On November 15, the mayor defended the media blackout that kept reporters out of Zuccotti Park as the NYPD evicted its occupants, claiming it was for the media’s own good. "It's to prevent a situation from getting worse and to protect members of the press," the mayor said.

But in light of reports that journalists were wrongfully arrested and bullied, the New York Civil Liberties Union appears to be offering some additional protection.

"Many of you were roughed up, harassed and even arrested yesterday," read an email sent out to reporters by an NYCLU employee last week. The email urged reporters to come forward with stories of abuse from the Tuesday raid.

"Problems with the NYPD? Let me know," it said. "If need be, we can speak on background only or we can keep names and other identifiers confidential."

The NYCLU did not return request for comment, but we caught up with Norman Siegel, the longtime director of group, and a legal adviser to protesters. In 2009, Mr. Siegel successfully sued the city for police press credentials for non-traditional journalists.

“The bearer of a press card is entitled to cross police lines and barriers for breaking news events,” Mr. Siegel explained. “Monday night clearly was that.” There is a provision to deny press access, but the order must come from a supervising officer or DCPI, not just any officer on the street, he explained.

"It's possible that a lot of what happened is a violation of NYPD patrol guides,” he said. He was summoned down to Zuccotti Park himself at 1 a.m. the morning of the raid. In past demonstrations, Mr. Siegel and other civil liberties advocates cooperated with the police to counsel protesters on their rights and reduce total arrest counts. Mr. Siegel was denied access to Zuccotti Park alongside reporters that morning, when arrests totaled more than 200.

Mr. Siegel was quick to add history shows the government can not delegate fundamental rights like the First Amendment to law enforcement.

“It was unseemly for the city, through its police department, to deny journalists their right to report the news,” he said.

(It is worth nothing that it was the Mayor's office, not DCPI, that defended NYPD's arrest of reporters.)

“The reporter is not only doing his job,” Mr. Siegel said, “under the First Amendment, they’re doing their job for all of us.”

DCPI Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne reiterated Mr. Siegel’s description of NYPD’s limited mandate on The Brian Lehrer Show on NPR on Friday, when he explained that NYPD is only concerned with unlawful conduct.

“We’re not in the business of judging whether a movement has political steam or not,” Mr. Browne said.

He went on to explain that no reporters were arrested at Zuccotti Park during the raid, where reporters cooperated and were held two blocks back. As for the arrests of reporters made later that day elsewhere in lower Manhattan, they might not have happened with more oversight.

“Had we had somebody there, DCPI would probably try to accommodate a reporter getting caught up in a situation with a group pushing through police lines,” he explained. He added that the five reporters had their arrests voided.

Mr. Browne made no defense for keeping media out of the Zuccotti raid altogether, explaining that a press pass does not mean the automatic right to cross police lines.

"There are other provisions,” he said, "providing basically we allow it at that moment."

"Just like a crime scene, we’ll bring reporters in after the fact."

WNYC Captain Brian Lehrer.

Pledge drives finally translated into line drives for WNYC. They scored their first win of the softball season in a nail-bitingly close game against New York. The score was tied 2-2 at the top of the eighth inning before WNYC went on to win 6-2.

New York movie critic Logan Hill said the game had the tension that is lacking in many summer blockbusters. Compared to the “sloppy, overblown movies this summer,” Mr. Hill found the game have an almost Indie narrative arc.

Taking advantage of playing on the small, AstroTurf-covered Walker Field, Freakonomics co-author and recent addition to WNYC’s on-air talent Stephen Dubner hit a homer for the public radio station early in the game.

New York’s Ben Mathis-Lilley’s coaching strategy (“drink more beer, loosen up”) somehow failed to score a win for the weekly. The team, clad in baseball shirts with the Lindsay Lohan-as-Marilyn Monroe cover, was, however, successful in not knocking over their Bud Tallboys as they guarded the bases.

After their win, WNYC debated the origin of the phrase “tallboy” before heading to nearby bar Antarctica to get some refreshments of their own. New York decided some batting practice was in order before joining their opponents for beers.

By the time that New York moseyed over, WNYC was finishing their pitchers of beer. After Mr. Dubner said his good-byes and identified himself, the not-so-jaded New York team acknowledged they were starstruck by the bestselling author’s presence.

Last week did not leave the public radio station in such high spirits. The Wall Street Journal Capitalists pummled them into the golden era of radio, 15-3.

Mr. Dubner clad in a red and white, inside-out New York Times Magazine jersey masquerading as the similarly colored WNYC issue, offered a statistician’s perspective of the loss.

“The other team is better,” said Mr. Dubner, citing the high ratio of WNYC players over the age of 45 as a possible reason for the disparity between the two teams, and jokingly made up an economic explanation on the fly: “Murdoch bought the ump.”

It was a father-son moment for Brian Lehrer of The Brian Lehrer Show. His son, Nathan, who just finished his freshman year at Dartmouth and confessed that he has not listened to his dad’s show since he left for Hanover last summer, replaced his father at first base mid-way through the game.

Much like one's public radio voice, “it’s very relaxed,” said the young Mr. Lehrer, of having his father as his coach.

“At the end of the day, we go home knowing more about John Cage than the other team,” said Rex Doane, the team’s manager and a promo producer at the radio station. “When it comes to avant-garde music, we have everyone beat.” This is true.

ksmoke@observer.com

Washington Post and Time.com alum Catlin Thompson gets the editor slot, where she takes over for the award-winning Anna Sale, who becomes the site's first full-time reporter. Their site has been populated by lots of good reporting from WNYC's newsroom, and insightful analysis gleaned from Brian Lehrer's indispensable show. The move is another step by the radio station to put their muscle behind online reporting, something not as many other their broadcast competitors have done.

By the way, I'd be saying all these nice things even if they hadn't let me work there.

In other journo staffing news: Bond Buyer's Ted Phillips is leaving the paper to join Newsday's growing team, as an economics reporter. His last Bond Buyer story is here. He starts at Newsday on March 7.

Anyway, official WNYC announcement here:

I am thrilled to be able to make two announcements about the It's A Free Country team.

First, there's a new member joining our ranks!   

Caitlin Thompson will start at WNYC on Tuesday as Site Editor for It's A Free Country, having most recently helmed the Web site for PBS Wide Angle and its special series Women, War & Peace, which explores women's roles in conflict. Caitlin covered the 2008 election for The Washington Post, where she produced the daily Post Politics podcast and worked on Citizen K Street, an investigative series on the rise of lobbying. From there, Caitlin went on the campaign trail for TIME, where she profiled the McCain campaign's resurgence in New Hampshire, the Barackstar effect and how to eat a Huckaburger, among other stories. She collaborated with Ana Marie Cox on a series of daily politics videos called the Swampcast and oversaw TIME's podcast department. Caitlin graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism and is the titleholder of the women's tennis team's pizza eating contest.  

Caitlin will report to me and will take the reins from Anna Sale, about whom I get to make my second announcement.  

Anna will transition to a new role with It's A Free Country, that of Site Reporter. In her new position, Anna will return to her first love -- reporting. She will use her considerable skills (her reporting has won Capitolbeat, regional Murrow and Connecticut and West Virginia AP awards, and she was an Associate Producer for The Great Textbook War, a radio documentary that won a Peabody and duPont-Columbia award) to find and tell lots and lots of local, regional and national stories as we head into what won't be anything less than a fascinating presidential election cycle.  

I also want to take this opportunity to thank Anna for the enormous amount of hard work she has done to pilot It's A Free Country from launch through its first six months. We wouldn't be where we are without her dedication and creativity. Thanks, Anna!

  Please join me in welcoming Caitlin and congratulating Anna.  

Kathleen [Ehrlich]

Lehrer asked Paladino about his pledge to cut government by 20 percent, and Paladino said that after submitting his budget to the legislature on February 1, he would shut the government down--save for public safety and public health measures--if an agreement was not reached in eight weeks.

"It's going to be bloody," he told Lehrer. "It's not going to be fun, it's not going to be more of the theatrics."

He was asked as well about a Daily News endorsement of Andrew Cuomo which, after running through some of Paladino's controversial statements in the past, said, "New York's governor must be cut from finer cloth."

Paladino responded that he had a very good conversation with the Post's editorial board, but added that as for the DN, "You should note. We told them to go fly a kite when they asked us to appear in front of their editorial board."

A few more items of note:

• He talked about his plan to pay family members $18,000/year to look after their elderly relatives, thus saving the state money on Medicare. "Other states are doing. New York is lagging. Why? Because probably the nursing home lobby is greasing 'em up nice and fat."
• He threatened to use whatever legal means necessary to stop the Islamic cultural center near ground zero, and evenquestioned if the organization was legally allowed in their current home, saying, "You tell me--why did these people call the project Cordoba?"
• He said there should be no mosque anywhere that the dust cloud from 9/11 covered.
• On Bloomberg's support for the project: "Who is Bloomberg to say anything? He just happens to be mayor."
• And asked by Lehrer if someone was fit to be mayor who forwarded along emails that showed an African tribal dance with the words, "Obama inauguration rehearsal" underneath, Paladino responded. "I'm human. I'm human like you and like everybody else. So don't pontificate to me, OK?"

We will update with audio when it's available.

dfreedlander@observer.com

Normally, I would say let the investigation run its course.  However, these are not normal times.

The state is in the midst of a fiscal crisis. A leadership crisis.  And there is a crisis of confidence in government. 

I believe it is a time for honesty.  And I believe David Paterson knows better than anyone else how this investigation will end. 

He knows what is being investigated and he knows what’s at stake. He knows what he did, who he talked to.  He knows under whose order the State troopers contacted this woman.

If the investigation turns out the way many suspect, his resignation is almost inevitable.

If that is the case, then it is in the best interest of the people of New York for him to cut bait now. 

If he knows, as I believe he does, what exactly will be revealed in the course of the investigation and if it is, unfortunately as is suspected, then for the sake of the people of the state, why go through this investigation and the turmoil that will be a part of it.

Republicans called for a rare slow roll-call vote, which meant that senators in alphabetical order were called on to say yea or nay. Here's an alphabetical list of the senators: three of the first four were key bellwether votes on the bill.

So when Joe Addabbo, the Queens Democrat who voted second, said, "Nay," it became clear to anyone following the public, but not private, nose count that the bill would fail.

"I think that the slow roll call had a consequence, because when people saw what was going to happen, it was inclined to snowball," said Gerald Benjamin, an expert on state government and professor at SUNY New Paltz. "I think the issue of whether it was purposeful is another question. There's a difference between saying Addabbo sand-bagged gay marriage on purpose, or circumstantially because they were called upon first to cast their votes. I'm having a hard time thinking it's purposeful."

After Addabbo came Jim Alesi, a Rochester Republican who visibly agonized over his ballot before voting no. Then came Darrel Aubertine, who also voted no. The final tally was 38-24.

One Democrat familiar with the lobbying effort said that the vote was all but locked in before the roll call. But it was certainly a "public signal."

Addabbo denied he had a snowball effect. Brian Lehrer asked him this morning on WNYC if affirmative votes by him and Alesi might have created pressure on other senators.

"I don't think so," Addabbo said. "I think as a conference they understood what they were going to do. Again, given the fact that nobody spoke on the bill, I think coming into the room it was clear that there were not enough votes. It was certainly there wasn't a strong majority to vote for it. Number one, that was clear. I also think it was clear that there was not enough votes."

While he's being attacked as a traitor—one gay-interest blog called him the "most heinous defector"—Addabbo told Lehrer that he cast his ballot based on the expressed desires of his constituents, and had never been a committed yes.

"I can see that [civil rights] argument. I can see the religious argument. I can see the morality argument. Again, I can see the argument on many levels," Addabbo said. "I've always kept my feelings personal because I am but one opinion. And it's an issue I really don't have strong convictions on either way. That's why I did keep an open mind. I felt that I was most neutral up until the end."

John Liu: “This is the chief financial officer in the city. Not CFO in the traditional sense that works very closely with the CEO.But someone who is independently elected, [someone] that should work with the mayor whenever necessary, but will always be an independent check on the city agencies to make sure there is no waste in the budget."

Melinda Katz, on whether the comptroller can set policy: “If you make an investment decision, whether it’s diverting money to specific growth industries that’ll create jobs in the city, or you’re divesting from companies that have business ties to Iran--I mean that’s setting policies. If you do an audit where you highlight the inefficiencies of an agency or discontinue an agency that doesn’t work, that’s setting policies.”

WNYC is hosting a comptroller debate tonight at 7 p.m. Listen here.

"We're in an emergency. We're in a crisis," Paterson just told Brian Lehrer on WNYC. "And one of the things that's disturbing me about a lot of people now is they acknowledge we're in a crisis in an academic sense, but then when you try to respond to a crisis, you start hearing regional and political interests. If a house is on fire, if the fireman goes to the east wing or the west wing first, as long as they're getting people out of the building and trying to save everybody."

Republican legislative leaders are calling for funds to be spent in accordance with longstanding formulas that guarantee balance among the state's regions.

"This is the latest in a long example of these people who do not understand that this state is teetering on the verge of insolvency if we don't get people to work and generating revenue in our economy," Paterson said.

In either case, on Thursday, June 12, from 11 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, WNYC employees will be holding a "stoop sale" in anticipation of their imminent move to new headquarters.

A bunch of public radio personalities will be on hand at the south side of the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan as WNYC folk attempt to raise some money for charity by pawning off "mementos" from the station's home for the past 84 years.

According to an email from WNYC here's some of what's up for grabs: