"Why have the wars cost so much under Obama?" tweeted @RepJackKimble (R-Calif.) at 7:40am on Sept. 2. "Check the budgets, Bush fought 2 wars w/o costing taxpayers a dime." This stunning bit of fiscal ignorance earned him a tart barnyard expletive from @MWJ1231.

Capehart didn't realize that Kimble's ignorance is "stunning" because "Jack Kimble" is a joke Twitter account. A pretty obvious joke at that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYWjEy2gRts

On his Twitter page Kimble claims to represent California's 54th District. California has 53 congressional districts. In his Blogspot-hosted weblog, Kimble writes passages like the following, describing his attendance at a fictional fair:

The National Rifle Association and Robert Baird society are here to tell you of a vast conspiracy to take away your guns and turn this country communist respectively. Look for the Heritage Valley Minutemen to stage another illegal alien roundup for the kids. It's fun for the whole family. I hope to see you there.

Citing Twitter statements has become a seemingly acceptable practice on TV and in print and probably won't go away any time soon, but it's still a little amusing--and from a blogger's perspective, a little scary--to see it turn into a bit of a cautionary tale.

As for "Kimble," he (or she) seems to be enjoying Capehart's snafu, joking with another Twitter user, "I just wish they would have contacted me for a comment. They at least gave Nixon that much."

We can't really give Jonathan Capehart too much grief, though--it's a mistake anyone could make under a certain set of circumstances. Also, Capehart has received enough grief in the past from other quarters.

[via HuffPo Blogger Karen Beninato]

They note:

Also worth noting is who specifically sent the message: Jonathan Capehart, a noted advisor to Mike during his campaign.

--Azi Paybarah

Particularly interesting, though, was Al Sharpton's hint at retribution: "There's some Democrats that left, that we're going to make sure they stay gone.... We now know who are our friends, who are not our friends."

That's curious since, as one reader writes, Sharpton breakfasted at the Regency with his friend Jonathan Capehart, who also happens to be a loyal advisor to one Mike Bloomberg.

NOTE: Capehart notes that his Regency breakfast with Sharpton is a quadrennial tradition, which started -- and sparked a round of rumors -- in 2001.

We hear Patrick Murphy, the Log Cabiner running for Council on the East Side, left a good impression on a crowd that included Bloomberg advisors Patti Harris, Kevin Sheekey, and Jonathan Capehart. Also there were Georgette Mosbacher and Herman Badillo.

Mike told the crowd that he knows the rap on him is that he used to be a Democrat, but that Giuliani was once a Democrat, and Reagan was once a Democrat.

"Badillo, weren't you one too?" he asked, and then called for a show of hands of lifelong Republicans, and found very few.

Within days, the Details controversy would become the media punch line of a city that had become resigned to quietly sunning itself until Labor Day.

"I was upset about it," Mr. Peres said. "I'll go as far to say that I was pissed."

Mr. Peres said that the matter remains under investigation. Neither he nor Details' spokesperson would comment on how the investigation has progressed. Nor would they say if they considered the hoax to be the work of an individual inside or outside the 20-year-old men's magazine.

Certainly the Kurt Andersen hoaxer-inside or outside-is not the first person to dupe a major publication, as The New Republic and The Washington Post and others can attest. But the Details caper illustrates a new kind of media vulnerability in the Internet era. The person behind the phony Kurt Andersen piece, sources at Details said, communicated exclusively through e-mail. Every publication these days uses e-mail to handle writers and stories-Mr. Peres himself said that working electronically "is great for a lot of reasons .... When I don't feel like talking to people, I don't have to." And for every competitor enjoying Details ' misery last week, there was another admitting that they, too, could have been duped.

"This type of thing-unfortunately, given the frequency people use e-mail-is scary and can happen to everybody," Mr. Peres said. "I hate the fact we're the ones to suffer."

The irony of Details ' plight is that in the end, his magazine could have avoided a lot of trouble by using an old, underrated device: the telephone. And here, some staffers expressed some incredulity at the breakdowns that had to occur for a monthly magazine-an operation full of deadlines, but traditionally capable of verifying all work before publication-to publish a piece by Kurt Andersen without ever talking to him. "There should have been safeguards in check," one Details source said. "Even in an opinion piece, a fact-checker should call. It's mind-boggling that nobody spoke to him."

The story of Details ' phony Kurt Andersen piece appears to have begun with an effort to work with the actual Mr. Andersen. Sources at Details said that recently departed senior editor Bob Ickes-who worked with Mr. Andersen during his tenure at New York and, later, in the last stages of the union between Inside.com and Brill's Content -had made contact with Mr. Andersen earlier this year about the possibility of his doing a piece for the magazine. Nothing came of the exchange, but later, according to sources, Mr. Ickes told them that he'd received an e-mail from Kurt Andersen through a different e-mail account, asking what he could write for the magazine.

From there, sources said, an assignment was given and the piece was handled via e-mail. Sources said Mr. Ickes told his co-workers that Mr. Andersen had made it clear he only wanted to work with Mr. Ickes on the piece and no one else. Fact-checking was conducted via e-mail, sources said, with the Details fact-checker sending questions to Mr. Ickes, who said he passed them on to Mr. Andersen. Mr. Ickes, sources said, obtained the photograph for the contributor's page from WNYC, where Mr. Andersen hosts his radio show, Studio 360 . Sources said no contract for the piece was ever drawn up and no check sent out.

The piece, an essay entitled "Dudes Who Dish," appeared on page 47 of the August Details . Citing the recent controversy over Mike Piazza's sexuality, that Mr. Andersen told Details readers it was O.K. for straight men to gossip, that in fact they'd all been doing it for years. The magazine's contributors' page also included a photograph, brief bio and a comment supposedly made by Mr. Andersen. "To say that guys-especially young clowns like you with some bucks and a career-gossip more than women is so disgracefully obvious that I'm ashamed I haven't written about it till now," it said.

To top it off, Mr. Peres quoted the phony Kurt Andersen article in his editorial, saying, "And it is our- your -lame, screwing-the-underage-temp-in-the-holiday-party-bathroom-and-bragging-about-it antics that have fueled its hydra-headed growth .... You cloak your observations in swaggering faux-disgust. But, dude, it's gossip."

Mr. Peres followed that citation with the declaration "Amen."

Details ' August issue hit newsstands on July 23. The big joke around town has been that it took a couple of weeks for anyone-including the

real Mr. Andersen-to notice anything amiss. In fact, the real Mr. Andersen was alerted to the piece's existence by his wife, who noticed the story while thumbing through a copy of Details at her gym the week of Aug. 4.

Soon after, Mr. Andersen's attorney wrote Mr. Peres informing of him of the error. (Mr. Andersen declined to comment for this story.)

By the time the letter from Mr. Andersen's attorney arrived at Details , Mr. Ickes had already announced his intention to leave the magazine, sources said. Four days prior, on Aug. 8, Mr. Ickes had given his notice to Mr. Peres, citing dissatisfaction with his role at the magazine, sources said.

When the letter from Mr. Andersen's lawyer came, sources said that Mr. Ickes told his bosses that he'd been the victim of an elaborate e-mail prank by someone claiming to be Mr. Andersen. Still, one source who knows Mr. Ickes said that despite the prank, the editor intended to stay on through September. But on Thursday, Aug. 15-the day the hoax broke and Details issued a statement apologizing to Mr. Andersen-Mr. Ickes was asked to leave the Details office by Mr. Peres and his computer was taken away, sources said.(A Fairchild spokes-person would only confirm that Mr. Ickes had "resigned and was no longer at the company.")

Reached by Off the Record, Mr. Ickes flatly denied any role in writing the fake Kurt Andersen piece. He said the piece had been rigorously fact-checked with the phony Mr. Andersen. He said he had even tried to get Social Security information from the ersatz Kurt Andersen so a payment for the article could be made.

"To think or say or allege that I or anyone at that magazine would actually fabricate a fictitious article, that we would then attribute it to one of the most highly regarded journalists, one of the most highly regarded media figures in the country and hope that he wouldn't see it-it's like Ripley's Believe It or Not ," Mr. Ickes said. "It's just crazy to think that I or anyone at the magazine would do that to him."

As for the impact the Great Kurt Andersen Caper had upon Details itself, Fairchild chief executive Mary Berner and editorial director Patrick McCarthy were out of town and unavailable for comment. But one Details source referred to the hoax as "yet another bizarre chapter in a bizarre magazine's history." Since its purchase by Condé Nast in 1988, the magazine has run through a veritable smorgasbord of editors-including James Truman, Mark Golin and Michael Caruso-before it was shut down and relaunched as a Fairchild publication in 2000. To run it, Fairchild tapped Mr. Peres-then the young Paris bureau chief of W . Though Mr. Peres, by his own admission, had a wobbly start, this year the magazine received a National Magazine Award nomination for general excellence and won the N.M.A. for design.

"The magazine is doing great!" a Fairchild spokesperson said. "We had the biggest September ever. The magazine is in the midst of a very successful comeback. This is a very unfortunate and isolated situation that we hope to resolve soon."

But Mr. Peres was more subdued about the injury the hoax has caused. "I think it's probably the most upset I've been since taking the job," he said.

Still, some at Details thought Mr. Peres should be kicking himself a little bit. They pointed out that the editor should have recognized that a piece by Kurt Andersen was a nice coup for his magazine and should have called to thank him for contributing-something many editors will do for their high-profile writers. One Details source said Mr. Peres could have stopped the problem dead in its tracks had he simply spoken to the writer prior to publication.

"If I were in his shoes and I suddenly had someone like Kurt Andersen, I'd call him just for the sake of schmoozing," said one Details source. "Why wouldn't you? He's an important guy."

Mr. Peres didn't shirk his culpability in the hoax. "The responsibility comes to me," he said. "I'm there to accept congratulations or honor, and I'm here to accept [responsibility] now. It's double duty." However, when asked if he was second-guessing any of his decisions regarding the piece, Mr. Peres said: "No. I wouldn't second-guess my decisions or anyone else's at the magazine."

The long, strange journey of Jonathan Capehart from editorial writer to Bloomberg political operative to poverty reporter has brought him back to the Daily News .

Mr. Capehart confirmed the move-from "global poverty correspondent" at Bloomberg News to deputy editorial-page editor at the News -to Off the Record on Monday, Aug. 19.

"This is what I like doing," Mr. Capehart said, "writing editorials-taking the bad guys to task and praising the good guys, highlighting things that are important to the city."

Formerly a staff member on the paper's editorial board, Mr. Capehart left the News in 2000 to join the well-fed, overly sugared ranks of Bloomberg News as a national-affairs columnist. Within the year, though, he took a leave of absence from his post to work on boss Michael Bloomberg's Mayoral campaign.

"As someone who writes about politics," Mr. Capehart said in explaining his decision, "the idea of working on a political campaign was too good to pass up .... I thought it would be interesting and fun to get him elected."

Of course, for most of the campaign it looked like the efforts of Mr. Capehart and others would probably go for naught.

"When I told people where I worked," Mr. Capehart said, "they looked at me like I was sailing aboard the Titanic and I didn't know it. But I always knew, as the campaign wound down and people got to know him, the gap would close."

Mr. Bloomberg's ascendancy provided Mr. Capehart with options unavailable to workers on most campaigns: It isn't often that a reporter can leave the business for the other side and then come back. But when given the opportunity to join the Bloomberg Mayoral administration, Mr. Capehart passed, choosing to return to Mr. Bloomberg's news operation to pursue a brand-new beat covering global poverty.

For his part, Mr. Capehart said that returning to straight news, particularly on a brand-new beat with just one editor, "wasn't the best fit." He said he looked forward to heading back to the raucous, spirited arguments inside the editorial boardroom of the News . There he will join another man with experience handling New York Mayors: Editorial-page editor Richard Schwartz is a former senior aide to Rudolph Giuliani.

"Hopefully," Mr. Capehart said, "it won't take too long to get back into the swing of things. Every day you go into that [editorial] room, it's a negotiation. It's like a debate club: You have to be armed and ready to fight for your say."

The font is familiar: a simple sans serif, synonymous with the Bloomberg name, ubiquitous on bus sides and taxi tops. So is the decor: simple, clean, the bowl of fresh fruit and bagged snacks in the reception area, the closely spaced work stations (no office for you!), a Bloomberg terminal on every desk.

Bloomberg the business has morphed into Bloomberg the candidate–right down to the look of what is described as the "exploratory campaign office" just down the block from the shiny black tower that is headquarters to Bloomberg News. Everything appears set for an official campaign announcement soon after Memorial Day.

There's one other familiar thing, too: To launch this venture, Michael Bloomberg has assembled the most eclectic team of political all-stars that money can buy–and, if you listen to the critics, probably did. Mr. Bloomberg's lineup is the political equivalent of those $100-million major-league payrolls.

There's the portly and seasoned David Garth, 71, the political consultant who helped get John Lindsay, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani elected Mayor. There's the puckish Frank Luntz, the pollster whose diverse clientele has included Mayor Giuliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

There's Doug Schoen, a pollster who has worked for the Bloomberg company, and who played a big part in another big-money campaign: the election of New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine. And Maureen Connelly, the savvy public-relations executive who used to work for Ed Koch.

Speaking for Mr. Bloomberg is the silver-haired Billy Cunningham, whose extensive political pedigree is most often associated with former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And also boasting a diverse and long political history: Lawrence Mandelker, the mustachioed and tenacious lawyer for former Republican Party chief William Powers, who tried–and failed–to block Senator John McCain from getting on the Republican ballot in last spring's New York Presidential primary. None of these people work for peanuts, and most campaigns usually can afford only one or two home-run hitters. Mr. Bloomberg, by contrast, has hired an entire wing of the political Hall of Fame.

The team also includes Jonathan Capehart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former editorial writer for the Daily News , on leave from his weekly national-affairs column at Bloomberg News, and–strangest of all to some–Ester Fuchs, the lefty Barnard political-science professor who has thrown a few impassioned lobs at Mayor Giuliani in her day, and some wet kisses to former Mayor David Dinkins now and again.

Exactly how much they're getting paid is a closely guarded secret–at least until the Board of Elections filing on July 15. But there's no doubt that this is a no-expenses-spared campaign: The Bloomberg terminals alone cost up to $1,640 a month each. "We pay full price!" insisted Mr. Cunningham, the campaign spokesman.

New York City has had career politicians, an accountant and a career prosecutor for Mayor in the last half-century, but it has yet to try a career businessman–and certainly not one worth an estimated $4 billion, and willing to fund his own candidacy. Assembling his campaign team, Mr. Bloomberg may be signaling exactly what having a billionaire for Mayor will mean (only without the big bucks to throw around).

It's his modus operandi: get a disparate group, mix them up, pay them a lot. It's a departure from the usual campaign approach, which usually revolves around a hired gun or two and a lot of passionate and underpaid acolytes hewn from some ideological cloth.

It might show a man who is willing to try anything that works–a sort of business-model-based, post-partisan approach.

"This is what you can expect from a Bloomberg Mayoralty," said Mr. Cunningham. The team, he said, "is a direct function of Mike Bloomberg–the way he will choose people based on their talents. He starts with no preconceived notions of what works and what doesn't."

Or it might reveal a man (the same man who jumped party lines purely for expediency, he freely admits) who has no core beliefs and no real vision of what he wants to accomplish as New York's next Republican Mayor.

"He is repeating all of the mistakes self-made billionaires make when they run for office, which is replicating their success in business and following their gut–none of which could possibly work," said consultant Norman Adler, who has become something of a one-man anti-Bloomberg quip machine.

"Why not work for Mike Bloomberg? It's good to get a paycheck," sniffed Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who said he was speaking on his own behalf, not for Mark Green, for whom he is a strategist. "If the guy is paying you–they're all making a lot of money."

It is not, consultants like Mr. Sheinkopf assume, because Mr. Bloomberg's team members think the mogul can win–and the polls indeed look grim. A recent Daily News poll, for example, showed Democratic candidates who are barely in the single digits in polls of their own party members walloping the media mogul in a general election by margins as big as three to one.

Of course, Mr. Bloomberg has tons of money to spend, and money can buy things in politics. Still, "look at all of the people who worked for Forbes, and they knew he was going to lose," said Mr. Adler, the consultant. "The political-consultant community follows the Biblical saying, 'He was a stranger and we took him in.'"

Privately, the language gets even more heated: "They are sucking him dry," said one prominent politico. "They are taking him for a ride."

Mr Cunningham would not comment on his or his colleagues' payment arrangements, except to say, "People do sign up, so they must be getting close to what they want." He would not make Mr. Bloomberg available for comment.

"He came to me ," Ms. Fuchs said in a Woody Allen-esque admission, in her cramped, book-filled office at Barnard College. "He wanted my opinion. So he gets credit for that." Still, on talk radio, the 49-year-old Ms. Fuchs has already been accused of "selling out for $100,000." She denies she is being paid that amount.

Mr. Cunningham himself left a nice lobbying job at Fleet Bank, and his wife and three teenage children behind in Albany, to crash at a small Manhattan apartment during the week. "This is going to shape up as a very interesting adventure," said the 50-year-old spokesman. "People in New York are going to respond to Mike Bloomberg's message. His personal history is compelling. His story will work wonderfully for him."

This is the kind of thing members of Mr. Bloomberg's team say. They are excited about the opportunity. Mr. Bloomberg is a fresh face. And yes, yes, yes, they insist, we do all get along. There is, for example, that open-door policy: In his corporate offices a few blocks away, Mr. Bloomberg himself sits at a work station in a cornerofthe Bloomberg newsroom.

In the conference room on East 56th Street, Team Bloomberg meets regularly, sometimes with Mr. Bloomberg, sometimes without, sometimes in smaller subsets. But there is no campaign manager–Mr. Bloom-berg eschews titles–so whoever jumps in can set the agenda. "It's not unlike the Knights of the Round Table," Mr. Cunningham said. Or as another participant put it: "There are a lot of very strong personalities–and no lack of opinions."

But how this will play out in the context of a campaign remains to be seen. When discussing polls, for example–which tend to be the most closely held secrets in campaigns–there was an argument about whether the door should be shut. It finally was.

Then there is the question of whether, having hired all this talent, Mr. Bloomberg will actually listen to it. Quite a few press noses have been knocked out of joint, for example, by his rather selective media policy. Mr. Bloomberg gave an interview to The New York Times , for example, but not to the Daily News . He broke news (of his willingness to accept $1 a year as Mayor) in the national press–in Newsweek . He chose to say "I'm running" to a gossip columnist: Liz Smith of the New York Post (but not to her colleague, Cindy Adams, who had reported weeks earlier, without the ultimate source himself, that Mr. Bloomberg was indeed in the race). Journalists wonder whether Maureen Connelly and Billy Cunningham, two of the savviest P.R. pros around, could possibly be advising Mr. Bloomberg to cherry-pick this way.

And will Mr. Bloomberg, the business shark, take the time to clue everyone in on the agenda? Take Ms. Fuchs. She can give an impassioned rationale for why Mr. Bloomberg should be Mayor: "I have a vision about how to make this city work better, which is also Mike Bloomberg's vision. People experience this city through their neighborhoods–their schools, their libraries, their parks. Making this city work is about making the neighborhoods work, not just midtown Manhattan. I myself, to this day, think of myself as a Bayside girl."

But this is Mr. Bloomberg on neighborhoods: "I don't think that knowing the details of every single little program, law, neighborhood–whether you're running for President or Governor or Congressman or City Council or Mayor or whatever–those aren't the issues," he said in an un-broadcast interview with Charlie Rose at a conference for television-industry professionals. You have staff for those things, Mr. Bloomberg said.

So much for the people of Bayside.

Then there is the question of how will they all get along? Beyond the well-known egos of the Luntzes and Garths and Schoens there are … even more egos.

Ms. Fuchs, dark-haired and dark-eyed, is the kind of person who speaks in exclamation points. "Dictator" is a word that tends to trip off her lips when she mentions Mayor Giuliani, for example. But Mr. Capehart, as a Daily News editorial writer and columnist, was supportive of most Giuliani policies. Young (he's 33), black and gay, he made a splash early in his career, for example, with a series of columns about unsafe sex taking place in New York bathhouses. But in the loose hierarchy that makes up the campaign, he and Ms. Fuchs will work closely together.

Mr. Capehart insisted that he and Ms. Fuchs were not really that far apart ideologically. And with a few clicks on his Bloomberg terminal in the office he shares with Kathleen Cudahy, a former aide to City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, he retrieved a letter responding to one of his columns that accused him of wandering "the angry and bitter landscape of the left."

Next to Ms. Fuchs, Mr. Capehart has generated the most buzz in his new role. (Much of this stems from skepticism about how Mike Bloomberg, the candidate, can possibly separate his radio and wire operations from his campaign.) Mr. Capehart had only just assumed writing a weekly column when he struck up a conversation with someone he described as "one of Mr. Bloomberg's people."

"And I said, 'Why is he thinking about doing this?' And I said, 'He's really going to have to have issues.' And I was told, 'Well, we were kind of hoping you'd help with that.'" Mr. Capehart said it took him a month to come to this conclusion:

"If it's good enough for [William] Safire and [David] Gergen to jump the fence, it's good enough for me. And I don't think you can ever really understand this stuff until you've done it. After November, I want to go back to my column, and I'll go back with more insight, more understanding."

The campaign already has on board field workers and someone to organize the petition effort. There are more hires to come, to be sure; a Mayoral race does take an infrastructure. Even the general phone message solicits résumés.

For, unlike any of the other campaigns, this one does have an unlimited budget.