property taxes, which is always a wonderful idea.

This one is a toss-up.

Now: do you see anything in that summary about Barack Obama's approval ratings, or health care reform's popularity, or Nancy Pelosi? No, you don't. This has nothing to do with anything besides the terribleness of New Jersey's government and populace.

Virginia Virginia does not allow governors to serve consecutive terms, which is nuts, but it keeps things interesting. So there is Republican Robert F. McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds. But stupid Deeds is a rural southern Virginia Democrat, not one of the rich suburban northern liberal Virginians, so he is not really exciting those Obama voters! Or black voters! So the coalitions that helped Obama win Virginia will probably not be turning out for Deeds. McDonnell is a tremendous asshole but this race is his to lose. Once again: this has nothing to do with national politics, except that people who vote on national issues don't usually turn out for off-year races.

New York's 23rd Congressional District This one is wonderful. Barack Obama appointed a Republican congressman from a safe Republican upstate New York seat to be the Secretary of the Army. The local Republicans decided to nominate a local Republican assemblywoman to take his place. But!!! While she is a Regular New York State Republican, she is also pro-abortion and pro-gays. So, hah, the complete lunatics who run the national Republican party, with blogs and TV shows and so on, went nuts and decided to throw their support behind the Conservative Party candidate.

New York's Conservative Party was invented to police the local Republicans, who have a tendency to be more liberal than Republicans elsewhere, because they want to get elected. It was also invented so that William Buckley could run for mayor on a "John Lindsay sucks and I am so awesome" platform. (Fun fact: Buckley supported congestion pricing! And also police brutality. He was always big on police brutality.)

So! The regular "moderate" Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, was called all sorts of names by the internet, and every Republican who endorsed her, like Newt Gingrich, got called even more names, by the internet. The Club For Growth then organized the grassroots conservative campaign for the Conservative Party candidate, some guy named Hoffman who does not actually live in the district and who is also not very smart. Sarah Palin's Facebook page sealed the deal, and suddenly every Republican who wants movement approval and money had to endorse Hoffman. Scozzafava finally quit the race (though she remains on the ballot) and, hilariously, endorsed the Democrat.

Hoffman will probably pull this one off. Frank Rich thinks this is a good thing, because the Republicans are forcing out even more of their electable moderates, and making the party more extreme and more white. Josh Marshall seems to concur, comparing it to when Rush Limbaugh was making everyone apologize to him a while back.

And, ok guys, it is maybe beneficial to the Democrats for the Republicans to become even less inclusive and even less able to adapt to the new America and all that.

But honestly, because of our intractable and entrenched two-party system, all this really means is that the next time the Republicans take back control of any portion of the government they will be even more destructive and evil than they were before.

There is one last race you should keep an eye on, though:

Queens NYC City Council District 19 This race to represent Bayside pits Democrat Kevin Kim, who'd be the first Korean-American elected to the New York city council, against Republican Dan Halloran, who is a pagan lord who worships ancient Norse gods.

As the Tribune first pointed out, Halloran is "First Atheling," or prince, of a Germanic neo-heathenist "theod" or tribe. State records show that he incorporated the group in 2002 with the official name of "New Normannii Reik of Theodish Belief."

Colloquially, Halloran's followers refer to their tribe as "New Normandy," with a territory that incorporates New York City and parts of New Jersey (some of Halloran's Pennsylvania tribesmen recently broke away — with his blessing — to form their own group, which they call "Arfstoll Thjod").

Obviously there's nothing wrong with being a modern pagan (except that it is dumb), but this particular branch of paganism has been quite popular with white supremacists. Not that this guy his a White Supremacist! Like many Pagans, he may just enjoy playing dress-up.

You know those idiots who don't know anything about politics but think it sounds smart to say "I am a social liberal and an economic conservative?" Bloomberg is the candidate for them, if they love a liberal nanny state and a conservative religious fervor for the eternal goodness of private enterprise.

For all the talk of Bloomberg the power-player who at least gets things done without worrying about the unions and special interests, he's been unable to win any political battle with anyone he couldn't literally buy off. Like Sheldon Silver, who (thankfully) killed the West Side Stadium and (annoyingly) ended all that "Congestion Pricing" talk. And those unions and special interests were just bought off, which worked fine back when the boom whose end Bloomberg never saw coming was in full swing.

And about that stadium: what the fuck was that? And the Olympics thing? After bitching about Giuliani's disgraceful subsidizing of the fucking Yankees, Bloomberg both turns around completely on that particular issue and attempts to build the fucking Jets a stadium, so that New York could get an Olympics that it did not want. And that failed, and everyone forgot about it. Meanwhile: 40,000 people in shelters! Bloomberg could personally buy every single one of those people an apartment in a vacant Williamsburg luxury condo building and still have enough left over to bribe a City Council member into supporting his fifth term.

And those luxury Williamsbug condo buildings, by the way, that stand vacant? Yes, well, that was part of this brilliant plan to utilize rezoning to spur the free market (which always allocates resources more efficiently than anything else in the history of civilization but sometimes it needs government help, like with tax breaks and stuff) to create affordable housing all over the waterfront. This did not work, as developers decided to just not bother to build all those affordable housing units they were supposed to build. More than 2,200 promised new affordable apartments in Williamsburg and Greenpoint have turned out to be 768, 20 percent of which are renovations of apartments that were already affordable. There are lots more of these stories.

His record on housing, like his record on nearly everything having to do with the outer boroughs and poverty and human beings who make less than $100,000 a year, has been a ridiculous disgrace. His entire philosophy of development solving everything turned out to be precisely, 100% wrong, and suddenly the city itself was driving the real estate boom, driving up land prices to absurd levels across the boroughs and tearing down neighborhoods only to replace them with vacant lots and half-filled cheaply built hideous high-rises once the bottom fell out of the City Hall-inflated market. But hey, we got the High Line and 311! So you can sleep in that fancy park while you call 311 asking if there is room in a shelter because you can no longer afford your home.

Eight years into the Bloomberg administration, Ground Zero is a still a hole that everyone continues fighting about.

The MTA has raised fares while cutting service (without actually cutting service, officially—it's just that whatever line you happen to ride is suddenly experiencing a whole lot of track work every single goddamn weekend).

The Gays: still not married! And also a lot of them are getting beaten up on the streets these days for some reason?

Bloomberg is also the beneficiary of the most friendly news coverage of any big city mayor in the nation. Easily. It helps that, you know, he is a media mogul, himself, and he is good, close, personal friends with the three publishers who run the newspapers that went after each one of his predecessors for shit they've let slide under this mayor, because they know he's a good, decent guy, at heart, and the only one who can Fix New York, because of his Money.

Can you imagine how the Post would've blown up if David Dinkins lied about taking the Subway to work every day? The Daily News response to discovering that John Lindsay flew to Bermuda every weekend?

Let's talk about the cops, for a second: they are still operating under Giuliani levels of complete disregard for the law. They are getting drunk and running people over and shooting unarmed black people and sodomizing people in subway stations. The Civilian Complaint Review Board has become a joke, unless your case gets a lot of publicity. There's obviously no accountability, whatsoever, and no attempt to recruit and train more cops from the communities they actually police. The NYPD remains, primarily, the home of roided-out white people from outside the city with a great deal of contempt for civil liberties. The Mayor always sounds properly upset when some of them rape someone, but he's never done a damn thing to rein them in or change the culture.

What he has done is Keep Us Safe by never once giving a shit about Civil Liberties. The cops stop and frisk thousands more people every year, your 4th Amendment rights do not apply in the Subway system, and expensive and completely ineffective new rings of cameras are going up across Manhattan.

Bloomberg deserves to be run out of town on an inadequately funded public rail line for the 2004 GOP convention alone. Remember that ridiculous farce? No, of course not, no one does, besides the thousands of people improperly spied on, arrested, harassed, and detained by the NYPD. All of this was completely illegal. No heads rolled.

One more special bonus factoid: New York leads the world in marijuana arrests! Specifically, marijuana arrests of black people!

And he is personally a jerk. He is a thin-skinned, unpleasant, sanctimonious asshole. His company is being sued for a culture of sexual discrimination that plaintiffs say Bloomberg himself contributed to. He is a tremendous dick to reporters whenever he gets cranky. He is fucking race-baiting with Rudy Giuliani again, because why not?

He has been a shitty mayor and he does not deserve the support of anyone who claims to be a liberal. Though what all of his most destructive missteps as mayor have in common is that they do not in any way upset or inconvenience the well-off self-professed liberals who support him. Besides maybe a couple Critical Mass riders arrested in illegal sweeps. (Though he sure does like bike lanes, so it's a wash, right?)

We cannot encourage you to vote for the Democrat in the race, because even we still aren't sure if we'll go for him or the much more delightful Billy Talen. Just don't fucking vote for Michael Bloomberg.

This "pretending to be George Washington on Twitter" game is actually one of the least embarrassing things about Newt Gingrich, of course. He was also the first Speaker of the House to be forced to pay a $300,000 penalty for ethics violations, he shut down the federal government because the president was rude to him during a plane ride, he left his first wife as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from cancer, and he left his second wife for one of the women he was sleeping with during his impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton. Never in his political career have his favorable ratings outweighed his unfavorables. And he keeps accidentally giving awards to porn producers and strippers.

But he is a dreamer! And we will hear about how he is considering this run for president for years, and no one will bring up all the terrible things about him, besides scumbag bloggers.

Forward men, forward!

[Illustration: Weekly World News]

"This city could very easily be taken back in a very different direction," he continued. What direction is this, exactly? "It could very easily be taken back to the way it was with the wrong political leadership." Hmm! He must not mean taken back to the way it was when he was mayor. So maybe he means the way it was under the guy before him? What does that guy, David Dinkins, have in common with Bloomberg challenger Bill Thompson, exactly? Oh, right, they are Democrats.

When Bloomberg was asked if he agreed with Giuliani's statements, on how the blacks are going to take over the city and mug all the Jews to death forever, Bloomberg said he was worried that New York could become Detroit.

As usual, Bloomberg means real New York, not the bits that are basically already as bad off as Detroit.

[Photo: AP]

"Will you ever run for president again? Yes or no," Curry asked.

"No," replied Clinton.

Ok. Done. Good. Right? That is enough of a straight-up denial to satisfy anyone! Unless, like, you run a website of some sort, and are also trying to drum up interest in an upcoming book about Hillary Clinton's relentless ambition. Then you would make this interview, with its question about Hillary being "marginalized" that comes entirely from your own writing highlighted, your top story. And you would also say that Hillary is lying about not wanting to run for president, any more. Because you are basically shameless, and you are Tina Brown.

Good news: your book, The Clinton Chronicles, is due to be published next year. Just make sure to keep planting stories about how dissatisfied and unhappy Hillary is, in the meantime!

It has been a depressing primary season, full of uninspiring hacks! Many candidates are people who thought they would be term limited out of their city council jobs, and then they were not, but it was too late to not run for whatever they decided to run for. The Democrats basically conceded the Mayoral race, even though this is basically a wonderful time to be running against an out-of-touch billionaire. (Sigh.) So we understand that it is not very exciting, but you should still probably go to your local middle school or whatever and vote. Because if you don't, Liberty will disappear! Check out this awesome animated gif from the Board of Elections website!

As for who to vote for? Christ, who knows.

Comptroller

This is a very important job! This person takes care of the city budget. The Working Families Party has endorsed John Liu, who seems fine, whatever, but he said he worked in a sweatshop when he was a child and that turned out to be made-up, and who the fuck makes that up?

New York Tumblrers have endorsed Melinda Katz, who has the best commercials, but she has taken more money from scumbag developers than anyone else, and that is lame. Also she was a Clinton delegate but she claimed she voted for Obama in the primaries until someone was like "what?" and she was like "nevermind." WTF, Melinda?

The Times endorsed David Yassky. He is the only candidate from Brooklyn and not Queens! He has complained about the G train! But RFK Jr. and Chuck Schumer also endorsed him, for what that is worth.

So, hell, this one's up to you.

Public Advocate

This is like the shadow-mayor, or something. This person's job is to annoy Michael Bloomberg—and on that count, Betsy Gotbaum has been a failure. So there is Mark Green, who was very good at bothering Giuliani, but he has just been hanging out on TV doing nothing ever since he was not allowed to be Mayor, before 9/11. There is Bill de Blasio, who won the Times endorsement. But is he too close to corrupt unions? And the Working Families Party, which is having some issues with their accounting, at the moment? There is Eric Gioia, who is some punk kid. How about Normal Siegel? He is the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union and he is basically a pretty good guy. He receives the coveted Gawker Endorsement.

Manhattan District Attorney

Billion-year-old zombie DA Robert Morgenthau decided Cy Vance Jr. should be the next Manhattan DA, and that is a good reason not to support Cy Vance Jr. Leslie Crocker Snyder has always been a little too zealously "lock 'em all up" for our bleeding heart, and she used to enjoy killing people a little too much. Richard Aborn, the third candidate, will not win. In this race, Gawker endorses moving to Brooklyn.

City Council

Just indiscriminately vote against any and all incumbents.

If you live in City Council Distict 33, why not vote for Steve Levin? When he attended Brown, he played drums with MGMT! How awesome is that! (Or vote for Evan Thies who is less entangled in the filthy DEMOCRATIC MACHINE.)

Abdullah is alleging massive voter fraud, including ballot stuffing, and he claims to have video evidence. But he's also urging calm and calls on his supporters to refrain from violence.

Voter turnout may be as low as 29%, because of threats of violence from Taliban forces and because many Afghan voters doubted the legitimacy of the elections.

It will not be until September 3 at the very earliest that we'll know who won the election.

Abdullah, an ophthalmologist, is a former member of the Northern Alliance. The bulk of his support is in Afghanistan's population centers, and he is basically a big fat smarty-pants elite intellectual reformer. He would like a parliamentary system instead of a strong president, elected officials in the provinces and districts instead of corrupt and ineffectual appointed officials, and other liberal nonsense.

He also promised to curb the rampant corruption and review foreign assistance programs to ensure that they focused on grass-roots development and addressed poverty and unemployment. In his public meetings, he emphasized support for the rights of women, the unemployed, the disabled and the victims of war.

If Karzai receives less than 50% of the vote—which might depend on how much the vote was fixed or on the incredibly poor turnout—there will be a runoff. Also lots of people and things will be blown up and killed.

Equality California announced officially that they will not bother trying to get Proposition 8 repealed until 2012, when they'll push for a constitutional amendment permitting same-sex marriage.

See, it's hard to raise money, when the recession is going on, and also when you are not bothering to do anything because raising money is hard.

And there is all this insane and stupid activist group infighting about the various rich people who forgot to do anything about Prop 8 until the Mormons took control of the issue and pumped their huge Mormon dollars into the anti-gay marriage campaign.

So, yes, brilliant, throw your next gay marriage fight during the next presidential election year! Make sure to add a ballot initiative about immigrants getting abortions in black churches, too, while you are at it. To boost turnout.

After two terms of not giving a shit about transit, and despite not having any control over the MTA, nor any real chance of gaining control of the MTA, and despite the fact that the MTA always and forever claims to be completely out of money and unable to reliably provide the service we are supposed to have now, Mike Bloomberg laid out a 33-point proposal for transit in his third term that amounts entirely to "a list of awesome things that will magically happen if you vote for me, for free, I promise."

Free crosstown buses! The V will run into Brooklyn! Express service on the F! Countdown clocks for every train! Reopening LIRR stations in Queens! Military technology to track buses! More ferries! New smart cards to replace MetroCards!

All of this sounds great to us! It is just too bad that the mayor is only responsible for 4 out of 17 votes on the MTA board, and so therefore he does not have the authority to implement any of these ideas that he stole from Anthony Weiner and others! (Hey, he could get Albany to give him more control, like with the schools, right? The could take care of it right after the State Senate gets around to giving him back control of the schools, which they might someday do, maybe.) So reelect Mayor Bloomberg and he promises an express train that runs directly from your apartment to work, and it will be free, and it will have a non-stop open bar!

MoDo, whose beliefs about the proper behavior and roles of the sexes are generally some unholy mixture of John Ford movie and Real World hot tub argument, has always believed Hillary Clinton to be "aggrieved, paranoid and press-loathing," and so MoDo was shocked to find our Secretary of State being competent and professional on TV one morning, instead of hysterically screeching and maybe castrating some lovably rakish men.

But this Sarah Palin lady, who used to charm her, has disappointed her by embracing so many of those terrible feminine traits Dowd abhors, like being a whiny bitch all the time.

Oh, there are so many classic Dowdian moments in this one simple column.

The Alaskan who shot to stardom a year ago as the tough embodiment of Diana the Huntress has now stepped down as governor and morphed into what the Republicans always caricatured Hillary as - preachy, screechy and angry.

You know, Maureen, that unfair Republican caricature kinda resembles how you have always written about Hillary Clinton! Isn't that funny?

Hey, can you stick a pointlessly emasculating description of Obama in here too?

Obama advisers say privately that the president truly respects the woman he ran against, and that they have a good relationship, so good it has even surprised Hillary. Certainly, she doesn't have to worry that this president's gaze is going to drift over her shoulder to some pretty thing behind her. In this White House, Barack Obama is the pretty thing who is taken with Hillary's serious, smartest-girl-at-Wellesley aura.

Now, Maureen, could you reuse a meaningless one-liner? Yes, thank you, that'll do.