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.

For those that thought faded journo Jimmy Breslin had passed on to his great reward, fear not for ol’ Jimmy is back and this time he wants you all to know that you Tea Partiers are wild-eyed racists filled with madness. Heck you are all as crazy as Bobby Kennedy’s killer Sirhan-Sirhan, you Tea Partiers are dangerous, and prone to riot and your inflammatory air is disturbing Jimmy’s retirement. Shame on you. In a rambling, maudlin piece for Harper's Magazine, Breslin, a former Newsday columnist, took after the Tea Party movement in a thinly veiled attack that compares the “national...

The lovely-looking restaurant and bar The Breslin begins lunch service tomorrow, and co-owner Ken Friedman (The Spotted Pig) is planning on serving alcohol despite objections from the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque across the street. Earlier this month the mosque’s leaders called a meeting with Friedman at The Ace Hotel, where The Breslin is located, and asked, "Can you move the bar?" Friedman's response makes us want to hurry over to The Breslin right now for a dram of Laphroaig to show our support (and drown out the voices): I laughed. And the guy said, "Oh, you think that’s funny?" And I...

NEW YORK – The daughter of writer Jimmy Breslin has died after collapsing at a New York City restaurant four days earlier. Bellevue Hospital Center spokesman Stephen Bohlen says Kelly Breslin died at the hospital Tuesday night. The cause was not immediately known.

There are, as stated earlier, now more than 2,000 young Americans who have died in Iraq. She wants to be a candidate for president and she doesn't even mention our dead, or our next dead. Wait. Here is question 9: "How concerned are you that the administration's unilateral policies have reduced our number of allies and endangered our national security?" How absolutely marvelous! "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is," her husband said when he was questioned about rolling around on the office carpet with a young office worker. And she not only copies, but clearly surpasses. She...

Columnist Jimmy Breslin: Clinton holds 'new North American record for fakery' Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., is coming under heavy fire for her continued support of the war in Iraq, with some of the strongest rhetoric against her coming from the political left. "Hillary Clinton today holds the new North American record for fakery," writes Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin. "She copies. She sneaks and slithers past you with her opinion on a war that kills every day." Breslin unleashed his scathing attack on the New York Democrat after reading a mailing sent out by the senator's campaign packed with questions...

This is a review of the performance of George W. Bush in tight times in this nation. It might explain the single solitary most catastrophic collapse of American government in all of our times. Mark ye well. This was the week when we turned a major American city into Haiti, and racism put its hand out and started to choke a nation, and it may not let go. With the water coming from the sky and the bottom of the sea, driving with such ferocity that a major American city, New Orleans, followed its face into the water, George W....

Bush and Breslin: Reasons to cry Michael Mayo November 4, 2004 A nation of self-righteous bullies got what it deserved on Wednesday. Another term of Bush. No more Breslin. The little guy is dead in America. Now I don't know what to think. I climbed a staircase Wednesday in honor of Jimmy Breslin's abrupt retirement from regular newspaper writing. I grew up reading him, never met him. He started in sports and never quit loving underdogs. Every sportswriter knows the better story is always in the losing locker room. There'll be plenty of losing stories the next four years. Maybe...

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...

Somewhere around 9:45 last night, Richard Cheney, vice president of the nation, turned and said to Sen. John Edwards, Democratic candidate, that he missed big votes in the Senate and had the worst attendance record. Cheney said that he sat as the head of the Senate and was there for practically every session. Cheney spoke in a deep, dull, confident voice and said things like, "al-Zarqawi has been in Baghdad before the war and after the war." As if all this smoke and fire and reports of dead soldiers and dead babies are an illusion. Now he said snidely to...

Jimmy Breslin Making call on sham of political polling Making call on sham of political polling Sep 16, 2004 Hard to keep good circulation going Sep 14, 2004 A fire truck that just keeps going Sep 12, 2004 Constantly being dogged in this city Sep 5, 2004 Kerry should counterpunch Sep 3, 2004 Enter a Category View List September 16, 2004 Anybody who believes these national political polls are giving you facts is a gullible fool. Any editors of newspapers or television news shows who use poll results as a story are beyond gullible. On behalf of the public they...

In the wake of the massacre in Russia a couple weeks ago, I discovered that New Hampshire has a freedom even I didn't know about: A state law protects the second amendment rights of teachers and parents even when they are in government schools. Here is part of an LTE I wrote about this in a New Hampshire paper: ------- ...there is a lot we as individuals in New Hampshire can do to make this state a more difficult (terror) target. Start taking advantage of the wonderful and almost unique self-defense freedoms we have here. For instance, if you're a...

People in the news business are 100 times smarter -- or more educated, I should say. And, by far, the most freakin' boring group of people." "They've missed the entire idea of life and death and everything," Jimmy Breslin says, whisper-screaming it like there's a good-size frog in his throat, forcing the words out between massive, mouth-filling bites of his Billy Goat double cheeseburger. We're talking about the Catholic Church, the nominal topic of the legendary columnist's latest book. But the "they" could be anyone on his enemies list: editors, rich people, right-wing politicians. "When the World Trade Center went...

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.

Writer Jimmy Breslin Takes on Catholic Church By Arthur Spiegelman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Some people call him a saint of American journalism -- a man who walks, talks and breaks bread with the homeless and the afflicted, a man who doesn't hesitate to take on city hall or march into a riot. Others call Jimmy Breslin a bully, a braggart and a misquoter, the sort of fellow who'll yell at anyone regardless of race, creed or national origin. A colleague once combined both ideas: Breslin, he said, talks like Archie Bunker, the loudmouth bigot of TV's "All in the...

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.

Excerpt from Breslin: "The great American news industry, the Pekinese of the Press with so much room and time and nothing to say, compared Reagan to Lincoln and Hamilton, they really did. This is like claiming that the maintenance man wrote the Bill of Rights. And almost all the reporters agreed that Reagan was the man who brought down Russia in the Cold War. Just saying this is absolutely sinful. The Cold War was won by a long memo written by George Kennan, who worked in the State Department and sent the memo by telegram about the need for a...

(Talon News) -- The overwhelming outpouring of affection during the week of remembrance for former President Ronald Reagan was apparently too much to bear for some of his liberal critics. While most who disagreed with the former chief executive managed a kind word or remained silent while the state funeral took place last week, some were unable to observe a respectful period before lambasting Reagan. Jimmy Breslin, a columnist for Newsday, wrote that putting Reagan on a $3 bill would be a suitable tribute. "This man Reagan was 93 years old and out of it with Alzheimer's for many years...