Rudy's Expensive (to the NYC taxpayers) Booty Calls

The BBQ Pit
21

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
I mean, I don’t expect them to be inside Judi Nathan’s condo, overhearing them doing the wild thing in the bedroom while they play pinochle in the living room, but if the mayor needs to be guarded, then you’d think they’d at least need to be close enough to hear the gunshots if someone sent a hit squad after him.

And if they’re going to be snoozing ten or twelve miles away, they can damned sure be quartered in a cheaper motel.
[/QUOTE]

To be fair, as much as I’m disinclined to be fair to Giuliani, if he has a 24-hour security detail, it is unlikely that the same officers will be on duty all 48 to 72 hours of a weekend vacation. Instead, they almost certainly took shifts covering him, and having a hotel several miles away to sleep while off duty isn’t unreasonable.

And with the summer prices in the Hamptons, it is likely that there weren’t any cheaper lodgings to be had.

22

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
But the notion that Rudy needed four cops with him when he was in Palm Beach or the Hamptons strikes me as totally ridiculous. This smacks more of the higher-class equivalent of a rap star wanting a posse to flaunt his importance than of a genuine security need, back in those pre-9/11 days.

And while my tone may have been jocular with respect to the posse’s hotel bills, I quite sincerely think they’re ridiculously expensive, and I’d expect any fiscal conservative to agree.
[/QUOTE]

I honestly have no idea why they are so expensive. I imagine it’s entirely because they were staying at a very nice hotel. If Rudy is staying at a nice hotel, his protection needs to stay there too. Having body guards is wholly negated if they sleep at the Motel 8 five miles down the road.

I have no idea what level of protection New York City mayors are afforded, I have no idea what sort of leeway they have, personally, when it comes to asking for said protection.

If he was at all entitled to the protection, then the only thing I find to be morally wrong is that he billed their services improperly (or at least it seems to be clearly improper) to various agencies within city government.

When you’re comparing giving multi-billion dollar subsidies to agriculture, spending millions on bridges to nowhere and et cetera, I honestly just don’t care about whether or not Rudy lived it up on the public dime. George Washington was infamous for living it up on the public dime when he was leading the armies and some suggest this is why the Congress decided to pay him a flat salary instead of agreeing to cover whatever expenses he incurred.

It’s an unfortunate truth that politicians in general spend willy-nilly on the public dime. I know managers in large corporations who have expensive nights on the town basically on the company’s dime without ever getting in trouble. It’s mostly human nature to spend like a fool when you aren’t the one picking up the tab.

I’m not really forgiving it, to be honest my general impression from this is “I don’t give a shit.” It’s obviously fun for some people to make sure they highlight every misdeed by GOP candidates, but I’d be very surprised if any of the major candidates who held elected office didn’t have the public picking up ludicrous tabs at one point or another. As a fiscal conservative, sure, I don’t like it, but I’m way more worried about the multi-million dollar appropriations for pointless public works projects than I am a congressman or mayor of some city I don’t even live in who costs the city a few thousand dollars. In the grand scheme of things we’re talking about an amount of money that isn’t even a material amount of the city’s budget. New York City is big with a big budget, and while we see the number “$400,000” spent on travel, there’s no itemization. We have no idea how much of it was “legitimate” travel costs associated with his duties as mayor and how much of it was trips to the Hamptons with his girlfriend. It’s also entirely possible he was totally allowed to bill the city for these little excursions and that he was entitled to protection when he left the city, I genuinely have no clue.

23

[QUOTE=Billdo]
To be fair, as much as I’m disinclined to be fair to Giuliani, if he has a 24-hour security detail, it is unlikely that the same officers will be on duty all 48 to 72 hours of a weekend vacation. Instead, they almost certainly took shifts covering him, and having a hotel several miles away to sleep while off duty isn’t unreasonable.
[/quote]

I never thought about that aspect of it, that’s entirely plausible.

If there weren’t any of them within 10 miles of Giuliani, it is sort of questionable why he even felt the need to bring them.

I’ll say this though, if he had actually quartered them in a Motel 8 I’m all but certain RTFirefly’s pit thread would read, “Giuliani makes New York’s finest sleep in roach motel while he bangs his mistress.”

24

[QUOTE=An Arky]
I don’t find this particular aspect of Giuliani’s sleaziness any more upsetting than any of the (many) others. What I don’t like though, is people lining up to suck his dick just because he made a few phone calls on 9/11.
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Giuliani’s sleaziness has always been a turn off to me, but the biggest thing is his authoritarian streak and his gun control stance. While I do not think I’d be willing to vote for Hillary Clinton, I wouldn’t vote for Giuliani if he were nominated. He’s one of those guys who I like less and less the more I know about him.

25

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
Giuliani’s sleaziness has always been a turn off to me, but the biggest thing is his authoritarian streak and his gun control stance. While I do not think I’d be willing to vote for Hillary Clinton, I wouldn’t vote for Giuliani if he were nominated. He’s one of those guys who I like less and less the more I know about him.
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For whom will you vote if it’s Hillary vs Rudy in the general? Third party?

26

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
I’ll say this though, if he had actually quartered them in a Motel 8 I’m all but certain RTFirefly’s pit thread would read, “Giuliani makes New York’s finest sleep in roach motel while he bangs his mistress.”
[/QUOTE]

RTF, like the good partisan* he is, is trying to convince the few Republicans hanging around here that none of the candidates on the slate is worth voting for. Just like Mr. Moto tries to convince all the Democrats that none of their candidates is worth voting for**.

*not that there’s anything wrong with that

**not that either of these guys does this exclusively, and not that I’m trying to equate those two posters on some other level

27

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
Giuliani’s sleaziness has always been a turn off to me, but the biggest thing is his authoritarian streak and his gun control stance. While I do not think I’d be willing to vote for Hillary Clinton, I wouldn’t vote for Giuliani if he were nominated. He’s one of those guys who I like less and less the more I know about him.
[/QUOTE]
These are excellent and reasonable reasons (among many others) to bring up when discussing why one might not support or vote for Giuliani.

For all those that keep saying they “don’t know” what is involved in a NYC mayor’s security detail, etc., here’s something to consider.

More than likely, security, to whatever degree, was the order of the day for Guiliani 24-7. The taxpayers of the City are expected to foot the bill, regardless of whether certain “items,” "venues, " or “total amounts” for the security that might raise an eyebrow. The mayor should have security and I wouldn’t want to quibble over small issues.

However, when 24-7 security for Mayor Giuliani was what is expected and provided for, why the need to put it on the books of (i) The Loft Board, (ii) the Procurement Policy Board, (iii) the Procurement Policy Board, and fer cryin’ out loud, (iv) the Office for People With Disabilities? Someone has stated that it was probably to help hide the affair, which I agree with, but fair enough; I really don’t care who he (or Clinton) has sex with or where. This was a big enough issue for the Comptroller of the City to launch an investigation, which was expanded as more stuff was uncovered and brought to the attention of the current mayor.

However, these are discrete NYC agencies with their own budgets. Now, while the total may all eventually accrue to New York’s overall budget, doing something this underhanded takes away from these individual agencies budgets and limits what they are mandated to do. For instance, $400,000, even in a NYC budget is a lot of money to take out of any functioning agency’s budget. This, IMHO, is what’s so wrong with what he did.

Also, given what we already know about his indicted cohort Bernard Kerik and how close they were, if anyone thinks these kind of shenanigans by Giuliani isn’t just the tip of the iceberg of more sleaziness that going to be discovered as this campaign gets further and further along has got another “think” coming.

28

[QUOTE=John Mace]
RTF, like the good partisan* he is, is trying to convince the few Republicans hanging around here that none of the candidates on the slate is worth voting for. Just like Mr. Moto tries to convince all the Democrats that none of their candidates is worth voting for**.

*not that there’s anything wrong with that

**not that either of these guys does this exclusively, and not that I’m trying to equate those two posters on some other level
[/QUOTE]
Thanks, I think.

Obviously, I don’t want a Republican to win the White House next November. But to be quite honest, Rudy scares me far more than any of the others. IMHO, he’s the one most likely to out-Bush Bush and Cheney in a few critical areas: being genuinely ignorant of what the rest of the world is like; wanting to solve foreign policy problems militarily; and wanting to continue the consolidation of authority in the Executive here at home. And in the cronyism department, he makes them look like amateurs. Plus I expect he’s just as unlikely as the others to try to do anything practical about global warming.

I doubt this little peccadillo is going to change too many minds about Rudy - certainly none here, and probably not too many elsewhere - but things have almost gotten to the point where I’d rather talk about relative fluff like this than the things that really scare me.

29

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
Thanks, I think.
[/QUOTE]

Just to be clear, I wasn’t trying to insult you by calling you a partisan. You don’t make any bones about being an active member of the Democratic party and that you want to see as many Democrats win as possible. And I honestly don’t think there is anything wrong with that. If there was actually a party out there that I thought deserved power more than another one, I’d be a partisan for it, too. Especially because of the way our system works.

30

Look, he was busy saving us all from 9/11. You don’t expect a guy to do all that manly swaggerin’ without getting his duck pressed, do you?

31

No offense taken, John. Not to worry.

This story seems to be getting more interesting:

32

the man’s a liar. In the middle of all the lewinsky drama, I distinctly remember a news clip of him saying clinton should be impeached. I only remember it because it was while he was carrying on with Nathan.

Now he says he disagreed with the impeachment:
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/09/08/State/Giuliani_stresses_nat.shtml

Combine that with his “there is no new york city except manhattan” attitude, and it makes me want to register republican so I can nominate someone else.

33

[QUOTE=miamouse]
the man’s a liar. In the middle of all the lewinsky drama, I distinctly remember a news clip of him saying clinton should be impeached. I only remember it because it was while he was carrying on with Nathan.

Now he says he disagreed with the impeachment:
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/09/08/State/Giuliani_stresses_nat.shtml
[/QUOTE]

Don’t trust your memory. And certainly don’t expect us to trust your memory.

But note the careful wording. He “ultimately” didn’t think Clinton should be impeached. Even if he expressed something differently before, he’s covered. Remember-- we’re talking politicians here. Precious few are going to be unimpeachable wrt stuff like this, no pun intended.

I gotta say that although I wouldn’t want Huckabee in the WH, he sure does come across as honest and sincere. You don’t see him pick and choose his words like a typical politician. I can see the appeal, on a personal level.

34

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
… Giuliani is plenty sleazy already so not really a surprise. I mean, he’s a New York, Italian-American politician, what do you expect?
[/QUOTE]
So Martin Hyde what do you think contributes more to Giuliani’s sleaziness, being a New Yorker or being an Italian-American politician? :rolleyes:

CMC +fnord!

35

What’s the average cost of a New York hotel room these days? My sister couldn’t find anything decent for under $200-something a night earlier this fall.

36

[QUOTE=Shoshana]
What’s the average cost of a New York hotel room these days? My sister couldn’t find anything decent for under $200-something a night earlier this fall.
[/QUOTE]
When Rudy was in NYC, his security detail, when they slept, presumably would have done so at their respective homes.

37

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
When Rudy was in NYC, his security detail, when they slept, presumably would have done so at their respective homes.
[/QUOTE]

Why do you presume that?

See, here’s the thing. You really don’t know anything about how the security detail works for the mayor of NYC (forget whether it’s Rudy or Joe Schmoe). Why do you automatically assume what is going to cast RG in the worst light?

38

[QUOTE=Shoshana]
What’s the average cost of a New York hotel room these days? My sister couldn’t find anything decent for under $200-something a night earlier this fall.
[/QUOTE]

Southampton, one of the famous Hamptons, where they stayed, is a high-end resort community on the eastern end of Long Island about 100 miles east of New York City.

In the summer, demand for lodging greatly exceeds supply. I don’t believe that there are any chain hotels (certainly no Motel 6/Super 8 type places) in the area, and what little lodging there is are small hotels/B&Bs or local motels. A room rate of in excess of $200 or $250 per night, even at a crappy little motel, is not surprising.

As for New York City, there are a range of hotel options, few of them cheap. Not finding anything decent for less than $200 isn’t surprising during a busy time (and people’s definitions of decent vary widely).

39

Familiarity. Some time back, I wouldn’t have, having no base line. Now that I know him better, not so much. He’s an opportunistic weasel, the Man Who Will Never, Ever Be King.

40

[QUOTE=elucidator]
Familiarity. Some time back, I wouldn’t have, having no base line. Now that I know him better, not so much. He’s an opportunistic weasel, the Man Who Will Never, Ever Be King.
[/QUOTE]

Being honest about your bias doesn’t make it not bias.

I know this is the Pit, so say whatever you want. But don’t expect the rest of us to be convinced but that line of reasoning. That’s all I’m trying to say.