Anthony Weiner’s wife is taking time off from her senior job with the State Department – as well as time off from the randy former representative, The Post has learned.

While Weiner, 46, heads to an “intensive” rehab program to recover from the sexting scandal that cost him his congressional career, his 35-year-old spouse, Huma Abedin, will be relaxing at an undisclosed location.

“She is definitely taking time off away from her husband and chilling,” a source said. “And he’s going some place for at least a couple of weeks.”

Huma, who is in the early stages of pregnancy with the couple’s first child, has been seen infrequently since she returned from a trip to Africa with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

She returned just before the Democrat announced his decision to quit his Brooklyn-Queens seat in the House after six terms. It was also reported that she had decided to try to make their marriage work.

Huma’s family “is going to be watching her like a hawk,” the source said, “like she’s under a microscope.”

There was no immediate confirmation from the State Department of Abedin’s plans to take time off from work.

The Post reported yesterday that Weiner, once considered a front-runner to be the next mayor of New York, is going into rehab.

Full article here.

Weiner told them that he would not make a move until his wife Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, returned from her trip to Africa and the Middle East with Clinton. Abedin is expected back on Wednesday.

***

Anthony Weiner does not intend to resign right away, but is apparently seeking a leave of absence from Congress to attend sex rehab.  It looks like calls to resign from Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were not persuasive to him.  If Pelosi isn’t enough, we can think of only one Democrat leader who could put a stop to this saga now: Barack Obama.  The President has been radio-silent on this issue thus far.  It might be time for him to offer his sage wisdom.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Rep. Anthony Weiner is asking for a temporary leave of absence from the House while he seeks professional treatment in the wake of his Twitter scandal.

A spokeswoman for the New York Democrat says he has left for professional treatment and will focus on “becoming a better husband and healthier person.”

Spokeswoman Risa Heller says Weiner wants the leave of absence so he can be evaluated and work out a course of treatment.

The statement doesn’t say what Weiner would be treated for.

Just before the statement, leading Democrats demanded that Weiner step down.

***

Reticent no longer, the Democratic Party hierarchy demanded on Saturday that Rep. Anthony Weiner resign for sending online material ranging from sexually suggestive to explicit to several women.

“This sordid affair has become an unacceptable distraction for Representative Weiner, his family, his constituents and the House,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party chairwoman, said in a written statement calling for the New York lawmaker to quit.

The House Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, said Weiner “has the love of his family, the confidence of his constituents and the recognition that he needs help. I urge Congressman Weiner to seek that help without the pressures of being a member of Congress.”

Weiner had no immediate reaction.

Before Saturday afternoon’s developments, Weiner told reporters in his neighborhood that “I have to redeem myself and I am going to try to get back to work.”

Weiner said his conduct involved “personal failings” and that he would try not to let them get in the way of his “professional work.”

Wasserman Schultz, Pelosi and others party leaders made their demands one day after Weiner acknowledged that he had exchanged online messages with a Delaware teenager. He said the exchanges involved nothing inappropriate.

His party’s leadership had refrained from demanding a resignation for days after Weiner admitted sending lewd photos and messages and at least one X-rated picture to a handful of women around the country over the past three years and then lying about it.

Weiner is married to Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Abedin is pregnant with the couple’s first child. She is traveling with Clinton in Africa until the middle of next week.

A recent poll of registered voters in Weiner’s New York City district found that 56 percent said he should stay in office while 33 percent said he should leave.

Pelosi has asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether Weiner used any government resources. He has said he does not believe he did.

Before Saturday’s developments, at least nine House members and three senators said Weiner should resign.

He has repeatedly said he would not.

Weiner said earlier Saturday that his wife “is doing well” and that she “is a remarkable woman who is working very hard.”

But this administration is more than simply its swivel-headed Fearless Leader, ping-ponging between his teleprompters as the law of diminishing returns exerts its iron grip on his poll numbers.  It’s also the executive officers, the governing party’s top senators and congressmen, the palace courtiers who enforce discipline among the spear-carriers as they split up the swag.  In this, the Obama Administration is especially blessed, featuring both the frozen rictus of Anunciata d’Alesandro Pelosi as the speaker of the house and Harry “the Horse” Reid, an innocent Mormon virgin wandering among the fleshpots and real-estate deals of Las Vegas, as the Senate majority leader.  The Right is, indeed, fortunate in its enemies.

Still, the prize for the dumbest Democrat currently extorting a salary from the taxpayer (check out what her staff costs you here) remains where it long has been, in the grip of Barbara “Call Me Senator” Boxer, née Levy, the pride of Brooklyn and, latterly, of Marin County, Calif., and former relation-by-marriage to Hillary Rodham Clinton during the brief marriage between her daughter, Nicole, and Hillary’s sterling brother, Tony.  Tony Rodham, you may recall, is a former prison guard and repo man who managed to get himself into hot water over a hazelnut deal in the republic of Georgia, got caught up in Pardongate, was assaulted in flagranteby a man who claimed Tony was boinking his girlfriend, got caught up in bankruptcy court and battled his ex over child-support payments.

Standing not quite five feet tall, Boxer has consistently distinguished herself in the discharge of her duties, including trying to prevent the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes during the 2000 election, attacking Condoleezza Rice during her confirmation hearings, racially patronizing Harry Alford of the Black Chamber of Commerce, and dressing down my namesake, Brig. General Michael Walsh, for an act of what she considered lèse majesté. The general had to bite his tongue, but the righteous contempt with which Alford treats the senator’s plantation racism was one of the feel-good stories of the year.

Not for nothing has she earned the people’s choice award as America’s Stupidest Senator and against some stiff competition. Now, the Terror of Tiny Town has stepped into the steaming pile of Climategate, the recent revelations via leaked/hacked emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  But is “Don’t Call Me Ma’am” Boxer upset that a scheme designed to siphon trillions of dollars away from the western economies, reduce their standard of living to Third World levels and enrich crackpot global-warming enthusiasts like Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.?  Of course not.  What’s got Barb’s panties in a bunch is “E-mail-theft-gate.”  ”You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate.  Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not… This is a crime.”

Her agita comes as no surprise.  Gangsters always get antsy when threatened with exposure of their rackets, and Climate Fraud is a hell of a racket, a grand bargain among greedy science whores, malevolent government officials and a supine but protective media – Americans who get their news from The New York Times or the networks basically have no idea what we’re talking about here – who are all in this together.  As Mark Steyn noted Wednesday over at NRO:

Whatever your views on the merits, if you’re an “environmental journalist” this ought to be news. The reviled “skeptics” and “deniers” have forced Prof. Phil Jones in East Anglia to step down “temporarily” and prompted Penn State to investigate Prof. Michael Mann. Yet you’d have no idea of what the story was about from reading the AP reports in the average American monodaily…  As Jonah [Goldberg] has said, this is not just a science scandal but a journalism scandal — worldwide.

With the Copenhagen Climate Conference coming up, the ruinous Waxman-Markey bill rattling around Capitol Hill, and the investigation into climate data-manipulation starting to head to these shores, the Democrats are heavily invested in “hiding the decline,” so naturally they’re changing the subject. Leaving aside for the moment the sheer counterintuitive insanity (did I mention Al Gore?) of carbon-constraining a civilization of carbon-based life forms, it’s awfully convenient for the Left to discover its High Dudgeon about leaks right about now.  For leaking, in all probability, is what we’re dealing with here: an insider who, faced with the specter of Copenhagen, decided to go public, rather than some crazed right-wing “denier” brazenly hacking into the system.  Indeed, the BBC had the files a month before they were posted on a handy Russian server – but naturally suppressed them.

Leaks are as old as the republic, and one man’s leaker is another man’s heroic whistle-blower.  And, in the end, it all comes down to one’s interpretation of the First Amendment.  The leak of the Pentagon Papers by a disaffected Daniel Ellsberg not only set the gold standard, but the subsequent Supreme Court decision, a 6-3 ruling in favor of The New York Times, which had published the purloined material, also firmly established the First Amendment principle of no prior restraint on publication.

Closer to our time, there was the 1996 cell phone call between embattled Speaker Newt Gingrich and some of his supporters strategizing about how to handle various ethics charges brought against him by the Democrats, which was intercepted and taped by a pair of Democratic activists, John and Alice Martin, who just so happened to be driving around in their car that day, monitoring the police scanner.  They leaked the tape to radical left-wing congressman “Baghdad” Jim McDermott, who helpfully passed it over to reporters.  Sued by John Boehner (R-Ohio), one of the phone call’s participants, for invasion of privacy, McDermott stonewalled for five years before finally admitting he was the source of the press leak. The case went to the Supreme Court, which remanded it because it had already decided, in a similar case, that the principle of no prior restraint also applied to the airwaves, no matter how the tape was obtained.  ”A stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens.

So nothing is likely to come from Barbara “I’m Not a Madam, I’m a Senator” Boxer’s idle threat to get to the bottom of “E-mail-theft-gate.”  Like the rest of the Democrats, she has too much invested in the scam, and with electoral disaster looming for Obama and the Democrats next year, she’s and the rest of the executive officers are going full speed ahead with their radical agenda, and damn the icebergs dead ahead.

The students were gracious particularly given the trying circumstances in recent days, including a faculty member (department-head level) expressing in a fairly open forum, with occasional lapses of civility, her sentiments about the club members and their decision to screen “Not Evil Just Wrong” Sunday, followed by hosting me on Wednesday. Oddly – read on – her peculiar take on campus tolerance and diversity included an  often salty angst over the students supposedly showing no interest in actually having debate or discussion.

That she had been originally approached to speak on a panel adds to the mystery. She said, in short, no professor would want to participate with someone “like that” (er, me). The school administrators have now agreed to address the issue of this instance and similar, fairly regular treatment of a political minority. But, having failed to interest any faculty in sharing a panel let alone debating the merits, the students finally asked a different faculty member to at least speak after the film. He declined and offered instead an informative lunch with his faculty colleagues. The ones who don’t want open discussion or debate (the real kind) except when they do (the purely aspirational type).

So with all of that as prologue it was with curiosity that, during the question and answer period last night, this latter faculty member was indeed in attendance with a (non-faculty) friend, the latter who was busy on a cell phone, passing it on occasion to said faculty member who feverishly took notes. With said notes transcribed, he raised his hand with a slightly inane inquiry about whether, if we seek to heat the planet, is CO2 a cost-effective approach? On one level I was pleased he apparently had no problem with anything I presented, though I did have to correct him for placing numerous words in my mouth in order to frame his query.

Moments later, after another passing of the phone, he wanted to know if I knew what the greenhouse effect was. I began to describe it, though not without interjections demanding that I direct my answer more to his liking (by chance, the repetitive and interrupting “you’re not answering my question” was the one typical campus Alinsky-like tactic I had mentioned to the students over dinner beforehand). In that context I did get out that greenhouse gases in our atmosphere either (take your pick) absorb or trap radiation… “From?” Well, radiation comes “From the sun.”

“Incorrect! It’s a basic principle of how the earth’s climate system works. If you don’t know that you should not standing there representing yourself as someone who can speak to that point” (then somewhat muffled comments as he gathers his things to run out, ironically showing no interest in discussion or debate).

Well he’s got a very good point, in that I walked into the trap with lazy shorthand, about which I know better regardless of the circumstances and which made what I said incorrect. As he quickly bundled up his effects I inquired which slides of mine he disagreed. This was followed by some undecipherable comment at which point he begins his exit. I asked him to “Don’t storm out. Stay. We’re having a nice discussion.” [Audience member: “Don’t. That’s the coward’s way out”. That only made him hurry faster, at least on the videotape I turned on when I sensed something good was in the midst of being staged.] My hat is off to him, at least up to the storm-out, he was textbook and followed it fairly well though to no substantive point, if the entirety of the act is transparent.

I do feel compelled to note, somewhat in my defense – the radiation is, as you might imagine, radiation courtesy of the sun, as asked and answered – and somewhat in a mea culpa – technically, of course and as I have described in numerous uninterrupted talks, pieces, books, and radio shows, the radiation when trapped/absorbed is so trapped or absorbed on the way out, at which point it is infrared and no longer “solar” radiation.

http://www.grida.no/_res/site/Image/series/vg-climate/large/3.jpg

So, yes it of course comes from the sun but to not specify that this absorption/trapping occurs when it is re-radiated from the earth was without question my bad. President Obama will be more articulate on this point when raised today across town at MIT, when he keens about the climate crisis.

While not exactly rising to the level of Al Gore reversing the cause-and-effect relationship of CO2 and temperatures, or Gore’s producer swapping a graphs axis labels to falsely present findings (two things identified in my talk but which apparently did not interest my emotional interlocutor), it was sloppy and therefore literally inaccurate, to be sure. Of course, I don’t know if he really assumed that I was asserting a belief that GHGs absorb or trap radiation before it gets to the earth, but I suggest his hystrionics thereafter affirm that it doesn’t matter. By text message or otherwise, it was decided that storming out claiming ignorance too insufferable to countenance was the way to best attain involvement without dreaded discussion or debate.

Whether that supports a tantrum by a fully grown man, if an environmental studies teacher, is in the eye of the beholder.* His hasty retreat surely had more to do with a bristling Richard Lindzen sitting just over his shoulder than a fear that I would elaborate in response. In no indirect terms Dr. Lindzen strode to the mike to express his impression of such behavior, likely not commonly experienced by a chaired Ivy professor renowned in his field. But on the other hand, maybe such acting out is why he dropped out of the IPCC.

Regardless, it did this department little more honor than the behavior of the previously mentioned faculty colleague – and, I’ll speculate, text-buddy – leading up to the event. The Environmental Studies faculty had already made a meeting necessary to address its behavior. Given that, as I understand it, the administration appears sincere in its concern for such and related outbursts as in the past few days, there should now be more to talk about. Regardless, we got some funny video.

* In fact, after more than two dozen campuses, this is only the second time a faculty member has attended and spoken, though both stormed out (the former was at UNC-Charlotte; related, the ES department chair and actual PhD climatologist at Knox College also stormed out, but only saying to a student “I’ll get him in class, tomorrow!”)