Council Redistricting In Exchange For Campaign Endorsements ?

Are Speaker Christine Quinn and Mayor Michael Bloomberg Engaged In An "Endorse-to-Play" Quid Pro Quo Over The City Council Redistricting ?

Council Redistricting Corruption Silence

From True News From Change NYC, written by Gary Tilzer :

Many of his fellow reformers felt that Citizens Union puppet general Dick Dadey sold out last year when he supported Albany's compromise to put off independent redistrict for 10 years. But nothing can compare to Dadey and the rest of the goo-goos, editorial boards', and reformers' silence on the corruption going on with the City Council redistricting operation. For starters, the appointed council redistricting commission is controlled by two people supporting Quinn for mayor in 2013 : the council speaker herself and her puppet master the mayor. Although the redistricting commission work has just begun, there are already reports that county bosses Crowley and Lopez, ethic and minority leaders are already dealing with Quinn operatives to cut districts favorable to them or those they support in exchange for their endorsement for Quinn's 2013 mayoral bid.

BOE Misconduct : Election Fraud ?

Troubling actions by Board of Elex members :
Rangel-Espaillat vote-count odyssey continues

''Troubling signs have now emerged that some officials at the board crossed the line in an all-out effort by the Democratic Party establishment to ensure a Rangel victory, and that the board’s staff wrongly disqualified hundreds of paper ballots,'' reported Juan Gonzalez in The New York Daily News.

Gary Tilzer, on his blog True News From Change NYC, wrote that :

Those who benefit from the BOE want the Rangel race over that is why they were counting until late into Friday evening. They hope questions raised by the election like other major corruption stories about the board are lost in the media's limited attention span and unwillingness to follow up on corruption stories. The question unanswered include: Why were 79 district recorded as zero on election night. The result of those zeros was an election night blow out of Espaillat has turned into a 2% squeaker? Why did BOE deputy chief Tim Gay meet with team Rangel and the district leaders that were supporting the congressman? Were Dominican poll workers and translators prevented from working in the primary to help Rangel? Ballot fixing by the former head of the BOE and Bribery by the HANC representative on the board involving the purchase of new voting machines are long forgotten.

Quinn NYT Infomercial Fluff

To find out how real journalists assess City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's record, one needs to look no further than the sensibility expressed in this blog post on True News From Change : NYT Sets the Definition on How To Judge and Pick the Next Mayor and It Fits Quinn

In his blog post, the journalist Gary Tilzer makes many astute observations about David W. Chen's infomercial fluff piece about Speaker Quinn, and perhaps this is the most sharpest of Mr. Tilzer's criticisms : ''It was the publisher of the NYT, along with the NYP and Daily News, that used their papers to support changing the term limits law to allow Bloomberg and Quinn to run for a third term. Mr. Chen does not challenge Quinn when she brushes off her term limits and other critics as 'naïve' ideologues.''

It's already been documented how Christine Quinn bluffs her way through important social issues.

What Speaker Quinn is doing by making her ''unapologetic'' ''move to the middle'' is selling out the working class families of New York City. Her policies favour real estate developers -- and come to the detriment, suffering, and mass displacement of working class New Yorkers. Speaker Quinn's vision of New York City is a continuation of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's vision : more glass and steel luxury condos and less hospitals, firehouses, public schools, and senior centers. Speaker Quinn wants to make life so unbearable to the average wage-earning New Yorker that we all pick up and leave town.

How do we know that Christine Quinn has sold out her values and beliefs and still find herself to be in a place of denial about it, so much so that she accuses her critics of being “naïve” ideologues ?

Speaker Quinn's ideas about leadership in New York, by supporting the luxury condo conversion of St. Vincent's Hospital, which used to be the only full-service hospital with a Level 1 Trauma Center below 14th Street, is like GLAAD publicly supporting the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger. Not only would AT&T be in an even stronger position to undo net neutrality, but what is GLAAD doing by meddling in a telecom merger approval process with the FCC ? Likewise, why is a ''supposedly!! celebrated LGBT third-term politician like Christine Quinn rushing toward the ''middle'' of the political spectrum, if it means that she has to abandon her idealistic beginnings and instead now oppose paid sick leave and a living wage bill ?

"AT&T was one of the companies whose local representatives sits on the board of directors of the Tennessee chamber of commerce," wrote John Aravosis at Americablog. "You remember them, the group that endorsed and actively lobbied for the measure repealing gay and trans rights ordinances in the state, mandating it so that no trans person can ever change their birth certificate gender in the future, and banning any future civil rights ordinances for anyone in the future. That AT&T."

What does the intersection of St. Vincent's Hospital/Rudin Family Luxury Condo Conversion and the GLAAD/AT&T T-Mobile mega deals have to do with Christine Quinn and New York City politics ?

In each case, you see the erosion of core values of fighting for an activist's central reason for being : serving their constituency. But once you get to be so big, you can blow off you constituency as “naïve” ideologues (or drop the F-bomb on them, the way that one of her administrative assistants did).

If, throughout our nation's history, our goal has been to distribute power and authority equally among voters, then the voters, who have less choices on election day, get their voices muffled. Who is going to challenge GLAAD to focus once again on its original intention ? Who is going to put pressure on Christine Quinn to deliver on the community’s demands to stop all the hospital closings that are happening across New York City ?

It is not too much to expect that the people, who you elect to City Council, start to deliver something tangible for New York City voters.

• If you disliked how City Council members extended term limits without a voter referendum, then let her know : quinn@council.nyc.ny.us
• If you agree, that Speaker Quinn needs to hear the voices of communities, who are demanding that hospitals stop closing all across the five boroughs, then let her know : quinn@council.nyc.ny.us
• If you can no longer accept a weekly threat by Mayor Bloomberg to layoff teachers and firefighters, and to close schools and firehouses, then let her know : quinn@council.nyc.ny.us
• If you want Speaker Quinn to shut down her $50 million slush fund, then let her know : quinn@council.nyc.ny.us
• If you refuse to settle for City Council members, who take tens of thousands of campaign donations from real estate developers in exchange for what seems like pay-to-play real estate development deal approvals, then let her know : quinn@council.nyc.ny.us
• If you believe that Speaker Quinn betrays the LGBT community, then let her know : quinn@council.nyc.ny.us
• If you have your own issue, that you'd like to bring to Speaker Quinn's attention, then let her know : quinn@council.nyc.ny.us

Speak now, or forever hold your peace.

True News From Change Blog Has Been Restored

Breaking News ! Update on True News From Change NYC Blog

Gary Tilzer's blog, True News From Change NYC, about New York government corruption, political reporting, and other commentary about government transparency, has been restored. Earlier today, it had been discovered that the True News blog had been suspended by Google for inexplicable reasons overnight. The suspension of the blog had become a focal point of support today by many New York bloggers and activists. No reason for the suspension is yet known, but New York bloggers suspect political censorship might have been one motive behind the removal of the blog.

CENSORED : True News From Change NYC Blog

Update : True News From Change NYC Blog Has Been Restored

Google Blogspot Blog Has Been Removed For No Reason ; Blogger Community Suspects Political Censorship ; Call To Action

Please send an e-mail to press@google.com and copy Gary Tilzer, the owner of the censored blog, at Gtprinter@aol.com -- demanding that the True News blog be restored.

True News is a blog dedicated to reporting about government scandals, politics, and transparency. (Here is the cached version of the True News blog.)

This is not the first act of censorship against Mr. Tilzer. Before the 2010 election, a YouTube video that Mr. Tilzer produced was banned by NBC/YouTube and had to be replaced with an edited version. In the last couple of years, others have faced incidences of cyber censorship or retaliatory activity. One and a half months before the 2009 election, the YouTube channel owned by the artist and political commentator Suzannah B. Troy was likewise censored, until bloggers and a lawyer intervened on her behalf. In 2010, this blogger was attacked by computer viruses 3 or 4 times, including on the day this blogger reported to the New York Department of State Committee on Open Government an act of censorship committed by Brad Hoylman.

Flashback : Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hailed Internet freedom as tool to ‘spread truth and expose injustice’

We need your help to keep courageous bloggers, like Mr. Tilzer, doing what they do. If you are reading this, it is because you are turning to the Internet for reliable information. For it to be here, bloggers, like Mr. Tilzer, have to be able to do their work without fear of retribution or censorship.