HuffingtonPost.com Inc.

For all the attention to tonight's high-roller Barack Obama fund-raiser on Central Park West, it seems that event is just an appetizer.

According to a schedule posted on a website called South Asians for Obama, the Illinois Senator plans to zip from the CPW fund-raiser at the apartment of Huffington Post founder Ken Lerer in the early evening to the Soho manse of retired investment banker Steven Gluckstern , and then to the Upper East Side lair of Credit Suisse First Boston executive George Hornig and his jewelry designer wife Joan.

Finally, the Obama saturation tour will be capped by his appearance on Late Show with David Letterman -- the only event which, presumably, he will leave empty-handed.

-- Lizzy Ratner

Mark Green, guest blogging on Huffington Post, said, "Rudy Giuliani is not the first politician to exaggerate and play to the cheap seats."

Scott Sala responds.

Republicans may look weak right now compared to the Democrats, but they may be stronger in the general election, according to Ben.

Representative Jerry Nadler and others will discuss Iraq at an event tonight at Columbia University.

Representative Eliot Engel criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her trip to Syria.

Tom Elliott thinks monogamy is a better way to stop STDs than circumcision.

Mathieu Eugene may win his City Council race in Brooklyn by knocking all his opponents off the ballot.

Errol Louis and Erik Engquist discuss the race here.

DMI has more about their forum on New York's shrinking middle class.

State Senator Andrea-Stewart Cousins weighed in on the school funding and blamed Albany's secret negotiations for Westchester's shrinking share.

A former spokesperson for Ross Perot is running for office in NJ.

Ever wonder who is trying to get reporters to cover Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tommy Thompson?

Karol is looking for guest bloggers. [link fixed]

And pictured above is City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, whose budget proposal is here.

-- Azi Paybarah

Andrew Rice sends in this email about what the primaries might look like in 2008:

You know, I realize it's way early to even be thinking about this, but it occurred to me yesterday morning when I was reading about California moving its primary up that one possible outcome of all this frontloading could be the return of another one of those mothballed political traditions, the brokered political convention. In years past, the way it played out is that the eventual nominee builds some momentum in early contests, wins big on Super Tuesday, and then runs the table as the rest of his contenders drop out (or are hounded out by calls for party unity).

But if big delegate states like California and New York move ahead in the calendar, there might not be time for this shaking-out process to occur. It'd effectively be a national primary, taking place over the course of a couple weeks, and you could certainly imagine a scenario where Edwards takes the south, Hillary wins New York and the northeast, and Obama wins Illinois and California --in other words, a return to the kind of fractured regional politics that made the smoke-filled rooms of the old conventions such interesting places to be.

It'd be cool for journalists, but maybe a nightmare for the parties. Imagine the prior scenario -- no one has a majority of regional delegates, so let's say two candidates-- Obama-Edwards? Edwards-Obama? -- get together in an anyone-but-Hillary coalition. But the math is not so simple because way back in the 1970s the Democratic Party instituted a "superdelegate" system, as a check on insurgency campaigns. As you know, most of the superdelegates are party elders--the very sort of people who might be beholden in some way or another to the Clinton machine. So all of a sudden, you have candidates spending the spring courting the likes of Tony Coelho. Journalists everywhere have to start familiarizing themselves with the arcana of delegate selection. The Huffington Post starts a "Draft Gore" campaign. It's chaos--and everyone realizes that the nomination process, though it pretends to be democratic, is really a relic of the party boss era.

So there you have it, my off-the-wall prediction for 2008: The new primary process is going to replace the electoral college as everyone's least favorite anachronism.

On to Denver!

-- Josh Benson

Here's a fun Friday exercise. See who is newsmaker on The Huffington Posts's newstracker.

The tracker counts the number of times a person has been mentioned online in the last week. And since you can plug in more than one name to the tracker, it offers a nice comparison between all the names we know.

Hillary Clinton trounced Chuck Schumer, who is slacking on his Sunday morning press conferences.

Even having personal campaign material "stolen" didn't help Rudy Giuliani to beat John McCain. Possible presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is blown out of the water by super-stealthy 2008 candidate, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. After the jump... Eliot Spitzer vs. Andrew Cuomo Eliot Spitzer vs. Arnold Schwarzenegger Mike Bloomberg vs. Gavin Newsom and a few more.  read more »

What match-ups can you come up with?

-- Azi Paybarah

Hillary Clinton is expanding her outreach.

Kos thinks Obama wins if he runs...and unless Al Gore gets into the race.

Huffington Post thinks Obama's candidacy serves as a lesson for Hillary.

Howard Kurtz sees an anti-Hillary narrative emerging.

Mitt Romney hired a senior communication strategist.

The Sun wonders why the AP slimmed down its story about Mike Bloomberg's war on trans-fat.

The TWU is holding a mass membership meeting on December 9, their first since the strike.

The Albany County DA's lead investigator on the Alan Hevesi probe got sacked over some local politics.

Charles Barron is considering a run for Public Advocate, according to Rock Hackshaw.

At a meeting in Manhattan, James Oddo told some people to go back to Queens [link fixed].

Rudy Giuliani is having a fund-raiser.

An above is Dawn Eden of the Daily News discussing the joys of not having sex.

-- Azi Paybarah

Joe Lieberman's campaign staff is staying resolutely upbeat about today's Q-poll that has Ned Lamont leading by 54-41 -- to say nothing of the decision of SEIU Local 1199 to support Lamont.

Lieberman spokesperson Marion Steinfels actually went so far as to suggest that there's a bright side to all of it. "Many of our supporters weren't really aware of how serious the challenge was, and this makes them aware of how serious it is."

She also dismissed the notion -- okay, our notion -- that the poll results reflected somewhat poorly on the impact of Bill Clinton's recent visit to campaign with Lieberman:

"It had an impact we have seen it in the days before he came to down and ever since," she said. "We have people walking into office and the phones are ringing off the hook and people are writing checks."

Still, it is clear that the campaign is scrambling to make up some ground. Today, they're focusing on Lamont's connections to a blogger who depicted Lieberman in blackface on the Huffington Post.

You know, substantive stuff.  read more »

-- Jason Horowitz UPDATE Steinfels called in to take issue with the characterization of the blackface incident as anything less than substantive. "It's a very important and substantive issue," she said, contending that it directly reflects upon the character and trustworthiness of Lamont, who the Lieberman campaign accuses of having close ties with the blogger in question. The full Lieberman campaign release is after the jump. Judge for yourself.

"In any case," wrote Eric Alterman on the Huffington Post yesterday, "I am about as low-level a celebrity as exists anywhere. And yet whenever [sic] see my name on P6, it's always something nasty and often something inaccurate."

Here are Eric Alterman's three Page Six mentions:  read more »

March 28, 2004: Fresh from a bizarre on-air showdown with CNBC talk-show host Dennis Miller, left-wing MSNBC pundit Eric Alterman has accused The New York Observer of doing a second "hatchet job" on him. [...] When we tried to contact Alterman for comment, he e-mailed us back: "I don't have a lot to say. I enjoy PAGE SIX but I don't admire it. I imagine most people feel that way." Mee-ouch!

March 12, 2003: The Week magazine held a forum on media bias featuring Janeane Garofalo, Arianna Huffington, Eric Alterman and William McGowan." [...] Jeff Jarvis: "hey, if you're going to get dissed by someone, it's much better to be dissed by Brown than Alterman."

August 6, 1999: We hear... That journalist/gadfly Philip Nobile overheard two clerks at the Strand bookstore complaining about Nation columnist Eric Alterman. 'He's a whiner,' said one. 'Yeah,' said the other. 'The first time I met him I almost punched him.'

Over at Huffington Post (Two HuffPost links in a day. Eek.), Michael Oates Palmer poses an interesting little challenge.

"If a Hillary supporter can point me to one decision or vote she's made in the last four years where she took a stand that went against her best political interests - I'll buy the first beer."  read more »

He offers as an example John Kerry's vote against the Defense of Marriage Act. (Clinton says she would have supported it.) Anybody want a beer?

Update: A reader who keeps track of these things points out that Palmer was Mark Green's speechwriter and -- extra credit! -- has his own political pedigree.

Joe Crowley, the Queens congressman who's in a race for a leadership position in the House, has made some real enemies on the left who are trying to kill his bid.

Sticking particularly in their craw is Crowley's work on behalf of the recent legislation making it harder to declare bankruptcy, as David Sirota writes over at Huffington Post.  read more »

Crowley, he writes, is "a sad example of a politician who has gone Washington in the worst sense."

A friend emails over a Huffington Post piece by former Gore aide Donnie Fowler, as the latest movement toward a Gore run.

He was particularly struck by the way Fowler's piece ends:

"Gore's conclusion: the United States' most significant political choice today is not between red and blue, it must be between red and green. Stay tuned ..."

Stay tuned for what?

(Sorry about the lack of links today. I'm writing via Blackberry from Albany and not up to the HTML. The HuffPost piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donnie-fowler/green-or-red-gores-pas_b_118...)  read more »

Having chided Steve Minarik for a ridiculous attack on the Drum Major Institute, I can't avoid mocking Drum Major's response as well.

Andrea Batista Schlesinger, who (not Freddy Ferrer) actually runs Drum Major, posted her response to Minarik on the Hollywood liberal organ Huffington Post, of course. She portrays Drum Major's bad press as a Republican conspiracy against liberal ideas. This plot is spearheaded by Bloomberg aide Bill Cunningham, whom she describes as a noted Republican operative. (It was open-minded of the New York State Democratic Party to allow a Republican like Cunningham to serve as its executive director, come to think of it.)

"[E]ach time DMI raises critical questions about social and economic policy in New York, the conservatives says it's tacit support for Mr. Ferrer's campaign.

"A bit of a stretch? You better believe it."

OK, I'm more or less with Andrea to this point.

But the article continues:

"Between Minarik writing letters asking for investigations and Bill Cunningham calling every newspaper reporter in sight to plant a story asserting connections that don't exist, it is clear that theirs is a press strategy designed to undermine our credibility and, ultimately, to bring us down. If they wanted simply to attack Fernando Ferrer, they would pick a better story line than affiliation with a civil rights organization....

"It is hardly news that the right-wing of the GOP has re-adopted the Nixonian strategy of seeking to silence any and all dissent by undermining its credibility with baseless attacks, rather than by taking on opposing ideas on their merits.

"What is news it that the Right Wing is now focusing its attacks on progressive think tanks, the most fertile breeding grounds for progressive thought and policy development in our nation."

There's an instinct on the left nationally, and in New York, to conflate classic, non-ideological local hardball politics with national, ideological movement politics. Karl Rove, puppet-master.  read more »

But the idea that this is anything other than Bloomberg vs. Ferrer misreads the local scene in a serious way.

On the other hand, maybe some of those folks reading Huffington Post will give Drum Major some money.