Step right up, kids. (NY Post)

A lot of bombast has been spread on both sides of the great Barclays Center battle of the past decade, but Andrea Peyser manages to take the cake as she always does, along with the amazing "photo composite" the Post put together of Bruce Ratner as ring leader. Cue Ms. (or is it Madame?) Peyser:

When Barclays is christened this fall as home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, Ratner will have pulled off the seemingly impossible. Almost single-handedly, he’ll have brought the Borough of Kings, long neglected and overshadowed by Manhattan, back to buzzworthy health.

“A young person can go to Brooklyn to see hometown [rapper] Jay-Z. A family who lives in the projects will walk here or take the bus. This is the soul of Brooklyn.’’

The buzz is back! But not without alienating the poor, project-dwelling locals. How about those $30 tickets for all! Without this, there would be nothing but needles littering the borough's beloved brownstones.

When I toured this site in 2004, it was a disgrace. It was scarred with toxic rail yards that had squatted on this spot, like a disease, for decades. Then I spied a pile of hypodermic needles.

It was long past time to breathe air back into Brooklyn. Or shut the lights and get the hell out.

Brooklyn 2.0: We'll leave the lights on for you.

(Courtesy: AndreaPeyser.com)

The New York Post’s tender-hearted angel of mercy, Andrea Peyser, is best known for the deeply humanistic perspective with which she handles the sensitive criminal proceedings of our legal system. Less well appreciated is her concern for the good physical hygiene of those society has cast aside.

“My advice to Pedro: Don't pick up the soap.”—on Sen. Pedro Espada, Jr., May 15, 2012

“Enjoy the communal showers, Sen. Piggy.”—on Sen. Espada, Jr.,  April 27, 2012

“...the boys can dine on the prison's famed kosher cuisine while enjoying warm showers.”—on Sen. Carl Kruger and Micahel Turano, May 3, 2012

“... guaranteed to spend years in the company of large and hairy individuals you wouldn't want to meet in the shower.”—on Cameron Douglas, April 21, 2010

“...he's going away for a very long time—permanently trading life in a mansion for...shared showers with men half his age.”—on O.J. Simpson, December 6, 2008

“...Bernie might be singing in the communal prison shower by now.”—on Bernie Madoff, January 13, 2009

“The monster who once hid in the shadows and called the shots must from now on cower in the shower.”—on Peter Braunstein, May 24, 2007

“As she spends her days stocking up on unfamiliar cotton underwear and liquid soap—safer for those communal showers—it might seem high time for the sponge-headed blonde to take responsibility for her crimes.”—on Paris Hilton, May 8, 2007

“Aha! Now we know how Martha Stewart triumphed through five months in the federal pokey. Two words: Liquid soap.”—on Martha Stewart, July 21, 2005

“Today...Martha Stewart gets busy stocking up on her supply of liquid soap—safer for those communal showers....”—on Martha Stewart, March 6, 2004

Andrea Peyser

It has finally happened: Andrea Peyser is a TV recapper. With bete noire Alec Baldwin overseas promoting his new Woody Allen movie and the Casey Anthony trial long since concluded, the Post's Ms. Peyser chilled out with some TV. And what she saw upset her.

Think: “Sex and the City’’ — for ugly people.

Psycho-sexual blue ribbon hate-spewer Andrea Peyser! In today's column "The Hate in Zuccotti," Ms. Peyser tracks the movements of a man from Georgia who came to Occupy Wall Street to announce on his sign that capitalism is "THE REASON ARABS HATE US [sic]" who explains that he is "not anti-Semitic." She cites a few fairly isolated examples of flare-ups within the Occupy Wall Street movement that has anti-Semitic overtones and notes that the movement has "a serious Jewish problem." She also notes the Anti Defamation League—ever quick to jump on even the first, most remote scents of antisemitism—putting out a "weirdly enabling statement" which noted that there's "no evidence that these incidents are widespread."

Of course, Peyser's disappointment to this result appears to weigh so heavily on her as to attempt her own way of getting attention from the ADL—in the form of a condemnation or otherwise—by comparing Occupy Wall Street to pre-World War II Nazism:

Organizers are desperate to maintain that acts of bigotry are isolated, carried out by a small cadre of hoodlums who don’t represent the movement. Some have even suggested vocal Jew-haters are “plants” sent by folks who want to take Occupy down.

Sound familiar? Germans dismissed prewar Nazis as a harmless bunch of clowns, too.

Snap! Andrea Peyser with the real talk, except prewar Germans didn't dismiss the Nazis as clowns so much as took to them like wildfire as a movement openly blaming Jews without reluctance for the economic problems plaguing their nation, already once-defeated by the world. It also wasn't a movement with any Jewish support; not having the ADL's stamp on a charge of antisemitism—about as easy to procure as an actual stamp—is like, well, sending mail without postage. Which is to say: it's likely to come back return to sender.

Furthermore, Peyser's not even well-versed enough in the Occupy Wall Street movement to detail the history of AdBusters (the anti-capitalist Canadian magazine whose poster-campaign triggered the very first supporters of OWS) which was legitimately accused of antisemitism in 2004 when they published a list of Jewish neo-conservatives, asking why these people weren't parading their Jewish hertiage around with their political views. If one were to set-up a straw man argument like Peyser's, it kind of starts there (and quickly ends at Occupy Wall Street's well-documented Kol Nidre service, held on the eve of Yom Kippur, the recipient of exactly zero anti-Semitic jeers).

Yet, it's the New York Post; could any New Yorker reasonably expect that august news organization to not have as much fun with Occupy Wall Street as a senior would with a freshman vis-a-vis locker room torture? Ergo, a new feature: The New York Post On Occupy Wall Street, where we will chronicle the daily musings of New York City's most openly misanthropic paper on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Surely, we've already missed a great deal of classics, but no doubt: there's plenty more like this to come.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Stay outta Cobble Hill! (NYMag)

The Observer's favorite newspaper columnist weighed in on our favorite grocer today. "Here’s Reason No. 501 never to set foot in the People’s Republic of Park Slope," Andrea Peyser declares in The Post, referring to the brewing Israel boycott at the Park Slope Food Co-op. Her screed is as loud and droning as a Phish concert.

Earlier this week, we gave space for a BDS defense, so it only seems fair to let Ms. Peyser air her grievances, as well.

The issue isn’t plastic bags, banned from the co-op in 2008 to save the planet. Nor is it plastic water bottles (banned), or Coca-Cola (banned in protest of labor abuses in Colombia). And it’s not about meat, which arrived on the free-range shelves in 2002 -- to the horror of militant vegans -- along with microbrewed beer but, tragically, no Budweiser.

[...]

The issue isn’t plastic bags, banned from the co-op in 2008 to save the planet. Nor is it plastic water bottles (banned), or Coca-Cola (banned in protest of labor abuses in Colombia). And it’s not about meat, which arrived on the free-range shelves in 2002 -- to the horror of militant vegans -- along with microbrewed beer but, tragically, no Budweiser.

[...]

Mazor just wants this to blow over, so she can go back to bagging her all-natural greens. “If I have anything to do with it, it won’t come up for a vote.”

Being reduced to shopping at Pathmark would be a major letdown. In Park Slope, it might come to that.

Ms. Peyser, herself a BroBo, even gives The Observer a shout-out, quoting from our interview with Alan Dershowitz. This reporter can now die a happy man.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Andrea Peyser rides in Trump's limo in New Hampshire, and captures the three-time presidential almost-candidate talking like a candidate.

"Mr. Trump! We have a 21st birthday here!" someone shouted.

"Oh, a voter!" he said, evidently unaware that the voting age is 18. "Vote for Trump!"

Uttering the phrase "Vote for Trump" comes up to -- and almost crosses  - the line of what federal officials say could make him an officially declared candidate, something the reality television star who has shied away from disclosing detailed info about himself and his company has long avoided. 

The guidelines, from the Federal Election Commission:

Examples of activities that indicate that an individual has decided to become a candidate include, but are not limited to:

(3) The individual makes or authorizes written or oral statements that refer to him or her as a candidate for a particular office.

Trump adviser, Michael Cohen, also hugged the line of official candidatehood, with his recent trip to Iowa, which Texas Rep. Ron Paul said violated FEC rules.

She explained that she was ejected after she kept asking Tiger Woods if he still loved his former wife at a press conference. Everybody else thought the golf was more important. "Tiger and his enablers don't like to admit he's a public figure and a role model who behaved like a slippery politician. So I treated him as such," she wrote.

Apparently she was causing a scene all over the place. The Associated Press reports that on Mr. Woods' first hole, Ms. Peyser walked onto the fairway with her notepad to ask him a question after his approach shot. "She had never been to a golf tournament and was not aware that reporters were to stay by the ropes," according to the AP.

The issue, for those--to evoke another bird species--who bury their heads in the sand, centers on the hundreds of Prospect Park geese who used to reside at the Prospect Park lake. Beloved by local children and families, the birds were rounded up and gassed in July by the federal government (with city approval), in an effort to prevent the sort of birdstrikes that brought down a U.S. Airways flight in 2009.

Even so, critics, including former Parks Commish Henry Stern and animal experts, question the efficacy of the technique. Not to mention the political indelicacy.

But sublety be damned! This is Andrea Peyser we're talking about:

The geese must die.

An epic battle is looming between the forces of goose and evil.

New York's militant animal-rights activists are outraged by the massacre this summer of some 400 Canada geese in Brooklyn's bucolic Prospect Park by government assassins -- and they're mobilizing for a fight. So crazy are these birdbrains for the nasty creatures, some vow to use their bodies as human shields to protect the flying plane-droppers from destruction.

...But as Round 2 approaches in the Great Goose War, officials from the US Department of Agriculture's wildlife service, who came in and gassed the birds to death early one July morning, say they won't back down. Not while geese are still getting stuck in jet engines, like those of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger.

More here.

Today is the season opener for both the Yankees and the Mets; it's big enough news to crawl around the bend from the back sports page to the front, and the Post highlights a story about the pressure on C.C. Sabathia to make good on his enormous contract with the Yankees: "CC earns his stripes," reads the text over a background of Yankee pinstripes. But the refer only tells readers to "SEE SPORTS," which we think is just a way to ask the reader to flip the paper over and take a look at its backside. After all, today they might be able to grab some nonregular sports readers. And who knows, maybe Mr. Sabathia can be made into a tabloid star the likes of A-Rod or Derek Jeter? Umm, probably not.

Daily News: Today the News gratifies us by actually playing Wood War with the Post: this at least is how we take their front-page treatment for Liz Benjamin's story out of Albany this morning. "Top Dems' ultimatum on Gov. Paterson: SHAPE UP OR ELSE!" reads the copy. Beneath: "Elizabeth Benjamin exclusive." The news here is fairly straightforward: "'Top New York Democrats have privately set a deadline of early November for Gov. Paterson to turn his poll numbers around or they'll urge him not to run next year,'" the story leads. "'The idea is to let him get through the budget and get through the summer,' said a prominent Democratic donor who sees the fall elections as the cutoff for Paterson's improvement." But who are these "Top Dems?" Not completely clear. And what form did this deadline take? Was there a letter? A meeting? We're sure Ms. Benjamin knows the answer, but the reader won't if he turns to page three to find the story. Nevertheless, it's a big coup: This is the kind of thing the Post's Fred Dicker is supposed to have in the bag. And more importantly, Ms. Benjamin, whom we've liked a lot better than Mr. Dicker since she started this gig to begin with, is getting the star treatment. It's a direct provocation of the Post, and here the News has the goods to back it up. What's the rest of the News front page? Sports! "PLAY BALL" reads the top headline, in yellow on a red background. This sure stands out, and as we pointed out before, it's a good day to have some sports on the front. But sports and politics both skew to Mars—where is Venus on this front page? The lower left is a refer to a story about President Obama's condemnation of North Korea's rocket launch, which is only sexy by a weird sort of analogy. Something on this page had to give. The News had the Gisele and Tom story, too; and plenty else besides inside the paper to give this page some balance. Maybe today wasn't a good day to devote half the wood to sports after all?

General observations: We have to give some points to the News today for taking aim at a Post stronghold. But they were wrong about the season opener treatment on Page One: the back page could have sold sports with a tiny refer on the front, giving room for something besides sports and politics on the page. What might it have been? Well Gloria Vanderbilt would have been a bit of a stretch; the Post isn't selling Ms. Peyser with the piece, which they needed to do to make an 85-year-old's erotic ramblings a selling point. That Sabathia refer on the front page does nobody any good at all. But finally, that giant "SHOTGUN WEDDING" headline is a grabber, and nothing on the News front page can match it. It's a weird tale to be sure: will there be any fallout whatsoever for actually shooting at these photographers? It's pretty bad news for Tom and Gisele. We want to read more, and so "SHOTGUN WEDDING" wins the day.

Winner: The New York Post