""Former Republican governor-turned Democrat Charlie Crist took the first step Friday toward attempting to reclaim his old job with a new party, paving the way for a bitter contest that will be one of the most watched in the nation. Crist filed paperwork to get in the race and is now the front-runner to represent Democrats against Republican Gov. Rick Scott, one of the most unpopular chief executives in the country. Scott, though, will be well-financed and is expected to spend as much as $25 million in attack ads against Crist.For Crist, he is hoping to revive a political career that seemingly crashed when he left the GOP and lost an independent run for U.S. Senate to Republican Marco Rubio in 2010. Crist has a 10 a.m. event scheduled in a park near his St. Petersburg home to kick off his campaign." (Politico)
"We’re at the peak of the Fall social calendar in New York. Wednesday was a good example. Downtown at the Standard, hotelier Andre Balazs hosted the party for George Rush and Joanna Molloy's new book, 'Scandal: A Manual' (Skyhorse, Publishers) last Wednesday night at the Standard. Rush and Molloy was for years the New York Daily News version of the Post’s Page Six. There was a difference because their column had a vibe that went for the joke rather than the jugular, whenever possible. Of course it wasn’t always possible in the Naked City (or Jungle), and so it was. Their book is full of those tales of show and woe.We've known each other for years, spoken many times, never developed a friendship (or had time for it) although they are very likeable, nice people, besides being Big Town gossip columnists. One thing that is remarkable about what appears to be their lovely relationship – they’re still husband and wife after all these years, and their little baby, born maybe 15 or 16 years ago, is now a young man. Everything changes, even the parents.Among the guests: Courtney Love, Carole Radziwill, Nanette Lepore, Judith Regan, Karen Duffy, Ellen Newhouse, Nan Richardson, AOL editor in chief Cyndi Stivers, Vanity Fair's John Connolly, Capital New York co-founder Tom McGeveran, gossip kings and queens Richard Johnson, Michael Musto." (NYSocialDiary)
"President Obama’s top aides secretly considered replacing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the 2012 ticket, undertaking extensive focus-group sessions and polling in late 2011 when Mr. Obama’s re-election outlook appeared uncertain. The aides concluded that despite Mrs. Clinton’s popularity, the move would not offer a significant enough political boost to Mr. Obama to justify such a radical move, according to a newly published account of the 2012 race. The idea of replacing Mr. Biden with Mrs. Clinton had long been rumored, but the journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in their new book, 'Double Down,' provide a detailed description of the effort inside the senior circle of Obama advisers. It was pushed by the chief of staff at the time, William M. Daley, despite the close personal rapport Mr. Daley had developed with Mr. Biden, a fellow Irish Catholic and veteran of Washington politics.'When the research came back near the end of the year, it suggested that adding Clinton to the ticket wouldn't materially improve Obama’s odds,' the authors write in their sequel to 'Game Change,' which chronicled the 2008 campaign. 'Biden had dodged a bullet he never saw coming — and never would know anything about, if the Obamans could keep a secret.” In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Daley acknowledged that he had wanted to research what the move would have meant for Mr. Obama, whose popularity, in the fall of 2011, was at its lowest in his presidency to date. He called it simply 'due diligence.'" (NYTimes)
"The '21' Club was packed when Dick Cavett, the longtime television talk-show host and a regular contributor to the Opinionator blog for The New York Times, and Alec Baldwin, star of TV ('30 Rock'), film ('Blue Jasmine'), theater ('Orphans' on Broadway) and, most recently, his own talk show on MSNBC, 'Up Late With Alec Baldwin,' arrived. The maître d’ led the men through the dining room, into the kitchen and down a narrow flight of stairs with a perilously low ceiling. ('Wait a minute: How are people going to ask for our autographs down here?' Mr. Cavett asked.) The stairwell was lined with special bottles of wine reserved for special patrons (T. Boone Pickens and Chelsea Clinton, to name two). After one final hurdle, they were seated in the private wine cellar at a long table with bottles of wine from floor to ceiling. Over lunch — an omelet for Mr. Baldwin and Dover sole for Mr. Cavett — and after some debate about who would sit where (Mr. Baldwin: 'I think Cavett should sit at the head of the table.' Mr. Cavett: 'I couldn’t possibly, just because I’m your senior by three years'), the men spoke of talk shows, Richard Nixon, being chased by the paparazzi and dealing with depression." (NYTimes)
"Snagged from among the thousands of condolences, recollections, posthumous mash notes and encomiums launched into the Twitter slipstream last week was a message from the actress Virginia Madsen to her 74,656 followers. Lou Reed was a 'cool cat,' the award-winning indie star observed. What is more, Ms. Madsen wrote, the singer’s biggest hit and most famous lyric, 'Walk on the Wild Side,' once served as 'encouraging words for a young Virginia.' Encouragement is where you find it. Plenty about Mr. Reed’s 1972 song, from the David Bowie-produced album 'Transformer,' flouted convention, beginning with the lyrics’ overt reference to prostitution, transsexuals and oral sex. Released as a single, the song went on to unlikely success as the biggest mainstream hit of the singer’s long career; more curious still, the ballad of misfits and oddballs — a hustler, a speed freak, a passel of drag queens — became an unlikely cultural anthem, a siren song luring generations of people like Ms. Madsen to a New York so long forgotten as to seem imaginary. Yet those people existed, a ragtag band of 'superstars' and assorted cosmic trash spinning in Andy Warhol’s orbit in the late 1960s. As Mr. Reed himself once said of the era and milieu evoked in 'Walk on the Wild Side,' it 'was a very funny period with a very funny group of people doing almost the same thing without anyone knowing anybody else.'" (NYTimes)
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