New Yorkers Paying for Giuliani's Booty Calls?

Or as Josh Marshall (of TPM) calls it "Government Funded Shagging."

[This is the missing "miscellaneous" items that I didn't blog about in yesterday's post plus the juicy new Rudy Giuliani stuff.]

ooooo this is very juicy stuff, very juicy stuff that combines both scandalous sex (he was visiting a mistress...you know, cheating on his wife...again) and ripping off the tax payers.

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, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, 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.”

Mmmm, delicious. You know, it is well known that this guy is a serial womanizer and that he's never been able to remain faithful to any woman so it's not as if this is a surprise. But this does reinforce that image and provides a good story easy for media dissemination that will continually highlight such personal flaws.

Now, we all have personal flaws (ask Bill Clinton) so I don't think these things necessarily should disqualify one from office but there is more to this than simple infidelity:

1) He is running for the Republican nomination and he is trying to court the votes of conservatives including social conservatives. When you run a party so freakin high and mighty and "morality" based you would think that, I don't know...stuff like this matters.

2) It's not just infidelity, it is corruption, abuse of power, and a scandal that shows how Rudy has taken the taxpayers of New York for their money, all so he could get him some tail. Add this with the stench of corruption that follows him due to his (former) best buddy Bernie Kerik -- who ALSO used taxpayer money to get him some sex -- and there is a perfect narrative that Democrats and other Republican candidates can use to pummel Giuliani with.

I hope this seriously undermines his campaing because I DO NOT LIKE GIULIANI!! Look at my profile, click the video, watch it....you'll understand why I'm so afraid that a man like this could even possibly be the next President of the United States.

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FBI: Widely Reported Threat to Fort Huachuca unfounded

Just read, the original scare was like a Republicans wet dream..

A plot by dozens of foreign terrorists who purportedly planned to attack Fort Huachuca with rocket propelled grenades and mines has proved unfounded, an FBI spokesman said Monday.

The threat, detailed by a local television station and The Washington Times [had to be..] after information was recently leaked to them, involved Iraqi and Afghan terrorists working with a Mexican drug cartel to smuggle themselves and weapons across the U.S. border.

It's got it all. Iraqis, Afghans, terrorist attacks at home, plus they even managed to add in Mexicans kingpins and smuggling things across the border!! It's a damn wingnuts wetdream. It's the kind of headlines that they dream about. The kind of headline that would produce instant wood at a very embarrassing moment that one time in gym class when I was in front of everyone doing sit up...*cough* sorry...anyways...

Seriously though, all that's missing from the story is to add that the terrorists were also gay and made man-love with the Mexicans prior to the operation, while a group of black thugs performed an abortion and then had sex before marriage.

And there was a midget...yeah, I bet you didn't know they hated midgets.

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UN Human Development Report: World Must Fix Climate in 10 years

Unless the international community agrees to cut carbon emissions by half over the next generation, climate change is likely to cause large-scale human and economic setbacks and irreversible ecological catastrophes, a U.N. report said on Tuesday.

The U.N. Human Development Report issued one of the strongest warnings yet of the lasting impact of climate change on living standards and a strong call for urgent collective action. "We could be on the verge of seeing human development reverse for the first time in 30 years," Kevin Watkins, lead author of the report, told Reuters.

The report, presented in Brasilia on Tuesday, sets targets and a road map to reduce carbon emissions before a U.N. climate summit next month in Bali, Indonesia. Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere help trap heat and lead to global warming.

"The message for Bali is the world cannot afford to wait. It has less than a decade to change course," said Watkins, a senior research fellow at Britain's Oxford University. Dangerous climate change will be unavoidable if in the next 15 years emissions follow the same trend as the past 15 years, the report said.

To avoid catastrophic impact, the rise in global temperature must be limited to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius). But carbon emissions mostly from cars and power plants are twice the level needed to meet that target, the U.N. authors said.

Climate change threatens to condemn millions of people to poverty, the UNDP said. Climate disasters between 2000 and 2004 affected 262 million people, 98 percent of them in the developing world. The poor are often forced to sell productive assets or save on food, health, and education, creating "life-long cycles of disadvantage."

HOMES, FOOD, WATER IMPERILED

A temperature rise of between 5.4 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (3 and 4 degrees Celsius) would displace 340 million people through flooding, droughts would diminish farm output, and retreating glaciers would cut off drinking water from as many as 1.8 billion people, the report said.

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Evidence for a Parallel Universe? - I don't to even understand most of the stuff here, but I thought it might be interesting to someone. Hey does anyone remember that show 'Sliders'? I used to watch that show all the time!!

Well that it for tonight. I have a lot of thinking to do (decisions) and I've put off thinking about it long enough. But I needed everything off my plate first so here I am two days in a row.

Goodnight