“Now Get on outta here, because I gotta get back to this screenplay. It’s about a pair of tough talking 1970s cops who don't take nuthin' from nobody. I call it ‘Hackshaw and Gatemouth.’ Kinda like ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ but with less sex.” –Long Forgotten Room 8 Video Blogger Adam Green

It did not start out well between me and with Rock.

Rock had introduced himself to the New York blogocracy in fall 05 with an incredibly pompous post on a thread on the Politicker, the New York Observer’s Ben Smith edited political blog, which, at the time was like Rick’s in Casablanca, the place where everybody goes.

The fact that my house, practically on the shores of the Gowanus Canal, shares a councilman with Greenpoint is not, in and of itself, proof that the lines for Brooklyn City Council districts are preposterous. Districts have to end somewhere and, even under the fairest of plans, some neighborhood is going to get split in a manner which will seem unfair to those so victimized.

That being said the lines are ridiculous. Given the Voting Rights Act (VRA), and geography, it is not per se preposterous that Park Slope would share a Councilman with Borough Park, or Brooklyn Heights with Greenpoint.

Much has been written by more knowledgeable writers about the efforts of the Working Families Party to game the campaign finance laws for fun and profit, in an effort to win friends and influence people and policy.

As I’ve noted previously, the WFP’s shenanagins, whether barely legal, or transgressive of the applicable statutes, assault the intent of campaign finance laws in at least three distinct ways. They allow candidates to elude both the contribution and spending limits embodied in the law; they transform any attempt at transparency into an unventilated hookah bar; and they potentially abuse taxpayer dollars by perhaps allowing candidates to undeservedly access matching funds.

Less is written about the Party’s efforts to game the system at the other end.

A quick glance through the campaign sites of the candidates for NYC Comptroller shows that all of them avoid talking about the two most important questions in state and local public finance, the questions whose answers determine how much worse off people will be in the future than today (as taxpayers, service recipients, future public employees, or all three), and how much more will today’s interests be allowed to take from that future. When determining how much money the City of New York has to contribute to its pension funds, and the cost of past and future retroactive pension enrichments for past and present public employees, what is the rate of return on pension assets that is fair and reasonable to assume, and from what level of assets? And how much more will people have to pay in the future to fund the retiree health insurance being granted in return for services provided today?

Is it just me, or is does the Working Families Party (WFP) only endorse candidates whose pants are on fire?

This may be appropriate for a political institution whose departing treasurer, when called upon to explain his exit (amidst accusations of violating campaign finance laws and very conveniently missing two filing deadlines), took the press equivalent of the Fifth Amendment and referred all questions to his attorney.

A similar reluctance to give a straight answer extends to its candidates.

From CITY HALL NEWS

Independence Party Mailers Tout Union Ties For Anti-WFP Candidates

When one sticks ones neck out, and says the candidate has no clothes, vindication is very sweet. 

TABLET MAGAZINE: “The editor of Der Blatt, Alexander Deutsch, told Tablet—via our columnist Eddy Portnoy, a professor of Yiddish at Rutgers University—that, after being contacted by Lander’s Satmar-community liaison Rabbi Yitzhok Fleischer, he “received copy for a paid advertisement and put it in just like any other ad.” Fleischer, he said, “bought the advertisement in the name of the Lander campaign,” and thus Der Blatt sent the campaign a bill (which is now around the internet).”

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/15436/did-nyc-candidate-publish-anti-gay-ad-to-attract-satmars/print/

In last week’s Sunday’s Daily News, Errol Louis wrote about my problems with one of my opponents in this race (Leithland “Rickie” Tulloch). I didn’t blog about it before, mainly because I didn’t want to sensationalize the issue of intimidation in politics. But since Errol used his column to put it out there, I will now elaborate: albeit in a nutshell. Believe me that there is a lot more to this and I will blog on it eventually. 

Way back when this race was shaping up and there were many potential candidates, I had a few short conversations with Mr. Tulloch. And after a while all he seemed to want was for me to get out of the race. I found him to be disrespectful. I used to have him on my e-mail list, and would even send him my blog column long before it was openly published. I took him off my list because I don’t think he is a nice person. I arrived at this conclusion after he berated a few people when they told him that they were supporting (or considering) me over him for the 40th council seat. There is much more to this. 

ONLY THE BLOG KNOWS BROOKLYN: ‘Sadly, it seems pretty clear that someone associated with one of the other campaigns or some kind of political entity is working pretty hard to attack Brad Lander (candidate for City Council in the 39th district) with a wild and crazy fake ad in a Yiddish newspaper..”

Bolstered by the Times endorsement and still considered the likely victor in the race for City Council , candidate Brad Lander’s campaign has gone on the offensive, in every meaning of the word, trying to make lemons into lemonade by turning their campaign’s darkest moment into his purported victim-hood at the hands of an evil and shadowy conspiracy which took out an ad in a Yiddish language paper in which Lander is portrayed as the one candidate committed to fighting the dreaded scourge of fellatio (usually translated as “toeivah,” which literally mean abomination, but not really if one is doing it correctly).

Council Candidate John Heyer’s website (http://www.johnheyer.org/) contains endorsements extolling his commitment to public education from six present or former public school teachers:

Lana Hoerburger, NYC Public School Teacher Retired
Laura Scott, Principal, PS 10
Carolyn Zodda, NYC Public Teacher Retired
Janet Lattey, UFT Member & Park Slope Resident
Robert Scott, NYC Public School Teacher
Assemblywoman Joan L. Millman

It contains no mention of his stand in favor of tuition tax credits, or his belief we should be using public dollars to shrink the public school population.