Chris Smith: Are Voters Ready for Civil Rights Redux?Senator Barack Obama gave a brave, powerful, important speech yesterday in Philadelphia, but he was forced to deliver it by the greatest crisis of his candidacy: the furor created by the incendiary remarks of his former Chicago pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
party lines
Fox Business Network: The Victory PartyLast night’s launch party for Fox Business Network had so many media and business moguls, you couldn’t throw a canapé without mussing up the rug of some very important dude. Seriously, our throats were burning from inhaling the perfume of wealth and success. In one corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur, Liz Smith chatted with Mel Brooks and Harvey Weinstein. (Apparently, Harvey loves the channel. “I love Roger Ailes,” he said, though he would not tell us what he liked the best or whether he ate Money for Breakfast.) In another corner, Oscar and Annette de la Renta greeted Regis and Joy Philbin. And kingly in the middle of it all, like a pair of samurai and their husbands, were Rupert Murdoch, Les Moonves, Julie Chen, and Rupert’s wife, Wendi Deng. “Wendi, we love your bracelets!” we cried in unison, suddenly morphing into Blair’s sidekicks in Gossip Girl. “They were only twenty dollars,” she exclaimed. Wow, we thought. Wendi is so down-to-earth! “But this wasn’t,” she laugh-cackled, flashing us her index finger, which was adorned with what looked to be the actual Hope Diamond.
developing
Spitzer, Already Bored of Taking on Albany, to Take on Moses, Too?
The Spitzer administration seems poised to undo a former public official’s legacy in the South Bronx — and this time we mean Robert Moses, not George Pataki. Community groups in the neighborhood have been trying since 1999 to raze Moses’s 1.25-mile, never-completed Sheridan Expressway and build a 28-acre greenway underneath. The state Department of Transportation committed a decade ago to overhauling parts of the Sheridan, but bureaucrats had dawdled while seeking easy plans for big contractors (and, as goes without saying, ignoring locals’ thirst for parkland). Now, says Sustainable South Bronx director Majora Carter, two of the four scenarios the state will consider this year include the local bikeway plan. That would replace the Tyrolean folly in the top picture with the boulevard in the lower shot. The community-proposed path would end at a park on a former cement plant usable for kayak launches. And it would mesh with Mayor Mike’s notion of making the mainland borough a middle-class beachhead. Imagine: You might pedal to Hunts Point’s wholesalers with your grocery basket and shopping list. What would Moses think? —Alec Appelbaum
