Hanky-panky, &c

The pious guv of New York gets caught fooling around and is terminally humiliated. What possesses these people to do stupid crap like that? Jeff Toobin was on one of the newsy channels last night, and said he was in law school with Spitzer and had always found him a straightest arrow. Interesting thing is that Spitzer is probably subject to a federal charge on a violation of the Mann Act, transporting a woman across a state line for immoral purposes. It was originally intended to scotch what was coyly called the white-slave trade, or, more simply put, prostitution. There's a lot of quasi-slave commerce in prostitutes in immigrant circles. Guess tricking is another one of those jobs that Americans won't do.
A long time ago, in a little town in northeast Oklahoma, I sorta knew a jolly undertaker, a merry mortician, raffish old guy who wore a straw skimmer without irony or a political label on it. Only time in my life I've seen that. Word around town was that he'd slipped up and taken some old gal across the state line to Fort Smith, Ark., for a bit of slap and tickle, and she'd used that fact to shake him down for a lot of money, as he had left himself liable to Mann Act charges. It could be true; it was told to me as true.