Andrea Tantaros

So the official announcement of moderate C. Scott Vanderhoef as John Faso's running mate will come at 1:00 today, the campaign says.

The timing, of course, is choreographed to coincide with the Conservative party's endorsement of Faso at the pre-convention convention today.

Bill Weld, meanwhile, is affecting an attitude of complete disintest about Faso's big day.

"We're continuing to work to gain support in the Republican Party and the Independence Party," said Andrea Tantaros, a spokeswoman for Weld.

—Jason Horowitz

Bill Weld has, his spokeswoman says, been dispatching the occasional postcard to Eliot Spitzer from his swing along the "supposed ribbon of gloom."

Apparently lots of teeth and no rickets up there. Though it certainly isn't conventional wisdom that the parts of Upstate deeply dependent on state handouts want to be told they're actually doing just fine.

The cards carry short notes like, "Rome wasn't rebuilt with a phrase!" and "Wish you were here!")

"We wanted to let Mr. Spitzer know we were thinking about him the entire trip," the spokeswoman, Andrea Tantaros, says.

Apparently there's also a care package in the works.

In a sign that dealing with the New York press corps is the trial by fire I alleged to Andrea Tantaros it is, the Hill reports that the D.C. consulting firm that hands out "Flak Jacket" and "Bomb Thrower" awards to press operatives has, er, honored three New Yorkers: Hillary spokesman Philippe Reines, Chuck aide Phil Singer, and Kevin Madden, who didn't always work for Tom DeLay. (via JustHillary)  read more »

A few advances in stories you first saw here or in the Observer:

The Washington Post's politics blog notes our Shrum book scoop and adds rumor -- and Shrum denial -- that the semi-retired consultant is whispering in Arnold's ear.  read more »

The Associated Press tracks the Democrats' response to Pirro spokeswoman Andrea Tantaros's undergrad musings, but omits her (rocking) Wawa-smokes defense.

And the Times reports on Bill Weld's Kentucky trouble. You may recall that Jess had the story and relevant documents here yesterday, but using a complex algorithim involving the number of hours by which you get beat and the distance your reporter travels, the usually-gracious Times declines to credit. (We, of course, blame Arthur Sulzberger for this.)

So The Politicker doesn't want to harp too much on undergraduate indiscretions, but it does seem that Jeanine Pirro's new spokeswoman, Andrea Tantaros, turns out to have been in training for the battle against the evil forces of Clinton for quite a while.

Tantaros has worked for House leadership and done an upstate congressional race, but it was back Lehigh University in 2000, that Tantaros -- then the student paper's conservative columnist -- exposed New York's junior Senator as a "power-hungry monster." Here's the parody-defying column, which dwells on the who-killed-Vince-Foster line, and more.

Some favorite excerpts:

....Yup, I guess Mrs. Clinton realizes that her time as first lady is coming to a close and this power-hungry monster feels she and her husband didn`t do enough damage to our country as a whole, so she needs to ruin New York.

Besides the fact that she isn`t even from New York and has never even lived or been educated there, Mrs. Clinton is a power-hungry congenital liar....

`Hill` has been involved in multiple scandals (probably) more than all of the first ladies combined) and has lied probably about as many times as her husband has dropped his pants.... Oh, we can`t forget the most famous, Whitewater. This was the Clinton`s real-estate scam in Arkansas that ended up costing us taxpayers $69 million and White House Deputy Vincent Foster's life. (He was found dead in a nearby park in the heat of the scandal.)

But really, read the whole thing. It's a classic of a lost genre.  read more »

UPDATE: Tarantos emails: "Man I was angry. Either the Wawa was out of smokes or I had been woken up before noon when I wrote that." Anyway: "I make a better press secretary than I did journalist, that's for sure."