Upstate’s declining population of increasingly elderly and poor remaining residents are no longer consistent conservatives. While Pataki, like Cuomo, has overseen this decline, he’s also clinging to the back of the demographic leviathan.

Because there can be no fear check on a free and open press, and because of the self-evident newsworthiness of the cartoons, the editorial staff of New York Press collectively resigned when ownership decided to kill the images and several thousand words dedicated to them just hours before the paper was to go to print on Tuesday.




Here is the editorial that was to have run on the issue’s cover and their letter of resignation and here are four of the essays on the cartoons that were to have run inside the paper.

The new arrivals look upon them with confusion, disdain and just a touch of pride—Look how real it still is here!

New York’s transit strike may be Bloomberg’s problem. But the excessive power wielded by public-employee unions is a natioanl problem for Democrats, who control most big city halls, who are tied most intimately to the public-sector unions and who will lose out most when the cities they run no longer work.

Any candidate so humble as to admit that he needs a degree in public administration after 22 years in elected office has the stooped shoulders needed to bear the weight of begging funds from Washington, apologizing for his helplessness in the face of national trends and other ceremonial duties of the mayor’s office, circa 1990.

 

 

Prior to 311, most non-emergency calls were taken by Mayor’s Action Center, headed by Fletcher Vredenburgh, best known for his online screed declaring that he was sick of “griping, often whining, often stupid New Yorkers … dumb fucks from the public to dumber fucks that work for the city… So I take painkillers, sleep a lot, and think about killing every citizen and employee of New York City every minute I’m awake.”

 

 

 
The destruction of 9/11 has placed the city’s already aging and inadequate infrastructure back on center stage for the first time since the fall of Robert Moses 35 years ago. Here is our chance to again plan for the whole city, not merely consider whatever groups yell the loudest.

As you may have heard, there’s a new editorial team aboard at New York Press. Mostly, we hope our work will speak for itself, but what’s the point in putting out a paper, let alone an alt weekly, if you can’t run an introductory manifesto?

 
Given a choice between hearing Freddy Ferrer explain that parks are essential, or reading comments like “Giff is so feisty! Grrr!” I’d have to go with the hecklers who were taken out by security, chanting “No Police State!” At least they knew this was theater.

 
In a city where Democrats outnumber barbarians by more than five-to-one, we’re on the cusp of an unprecedented 16 straight years of Elephants in Gracie Mansion. What happened?
 

New Yorkers should know better than to take seriously an argument which asserts that “the real foreign threat is not terrorism; it’s that we may make creative and talented people stop wanting to come here.”

What stood out from Mayor Mike’s rather lengthy list of his accomplishments, real and otherwise, were the two subtle but unmistakable cracks at his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, who no doubt casts a big shadow.

In the upside down world of New York, the new school money is more likely to prove the straw the breaks the state’s fiscal back — and brings the city down with it — than it is to have much effect on education.

Most every New Yorker had a sense of each mayor’s New York, from Giuliani’s law and order town to Dinkins’ gorgeous mosaic, at last as far back as Lindsay’s Fun City. But Bloomberg has yet to define his vision, either to the city at large or even to the members of his own administration, who often seem to be running their own mini-mayoralities.

All these Crouches—the iconoclast and the blowhard, the visionary and the hack—are on display in The Artificial White Man, a series of essays on books and films loosely grouped around the idea of cultural miscegenation as the catalyst of the American experiment.

Read no further ‘till you take the pledge: “I pledge allegiance to no authority beyond my individualism. I have taken the burden of the masses upon my shoulders and will suffer and die if necessary in bringing the greatest amount of good to the greatest number… . I declare myself a member of The Organization and a sister/brother to the Resistance.”

At the march, I asked a fellow in a hammer and sickle shirt if he was a Communist. He told me he just thought “it was a cool shirt.” I suggested a swastika belt buckle might complete the look, but he didn’t seem to get it. Maybe he thought they’d clash. There were, though, numerous swastikas on signs and shirts comparing Bush to Hitler.