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They had one of those Tea Parties in Ely, Nevada recently, and tea-partier laureate Lloyd Marcus, accompanied by some lady rebels in a kick-line, performed a version of "New York, New York" with some new lyrics. "Start spreading the news... we're taking back America/In 2010," he croons. "This socialist nightmare/must come to an end/Cause we're gonna vote them out/In 2010/I wanna wake up in an America where I can speak as I please..." Then he takes it to the bridge: "I wanna find my freedom restored/ACORN is out/No Obama something something something... My Obama blues/Will soon melt away..." Maybe he...

This character defamation is not what I wanted to wake up to this morning, but as NewsReal continues to grow it's something we'll have to grow accustomed to accompanying each morning's breakfast. I've always taken my morning coffee black, though I guess now I'll have to down it with two lumps of leftist lies. It appears NewsReal is now officially part of the "Right-Wing Blogosphere," as it made the regular round-up at the leftist Village Voice's feature "The Voice Explores the Right-Wing Blogosphere." Heh, Lies About the Right-Wing Blogosphere is more accurate. Though this shouldn't be a surprise coming from...

As you may have heard, there is among certain people a controversy as whether Barack Obama was really born in the United States.

On Thursday’s Countdown show, Michael Musto of the Village Voice appeared to help MSNBC host Keith Olbermann lambast Miss California, Carrie Prejean, because of her expression of opposition to same-sex marriage. After Olbermann set up the segment by revealing that Prejean had received breast implants paid for by the Miss California organization, Musto made a number of crude sexual jokes, and even cracked that she was like a "Klaus Barbie Doll," presumably a reference to Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who was a Gestapo officer responsible for thousands of deaths during World War II. Referring to the Miss California organization,...

The basic story line so far is that we are all to blame, including homeowners who bit off more than they could chew, lenders who wrote absurd adjustable-rate mortgages, and greedy investment bankers. Credit derivatives also figure heavily in the plot. Apologists say that these became so complicated that even Wall Street couldn't understand them and that they created "an unacceptable level of risk." Then these blowhards tell us that the bailout will pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the credit arteries and save the patient, which is the world's financial system. It will take time—maybe a year or...

Conservative reaction to the Kirsten Gillibrand appointment thus far has been mixed. Some approve, on the grounds that it will bother liberals. "LIBERAL DEMS HOWL," heds the New York Post. Wake Up America is happy that liberal blogs are unhappy. NewsBusters says the mainstream media's refusal to use their terminology is proof of bias. "When will the mainstream [media] begin labeling Gillibrand as a 'Maverick Democrat?'" they demand. "Or is the 'maverick' label applied by the MSM only to Republicans who are liberals or 'moderates' (really meaning liberal)?... If she holds to her views then she would definitely be qualified...

I've borrowed Woody Guthrie's 1942 song to report that this is my last column for the Voice. I'm not retiring; I've never forgotten my exchange on that decision with Duke Ellington. In those years, he and the band played over 200 one-nighters a year, with jumps from, say, Toronto to Dallas. On one of his rare nights off, Duke looked very beat, and I presumptuously said: "You don't have to keep going through this. With the standards you've written, you could retire on your ASCAP income." Duke looked at me as if I'd lost all my marbles. "Retire!" he crescendoed....

The troubled Village Voice laid off three employees Tuesday, including Nat Hentoff, the prominent columnist who has worked for the paper since 1958, contributing opinionated columns about jazz, civil liberties and politics.

Over the course of a 40 minute phone conversation rock legend and conservative firebrand Ted Nugent discussed his new book, Ted, White and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto, his charity work, the state of the presidential race, gun control and even Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to change the term limit laws. Nugent is planning two new books, including a tell-all on his rock lifestyle slated for 2010. "I'm a pretty exciting young man, at the tender age of 60," said Nugent, adding that the perfect response to almost any situation is a big "xxxx you." Here are some highlights.

John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?" My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice. Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot. Twentieth century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage. When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the...

One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be. While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules. In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash...

Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie How the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history gave birth to the mortgage crisis By Wayne Barrett ...... http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-08-05/news/how-andrew-cuomo-gave-birth-to-the-crisis-at-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac/ There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal...

<p>William Halby, a Brooklyn tax lawyer, owes back taxes for wrongly deducting more than $300,000 in prostitutes, porn, sex toys and erotic massages, a state tax judge ruled. Halby is divorced, semi-retired and living alone in a Bay Ridge apartment......"I have no social life. I needed that release." Halby said he found his "sex surrogates" - preferably brunettes - through ads in The Village Voice. All told, Halby spent about $322,000 to satisfy his desires....deducting $111,364 for "therapeutic sex" and massages "to relieve osteoarthritis and enhance erectile function through frequent orgasm." He claimed another $2,173 on porn "to enhance sexual performance in lieu of taking Viagra." In 2003, his $101,930 in deductions included $162 for "sexual performance aids" such as lubes, condoms and nipple clamps........... "It must be noted that portions of [Halby's] 'sex therapy' were, in fact, sex for a fee, in violation of penal law," Administrative Law Judge Brian Friedman wrote. Halby recorded each liaison in a "Tax Journal" ......he produced books and articles demonstrating the health benefits of sex, including a 2001 NY Post article about sex workers in Danish nursing homes. Halby is "of counsel" with the Larchmont law firm McMillan, Constabile, Maker & Perone.</p>

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current [housing] crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded "kickbacks" to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans....

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was said to have a lesbian relationship with her aide, Huma Abedin....... Experts say that the current campaign promises to become the dirtiest one in the history of the United States..... The best thing to do here is to ignore all the rumors. "People say a lot of things about me, so I really don’t pay any attention to it. It’s not true, but it is something that I have no control over. People will say what they want to say,” Hillary Clinton says. The rumor of Hillary Clinton’s lesbian love affairs started in August of...

Speaking at an April 4 awards banquet, Village Voice editor Mike Lacey let slip the N-word. The fact that his remark was uttered exactly 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King didn't help matters. Lacey didn't mean any harm, of course, and he issued the required apology. This wasn't the first time Mr. Lacey has crossed the boundaries of good taste - a few years ago he publicly defended Jesse Jackson when he referred to New York City as "Hymietown."But Lacey stands in good company.The discovery of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's expletive-laced sermons and anti-Semitic rants plunged the Obama...

Arizona will never shake its reputation as a backwards, redneck state with vestiges of racism as long as incidents like this are just swept under the rug. A week ago, the most powerful owner/publisher/editor of left wing newsweeklies in the country, Michael Lacey, made a racist remark, "my n****" at an awards dinner in Phoenix on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. The mainstream media ignored it. Contrast this with talk show host Don Imus's racist remarks. Imus was admonished by every major network for days, until he was eventually fired.The difference is that Lacey champions far...

Liberal fish rot from the head. ... it brought me back to our guest speaker who was speaking about Tom Fitzpatrick, who, if you don't mind the expression, was my nigger. – Michael Lacey, co-owner of Village Voice Media, while accepting an award from the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists Friday, referencing the late Pulitzer Prize winning reporter

Where is the outrage over the racist use of the word n**** at an awards ceremony by powerful editor and owner Michael Lacey of the Phoenix New Times, who also owns at least half a dozen other weeklies across the country, including Village Voice weeklies? Other prominent persons of influence have been forced to step down for similar remarks, including Senator Trent Lott, talkshow host Don Imus, and Gov. George Allen of Virginia had to drop his presidential bid. Arguably Lacey’s remark was even more derogatory than Lott’s or Allen’s.In his acceptance speech at the Society of Professional Journalists...

John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?" . . . And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace. . . . Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of...

Will Eliot Spitzer resign in time for this evening's network newscasts? I wouldn't if I were him. I'd wait until right afterwards, so that my smiling face wouldn't appear simultaneously on every TV set in the Western world. This is not New York provincialism. Spitzer is practically the most prominent and powerful Democrat in a huge state — Hillary Clinton's state, Wall Street's state, the state of millions of Democrats. Spitzer's boner really sticks out, even in this day and age. He didn't just get some on the side. He violated the law, if the federal complaint and published reports...

A Play in One Act* "Just promise me one thing John, you will always take my calls?" "Are you kidding? Anytime Rudy!" "And Tony Carbonetti's too?" "Err, ok.." "And can Judi please have something, a beautification commission maybe?" "Uh, I did sort of tell Cindy she could have that..." "Well, forget beautification. Judi would be great for any kind of health thing. You know she's a nurth! You could put her on your health insurance commission, not as chairman obviously, but vice chair I think would be perfect." "Rudy, here's my hand on it. I don't know what the...

GIULIANI PARTNERS LLC 5 Times Square Confidential memo to file From R. Giuliani July 15, 2002 In one week I bought a new 3100-square-foot Central Park apartment for $5.25 million and dumped Donna for $6.8 million, plus the old apartment, child support, taxes, and legal fees. Not bad for a guy who made a measly $294,000 in 1992—my last year of private employment before becoming mayor. I'll make $8 million this year just for delivering my already oldie but goodie, the stock September 11 speech. Without 9-11, I'd be lucky to get a date at the Guy Molinari Republican Club...

[snip] New York congresswoman Nita Lowey secured $10 million for the ongoing rehab of Fort Slocum, a defunct military garrison that, according to a Voice review of an atlas, is a long way from the combat zone. [snip] Other Congress members snagged more dreamy projects. Fellow Democrat Eliot Engel got $4 million for Verdant Power, which uses "underwater windmills" to generate electricity. Who at the DOD is going to say no to Engel's shoehorning of this vital project into the Defense bill? He's the vice chair of the Democratic Task Force on Homeland Security. Meanwhile, Democrat José Serrano got $2...

Several members of anti-immigrant groups like NY I.C.E., New Yorkers for Immigration Control and Enforcement, arrived to counter the candlelight vigil, saying they represent the "silent majority" of Americans who want illegal immigrants to go home. A group of six men and one woman—some in camouflage ponchos— gathered Thursday night outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center on Varick Street. Despite the freezing rain, they smiled as they carried several American flags and got their whistles ready for action. They are among the city's few but vocal anti-immigration activists, and they were giddy at the opportunity to disrupt a...

Giuliani's business contracts tie him to the man who let 9/11's mastermind escape the FBI Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city's skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. Although a member of the emir's own royal family had harbored the man who would later be identified as the mastermind of the attack—a man named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials, KSM—al-Thani rushed to New York in its aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, principally to the families...

Runnin' ScaredRudy's Pants On FireSecret testimony shows that Rudy's stump speech is inflated, at bestby Wayne BarrettOctober 23rd, 2007 9:25 PM In a recent broadside deriding the Clinton administration's response to Al Qaeda, Rudy Giuliani told an audience at Pat Robertson's Regent University: "Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn't hear it. I thought it was pretty clear at the time, but a lot of people didn't see it, couldn't see it." Other tenets of his standard stump speech include the assertion that he's been "studying terrorism" for more than 30 years, and that "the thing that distinguishes me...

A couple of weeks ago, Wayne Barrett did the political world a great service with a devastating piece in the Village Voice on Rudy Giuliani and the “five big lies” surrounding the former mayor’s claim to fame: his 9/11performance. The entire piece, if read, should effectively end Giuliani’s presidential ambitions. NRO’s Ramesh Ponnuru got around to the article this week and agreed that the revelations “are, if true, pretty devastating.” Of course, this only matters if the information reaches a large audience. Will the rest of the media scrutinize Giuliani’s record on terrorism as closely as Barrett did? If this...

Candidate whisperer: The ex-bartender who's got the ear of the GOP's top contender The most enduring lesson that Karl Rove taught the American people during his term as George W. Bush's top adviser was to always find out who the candidate's brain is before you elect him or her. For instance, if voters had fully understood that the swaggering, brush-cutting cowboy they elected was under the total sway of a dumpy balding guy with glasses who dropped out of college and believed William McKinley was America's greatest president, they might have thought twice. Had voters been more attentive, they'd have...

When the heat got to be too much on Friday, Rudy Giuliani backpedaled from the claim that he was at Ground Zero as much, if not more, than the 9/11 rescue and recovery workers. "I think I could have said it better," he told nationally syndicated radio host Mike Gallagher, the Associated Press reported on Friday. "You know, what I was saying was, 'I'm there with you.'" This is what Rudy in to trouble on the campaign trail in Cincinnati in the first place: "This is not a mayor or a governor or a president who's sitting in an ivory...

A former columnist and self-described Asian supremacist who applauded the Virginia Tech slayings has been sentenced to a year of mental health treatment for waving a hammer at a neighbor's face and threatening to kill her and her family. ---SNIP--- Last February, Eng was fired from the San Francisco-based weekly newspaper AsianWeek for writing a column titled "Why I Hate Blacks." Three months later, in a Village Voice interview, Eng gloried in the slayings of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech and fancifully speculated that his own writings might have inspired the killer, Seung-Hui Cho.

By all rights, battered Joe Bruno should have been waiting in line at the state Crime Victims Assistance Board last Wednesday, seeking the redress that is rightfully his. The governor's men had tried to get him, hadn't they? Set him up, put the state police on his trail, concocted phony reports, leaked them to friendly reporters? It was all right there in a report put together by novice prober Andrew Cuomo, an investigation compiled in record time. It should have been called "Joe Bruno: Wronged." But the wily old Republican, savvy leader of the state senate, knew luck when he...

Doesn't this seem more like something a Yankee fan would do? Or a Red Sox fan? Mets fans always appeared more suicidal than homicidal. In any event, it's awfully tragic. Michael Anthony—no relation to the former bassist of Van Halen—stabbed his mother in the head and beat her to death with a twenty-pound barbell on Saturday night after she tried to break up a fight between him and his father during a Mets game, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said Monday. Anthony, 25, of Fresh Meadows, started pounding on the walls while watching the Mets play the Nationals, Brown said....

When Pope Benedict XVI attacked Catholic politicians in Mexico who supported abortion rights last month, Rudy Giuliani was asked for his opinion. The presidential candidate replied in the language of the church: "Issues like that are for me and my confessor. I'm a Catholic, and that's the way I resolve those issues, personally and privately." Giuliani has invoked his Catholic heritage on Larry King; he's been described by The Washington Post as a "devout Catholic"; he's appeared on Fox News with the label "Catholic" floating on-screen; and he's handled a CNN debate question about a bishop who denounced him with...

When Pope Benedict XVI attacked Catholic politicians in Mexico who supported abortion rights last month, Rudy Giuliani was asked for his opinion. The presidential candidate replied in the language of the church: "Issues like that are for me and my confessor. I'm a Catholic... Married three times, Giuliani simply isn't the Catholic candidate he claims to be. He can't have a confessor. He can't receive the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist, or marriage. While bishops disagree about whether or not a Catholic politician who supports abortion rights can receive the sacraments, there is no disagreement about the consequences of divorcing...

The greatest love affair of Rudy Giuliani's life has become a sordid scandal. His monogamous embrace of the Yankees as mayor was so fervent that when he tried to deliver a West Side stadium to them early in his administration, or approved a last-minute $400 million subsidy for their new Bronx stadium, New Yorkers blithely ascribed the bad deals to a heaving heart. It turns out he also had an outstretched hand. Sports fans grew accustomed to seeing Giuliani, in Yankee jacket and cap, within camera view of the team's dugout at every one of the 40 postseason home games...

by Mark Finkelstein August 10, 2006 - 10:47 Keith Olbermann's regular media critic guest, Michael Musto of the Village Voice, called Ann Coulter a 'bastard' on last night's Countdown. The topic was the news that Vanity Fair has picked celeb photographer Annie Liebovitz to snap the first pics of Suri, newborn daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. There is controversy as to whether Suri actually exists, given that, months after her announced birth, there have been no photos or viewings of the child. Musto is clearly a skeptic on the subject. When Olbermann asked him what we should expect...

The Seekers The birth and life of the '9-11 Truth movement' by Jarrett Murphy February 21st, 2006 11:48 AM Essentially, it's all about physics and common sense. Cut steel, and buildings fall. Crash a plane, and the Earth gets scarred. Fire a missile; see a hole. What's up must come down, cause makes effect, and for the truth to set you free, it must be freed itself. It's dark in the basement of St. Mark's Church and dark outside on a mid-December Sunday night, but inside they have seen the light. Among the 100 or so people in the room,...

Watching the detestable scenes of thousands of pissed-off Muslims destroying lives and property over a mere cartoon, it's tempting for 'Mericans to saddle-up the high horse, what with our Western values of tolerance and all. Indeed, if there's anything worth fighting over, the freedom of expression is probably it. The only thing to keep in mind is that while the West largely avoids the Molotov cocktail parties, that same fight—between tolerance and intolerance—has broken out on this side of the Bosporus, too: There was Mayor Rudy Giuliani's famous war against the Brooklyn Museum over a painting of the Blessed Virgin,...

Who knows whether Cardinal Edward Egan is sleeping soundly these days. But as head of the New York archdiocese—as the top Roman Catholic prelate in the state—he'd have every reason to be restless after the recent advent of a little-noticed lawsuit. The suit, now pending in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, was filed on December 13 by Bob Hoatson—a 53-year-old New Jersey priest considered a stalwart ally among survivors of sexual abuse by clergy. Hoatson, the now-suspended chaplain for Catholic Charities in Newark, is suing Egan and nine other Catholic officials and institutions, claiming a pattern of "retaliation and harassment"...

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Tuesday night before the start of the president's State of the Union address. A guest of California representative Lynn Woolsey, who has called for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, Sheehan was handcuffed in the House chamber for wearing an anti-war T-shirt.

The annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., has always been identified with the anti-abortion hard-liners, the ones who openly call for the overturn of Roe v. Wade and insist, "No exception! No compromise!"--not even for cases of rape or incest, or to save a woman's life. But this year, the harsh rhetoric relaxed a bit, as, at least in this crowd, the end of Roe had gained the air of inevitability. Gone were the posters of bloody fetuses and shouts of "baby killers," replaced at Monday's march by images of cute fetuses, even cartoon fetuses, sonogram images with captions...

Full Text: Hillary Clinton Talks IraqHer vote, her constituents, her conscience by Kristen LombardiNovember 30th, 2005 11:16 AM Yesterday, Hillary Clinton quietly posted what her staff is calling a "routine communication between the senator and her constituents" on her website. The letter was timed to come out just ahead of President Bush's speech on the Iraq war today and the release of his 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." The full text of her "routine communication" on Iraq follows: Letter to Constituents on Iraq Policy  November 29, 2005 Dear Friend, The war in Iraq is on the minds of...

TURIN, ITALY "This is a horror story because most of the characters are Republicans," director Joe Dante announced before the November 13 world premiere of his latest movie, Homecoming, at the Turin Film Festival. Republicans, as it happens, will be the ones who find Homecoming's agitprop premise scariest: In an election year, dead veterans of the current conflict crawl out of their graves and stagger single-mindedly to voting booths so they can eject the president who sent them to fight a war sold on "horse(manure) and elbow grease." The dizzying high point of Showtime's new Masters of Horror series, the...

more proof of why the antiwar movement is in bed with al qaeda, or might as well be. An Army of None If counter-recruiters succeed and enlistees flee, a draft could be next. by Sarah Ferguson November 17th, 2005 6:41 PM snip: Buoyed by falling enlistment rates, peace activists of all stripes now see draining the supply of new soldiers as a more hands on way to stop the war in Iraq.

When it comes to the abortion issue, TV shows are where they were 30 years ago. It seems like everyone in TV land is pregnant these days. All of those plot-pushing hookups that keep us tuned in week after week have resulted in positive pregnancy tests for Housewives and high schoolers on every channel. This is often an unwelcome surprise, but none of these fictional characters, unlike their real-world counterparts who might agonize over the choice to have a baby, will choose to end their pregnancies. In fact, we might as well be living in an era before Roe v....

Cindy Sheehan, a/k/a the "peace mom," probably never intended to sound like a candidate, but she did. Sheehan, the activist who became the face of anti-war sentiment after camping outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, last summer, had just mounted the podium at the Brooklyn Peace Fair on October 22. And already she was getting political. "Maybe later we'll talk about your senators," she said, provoking a wave of booing and hissing from the 200-plus crowd. Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey was killed in Iraq in April 2004, was referring to both of New York's "pro-war Democrats," as she...

US military chiefs called on news organisations not to look at the 2,000th death in Iraq as a milestone in the conflict, yet many reported it as a politically significant landmark. The Pentagon says the 2,000th death in Iraq is an "artificial" mark The online edition of the Washington Post carried a story that noted: "The grim milestone was reached at a time of growing disenchantment over the war among the American public toward a conflict that was launched to punish Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for his alleged weapons of mass destruction. None were ever found." CNN.com set the occasion...

New Times Media Buys Village Voice By SETH SUTEL, AP Business Writer 1 hour, 18 minutes ago NEW YORK - New Times Media, the nation's largest publisher of alternative weekly newspapers, is buying the owner of the Village Voice and its five sister newspapers, creating a company with 17 weekly publications and a combined circulation of 1.8 million. The new company will keep the Village Voice name but will be run by the two top executives of New Times Media, a Phoenix-based company with 11 newspapers, the companies announced Monday. The deal creates a dominant player in the alternative newsweekly...