Newsweek Inc.

In case you missed this, my colleague Michael Calderone stopped by a party last night in Manhattan hosted by News Corp, where Michael Bloomberg presidential buzz was in the air.

From Newsweek senior editor Lally Weymouth's introduction:

“Everybody in New York that I know thinks he’s a brilliant mayor, and everyone thinks he would be a brilliant president.”

But the line of the night unquestionably goes to Fox News executive Roger Ailes, who is upset that the Democrats won't participate in a presidential debate co-sponsored by Fox.

“The candidates that can’t face Fox, can’t face Al Qaeda,” he said. “And that’s what’s coming.”

Hillary Clinton and other elected officials said there may not be enough money to treat 9/11 workers.

Hillary pulled ahead of Rudy Giuliani and John McCain in a Newsweek poll.

In that same poll, Barack Obama was in a statistical dead heat with McCain and Giuliani in head-to-head matches.

The Washington Post takes a lengthy look at Giuilani's presidential bid.

The Chicago Tribune has a column defending Obama's experience and credibility as a 2008 candidate.

Alan Hevesi's lawyers are in negotiations with the Albany County District Attorney.

If Hevesi is indicted by the Albany DA, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver will not support him, reports Fred Dicker.

Joe Mahoney reports that the indictment could come today.

There may be pressure on Sheldon Silver to delay approval of the Atlantic Yards project.

And Herman Badillo said that education is not a high priority in the Hispanic Community.

-- Azi Paybarah

Newsweek looks at, what else, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Obama has a lot of potential but remains something of a mystery, according to New York magazine.

Hillary's pollster said that she's not a polarizing figure and that John McCain's problem isn't his personality, but his views.

John Edwards is still the front-runner in Iowa.

The Economist takes note of Mike Bloomberg's 25-year plan for New York City.

Bloomberg is the Daily News's New Yorker of the Year.

Sheldon Silver could derail the Atlantic Yards project.

Rudy Giuliani will headline a political event in California in February.

George Pataki defends his legacy and his handling of Ground Zero.

There is talk of Randi Weingarten possibly heading the national teacher's union.

-- Azi Paybarah

Adam Nagourney says that "In Mr. Obama, Democrats have a prospective candidate who both underlines and compensates for the potential weaknesses that worry many Democrats about Mrs. Clinton."

Hillary is meeting with New York Democrats to talk about 2008.

After meeting Eliot Spitzer in his apartment for two hours, Hillary told reporters they discussed "so many issues that affect the city, the state and the country."

Some people wonder if Hillary can win in 2008.

In a New York magazine cover story, Mike Bloomberg asked rhetorically, "What chance does a five-foot-seven billionaire Jew who's divorced really have of becoming president?"

John McCain's counter-intuitive call for more troops in Iraq may be "reminding independents of the maverick they fell in love with in 2000," according to Newsweek.

Eliot Spitzer may release a damning report detailing a two-month long probe by his office into Alan Hevesi.

The Democrats' secret weapon of 2006 is revealed: Blake Zeff.

Congestion pricing is not on the mayor's to-do list. John Haggerty may be the next executive director of the state GOP.

Some Times reporters are reportedly banned from reading Manhattan weekly newspapers.

Spitzer's campaign turned down $25,000 in contributions from a company but later accepted donations in the same amount from that company's owner [added].

And could wikis and blogs prevent the next 9/11?

-- Azi Paybarah

The incident in which police fired 50 shots and killed a groom on his wedding day was "contagious shooting."

The mayor has better relations with minorities than during the police shooting of Amadou Diallo seven years ago.

The cops involved in the shooting had at least five years of experience on the job.

Two Council members have called on the police commissioner to resign.

Christine Quinn's citywide speaking tour is generating buzz about a possible mayoral run.

An advocacy group wants congestion pricing in the city.

The state Assembly will make public a detailed list of pork projects it funds.

Political parties can now spend money during primaries in New York.

The head of the Executive Director of the state's Lobbying Commission may be ousted.

Eliot Spitzer will get to fill at least two upcoming vacancies on the state's highest court.

2008 wouldn't be the first time Rudy Giuliani tested the presidential waters.

Al Gore told Time magazine that despite traveling by jet to promote his global warming lecture, he does live eco-friendly.

Newsweek looked at Mitt Romney's opposition to same-sex marriage in his last days as governor of Massachusetts, and wonders if he can ride that issue into the White House.

Time magazine simply asks whether a Mormon can be president.

Jonathan Chait, writing in The New Republic, argued that "psychotic mass murderer" Saddam Hussein should be restored to power [subscription]in Iraq.

"Under his rule, Iraqis were shot, tortured, and lived in constant fear. Bringing the dictator back would sound cruel if it weren't for the fact that all those things are also happening now, probably on a wider scale."

And Andrew Cuomo told Page Six that he asked Louis Freeh, a Clinton foe, to be on his transition team because of his legal expertise, not because of politics.

-- Azi Paybarah

• New noodle shop spills onto the Lower East Side.
[Voice]
• Listen in on the Association of Realtors' convention.
[Newsweek]
• Hotel-condo turning office tower on 53rd Street.
[NY Post]
• Office tower plans for 55th Street and Eighth Avenue.
[NY Post]
• Union Square bank building going condo. [2nd item]
[NY Post]
• Parents protest Columbia's plans for Harlem charter school.
[NY Post]
• Renters sweat Second Avenue subway changes.
[NY Post]
• Citigroup may not be good for Mets stadium.
[NY Times]
• Security concerns may delay trade center site arts center.
[Daily News]
• Anger festers over Diamond District tower plan.
[Daily News]
• Apartments heading for former Upper West Side stables.
[NY Sun]

Did we miss any New York City real estate news this morning? Please send along tips and links.

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Annie Leibovitz, the grand dame of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone covers, was the one facing flashbulbs. The other morning she gave a private press tour of her new show at the Brooklyn Museum.

"Walk slowly. Watch your cameras," she said. Microphone booms swung through the air, nearly knocking the photos off the wall. "Careful, we have lots of time," she said as she was followed.

Ms. Leibovitz has recently been profiled in Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She has a new book, "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographers Life, 1990-2005," and a retrospective of her work that will travel the world.

"It was time to look back at my work," Ms. Leibovitz said. She wore a faded black button-up shirt, tapered black jeans, and heavy work boots. "It was like being on an archeological dig finding these pictures," she said.

One entire wall was snapshots of her family at the beach, her parents in bed, her children wet with afterbirth in the delivery room, and hotel rooms with rumpled bed sheets, Susan Sontag included.

On another wall Donald Trump sat in a sports car and a hugely pregnant Ivana sported a gold lame bikini on the stairs of a gigantic jet. A portrait of Colin Powell in full military regalia hung near the Clintons on election night.

Ms. Leibovitz said the idea for the exhibit "came out of a moment," when she faced the deaths of Sontag and her father, plus the birth of her twins, by a surrogate mother.

On one wall Sontag battles cancer in a hospital bed, another shows her being wheeled on a gurney to a private plane in Seattle to be air-evacuated to a hospital in New York. A small print in a corner shows Sontag's corpse at a funeral home. She is dressed in Italian silk.

In "On Photography," Sontag had written: "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have.""

With every photo, regardless of the narrative, it's clear that sometimes Ms. Leibovitz was an intruder in her own life. The exhibit, which gives such a remarkable window into Ms. Leibovitz's private world, also shows the limits of that view.

Ms. Leibovitz said that she enjoys how her magazine assignments create a sense of history, but that her personal work is her strongest work, in fact because she is know to her subjects.

"Most people don't like to have their picture taken," Ms. Leibovitz said. "They have to confront themselves." Every photo involves problem solving. "It's never easy."

And with that, Ms. Leibovitz left the room, accompanied by two women in black suits. "I mean, you wouldn't expect anything less," said a reporter, who wore a sticker that read Panarama. "She's a living legend." — Kaija Helmetag

I thought Lamont won, but then I'm crazed about Iraq. My wife and Imus both said that Lieberman won. He seemed far more rounded as a person. Imus called Lamont a pencil-neck.

But if Lieberman won, he damaged himself among the engaged, like myself. As Howard Fineman of Newsweek said on Imus, Lieberman seemed angry and rattled. He's in real trouble, and knows it.

Fineman also made a revealing statement: Lieberman had shown "courage" in voting for the Iraq war. This is the conventional wisdom now in Washington, where as Paul Krugman said so beautifully, To be credible on national security, you have to have been wrong about Iraq.

Why is it the conventional wisdom? Because all the columnists were for this war and they're still covering their asses now that even blockheads are questioning their judgment. As Fineman said in his role as a cheerleader in 2003 (per FAIR): "We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back." Well, I remember disunity. I remember people saying, Not in my name.

Courage wasn't going along with a foolish idea that would alienate the Arab world and turn Iraq into a terrorist-breeding hellhole, it was opposing it. Ned Lamont's riding that wave.

One of the chapters left out of yesterday's Times obit of Rosenthal was his treatment of gay staff members when he was managing editor and executive editor. Gay people say he was oppressive.

"It was the presumption of everyone at the Times that in order to have any possibility of being promoted or getting anywhere if you were gay you had to stay in the closet," says Charles Kaiser, a former clerk to Rosenthal.

In his book, The Gay Metropolis (and in his obit for the Observer), Kaiser reported that Rosenthal had blocked Walter Clemons from becoming a daily book critic at the Times in 1971 after conducting an informal investigation of his homosexuality. (Clemons went to Newsweek). Another writer whose career he damaged was Richard Meislin, a former favorite. Meislin was a foreign correspondent in Mexico City when Rosenthal learned that he was gay. (By one report, Meislin had brought his Mexican boyfriend into the newsroom on a visit home. Rosenthal asked others who the man was. Ka-boom!)

Michelangelo Signorile wrote in the Advocate in 1992:

Staffers say he chastised two editors for not telling him previously that Meislin was a homosexual. Rosenthal apparently decided that Meislin, as a homosexual, shouldn't represent the Times in Mexico and eventually pulled him back, though Meislin was doing what some editors consider to be exemplary work.

Meislin was not assigned another foreign post or sent to Washington, D.C., which would be a usual next step. Instead, he was brought back to the New York newsroom to do a job he hated. "What kept me from leaving the paper," says Meislin, "was that one of the [other] editors took me in his office and said, 'We know you've been screwed, but don't do anything rash. You have a long career ahead of you, and Rosenthal will be leaving soon.'"

Meislin declines to comment. Though he himself wrote about Rosenthal in a piece about the late Doug Schmalz published inthe Media Studies Journal:

Like most gay people whose careers overlapped A.M. Rosenthal's tenure as the Times' top editor, Schmalz had hidden his sexual orientation from most of his superiors as he rose for nearly two decades through the newsroom ranks.

Kaiser notes that when he criticized the Times in a piece he wrote for Newsweek (about the Times protecting Rosenthal's friend Jerzy Kosinski during a fabrication scandal), Rosenthal lashed out at him everywhere, virtually outing him. "He said I had written the piece because I was gay, and that all my sources must have been gay. As a matter of fact none of my sources was gay, but at a meeting he said that he was going to summon every gay employee at the paper to find out whether they had been my source. He didn't do so. But half the world then knew I was gay. My stance then was, 'Don't ask, don't tell.' I was furious at the time, but looking back on it, he did me a big favor. Once you're out, it's a lot easier."

As soon as Rosenthal left, the paper's culture changed. When Max Frankel succeeded Rosenthal, he had an understanding with Times publisher Arthur M. Sulzberger Jr. to change the climate for gays. "It was the most important thing Max did," Kaiser says. "The Times went from being the most homophobic major institution in America to being the most gay friendly major institution in America." In his memoir, Frankel writes proudly of finally getting the word "gay" into the Times after years in which Rosenthal had forbidden its use.

This morning on Meet the Press, Tim Russert had a table of religious experts and at the end said they just had enough time for each of them to give a twenty second message for people on Easter. Well, then the pastor on the remote said something about Jesus, Professor Seyed Hossein Nasr said something about common religious values the world over, Rabbi Michael Lerner said something about getting past nationalistic ideas of faith, Sister Joan Chittister said a few inspiring words about Growing with god, and then the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a neoconservative, rattled on and on about God giving up his only son Jesus and what this means to all religions... He went on for a long time, over 30 seconds. So when Russert turned to the last guy on the panel, Jon Meacham of Newsweek, he had to apologize, but they were out of time.

Neuhaus had left out a basic spiritual value, unselfishness.

A couple of interesting Daily Kos pieces recently, including this very smart profile in Washington Monthly.

Also, in this Newsweek interview, Kos throws down a gauntlet: "Lieberman is going to get a primary challenger for his Senate seat next year if me and a lot of grass-roots groups have our way."  read more »

My instinct is that the media hype still exaggerates the electoral power of Internet politics (though it is growing fast), and that Lieberman will win handily, though a primary a huge headache for an incumbent. In any case, it seems a good opportunity to count the votes Kos pulls.

NOTE: Kos had some problems with the Washington Monthly piece, catalogued here. I'm not sure which side of the blogger/journo divide I am on this one, but it does seem wise to be careful when writing about people who can write back.

Enough actual coverage of the Senate race. Time for some quick coverage of the coverage.

In an ordinary campaign, there might be some benefit to the wave of bad news that's washed around Jeanine Pirro on her first week. A bad press conference is never a good thing; the ransacking of dirty laundry is messy -- and wait for the Sunday stories! -- but in another campaign it might die down. Pirro, you might say, is getting all this stuff over with early.

The problem here is that the coverage will come in waves. We in the city and state press are poring over Pirro's life now. After this November, the national political press will increasingly focus on this election. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal will start offering occasional dispatches, going back over the Pirro tax trial, and turning up the occasional new angle. Newsweek and Time will do serious reporting on Al Pirro's legal problems.

As next summer approaches, every paper in America, television, and radio will start to focus in, redoing the same old stories with new interest, asking the same questions at press conferences that the local press might have tired of. There's just no end in sight.  read more »

Thinking back to my interview with Pirro a few months ago, and to her press conference this week, it's unclear how prepared she is for this intense scrutiny. In the interview, I suggested that she might see a picture of her husband next to Bill Clinton on the cover of Newsweek. She laughed at the idea, and didn't seem to think such a thing was particularly likely.

At lunchtime on July 11, as Time Inc.  read more »

This week Edward Klein, brandishing his credentials as the former editor of The New York Times Magaz  read more »

What does it mean when a news-weekly becomes the news story of the week?  read more »

Newsweek' s story about the Koran in the toilet roused the elemental passions of primitive believers  read more »

On May 15, Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker opened up the Web page of The New York Times and read the f  read more »

To depart for a moment from our usual beat, we've (sort of like Pollock) been muttering in frustration all morning. In our case, the source of frustration is how ridiculous it is that Newsweek is getting beat up for this Koran story, while the White House makes common cause with Islamist lunatics. The Sun has the smartest line on this we've seen.  read more »

Our faltering effort to crush the Iraqi insurgency is now taking a turn that recalls the worst episo  read more »

"There are three kinds of lies," Disraeli purportedly said.  read more »

Waziristan, on the Pakistani frontier with Afghanistan, is a dangerous place to be an American journ  read more »

For the first time since the Civil War, government officials in Washington are talking about the pos  read more »

Last spring, Seth Mnookin landed himself the kind of book deal every journalist who's honest would a  read more »

Wednesday 11th City takes deep breath today and tries to figure out how to handle the anniversa  read more »

Wednesday 7th How're ya liking August?  read more »

In recent days, the conventional wisdom has hardened on theBob Kerrey story: Who are we to

judge?  read more »

The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued , by Ann  read more »

The cover of the July-August issue of Brill's Content made a good point about the two-year old media  read more »

Day One .  read more »

Two weeks ago, on Palm Sunday in Grace Church, I found myself wondering whether my fellow congregant  read more »

Two weeks ago, on Palm Sunday in Grace Church, I found myself wondering whether my fellow congregant  read more »

Monday, July 12, was a big day because my wife was taking her driver's test and we were closing on a  read more »

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment I began to suffer.  read more »

All Too Human: A Political Education , by George Stephanopoulos.  read more »