And this makes me want to vote for Rudy how?

[MKSheppard]

Link

City taxpayers picked up tab for Judith Giuliani's visit to kin in Pennsylvania

BY MICHAEL SAUL and DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Saturday, December 1st 2007, 4:00 AM

In the fall of 2001, city cops chauffeured Rudy Giuliani's then-mistress, Judith Nathan, to her parents' Pennsylvania home 130 miles away on the taxpayers' dime.

Records show that city cops refueled at an ExxonMobil station down the road from Nathan's childhood home in Hazleton on Oct. 20, 2001, while Giuliani stayed behind in New York attending 9/11 funerals.

A similar receipt pops up at a different Hazleton gas station two months later, when Nathan apparently went home for a pre-Christmas visit with her parents.

The records show that - in addition to using City Hall funds to take Giuliani and Nathan to 11 secret trysts in the Hamptons, as has been previously reported - taxpayers were paying to ferry Nathan on long-distance trips without Giuliani, now a Republican contender for President.

Aides to the presidential hopeful insisted Friday that all the expenses were legitimate - although Mayor Bloomberg's gal pal, Diana Taylor, happily goes without police protection.

Neighbors from Nathan's old town said Friday that explains the burly men they remember seeing with her in the fall of 2001 when she visited her parents.

"They looked like [cops], clean-cut and well-built," recalled Madeline Kowalski, 48.

The receipts, first revealed by Politico.com and obtained by the Daily News, also show that the obscure accounts that covered the cop expenses were put to other surprising uses.

Giuliani's Community Assistance Unit doled out pricey meals, Broadway tickets - even tickets to Yankee games - to victims of the melee that followed the Puerto Rican Day Parade in 2000.

Giuliani advisers insisted that the manner in which the travel and other bills were paid - by scattering expenses across several little-known mayoral agencies - was appropriate and not an attempt to obscure anything.

"At what point do we acknowledge that this was just a cheap political hit and that the premise of the original story has been proven false?" said Giuliani adviser Anthony Carbonetti. "Nobody was trying to hide anything."

Aides dismissed questions about Nathan's security detail as old news, since it was reported in 2001 that the NYPD granted her full-time protection that year after an unspecified threat was allegedly made against her. The detail was approved by Giuliani pal Bernard Kerik.

At the time, it was not uncommon to see Nathan being chauffeured around the city in an undercover Dodge with two detectives, who sometimes even helped to walk her dog.

As for the tickets, Carbonetti said they were "a token of goodwill from the city."

The expenses were all paid with a City Hall American Express card funded with money from mayoral office units that had nothing to do with travel or security.

One document dated June 26, 2000, shows how money from five such offices - the Mayor's Office of People with Disabilities, the Community Assistance Unit, the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, the Loft Board and the mayor's liaison to the United Nations - was used to prepay an American Express account to the tune of $60,000.

That card was in turn used to pay for many security-related costs on trips taken by Giuliani, Nathan, Giuliani's children and, until their marriage dissolved in 2001, First Lady Donna Hanover.

Carbonetti said that the document - dated four days before the end of the city fiscal year - simply showed how unused money from agencies was being used to prepay bills.

"It's fiscally responsible to anticipate predictable expenses and prepay them," he argued.

As for Hazleton, the Giulianis are buying more than gas there these days. On Nov. 1, records show, the couple purchased Nathan's childhood home from her parents for an unspecified sum.

With Mike Jaccarino, Kirsten Danis and Heidi Evans

[Darth Wong]

I would ask how anyone could possibly consider voting for Giuliani even before any of this became public. But then you look at the Republican field of candidates, and you remember that some people would rather die than vote Democrat, and you see that they have few palatable choices.

[Guardsman Bass]

A Giuliani presidency genuinely frightens me, particularly after reading the book Takeover, about the actions Bush has done to make the executive branch of the US government extremely powerful and minimally accountable to the other branches. Giuliani seems to have the same penchant for both executive power and using the government for patronage and his own needs, but doesn't have the weakness of being stupid like Bush.

[Solauren]

I agree. Rudy is intelligent enough to use what Bush has created, and use it well.

A powerful government branch, that he would be head of, that isn't accountable to anyone, not even the voters really.

The only thing that could stop him would be Congress + the Senate, if they were controlled by the Democrats, and they somehow grew some proverbal balls. (or are hiding them and don't think it's worth the effort of tossing Bush + co out).

Oh well. If Rudy get's elected, hopefully the United States of America will enjoy becoming what they claimed to have rebelled against to become an independent nation in the first place.

A Constitutionally crippled dictatorship.

Still, the US made it several hundreds years as a democracy. That still fairly impressive.

[Elfdart]

I would ask how anyone could possibly consider voting for Giuliani even before any of this became public. But then you look at the Republican field of candidates, and you remember that some people would rather die than vote Democrat, and you see that they have few palatable choices.

Then they should take one for the team and choose death.

[Elfdart]

Jesus' General is on the case:

[Guardsman Bass]

Hell, there's no excuse even for the Republicans. Even Mormon Boy Scout-turned-Getting-to-Yes businessman Mitt Romney would be more tolerable than the American Caudillo.

[Pelranius]

As if the tabloids didn't have enough to talk about "America's Mayor."

I can't wait for the South Carolina primary. 2000 is going to be nothing compared to this.