Patterson: "Kirsten Gillibrand is the best"

When an unknown corporate lawyer named Kirsten Gillibrand first ran for Congress three years ago, she commissioned a research study to identify her own personal and political vulnerabilities — lines of attack that might be pursued by wily Republican incumbent John Sweeney.

The result was a 12,700-word “self-oppo” report culled from online research and public databases. It uncovered no bombshells — but did outline a litany of possible pitfalls for a fast-rising rookie who had no idea, at the time, that she would soon be trading an obscure House back bench for the center stage of Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat.

“[A]ny attack on Gillibrand will likely focus on… her family and commitment to the region [and] her law firm work,” concluded the unnamed authors of the December 2005 document, obtained by Politico from a New York Democrat.

“Kirsten's family could cause her some political headaches. While her relatives have endured individual problems… the most likely attack she will face is that she is a product of Albany's political machine. The more voters learn about Kirsten’s family, the more they may not believe that she is a true political outsider, as she claims.”

The report flags a host of nagging, non-fatal problems. At the top of the list — Gillibrand’s work as a white-shoe lawyer representing corporations like Qwest Communications, which had been accused of financial misdeeds, followed by “headaches” stemming from her father’s lobbying work and his romantic involvement with a top aide to former Gov. George Pataki and also carpetbagger charges that might arise from her longtime residence in Manhattan.

There was even a passing mention of Gillibrand’s Montana hunting license, hinting at a Palin-esque penchant for sport shooting, and her $895,000 house in affluent Hudson, N.Y.

As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. Sweeney’s campaign imploded after the release of reports showing that state troopers had been summoned to his house to break up a domestic disturbance with his wife.

And Gillibrand cruised to victory last November, despite representing a GOP-tilting Albany-area district that could revert back to Republicans in her absence.

Nonetheless, the report takes on greater significance with its patron’s ascendance. It gives new fodder to future opponents like Long Island Rep. Carolyn McCarthy. And it provides a partial answer, at least, to the political question of the day: “Who is this Kirsten Gillibrand?”

The report paints a portrait of a 42-year-old Jaguar-driving political obsessive raised in the hothouse of state politics, educated at Dartmouth, energized by feminism and employed, from 2001 to 2006, by Boies, Schiller & Flexner, a powerful New York City corporate law firm with connections to the Clintons.

New old "Nazi News"

A German magazine published Thursday featured reprints of a Nazi newspaper, including stories about the 1933 Reichstag fire and a column by Joseph Goebbels. Bavaria, which owns the copyright to the texts, is threatening criminal and civil proceedings to stop further reproductions.

Reprinting original Nazi texts is always controversial in Germany -- the original text of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf," for example, cannot be printed here because its copyright is held by the state of Bavaria, which quickly gets litigious if anyone attempts to reproduce the work. Now a new magazine has run into trouble for reprinting Nazi newspapers.

The Bavarian Finance Ministry announced Thursday that it will file a complaint against the magazine Zeitungszeugen over its decision to reprint the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter in its second issue. The ministry also said that it would launch civil proceedings against the newspaper to stop it from further reprints.

The ministry owns the copyright to publications by the Nazi publishing house Eher-Verlag, which include National Socialist newspapers such as the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff as well as "Mein Kampf," and has refused to allow reproduction of the titles. It justifies its decision by arguing that straightforward reprints without critical remarks could be used by neo-Nazis for propaganda purposes. Germany's influential Central Council of Jews has also condemned the republication of the Nazi papers by Zeitungszeugen.

Zeitungszeugen -- the name consists of the German words for "newspaper" and "witnesses" -- is a new magazine published in Germany by the British historian and publisher Peter McGee which plans to reprint newspapers from the years 1933-1945 in chronological order as a historical resource. The newspaper pages are included as separate facsimiles in the magazine, which also features historical analysis and expert commentary on the material. As well as the controversial Nazi newspapers, the magazine, whose first issue went to press on Jan. 7, is reprinting newspapers from all parts of the political spectrum, including communist and social democratic papers.

Zeitungszeugen's editor-in-chief Sandra Paweronschitz told the Associated Press that the magazine would press on with its plans and wait to see how the courts decide. "We will certainly not back down now," she said.

The Bavarian Finance Ministry and Zeitungszeugen have been at loggerheads for some time now. The ministry tried to get the newspaper's first issue, which included material from Der Angriff, withdrawn from sale and demanded that McGee's publishing house Albertas Limited commit itself to not publishing any more of the Nazi texts. The publisher refused to oblige, however, and disputed whether the Bavarian Finance Ministry actually holds the rights to the newspapers in question.

Source: Der Spiegel