The New York Times has endorsed Bill de Blasio for a position that no one's sure should even exist. It's a position so embarrassing that it can only be released in a lightly read Saturday newspaper.

My opinion (shared by many) is that the Public Advocate position should not exist.

My "public advocate moment of zen" happened way back in the 1990s, when I was championing appreciation for model Audrey Munson. Miss Munson had posed for the statue "Civic Fame" on top of the Municipal Building (and just a few floors above the Public Advocate's office). I discovered that Miss Munson had also posed for "Miss Manhattan" for the Manhattan Bridge (now at the Brooklyn Museum), Miss Munson was the lady in the Plaza Hotel Fountain, and she was very much else. Munson was the first person to pose nude in film (re-creating her famous poses), but had fallen into obscurity and had lived that last 60 years of her life (she died at age 104 in 1996) in a mental institution. The New York Times had just written a Munson piece about my research for its City section.

No one else seems to be covering the expanding Working Families Party scandal around here, even though it was on Room 8 that it was erratically covered early on. So I will provide the followup to Hildy Johnson's somewhat difficult to interpret coverage.

An article in City Hall News covers this developing scandal in considerable detail. Here is the breakdown they give of the scandal:

A complicated web of coordinated activities, shared resources and staff, and quiet money transfers between the Working Families Party, a secretive private company called Data and Field Services and at least six current Council campaigns, as well as Bill de Blasio’s campaign for public advocate, appears to have found several ways around the strict city campaign finance laws. Upwards of a million dollars, and possibly more, are involved, with over $1.7 million in matching funds comprised of taxpayer dollars already disbursed and more are potentially at stake.