Consider these assessments by playwright Yasmina Reza of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, gleaned from her yearlong stint as insider on his 2007 campaign trail:

“One of the things that I liked about him — there are many things, but this really seduced me — was his insolence,” she recalled. “But he has not understood that power is itself insolent and that he could not continue with his habitual insolences. During the campaign his insolence seemed like an expression of freedom, frankness. But in office he has not curbed it, he has misjudged its effect.”…

Ms. Reza was not surprised when Mr. Sarkozy was next seen dating the former model Carla Bruni, whom he married in February. “He’s the kind of man who is incapable of being alone,” she said. “I don’t think he can spend a night alone, an evening alone. There may be passing affairs, but he needs someone real. So quickly someone serious entered his life.”…

“I think he is a tragic personality, a man bent on self-destruction,” she said. “It wasn’t clear during the campaign, but I am convinced that he has a powerful faculty for self-destruction.”

With all that in mind, let me throw this out there:

Is Sarkozy just France’s version of Bill Clinton, appropriately amped up for a Gallic political culture? Both men came into office as establishment-challenging reformers, after all. And as far as spotlight moments: Imagine the Monica Lewinsky scandal culminating not in impeachment, but rather in a divorce and remarriage… And you’ve got the Carla Bruni episode.

If all this holds, I guess we’ll be seeing a meltdown from the Presidential Palace in Paris before all’s done.

They’re no longer in Montreal, but the Washington Nationals are still saddled with a familiar problem: Anemic attendance, despite a spanking-new stadium.

Since we can’t blame a hockey-distracted populace this time around — or some sort of franchise curse — a trickle-down effect in DC’s political mechanics may be to blame for all the empty seats, particularly the highly-visible ones:

Then Jack Abramoff tried to buy off all of Washington. New lobbying laws soon followed, and now the maximum gift given to a lawmaker cannot exceed $50. Which means all the [behind home-plate] Presidential tickets – $325 for single-game ones, $335 on Saturday and $400 for the front row, all more than the best seat at Yankee Stadium, which goes for $250 – that should have gone from lobbyist to Congressman to hard-working staffer no longer exist, and the market won’t get any hotter unless the Nationals do, too.

So cleaner politics means bad business for the nation’s (alleged) pasttime in the nation’s capital. Emblematic of the times, no?

For anyone who was wondering what prompted new New York governor David Paterson to go on a confessional spree shortly after inauguration, he now claims that elements within the state police were zeroing in and would have outed him anyway.

Paterson first disclosed to the Daily News in March that both he and his wife, Michelle, had affairs during a troubled point in their marriage several years ago. The day after he was sworn in, the couple fielded questions at a tense press conference at the state Capitol.

“That feeding frenzy was getting closer and closer to my family,” Paterson said Friday, adding he had heard “wild rumors” about himself - including that he fathered his 23-year-old nephew.

“So what we decided to do was you get yourself before they get you,” said Paterson, who has also since disclosed that he smoked pot and used cocaine in his youth.

This is pretty much what I suspected, although I didn’t know specifically who was getting ready to hit Paterson — I would have guessed it would have been some investigative reporter or somesuch. But the flood of admissions were clearly a preemptive move.

What I’ve argued is that Paterson made his disclosures at the only good time possible. He couldn’t have done so before he was sworn in, because that would have jeopardized his ascension to the Governor’s mansion. And had he waited until later, not only would he have risked someone else beating him to the punch, but he also would have gotten considerably more flak; the positive energy he was getting from not being Eliot Spitzer served as enough of a shield to deflect serious fallout.

Simply put, there was no other time when he could have done it, and gotten gain out of it. It was actually a very shrewd public relations strategy: Taking advantage of a window of optimal goodwill.

Appropriately enough for a gambling mecca, Las Vegas is taking a double-down approach to urban revitalization: Instead of rehabbing its existing downtown, it’s building a sparkling-new replacement, right next door.

[T]he city will formally inaugurate a new urban core on a 61-acre, undeveloped parcel of land — a project that some experts say is unprecedented in city planning. Called Union Park, its supporters hope it will revive the historic downtown just to the east, where the region’s courthouses, government offices and oldest casinos are clustered…

“It’s quite unusual that there’s a big swath of downtown ground just sitting there without having to go through a whole rigmarole to acquire,” said Bill Hudnut, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington. Mr. Hudnut, the former mayor of Indianapolis, recalled that acquiring just three blocks of that city “involved some legal fights and eminent domain, the demolition of buildings, numerous deals with numerous owners.” In Las Vegas, he added, “they’re just building new stuff.”

And I suppose if Union Park fizzles out after it goes up, they can just pick up another several adjacent acres and take a third stab at it. All that desert terrain is just a blank slate anyway, right?

New York State’s newly-enshrined governor, David Paterson, is legally blind: Only his right eye has any visual functionality to it.

So how does he manage to head up the government of the nation’s third-largest state? With plenty of audible help:

Mr. Paterson, a Harlem Democrat who has been blind since infancy, has been making adjustments to his surroundings throughout his life. But, with the added demands of the job of governor and the relentlessness of his new schedule, staying on top of his work now takes a lot more time. He said much of his day can feel like a big game of catch-up. “I’m always trying to get back that time that I’m losing,” he said.

Given the volume of material he must take in, he tries to find ways to do things faster. He listens to very long articles or books on a special tape recorder for the blind that plays at speeds so fast, it is difficult for others to comprehend. “You get used to listening to that Alvin and the Chipmunks voice,” he said.

Not to get all gushy, but as someone with fairly weak eyeballs, I find Paterson’s ascent inspiring.

The Empire State is just waiting for the other boot to drop at this point, as Eliot Spitzer is holed up on Fifth Avenue, contemplating his resignation from the governor’s office.

But in the meantime, David Letterman is going off on the “luv guv” and his stalemate:

The studio audience erupted in applause when Letterman ripped Spitzer for pondering his future on the public’s dime.

“Well, I mean how does that benefit us residents of the Empire State, you know what I’m saying,” Letterman said. “I mean, should that really be his decision?”

Spitzer should “go down to the Mayflower hotel and figure that out there,” said Letterman, drawing both laughs and cheers referring to the Washington D.C. location of the governor’s tryst.

When one of the main beneficiaries of the punchline material being generated gets down and serious about ending this episode sooner rather than later, I think the writing on the wall can’t get any clearer.

As for the long-term impact, we can always look back on this as a prime example of hubris in action. Spitzer went from coronation (his landslide election victory over hapless Republican John Faso, which was telegraphed months beforehand) to condemnation in a remarkably short timeframe. And his vague apology over the prostitution sting, which came off more as an attempt to frame the issue as a private family matter than a political target, was the cherry on top.

I give you the last mortal words of Pancho Villa:

“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

While making note of Villa’s penchant for Hollywood-quality self-promotion, I’ll let the statement stand.

I came across this quip over the weekend, before the prostitution scandal surrounding New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer hit the fan today. I may be the only one in the world drawing a connection between these two figures; but somehow, Villa’s coda seems well-tailored to Spitzer’s prospective hubris-filled fall from grace.

Once or twice in the past, I’ve invoked that old joke about finding a parking spot in New York City:

It’s like playing musical chairs, and everyone already sat down back in 1965.

For all the city government knows, the mid-60s might be when some of the 142,000 municipal free parking permits currently in use — only half of which can be accurately accounted for — were first issued.

The Bloomberg administration has vowed to reduce the number of free passes, as part of the justification for the congestion-reduction plans the Mayor’s been tossing around. But history suggests this cancer won’t be easy to reduce:

The placards have been a source of frustration to New York drivers for decades. In 1987, The New York Times reported that to ease traffic around City Hall, the number of placards issued to public employees would be cut to 15,000 from an estimated 50,000.

But the numbers continued to grow. For example, there are now some 50,000 permits that have been issued to Police Department employees to park around station houses and other workplaces, a number close to the 59,000 police and auxiliary officers and civilian employees who are eligible for them…

The numbers grew, in part, because city agencies were allowed to issue their own permits with no central accounting of whom they went to or why. In addition, the placards were easy to duplicate, creating numerous fakes on the street.

From now on, only the Police and Transportation Departments will be allowed to issue them. That will make them easier to track; it will also make it easier for the police and traffic agents to tell the difference between legitimate and bogus placards, city officials said.

Good luck. The only way to fix this mess is to null and void all the existing permits, and then force those who want/need them to reapply for theirs, with a limited number of justifications for getting them. That sort of drastic act just doesn’t come out of City Hall.

Once again, being carless in the City, I’m glad I don’t have a dog in this particular fight (and can function splendidly besides).

Macroeconomics doesn’t get much hairier than when stagflation, that old invisible-hand smacker from the 70s, makes a comeback.

“[The Federal Reserve is] cutting rates with a bill to be paid later,” said John Ryding, chief United States economist at Bear Stearns. “The question is not, will we get inflation, but how much will it cost to stuff the genie back in the bottle. This has the feel of 1970s stagflation.”

Over the last 12 months, consumer prices are up 4.3 percent on average, according to the Labor Department. The core index of consumer price inflation, which excludes food and oil, was 2.5 percent higher in January than a year earlier, significantly above the Fed’s unofficial comfort zone of a 1 to 2 percent underlying inflation rate. That’s a far cry from the double-digit inflation rates that battered the economy at times in the 1970s, but still worrisome.

What’s next? A re-experiencing of “malaise forever”?

This quote by 19th-century British poet/social critic Matthew Arnold resonates with my personal worldview:

“The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”

It also comes across as timely in this political season. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which side of the political divide it more closely hews toward.

As the Federal government strains to deliver an economic stimulus package that would net average taxpayers some $600 in intended extra spending money, Economy.com argues that pumping up more traditional welfare-state programs would be more effective more quickly.

In findings echoed by other economists and studies, [economist Mark Zandi] said the study shows the fastest way to infuse money into the economy is through expanding the food-stamp program. For every dollar spent on that program $1.73 is generated throughout the economy, he said…

Tracking that single dollar spent through the economic chain shows what economists call the ripple effect, Zandi said. For example, that dollar spent at the grocery store in turn helps to pay the salaries of the grocery clerks, pays the truckers who haul the food and produce cross-country, and finally goes to the farmer who grows the crops.

The report pointed to expanding unemployment benefits as the program that gets the next biggest bang for the buck. That’s because, although the unemployed are already getting checks, they need to spend the money. For every dollar spent here, the economy would see a return of $1.64, Zandi said.

These are very much bottom-up methods of juicing the economy: Spur more necessary spending among the huge mass of have-nots, and the ripple effect will be substantial. The real question is if that effect will be sustainable.

It makes more sense to me than that one-time $600 bonus, which to me is a ridiculous proposition for kickstarting a wave of economic activity. What does 600 bucks represent for middle and upper class households — a weekend or two of fun-money spending? It’s a laughable token giveback.

A recent news item out of Washington brought this conjured-up word to my attention: “Prebuttal”.

A rebuttal, inserted into an argument, that refutes an anticipated counter-argument; a rebuttal given in advance of another’s argument.

In other words, a preemptive way to scuttle a rebuttal. Like it. I can see it having wide application beyond the political realm.

Can a man experience an abortion? No, but apparently he can suffer sympathy stress over what might have been:

These days, he channels the grief into activism in a burgeoning movement of “post-abortive men.” Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman’s issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement — both political and deeply personal in nature — contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

“We had abortions,” said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. “I’ve had abortions.”

Morrow spoke to more than 150 antiabortion activists gathered recently in San Francisco for what was billed as the first national conference on men and abortion. Participants — mostly counselors and clergy — heard two days of lectures on topics such as “Medicating the Pain of Lost Fatherhood” and “Forgiveness Therapy With Post-Abortion Men.”

This seems to be a natural outgrowth of the pre-natal hyper-involvement manifested by couples who declare, “We’re pregnant”. If having a baby is characterized as a team effort, then it follows that not having a baby would be just as much a shared experience.

Or maybe it’s just another disembodied view of reproductive rights, with a focus on the fetus above all else:

In the end, [Houston lawyer Chris] Aubert says his moral objection to abortion always wins. If he could go back in time, he would try to save the babies.

But would his long-ago girlfriends agree? Or might they also consider the abortions a choice that set them on a better path?

Aubert looks startled. “I never really thought about it for the woman,” he says slowly.

Yeah, I recognize a set-up “gotcha” moment when I read it. It doesn’t invalidate the fundamentals here: At root, just as the woman is the one who has to bear the nine-month pregnancy, the woman’s the one who bears the direct physical and emotional scars of an abortion. The male partner can empathize all he wants, but ultimately, he’s doing so just so he can say he’s along for the ride, for whatever reason — emotional, political, whatever. The heavy lifting remains with the X chromosome.

The editorial board of the Concord Monitor has yet to endorse either a Democrat or Republican for the upcoming New Hampshire party primaries. But that didn’t stop it from delivering this explicit anti-endorsement of Mitt Romney:

If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you’d swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you’re left to wonder if there’s anything at all at his core…

When New Hampshire partisans are asked to defend the state’s first-in-the-nation primary, we talk about our ability to see the candidates up close, ask tough questions and see through the baloney. If a candidate is a phony, we assure ourselves and the rest of the world, we’ll know it.

Mitt Romney is such a candidate. New Hampshire Republicans and independents must vote no.

Harsh, a bit.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a newspaper has done this before. I can cite one previous example, although it was more in the shape of a non-endorsement: The Tampa Tribune’s decision to withhold support from either Presidential candidate in the 2004 election, which, because of the paper’s conservative track record, was interpreted as a no-support nod toward George W. Bush.

Just as in that scenario, the Monitor’s diss on Romney amounts to a vote of no confidence. And by extension, it’s probably the natural outcome of the failure of the candidates to truly distinguish themselves from each other: Since there’s nothing to commend any one of them, the paper goes after the obvious (and close to local) negative target.

Maverick Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul is staying true to his populist image by refusing to return the $500 campaign contribution he received from Don Black, who runs a white supremacist website called the “Stormfront White Nationalist Community”.

The reasoning behind keeping the money is pretty specious, though:

“Dr. Paul stands for freedom, peace, prosperity and inalienable rights. If someone with small ideologies happens to contribute money to Ron, thinking he can influence Ron in any way, he’s wasted his money,” Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said. “Ron is going to take the money and try to spread the message of freedom.

“And that’s $500 less that this guy has to do whatever it is that he does,” Benton added.

In practical terms, there’s no risk in dissing Black and his ilk, precisely because they represent a fringe movement, e.g. a “small ideology”. Paul’s not going to alienate any significant number of voters by spurning white supremacists, and indeed will probably see a net gain of supporters. Meanwhile, what are the whitey-righties going to do to retaliate — vote for Obama?

Still, keeping the money and framing it as some sort of resource drain to prevent further mischief from disagreeable movements? Not that any candidate is obliged to apply a blanket policy to how it handles campaign contributions, but let’s imagine how the Paul campaign would address donations from “big ideologies” if it treated them the same way:

- National Rifle Association: “Keeping this money keeps that many more guns out of the hands of these people!”

- Planned Parenthood: “This is a few hundred dollars less that abortion clinics will have to keep the lights on!”

- Oil companies: “Less money for fossil-fuel drilling, more to dedicate toward research on green-energy solutions!”

- Pharmaceutical makers: “We’re taking this money in the hopes that we’ll see fewer of those penis-pill commercials on TV!”

Heck, the possibilities are endless. Who knew spreading the message of freedom was a special-interests zero-sum game?

Last year, analyst Ben Dell’s controversial assessment that oil prices were being artificially inflated via market speculation instead of supply shortages seemed to bear out when pump prices dropped toward the end of 2006.

Since then, of course, black gold’s $3-per-gallon-and-rising status has made a comeback. So hedge fund investors or no, expensive oil as a dwindling commodity is here to stay.

Or not. Portfolio’s John Cassidy argues that the rising cost of a barrelful simply resets the economics of global petroleum production, to the point where more players enter and prices eventually will be driven down:

When experts claim that oil is running out, what they really mean is that cheap oil is running out. About this, they may be right. Outside of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and a few other countries, it is no longer possible to recover large quantities of crude for a dollar or two a barrel. But there are plenty of places where oil can be produced for $20 or $30 a barrel, let alone the $100 range where it has been trading recently…

With energy supplies expanding and the demand for oil showing signs of faltering, it won’t be very long before economic fundamentals reassert themselves. If oil were a normal commodity, competition would eventually drive the price down to a level close to the current cost of production, which at the margin is probably somewhere between $20 and $30 a barrel.

Of course, the oil market is hardly a textbook case of open competition: The OPEC cartel controls 40 percent of the supply, and geopolitics is an ever-present factor, as is speculation. The recent surge toward $100 a barrel was a dramatic demonstration of how traders can cause prices to become unmoored from costs for a lengthy period. But that also means that once market sentiment turns, the fall in prices could be just as dramatic.

All this depends on those competitive producers actually coming up with oil, instead of mostly dry holes. If they do pan out, we might see another years-spanning rollercoaster in fuel volatility.

As Michael Mukasey starts his stint in the Attorney General chair, he might want to include a couple of history texts in his reference library, just to help him out on his fuzziness regarding waterboarding.

Because apparently, this technique was debated as a form of torture during America’s colonial ware in the Philippines, more than a century ago. And if the “water cure” from those days wasn’t definitively identified as torture, then it certainly was by the Vietnam era.

So if the issue was already decided decades ago, why the confusion? Is it because of the supposedly new terrain that the War on Terror represents? Mukasey will have to hash that one out as he guides the Justice Department during the remainder of the Dubya years.

What happens when you cross belovedly portly cartoon icon Fat Albert with an ever-expanding Al Gore talking about an ever-expanding climactic crisis?

By way of “Talkshow with Spike Feresten”, I give you “Fat Albert Gore”:

Yes, this is a segment from “Comedy for Stoners”, and no, I am not/was not high. Who needs chemical assistance to enjoy lyrics like these:

Greenhouse gases makin’ me blue
The ocean’s turning into stew
…
Na, na, na — say goodbye to penguins (hey-hey-hey!)
Na, na, na — really big mosquitoes (hey-hey-hey!)

I tell you, if An Inconvenient Truth had had musical numbers, it would have been even more impactful.

I only wonder where Bill Cosby fits in here.

What to make of Dick Cheney hoisting a shotgun this weekend to shoot at some birds near Poughkeepsie?

Offhand, based on the Veep’s track record with hunting rifles, I’d say that the Homeland Security Threat Level for the Hudson Valley has just jumped from High/Orange to Red/Severe.

On the plus side, this means more empirical data for The Cheney Shotgun Experiment.

What do you do when you’re accused of indiscriminate and fatal paramilitary blunders in Iraq?

Naturally, if you’re Blackwater USA Worldwide, you roll out a less-threatening, more professional-looking corporate logo.

The rifle-scope crosshairs so obvious in the old Blackwater logo have been reduced to a set of horizontal elipses that bracket, but no longer enclose, the paw print, which has also changed to more closely resemble an actual bear-paw imprint. The original Blackwater logo had thick white serif lettering draped over the crosshairs on a menacing black field. The new logo separates the image and the letters, which now appear in buttoned-down sans-serif black and slightly italicized on a white field.

Though the red elipses in the new logo retain the horizontal crosshairs, the overall look is far less “kick your butt” and much more “quarterly report,” some branding experts said. The new logo, which began to appear on some Blackwater material in late July, may also speak volumes about the company’s desire to begin its second decade on a more anodyne note.

“I would say it’s a highly significant change; they’re repositioning themselves,” said Lauren Miller, the owner of MDesign, a graphic design firm in New York. “The old logo suggests that they’re targeting people. The new logo is a more ambiguous, more safe corporate logo.”

The new look may indeed be a more high-tech, truer-to-real-life crosshairs scope, but it certainly comes off as less specific. It almost looks like the paw is surrounded by parentheses.

I don’t know if this is intentional, but the Blackwater site’s favicon image retains the old killer-sights look, as shown here in the second image above. The shoddier Web-design outfits routinely overlook this subtle element of a website, so I’m assuming that’s what’s happened here. If, by chance, they come across this critique, I’ll go ahead and help them out by pointing them toward Chami/HTML-Kit’s FavIcon Generator, where they can quickly correct their oversight.

Here’s how to pare down the Presidential Cabinet, which is often criticized as being bloated:

Eliminate the Departments whose Secretaries are wasting time blogging.

Hello, Homeland Security’s Michael Chertoff and Health & Human Services’ Mike Leavitt!

Start packing up your desks now, boys. And be heartened that, once relieved of your post, you’ll have loads of time for blogging full-time.