​If you read the Which Lazy Bastards Are Ripping You Off section of yesterday's tabloids — you can find it after the Who Is Sandra Bullock Not Sleeping With/Adopting section — you may have spotted the story that the Post headlined "Millionaires' welfare 'con' ": The Brooklyn DA's office was prosecuting 32 New Yorkers for receiving nearly $1 million in welfare benefits they weren't entitled to. The Post zeroed in on a couple of landlords with "three luxury vehicles" who'd lied about their assets to get taxpayer cash; for NY1, the hook was a married Brooks Brothers employee who claimed to be a single mom on her application, raking in $460,000.

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​Bonus awards on Wall Street are expected to be up almost 20% this year, and Mike Bloomberg thinks they should be higher. Mayor Mike announced Friday on his radio show (mp3) that New York City workers should do something about that: "Our cops, firefighters, teachers -- all municipal workers -- should be down there screaming: `Pay Wall Street people more.' That's where their salaries come from, not the reverse." Per the Post, he was being puckish.

Presumably he was also being puckish about this: according to Bloomberg, it's just not fair that everyone's picking on Wall Street, because the biggest bailouts last year were AIG (which, actually, is here in New York) and the auto industry. Payments to both, of course, were dwarved by the payments made to Wall Street, but they took place the year before.

Wannabe public employee Harold Ford has, so far, declined to say if he is paying any extra municipal salaries this year.

​As most in the world of media reporting are aware, one of the Voice's sister papers, SF Weekly, was sued by a competitor, SF Bay Guardian, and almost two years ago the Guardian won a $15 million verdict. SF Weekly is appealing that decision, and that appeal should be heard this year.

Just recently, however, the Guardian has been making some noise about trying to collect on the judgment before the appeal is heard, leading to various news stories, some more accurate than others.

But we were caught by surprise by the really garbled story put out this morning by the Bloomberg news service which suggested that the Guardian was somehow about to force this newspaper, the Village Voice, into bankruptcy.

That's nonsense.

We're posting the letter that a company lawyer, Randall Farrimond, has sent to Bloomberg's media reporter, Greg Bensinger, explaining how badly he screwed up the story, and asking for a correction. The letter, after the jump...

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Prominent DC Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway has released the results of a phone poll (commissioned by tourism promoter and prominent former city employee Cristyne Nicholas, nee Lategano) of 300 New Yorkers with landlines who got a bunch of general knowledge questions about New York wrong. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the questions got a few of the answers wrong too.

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​Former White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said it without too much blowback months ago on Fox, and columnist Michael Goodwin rolled it out largely unnoticed last week in the New York Post. It wasn't until Rudy Giuliani decided to use the fantasy-world talking point about the Bush administration's perfect anti-terror record on Good Morning America that people - even, eventually, complaisant interviewer George Stephanopoulos - started to pay attention.

Now America's former Mayor, whose post-9/11 career is largely predicated on 9/11, is trying to explain why domestic attacks which occurred under Bush don't count as domestic attacks which occurred under Bush. According to Giuliani, he was clearly discussing attacks after 9/11, which weren't "major." According to a spokeswoman, he was clearly discussing attacks after 9/11, which weren't "islamic." Both of them are still mistaken.

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​Apparently a lot of people suspect that the frail comandante of Cuba has died, so we went down to the bodega and asked a guy they call Cubano, who at first seemed to confirm the report; but, after some minutes of conversation and gestures, we found that he merely wished Castro dead, and had no intelligence to suggest that this was the case. We're taking that as a denial. Also, Castro Death Watch doesn't have it, and we imagine they'd be among the first.

​Whenever we see a piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, we know exactly what's going to happen. We'll be entertained and titillated as the frizzy-haloed essayist takes us once again into the trippy world of statistics and ideas, only to confront us with evidence that some axiom or law we thought was on solid ground is in fact misleading and counterproductive.

Our immediate reaction is nearly always the same -- 'Wow! I never thought of it that way. What a genius this Malcolm Gladwell is!'

But then, inevitably, as his seductive reasoning sinks in, we get the nagging feeling that Gladwell's been gaming us, and that despite the requisite overlooked small-time experts that he's dug up to back up whatever it is that he's debunking, we wonder if he really isn't full of shit.

Well, now there's lovely proof that yes, Malcolm Gladwell doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

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​Just to bring everyone up to speed, in the past year, the media/society et al have demonized the Yankees based on accusations from the following sources:

• A laundry list of names from a clubhouse source who not only has biased connections rendering clear conflict of interests, but who developed this Who's Who in American Juicers largely through second-hand sources


• A journalist more noted for her lack of credibility than her linguistic skills, and whose resume is littered with false accusations


• A blog of a team who has been dominated by the accused

In the medical writing business, this is what we call "cherry-picking data."

In the sports writing business, this is what I call "bullshit."

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The papers today are full of the story of Deborah Perez, who claims her dad was the Zodiac Killer -- who terrorized San Francisco in the 1960s and has never been caught -- and has presented documents, handwriting analysis, and a pair of what she says was one victim's eyeglasses as evidence. San Francisco cops are looking into it, and the press ranges from agnostic to mildly skeptical.

Our man at True Crime Report flat-out calls Perez's story "ridiculous." He says Perez contacted him earlier with her spiel, and shows "why none of her claims held water then and why they don't now." He says that the glasses don't match what the victim was known to be wearing, that a section of a card sent by the killer Perez claims to have penned is obviously pre-printed, and that her May 2008 statement requires "hipwaders."

Give a look and see what you think.

It was interesting to see the Times pounce so viciously on a recently published memoir, saying that it was filled with inaccuracies, and that it was yet another example of the troubling trend of publishers trying to pass off fiction as fact.

In this case, it was today's Times sports section that eviscerated the book "Odd Man Out," Matt McCarthy's memoir about the year he spent in the minor leagues pitching for the Angels rookie-league team in Provo, Utah. McCarthy, the Times writes, portrayed his teammates and coaches as a bunch of neanderthals who were generally foul-mouthed idiots. But so many basic facts in the book are incorrect -- one player, for example, is supposed to make fun of disabled kids during a bus trip that took place after he'd actually been promoted off the team -- that it calls everything in the book into question.

Well, isn't it refreshing to see the Times take that position! You see, as Voice staff writer Graham Rayman has shown, the Times has a very different standard of credibility for another book that the newspaper promoted heavily -- a child-soldier memoir whose factual errors are far more egregious than the things in McCarthy's little book about baseball.

McCarthy has apparently invented some unflattering stories about his colleagues -- that they faked injuries to get rest, for example, or cried when he left the team.

Ishmael Beah, on the other hand, in his book "A Long Way Gone" invented the murder of six children in a UNICEF rescue camp.

A team of Australian journalists found serious problems with Beah's account of life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, but were unable to get Beah to answer their questions. The Voice's Rayman managed to confront Beah with the problems with his book, but the author provided only mealy-mouthed answers.

Still, the Times, which has pushed Beah's memoir in a big way, has hardly acknowledged that there's any question about the bestseller, and certainly hasn't investigated the book's problems the way they went after McCarthy's yarn about minor league baseball, putting three reporters on it and going so far as to check the book against published box scores.

Apparently, a major book about child murder isn't worth that kind of scrutiny. At least at the Times.