In your woozy Tuesday media column: MSNBC pulls in the crazies for airtime, Gallant former journo beats Goofus current journo, NYT family members catch the swine flu, and the LA Times is all fucked up.

You wish you were cool enough to have mob bosses after your head, like GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. Two out of five mafia bosses wanted to waste Giuliani in the 80s, when the future mayor was all up in their business. "The reality is, I've dealt with this all of my life," Giuliani told Fox last week. "If you've got to live with threats, you live with threats." Oh, what a badass. But where oh where does this moxie disappear to when Judith calls him in the middle of a major political event? Earlier this month, Giuliani took his wife's call smack dab in the middle of a televised speech he was giving to the NRA. "If he wants voters to respect his privacy, he ought to show some respect for basic manners," wrote John Fund in the Wall Street Journal. In all fairness to Rudy, Fund isn't exactly the arbiter on etiquette—we hear the columnist has absolutely terrifying table manners.

Certainly, it will be hard to beat the crazymaking fun of the Bartha blowup, but in terms of strange documentary effluvia leaking out of a long-dead relationship, it's not this week's only gift. For this week marks the civil case in Manhattan Supreme Court involving Wall Street Journal columnist (and conservative TV commentator) John Fund. The short version has Fund engaging in ugly-bumping with Morgan Pillsbury, the daughter of one of his previous erotic conquests, back in 1999. Since then it's been one long safari through Fund and Pillsbury's dirty laundry. Pillsbury accuses Fund of "physical and emotional abuse" and "blamed him for a traumatic abortion." Fund mildly retorts with charges of "stealing checks and making credit-card purchases in his name," and also "witness tampering" (do tell). Pillsbury fires right back, seeking a half-mil in damages — notably, she wants the "larvae" out of her freezer. That must have been a pretty traumatic gagortion indeed.