Harry Siegel

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

Eliot Spitzer created the new position of Education Czar.

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

Harry Siegel explores a Libertarian traffic plan. (Insert joke here).

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

The city comptroller collected $5 million in back wages for underpaid workers.

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

African-Americans are safer in prison than in their own neighborhoods. The opposite is true for whites.

Is Barack Obama the Tiger Woods of politics?

The Independence Party is wired. Literally.

And John Edwards reveals the secrets of politician-hair.

-- Azi Paybarah

When State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sat down to breakfast with storied financial consultant Fe  read more »

When State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sat down to breakfast with storied financial consultant Fe  read more »

So my old employer, The New York Sun, has stolen away Politicker contributor and former New York Press reporter Azi Paybarah.

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.

Aargh. Um, I mean, "Good luck, Azi."

So Tom Suozzi is starting to look like that rare species, an actual conservative Democrat. Not sure how this gets him many votes in a Democratic Primary, but it could make the substance interesting.

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

And now Suozzi has hired Harry Siegel, a former editorial-page editor at the New York Sun and the former editor of the conservative alt-weekly New York Press, as his policy director. Harry is the one who quit, with his deputies, after his publisher refused to run the famous Danish Mohammed cartoons.

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

As for Siegel's politics, he's an idiosyncratic urban conservative, though I'm not sure he'd describe himself that way. Here's from the manifesto he ran on taking over the Press:

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.

Not sure how that translates into policy. Also in that piece, an account of some stumbling drunkenness, which everyone's in favor of.

But now that we're getting some real ideological distinctions in the Democratic Primary, this seems like a reasonable question: What do Spitzer and Suozzi think about the Iraq War?

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.

New York Press, unpolished, ramshackle place that it is, proved a pretty transparent labrotory for how this happens. The publisher's statment was the usual boilerplate: "We came to the same conclusion as many other responsible newspapers and media outlets that have chosen to not run the Danish cartoons. We felt the images were not critical for the editorial content to have merit, would not hinder our readers from making an informed opinion and only served to further fan the flame of a volatile situation."

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

"The owner of the paper [David Unger] was talking to me about his fear that things would get blown up," he said today. "This was expressed to us directly: 'I'm not putting lives in danger. We're not getting things blown up.'"

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.

"I honestly thought on Friday that 70% of the newspapers in America would run the cartoons by Monday," he said.

"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."

The editorial staff of the alternative weekly New York Press walked out today, en masse, after the paper's publishers backed down from printing the Danish cartoons that have become the center of a global free-speech fight.

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

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 editorJonathan 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.

New York Press editors resigned en masse today in a dispute with top management over reproducing the riot-linked Danish Mohmammed cartoons. Editor in chief Harry Siegel's explanation follows:

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.

—Harry Siegel, EIC, on behalf the editorial staff

The New York Press a couple of weeks ago had a brief story about a new counter-terror strategy: taking down all the street signs. An NYPD spokesman was quoted saying, "Street-sign removal is an effective security option with a proven track record. It's the same thing the English did in London during the Blitz. They removed the street signs to confuse German paratroopers, and it worked."

It was, you may have gathered, a joke.

But apparently, some in the federal government didn't quite figure that out. The paper's editor, Harry Siegel, got a call from an EPA official the other day, who was looking for a contact at the police department to talk about the new plans.

Siegel sympathizes this week:  read more »

"It's been tough all around, we suppose, since the NYPD switched to that unlisted number."

It's been a while since anybody picked up the shrinking alt-alt weekly, but the Sun has news today that the current regime at the New York Press has been replaced by my friend and Ditmas Park neighbor Harry Siegel, an occasional Observer columnist.

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.  read more »

Given the quotes in today's story, the new regime seems to be something of a Russ Smith restoration. Siegel, a Brooklyn native and holder of the world's last, thickest Brooklyn accent, ran the Sun's editorial page for a while and is the founder of the eccentric, interesting New Partisan Web site. He's smart and serious, and despite being to the right of most New York political types, knows his way around city politics, being the son and collaborator of Giuliani analyst Fred.

Harry also holds the distinction, as I recall, of forcing the generally anti-regulatory Sun into strict enforcement of the smokefree workplace rules.

Chuck talks about terrorism, judges, and the Democrats' message. Mike Bloomberg calls his almost-rival Howard Dean -- to ask for the 2008 Democratic National Convention (third item). And Harry Siegel takes a look at the Democratic field, compares this year to 1997, then wonders if 1989 comes next.  read more »