She was dehumanizing herself. We're supposed to say, "Oh, you pore li'l thang"?

&  illegal behavior are not synonymous. If  Spitzer had an affair, he'd still be  in office. Many married  people  have affairs  with the tacit approval of  spouses,  acknowledging that they are little  more than opportunities for  intimacy in aging marriages that lack intimacy but are still glued together otherwise.  

with the idea that hiring someone to have sex with you is inherently different from hiring them to perform another service like, say, a massage therapist or a psychiatrist (that is, I understand arguments about exploitation and so on; my point is that assuming that a prostitute has as much freedom to choose her jobs and clients as a massage therapist does, I don't see that it's inherently different—it's the exploitation that's wrong and not the prostitution).

Given that, as the post you linked to said, Spitzer is a public official, I think overall it is more wrong for him to have hired prostitutes than for him to have an affair. However, if he had hired prostitutes legally in Nevada, I would think it was more wrong for him to have an affair, and if it were a private citizen (even one I was married to!) I would say having an extended, emotionally-involved affair is worse than hiring a prostitute occasionally.

Paul saw no difference between marriage and sex with a prostitute (and said it like it was general knowledge in the church). He used the exact same language for both; and the exact language Christ used as well:

Matthew 19:3 Then some Pharisees came to him in order to test him. They asked, "Is it lawful to divorce a wife for any cause?" 4 He answered, "Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."

1 Corinthians 6:15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 Or do you not know that anyone who is united with a prostitute is one body with her? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh." 17 But the one united with the Lord is one spirit with him. 18 Flee sexual immorality! "Every sin a person commits is outside of the body" – but the immoral person sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?

We can make secular distinctions between what is legal and illegal by secular law. However (and not having researched Spitzer's theological beliefs), from Paul's perspective having sex with a prostitute is the same as marrying her - and is as much adultery whether it an "emotional" or financial relationship.

Of course, I think that is a revelation that is directed at Christians, and not generally - and I do not know whether it applies to Spitzer at all.  

that he's a sex addict and should go to SA or SLAA? Maybe he and Bill Clinton can go together.

Beyond stupid and immoral, there's compulsion. When an bright person does something this dumb and self-destructive (not to mention wife-destructive), it's possible that there's a factor not accounted for.

Not that it isn't interesting, but Spitzer is done.

I am a tad unclear about all manners of prostitution.  Certainly some are exploitive and violent and should reasonably be opposed.

However, I have only known of one person who consorted with such women openly and on a regular basis.  He happened to be a VietNam vet who had the misfortune of having about half of his face shot off.  The wound was so bad that the medics packed it off with a pressure dressing and waited three days expecting him to die of ceberal hemorrage.  When, after three days, he did not expire, they began the restorative surgery.  The results of field hospital restorative surgery is not a thing of beauty, but it did fill in the gaps.

At any rate, having lost an eye, an ear, a fair amount of function in what remained, the VA was sending him a check of about $2000 a month for the rest of his life.  He managed after a good bit of rehab to land a decent job, where we met.

The long and short of it was that he took his $2000 every month down to a local adult nightclub and spent it quite liberally, and often enough ended up with some companionship.  Even looking back on it now, I find it as sad as I did then, but not objectionably so.

The other topic is Ferraro.  

When playing golf, as I occasionally do, I note that most men, when they hit a bad shot will blame everything but the obvious.  They will blame the wind, the clubs, the condition of the golf course, noises, distractions, virtually anything but the idiot swinging the club.

The Clinton campaign seems to have hit this mark.  Barack is winning because caucuses are undemocratic, because his supporters are stupid, confused, or delusional, because he promises anything, and now because he is black.

The actual answer goes more like this.  Any organization that can take a candidate with 99% name recognition and 150+ million dollars to make their case and still manage to only come in second, is plainly incompetent.

There is a corrollary:  Any campaign that can take on a candidate with 99% name recognition, all the top drawer talent money can buy, and 150+ million dollars to spend, and cause it to come in second place by simply doing an end run to Kansas, Idaho and other less traveled destinations, is plainly brilliant.

Ms. Ferraro:

Barack is not there because he is black, he is there because he, by himself, is simply smarter than the entire "brain trust" Hillary has recruited to run her campaign.  Worse yet, he hired even smarter help.

From where Hillary started the year, there is no other tenable explanation.