City council candidates answer questions about police brutality (bad), affordable housing (more, more) and Iraq (boo!).

The Daily News' publisher is pissed off about getting calls on his cell phone about Rudy Giuliani.

John DeSio reflects on the bad things Efrain Gonzalez's ex-wife is saying about her former husband.

The attorney general has a major settlement against advertisers who use adware.

Is Barack Obama the Tiger Woods of politics?

And John Edwards reveals the secrets of politician-hair.

My only consolation is that I've obtained a copy of the memo from Sun managing editor Ira Stoll:

From: Ira Stoll

Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 2:30 PM

Subject: New employee

I'm pleased to announce that Azi Paybarah will join the Sun starting Wednesday morning as a staff blogger and news reporter focusing on New York city and state politics. You may be familiar with his contributions to Ben Smith's Politicker blog at the New York Observer Web site. He is one of the editorial team who left the New York Press when Harry Siegel resigned; at the time Azi was the Press's City Hall bureau man. Please join me in welcoming him to the Sun.

His early policy stuff -- abstinence, no new taxes -- has slanted that way, as have his hires. First there was former Lieberman staffer Dan Gerstein.

Suozzi aide Kim Devlin calls him "a real find."

Everyone agrees not only that the city has changed immensely since 1988, when New York Press was founded, but also that something has been lost. Only fools and charlatans, though, wish it were 1988 again, when the city was crime-ridden and madman-strewn, on the cusp of bankruptcy and the verge of race riots. A different group of fools and charlatans are ecstatic about Gotham's brave new existence as a place for college grads to drink, screw, and so forth for a few years before growing up and settling down elsewhere and for tourists to shop and gawk; a mixture of circus, campus and strip mall.

These need not be the only alternatives, but it's where we now are. Gotham is fast becoming Mayor Bloomberg's vision of a luxury city, where the wealthy subsidize the poor and everyone in between scrambles to make it. Or leaves. And that's not to mention the vision—we use the word generously—of the Democratic candidates.

The newspapers who haven't published those controversial Danish cartoons typically cite appropriateness and editorial judgement. Only a few, notably the Boston Phoenix, have added the obvious: Fear of violent retaliation is a consideration -- and not, as John Podhoretz notes, an illegitmate one, as long as you're honest about it.

But, says former editor-in-chief Harry Siegel, that's not what he was told.

Harry (full disclosure: he's a former colleague, and current neighbor) said he's been shocked at how this story has unrolled in the American media.

"There's this whole attitude that we can't upset the armed barbarian children who will react to cartoons this way," he said, arguing that it's an insult to moderate Muslims. "New Yorkers of all people should know about rent-a-mobs."

Editor-in-Chief Harry Siegel emails, on behalf of the editorial staff:

We have no desire to be free speech martyrs, but it would have been nakedly hypocritical to avoid the same cartoons we'd criticized others for not running, cartoons that however absurdly have inspired arson, kidnapping and murder and forced cartoonists in at least two continents to go into hiding. Editors have already been forced to leave papers in Jordan and France for having run these cartoons. We have no illusions about the power of the Press (NY Press, we mean), but even on the far margins of the world-historical stage, we are not willing to side with the enemies of the values we hold dear, a free press not least among them.

New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization.

Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editor Jonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.

We have no desire to be free speech martyrs, but it would have been nakedly hypocritical to avoid the same cartoons we'd criticized others for not running, cartoons that however absurdly have inspired arson, kidnapping and murder and forced cartoonists in at least two continents to go into hiding. Editors have already been forced to leave papers in Jordan and France for having run these cartoons. We have no illusions about the power of the press (NY Press, we mean), but even on the far margins of the world-historical stage, we are not willing to side with the enemies of the values we hold dear, a free press not least among them.

This was not an easy decision. I've been reading the Press since 1988 and have dreamed of running it for nearly as long. The paper's editorial staff has worked impossibly hard hours and has come quite a ways in only a few months towards restoring the paper's tarnished editorial reputation and credibility. I'm proud of the work we've done, and wish we'd had time to finish the job. I wish the Press all the best, and hope that under new ownership and leadership it can again be an invaluable read for all good Gothamites.

It was, you may have gathered, a joke.

Siegel sympathizes this week:

The Press, if you've read it in the last year or two, has been modeling itself after a demented, occasionally brilliant, Moscow weekly called the eXile; the nihilism didn't work as well in this somewhat better-functioning democracy, and the paper wound up being totally irrelevant, except when it offended Anthony Weiner.