Posted on 05/13/2003 3:10:51 AM PDT by BigWaveBetty
It's fun and challenging to grow new or exotic plants, but it's also nice to have some solid favorites to fall back on, too.
More at the link. Happy digging!
LOL,LOL! OK, then I won't. You're on a role today. Now about that out fit at the Goodwill? OMG! What a hoot.
...And it ain't going anywhere.
JFK's intern tells all:
John F. Kennedy's intern admitted to the Daily News yesterday: "I am the Mimi." Marion (Mimi) Fahnestock, now 60, called it a huge weight off her shoulders to finally reveal her affair with the dashing young President four decades ago.
"The gift for me is that this allowed me to tell my two married daughters a secret that I've been holding for 41 years," she said. "It's a huge relief."
"It's all true," said Fahnestock, sitting in a pew in Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where she works as an administrator. Referring to stories in The News this week detailing the affair, she said: "I was 19 years old. It was 1962, '63, and it's the truth."
Fahnestock, who was identified only as Mimi in long-sealed White House documents, didn't want to discuss the assassinated President. "I think the world knows what he was like," said Fahnestock, a tall, slim woman with short blond hair. She declined to be photographed.
Long before Bill and Monica hit the headlines, Kennedy's affairs were common knowledge in the White House, but reporters kept quiet about what was considered the President's private life. The long-forgotten affair was disclosed in a sealed portion of a 1964 interview with Barbara Gamarekian, a former White House press aide. Gamarekian recently agreed to reveal the tale to historian Robert Dallek, who was researching his new Kennedy biography, "An Unfinished Life."
Although he never tracked down Mimi, Dallek concluded that Kennedy - whose roving eye was legendary - had a fling with the intern. "Apparently, her only skill was to provide sexual release for JFK on those trips and maybe in the White House," Dallek said.
The then-Mimi Beardsley was a senior at Miss Porter's School in Connecticut when she came to the White House in 1961, months after Kennedy became the youngest elected President in history. The editor of her school paper, Mimi was invited to Washington to interview Jacqueline Kennedy, who had graduated from the exclusive girls' boarding school. She never met the First Lady but quickly captured the attention of the world's most powerful man. A year later, Mimi was awarded a prestigious internship in the White House, though she couldn't even type.
"I was 19 years old, a very young, very naive, very innocent young girl," said Fahnestock, who lives on Manhattan's upper East Side.
The striking teenager was invited to White House pool parties with a handful of other young women and flown on Air Force jets to secret liaisons with Kennedy at resorts and summit meetings, Gamarekian said. Once, presidential aides caught her hiding on the floor of a limousine in JFK's entourage in the Bahamas moments after the President left. Fahnestock declined to discuss her time in the White House but said in measured tones, "All of these things are true. Remember, I was 19 years old. It was my first job."
Mimi worked two summers at the White House and stayed into the fall of 1963 before returning to college, just a few weeks before Kennedy was gunned down Nov. 22. The next year, she married. She had two daughters and later divorced. Through it all, she did everything she could to keep her White House affair under wraps.
She declined to say whether she had told her former husband, the late Anthony Fahnestock. "I kept it a secret," she said simply. "I didn't have a story to tell."
Fahnestock, a grandmother of four, said she decided to end her long silence after JFK's affair with the intern made news this week. "It's a gift that my daughters know this is a piece of my history," she said. "They are totally supportive of me."
Now that her secret is out, Fahnestock said, she wants to return to a private life. "I have a wonderful job ... a close family, a lot of friends," she said. "I have a life to live." Daily News
WASHINGTON -- Bill Clinton said last night that the Democrats seeking the White House have a chance to win in 2004 if they quit bickering and develop a clear philosophy with a national security element.
''I think on balance they're doing pretty well,'' the former president said in an interview. ''They need to keep making their philosophy clear.'' Clinton made the comments after a private session with the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist Democratic think tank that helped propel him to the White House.
The 2004 Democratic candidates will have to incorporate strong positions on national security as they develop a clear overall philosophy spelling out why they are running for president, Clinton said. Democrats should not cede the national security issue to Republicans, he said, whether on defense strategy, weapons systems, or foreign policy.
But he said it was important for Democrats to stop fighting among themselves and refocus their criticism on their eventual foes -- President Bush and the Republicans. Boston Globe (excerpted)
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NY Times gives Sid Vicious Blumenthal's book a skeptical read:
When her book "It Takes a Village" was published in 1996, Hillary Rodham Clinton was assailed for not mentioning the ghostwriter who had been paid $120,000 to help. Her aide and confidant Sidney Blumenthal is now ready to set the record straight on this Clinton contretemps and hundreds of others. His most often repeated assertion, throughout an 800-plus-page memoir and political treatise, is this: "The charge was, of course, completely false."
Writing throughout "The Clinton Wars" with the patience of a schoolteacher aiding the benighted, Mr. Blumenthal explains that Mrs. Clinton has proof that she wrote the book herself. But why no mention of a hired collaborator? "Because, she decided, no matter how endless the list, some of the many, many people who had helped her were bound to feel that they had been left off."
Not for nothing does Mr. Blumenthal, a former White House senior adviser, identify himself as the Clinton administration's "good soldier" and "first knight." If this is not sufficient proof of Mr. Blumenthal's devotion, the book's chapters have titles like "Hillary Under Siege," "The Reign of Witches" and "The Stolen Succession."
Beyond his intention to set the record straight on controversies that plagued the Clinton presidency, Mr. Blumenthal has a more personal agenda. Barely mentioning others close to the Clintons, and illustrating this memoir with smiling, convivial photographs of himself in their company (though much of the book is about others, like the less lovable Kenneth W. Starr), Mr. Blumenthal sends a clear message to his administration colleagues: Mom liked me best.
It's easy to see why. His loyalty extends to describing the administration's Republican enemies as "velociraptors in bow ties" and to explaining that President Bill Clinton "reflected upon the nature of sex and memory" when he gave vague answers to graphic grand jury questions about Monica S. Lewinsky. In discussing the first whiff of scandal to affect this presidency — and, Mr. Blumenthal says, to pave the way for widespread, snowballing hysteria from the press — he recounts a conversation with the first lady. "She spoke frankly," he writes, "explaining Whitewater's emptiness."
Such acrobatic feats of protectiveness — and they are endless here — take their toll. The most strained parts of this overlong but highly readable tome are the sections that strive for supercilious calm rather than honest anger. rest of Janet Maslin article
Look at the picture of the Clinton libary sign. Is that a single wide next to the bridge?
I won't be here today. My next door neighbor and her hubby paid $5000 bucks to attend a Bush fund rasier this month. She's asked me to go with her to look for a dress. The affair is black tie, and she's only lived here about 2 months. So we're off looking for some marrrr-vu-lus for her to wear. Wish us luck.
But the legacy he is most intent on lauding is of course the Clintons'. This is a book in which "the Democrats roared" while "the Republicans silently glowered." It's one in which the first lady's running for the Senate from New York "could not but flatter New Yorkers' self-conception." It's one that compares President George W. Bush to Benjamin Harrison and Rutherford B. Hayes, meanwhile asserting that "just as the presidents of the late 20th century operated in the shadow of F.D.R., those of the first part of the 21st century will stand in the shadow of Clinton."
Speaking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "The Clinton Wars" begins with a visit by President Clinton's entourage to the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, N.Y. While Mr. Clinton looks at his predecessor's desk, Mr. Blumenthal sounds a wistful note. Those were the days when the press was too respectful to mention the president's wheelchair.
Mazel tov to 59-year-old Fox News star Geraldo Rivera -- who will wed his 28-year-old girlfriend, television producer Erica Levy, at New York's historic Central Synagogue on Aug. 10, The Post's Christine Haughney reports.
"You can't be my age and getting married and not be an optimist," Rivera, the son of a Jewish mother and Puerto Rican father, told us yesterday. He noted that he had been to the altar four times previously and had four children to show for it.
"I don't know, maybe there will be one more with Erica," he said. He added that "hundreds of people" -- including Bill and Hillary Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a top Palestinian official, the foreign minister of Afghanistan and various U.S. military commanders from Iraq -- have been invited to the Reform Jewish ceremony and the reception at the Four Seasons restaurant.
"I was not only bar mitzvahed; I was confirmed. But this is actually my first 'church' wedding, as opposed to some hippie thing in a back yard," Rivera said. "I'm making a conscious decision to take this whole Judaism thing seriously. I think the Jews need me right now." WashPost
O, Canada! Is there a Bubba/Belinda brouhaha in Toronto?
Canadian society is all atwitter with rumors former President Bill Clinton may be involved in more than a friendship with wealthy socialite Belinda Stronach, 37. The press is going ape over word Stronach is divorcing Johann Olav Koss, her Olympian speed-skating Norwegian hubby of three years.
The chat: Stronach, whose father runs Magna International, has played golf with Bubba, dined with Bubba and reportedly looks like a young Hillary.
The tittle tattle began last September when the two "B's" both attended a fete at Toronto's Four Seasons Hotel and got people wondering if they were an item. The flip side: The Stronaches have reportedly been in talks with Clinton about his library and foundation . . . but more than that, who knows? Chicago Sun-Times
Huh?
Now she has?
Some gift, huh.
Well, it's the hip thing to be these days.
So do we start calling him Julius Rivinsky?
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