Clout: Buxom Clinton pic seemed like a good idea at the time

A BIG CHUNK of the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., has come to the National Constitution Center for a show opening today.

One treasure in the "Baseball as America" show is a rare 1910 Honus Wagner Piedmont cigarettes baseball card. The last 1910 Wagner to be auctioned sold for $1.245 million.

Clout now brings you another valuable rarity: The 2008 Upper Deck Hillary Clinton card.

The Hall of Fame doesn't have one.

A check of eBay yesterday morning showed one selling for $3,899.

How did this happen?

Like most bad things, it began with a good idea.

"We wanted this set to be light and humorous and chronicle presidential history," explained Terry Melia, Upper Deck's public relations manager. "We married each candidate to a character or moment in baseball history."

The cards (sprinkled through the regular baseball card set at a ratio of one per every eight packs) feature a caricature of each presidential candidate in a baseball role. Mitt Romney, for example, is seen as Carlton Fisk, waving his famous home run just past the foul pole in the 1975 World Series.

"The others were all male," Melia said. "Hillary, being the only female in the lineup, we were reaching for comparisons to make."

Well, they could've made her one of the professional women ballplayers honored in the movie, "A League of Their Own."

Instead they made her Morganna, "The Kissing Bandit."

Morganna was a buxom stripper who gained fame in the 1970s and 1980s by running onto the field during games and kissing a player.

She was arrested every time, but her notoriety wound up landing her a guest spot on David Letterman's show.

The famous defense attorney Richard "Racehorse" Haynes once introduced a "gravity defense" for her, arguing that her top-heavy condition caused her to fall over the railing and onto the field.

"Some people hadn't seen the illustration until the 11th hour," Melia said. "Then there was a concern about having the card misconstrued as being in poor taste."

Poor taste? Portraying Hillary as a top-heavy stripper? Ya think?

The production line in Carlsbad, Calif., was immediately shut down.

"We went down onto the production floor and were literally pulling them manually out of the hoppers," Melia said.

But some cards had already been shipped. Melia wouldn't divulge a number but says "98 percent" of the Hillary cards were withdrawn.

Upper Deck plans to create a new Hillary design. It will be included in their next series of baseball cards, which launches at the end of May.

Whether Clinton is still a candidate by the end of May is another matter.

Grimes: Vote Fascist

We always thought fascism and racism went together like a truncheon and jackboot.

But Jack Grimes of Elkton, Md., this year's United Fascist Union presidential candidate, says he hates racists.

"I've met racists over the years and they are degenerates," Grimes told us this week. "They are scum. So I avoid them."

Fascists get a bad name, Grimes says, thanks to Adolf Hitler.

The Nazi leader, architect of the Holocaust, was "a political parasite" who "perverted fascism," Grimes said.

Grimes favors the path of Benito Mussolini.

"We try to follow Il Duce's ideology," he said. "The corporate state can create economic equality."

The fascists won't allow most of a nation's wealth to be in the hands of the few, he said. His party also supports free elections.

"We'd allow freer elections than President Bush has allowed," Grimes promised.

You mean under fascism the Supreme Court wouldn't get to choose?

Grimes has worn Mussolini-inspired black uniforms and Imperial Roman head gear in the past, but says he avoids it while campaigning.

"We've all but given up on the uniforms," Grimes said "They don't work in America."

Murphy's law

The U.S. House on Wednesday passed the following resolution: "Congratulating the National Football League champion New York Giants for winning Super Bowl XLII and completing one of the most remarkable post-season runs in professional sports history."

The vote was 412-1. The one was Bucks County's Patrick Murphy, D-Pa.

"As a former 700-level security guard and lifelong Eagles fan, I couldn't, in good conscience, vote for our rival Giants," Murphy said yesterday. "The only thing worse would have been congratulating the Dallas Cowboys."

A man, alone, standing up for what's right.

Goode on MOVE

The Rev. W. Wilson Goode, former mayor, took issue with a box we ran Wednesday with a story on the political honeymoons enjoyed by past mayors and when they ended.

The box described Goode as "permanently scarred" by the 1985 MOVE bombing.

This wasn't intended to mean that Goode personally was scarred. What got scarred were his relationships with some members of City Council and his ability to achieve some of his second-term goals.

Goode, of course, has gone on to a much longer and successful second career as a minister and founder of Amachi, a program that provides mentoring for the children of parents in jail.

Amachi has grown into a national program now and Goode is constantly on the go.

In his visits across the country, Goode said, "No one ever brings [the MOVE incident] up." *

Staff writer Gar Joseph contributed to this report.