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Daily Flog: Lennon killer gets laid regularly and Edwards doesn’t, Russia rips Georgia, China rips U.S., Con Ed rips us off

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Running down the press:

Daily News: ‘Lennon killer gets wife time in Attica’

Best lede of the day on the most fascinating sex story of the day:

Imagine: The man who killed John Lennon has been enjoying conjugal visits with his wife for at least 16 years.

The Daily News also has the most laughable sex story of the day (see below for a rundown of Mike Lupica).

Daily News: ‘7 train riders dodge bullet from gun toss’

The Daily News also has the scariest story of the day:

Subway riders raced for cover Sunday after a 20-year-old Brooklyn man tossed a loaded gun onto the 7 tracks, police said.

Times: ‘Isaac Hayes, 65, a Creator of ’70s Soul Style, Dies’

Always wait for the Times‘s usually stilted official obits. This one, however, is relatively loose, mentioning Hayes’s “lascivious bass-baritone” and his sojourn in South Park that was cut short by the singer’s Scientology obsession.

Kudos to the Times for running a photo of Chef with Stan and Kyle. But where’s Cartman?

Post: Page Six’s Sightings.

A riveting tidbit:

Alan Cumming exiting a dirty black Ford SUV hybrid on Avenue A and going in and out of Cafe Pick Me Up when he realized he’d left his wallet in the vehicle.

But where’s “Russians packing heat in Georgian hot spot”?

Times: ‘Russians Push Past Separatist Area to Assault Central Georgia’

The Russians bombed Tbilisi, so why not say “bomb Georgia capital”?

Don’t fool around with the U.S. press. Go straight to sites like Eurasianet and the Armenia-based Caucasian Knot, where you can read Georgian bloggers.

But peace is on the way: The Bush administration says it will seek a U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s actions. Here’s George W. Bush over the weekend:

This situation can be resolved peacefully. We’ve been in contact with leaders in both Georgia and Russia at all levels of government. Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity must be respected.

No doubt the world will take seriously this condemnation by Bush of unjustified invasions.

Post: ‘HOW DARE THAT BRAZEN FLOOZY!’

Thankfully, an unpretentious story about the Edwards scandal. Dan Mangan‘s lede:

Me-ow! John Edwards‘ nasty mistress cattily dissed his cancer-stricken wife to a friend – and later coldly blamed the ailing spouse for getting her fired from a videography job on her lover’s presidential campaign, a new report claims.

Daily News: ‘Touchy-feely Rielle trashes Elizabeth’

More sifting through Newsweek‘s breathlessly headlined weekend scoop of glitter litter (‘What Rielle Hunter Told Me’).

Daily News: ‘John Edwards is a liar and cheat who has mastered the sleazy art of hypocrisy’

Not just hypocrisy but sleazy hypocrisy — the worst kind, apparently.

This tsk-tskiest piece is sports columnist Mike Lupica’s hysterical rant about pols screwing other women.

Surprised that Lupica didn’t rag on Woody-Allen-like Grover Cleveland, who entered the White House as a bachelor and then entered the daughter of his good friend Oscar Folsom — a girl whose upbringing he had supervised — and wound up marrying her in the White House. It was the best sex-related event in the White House until Marilyn Monroe‘s sleepovers with JFK.

Cleveland even admitted fathering an illegitimate child — astonishingly, the brief bio of Cleveland on the site of his birthplace museum in Caldwell, New Jersey, freely admits it, saying in its entirety:

Birthplace to the only United States President to serve two non-consecutive terms. He was the 22nd and 24th President of the United States and the first to also admit that he had an illegitimate son. Grover Cleveland was born in Caldwell on March 18, 1837. This Historic Birthplace is a National Park and Museum located at 207 Bloomfield Avenue next to St. Aloysius Church.

Edwards, like fellow wick-dippers Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bill Clinton, has never been much of a hidebound moralist about other people’s sex lives, at least not compared with sex hypocrites such as David Vitter, Larry Craig, Roy Cohn, Billy James Hargis, Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, J. Edgar Hoover . . . too many images of pols’ genitals, so I’m stopping now.

Lupica excoriated Edwards for mentioning that his screwing around with Rielle happened during his wife’s cancer fight. But read the BBC’s Saturday story, which includes this from Elizabeth Edwards:

She described the affair as “a terrible mistake”, and said that coming to terms with it had been “a long and painful process”.

But she added that the healing process was “oddly made somewhat easier” when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2007.

Mrs Edwards said she was proud of her husband despite his shame, and she asked that her family’s privacy be respected.

Making fun of a pol who does this is appropriate behavior. But at least Edwards, unlike Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, and many other pols caught in sex scandals, didn’t make his wife sit beside him as he answered questions on TV.

Post: ‘Lesbo Lap Dance’

At last look, the Post‘s sixth most popular story — the kind men like.

Wall Street Journal: ‘Mortgage-Market Trouble
Reaches Big Credit Unions’

An unpopular story of the kind that nobody will like and which is extremely important to your present and future:

Five of the nation’s largest credit unions are reporting big paper losses on mortgage-related securities, a sign that housing-market distress is spreading even to the most risk-averse financial sectors.

Slate: ‘China Beats the United States’

No, not the Olympics, but the clever hed on Matthew Yeomans‘s roundup of business news. His lede is even better:

China’s productivity might have shrunk a bit, what with having to close down all those factories to reduce Olympic smog, but it’s a only a minor blip. As the Financial Times reports, China will overtake the U.S. next year as the world’s largest producer of manufactured goods. That’s four years earlier than expected, and it comes on the back of the severely weakening economy.

Daily News: ‘UPPER EAST $IDE IS TOPS FOR ALL POLS’

Ooh! Breaking news lede this morning by Daphne Retter:

Residents of the Upper East Side gave more political contributions than any ZIP code in the nation, according to calculations by a Washington watchdog group.

I wrote the same thing four years ago in “The Best Votes Money Can Buy,” in which I analyzed the top 50 ZIP codes and noted:

The parties are on the Upper East Side, and you’re not invited.

Far and away the biggest-spending single zip code in the United States for donations to political parties, candidates, and PACs is 10021, the area of Manhattan once commonly known as the Silk Stocking District, stretching from 61st to 81st streets, Central Park to the East River.

Give it to Retter, even though her real news doesn’t start until the fourth graf:

The top fund-raiser in the neighborhood is not former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, or even the presumptive nominee, Barack Obama.

Rather, it’s native son Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) who is convincing New York’s richest residents to get out their checkbooks.

Schumer heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), which collects and redistributes funds to candidates in his party who need the help.

Since taking the reins of the committee in 2005, Schumer has decimated any fund-raising records set before him.

Post: ‘SHOCKING POWER SCAM JOLT$ NY CONSUMERS’

Predictable hed on Bill Sanderson‘s important, though unsurprising, story:

Con Ed customers and electricity users across the state were scammed out of hundreds of millions of dollars – and New Yorkers were put at risk of a blackout – by an elaborate plan to sell power out of state, explosive documents filed with federal regulators charge.

And some of the estimated $240 million in consumer losses probably wound up in the pockets of companies that had no idea they were gaining from the scheme, experts say.

Get pissed about this, not about Edwards.