Via Alex Massie, I see an intrepid group of Ron Paul supporters has launched a grassroots fundraising drive to buy the man a blimp. Their YouTube ad is pretty catchy:

From the Obama blog:

Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie endorsed Senator Obama for president today. Mayor Cownie was elected in 2007 with 80% of the vote.

After a lengthy investigation, The New Republic finds much to corroborate Scott Beauchamp‘s Baghdad account but also too many problems getting direct confirmation of everything in his stories for its comfort. Writes editor Frank Foer:

in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

Meanwhile, TNR Special Correspondent and Huffington Post political editor Thomas Edsall takes the The National Review‘s W. Thomas Smith, Jr., a Marine, to task in The Huffington Post:

There is a growing dispute over the veracity of reporting from Lebanon by former Marine W. Thomas Smith, Jr. who is posting reports on his blog, The Tank, published by the conservative website, National Review Online (NRO). Smith is a supporter of the war in Iraq, and is affiliated with two politically conservative organizations, the Counterterrorism Research Center and the Family Security Foundation. He is the executive editor of World Defense Review, and the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design.

At question are two reports filed by Smith on The Tank — reports which appear to be designed to bolster support for the ongoing
presence of U.S troops in the Mideast.

Smith was also an NRO critic of the Beachamp story in TNR, writes Edsall:

NRO has been a frequent critic of The New Republic and its publication of a controversial and disputed “diary” by Iraq soldier Scott Thomas Beauchamp. Beauchamp, using the nom de plume Scott Thomas wrote on July 13 about troops digging up “children’s bones: tiny cracked tibias and shoulder blades,” about one private who wore a child’s skull “on his head like a crown,” and about another soldier who purposefully ran over dogs while driving a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

Smith wrote at least five posts in September and October on The Tank attacking the Beauchamp stories, including the following comments: “It would have been virtually impossible for the things Beauchamp said happened to have played out the way he says they did” on September 10; and “Scott Thomas Beauchamp was either a fictitious character or a liar” on October 27.

And so the magazine wars grind on.

Crowley flags this retrospectively hilarious June 2006 Hamptons Style cover story on Judy G. This passage is of particular note, given recent revelations:

Rudy Giuliani discovered golf as a young boy sneaking onto the Garden City Country Club at night with friends to hit balls, later buying his first set of clubs as a law student at NYU. Now the man associated with cleaning up the urban jungles of New York finds a retreat from the public eye on the bucolic green links. On a recent Saturday afternoon, he joins Judith on her HamptonStyle photo shoot, fresh from a day spent on the course and full of anecdotes from the game. For the mayor Americans see as an indelible New York institution, the transition from his native Brooklyn to the South Fork has been natural. He spent his first full summer in the Hamptons just a few years ago when he was writing his memoir and serving his last year as mayor.

The security billing records uncovered by Ben Smith indicate that Giuliani also spent some time out in the Hamptons in the summers of 1999 and 2000, and not just in his final year as mayor, 2001. Smith further notes that Giuliani’s “second marriage was officially intact until the spring of 2000, and City Hall officials at the time responded to questions about his absences by saying he was spending time with his son and playing golf.”

Giuliani announced his separation from previous wife Donna Hanover in May 2000, saying, “For quite some time it’s probably been apparent that Donna and I lead in many ways independent and separate lives.”

Perhaps I am too much of a New Yorker at heart, but it seems to me that the most damaging thing about Rudy Giuliani‘s peculiar billing arrangements to visit the Hamptons and his future wife, then mistress, Judith Nathan, on the mayoral dime, as well as revelations that she also used police services for her personal travel, is not that it reminds voters of his affair — already common knowledge — but that it transforms his image from that of a solid working-class-made-good white ethnic New Yorker into the kind of effete, obnoxious, Hamptons-vacationing, limousine-riding toxic power-player popularized in the novels of Candace Bushnell.

Giuliani has long surrounded himself with police and firefighters and speaks with a hint of a regional accent. Though he wears nice glasses, he is not a natty dresser. He wears grandpa shoes and calls himself imperfect and can come across as appealingly down-to-earth. But now those of us who didn’t have the privilege of watching him up close and personal as mayor are seeing a very different side of him — a side in which he is much more like the self-indulgent, troubled, well-to-do dads of Gossip Girl, right down to the bad relationships with his children and constant wheeling and dealing, than to the person he’s asked us to imagine him being. He’s not outer-borough at all, the new revelations whisper, but pure uptown, upscale Manhattan.