Rudolph W. Giuliani has been broadcasting radio advertisements in Iowa and other states far from the city he once led stating that as mayor of New York, he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.”

The assertion, which Mr. Giuliani has repeated on the trail as he has promoted his fiscal conservatism, is somewhat misleading, independent fiscal monitors said. In fact, Mr. Giuliani left his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, with a bigger deficit than the one Mr. Giuliani had to deal with when he arrived in 1994. And that deficit would have been large even if the city had not been attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

“He inherited a gap, and he left a gap for his successor,” Ronnie Lowenstein, the director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that monitors the city budget, said of Mr. Giuliani. “The city was budgeting as though the good times were not going to end, but sooner or later they always do.”

I advise folks to take all political predictions with a grain of salt, and take mine with a whole silo, but I think you have to be crazy to think that the same religious far-right voters who saw a vote for George W. Bush as a vote for Jesus’s Emmisary On Earth Against The Gay Homosexual Liberal Terrorists will turn out for Rudy Giuliani both in the primary and general election. Rudy’s base is the pro-war wackos and the folks who like in Trickle-Down Fairyland. And while those people may constitute a part of the Republican’s mostly white, mostly male tent – they don’t look like America at all.

That said, I almost look forward to a candidate with as much baggage (corruption, anti-firefighter, racial insensitivity, etc.) being the GOP’s boy versus any of the top-tier Democrats.

Representatives of New York groups who advocate for abortion rights, gun control, and rights for immigrants, also said Giuliani’s actions on the presidential trail, presenting himself to a more conservative GOP electorate, bears little resemblance to the man they knew as the stand-up mayor of Gotham in the 1990s who was open to moderate and liberal arguments.

More than any candidate in the Republican presidential field, rival Mitt Romney has been tagged with the flip-flopper label. But Giuliani, with late shifts on civil unions and federal campaign finance laws, is a political makeover in progress.

Speaking to reporters in Cincinnati, Giuliani said: "I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. … I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them."

Michael Palladino, head of the Detectives Endowment Association, the union of NYPD detectives, told the Associated Press that the mayor’s record can’t compare to those who spent 12 months sifting through toxic debris for evidence and human remains.

"As a result of their hard work, many are sick and injured. The mayor, although he did a fine job with 9/11, I don’t think he rises to the level of being an equal with those men and women who were involved in the rescue, recovery and cleanup," Palladino said.

Asked about health insurance, Giuliani talked about television sets, saying the plummeting cost of a TV shows the power of the market.

We all know that vital medical care is just the same as catching "Heroes" each week. Then again, this is the "brilliant" mind that thought the criminally connected Bernard Kerik should oversee the entire country’s security from terrorism and other threats.

Oh, poor dear.

In a video that is by turns emotional, scathing and at times factually questionable, the nation’s largest union of firefighters is appealing to its members across the country not to support the Republican presidential candidacy of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

The video, issued by the International Association of Fire Fighters and titled “Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend,” strikes directly at what Mr. Giuliani’s campaign has presented as a central strength: his leadership of New York City after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which nearly 350 firefighters died.

Advocates for victims of abuse by Catholic clergy on Friday urged presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani to fire a priest who was suspended from the church and then hired by the ex-mayor’s security consulting business.

A spokeswoman for Giuliani said the firm had no plans to fire Monsignor Alan Placa.

Placa, a childhood friend of Giuliani’s, has defended himself for years over allegations in a 2003 Suffolk County grand jury report that detailed decades-old abuses by priests in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y.