If it weren't for pain I wouldn't know I'm alive.

Anderson Cooper and his mother are promoting a book about themselves that they wrote together. The book is called The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love and Loss. There is a companion HBO documentary.  This video pushes my buttons, like five all at once but I flicked off my button control panel and ignored my impulse to offer Charlie Rose a discount on industrial kneepads and resisted my impulse to tell the This Morning interviewer to give back my stained glass window because those stem from my own shortcomings and none of those impulses are helpful. I stuck it out and I must say I have a newfound respect. Anderson has a really cool mum. And so did I. This video makes me appreciate my mum even more. All my friends knew my mum is the best.

Comments to this video on YouTube are unkind. I like both these two people more by seeing it.

More Clinton appearance of conflict of interest

"CNN Debate Moderator Was Member of Clinton Global Initiative"

The Clinton Foundation later told Mediaite that none of these journalists were asked to pay the $20,000 membership fee required of  members. However, it's safe to say that access to big name journalists was a key selling point for paying Clinton Global Initiative members. In a nutshell, Anderson Cooper helped Hillary Clinton raise money, and now he's presented as an impartial moderator for tonight's debate.

Then there is this story at the Washington Post.... "While at State, Clinton chief of staff held job negotiating with Abu Dhabi"

During her first four months at the State Department, [Cheryl] Mills also held another high-profile job: She worked part time at New York University, negotiating with officials in Abu Dhabi to build a campus in that Persian Gulf city.

At the State Department, she was unpaid in those first months, officially designated as a temporary expert-consultant — a status that allowed her to continue to collect outside income while serving as chief of staff...

Mills reported her NYU income on public federal disclosure forms. She did not reference the Abu Dhabi element of her role on the forms, which ask only that employees identify the sources and amounts of their outside income....

Under ethics laws, employees are prohibited from participating in matters that would have a direct and predictable effect on themselves or an outside employer.

Mills said she didn’t “recall any issues” at the State Department that would have required her to consider recusing herself and said she would have consulted with the ethics office if one had come up....

In recent years, more than 100 State Department employees annually have typically been granted a designation that allows them to hold outside employment, including scientists, foreign affairs officers and Abedin, a senior adviser. But experts said that a dual employment arrangement is rare at the chief-of-staff level and that the nature of Mills’s non­governmental work made her situation even more atypical.

“This is exceedingly unusual, perhaps exceptional in the history of modern federal bureaucratic leadership. I’ve never seen it before,” said Paul C. Light, an NYU professor who has studied government employment in depth...

After Clinton spoke at an NYU graduation ceremony in New York in May 2009, a top university official e-mailed Mills to thank her for her “help and guidance” in getting Clinton to the event, according to correspondence recently released by the State Department.

In 2011, Mills forwarded to Clinton an e-mail she had received from a university official describing a new NYU campus planned for Shanghai.

Serious Visage aerosol tart face

Nick Stahl gets the Anderson Cooper "darkened furrowed brow of concern" treatment. No more needles and threads and tying knots to pull a furrowed brow. Now you too can add instant gravitas to your hopelessly naïve face with Serious Visage, the new instant darkened furrowed brow of concern aerosol application. 

[I have no idea who Nick Stahl is. I searched for "plain face male,' and that is all.]

Anderson Cooper: "I don't believe in inheriting money"

"So he's far from miffed that his famous heiress mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, has told him he doesn't stand to inherit her fortune. In fact, he sounds relieved."

"My mom's made clear to me that there's no trust fund," Anderson Cooper, 46, told Howard Stern on his radio show Monday. "There's none of that."

"Who has inherited a lot of money that has gone on to do things in their own life? From the time I was growing up, if I felt that there was some pot of gold waiting for me, I don't know that I would've been so motivated."

That question begs some research, which would/could mean he is passing on a chance to be a pioneer... or something.

"My dad (Wyatt Emory Cooper) grew up really poor in Mississippi ... I paid attention to that because I thought that's a healthier thing to pay attention to than, like, some statue of a great-great-great-grandfather who has no connection to my life."

When Anderson Cooper "came out", he said in an email to Andrew Sullivan...

I’ve also been reminded recently that while as a society we are moving toward greater inclusion and equality for all people, the tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.

I don't know. Maybe Cooper could have made the case for using that money to advance the tide of history. That's the bottom line, isn't it? 'Money makes the world go around', pulling and tugging the moon, advancing and retreating the tides. What do you think?

Anderson Cooper stalker arrested

$75,0000 bail, first-degree menacing. That is all you have to know, and you don't even have to know that. But there's more!

Laura Italiano writing for NY Post describes stalker harassing Anderson Cooper as gay, Jewish white supremacist named Hausner. He has long hair and that runs counter to stereotype.  *adjusts stereotype*  Psychiatric patient from Queens, he has already been told numerous times to leave Anderson alone. Has scraggly hair and wears an X-Men t-shirt. Is a thug, says sweary words. Oh, ex-neighbor says he believes in one race, white race *readjusts stereotype back to default* 

Italiano for the NY Post describes Anderson as  steely-eyed stud, has posh red lacquered doors and a four-story West Village firehouse, three decades newsman, ducked Israeli rockets in Gaza, a hunky bar-owner boyfriend named Benjamin Maisani, who actually owns an East Village gay bar. And finally, the firehouse is a 1906 landmark, 8,000 sq ft, cost $4.3 million, has a pole, purchased 3 years ago, and he has a another place too. 

Goodness.

All that extra lifestyle stuff.  Ducking Israeli rockets in Gaza means ducking rockets fired by Israel army. Poor Laura. She meant to say ducking rockets in Israel. Fired from where? That is too much to expect Laura Italiano to know, please, she is more interested in having us know she knows all about Anderson Cooper's boyfriend.