Illinois Democrats dug deep for this Lieutenant Governor candidate: Scott Lee Cohen is accused of threatening his prostitute ex-girlfriend with a knife, abusing steroids, trying to rape his ex-wife, and terrorizing his children. "That is my parenting style," he explained.

Cohen, a millionaire pawnbroker, managed to gloss over reams of domestic violence allegations until after he won the Illinois Democratic Party's primary for Lieutenant Governor this week. Once the Cohen floodgates opened on Thursday, however, they wouldn't stop. Here are all the terrible things we learned about him in the last 24 hours:

• According to ex-wife Debra York Cohen, Scott's abuses included beating her, choking her, and trying to rape her.
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• Petitioning for a restraining order during their 2005 divorce, Debra said Scott abused illegal drugs and anabolic steroids, the latter of which he admits to be true.
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• For all the steroids, though, Scott claims he never roid raged at his children, which Debra says he did. He explained in court that he's just a shitty dad:
  

  Although I may have taken steroids and or performance enhancing drugs in the past I have not utilized any of these drugs in the last two weeks … Although from time to time I have screamed and yelled at my children, that is my parenting style and my prerogative. I have never abused my children, I have never hurt my children and I have never done any harm to them

• After the divorce, Cohen dated a convicted prostitute employed by a Glenview "massage parlor." She called the cops after a fight in which she claims Scott held a knife to her throat. The charges were dismissed. Here's how he explains it now:
  

  I was going through a divorce, and I started running with a fast group. I was in a tumultuous relationship with a woman I was dating. We had a fight, but I never touched her.

• He is very persuasive, because he somehow convinced Debra to accompany him on television (photographed above) where she said he'll be a fine lieutenant governor in spite of it all: "It was a short period of time and it's certainly not something that the people of Illinois need to be concerned with."

How did this sterling gentleman land a critical role in Illinois' 2010 landscape? (a.) The lieutenant governor primary is usually a tiny, low-budget race. Cohen threw $2 million of his own money on the campaign, making him the only candidate with popular name recognition. (b.) Despite the boatloads of money, local Dems and media didn't take him seriously until it was too late, probably because he was a total unknown, politically. Cohen explains,

I tried to tell everyone about this early on. I wanted to talk about all of these issues, but everyone wrote me off, and said I didn't have a chance to win. Now that I'm the Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor, the day after the election, there are questions. I am happy to answer any and all questions.

All of which is rather unfortunate for Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, who thought Rod Blagojevich's downfall meant he wouldn't have to run with criminals, anymore:

"No one in my campaign staff told me anything about it and I don't think anybody knew about it, at least I didn't," Quinn said. "I had no idea of these matters and I learned reading the papers, watching TV. I consider them very, very serious and grave matters. I think any citizen would feel the same."

Quinn says Cohen has an "obligation to step aside," but since Cohen won the primary fair and square (albeit by a tight margin) the Democratic Party's hands are tied. Last time a gubernatorial candidate found himself in this position, it was Adlai Stevenson III in 1986, when a follower of Lyndon LaRouche won the Democratic Party's Lieutenant Governor candidacy. Adlai ended up stepping down and inventing a whole new political party so he could have a better running mate, and ultimately lost to the Republican. Moral of the story: Don't take moneyed upstarts for granted. Moral of the story, part II: If you'd like to buy your way into Illinois politics, lieutenant governor is the path of least resistance. [ChicagoTrib] [ChicagoTrib] [Politico]

After yesterday's nicknames post, I received several indignant emails about leaving out perhaps the most elite nicknamed person of all time: J.D. Salinger, who—as readers of tributes to him know—was called "Jerry" by friends. But there are more.

In fact, in the lovely Lillian Ross piece I linked to above, there's another one: the late New Yorker editor William Shawn, whom Ross refers to as "Bill."

Others to note:

New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh: Sy

Author and New York Times writer William Grimes: Biff

New York University professor and former New Yorker writer Lawrence Wechsler: Ren

New York Times political reporter Katherine Q. Seelye: Kit

Late New York Times writer R.W. Apple: Johnny

And even though you should never call David Remnick "Dave," you're best off using these people's (more obvious) shortened names:

Atlantic National Correspondent James Fallows Jim (along with "Rick" Hertzberg, another one of Jimmy Carter's former speechwriters)

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg: Jake

Time editor Richard Stengel: Rick

New Republic editor Franklin Foer: Frank

New Yorker writer Katherine Boo: Kate

In your foreboding Thursday media column: Jared Kushner has a bright idea, Howard Zinn's reputation impugned, David Letterman plays a funny joke, and Janice Min somehow survives being rich as fuck.

Look what dashing young man-about-town and charitable New York Observer owner Jared Kushner is doing now: he's starting a free newspaper in Las Vegas! Because he already has New York in his pocket. (No idea.)


NPR's memorial report on dearly departed lefty historian Howard Zinn included a quote from conservadork David Horowitz saying "There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect." People complained that he should not have been quoted! But as much as he is wrong, we are in favor of dissenters being included in obits, because otherwise obits get so mawkish, god.


News of the Weird: David Letterman's television show has hired its very first lady, to write jokes? So I guess it's either just a stunt for some kind of " bit," or another, more powerful joke about ladies aren't funny? David Letterman, you're America's favorite cad!


Former US Weekly editor Janice Min reveals for the first time: It was totally stressful how she earned so much fucking money that one of her paychecks dwarfed her emasculated husband's entire tiny, unsatisfying yearly salary. How did she survive this nightmare situation? She will tell you in the New York Post.

Obama's "Aunti Zeituni," Zeituni Onyango, will stand before a federal judge after living illegally in America ever since her asylum request was rejected in 2004. The president says he won't intervene for Onyango, who could be deported to Kenya. [CNN]

Supporters of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney tend to fancy themselves red-blooded capitalists. So it would probably upset them to learn they funded someone else's business, and get none of the profit.

BlueSwarm LLC freely admits its fundraising management software was built for Romney, the remarkably lifelike 2008 Republican presidential contender. Its pride is understandable from a marketing, if not legal, standpoint: the system attracted some favorable press during the campaign.

But the code's use in subsequent campaigns by entirely different candidates, and its repurposing to fill BlueSwarm's coffers, raises questions over whether Romney's donors are getting a raw deal. The same finance director who drove the custom software for Romney, Spencer Zwick, is now finance director for California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. And, go figure, Whitman is a prominently advertised BlueSwarm user, using the software to coordinate her fundraising operations.

It's unclear how much, if anything, Whitman is paying to use the code. But other politicians are paying "astronomical rates" for BlueSwarm access, an anonymous tipster claims.

Somehow we don't think Romney's many Utah Mormon donors would appreciate the spoils of their generosity being provided to candidates like Whitman, a "socially moderate," gay-friendly female California CEO who supports (at minimum) civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. Or being funneled to a closely-held LLC. They probably should have found some way to properly liquidate their software assets at the end of the campaign (*cough*).

If you know more about this tangled web of software, politics and money, do email us.

Cosmo editor on her choice for the magazine's next nude Senator centerfold, to PopEater.com. Reference photo of Bayh, of whom White added, "We think he's hot in a natural, low-key, Midwestern sort of way," provided after the jump.

After half a year of bragging about all his customers, would-be newspaper paywall king Steven Brill has finally named some of them. Prepare to follow The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era right into the future.

That's just one of the newspapers that has signed on with Brill's Journalism Online for software to sell content online. The others, says the New York Times, "include The Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina and Global Post, an Internet site based in Boston." So the next time someone tells Brill that nobody wants to buy paywalls from him, he can correct them: "That's nobodies to you, pal."

Once upon a time, Edwards' staff thought white wine and sissy sodas were their biggest problems. In anticipation of Andrew Young's 20/20 interview tonight, Gawker asks an Edwards staffer to evaluate the latest rumors—and lob some new ones.

"I don't think there's really any sympathy for him," says our anonymous staffer, who worked on Edwards' 2004 and 2008 campaigns and says Edwards' old staff is universally "disgusted" with their former boss.

Back before they realized John was knocking up videographers while his wife lay dying, Edwards' staff worried that his beverage choices were too girly:

He had very weird soda preferences. For the longest time it was all Sprite Zero. And then at one point the word came down that he would no longer drink Sprite Zero. He would only drink Diet Orange Sunkist. And Diet Orange Sunkist can be very difficult to find on short notice. It had to be in cans. It could not be in bottles. We'd pick him up at the airport you'd have to have a cooler of that and white wine on ice.

His alcohol of choice was simultaneously elitist and tasteless...

He only drank white wine. Despite all that "man of the people" beer drinking, he preferred Sauvignon Blanc. It could be a three-dollar or a fifty-dollar bottle of wine and he would not have a clue. I don't really think he would've known the difference if you'd given him chardonnay. ... He's your classic—I hate to use this term—but he's so nouveau riche. He's totally a guy with no taste who suddenly came into a lot of money.

...and illegal: "If you were driving, plastic cups were a good idea because he'd want to have a drink while you were driving him around." An open container in a moving vehicle? "Yes." Did this make you nervous, anonymous staffer? "Yes. Especially when he'd ask you to drive faster."

The staffer says he's kept up with the leaks and recent excerpt from assistant-turned-memoirist (and early sex tape whistleblower) Andrew Young's forthcoming book, and they "seem pretty consistent" with his experience. But he admits that Young is "a little disconnected from reality." (A passage describing Young's fear of Grisham-style retribution drew particular disbelief.) Our staffer says Edwards' lies fooled most everyone:

We all bought the spin. Until the pregnancy stuff surfaced, it wasn't that crazy a story, just a report that he had an affair with a videographer. But when the other layers came out—the child, and the timing with Elizabeth's cancer—it became more monstrous.

He adds that the National Enquirer's trashy reputation "aided our desire not to believe." He realized the Enquirer was right in January of 2008, when a friend told him Andrew Young had a vasectomy and thus could not—as Young and Edwards claimed—be Rielle's baby daddy. The staffer is quick to note that not everyone on staff knew this. (Like Edwards' spokespersons, whom he says did not know they were passing on lies.)

The staffer suspected Dallas donor Fred Baron of paying to support Rielle. (Baron confirmed this shortly before his death in 2008) He finds plausible Young's claim that Listerine heiress and Jackie Onassis bosom buddy Bunny Mellon's "Bunny money" also played a role:

Everybody knew about the Bunny money, though not that it was part of that [the sex scandal]. Everybody knew 'Bunny money' as this rich heiress who thought [Edwards] was the reincarnation of Robert Kennedy. You sort of pieced it together by working backwards: You hear the story about Rielle living in a house, and you know she doesn't have an income. You know that Fred [Baron] has a billion dollars, and you know Fred would do anything for John.

Asked about Edwards' recent camera-friendly trip to Haiti, the staffer comes as close to rolling his eyes as one can by telephone:

I think there is less than zero chance of him ever having a public career again. And I am absolutely positive that he will try. He's addicted to it. He needs attention. ... He was the kind of guy who'd been told all his life he was the golden child. I think that's what Rielle tapped into. She told him he was the golden child, and I think he liked to believe that.

The staffer isn't in touch with John anymore, but if he were to offer advice?

The guy needs professional help. There's a big-ass screw loose in that guy's head, and unless he gets professional help, it's going to stay loose. ... He lived in a bubble, and it's hard to gauge that stuff because most politicians do. When you're running for president, every single day you wake up and someone hands you a piece of paper with every single minute of your time budgeted. You're never alone. Some people can stay grounded and others can't. And clearly he couldn't.

Barack Obama's first State of the Union was not a particularly soaring or pretty speech. But it was really the model every future president should look to when composing their own.

There hasn't been a major change to the State of the Union since Lyndon Johnson moved it to prime time in 1965. The closest thing to a modern update we've had since then was when Reagan introduced the first "Lenny Skutnik" (it was, coincidentally, a man named Lenny Skutnik). And guess what: Barack Obama didn't introduce any of his Lenny Skutniks last night!

Some pundits will tell you that a) Barry is good at giving speeches and that was a good speech but good speeches don't matter and b) Barry needed to match the rhetorical heights of his campaign speeches and wow us with elevated language delivered passionately, but he didn't. Both of those are idiotic pundit responses that were drafted at 4 p.m. yesterday. (Looking at you, Larry Sabato!)

The president was petty and score-settling. He embarrassed his opponents to their faces. He was gunning for short-term political gain and not concerned with laying down a legacy. There's nothing in the speech that'll be taught in classes as a classic piece of presidential rhetoric.

The only tear-jerking line was the kid who donated his allowance to Haiti. He closed with the usual "American spirit rests in the hearts of dudes who wake up early to go work in our clean coal plants" bullshit but the speech was not about the indomitable American spirit, it was about how congress needs to stop making him look bad and put a fucking jobs bill on his fucking desk, and fuck you, too, Supreme Court.

Here's the brilliance of the jobs focus: an incoming president's first address to a joint session (his pseudo-SOTU) can be lofty and grand and all that bullshit. And it would've been insane for Obama to have hammered on job creation in that first address, because every economist in the nation knew we were going to shed a zillion jobs over the next year. Obviously the stimulus should've been larger, and a supplemental stimulus should've been passed last year when it became apparent that the one passed was not large enough, but from a purely political standpoint, to announce your job creation plan in the trough of a major recession is just setting yourself up to be blamed when the jobs continue doing what jobs do in a recession. To bring your Presidential focus back around to it now, when the worst is hopefully behind us, is a nice bit of maneuvering.

He actually focused on health care more than we expected him to, and while some were hoping he was going to explicitly say "I call on the House to pass the Senate Bill and I call on the Senate to amend their bill through reconciliation," that is actually the sort of thing he should save for his sessions with congressional leaders. Reminding the public that the bill will regulate the insurers and be deficit-neutral was way more helpful for the cause than explaining his plan to ram it through an unfriendly congress.

George W. Bush couldn't deliver an inspirational address to save his life, but his obsession with his legacy and his War Presidency-fetishizing staff kept giving him these grand addresses meant to go down as Historic Moments. Axis of Evil was supposed to Churchillian. As a punchline, it may have slightly more staying power than Bimbo Summit. Remember when we were going to put a man on Mars? That was supposed to inspire us! Instead it just confused us. (Wasn't a robot on Mars enough for us to worry about, especially with a war on?)

And there is a graveyard somewhere in SW DC filled with nothing but stupid grand inspirational announcements of new days in America and Fair Deals and New Societies from these lousy speeches.

Last night's speech is a much, much better model for presidents to follow: be informal and colloquial, come out swinging, don't be afraid to ad-lib, point out your successes, point out the other side's failures, and lay out a specific, short-term agenda.

(Remember when he made the entire Supreme Court look super awkward? That was awesome.)

(Also Mr. President you know we're on your side but there is still no such thing as clean coal.)

[Photo: AP]

Kabul residents say US soldiers murdered an imam who was sitting peacefully in his car with his three children. "After they shot him, they didn't stop, they just kept driving," said one witness. The US military confirms the killing. [WP]