The Republican mayor of Larchmont, Liz Feld, just announced she'll challenge the incumbent State Senator Suzi Oppenheimer, a Democrat. The strategy is laid out nearly in Feld's public statement:  read more »

On the morning of Wednesday, May 14, Torrey Meeks, a 25-year-old freelance writer and producer in Las Cruces, N.M., rolled out of bed and checked his various Web pages. “Unbelievable,” he thought to himself. “This thing is blowing up.”

The previous afternoon, Mr. Meeks, along with thousands of others, had taken his first (and second, and third … ) look at the Internet’s viral video du jour—specifically, a decades-old clip, freshly unearthed on YouTube, featuring news anchor Bill O’Reilly (long before his current Fox News fame), unleashing a curse-filled tirade on the set of Inside Edition.  read more »

Independents and Republicans are free to vote in next Tuesday’s Indiana Democratic primary – the latest do-or-die test for Hillary Clinton. And Independents and Republicans – along with a healthy dose of Archie Bunker Democrats and a scattering of masochistic liberals – also constitute the core of Bill O’Reilly audience. So, in a way, her appearance on his show Wednesday night was a logical exercise in voter outreach.

But that’s only if you ignore history.  read more »

Bill O’Reilly, the Republican spokesman, is leaving the communication firm he founded nine years to join a firm headed by former Rudy Giuliani aides George Lence and Cristyne Nicholas.

O’Reilly’s Midtown-based firm had lately specialized in Republican clients running against the Republican establishment: they handled conservative Republican John Faso’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, when most of the George Pataki-centric party establishment was pulling for Bill Weld. That year, the firm also handled the campaign of K.T. McFarland, a latecomer to the Republican Senate primary race who ultimately lost, but not before she blasted Rupert Murdoch's media empire for their coverage of the race.

O’Reilly, a relative of William F. Buckley, is leaving the firm in the hands of its co-founder, Susan Del Percio.

O’Reilly’s email is after the jump.  read more »

John Koblin meets twins who blog, discovers that a Ron Paul party distracted Times reporters on deadline, and witnesses an interesting moment involving Hillary Clinton, Bill O’Reilly and a girl with red hair.

PENACOOK, N.H.—A little after 10 this morning, Hillary Clinton hosted a rally at a high school gym here. She had an unexpected guest.

The first question in a Q. and A. session was from a young girl with red hair. Bill O'Reilly, she said, had asked her how quickly troops could leave Iraq, and wouldn't the Senator have a better answer for him than she?  read more »

While we're linking to end-of-year lists ... here's Inside Cable News' awkwardly introduced "list of the hottest and not hottest cable news related stories for 2007."

Almost every prominent cable-news personality, from Campbell Brown to Maria Bartiromo to Shepard Smith, makes it onto the list one way or another -- with one obvious exception: Bill O'Reilly. Guess this year the FNC anchor was neither hot nor not hot, but just sort of ... luke warm.

Director Brian DePalma—whose new film, Redacted, opens this Friday—is not very happy about the way the movie has been treated in the months since he completed the project. The film tells the true story of an Iraqi girl who is raped and killed by American troops.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Mr. DePalma says, “I would expect it, because the film shows an aspect of our troops that has not been shown before. You're going to get a very negative reaction from the right wing. I was more surprised that the film was accepted to every film festival. That's never happened for one of my films."  read more »

Eliot Spitzer is making his second trip to Washington D.C. today, to explain his decision to back off his plan to allow illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses.

Spitzer will make the announcement flanked by New York’s Democratic congressional delegation, which almost uniformly opposes a related aspect of that driver’s license policy: the federal Real ID Act.

The long-term political question is going to be whether this will be the beginning of a second act for Spitzer, in which he finally regains control of a governing agenda that's been getting away from him since he took office. Short-term, though, the question will be whether this will really allow him to step away cleanly from the licensing issue at all. Certainly, his Republican opponents will do their best to see that the controversy lingers.

More after the jump.  read more »

Here's Republican strategist Bill O'Reilly's take on the Kelly for Mayor mayor boomlet that found expression in the Times and on the opinion page of the Daily News over the weekend:

“All the buzz about Ray Kelly shows how eager New Yorkers are to keep the city moving in the same direction. There is definite fear out there about handing the keys to City Hall back to a career politician. The past 16 years have been a wildly successful experiment for New Yorkers; they have shown that extraordinary individuals from outside the normal political process can do the job better."

Which I imagine is also a neat preview of the argument John Catsimatidis or whoever the main non-Democrat is going to be if Kelly doesn't run.  read more »