President Obama’s budget guru has a secret love child — with the woman he jilted before hooking up with his hot new fiance, The Post has learned.
White House budget director Peter Orszag’s ex, shipping heiress Claire Milonas, gave birth to little Tatiana Zoe in New York Nov. 17. That was just six weeks before Orzsag and ABC news babe Bianna Golodryga gleefully announced their engagement on national TV and in the press. . . .
‘‘Claire told Peter she was pregnant, and he said he’d marry her — and then something went wrong,’’ a source close to the situation told The Post.
[After the site was announced at the Heritage Foundation in May] Carlson and his partner Neil Patel — a former aide to Dick Cheney — raised money, scouted out staff (”we didn’t ask about ideology,” said Carlson) and held poker games at their original, grimier office in Washington’s Dupont Circle. A June launch date was pushed into autumn, and then pushed back again. The reason, explained Patel, was that “our aspirations kept growing.”
“The size of the staff is much bigger than we started with,” Patel said. “We were very lucky to get the amount of money we did based, basically, on a PowerPoint.”
Among the more interesting quotes in the story:
Conor Friedersdorf, a freelance journalist who worked for the short-lived site Culture11, contrasted Carlson’s focus on journalism with the much-praised, quick-hitting tactics of Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism.
“I hope that The Daily Caller aspires to produce writing that is as well written and professionally edited as the stuff that the talented Tucker Carlson writes for Esquire,” said Friedersdorf. “The alternative — the Andrew Breitbart model — is to publish poorly reasoned, atrociously edited screeds on the cheap, on the assumption that ideologically friendly readers will keep clicking anyway.”
It so happens I read Friedersdorf’s quote this morning in a room at the Crown Plaza in Redondo Beach with Mike Flynn, editor of Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com. “That dude’s always slagging Breitbart,” Flynn said. “What’s his problem?”
Last month, I took a vow to stop slagging the Daily Caller. With $3 million in start-up capital, they’ll be around at least through the November elections and it would be wrong for Carlson’s operation to suffer from red-on-red fire from the outset. But as I said in May, it had better not suck.
UPDATE: Also here at the Crowne Plaza is the publisher of theQuincy (Ill.) News., a year-old online start-up. The publisher (who prefers to keep his name offline) raised an eyebrow at Weigel’s report that Daily Caller now has a staff of 21: “Lean and mean is the way to go in the New Media environment.”
They came together on a hot afternoon in Los Angeles, howling and clawing at each other like wild beasts in heat.
Under a brown California sky, the fierceness of their struggle brought tears to the eyes of 90,000 God-fearing fans.
They were 22 men who were somehow more than men.
They were giants, idols, titans.
Behemoths . . .
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72
Ah, but that was another era, before the BCS, before Rose Bowl media assistant Stephanie Montano was required — by the protocol of the collegiate football oligarchs — to look a correspondent of The American Spectator square in the eye and say, “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”
No press credentials, no exceptions, and although many others had been denied in the same fashion, none of those others were genuinely gonzo. They hadn’t Paid Their Dues.
PASADENA, Calif. — College football expert Stacey Mickles yesterday offered a bold prediction for tonight’s BCS finale — a repeat of top-ranked Alabama’s 32-13 victory in the Southeastern Conference title game, which brought Florida QB Tim Tebow to tears.
“If we can make Tebow cry, we can make anybody cry,” said Mickles, a Crimson Tide fan and Army sergeant currently stationed at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, who was in town for the game with her boyfriend and fellow soldier Richard McAlpin.
Some may doubt Sgt. Mickle’s expertise, but none of the doubters were wearing crimson and white yesterday outside the stadium in Pasadena where ‘Bama hasn’t played in January since 1946. . . . .
Read the whole thing. Here’s the video of my interview with Mickles and McAlpin:
The universal language of human brotherhood: “ROLL TIDE!”
Little Miss Attila points to Real Clear Politics where, under the skilled hand of Robert Gibbs, Operation Assclown staggers forward, at a medium pace*.
Historians will study the history of journalism and engage in thumb wrestling matches about when it devolved into such a stream of effluent that Red Eye can feature canned robotic cartoons and get a laugh. That HotAir clip ought not to be funny in the slightest, and, yet…Continue reading May Fortune Smile On Andrew Breitbart →
