On Thursday at a breakfast meeting hosted by Crain's New York Business Rudy Giuliani stated that for him to run for Governor of NY things would have to be "bad". Well if our state's current economic and political situation doesn't count as "bad" then I don't know what "bad" is!

Here is an article talking about it and urging Rudy to throw his hat into the ring: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2009586/draft_rudy_giuliani_for_governor.html

Looks like the folks over at Urban Elephants have started the Draft Rudy Giuliani for Governor campaign.

Here is the link to the posting:

http://www.urbanelephant.com/index.php/component/content/article/64/1031-draft-rudy.html

 They got a facebook page:

 http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=92931420297

 And even a Draft Rudy for Gov website going:

http://draftrudy.com/

“To meddle for a half a second, I think if we had Mayor Giuliani for governor, and we had Governor Pataki for senator, we would be a large step toward a tidal wave, which would make 2010 comparable to 1994,” Mr. Gingrich said.

Newt's nuts.

George Pataki is politically dead in New York and has been for years. Rudy Giuliani was popular in 2001 (when he last held elected office), but 2010 is nine years removed from that. Giuliani's presidential campaign was a disaster to his name. Giuliani is making a mint doing consulting and will probably stay there.

If the Republican Party was serious about developing the Republican brand it New York, it could have done several things. It could have said "no" to allowing Michael Bloomberg back on its ticket. It could have pulled out a victory for Jim Tedisco in a Congressional special election for the current senator's old seat. That election was in a Republican stronghold, after all. But it's loss one and loss two.

Political scandals (especially those involving a mistress and money) always seem to fall into two categories - the ones that are handled well and the ones that don't end well.

They also inevitably get a "gate" assigned to them (no, Gatemouth, not you). Perhaps we'll call this one "JudyGate."

Let's review the timeline:

On LunchBox today, host Adam Green on: Republican debate, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo, Jim Gilmore and more...

On LunchBox today, host Adam Green on: Nicolas Sarkozy, the French, George Tenet, Ron Jeremy, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Biden, Mike Huckabee and more...

I haven't posted much in the past year, but recent developments have gotten my attention.

I have long regarded public polling with more than a measure of disdain. My distaste is primarily with the flawed sampling and methodology utilized by the polling organizations – antiquated screens, RDD, self-identified partisanship and likelihood of voting with little or no voter file validation - and the trumpeting of facile analysis without fully releasing the underlying data.

Perhaps the worst part of public polling is the complete inability of the talking heads from the polling world to avoid hyperbole or to speak in metaphor-free English, compounding the weakness of their data and diluting the quality of the public discourse.

via The Politico

In the spirit of openness and of drowning you all in information, we at the Politico are pleased to make available the full contents of Rudy Giuliani's 140-page campaign plan, which the campaign lost possession of under murky circumstances at the beginning of November, and whose contents I reported on in the New York Daily News earlier this month.