Apparently a few incidents of incompetent sockpuppetry are not enough to get a flack shamed out of high-level Republican politics. John McCain has hired her for his presidential campaign. (Thanks to The Plank on this one.)

-- Andrew Rice

Menendez 100,359
Kean: 88,460

-- Steve Kornacki

The immediate analysis, from both camps, is - not much. Though the court's ruling is in many ways monumental, it leaves the question of marriage to the state legislature. That takes pressure off the two candidates, who only have to worry about the next two weeks. Plus, everyone pretty much knows where the two candidates stand on gay rights.

Tom Kean's spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbacker, reminded that "Tom unequivocally believes marriage is between a man and a woman. Tom believes it should remain that way. He supports preserving the traditional definition of marriage. And that's the main difference between him and Bob Menendez."

Well, sort of. While Bob Menendez supports civil unions for same sex couples, he has also said that marriage should be reserved for unions between men and women.

So, in the meantime, the race in New Jersey rolls on with Kean taking a break for a few minutes today from his attacks against Menendez ("Raising YOUR Taxes to Line the Pockets of HIS Special Interests) to release a sort-of-positive television ad.

--Jason Horowitz

We're all in for a realignment, and not as David Brooks has stated, of warmongering elites versus populist isolationists. This realignment is about how to handle the Arab world, how to handle autocratic Syria as it tries to put a damper on Islamic fervor, how to handle the Israeli occupation, how to put down weapons, how—as Tom Kean emphasized at the National Press Club yesterday—to win hearts and minds.

Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, L.I. Republican Peter King, has some kind words for Hillary Clinton.

Mayor Bloomberg and Christine Quinn wine and dine the DNC in hopes of landing another national convention for the Big Apple.

Staten Island Democratic Leader, John Lavelle, is supporting Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman.

One person who didn't vote for Lamont was his own daughter.

And Karol Sheinin of Alarming News gets dissed by Andrew Sullivan, and likes it.

-- Azi Paybarah

In 2004, Mr. Joel dropped $3.9 million on the place. Then, last July, the piano man moved out when he bought a three-story townhouse on Perry Street from artist and heir Seward Johnson for $5.9 million.

To complete the transition from Tribeca to Greenwich Village, Mr. Joel first tried unloading the Tribeca condo last summer for $5 million, listing it with Donna Senko of Sotheby’s International Realty. No bites.

But after a price drop in December, down to $4.5 million, Mr. Joel found a buyer. The deal on the apartment, which has three bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms, closed in late February.

Other well-heeled tenants at the Hubert include British television producer Michael Davies, who grabbed one of the building’s two maisonette units for slightly over $8 million.

Janice Min Sells Porter House To Bachelor-Broker Futterman

In January, The Observer reported that Us Weekly editor Janice Min and her husband, Peter Sheehy, were moving into a $4 million Soho spread.

But the couple still had to get rid of their sleek apartment in the Porter House, a West 15th Street condominium in the meatpacking district.

Despite celebrity tenants like designer Carlos Miele and actress Molly Shannon over the past few years, it was reported that some unwelcome guests—of the rodent family—had also taken up residence in the chic building.

Regardless, Ms. Min found a very willing buyer, selling the apartment to retail real-estate maven Robert K. Futterman for $3.15 million, according to deed-transfer records.

The three-bedroom, three-bath condo features a Valcucine Chef’s kitchen, Viking appliances and Jatoba wood floors. The building includes a fitness room, private storage room, and full-time superintendent and doorman.

And for Mr. Futterman—who has been divorced for two years—the swank bachelor pad serves as the ideal place to crash when not trekking out to his Greenwich, Conn., house.

“What I liked about it is that it is in the fringe of the meatpacking district,” said Mr. Futterman. “Having an apartment in the city really works out for me. When I’m in the city, I tend to go out to dinner every night.” A few of his favorite nearby restaurants include Morimoto, Buddakan and Mas.

Mr. Futterman already owns a crash pad at the celebrity-filled (and Whole Foods–infested) Chelsea Mercantile building. But he needed a bit more space—especially when his two children, ages 13 and 11, come to visit.

Now, Mr. Futterman’s designer is giving his new 2,271-square-foot space a makeover, helping decide which contemporary artworks will adorn the walls. (An Ed Ruscha painting is a possibility.)

Surprisingly, Mr. Futterman’s interior-decorating proclivities have been on display of late.

Last week, Mr. Futterman graced the cover of The New York Times House and Home section, where he was featured in a piece about recent divorcées gussying up their new places without having a spouse to criticize their tastes. Mr. Futterman is shown playing pool in front of a large photograph of a Chinese man flanked by women in a tub. It “screams independence and bachelorhood,” he told The Times.

Now situated in the Porter House, Mr. Futterman is in prime position to fully embrace that independent bachelor lifestyle, within spitting distance of the velvet-rope-protected nightclubs in the meatpacking district.

Edward Hickey, of Meisel Real Estate, represented the seller. Ms. Min declined to comment.

Correction!

Two weeks ago, The Observer reported that artist and designer Barry Cord had listed his townhouse for $23.5 million. However, some historical information and architectural details obtained by The Observer, from a shared database used by real-estate brokers, were incorrect.

Built in the 1890’s, Mr. Cord’s East 65th Street townhouse was designed by J. Stewart Barney, a renowned architect and social figure of the era. An ancestor of former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, the townhouse only changed hands once—from the Kean family to the Cords.

The townhouse is actually three buildings joined together—two townhouses and a carriage house—and the entrance is set in an 80-foot façade. Also, there are almost 18,000 square feet of air rights available—which means that an individual or organization could utilize the property with commercial interests.

Charitable organizations are already quite familiar with the building. The Cords have held fund-raisers in the past for the Beth Israel hospital, Bard College and the Preservation League of New York State.

Now that Mr. Cord’s son is heading off to boarding school, the noted designer and his wife, Karen, plan to relocate into a smaller townhouse.

Roger Erickson, of Sotheby’s International Realty, is the listing broker. Currently traveling abroad, Mr. Erickson could not be reached for comment.

All this torrent of instant fictionalizing put me in mind of a moment in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A harmless drunk named Boggs, who’s been playing at terrifying the small town where he lives, is shot dead by one Colonel Sherburn, who either calls Boggs’ bluff out of impatience with pretense, or is taken in by Boggs’ performance. Minutes after Boggs falls lifeless to the ground, some townspeople gather around him, and they do something quintessentially American: They begin to act out the killing that just took place. Nobody knows how Boggs came to be murdered—he’d been pretending to scare everybody for years. And nobody knows whether Colonel Sherburn is a cold-blooded killer or a gullible fool. Amid the confusion, all that Boggs’ fellow citizens can do is enact the confusing event itself, again and again, as if brooding over an insult. The only thing that dates Twain’s familiar-seeming scene is the fact that none of the performing townspeople is accompanied by an agent.

I feel a certain low-intensity emotional and intellectual stupor lying like a shallow pool of grease in New York. When the subject of Iraq comes up, people seem to experience an anxiety, perhaps even a despair, over not being able to think or feel anything definite at all. They—we—return, with this low-intensity numbness, to their everyday lives. And so much of New York’s everyday life has to do with culture—with conversations about the products of culture, those little universalizing mediations of experience that hold people together in a big city. That’s a good part of what it means to be urbane. Talk about the war leads immediately to talk about representations of the war. Few people want to argue any more about our involvement in Iraq itself, to approach the fact of that directly. They refer immediately to a book or an article they’ve read, to a movie or television show they’ve seen. They are, in a sense, enacting from indirect angles the confusing event of the war, again and again, as if brooding over an insult to the intelligence. Somehow, the provincial figures in Washington have, for now, heightened New Yorkers’ urbanity.

The war has barely touched New York. Rather, Sept. 11 indelibly touched New York, and the conflict in Iraq is a warped betrayal of that sudden violence. The architects of this senseless slaughterhouse stole from us a terrible clarity about suffering, and being human, and living in history, and instrumentalized it into a purpose that even they can’t explain now. That betrayal puts New Yorkers at a double remove from the war.

You know you should suffer along with the Americans and Iraqis who have been maimed or killed, you know that it’s right to feel sympathy and outrage—whatever your politics, whatever the object of outrage—you know that this is what good people, and educated people, and sensitive people, should feel. But your heart refuses to oblige your conscience. Partly, of course, this is because there never has been an American war whose purpose was less clearly defined than our conflict in Iraq.

The Vietnam War began to affect the national nervous system when the anticommunist purpose for pursuing it started to unravel into the other convulsions that were pulling the country into a maelstrom. In this case, we don’t even have a purpose that can unravel. There are no general convulsions. There are, to take one example of erstwhile public passions, no intellectual donnybrooks at Town Hall, as there were during the Vietnam era. But those are the types of thunderous verbal conflicts that happen when a city ceases to be merely urbane, when style surrenders to raw experience. When conversation stops taking detours into culture in order to evade the facts.

Yet the deeper reason for our inability to feel what we know we ought to feel is that the intimate ferocity of Sept. 11 has produced in many New Yorkers the odd impression that this particular war is over. The worst is behind us, it seems—and unthinkably before us. But the present, what’s happening in Iraq, is their present, their war, the liars’ adventure, a war waged without our consent by narrow-minded people in the name of, to begin with, injuries suffered by cosmopolitan New York.

And this war is prosecuted against whom, exactly? Saddam’s Baathists have been defeated; Al Qaeda, we’re told, is everywhere and nowhere; the “jihadists” are from outside Iraq; the “insurgents” comprise different Iraqi sects that hate us and each other. And now we can’t even leave without creating the very situation—a bastion for terrorism—that our government pretended existed in order to provide a pretext for invasion!

An intensely commercial society like ours fosters in people, especially urban people, an instinct for knowing when you’re being suckered, and a reflexive revulsion against the one doing the suckering. There may not be widespread depression about Iraq in New York, but there’s a disabling cynicism toward the powers that deceived us. It’s a cynicism that repels even sympathy for soldiers and civilians dying abroad. It’s remarkable how Bush and Co., by means of their outrageous war, have created in hyper-liberal New York a mental situation that tolerates the war.

The 19th-century French sociologist Auguste Comte spoke of organic periods and critical periods. The former create new forms of thinking and feeling; the latter react sharply to the prevailing old forms. Organic periods brim with sympathy and imagination; critical periods are cold, wary, unfeeling. Great cities alternate between the two conditions. New York passed through an organic period of artistic originality after the Second World War, and another moment of artistic and political ferment in the 60’s and early 70’s. You could say that since the 80’s, the city has experienced a critical period, during which the super-scrutinizing news media grew and loomed larger than any artistic or intellectual trends.

The war in Iraq has reinforced the current critical state of mind and strengthened New Yorkers’ innate coldness, wariness, cynicism. It has amplified the city dweller’s defensive passiveness. For now. Sooner or later, the facts will detach themselves from the liars and the fools who set them in motion (we’ll get to the bottom of our Colonel Sherburns); before long, the war’s immediate reality will pierce the mediating representations that currently caricature and obscure it. That’s when television will give way to the street—to Town Hall. That’s when the horrific overseas deaths will snap us back into life.

Lee Siegel is the book critic for The Nation, TV critic for The New Republic and art critic for Slate.

This odious maneuver was seen for what it was, and a public outcry ensued. Mr. Kissinger was dumped. But who could take his place? Was there any good Republican out there who could be trusted, and yet who might give the appearance of apolitical objectivity? Mr. Bush scanned the horizon and set his sights on a man he recognized: Thomas H. Kean, the former governor of New Jersey. Mr. Kean seemed to be the kind of WASP-y, patrician, Northeastern Republican who could be trusted with the silverware at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport.

Once again, however, Mr. Bush was the victim of faulty intelligence. As anybody on the ground in New Jersey could have told him, Mr. Kean is nobody's puppet, and nobody's fool. Under Mr. Kean's firm guidance, the 9/11 commission has been asking tough questions of officials from two administrations, one Democratic, one Republican. The panel has just one agenda: finding the truth.

Nearly three years ago, as we watched the horror downtown, we asked each other: "How could such a thing happen?" Now, thanks to Mr. Kean's persistence, that question is getting answered.

Mr. Kean's work, and that of the other commissioners, is absolutely vital. In order to learn from mistakes of 9/11, we must first identify those mistakes, and do so in a way that is even-handed and nonpartisan. Mr. Kean is doing precisely that.

Perhaps Mr. Bush was counting on Mr. Kean to act like a loyal member of the club rather than an independent public servant charged with grave responsibilities. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Mr. Kean has proven to be a fair-minded and strong chairman and seeker of the truth. Mr. Bush deserves credit for making the right choice, even if he didn't realize just how right Mr. Kean would be.

A White-Shoe Firm Without a Spine

Although New York continues to be the nation's safest large city, thanks to policies instituted by Rudolph Giuliani and continued by Michael Bloomberg, there's no denying that guns remain Public Enemy No. 1. As if to illustrate the point, it was considered big news recently when an entire week passed without a shooting in the Bronx.

That's good news, for sure, but it also demonstrates the ubiquity of firearms in this city, and in others. Many of these guns are purchased illegally from shady dealers, and they wind up in the hands of people who use them to commit crimes.

Taking a page from the successful tobacco lawsuits, which held that industry responsible for the mayhem caused by its product, the city has filed suit against gunmakers for their complicity in illicit gun sales. To argue its case, the city enlisted the pro bono services of Weil, Gotshal and Manges, the high-powered midtown law firm. The presence of Weil, Gotshal on the city's side was critical, since the gun industry had lined up some legal powerhouses of its own.

With the trial looming later this year and the gun industry in a frenzy to head off this potentially lethal lawsuit, the city has lost its lawyer. Weil, Gotshal recently announced that it would withdraw from the case, claiming a conflict of interest.

A conflict of interest? That makes it sound as though the firm's partners sat around the board room, gravely discussing Ethics 101. In fact, it's pretty clear that the firm's decision was driven not by conscience but by the bottom line, that great arbiter of high-minded principles.

Weil, Gotshal dropped the city's case after a lawyer from Smith and Wesson-one of the gun companies cited in the city's suit-contacted a corporate client he shares with Weil, Gotshal. The corporate client, in turn, got in touch with Weil, Gotshal and apparently expressed some concerns about the suit. Wouldn't you know: After this conversation, Weil, Gotshal decided that it simply couldn't handle the suit.

The city is prepared to move forward, but there's little doubt that Weil, Gotshal's spineless behavior is a blow to the case. With any luck, a firm made of sterner stuff (and not already bought off by the gunmakers) will step forward to assist the city in its quest for a measure of justice. As for Weil, Gotshal, its shame ought to be endless-assuming, that is, that the firm is capable of shame.

April Is The Cruelest Month

Like a dinner guest with an insatiable thirst, stubborn winter couldn't take the hint. It overstayed its welcome and then grew belligerent, darkening the skies and wreaking havoc with April schedules built around soccer games and gardening and weekend strolls through Central Park.

There was nothing we could do but wait for the inevitable. Exhausted, winter collapsed in the sunshine of a spectacular April weekend in New York. Temperatures soared to mid-summer levels, and New Yorkers celebrated their liberation from sweaters and umbrella and scarves by streaming into parks, lacing up their rollerblades, grabbing their tennis racquets and strapping the babes of winter into strollers for their first glimpse of the colors of New York.

A glorious spring weekend distracted us, if only for a moment, from dismal reality in Iraq, where April has been a cruel and deadly month. As we streamed into playgrounds, ballfields and outdoor cafés, we were all too aware that unrest in one corner of the globe can bring death and destruction to another, mocking this season of hope and renewal.

For a few hours in the sunshine, however, we embraced life rather than dwell on those who celebrate death. We caught a glimpse of hope in a time of hopelessness. The poet Virgil might have had New York City in 2004 in mind when he wrote in The Aeneid:

"A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this."

Excessive spending and tax breaks always elicit more applause than controversies over the global "Axis of Evil," Niger's phantom yellowcake and Iraq's weapons of mass disappearance. So do such perennially popular topics as improved health care, the protection of heterosexual marriage and, in the immortal words of the President's father, jobs, jobs, jobs. Estimates of future deficits depend on whether the President actually tries to send astronauts to live on Mars and the moon, or abandons that vision in deference to disapproving poll numbers. In short, bread and maybe circuses.

What Mr. Bush understandably chose not to highlight, however, is his administration's continuing determination to undermine, restrict and censor the investigation of the most significant event of his Presidency: the attacks on New York and Washington of Sept. 11, 2001.

The President is fortunate that until now, the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has received far less attention than controversies over the design for a World Trade Center memorial. At every step, from his opposition to its creation, to his abortive appointment of Henry Kissinger as its chair, to his refusal to provide it with adequate funding and cooperation, Mr. Bush has treated the commission and its essential work with contempt.

In the latest development, the President's aides refused additional time for the 9/11 commission to complete its report. Although the original deadline in the enabling legislation is May 27, the commissioners recently asked for a few more months to ensure that their product will be "thorough and credible."

Earlier this month, Thomas Kean-the former New Jersey governor who has chaired the commission since Mr. Kissinger recused himself-explained why the commission needs more time. As the genial Republican told The New York Times , he is only permitted to read the most important classified documents concerning 9/11 in a little closet known as a "sensitive compartmented information facility" (or SCIF). He cannot photocopy the documents, and if he takes notes about them, he must leave the notes in the SCIF when he leaves.

Other recent statements by Mr. Kean, which he subsequently modified, suggest that the White House has ample reason to worry about what the commission's report will say. In December, he told CBS News that he believes the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented-and that incompetent officials were at fault for the failure to uncover and frustrate the plot.

Following the creation and staffing of the commission, many months passed before the administration agreed to let Mr. Kean look at any of those crucial documents. The commission still has hundreds of interviews to conduct, and millions of pages to examine, before its members begin to draft their conclusions.

But the President's political advisers, concerned about the political impact of the commission's report, are unsympathetic to its requests for additional time-and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who would have to approve an extension, is perfectly obedient to his masters in the White House. According to Newsweek , the administration offered Mr. Kean a choice: Either keep to the May deadline, or postpone release of the report until December, when its findings cannot affect the election.

Mr. Bush doesn't want his re-election subject to any informed judgment about the disaster that reshaped the nation and his Presidency. But why should such crucial facts be withheld from the voters? What does the President fear?

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Kean provided a clue to the answers in his Times interview. Asked whether he thinks the disaster "did not have to happen," he replied, "Yes, there is a good chance that 9/11 could have been prevented by any number of people along the way. Everybody pretty well agrees our intelligence agencies were not set up to deal with domestic terrorism …. They were not ready for an internal attack." Then, asked whether "anyone in the Bush administration [had] any idea that an attack was being planned," he replied: "That is why we are looking at the internal papers. I can't talk about what's classified. [The] President's daily briefings are classified. If I told you what was in them, I would go to jail."

But the commission's final report may well indicate what the President was told in his daily briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, when he was sunning himself in Crawford, Tex.-as well as the many warnings he and his associates were given by the previous administration. That kind of information could send him back to Crawford for a permanent vacation.