In a letter forwarded to me by a reader (and subsequently posted on this website), Tom Frieden wrote:

The rest of the letter is here.

-- Azi Paybarah

The Post calls yesterday's news of a federal investigation into Jeanine Pirro over allegations of illegal wire-tapping a "devastating blow to her campaign," while the Daily News has a sidebar piece - leading with the cancellation of a planned fund-raising appearance by Rudy Giuliani - headlined "Uh, Jeanine, hope you had career Plan B."

Jeanine Pirro's plan to bug her husband's boat is, according to her lawyer, perfectly legal under federal law.

And the Times coverage includes a stand-alone piece on the fact that former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik is once again in the spotlight, with predictably unflattering results.

Last night, the AP reported that Giuliani defended President Clinton's anti-terrorism efforts, saying, "Every American president I've known would have given his life to prevent an attack like that."

Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey is getting a great reception. In Florida.

Some Republicans want to lose the midterm elections because the party has drifted from its fiscal conservatism.

The Journal takes note of a clever political calculation in the GOP decision to hold the 2008 convention in the Twin Cities instead of, say, New York: "It has become less of a Democratic bastion and more of a swing-voting state, a change attributed in part to population growth in the Twin Cities suburbs."

Congress will approve a bill to spend more money on the Iraq War than was spent in the Vietnam War and during the arms race under President Reagan.

The City Council is going to convene a "nightlife summit" to mull issues of safety at bars and clubs.

Forest City Ratner agrees to shrink the Atlantic Yards project.

And Tom Frieden's trans-fat offensive is unpopular among restaurant owners and the Post editorial board.

I'd add just one political footnote: A subtext here is that chasidic leaders are still suffering from the loss of City Hall power that came with Rudy Giuliani's departure.

A central question is why the chasidic leaders feel, in the first place, that they can demand that Tom Frieden be removed from the case -- as they did again at yesterday's Gracie Mansion meeting with the Mayor, a person familiar with what went on said. The Mayor -- who once seemed to consider the Orthodox quite alien, but seems to have broadened his views on the topic -- flatly refused.

So why to these community leaders feel so empowered? And as one Jewish community insider -- one with a good deal of sympathy for the Satmar case -- points out, a central reason for their political confidence is that, under Rudy, they would probably have won this fight. Rudy's Jewish liason, Bruce Teitelbaum, had been his campaign manager, and clearly outranked most agency heads. And the Jewish communities that supported the Mayor were well taken care of.

There have been rumblings of protest in the community since Frieden announced that he would circulate advisories, in Yiddish, warning that the practice could transmit herpes to babies, and that at least one baby had died that way.

But one segment of the Satmar community (supporters of Aaron, if you follow the Shakespearean politics of the Satmar) is pushing back much harder, most recently in an editorial from a Satmar Yiddish paper published in Williamsburg, Der Blatt.

The paper's editors claim to have understood that City Hall made a campaign promise to leave circumcision practices unregulated; now they accuse unnamed intermediaries (read: their communal opponents) of distorting the result of the community's negotiations with the Mayor.

The editorial isn't online. Here are a couple of excerpts from a translation:

"What has been promised to us prior to the recent elections -- and this was the only request we made -- was that the subject of 'Metzitzah B'peh' should completely be untouched by the City Department of Health."

The way the paper sees it, the Mayor himself didn't know what he was supposed to have agreed to:

"[A]t the big rally (in Williamsburg) the crowd heard a fiery speech in the Yiddish language at which the speaker spoke with much emotion and power about 'Metzitzah B'Peh'. But upon switching to the English language so order the mayor should also listen in, he didn't even mention a single word about 'Metzitzah B'Peh'. He spoke only of social issues as housing, crime, and clean streets."

City officials have denied that there was any deal. And note that the allegation isn't that Mike or his aides decieved anyone; it's intra-communal. It was, however, a serious campaign issue in parts of Brooklyn.

A person familiar with the controversy, meanwhile, told The Politicker that the situation has been rising to a head since the Health Department identified at least one other herpes infection, and the community refused to give them the name of the mohel. Tensions rose at a meeting Friday in which representatives of the Central Rabbinical Council (read, in this context, the moderates) asked Frieden to relinquish his authority to the state health department, which they assume will be less aggressive.

Frieden's response? That would be like asking the rabbis to relinquish their authority to the Catholic Church.

But the Chasidic communities affected are also upset. They don't want the city to launch a public-information campaign warning people that the practice is dangerous.

Williamsburg Rabbi David Niederman, speaking for the Central Rabbinical Congress, put out a largely conciliatory statement that ends on this note:

"We have serious concerns about the Health Department's insistence on advising mothers of newborn boys concerning a religious practice. We believe that continuing the religious practice of metzitzah b'peh is highly safe. We will work with expectant mothers and fathers in our community to urge them to consult with their rabbis as they approach the blessed event of celebrating a bris for a newborn boy."

That's in direct contradiction to the assessment by the Health Commissioner, Tom Frieden, and seems aimed at undermining the public health campaign. This one doesn't quite seem over.

The Jewish Week reports that, after suggestions of banning a particular practice that involved a mohel putting his mouth on the open cut, or of barring this particular mohel from performing circumcisions, the Bloomberg has handed it off to a religious court.

This draws a scathing response from a Baltimore institution which which the Mayor is more than passingly familiar:

"[It] is a major public health hazard," declared Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, a professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health -- the Johns Hopkins University education and research center named for New York's philanthropist mayor, its biggest financial supporter. Zenilman, who grew up in an Orthodox family in Woodmere, L.I., warned that allowing the practice known as metzitzah b'peh "is actually crazy" due to the potentially fatal danger of transmitting herpes to vulnerable newborns.

"Actually crazy?" One has to wonder what Tom Frieden thinks about this decision, and I've left a message asking.