Ashley Alexandra Dupré Continues to Haunt New YorkReal celebrities are riled by sightings of Eliot’s lady friend; Simon Doonan gets his own TV show and pretty people buy expensive homes in our daily roundup of the news from New York’s best gossip columns.
it just happened
Breaking: Hillary Cries!
While Barack Obama is waltzing around New Hampshire cracking dirty jokes, Hillary Clinton is up there crying. It happened during a chat with a gathering of women at a coffee shop in Portsmouth. Sixty-four-year old Maryann Pernold told Hillary that as a woman, she knew “it’s hard to get up every day and get ready and get out of the house in the morning.” She asked Clinton how she did it every day on the campaign trail. The Wall Street Journal was there and caught the moment:
“It’s not easy, it’s not easy,” Clinton said shaking her head. Her eyes began to get watery as she finished answering the question, “I couldn’t do it if I didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do. This is very personal for me. I have so many ideas for this country and I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. It’s about our country, it’s about our kids’ future,” she said softly crying, her voice breaking. The group of 15 women sitting around a table at the Cafe Espresso nodded understandingly. Clinton continued, her voice still cracking: “We do it each one of us because we care about our country, but some of us are right and some of us are wrong, some of us are ready and some of us are not, some of us know what we’ll do on day one and some of us don’t,” she said.
The Journal wonders whether this may be Clinton’s Edmund Muskie moment (Muskie appeared to tear up in 1972 after a New Hampshire newspaper attacked his wife, and the image managed to derail the popular Maine senator’s candidacy). But we have to wonder, like Bob Shrum before us, if this isn’t exactly what her campaign needs. Finally, proof that Hillary is human. Even though the campaign is ravaging her physically and emotionally, she’s still fighting because she cares. What better testament to someone’s character as a candidate?
Either that or she faked it, which would also be totally stellar.
Emotional Moment for Clinton in N.H.[WSJ]
Video: Teary Hillary [ABC News]
in other news
Questioning the ‘Times’ DogsThere are a few things we can’t wrap our heads around with this whole story about Blackwater shooting one of the New York Times’ dogs in Baghdad. One of them is, why does the Times bureau have dogs? It wasn’t someone’s personal pet, according to the stories. It was a pet shared by the residents of the Times compound. Even a Huffington Post blogger who was bitten by one of them doesn’t explain why they are there. Another question is this: On a day when Britney Spears’s 16-year-old sister gets knocked up, who at the Post thought it would be a good idea to split the cover between the pregnancy story and a drawing of a doghouse with “Pooch Sulzberger” written on it? The Spears family is like the mother lode (ha, they’re all mothers now) for the Post. Over the years, the paper’s probably devoted more ink to hating them than to hating Al Gore. But somehow a cheap joke comparing Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger to a dead dog elbowed Jamie Lynn halfway off the cover. And finally, how come everybody who has written about it gets to use a “this time the deadly shooting in Baghdad was of a dog” joke? How is that, in any way, appropriate? Ha-ha! Murders are so common here, it’s funny when something dies that isn’t an American! That’s a real home run.
New York Times in Iraq: Blackwater Shot Our Dog [Reuters]
announcements
Introducing VultureThere are innumerable places to find cultural coverage online, but there are very few, if we may be so bold, that do it right. This is why we’re so proud this morning to welcome our newest bloggy brother in New York’s brood: Vulture, your daily source for arts and entertainment news. Vulture soars both high and low; it’s perhaps the only site offering critical analysis of the latest fake memoir, an MP3 of the hottest indie-rock single, breaking news when your favorite performance artist straps a dog to his head, and YouTube videos of Joey Lawrence break dancing all in one spot. And it’s all presented with the magazine’s trademark smart and informed perspective on all the city’s cultural offerings. It’s written by Melissa Maerz, a former editor at Spin, and Dan Kois, a former literary agent and a film executive, and they’re waiting for you at nohib.com/vulture.