Dear Headline Writer (The first post here) - I love it when you Leftists show your true peace & love compassion. Why do you (who consider your opinions so highly) always resort to violent cursing when you don't get your way?...and you ALWAYS blame it on the mythical "right-winger".

Sorry... typekey isn't working!!!

The only thing being shoved down my throat is fear of art. New ideas are dangerous, they make me afraid. Save me, governor.

And the governor, lacking any backbone himself, dropped his drawers and rolled right over.

We live in so much fear, the terrorists have already won.

BAKAYAROU....you pathetic demorats and repubes can only argue politrixs over the site of a tragedy.

sad, but on the other hand, not surprising, the left and the right are solely responsable for the shit america has become in this day and age..

evolved humans vote third party. just to say KUTABARE to the humans who are stuck in stupid.

shut up dumb-asses

Step # 2 the White House in 08

Step # 3 Evict the UN from our shores

Step # 4 Offer a one ticket to Canada for all the

left wing cry-babies

I think it was a stupid idea. The plans showed an empty warehouse where people milled around looking at giant P.C. photos. The was no grassroots concept of what was going to be installed. Good riddance. I have no problem with buying pants at the WTC site.

because it was canned due to victim family concerns, not because 'most people think it is a stupid idea".

i could be wrong, but as i understood it, the museum's purpose was to educate people on the long history of similar events with the hope that insight may help avoid such stupidity in the future. they didn't want to sign a contract that would give nimbys the right to censor the content. that's different from a 'down with the white man' agenda.

hijiki: The plugged wan't pulled on this idiotic idea by the 9/11 families alone. I agree that they should not be in charge of this process, and I agree that the process has been one long bad joke. But why do you have a problem with the IFC being canned when most people think it is a stupid idea?

WTF-Est: A museum doesn't hurt, unless some left-wingers decide to use it as an opportunity to bash the evil white man for stealing Indian land. That's what happened here and I'll take a Starbucks over that any day.

Tim N.: You seem to think shoving this project down NYers throats would represent a triumph of freedom. Is this one of those lame "if we don't build it the terrorists will win" arguments?

I think bootsy missed the word "elsewhere" in the lead paragraph of that story. The Freedom Center site is not going to be turned into some downtown version of the Time Warner Center. Thanks to the Governor, it'll be yet another mostly empty building downtown where people feel bummed out and unsafe. The future boarded-up storefronts will be a few thousand feet away.

Really, it just turned into more of a Freedom Mall.

nola, personally i don't care about the 'freedom museum'. the memorial is there for the mourners and that's where i feel the victims' family input should end. but my point was that the whole process so far is a parody of the word 'freedom'. i wonder why you see this as a party politics. i know you have trouble hearing opinions outside your party-religion, but i'll tell you again, i'm no left-winger.

By the logic of "remember the dead where they died," perhaps we should raze all of south Brooklyn to honor the colonial regulars who died in the pitched battle there during the Revolutionary War?

It's not gonna be a cemetary. It's gonna be a freaking shopping mall. Why would a museum hurt?

I'm not a republican or a family member or a left-wing hypocrite, and I think the IFC was a terrible idea. And nola's right: you can mourn however you fucking want. But putting that center there would be like installing a museum on heart disease or smoking or drunk driving at a cemetery. Yes, we want to know why these deaths occurred. Just do it somewhere else - remember the dead where they died, plain and simple. No museum is warranted or necessary.

ttorison be mad confused, son.

Nola hit it on the head. First of all, aren't ALL museums and art galleries "Freedom Centers"? The fact that there would be a door (and probably an admissions charge) to get into the "Freedom" Center made it questionable from the get-go. The idea that today's Artists would celebrate 'freedom' with flags and heroes and celebrations of America was absurd. It would have been a cultural free-fire zone and a flashpoint for protests and the sort of publicity-driven "art". Let's face it, this building would not please families of the dead even if it had Lynne Chaney in charge it.

So who wanted it? Pataki. Because it was part of Daniel Liebskind's master plan. Hey, is there ANYTHING left of that guy's master plan?

I blame Pataki for the entire debacle downtown post 9/11. Simply put, his cronies picked the wrong master plan. They should have bought out the Port Authority and all the lease holders from the get-go and looked at the area with a clean slate. They should have concentrated all the re-building money the feds were putting up and put it into transit, security and a memorial. Take care of the transit problems downtown and make people feel safe and the place will bloom. My guess is, the whole area would be studded with construction cranes right now instead of, well, nothing much.

The current re-building effort seems much closer to Sir Norman Foster's arguably better master plan than Liebskind's...minus the gorgeous twin tower replacement that frankly would have been a huge terrorist target and un-rentable fiasco. So what DO we have? We have a lot of angry artists and their supporters and more space for yet another banal office building with no tenants. Or a nice vacant lot until they can figure out what to build on it. Great job George.

The re-building of downtown has been a disaster, but thankfully this minor, fixable disaster has been averted. And only a few years and millions of dollars have been wasted. Let's hope it further dooms Pataki's hopes for higher office. If he can't rebuild a few acres in New York how the hell would he deal with Iraq? Or New Orleans for that matter.

Culture DOES belong downtown. I've written before about how much sense it would make to re-locate New York's two woefully under-visited history museums on the site. But what downtown really needs is a new Governor.

Begging for handouts? Bashing the government? Nola, how did you know that I was a Republican congressperson? Good job, Sherlock!

Thank you, heroic Governor Pataki, for declaring ground zero an art-free zone.

Too bad this also makes it a freedom-free zone.

I always thought we were attacked because our enemies thought we didn't have the guts to stand up for what we believed. They must have been looking at Pataki when that conclusion was reached.

And four years later (more time than it took us to win WWII for crying out loud) we still have a gaping hole in the ground.

Nice work, scumbag.

nola nola

sipped a cola

told us all to go fuckola