Clout: Truth makes Taubenberger's blood Boyle

AS

MARK TWAIN

once observed, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

The latest application is in Northeast Philadelphia, where state Rep. John Perzel and House candidate Matt Taubenberger have been running misleading newspaper ads, accusing Taubenberger's opponent, Brendan Boyle, of failing to pay real-estate taxes on a rental property owned by his wife.

The controversy is based entirely on a city bookkeeping error, according to an analysis by the city Revenue Commissioner Keith J. Richardson.

When the Boyles bought the property last year, their settlement included $778 to cover the 2007 real-estate taxes. The city got the money, but mistakenly credited it to the property's water and sewer account instead of real-estate taxes.

That led to an unpaid balance that Taubenberger discovered this year on a Web site set up by the Board of Revision of Taxes. The site itself cautions that its information may be inaccurate.

When the issue arose, Boyle insisted that all his taxes had been paid. While struggling to get an explanation from the city, he gave the city another check to cover the unpaid bills, hoping to defuse the issue.

But Taubenberger launched a series of full-page newspaper ads in the Inquirer and the Daily News describing Boyle as a "tax deadbeat." The ads were put together by Perzel's longtime consultant, Marty O'Rourke, and paid for by Perzel's political-action committee.

Two days ago, the city finally took responsibility.

"It appears the real-estate payment from the title company last year was applied to water-sewer in error by the department," Richardson told the Boyles in a letter. "The problem has been resolved with regards to your real estate taxes and the file has been cleared."

But Taubenberger refuses to apologize. "This is all highly questionable and suspect," he said. "Commissioner Richardson's letter is not worth the paper it's written on."

Halloween politics: Boo!

Ooooooo, it's scary! Very, very scary!

And not just because today is Halloween.

Last week, 75,000 Jewish voters in Pennsylvania got an e-mail that read, "in the 5,769 years of our people, there has never been a more important time for us to take pro-active measures in order to stop a second Holocaust."

And who might be the agent of this second Holocaust? Barack Obama.

The e-mail was signed by former state Supreme Court Justice Sandra Schultz Newman, a member of Republican presidential candidate John McCain's task force monitoring Election Day voting; real-estate developer Mitchell L. Morgan, who has raised money for McCain, and steel-industry executive I. Michael Coslov.

Newman wound up apologizing for the e-mail, saying that she hadn't read it closely before it went out. (Too busy fighting ACORN's threat to the fabric of democracy!)

The McCain campaign disavowed the e-mail, the consultant who wrote it was fired and Abraham H. Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League's national director, condemned it as "an odious, false and repugnant analogy."

Now, over the past two days, two slick pamphlets have arrived in the mail of local Jewish voters from the National Woman's Committee of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

"I thought the first one was bad, but the second one was even more incendiary," said Ellen Levinson, who lives near Graduate Hospital.

The mailer shows Obama with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Zbigniew Brzezinski, saying that he "surrounds himself with advisers who are hostile to Israel and American Jews."

The Democrats aren't innocent of this nonsense, either, as advocates raise fears of the return to the days of "back-alley abortions" if McCain gets to name justices to the Supreme Court.

Of course the scariest Halloween ad of all time came the Friday before the 2004 election, when Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape.

The tape swung the media spotlight onto the issue of terrorism, President Bush's strength. Democrat John Kerry blames it for his narrow loss four days later. And the Bush campaign still hasn't listed bin-Laden as an in-kind contributor.

Another candidate for D.A.

Brian Grady, 40, a former assistant district attorney, born in Olney and living in Roxborough, is joining next year's crowded race for D.A., hoping to succeed retiring Lynne Abraham.

"This is the reason I went to law school," says Grady, a graduate of La Salle and of Notre Dame law school. He says that the different factions in the criminal-justice system - the police, the D.A.'s office and the courts - have to improve their relationships to deal effectively with problems like witness intimidation.

Grady was one of the prosecutors involved in the Center City jogger case in 1996, but he's better-known for a 1997 incident in which he punched out a defense attorney

inside a judge's chambers.

Grady says that the other guy hit him first, but not as hard. It cost him $2,500 and a six-month suspension from practicing law.

He admits that he made a mistake. "You can't go around punching people out," Grady told Clout. But, he promised, "it's the same passion you'll see out of me as D.A."

Sarah's Bedtime Prayer

A poker-playing lady lawyer sent Clout the following creation:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray that god will make me veep

And let me keep these fancy clothes

Not send me back to Eskimos

I don't know why the gotcha press

Is mocking me; I must confess

I hate them and their snooty looks

Their smirking 'cause I don't read books

Don't they know I'm a beauty queen

Who can kill a moose and strip him clean?

That I was mayor of Wasilla

(A town I sure have had my fill of)

Who cares if I can't cite a case?

I've got a photogenic face

Bush Doctrine Shmush Doctrine, here's what I think:

It's more important to look good in pink

A bridge to nowhere, books to be burned,

Ex-in-law fired, diplomas unearned?

None of that matters, that's what I say

(And that's me talking, not Tina Fey)

I'll come to town, first dude in tow

Ready and eager to overturn Roe

Winkin' and sayin' "you betcha" and thinkin:

I could someday hold the same job as Lincoln!

So here's my prayer: Lord, please let me win

Make the polls wrong and I'll never sin

Put me in office and I'll be euphoric

(Even more so if you smite Katie Couric.) *

Daily News reporters Bob Warner, Dave Davies and Gar Joseph contributed to this report.