Ryan Sager

There may be a rift between Mike Bloomberg and one of his appointees to the city's Commission on Human Rights.

They city will promote circumcision.

The bruising budget battle diminished Eliot Spitzer's approval rating.

Judges across the state are upset they didn't get pay raises in the state budget.

Spitzer spent $500,000 of his own money to keep his television ads about his Medicaid plan on the air.

Bernie Kerik may not be able to travel to the Caribbean to work with security clients because of legal troubles at home.

James Baker III said the only bi-partisan plan for Iraq is the one his group recommended about 100 days ago.

Barack Obama raised more money for the Democratic primary than Hillary Clinton, according to Ryan Sager.

And a candidate in the New Paltz mayor's race was removed from the ballot.

-- Azi Paybarah

Howard Wolfson has arrived in the top tier of Hillaryland.

The "right-wing conspiracy" is back in Hillary's vocabulary.

John McCain may be gaining on Rudy Giuliani.

John McCain is the new Darth Vader, says Ryan Sager.

One pro-Giuliani blog finds another pro-Giuliani blog...with firefighters.

Does Barack Obama now have a Jewish problem?

The mayor's 2030 plan was the subject of a screaming match in City Hall last week, according to Aaron Naparstek.

More than 100 people are currently displaced in the Bronx.

For city public school parents, today was lobbying day in Albany.

The state Senate's budgetary numbers putEnron's accounting in a better light.

Andrew Cuomo took a swipe at Senate Republicans too.

Malcolm Smith proved he can deliver the votes of his conference members.

Glenn Thrush almost heard Eliot Spitzer endorse Hillary Clinton today. Sigh.

Scorecards from the New York League of Conservation Voters are out.

Assemblyman Jim Brennan is concerned about the special election in Brooklyn's 40th City Council district.

And pictured above is a John Kerry staffer who kept getting in between me and the man himself.

-- Azi Paybarah

Rudy Giuliani has hired Daniel Freedman, a conservative editorial writer from The New York Sun.

Here's a note from the paper's editor.

From: Seth Lipsky

Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 11:05:23 AM

To: ~Business Staff; ~Editorial Staff; ~NY Sun Office Staff

Subject: welcome back to ryan sager

I'm delighted to report that Ryan Sager has returned to the Sun as editor of the online edition. He had been with the Sun as an editorial writer in the startup period and then went to the New York Post and wrote a book about politics, "The Elephant in the Room." In his new job, he will edit the online edition, edit and help write a blog on politics, and write editorials. He's a brilliant journalist and we're all happy to have him back. He replaces Dan Freedman, who is joining the Giuliani campaign. Dan did a terrific job here. I'm sorry to see him go. I do note that Giuliani's rise in the polls began about the time word spread that Freedman was signing on. Good luck to all of them.

This isn't the first acquisition Giuliani has made from the Sun. Earlier, he hired John Avlon, who was a columnist and deputy editor at the paper.

-- Azi Paybarah

Ryan Sager has a bit of a scoop in today's Post -- conservative leader David Keene softening on Rudy -- and some fairly surreal photos on his blog from the Conservative Political Action Conference.

A blogger over at the UFT's Edwize blog takes a swipe at the New York Post's "barely post-adolescent editorial writers," and moderately post-adolescent editorialist Ryan Sager takes it as a compliment over at his own blog, Miscellaneous Objections.

"I know it was painful admitting that you'd been lying for three years about the problems with the teachers contract and accepting most of the recommendations from the fact-finding panel.  read more »

"But really, my age?

"Call me when you have an argument."

The folks opposed to regulating campaign finance are having some fun out in Washington State today, where a judge ruled that talk-show hosts backing an anti-gas-tax should be considered contributors to the campaign. As Ryan Sager details on his libertarian blog, the campaigners responded by filing a report that lists as contributors every newspaper that ever ran an article about them. Which I figured the lawyers who spent last week poring over the minutae of this stuff would enjoy; the staff of the Campaign Finance Board, less so.  read more »

Don't miss Ryan Sager's damaging attack on the Campaign Finance Reform movement in the New York Post today.

Sager has unearthed a video of one "reformer" bragging about how, to put it generously, his movement uses the tools of its enemies: massive spending campaigns, "astroturf" popular movements, and general deception.

Here's Sager's description of a speech by a former Pew Charitable Trusts staffer, Sean Treglia:

"Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of 'experts' all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.

"'The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington,' Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. 'The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.'"

Now we're not entirely on board with Sager's thesis. When you spend a lot of time watching how money sloshes around City and State politics, it's hard to view it as "speech," or to share Sager's libertarian hostility to the notion of regulating it.  read more »

But hypocrisy is always damning, and the slimy tactics of holier-than-thou reformers are fair game.

Before the election, the New York Post's Robert George raised some eyebrows with a New Republic cover story explaining why he couldn't support George W. Bush. Now one of his colleagues, Ryan Sager, is home from the Conservative Political Action Conference, and a bit freaked out by what he took as the central message:

"We Christians can do this alone, y'all who ain't down with J.C. best be running along."

Sager's and George's articles cast some light on the developing rift between the conservatives -- yes, we're still on conservatives -- around Rudy Giuliani, the Manhattan Instititute, the Journal and Post and Sun, on one hand; and the crowd running the GOP and the country on the other. New York vs. Washington is a shorthand for the split here, which is part cultural, part intellectual. On the cultural side, the New Yorkers are as likely to be Jewish as Christian; likely to have, as Barack Obama put it, gay friends; and unlikely to own guns.

But the ideological split is more important. For the New Yorkers, small government is often the end in itself, as is judicial restraint. They're libertarians and Reaganites when it comes to this. But for the Rick Santorums of the world, small government is a value that can be discarded when it comes to, say, government programs promoting marriage. And judicial restraint is just this week's line of attack against gay rights and abortion. If the legal tide shifts, they'll think of another one.

(New York's Conservative Party is aligned with the national movement. That may be part of why it's dying.)

Sager, along with being a Postie, is a fellow blogger and Sun alum. And for all his hawkishness and libertarianism, he apparently felt distinctly unwelcome at CPAC, as he writes at Tech Central Station:

"The arrogance that will prove problematic, ultimately, was that directed at the libertarian-leaning conservatives by the social conservatives. The message in that regard was clear: We Christians can do this alone, y'all who ain't down with J.C. best be running along.

"That was the message when Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute, who was on a panel to defend President Bush's proposed immigration reforms (supported by no less a conservative institution than The Wall Street Journal), was loudly booed by the anti-immigrant crowd. That was the message when a representative of the Log Cabin Republicans was booed and then asked by a student, 'You people [homosexuals, that is] already have the right to live together, you got the sex, what else do you people want?'  read more »

"In fact, if there was anything particularly striking about this year's CPAC, it is to just what extent Republicans have given up being the party of small government and individual liberty.

"Make absolutely no mistake about it: This party, among its most hard-core supporters, is not about freedom anymore. It is about foisting its members' version of morality and economic intervention on the country. It is, in other words, the mirror image of its hated enemy."

Teachers' Union chief Randi Weingarten sets a December 1 deadline for contract negotiations, which are currently on "life support."

If they fail, she could be a potent enemy for Mike Bloomberg.  read more »

She blames Eva Moskowitz and Post columnist Ryan Sager, who gleefully takes credit.