​If and when the Times breaks its David Paterson story, some of the news is expected to focus on the governor's exploitation of his campaign kitty for personal use. In that spirit, let's consider the opposite: the use of a campaign committee to advance the public interest.

And guess what? It involves the governor's nemesis, Andrew Cuomo.

Is he toast or not? The suspense is killing us!

​All the news unfit to print out of Albany today is about David Paterson, supposedly the target of a Timesbomb about to drop. One wag up there told me that if there was a Pulitzer for buzz, the Times has already won it -- and we're only a month into the year.

The scuttlebutt suggests a very un-Timesian probe of Paterson's pulsating personal life.

Bill de Blasio's job as public advocate: something Mayor Bloomberg would love to eradicate

​One surprise in Mike Bloomberg's State of the City speech this week was his failure to say anything about the long-promised charter revision commission, which is expected, among other things, to act on one of his pet peeves and "get rid of the Public Advocate," as he put it last year to the Staten Island Advance.

Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg are very different mayors in many respects, but one target of contempt that they've long shared is this office. They've waged 16 years of war on it, trying to get voters to strip it of its limited powers in charter referendums even as they combined to reduce its budget to a puny million and a half. Bloomberg calls it "a total waste of everybody's money," though it operates on half of what he paid in bonuses to his campaign staff. Maybe it's the name that makes Republicans rant, or at least those elected on its ballot line.

​On the heels of Scott Brown's big win, Larry Kudlow, the CNBC rudderless anchor, is apparently considering a senate run against New York's Chuck Schumer, pushed by GOP and Tea Party allies and admirers.

It would make Schumer the only incumbent known to be facing two reformed cokeheads in the same year, since Randy Credico, a longtime leader in the fight against the Rockefeller drug laws, is already running in the Democratic primary. Credico's drug-laced trajectory as a comic -- from the Johnny Carson show to Rocky Sullivan's bar -- has already been turned into the film Sixty Spins Around the Sun. Credico, a lefty whose media friends range from Albany's Post powerhouse Fred Dicker to me, is challenging Schumer as a waterboy for Wall Street, while Kudlow wants to carry wine for them.

​When I got up this morning, I wanted to know what Billy Bulger thought.

After all, he ran Massachusetts politics for 35 years as the president of the same state senate that Scott Brown joined in 2004. Indeed, one of Brown's few state senate achievements was his role in drafting a 2009 pension reform bill that made it impossible for state employees to define a state $29,000 housing allowance as compensation, like Bulger did, inflating his $179,000-a-year pension to $196,000.

It doesn't hurt that Billy, now 75, has assumed legendary proportions on the screen. He's brother to James "Whitey" Bulger, top man on the FBI's most wanted list, a fugitive since 1995 after years of running the Irish mafia of Boston.

Showtime's "Brotherhood" and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning "The Departed" have made Whitey, and thereby Billy, larger in life than Fenway. Few in the state will forget the day Whitey showed up, before he became a fugitive but while he was godfathering the mob, with a $14 million winning lottery ticket and the state lottery director, unnerved by both brotherhoods no doubt, said that the only thing worse would have been "if my mother had won."

​The Daily News and the Post have rushed to the defense of Fire Department exams that have given us the whitest rank and file of any big-city department in the country, with 303 black firefighters out of 8,998, a percentage that's actually lower than the last time a federal judge ruled the same hiring practices discriminatory, way back in 1973.

The tabloids were responding to the latest threat to apartheid at the FDNY, namely last week's extraordinary decision by U.S. District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis found that that the city "intentionally" discriminates against blacks, and charged it with "34 years of intransigence and deliberate indifference, bookended by identical judicial declarations."

The Post ranted about Garaufis' "arrogance," calling his "self-righteous and agenda-driven decision" a "scandal," mistaking the ruling for the sinkhole it seeks to clean up.

Much ado about Hiram's misdemeanor

​They don't teach this in journalism school. But yesterday, I discovered the perfect lede (yes, that's how journalists spell the leading paragraphs of our work). It was in a press release emanating from that font of wisdom, the New York State Senate. Beleagured by scandal and satire, the august body finally got something right.

State Senator Eric Schneiderman, who is running for attorney general if the incumbent Andrew Cuomo runs for governor, issued the release that managed to get his name into the eighth word of the lede, jumbling it incomprehensibly but managing to highlight Schneiderman even before it mentioned the target of the nine-member select committee Schneiderman chaired, Hiram Monserrate. Here is the lede that may well become a classic, analyzed wherever students pay $40,000-a-year to study the craft of grabbing a reader by the throat:

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See UPDATE after the jump

"Harold Ford is a great candidate who knows how to handle himself," Chuck Schumer said in 2005. "We're very hopeful about his candidacy." Maybe a bit less hopeful today.

The fine line between irony and hypocrisy is crossed every day in politics. But in 2005 and 2006, the heavy artillery that our own Senator Schumer is now firing at Harold Ford was trained on Rosalind Kurita, a three-term Democratic state senator from Tennessee then running against Ford. Schumer was the chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee at the time and, though it was his job to try to get Democrats elected in general elections, he decided that DSCC had to throw its resources and power into primaries, handpicking candidates he thought could win in November. So, as Kurita put it, DSCC wouldn't even list her name on its website as a candidate for the seat.

Kurita was running to Ford's left, accusing him of sounding like a Republican half the time, declaring that with him, "you get a little bit of this and a little bit of that," not a bad attack ad now for Kirsten Gillibrand, except that it might also be her motto.

Kirsten's protector is ever vigilant

​Thank God for the ballot police.

But for them, five or six elected Democrats would've already committed the crime of running against Kirsten Gillibrand.

Now we have the man Harry Reid obviously mistook for Barack Obama, Harold Ford Jr., illegally panhandling at Steve Rattner's 5th Avenue apartment, shaking down big donors in a brazen attempt to challenge our unelected senator, handpicked by our unelected governor. Zero tolerance for broken window violators!

Thank God, most of all, for NY Ballot Police Commissioner Charles Schumer. The senator who won a four-way primary in 1998 left the Riverside funeral of Percy Sutton last Wednesday and spent the afternoon threatening Ford if he dared to cross state lines to commit what even Robert Gibbs seemed to think might be a federal felony. Not even the hours of salutes to Sutton for empowering black leadership -- though Schumer is said to have slipped out of the memorial very early -- slowed our top cop's pursuit of miscreants.

​Bill deBlasio may have set a record with his first-day-on-the-job thumping by the New York Post last week. Under the headline "ACORN's City Hall branch," a Post editorial, posted at 1:40 on the morning of deBlasio's second day as public advocate, blasted his announcement that he was forming a new Community Organizing and Constituent Services Department in his office.

The Post mocked deBlasio's "community partners" as "the same lefty grabbers who've been picking the city dry in the first place," and assured us that the liberal Democrat would not be organizing citizens for "tax relief," its approved form of tea party protest. What was odd was that the Post never mentioned an aspect of the deBlasio innovation that actually is troubling, assuming that using the charter-created post of Public Advocate to organize advocacy dumbfounds few New Yorkers other than those charged with manufacturing right wing umbrage at the Post.