Gregg Birnbaum

Ben has a fun piece on Gregg Birnbaum and JustHillary.com. (The Hillary people, he reports, have taken to calling the site "Stalker.com.")

Hillary will campaign in South Carolina.

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An $84 million approval fee requested by the Port Authority may doom efforts by Dubai Ports World to divest its US holdings, according to the WSJ political blog.

A toll-free storm damage hotline is now ready for your phone calls.

Daily Gotham has video of City Council candidate Wellington Sharpe.

Newsday has final numbers from the Craig Johnson-Maureen O'Connell race.

A Tom Suozzi staffer is leaving for a job at a Manhattan law firm.

Dee Richards hears that Assemblywoman Audrey Pheffer may run for Queens Borough President.

Bill O'Reilly antagonist Keith Oberman has a new contract with MSNBC.

And pictured above is Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, who looks like he really enjoyed Christine Quinn's speech today.

-- Azi Paybarah

Hillary aide Ann Lewis gives a classically unrevealing interview to Gregg Birnbaum's (alightly stalkerish) JustHillary.com:

A sample:

JH: Lastly, a vital question that has gone unanswered for months. Let's take care of it here and now. Has Sen. Clinton seen the ABC show about a woman president, "Commander in Chief," and what does she think about it?

AL: You didn't really think I would go there, did you? Now, about Hillary's Farm-to-Fork Initiative...

On a day when the Times rewrites our Rupert-and-Hillary romance (two months late, but thanks for the plug!), the Post (whose idea of giving credit to another source is "it emerged") eschews the meta and puts out a special collectors-edition issue that shows why, love it or hate it, the Post wields outsized influence on New York politics.

Metro editor Jesse Angelo and politics editor Gregg Birnbaum must be particularly pleased with the cover story, which actually manages to make Al Pirro look even worse: we knew he had mis-spent business funds to fight, and lose, a paternity suit; now we learn that he bought his previously-ignored daughter a car the day Jeanine announced her Senate run, a "glaringly obvious" move, as his ex-lover helpfully explains.

And then there's this, sure to impress Mike Long: "She said the two split after she told Al Pirro that she was pregnant and he told her to get an abortion. "

Then there's Dicker's report -- which mirrrors what I've been hearing -- that there are senior Republicans basically rooting for Pirro to fail, also an important story. Along the way, Leslie Snyder gets savaged, Margarita Lopez takes another hit, and we read a nice little tidbit about Hillary.  read more »

Enough of the rewriting; it's an impressive paper today. Which isn't to say we wouldn't mind a little credit when they take our stories.

UPDATED: At the urging of an enraged Postie, this item was updated to spread internal credit around a bit more fairly.

Post editor Gregg Birnbaum's Hillary Clinton fan site, comprehensive and with a heavy dose of Drudge, is up and running.

Among the links is the most interesting piece on Hillary in days: full-page, fulsome editorial praise in the New York Post under the heading "Hillary Clinton: The Unlikely Warrior." More evidence for the Rupert-and-Hillary thesis? Or, if you want to take it a level more confusing, an attempt to make trouble for her in the Democratic primary.  read more »

Or, for the sake of sanity, you could just take the piece at face value.

The amount of information available to the owners of Web sites continues to amaze.

The owner of this site, for example, recently noticed links from a password-protected site "in development" at www.justhillary.com.  read more »

The owner? The New York Post's sharp political editor, Gregg Birnbaum.

It will, I assume, be a tribute site.