Michael Moore recounts his memories of Gore Vidal.

Longtime friends, colleagues and admirers of Gore Vidal gathered in the currently patriotically decorated Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre—where Mr. Vidal’s 1960 play The Best Man is playing through September 9—on Thursday afternoon to pay their respects to the recently departed writer. The mood was serious yet not solemn as many who were likely humbled to be counted among Mr. Vidal’s contemporaries took the stage to recount memories and share anecdotes from their own experiences with the man.

Reading selections from his own eulogy for Mr. Vidal and praising his friend’s great wit, Dick Cavett recounted many of Mr. Vidal’s most celebrated one-liners. His favorite, he told the audience: “Success is not enough. One’s friends must fail.”

“Whenever my friend succeeds, I die a little,” was another Vidal aphorism recalled to much laughter, and, reading a line from a message prepared by David Mamet for the memorial, Liz Smith decreed Mr. Vidal “smart enough to see through the self-interest of everyone except himself.” Yet none of this seemed to remotely deter the hordes of successful friends who seemed to be endlessly seeking his advice.

“In 2003, when I determined that I would run for president, Gore was my first call,” explained Dennis Kucinich. “I said, ‘Gore, I’m going to run for president, and I’d like your advice.’ Ever mindful of the great death of the American political state, he said, instantly, ‘You’ve got to do something about your hair.’”

Laughing good-naturedly along with the audience, Mr. Kucinich reenacted the conversation. “Gore, what, then, do you suggest?” he inquired. “A guillotine,” was Mr. Vidal’s response.

Michael Moore also shared some advice Mr. Vidal gave him over lunch in 2003. His 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine had been nominated for an Oscar, and Mr. Vidal wanted to know what Mr. Moore would say in his speech if he won.

“Finally, I said, ‘Listen, Gore, I think all I’m going to do is thank my agent and my stylist and get the hell out of there,” Mr. Moore said, drawing predictable laughs from the audience at the mention of a stylist. “He said, ‘No, no, you must quote Jefferson. He’s never been quoted at the Oscars."

“I thought he was going to give me a bit Jefferson line,” Mr. Moore continued. “And he begins, and he doesn’t end until four or five minutes later, just reciting one continuous Jefferson quote from memory, and he finished this as if I could remember it. And I just looked at him and said ‘If I do win, will you go up and accept it?’ He seemed to like that idea.”

Susan Sarandon took the stage to pass on “one pearl of parenting wisdom” Mr. Vidal had shared with her shortly after the birth of her first child. “I was struggling to be the best mother, and he told me, ‘Darling, it’s inevitable that you give your children neuroses, just make sure they’re productive ones,’” she recounted.

In her own tribute to Mr. Vidal, Elizabeth Ashley referred to a dictionary, explaining, “As many of you may know, after any conversation with Gore a lot of us have to go to the dictionary.” She read aloud the definition of “heretic,” and then asked the audience, “Remind you of anyone?”

“I didn’t meet Gore until the ’70s,” she told the audience, explaining that Tennessee Williams dragged her to the Carlyle to meet the man. “Now, Tennessee and I were in no condition to even be in public, let alone at the Carlyle,” she informed the crowd, laughing and explaining that when they arrived, Mr. Vidal “jumped to his feet, embraced Tennessee and kissed him full on the mouth, to the somewhat dropped-jaw constellation of patrons at the Carlyle in 1974."

“Tennessee and Gore talked for hours, and I just sat and drank,” Ms. Ashley remembered. “When we finally got in a cab, I said to Tennessee, ‘I just feel so stupid,’ and he said, ‘Oh darling, never mind, he’s just an old smarty-pants.’”

Ms. Ashley reached down to the ground to pull out a shot glass. “So here’s to you, old smarty-pants,” she said, raising the glass to the portrait of Mr. Vidal that adorned the stage. “We’re gonna miss the hell outta you.”

That was Jerry Nadler, the liberal Democratic congressman, in an interview this weekend, referring to President Obama and the military intervention in Libya.

Those concerns were also raised on a conference call Saturday, where other liberals, like Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, raised constitutional questions about Mr. Obama's actions.

The tension is over who has the authority to declare war, the Congress, or the president? Nadler, and his colleagues, say had the president sought congressional approval before taking military action, many of the questions they now have could have been answered.

The split on Libya is also dividing liberal and conservative non-interventionists from liberal and conservative interventionists.

Hence John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, who have been harshly critical of the Obama administration for waiting several days before agreeing to participate in a multilateral military attack on the forces of Mohamar Qaddafi, are on the same side as Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who tend to regard Bill Clinton's decision to intervene in Bosnia as the height of enlightened humanitarianism.

"We did not lead this," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted saying this Sunday in the New York Times and other outlets. "We did not engage in unilateral actions in any way, but we strongly support the international community taking action against governments and leaders who behave as Qaddafi is unfortunately doing so now."

Nadler, who is generally a hawk on Israel, but who was also an early proponent of unilateral withdrawal from Iraq, doesn't buy the argument about multilateralism. "It doesn't matter that the U.S. is not taking the lead," said Nalder. "So what. We are still using U.S. military forces" and "the fact that other countries are doing it to are irrelevant. This act was unconstitutional."

French and British forces led the military assault in support rebel forces in Libya, who seek to depose President Qaddafi, whom President Obama has already said "needs to go." But Nadler said that the decision to pile in against the rebels could set a precedent for American forces taking action all over the place.

"If we're intervening for humanitarian reasons, why not the Ivory Coast or Darfur? Why here ?" he asked. "We cannot intervene at every situation."

"It's hard to see any vital national interest" in Libya, he said, referring to the constitutional powers a president has for using military force without the requisite consent of the congress beforehand.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, who has been broadly supportive of the steps taken in Libya, has warned of uncertainty about the mission.

"I do believe we must be a country that steps in to protect citizens from despotic leaders of their own country," Weiner said at a press conference this Sunday.  When I asked Weiner why there was intervention in Libya, versus other places facing political unrest, he said, "We haven't heard the president articulate that. It's been only a vague articulation from the president's cabinet."

He went on to repeat explanations he said came from the president's administration about why Libya was more suitable for U.S. military action: "that this was an achievable objective, making it different from other places around the world; this is something that there's a ready-made coalition, making it different than places like the Congo," he said.

"But that's a question a lot of members in Congress were asking," he said.

"Who are these rebels?" Mr. Nadler asked, referring to the soldiers on the ground in Libya. "Are they democratic, with a little d? Look at what we did in Afghanistan. We armed anti-Soviet forces, and we got the Taliban."

[Note: This item was slightly expanded from an earlier draft.]

The current chairman, Henry Waxman, is leaving that position because he ousted the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The most senior member of the committee on Oversight and Government Reform, after Waxman, is Towns, according to one of his aides. Usually, chairmanships are assigned based on seniority, which means Towns is already Waxman's likely successor.

Towns' lack of a committee chairman was one of the critiques raised by his opponent in the Democratic primary.

Mr. Brodsky, who testified at Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Congressional hearing today on the issue, lobbed a series of accusations at the city on Tuesday when he released his report titled "The House that You Built" [click here for a PDF, along with testimony]. Among other criticisms, Mr. Brodsky charged that the city artificially boosted the appraised land value for the Yankee Stadium site so as to better qualify it for a complex tax-free financing plan. Last week, Daily News columnist Juan Gonzales reported on the issue and quoted a "veteran Finance Department official" as saying, "Our assessors jacked up the numbers and the comparables ... to justify the stadium bonds."

The city has denied the claim, and in its two-page response today, titled "Yankee Stadium: Fact vs. Fiction," it said the discrepancy between two city assessments was due to the inclusion of hundreds of millions in infrastructure in one of those assessments.

From the city's Economic Development Corporation:

At the least, the two stand to be a biting irritant to city officials and sports executives, as City Hall seeks to fight back on one news-making charge after another. But more than an annoyance, the two bring publicity, scrutiny and attention to the issue that could conceivably influence an impending ruling at the Internal Revenue Service on the matter, threatening the development of the planned $950 million Nets basketball arena in Brooklyn and additional loans for the Yankees and the Mets.

The chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee, Mr. Kucinich is holding the hearing as part of his larger focus on subsidized sports arenas and a Congressional probe on the Yankee Stadium deal. At the hearing, Mr. Brodsky expects to present a report he released Tuesday that’s highly critical of multiple aspects of the city’s financing deal for the new Yankee Stadium.

The focus of the two men—one a loud and often relentless critic of many Bloomberg administration policies; the other a mousy, twice-failed far-left presidential candidate—is on a complicated mechanism the city used to win tax-free financing for the new Mets and Yankees stadiums (and plans to use to finance the new Nets arena). The Mets and Yankees already have obtained their financing, but both teams want more to cover additional costs. The Nets have yet to gain approval for the financing, with plans to break ground on a new arena before the end of the year. The I.R.S. has criticized the mechanism as a loophole and has yet to rule on whether the teams can get any additional financing through the city’s structure.

Without the mechanism, for which the teams give fixed payments in lieu of taxes that pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds, costs would rise substantially for each of the three teams, and in the case of the Nets, perhaps further upset an already troubled project.

At issue is the tax-exempt aspect of the financing. Under the Bloomberg administration’s arrangement, once the city-controlled Industrial Development Authority approves the financing plan, the teams are eligible to issue hundreds of millions in bonds that are free from city, state and federal taxes. Such savings can lower the cost to the teams by perhaps 15 or 20 percent.

But now, two and a half years after the IDA first approved the Yankees for the financing, the two lawmakers are crying foul in a loud, public way, questioning both the premise that the stadium deals are indeed a public good and the legality of the details in the financing mechanism.

For their part, Bloomberg administration officials are proud of their work and say they have nothing to hide in the deal, which uses a tax-free structure with a relatively minor amount of city and state investment to leverage a major federal subsidy for city projects. The financing allowed for billions in private investment, officials contend, making Mr. Brodsky’s crusade a frustrating one, especially as the financing mechanism for the Nets is up in the air.

“Why is he trying to create additional challenges for economic development beyond the challenges that the larger economy is already creating?” said Seth Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation and an architect of the financing agreement. “It’s unclear to me what Richard Brodsky’s endgame is.”

Mr. Brodsky, who was the leading state legislative voice against the mayor’s failed congestion pricing proposal, holds that the issue is no different from any of those on which he focuses, and highlights a need for reform of the state’s public authorities, his pet cause.

“The state IDA law, in my opinion, was at best manipulated,” he said. The investigation is “consistent with the abuse of the state authority structure. … These are run as Soviet-style bureaucracies with no transparency and no accountability.”

Looking at the deal—a Yankees request for an additional $350 million in tax-free financing, for instance, would have meant $3.6 million and $6.7 million in estimated subsidy from the city and state, respectively, compared with $72.6 million from the federal government—the city and state appear to come off fairly well. But Mr. Brodsky points to broader questions of legality with the deal in its entirety. In his report on the issue, he alleged that property assessments were artificially boosted to meet the financial arrangement, and that there are legal questions as to whether the city had the right to take on new public debt without other approvals, among other issues. (The city has denied any wrongdoing on assessments or other questions of legality.)

The attention of Mr. Kucinich, who declined to comment in advance of the hearing, comes as the I.R.S. in a waning Bush administration weighs the request by the city and state to allow the use of their financing structure for the Nets arena. The city and state want the agency to allow the use of the structure for projects that were already in the pipeline, and the I.R.S. is expected to issue its ruling shortly.

ebrown@observer.com

He was there for a fund-raising gala thrown by Farm Sanctuary, which rescues and protects farm animals. The party was emceed by television host Melissa Rivers, who told the Transom that a difficult pregnancy had ended her brief flirtation with vegetarianism. Still, “I’m not a huge meat eater,” she said, “and if I do, it’s an occasion, and then it sits in my stomach like a brick.”

Actress Ally Sheedy also professed discomfort digesting flesh. “Honestly, I feel like, why do we eat meat at all?” she said. “I do eat fish. I find that a little bit easier.”

Ms. Sheedy was talking with Michele Balan, a comedian in a serious mood. “We tend to blame everything on China and the third-world countries, but in this country it’s just as bad,” Ms. Balan said. “I was horrified at the Kentucky Derby when they shot that horse.”

“They didn’t shoot the horse!” Ms. Sheedy gasped. “They euthanized it.”

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons lurked behind a pillar with his gazelle-like girlfriend, actress Porscha Coleman. “Every so often I get a glimpse of obvious truth,” Mr. Simmons said softly, “and the obvious truth is the abuse of animals is a horrible thing.”

As the crowd was prodded downstairs for dinner, servers were circulating platters of mock-chicken nuggets. “Usually the waiters steal food,” one said. “Not tonight.”

But with Dennis Kucinich, who's spent the last five years seeking the presidency with little to show for it and who formally abandoned his second bid this afternoon, there's a more interesting question: Has he ruined his political career?

Kucinich didn't say so, but the real reason he's dropping out now (instead of hanging around through the convention, as he did in '04) is because his Congressional seat is now imperiled. He faces four primary challengers on March 4, but one of them stands out from the rest: Cleveland Councilman Joe Cimperman, who has some name recognition, lots of money, and some key machine support. Not coincidentally, it was just a week ago that Frank Jackson, the mayor of Cleveland, endorsed Cimperman over Kucinich in the primary.

Kucinich has earned the wrath of many voters and establishment Democratic figures in Cleveland for spending so much time pursuing—with very limited success—a role on the national stage while clinging to his day job as the city's voice in the U.S. House. His second White House bid has been particularly detrimental on the local level because he promised in his '06 re-election campaign not to run for president in 2008.

A parallel can be found in former Republican Congressman Robert Dornan, a fiery California right-winger who mounted a scattershot presidential bid in 1996, becoming something of a punch line en route to miserable showings in Iowa and New Hampshire (in one of his final New Hampshire speeches, he begged the audience to help him crack the one percent mark in the state, to no avail). Upon his return to the Orange County district he'd represented for 20 years, Dornan was greeted by an unamused electorate and was unseated in the 1996 general election by Loretta Sanchez.

Kucinich has represented Cleveland, where he served as mayor in the 1970s, since 1996. Now he has less than six weeks to save his job.

“I'm trying to figure out why FOX News chose not to put you on,” said Mr. Leno. “I mean, I might not necessarily agree with you, but I think, as an American, we like to see everybody get an equal shot."

But, as it turns out, Mr. Leno’s ardent belief in political inclusiveness is not all that, um, inclusive.

To wit: Last week, when presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was publicly battling with NBC executives over their decision to exclude Mr. Kucinich from the Jan. 15 debates, Mr. Leno was a touch more forgiving of his bosses at NBC.

“NBC did not invite Dennis to tonight’s Democratic debate in Nevada,” said Mr. Leno. "Although, to be fair – they did invite his hot wife.”

Cue the laugh track.

"After failing to qualify for a Democratic presidential candidates debate on Monday in South Carolina, Cleveland Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich has filed a Federal Communications Commission complaint against host network CNN," reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

"The complaint accuses the network of 'arbitrarily establishing criteria' for the presidential debate, and asks the FCC to order Kucinich's participation," notes the Plain Dealer. "Television networks stopped inviting Kucinich to presidential debates after he fared poorly in early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan and Nevada. His past legal efforts to force inclusion haven't been successful. The candidate filed an FCC complaint against ABC earlier this month when he was excluded from a candidates' debate in New Hampshire, and last week unsuccessfully petitioned Nevada courts to force MSNBC to include him in a debate."