New York Governor David Paterson does the next best thing to starting a blog, which is going on Larry King on… Thursday. Thursday? They couldn’t bump Biden from Wednesday’s slot or Michelle Obama from tonight’s? God. Honey! JUST GET A TUMBLR ALREADY.

Seriously. I know that everybody loves Google and all, but you know what they are really great at? Coming up with new shit that I completely do not understand! Also: making me feel old. I’ve watched this twice and I think I actually know less than I did before. I’m still trying to figure out Google Wave, for fuck’s sake. I would say more about this but don’t want to make Google mad at me, because they are the only people still living to have proof of that thing I did in 1996 that I am hoping never comes out. So, yeah, Google Buzz! It sounds great! We should all try it!

Whoa! Breaking! Lil Wayne’s sentencing postponed until March 2nd! While he completes a series of surgeries to fix his teeth. Man, he should get them done, like, one tooth at a time. He should go to the most cautious, careful, methodical dentist he can find.

by Elisabeth Donnelly

Oh, to be a governor of New York — if you’re not dealing with a sex scandal, you’re not doing it right. Take the case of our 22nd and 24th President, Grover Cleveland. (The only guy to serve two nonconsecutive terms, and the second bachelor — but not for long — to take office.) If there’s one thing that’s true, it’s this: a bachelor politician equals girl trouble for sure.

Freed from the freezing shackles of Buffalo, where he was mayor, the New York governor was kicking it in Albany with his political shtick of “honesty” — which gave him the nickname “Grover the Good” — when the Democrats decided that he was the best candidate for President in June of 1884. He appealed to both Democrats and reform-minded Republicans (who were referred to disparagingly by The New York Sun as “Mugwumps”; they later reclaimed this term as a point of pride), and who hated candidate James G. Blaine for his ties to the railroads and stocks. Cleveland’s campaign had the slogan “Public Office is a Public Trust,” coined by reporter William H. Hudson.

Yes, from the beginning, Cleveland was a nice boy!

On July 21, 1884, though, the Buffalo Evening Telegraph tried to change the game on Cleveland, with an article: “A Terrible Tale: A Dark Chapter in a Public Man’s History.” This bombshell, subtitled ‘The Pitiful Story of Maria Halpin and Governor Cleveland’s Son,’ detailed, according to Republican loyalist and pastor Reverend George H. Ball, how the rotund bachelor Cleveland “seduced” a Buffalo resident — and likely wanton woman — named Maria Halpin, who had his now ten-year-old son out of wedlock. It was, “an epic of moral depravity…between brothel and the family, indecency and decency, between lust and law.”

This was a salacious piece, and was doomed to irrelevancy-until the Blaine-supporting Boston Review took it up. Scandal ensued, and the story broke nationally. (The Nation, it should be noted, said that Cleveland’s sin should be a disqualifier if the opponent was good “in all other ways”-but Blaine was a dick, essentially, and Cleveland’s indiscretion was just in the tradition of randy politicians.) The Republicans started bringing children to Cleveland rallies to chant: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”

So how did Cleveland deal with it? As relayed in a public telegram, he simply decided to: “Tell the truth.” He admitted he had relations with that woman, but that so had other men in Buffalo at the time. Since he was the only bachelor in his group of friends, he decided to take responsibility for the child and to send money. (Shades of Andrew Young, but, you know, in this case money was being give to the baby.)

The child was named Oscar Folsom Halpin, after Cleveland’s law partner and best friend, Oscar Folsom. Folsom was married but also a suspected baby daddy. Later Cleveland would marry Folsom’s daughter, Frances, while he was in office-but long after she had become his ward, as Oscar Folsom (maybe-pere) had died in a wagon accident.

Despite the scandal, Cleveland squeaked into office with a mere one quarter of one percent of the popular vote and a slim electoral lead. What ended up helping him was Blaine’s mistakes. He had scandals: a shotgun wedding in Pennsylvania and another one (to the same woman) in Kentucky, when he was twenty. (He didn’t come clean in the press-and was apparently his wife was six months pregnant when they wed.)

His big mouth didn’t help: he said the Democratic party aligned itself with “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” This offended New York City’s Irish Catholic voters, and he lost thousands of supporters to Cleveland. He lost because Cleveland’s shtick was “honesty,” and when this love child thing broke, he went pretty much straight out with it.

With Cleveland’s democratic victory, the Republican’s chant of “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” had “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” added onto it, and another chant was born: “Hurray for Maria! Hurray for the kid! I voted for Cleveland, and I’m dammed glad I did!”

And for the son of an “honest” man (who was, let’s be honest, quite possibly the son of his business partner), the story of Oscar Folsom gets epic: Cleveland committed the alcoholic mother to an asylum after Oscar’s birth, placing the boy in an orphanage. When she got out, she kidnapped the kid from the orphanage, and Cleveland stepped in, to try to set her up in business. When that failed, he gave her money to give up the child, and Oscar was adopted by a New York family. This Dickensian lifestyle led to the presidential love child changing his name.

The moral? Bring out your, let’s say, “life complications” right away. One’s admitted screw-ups are never a betrayal. It’s a moral that certainly would’ve changed the insane, disastrous trajectory of John Edwards’ staggering-and currently unavoidable-narrative of hubris and lies.

Cleveland, of course, was also lucky enough to have an opponent that self-immolated in a fit of Irish Catholic slurs. Ultimately, Cleveland beat Blaine with what are still the two most successful political tactics available: honesty and running against an idiot.

Elisabeth Donnelly finds the song “Love Child” to be really poignant.

Story That Is Difficult To Make Fun Of Contains Quote That Is Pretty Much The Same As What Sandra Bullock Says In “The Blind Side”

So CBS News runs this AP story with a headline that makes you read it more than once. “Bridge Collapse Widow Adopts Haitian Twins.” And, yeah, yeah, you’re already like, come on! And sure enough, yes, Minnesotan Betsy Sathers lost her husband of ten months, Scott, when the Minneapolis freeway bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River in 2007. And she thought she was pregnant at the time, but then her sorrow was compounded when she found out she was not. She didn’t know if she ever wanted to get married again, but she knew she wanted to be a mother. So she started the process to adopt a child from Haiti last year. In August, she learned she’d been assigned boy-girl twins. She made three trips to Port-Au-Prince to visit them as paperwork went through, the last one on January 1. Eleven days, later, when the earthquake hit, she didn’t know whether or not they survived. They did, thank God, and were flown to Florida, where Sathers picked up the 22nd. “I don’t think I rescued them,” Sathers said of her twin two-year-olds, Ross and Alyse. “I feel like if anything, they’ve rescued me.” Come on!

What lies behind the overwhelming and archaic concepts of masculinity in this year’s Super Bowl (best exemplified by that Dodge Charger spot? Let’s hear from Dr. Prudence Gourguechon, President of the American Psychoanalytic Association!

I can only speculate. The economy is what comes to my mind. Perhaps so many men have suffered narcissistic injuries as a result of lost jobs, foreclosed houses, shuttered opportunities and expectations, that culturally we regress to the fantasy that it is women, or specifically the eternal Castrating Woman, who is taking away their power, causing them to feel small, young and afraid.

She also harshes on The Who.

“Dramatically speaking, Avatar is predictable and lacks imagination in plot development, as is expected of many others of its ilk conceived in Hollywood.”
–That’s the film critic for Diario Granma

, the órgano oficial of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. (The paper also claims there will be two sequels, if I’m reading it correctly? Also: Danza con lobos, I’m totally dying.)

In our continuing effort to keep the editorial staff from selling their bodies on the street (but really, who would pay for them?), we are now building new relationships with advertising partners. Maybe you can help!

We know that many of our readers are part of the larger media strategy/planning/buying machine. Whether that role is on the brand side or the agency side, we’d love to hear from you and have a chance to try and earn your business. Got some RFPs? Bring them on.

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I was forced to spend 15 minutes outside of the house today, because I do not own a printer or a cigarette dispensary, and it could not have been a worse experience. First I had to go to the copy shop, which is about 9 square feet large and was occupied by a young woman on her cell phone who is 1) on new pills for her “wheat allergy.”

Also and 2) she is concerned that sometimes, when her boyfriend shows her things in his email, she can clearly see that he is writing to his ex-girlfriend and is she just not supposed to talk about this with him, or should she bring it up, and is that okay, or what is the deal, and why is he doing that anyway? I did feel some concern for her a little, I must say.

Immediately thereafter, during a trip to the deli, the guy behind the counter told me that he’d thought I’d looked kind of fat recently, because, he presumed, I’d quit smoking, but now that I was buying cigarettes again, I was clearly smoking and also, not coincidentally, I was looking quite grand and also thinner. Do you wonder why there are so many ridiculous-seeming novels with these people in them set in New York? It is because that is what it is really like outside.

It’s simple: The first STD you were ever diagnosed with is your first name, and your childhood pet’s name is the surname. (Click through for the full image.) [Via]