Free Republic

Tabloid titan Jimmy Breslin — the cigar-chomping, hard-nosed newspaperman who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Daily News’ columns championing ordinary New Yorkers — has died, according to two friends of his family. He was 86. The cause of death was not immediately released. The curmudgeonly ink-stained wretch — whose velvety and witty writing style uplifted the downtrodden and eviscerated the scoundrels — crafted scores of columns for The News, Newsday, the New York Herald Tribune and New York Journal American.

The most surprising thing about Jimmy Breslin's article in Harper's Magazine is that he is still around. Who knew? Not so surprising is that Breslin hasn't lost any of his barely coherent rage which seems to be his trademark. This latest example from Breslin is so off the wall and all over the place that it is actually hard to get upset over it. Just mark it up to typical Breslin and savor it for the flat out nuttiness of the proposition that people attending last week's Glenn Beck rally in Washington, D.C. are somehow like assassins. Breslin jumps right...

Headline and link only due to copyright complaint.

Jimmy Breslin, the brash newspaperman who became so famous he starred in TV commercials for Piel's beer and Olivetti typewriters, has written his last regular column for Newsday.We report this because otherwise no one in town would have noticed.Breslin, who "will write from time to time," Newsday said, signed off in typical blowhard style, writing yesterday how he'd called the election for John Kerry "early and often."

He cried out against stem cells because he said they are sinful. You are taking a life to perhaps save a life, he says. He sees armies of women having babies and then chopping them up like chickens for the stem cells. He is opposed to embryonic stem cells, which come from a fetus that has been fertilized in vitro. His wife says the stem cells couldn't save her father from Alzheimer's, which means nobody should have them. They get their views from a Dust-Bowl Bible left by Elmer Gantry. Fifty years from now, people will look back on this...

There were four Marines and an Army soldier killed in Iraq in one 24-hour period over the weekend. George Bush, who does not like people who go to war, probably will say that they are not dead. As of Aug. 20, we list 952 of our troops killed in fighting. That is the Defense Department figure. When the figure goes over 1,000, that can be devastating in an election.

Ralph Greenberg called, at 8 a.m. yesterday, as he has on every single solitary day since 1968. Sometimes, he calls two and three times over the day, with his last call always at 8 p.m. If my wife answers the phone in the morning, he says, "Let me speak to Jimmy." If I answer the phone, Ralph says, "Let me speak to Ronnie." This time, she answered and handed the phone to me. He began, as he has for months, "When are you coming to see me?" He lives in a group home in Woodstock. I tried to get him...

FLEETCENTER BUILDING RIKERS ISLAND NORTH INMATE INTAKE JULY 26, 2004 (Form ARC 239M) Copies to all law enforcement people assigned to arrest at FleetCenter building: Boston police, state police, CIA, FBI, Army intelligence, Naval intelligence, Army military police, police aviation. INMATE'S NAME: Breslin, Jimmy DESCRIPTION OF CLOTHING: Rumpled. REASON FOR ARREST: Newspaper Reporter. SPECIFIC REASON: He complained and caused trouble making his way through wrong space in entrance. It was reserved for law enforcement gate. He was unable to make his way through security gates and therefore was too agitated to work properly.

The now-familiar specter of a journalist for a prominent newspaper fabricating a story has come up once again, this time involving one of New York’s most respected columnists. The controversy stems from an April 7 Newsday column by Jimmy Breslin on how religion helps inflict physical and mental brutality. Part of that column relayed a discussion he said he had had with Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston. Breslin had failed to mention in the column where and when the conversation took place. Breslin wrote, “‘Homosexuals are dangerous,’ Sheldon...

In May of 1990, Newsday's syndicated columnist Jimmy Breslin received an e-mail criticizing one of his columns as "sexist." That so outraged Mr. Breslin that he denounced the sender, a female Korean-American reporter, as a yellow, slant-eyed cur. And he went on the Howard Stern filth show to further discuss his displeasure. Newsday, Long Island's daily newspaper, which at one time had a New York City edition, suspended Breslin for two weeks without pay, even though he apologized to the young reporter. They should have fired this New York thug who has now been charged with fabricating quotes in order...

I am standing on Broadway on this night some years ago with crowds passing as they came from the movie theater that was showing "JFK." Here's a man with his wife and two other couples announcing to his group, "I knew Lyndon Johnson killed him."

Howard Dean, who runs for president in the Democratic primaries early next year, spoke to a crowd here that appeared larger than the population of Montpelier, the capital of Dean's home state of Vermont. His speech was on Tuesday night in Bryant Park, which runs from the back of the Fifth Avenue library, whose soft amber lights in the back windows were calming. The park then goes out a full block to the nervous, loud, speeding white light stream of traffic on Sixth Avenue. In the park were 10,000, and maybe more, waving blue "Dean" signs.

"Why?" I asked her. "Just a minute. I am counting." Kathy Fierre, 26, here from Ecuador for 16 years, was arranging her cash register in the coffee shop at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I am watching TV at this coffee counter yesterday afternoon. It was the counter nearest the Times Square subway entrance.

They put a drama about Hitler on CBS television, which was the idea of some complete fruitcake, and look what happens. "The Police Department's motives are something that nobody should question." How do you like him? How do you like the country he imagines he's in? The woman, Alberta Spruill, was dressing for a day of her 29th year of work. A dozen cops using some homeless bum as a stool pigeon come busting into the apartment of this black working woman, a church woman. They put handcuffs on her and frightened her to death.