Dawn Eden

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The state legislature wants more money for its operating costs.

Liz has an email from someone leaving their job in the waning days of the Pataki era. This should be a trend.

Dawn Eden gets a column in Daily News.

In the comments section, Yehuda Katz defends a lawmaker who "received a Marist 'honorary' doctorate" because it "had nothing to do with the $5 million" that lawmaker secured for the school.

And pictured above are some decorations from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

-- Azi Paybarah

You kind of have to like the Daily News’s "Big Town, Big Heart" "Big Heart, Big City" feature, if only as a form of moral rehab for reporters.

And it’s edited by my old friend (so to speak) Dawn Eden, the only person ever fired from the New York Post for being too right-wing. (Here’s n Observerish take on the disputed story, which involved her tweaking a news story into anti-abortionlanguage.)

This column, which ran last week, however, is an amazing attempt to slip one under New York’s typically sensitive political radar. It’s a glowing profile of a crisis pregnancy center, Bridge to Life, and its devoted founder.

No particular facts are in dispute, but somehow the part about how such centers are controversial foot-soldiers in the life-choice wars -- they’re often accused of using any means necessary to prevent women from having abortions, just as they accuse Planned Parenthood of pushing abortion -- never makes it out from under the warm, fuzzy feelings.

However, a reader, Sunny Chapman (also an abortion-rghts advocate) did call up Bridge to Life, and told them she thought she was pregnant and was considering an abortion.

She emails:

Here are some of the things I was told:

Abortion clinics do not inform patients of medical risks Suction machines can damage the cervix, scar the uterine lining and puncture the womb. Women who’ve had abortions have a higher rate of miscarriage and premature birth. Women who’ve had abortions have a higher risk of not ever being able to have children. 27 studies have shown a link between abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer. The high rate of breast cancer in Nassau & Suffolk counties is not linked to toxins, but to a high rate of abortion Women who’ve had abortions are five times more likely to commit suicide.

Hmm.

Over at Dawn Patrol, Dawn Eden's on-hiatus-'til-it's-not blog, she's looking for a few good Catholic school veterans.

Why, you ask? For the next edition of Blog On!, her Wednesday column in the Daily News. The upcoming edition will feature insights from former Catholic school students, who will weigh on a current article about a New Jersey Catholic high school that banned student blogging (not snogging, mind you: blogging!). Her comments section has already been flooded; if you'd like to reply yourself (added points for former Catholic schoolers who - duh - blog), you can email her.  read more »

Thus hath Dawn revealed a new and formidable force in blogging: the ability to scoop thyself.

Only a certain segment of The Politicker's readership will appreciate this (OK, one person. She knows who she is.), but FishbowlNY has found eerie parallels between Times lightning-rod Judy Miller and Daily News lighting-rod-to-be Dawn Eden. (via Gawker)  read more »

We took some heat over the weekend for questioning the wisdom of the Daily News in giving Dawn Eden a column. Her colleague Derek Rose wrote that we want to blacklist social conservatives. Others thought we were being intolerant of her faith. And somebody suggested that maybe we should let her write a column before jumping on her.

We'd just note that our original post wasn't about setting rules for who should write for New York papers; it was about the News, a New York institution that's desperately trying to break its chains to an aging, dying, readership. That means the paper, which employs some of the smartest journalists in town, needs to be part of the city's ongoing conversation.

And the questions of whether homosexuality is a sin, a perversion, or the fault of Sponge-Bob just aren't part of that conversation. It's not that they're forbidden topics. It's that they're irrelevant topics, settled questions, to the readers they're hoping to attract.

Anyway, Eden's first column ran Sunday. (The nominal topic is blogs! Guess who won't be getting a plug...)

Nothing on the gays. But in her survey of the Inter-Web, Eden does make one foray into politics:

"Guess which nonprofit proudly proclaims its support for 'the deemphasis on bilateral military alliances and spheres of influence in favor of strengthening the international peacekeeping role of the UN?'  read more »

"Yup. It's those radical internationalists at the YWCA. Matt of Overtaken By Events (overtaken.blogmosis.com) notes, 'If you were confused when little Sally came home from her swimming class and burned her training bra, wonder no longer.'"

Daily News, paper of the future.

The Daily News's running identity crisis is one of the best stories in town, and while we're not exactly sure what to make of this post on Dawn Eden's blog, we suspect it'll advance that story:

"Looks like the big news that I promised a while back is finally coming to pass. It has to do with something that'll be in this coming Sunday's New York Daily News."

Eden, as you'll recall, was a copy-editor fired by the New York Post (!) for surreptitiously putting some pro-life spin into a story. Our George Gurley fell in love with her, and the subsequent profile, according to Eden, got her a job on the copy-desk at the Daily News. Now, apparently, she's moving on up at the biggest-circulation paper in New York City.

This is such a perfect snapshot of the way in which the News constantly gets tangled over its own feet in trying to be, and yet not be, the Post. Hiring a woman banished from Murdoch-land for conservatism somehow crystallizes that.  read more »

But it's also a classic News misstep. Eden's not a New York conservative like Ryan Sager or Robert George, the younger, libertarian generation on the Post's editorial page who represent, in some way, the way in which the movement has a future in New York. Her conservatism is more U.S. House of Representatives: Here she is cheerleading the Christian attack on Sponge-Bob, and here's her observation that "at the root of homosexuality is a desire to avoid true human intimacy."

And so the Daily News barrels into the future.

There are narrow-interest memoirs, and then there are very-narrow-interest memoirs.  read more »