Twawking Tweets - Episode 2 - Top NY political tweets on Twitter
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New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito fires an NYPD whistleblower. In this episode, the following issues were discussed :
Twawking Tweets is sponsored by the Twitter account, @InformedVoting. |
RELATED Twawking Tweets - Episode 2 - Top NY political tweets on Twitter (Progress Queens)
Michael Hayes, LMT, has practiced massage for more than 20 years as a licensed massage therapist in New York City. |
City Council aide Artyom Matusov was fired for exposing a misrepresentation by Commish Bratton that "implied the percentage of arrests in which force was used had dropped in recent years"
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Speaker Mark-Viverito's War on Whistleblowers A Harvard University Kennedy School of Government-educated City Council staffer was fired on Friday after he blew the whistle on inaccuracies in the official testimony provided by NYPD Commissioner William Bratton last Monday. In the City Council hearing, on the subject of police use of deadly chokeholds, Commissioner Bratton testified that police use of force was declining, stating that police officers used force in about 3 per cent. of the time out of an annual arrest rate of about 400,000. After City Council staffer Artyom Matusov heard the testimony, he did some number crunching, and Mr. Matusov discovered that Commissioner Bratton's calculations couldn't hold water. According to statistics analyzed by Mr. Matusov, Commissioner Bratton's testimony was incorrect, because police officers self-reported arrests in which force was used at a rate more than double than the rate to which Commissioner Bratton testified. That doubled rate covered approximately only 10 per cent. of annual arrests, meaning the actual use of NYPD force during arrests could be extrapolated to be at a much higher rate.
In an interview with The New York Daily News, Mr. Matusov claimed that speaking out about Commissioner Bratton's faulty testimony cost him his job, because Speaker Mark-Viverito retaliated against him to protect Mayor de Blasio from any political fallout from Commissioner Bratton's perjury. Mr. Matusov noted how Speaker Mark-Viverito owes her political career to Mayor de Blasio, telling The New York Daily News that, “Remember, he appointed the speaker.” |
RELATED Council aide claims he was fired for disputing Bratton (Capital New York) City Council aide says he was fired for exposing Bratton’s bogus data (The New York Post) Melissa Mark-Viverito Won’t Say Race Was a Factor in Eric Garner’s Death (The New York Observer)
Michael Hayes, LMT, has practiced massage for more than 20 years as a licensed massage therapist in New York City. |
PUBLISHED : TUES, 26 AUG 2014, 06:57 PM
UPDATED : WED, 27 AUG 2014, 08:20 AM
The New York Daily News to City Council Speaker : Vote of No Confidence
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Threatening retaliation, the City Council's Manhattan delegation, overseen by Speaker Mark-Viverito, are on quest to stop leaks to the media about shady closed-door meetings to select the city's next chair of the Board of Elections The Editorial Board of The New York Daily News again admonished Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito for her lack of ethics and violations of transparency, this time over the decision by the Manhattan delegation of the City Council to meet in secret to select a new commissioner representing the Democratic Party on the city's Board of Elections. As if that weren't enough, the Editorial Board found it appalling that City Councilmembers, who are overseen by Speaker Mark-Viverito, further decided to retaliate against a fellow member for blowing the whistle about the shady closed-door meeting. Apparently, one of the Councilmembers has been leaking information to The New York Daily News political reporters, and City Council officials have set out to identify and punish the whistleblower. In an act of retribution, the Manhattan Councilmembers circulated a memo of unspecified origin "stating that the leaker would be expelled from the delegation if identified," according to The New York Daily News editorial. That Councilmembers are having to conduct the public's business in an environment of secrecy, political hostility, and likely retribution means that the City Council hasn't change much since it was governed by former Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who famously strong-armed the City Council to do her political bidding. This isn't the first time when self-appointed progressive members of the City Council have tried to use secrecy to subvert the public's business of running city government. Late last year, during the race to select the next City Council speaker, members of the Council's Progressive Caucus briefly considered voting by secret ballot to select their choice for City Council speaker. The Progressive Caucus, then co-chaired by Councilmember Mark-Viverito, was trying to finagle ways to rally support for her speakership campaign without agitating big money campaign contributors, who were then coalescing around her opponent in the speakership race, Councilmember Daniel Garodnick. The brief flirtation with the idea of a secret ballot was abandoned after government reform activists pointed out the hypocrisy of self-styled progressives flagrantly violating government transparency. Councilmember Mark-Viverito eventually won the speakership race, after she reportedly violated city ethics rules and possibly campaign finance laws, triggering previous condemnations by the Editorial Board of The New York Daily News. |
RELATED For Council Speaker Mark-Viverito, a Vote of No Confidence (The New York Daily News) |
Chelsea Manning on the Obama administration's police of making the U.S. Military control and restrict Media Freedom
| RELATED If a reporter’s embed status is terminated, typically she or he is blacklisted. (The Fog Machine of War : Chelsea Manning on the U.S. Military and Media Freedom * The New York Times) Mushroom clouds, duct tape, Judy Miller, Curveball. Recalling how Americans were sold a bogus case for invasion. (Lie by Lie : A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq * Mother Jones) "The Justice Department has completely lost sight of the First Amendment." (A Radical Departure on Press Freedom * The Wall Street Journal) | From her prison confines in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, former United States Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has written a scathing editorial, published in today's Sunday edition of The New York Times.
"However, the concerns that motivated me have not been resolved. As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance." Fromer PFC Manning, now jailed by the Obama administration as part of the White House crackdown against government corruption whistleblowers, provides a needed reality check -- really really REAL TALK -- on how the government bullies journalists into reporting government propaganda in the mainstream media, deceiving the public about the government's actions. Her editorial is a must-read for any First Amendment activist, blogger, and voter. |
High-level U.S. government officials, including Clinton and Biden, demand for the assassination of Assange and to list WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization. In this country, do we prosecute whistleblowers ?
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Obama eulogizes NYT publisher Sulzberger ; Still Persecuting Whistleblower Manning
After the death of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was announced yesterday, President Barack Obama praised the courage of Mr. Sulzberger throughout his journalism career.
Although President Obama didn't mention Mr. Sulzberger's risky -- but legal -- decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, President Obama acknowledged the important role that Mr. Sulzberger has played in improving our democratic form of government.
"He was a firm believer in the importance of a free and independent press -- one that isn't afraid to seek the truth, hold those in power accountable, and tell the stories that need to be told," Mr. Obama said.
But Mr. Obama made no connection between his praise for Mr. Sulzberger, but his continued campaign to prosecute the government whistleblower, PFC Bradley Manning.
Activists question how could the Obama administration reward Bradley Birkenfeld for his acts of whistleblowing, but then prosecute PFC Bradley Manning for exposing war crimes ?
Manning and Assange are each just "test case" for Governments' hostile treatment and retaliation against Whistleblowers.
The pre-trial hearings in the case of Bradley Manning, accused of the biggest classified data leak in U.S. history, have kicked off in Maryland. But there's growing concern over their fairness, with the U.S. government withholding more than 200 thousand relevant documents from Manning's defense.
By neglecting whistleblower protection laws and escalating the Manning and Assange cases, the US government is setting a precedent to be applied to journalists, future whistleblowers, activists and bloggers, activist Sibel Edmonds told RT. Edmonds is the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers coalition, an independent alliance. The activist believes Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are just the beginning.
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.
