Bob Hardt

UPDATE: NY1 Political Director Bob Hardt responds: "Ms. Fulani is obviously entitled to her opinion but our award-winning record of covering her and her organizations speaks for itself. Ms. Fulani has received several opportunities to appear on our program and has had ample opportunity to give her side of the story in every report we've aired about her."

Somebody is taking up Bob Hardt's suggestion that there needs to a full-time blog reader to read all the stuff that people are writing.

At about 2 p.m., the Wall Street Journal is going to launch just that.

"It's going to be like a blog that watches the blogs. A meta-blog!" a person familiar with the site says.

-- Azi Paybarah

You might think that the Suozzi campaign would want to focus at this point on the decent performance of their candidate at the debate last night, rather than harping on a nearly incomprehensible dispute over the rules.

But you'd be wrong.

Here are a couple of (trimmed!) excerpts from an email Dan Gerstein sent out today criticizing NY1, which hosted the debate, for not being explicit enough about banning written notes, and for "changing the rules" at the behest of the Spitzer campaign. The email also condemned Eliot Spitzer for threatening to back out of the debate and then "openly lying" about it afterwards.

The Spitzer campaign spread a lot of misinformation last night about the Attorney General's threat to storm out of the debate last night right before it started, and the falsehoods are continuing today. We would like to clarify a few important points.

• In NY1's initial invitation and other written communications to our campaign about the debate rules, we were told that the candidates could not use "visual aids, props and charts."

• If NY1 wanted to ban private notes, as opposed to materials meant for public consumption, why wouldn't they say something explicitly about candidate notes?

• Tom was objecting because he thought it was wrong for the Spitzer campaign to bully NY1 into changing the rules as we understood them at the last minute.

NY1's Bob Hardt sent over a response:

"We have never allowed written materials to be used in any of our debates and we weren't going to make an exception to our longstanding rules. If the Suozzi campaign was unclear about what constitutes a visual aid, they had plenty of time to ask NY1. Finally, if there were any uncertainties about that rule, it was made very clear to the Suozzi team more than four hours before the debate that their briefing book wouldn't be allowed on the podium. We told them that we were providing both candidates a pad of paper and two pens."

The full Gerstein email is after the jump.  read more »

There's no better way to defeat the news cycle than to begin an event at 7:00 p.m. amid a great national tragedy. So NY1's Mayoral forum last night, understandably, doesn't get much ink in the papers this morning.

Still, it was a more interesting spectacle than many expected. Set as a town hall meeting in the grand but decrepit City Council chamber, the questions were fairly lively. A blond woman rose to ask Mayor Bloomberg why he hadn't rushed to the scene of an alleged anti-white bias crime in Brooklyn as he had to an alleged anti-black one in Howard Beach. And after the Mayor floundered for a bit, his spokesman, Ed "Relax?! They don't pay me to relax!" in heated conversation with NY1's Bob Hardt over how long the forum had run.

Later, Freddy responded capably to a rather confused question about "your suggestion that Wall Street relocate to the Bronx." ("Nice as that would be for the Bronx and the Yankees..."). Gifford was in pretty good form. And Anthony got in a Ricardo Montalban reference.

But the rawest moment of the evening (only the News really picked up on it) came during Virginia's segment, which began -- oddly -- with her delivering an opening statement directly to a camera that was turned off for a commercial break. Early on, NY1's Dominic Carter asked her, in essence, if she feels the media is ignoring her because she's a woman.

"Gender definitely has something to do with it," she replied, quoting Shirley Chisholm about race and gender, but adding, "race aside."

"Have I been marginalized today?" she asked. "Absolutely."

Fields was particularly irritated that her housing plan got only a passing mention in a New York Times story about housing, which mentioned her plan, handed out at a Citizens Budget Commission forum with little fanfare months ago, only in passing.

Does Fields have a point here? It seems odd to suggest that women running for office are ignored. More often, they complain of too much of the wrong kind of attention -- glamorized, personalized coverage that ignores the issues. And the ingrained discrimination seems to me to set in lower on the political food chain, weeding out women before they reach the stage of seeking office. Indeed, noted feminists like unreconstructed GOP Chairman Steve Minarik have made a practice of seeking out women candidates because they win.

Still, Virginia does often appear to be getting taken less seriously than the three leading male candidates. There are other possible reasons for that than her gender. But her anger about it was very real, and seemed to connect with many in the audience.

"Sure I can lead this city," she said at one point. "Men have led the city for so long and look at the shape it's in."  read more »

NOTE: The second paragraph of this post has been corrected.

For Lenora Fulani to get herself cast back beyond the pale? Well, she gave it her best shot on NY1 News last night. We look forward to the reactions of all her many good friends -- Mike, Chuck, Eliot, etc.

The whole exchange between her and Dominic Carter is here, and is worth a read, as is Bob Hardt's amused/astonished commentary.

But the bottom line is that Carter repeatedly asked Fulani about a New Alliance Party publication that said Jews "had to sell their souls to acquire Israel and are required to do the dirtiest work of capitalism - to function as mass murderers of people of color - in order to keep it."

Fulani's response: "What is anti-Semitic about it? ... That quote in my opinion isn't anti-Semitic. It's raising issues that I think need to be explored."

Also, here's the ADL report from which the quote is drawn.

Anyway, we're sure to be reminded that she's just another member of that great institution, the Independence Party. Never mind this photo.  read more »

UPDATE: One correspondent tells us that the best Fulani-and-politicians pictures are here.

Thanks for reading us this week. Somewhat to our surprise, there were suddenly a lot of you.

For this we thank David Chai, and also The Note, which called us "a top-notch blog"; Bob Hardt, who thinks we're "really cool"; and the Albany Times-Union, which quoted us at our most banal: "'Really, in New York City, there's a large world of people who read blogs,' said Smith."  read more »

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