The New York Observer

NASHUA, NH Newt Gingrich made an appearance at the Hillborough County Republican Gala in New Hampshire on the eve of the primary election here and said that winning the White House will be just the beginning of the fight for the GOP.

"We are a country where the incumbent president is going to have a billion dollars to attack and smear the Republicans. We are a country where every institution of the left is going to fight every day, so even if we win the presidency, that is only the beginning. But the struggle is going to go on. If you look at what is happening with Scott Walker in Madison, you have a pretty good idea of what this is going to be like." Read More

Friday evenings are a typical time that political folks release news that they don't want to be overly emphasized in the news cycle, and today is not one of those exceptions. Albany's legislative task force has decided to add another State Senate seat, something that will surely be contended in lawsuits by Democrats.

Marty Dilan isn't sure how the Senate Republicans get to 63 seats.

Mike Gianaris isn't too happy with the Senate Republicans' redistricting efforts either. Read More

In a December 28th letter, GOP State Senator Greg Ball wrote a politely scathing letter to Republican Congresswoman Nan Hayworth, focusing on her District Director, Rob DiFrancesco.  The letter begins by noting that Senator Ball first brought this to Congresswoman Hayworth's attention close to a year ago, "and I have still not received a response."  Senator Ball is rumored to be a  possible primary challenger against the Congresswoman, and this wouldn't be the first time that he criticized her actions. 

Senator Ball's letter, which you can read below, makes big claims. It argues that the staffer in question has "seemingly admitted" to stealing everything from printer toner to  email accounts. The letter highlights each example of theft with the word "stealing" in bold print while claiming there is a federal investigation involved as well. Read More

Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. defended Mayor Michael Bloomberg's policy of requiring food stamp applicants to submit fingerprints in a Facebook post this afternoon. Governor Andrew Cuomo said he wants to stop food stamp fingerprinting in his State of the State address Wednesday arguing that it deters some people from signing up for the program. Councilman Vallone took issue with the idea that people feel stigmatized by being fingerprinted. "I was fingerprinted to be a prosecutor," wrote the Councilman, who worked for several years as an assistant district attorney. "I havent needed therapy at all to get over the stigma. Most city workers are fingerprinted." Read More

Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1, and RoseLee Goldberg, director of Performa, will co-curate "100 Years of Performance" at Boston University Art Gallery. The exhibition includes seminal works like Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965), in which the artist instructed her audience to cut the fabric from her body until she was naked, and Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains, where about 500 volunteers armed with shovels moved a 1600-foot sand dune just outside Lima, Peru four inches away from its original location.

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Robert E. Lucky Jr. of New Orleans was sentenced to two years in prison for selling forged paintings that he claimed were the work of Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter, according to the Associated Press. It goes without saying (but it's Friday and we feel like making a stupid and obvious joke), Mr. Lucky is not, in fact, so lucky.

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There is a scene in the movie American Splendor in which the main character, Harvey Pekar, played by Paul Giamatti, riffs about other Harvey Pekars whose names disappear and reappear. "Who are these people? What do they do? What's in a name?" he begs of the camera.

But while Mr. Pekar was too timid to ever pick up the phone and find out, Aaron Cohen was not. “I looked up my name in the phone book and there were eight Aaron Cohens living between 72nd Street and 96th Street, just on the Upper West Side, you know, just between West End Avenue and Central Park West,” Mr. Cohen told The Observer in 2009, and in that same year, he met a gaggle of nine AC's, as he calls them, at Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side. From there, he plotted out a documentary about Aaron Cohens around the world, finding and friending them through Facebook (he is now friends with 132 of the 1,000+ AC's on the social network), and just launched a Kickstarter campaign for the film last night around 10 p.m. from the Salt Lake City airport, after his redeye flight back to New York was canceled.

Mr. Cohen spent most of his career as an entrepreneur, as co-founder of Concrete Media and Bolt.com and CEO of Menupages and Anyclip). He teaches a class called the History of Internet Media at NYU. "Twenty-five years ago, Woody Allen, Spalding Gray, and Ross McElwee sparked something inside of me. The Aaron Cohens is that thing," he says on the campaigns Kickstarter page.

Mr. Cohen spoke to Betabeat about the via Gchat from the plane (edited slightly for punctuation) about the film, Kickstarter, Facebook, and being Aaron Cohen. Read More

Former New York City Comptroller Bill Thompson, who came close to defeating Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2009 and says he's running again in 2013, is calling on ABC and the producers of their “Work It” producers to apologize to Puerto Ricans everywhere for a joke made at the community's expense on the show.  This may be a sign that Mr. Thompson is making a concerted push for the Latino vote for his next mayoral run.

Noting that the show as a whole has been panned by critics, Thompson said in a statement that the “Puerto Rican-Latino community has struggled for decades to combat negative stereotypes in the media while encouraging a true portrait of their contributions and achievements.” Read More

Blame it on Giuliani, we suppose. Once a haven for thrifty twenty-somethings and starving artists, locals are being priced out of their East Village neighborhood by bars and boutique shops catering to those who can afford NYU tuition.  The local community board, however, is trying to remedy the situation and reclaim the hood, DNAinfo reports.   Read More

Like Jenna Bush, Meghan McCain and Chelsea Clinton before her, Liz Cheney, daughter of Dubya V.P. Dick Cheney, has secured a paid TV gig. The former State Department employee and Republican Party activist is joining Fox News as a contributor and substitute host, the Times reports. Ms. Cheneyis no stranger to the network. She Read More