In November, the identity theft-prevention outfit announced a partnership with "America's Mayor," who will be a "Strategic Advisor" who will "be providing strategic counsel to LifeLock's leadership and working with LifeLock to stay ahead of the constantly evolving threat of identity theft."

Now, as Mediaite points out, Giuliani is finally popping up in ads for the company, telling prospective customers: "Looking forward to your tax refund? So are identity thieves, and they can steal your identity without you knowing it, in order to get your refund."

"You have to be proactive when it comes to identity theft, especially during tax season," he says in the ad.

Watch:

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So I approached Giuliani, bearing in mind an incident from Ron Paul's "Rally for Liberty" on Sunday, at which a montage of Serious pundits and politicos trashing the Texas Congressman was shown on a projection screen. Rush Limbaugh, David Frum and Chris Wallace were all subject to prodigious boos (Jon Stewart was heartily cheered), but the loudest angry roar came in reaction to a December 2011 clip of Giuliani dismissing Paul as a “complete distraction.” I informed Giuliani that he was the most reviled villain at the rally, and he assumed that another clip was what provoked the response:

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Today, also on CNN, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani likewise had kind words for Gingrich, arguing he's more electable than Mitt Romney in a race against Barack Obama.

“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. "You won't have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively."

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After Giuliani left his (second) wife in 2001 by announcing his infidelity at a press conference, he moved in with his good friends Howard Koeppel and Mark Hsiao, a gay couple who've been together since 1991. They were so close, these three, that Koeppel asked if Giuliani would perform their wedding ceremony. Giuliani said he would, once gay marriage became legal in New York.

Then Giuliani ran for president. And he decided that marriage is between a man and a woman (followed by two more women). His sudden change of heart propelled him to a distant third-place finish in the Florida Republican primary, followed by his exit from the race.

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Giuliani will spend Thursday in the state, which is scheduled to host the first presidential primary next February. He'll headline a fundraiser for the state Republican Party and have lunch with several GOP activists. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will formally kick off his campaign in New Hampshire the same day.

Giuliani was widely praised for steering New York through the tumultuous days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. He sought the GOP nomination in 2008 but placed a distant fourth the New Hampshire primary that year.

A CNN poll released Friday found Giuliani topping the field of potential GOP candidates.

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Polls this early are, as York should know, total hogwash. It's a contest based on name recognition, long before most voters have started to pay attention. That's why Giuliani led the Republican field in national polls throughout 2007, with Fred Thompson in second. Both candidates crashed and burned dramatically in the early primaries and were gone before Super Tuesday. There were four main reasons Giuliani's campaign failed last time, and none of them have been ameliorated since:

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Among Regan's many charges against her old employer was the claim that a top News Corp. executive told her to lie to federal investigators about her affair with Kerik, when he was (unbelievably) being vetted to head Bush's Department of Homeland Security in 2004. (He dropped his bid when legal troubles came to light, and he's currently in prison for tax fraud.) The exec told her to lie, Regan said, to protect Giuliani, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and a close friend of Roger Ailes. Fox-haters speculated the "high executive" was Ailes himself, given the fawning coverage the former New York mayor got from Fox, but Regan settled the lawsuit for a cool $10.7 million payment from News Corp., and the matter seemed to end there.

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Rudy Giuliani's reputation rests on his tyrannical rule of New York City. While Bloomberg has kept aspects of the Giuliani management style -- like his utterly unaccountable and institutionally racist NYPD -- in place, he has seriously dialed back the shouty rhetoric. So when the post-Christmas snowstorm came and the city's response was atypically inept and slow, Giuliani went around telling everyone that in his New York, all the snow would've been plowed, beaten and shot 41 times within 24 hours.

New Jersey's loud governor was out of town during the storm, and his state's response was similarly inadequate. So last week, Giuliani said Christie should've raced back home. "They elected you governor, they've got an emergency, they expect you to be there," he said. That is actually an incredibly polite and reasonable comment for Giuliani. Chris Christie, on Fox & Friends today, responded:

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Sources say the tough-talking former mayor "thinks the Republican race will be populated with far-right candidates like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and there's opportunity for a moderate candidate with a background in national security."

Giuliani has even scheduled a trip to New Hampshire for next month to meet with constituents in the state that failed him in January 2008, when he placed fourth in the Republican presidential primary.

It's easy enough to dismiss this, although it's also worth noting that, just as the Post was hitting the streets this morning,  Giuliani appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," where he took a shot at another potential '12 GOP candidate, Chris Christie. Asked about the New Jersey governor's unapologetic absence from his state during the post-Christmas blizzard (he was in Florida with his family), Giuliani replied, "Chris should've come back. I mean, if he asked me my advice, I would've said 'They elected you governor, they've got an emergency, they expect you to be there.' You know, you've got to be there if you're a governor, a mayor, or even a president, if it's important enough."

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Both potential 2010 presidential hopefuls have in the last week endorsed Pantano, who is best known for a 2004 episode in which he killed two unarmed Iraqi prisoners (charges were later brought and dropped). He has also embraced the endorsement of anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller.

Palin praised Pantano in a Facebook note Tuesday:

Ilario Pantano is another dedicated patriot running for Congress this year. Ilario first swore an oath to defend the Constitution as a 17-year-old Marine. Today, he needs your help to bring common sense back to Washington. ... We can win this seat and send a decorated Marine to Congress who will be a strong voice for veterans and active-duty military.

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The former New York City mayor and 2008 presidential candidate will appear with his fellow Republican in Los Angeles on Sunday, where they will talk to supporters in the San Fernando Valley.

Giuliani -- who took a beating in his quest for the presidential nomination -- endorsed Whitman last year. But he wasn't Whitman's favorite in the presidential race: She was an economic adviser to candidate Mitt Romney and, later, to GOP nominee John McCain.

Whitman is in a tight race with Democrat Jerry Brown.

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Not running a successful consulting business, as it turns out. Maggie Haberman at Politico reports on the winding down of Giuliani's home for the last eight years, consulting outfit Giuliani Partners:

Giuliani Partners, the consulting business formed by the former mayor shortly after he left City Hall, has vacated the flagship office it had on a floor of the Ernst & Young offices in Times Square for nine years, consolidating space with the ex-candidate's law practice, sources confirm.

The consulting practice, which took a hit in the wake of his presidential campaign loss and had whittled down to a smaller number of employees, moved into the new space that Bracewell & Giuliani holds last week, the sources said.

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Perhaps to make up for his relative lateness to an issue he used to own, Giuliani said on the Jeff Katz radio show a few weeks ago not only that the project is a "desecration" but that "decent Muslims" shouldn't mind the "Islamist extremist terrorist" label that Giuliani applies to "our enemy." For Giuliani, the enemy includes the (in fact moderate and progressive) Muslim Americans behind the Cordboa House project in Manhattan.

(Thought experiment: how would the mosque-opposing Anti-Defamation League react if a national politician said "Decent Jews should oppose x"?)

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In the race for the Republican nomination for governor, Medicare defrauder Rick Scott is on the attack against Attorney General Bill McCollum. Scott's platform is being a rich person who hates Obamacare. In case that's not enough to put him on top, he's now accusing McCollum of being objectively pro-homosexuals.

"McCollum endorsed pro-abortion and pro-homosexual rights candidate Rudy Giuliani for president in 2008 and was a Giuliani campaign leader in Florida," a Scott consultant wrote in a memo sent to reporters. I am not sure if that is a successful line of attack in Florida, but I guess this year the crazy right-wingers are the ones most energized about the primaries.

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Giuliani, the former New York mayor and noted "Nasty Man," already ran for for president in 2008. Oddly, he found that GOP primary voters didn't much care for a twice-divorced cross-dressing New Yorker who used to be friends with gay people. After his brilliant campaign strategy of not campaigning and then losing Florida failed, he skulked back into the shadows, waiting for the day when America needed a hero.

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So I don't begrudge the folks over at Fox News their right to ask questions in the wake of the attempted bombing in Times Square. However, I do begrudge the Fox crew the inane questions they've chosen to ask. (Hat tip to Media Matters on this.)

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But on Friday, Giuliani appeared to have forgotten it ever happened.

In an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," Giuliani said, "What he [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did -- one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.”

Of course, 9/11 happened on Bush's watch. And if he's counting the failed bombing of Northwest Flight 253 as an attack, then shoe bomber Richard Reid's own attempt -- also during the Bush administration -- counts too.

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Things can change down the line, of course, but for now this seems to be the end of Giuliani's career in politics, and the obituaries are being written.

He did seem to have a shot at becoming either senator or governor, but at the same time he also had quite a bit of baggage to deal with, including the recent guilty plea of his friend Bernie Kerik. And certainly any hope he has of being influential in the political world from the private sector would have faded if he suffered another embarrassing loss like the one he faced in the Republican presidential primary last year.

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There's been no official announcement so far -- the Times sources their report to "people who have been told of the decision." And the National Review's Jim Geraghty writes that he has "a reliable source close to Giuliani" who says the former mayor of New York City hasn't yet made a decision.

If Giuliani has opted not to get in the race, thoughl, it probably would be a good decision. It'd be one thing if he were running against incumbent Gov. David Paterson, whose unpopularity rivals even former Vice President Dick Cheney's. But Paterson's widely expected to lose in his quest for the Democratic nomination to state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who'd be a much more formidable opponent in the general election. And if Giuliani loses two races in two years, especially after the way his presidential campaign crumbled, he'd stand to lose quite a bit in terms of his credibility and visibility in politics as well.

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He's certainly done so in the wake of the Obama administration's announcement that self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others will be taken from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and brought to New York City for trial. A former spokeswoman for Giuliani said on Twitter that the former mayor will be on three networks -- ABC, CNN and Fox News -- this Sunday talking about the decision. On top of that, he's put out a statement condemning the move:

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