Publicist praises boyfriend

New York Lizzie Grubman said she wouldn’t have made it through the most “horrible year” of her life without the support of her new boyfriend.

The Manhattan publicist pleaded guilty Friday to backing her luxury SUV into a crowd outside a trendy Long Island nightclub last summer.

“If not for him I couldn’t have gotten through the most difficult time in my life,” Grubman told the New York Post.

She identified her boyfriend only as “Jeff.”

Regis-Kelly tiff rumored

New York The New York Post has information that Kelly Ripa just might be Kathie Lee Gifford II. Could it be that after losing Gifford from his syndicated morning show, Regis Philbin actually misses his previous preternaturally perky sidekick?

Spies on the set of ABC’s “Live with Regis and Kelly” say the animosity between Philbin and Ripa, his cohost of one year, is so thick, the pair won’t even gab anymore.

Trouble started brewing between the two almost immediately after Ripa was hired to cohost the show.

“Regis was the star when Kelly came in, and now she’s acting like the star,” a source told msnbc.com’s Jeannette Walls. “It hasn’t helped that Regis’ prime-time show, ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’, has moved into syndication with a new host, Meredith Vieira, and that Ripa is hotter than ever … But who ever thought that he’d be nostalgic for the days of Kathie Lee?”

Book recounts 2000 election

Tallahassee, Fla. Former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris says in a new book that Al Gore might have gotten a statewide recount if he hadn’t decided to “unleash the dogs of war.”

Harris’ 289-page memoir of the 2000 presidential election “Center of the Storm” is scheduled for release in October just before the election that Harris hopes will take her to Congress.

“Regardless of what course of action we chose, we knew we had landed in a no-win situation,” Harris writes of returning to her Capitol office at 3:45 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2000.

In the next 36 days, she was sued in several counties, stung by partisan barbs, and lampooned on talk shows. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement gave her bodyguards because of death threats.

“When the Gore campaign began to unleash the dogs of war upon me during the difficult recount controversy, I was not inordinately surprised,” Harris wrote.

But she goes on to write that his aggressive tactics may have cost him the chance to obtain a statewide recount.

Broker’s home on the market

San Francisco Discount-brokerage mogul Charles Schwab is selling his ranch and all the duck hunting that goes with it.

The property, called Casa de Patos or “House of Ducks,” is a 1,600-acre ranch in one of the best hunting tracts in the Sacramento Valley.

Schwab is selling the ranch, located about 100 miles north of San Francisco, because he has less time to spend there due to the growth of his brokerage.

The ranch, which includes two cabins, a pool, hot tub and a caretaker’s house, has been on the market for a little over a month.

Schwab is asking for $10.3 million.