FBI Investigates Anti-Christine Quinn Group, Questions Donations To De Blasio

About this time last year Christine Quinn had a comfortable lead in the polls and many thought that she was a lock to become New York City's first openly gay mayor. Late in the summer of 2013 she fell to third place not long after the Anyone But Quinn campaign began running attack ads that accused her, among other things, of allowing the closure of a major West Village hospital. The FBI is now investigating the group behind Anyone But Quinn over donations made to them by a union with ties with now-Mayor Bill De Blasio. The investigation is centering on the continuing battle to ban the city's horse-drawn carriage trade, which Quinn opposed. Via the New York Daily News:

De Blasio came out against the Central Park industry after receiving campaign donations from the anti-carriage group, New Yorkers for Clean, Livable & Safe Streets.  NYCLASS supporters spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking Quinn shortly after de Blasio publicly embraced their cause. The “Anyone but Quinn” campaign blasted the Democratic mayoral contender who entered the race as the favorite to succeed former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Agents have zeroed in on $225,000 donated to NYCLASS by a union run by de Blasio’s cousin, John Wilhelm, and a key de Blasio fund-raiser, lawyer Jay Eisenhoffer, several sources familiar with the matter told The News. A spokesman for Quinn declined to comment Saturday, as did J. Peter Donald of the FBI’s New York office.  De Blasio, asked Saturday about the investigation, denied that the feds were looking at him.

RELATED: The Daily News opposes any ban on the carriage trade and has rallied its readers with a petition to De Blasio, who had vowed to eliminate the 156 year-old industry in his first week in office. De Blasio has suggested replacing the carriages with electric replicas of antique cars.

NEW YORK CITY: Christine Quinn Signs Off As Speaker Of The City Council

"Dear friends, I'm writing today to say thank you, and wish you a Happy New Year. Thank you to each and every one of you who came to committee hearings or town hall meetings, who sent emails, who made phone calls. Thank you for lending us your ideas and making your voices heard, for playing a part in shaping the city we love so very much. And thank you for helping make the greatest city in the world even greater. As I think back on my eight years as City Council Speaker, and my fourteen years as a member of the Council, I can't help but feel grateful, humbled, and proud of all we accomplished together.

"We helped thousands more families find affordable homes, and thousands more students get full day pre-kindergarten. We created good middle class jobs, passed some of the strongest environmental protections in the nation, and helped New Yorkers lead longer and healthier lives. Though we are ending this chapter of our work together, the story of New York City is still being written every day in every corner of the five boroughs. I look forward to continuing to fight by your side in the months and years ahead, to give every New Yorker even greater opportunity, to find innovative solutions to our biggest challenges, and to ensure that our best days are always ahead of us." - Christine Quinn, in a press release issued on her last day as speaker and member of the New York City Council.

UPDATED: Hers To Lose

A documentary about Christine Quinn's mayoral campaign.

UPDATE: I've replaced the trailer with the full documentary.

Stop Everybody

Last night I noticed that the Stop Christine Quinn people, having won their years-long crusade, are now retweeting posts from an account called Stop Bill De Blasio.  And the website linked in the account is posting tweets from Stop Christine Quinn. I'm confused.

Christine Quinn Concedes

Openly lesbian New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn finished with 15% of the vote. She has conceded.

De Blasio Far Ahead In Final Mayoral Poll

New York City's mayoral primary is tomorrow and the final poll released today shows Bill De Blasio maintaining a 14-point lead at 39%, just one point shy of the cutoff to avoid a runoff.

De Blasio, 52, elected four years ago to the citywide watchdog office of public advocate, retains the lead among seven candidates. Former city Comptroller William Thompson has 25 percent and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has 18 percent. About 8 percent were undecided, and 18 percent said they may change their minds, according to the poll released today, which has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. “There are no undecided voters on Election Day,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Hamden, Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “If de Blasio picks up just a few of those undecided voters, he’s over the top.”

Spoof Ad For Christine Quinn

Evan Wolfson Endorses Christine Quinn

Unlike Dustin Lance Black and George Takei, Freedom To Marry head Evan Wolfson actually lives in New York City.

Dustin Lance Black Endorses Quinn

Quinn's campaign is heavy with celeb endorsements this week. Both Black and George Takei, it should be noted, live in Los Angeles.

George Takei Endorses Christine Quinn

NEW YORK CITY: Bill De Blasio Widens Lead To Possible Runoff-Proof Position

The top line above is the latest poll result in the New York City mayoral race.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has skyrocketed to 43 percent in the latest mayoral race poll, an astonishing climb that puts him past the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. The poll of likely Democratic primary voters from Quinnipiac University released one week before the September 10 primary election finds former Controller Bill Thompson and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn locked in a brawl for second place with Thompson getting support from 20% of likely voters and Quinn just behind with 18%. The two are in a statistical dead heat in the poll of 750 likely Democratic primary voters that had a 3.6% margin of error.

Former MTA head Joe Lhota, the leading GOP candidate, is not predicted to face a runoff either.

New York Post Endorses Quinn & Lhota

Christine Quinn today earned a newspaper hat trick as the third of New York City's three biggest dailies joined the New York Times and the New York Daily News in endorsing her. (Like the Times did on Saturday, the Post has also endorsed Republican front-runner Joe Lhota, the former head of the MTA.)  But the Rupert Mudoch-owned Post cannot resist slamming Quinn's "lurch to the left" even as it endorses her.

If we were seeing today the Chris Quinn that we saw a few years ago, this would be a more enthusiastic endorsement. As speaker, Quinn often showed courage and responsibility by siding with Mayor Bloomberg, as well as by opposing the dangerous proposals of her far more radical council members. Ever since her mayoral campaign kicked in, however, she has lurched hard to the left, embracing the kind of ridiculous nostrums for which she had previously shown considerable and rightful contempt.

A perfect example: the ill-advised mandatory paid sick-leave bill, which for years she courageously refused to bring to a council vote, only to reverse herself last spring when she was sharply criticized by her mayoral opponents and the unions. Similarly, she first declared unconditionally she would retain Ray Kelly as police commissioner. Then she made her proposal for an NYPD inspector general, a new and unnecessary layer of oversight. That turned the race into a referendum on the police, and stop-and-frisk came under withering political attack. Hard to imagine Ray Kelly would take her up on the job offer now.

The primary is two weeks from tomorrow.

NYT Endorses Quinn & Lhota

The New York Times editorial board has endorsed both Christine Quinn and Joe Lhota for mayor. Republican front-runner Lhota is the former head of the MTA.

About Quinn:

We had already made up our own minds in favor of Ms. Quinn, but the Wednesday debate would have clinched it anyway. Candidates were asked what legacy they wanted to leave after two terms. “More people in the middle class,” Ms. Quinn said. It was a perfect answer, and she could have left it there. But, Quinn being Quinn, she threw in supporting details. She wants 40,000 more apartments the middle class can afford to live in. She wants to repair crumbling public housing, providing “quality conditions” for 600,000 people. She wants to make the school day longer and replace textbooks with electronic tablets. At the buzzer, she threw in: make the city “climate-change ready.” A lot of good ideas that, in Ms. Quinn’s case, add up to an achievable vision, and one we would be glad to see come to pass.

About Lhota:

Few people know better than Mr. Lhota how city government works. He was an expert budget director for Mr. Giuliani, and then became deputy mayor for operations. In 2011 and 2012, he ran the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which, under his leadership, recovered amazingly quickly from the damage done by Hurricane Sandy. Mr. Lhota, son of a New York City cop, is not a glad-handing pol, but a practical and efficient one. When The Times’s editorial board interviewed candidates for the mayoral endorsement, it asked them to supply one practical idea to improve the quality of life in New York. Some were flustered. Not Mr. Lhota, who gave an instant, excellent answer: park-and-ride lots at the far ends of subway lines, to coax drivers at the city’s edges onto mass transit.

UPDATE: Queers Against Quinn responds on their Facebook page.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone to see the New York Times endorse Christine Quinn for the Democratic mayoral nomination; it's exactly what one should expect from a paper that's nothing but a shill for Bloomberg, Inc.; in fact, the Times all but says that it's endorsing Quinn in order to carry on Bloomberg's legacy, following with an almost entirely fictional account of Quinn's role as Speaker of the City Council. On the same editorial page, the Times endorses Joe Lhota for the Republican nomination, which should give you a clue as to how far to the right the NYT has swung over the course of the last few decades, serving as a cheerleader for Bloomberg's 12 years of misrule & for the real estate industry of which the Times is a part (few know that the NYT itself holds major real estate interests in the city). Here's the good news: the NYT's disgraceful endorsement of the worst candidate in the Democratic field won't do anything to guarantee Quinn's election; in fact, there's quite a record of NYT-endorsed candidates going down to defeat, which every true progressive in this city is hoping will happen to Chris Quinn~!

New York Daily News Endorses Quinn

The New York Daily News has endorsed Christine Quinn by calling her the right person to continue the Bloomberg era. Which is pretty much what her detractors have been warning about.

The Bloomberg era will end with crime lower than it has ever been, employment at a record level, neighborhoods reborn, the schools rescued from a culture of failure and an economy enlivened by cutting-edge high-tech enterprises. The streets are clean, the parks are in good shape and New Yorkers are living to riper, older ages. Like Bloomberg or not, the gains have been real and, because they have been sustained, they are far too easily taken for granted. Allow crime to rise and the party’s over. Let up on demanding achievement from the schools and they will quickly surrender hard-fought progress. Against this backdrop, the Daily News measured the backgrounds and promises of each contender by the standards of pragmatism, realism and effectiveness: Council Speaker Christine Quinn is the Democratic primary candidate best qualified to lead New York as mayor over the next four years.

New York's other major newspapers have not yet made endorsements.

Sparks Fly At NYC Mayoral Debate

Everybody seemed to gang up on new frontrunner Bill De Blasio at last night's Democratic mayoral debate. Most analysts are saying that Christine Quinn turned in one of her strongest performances, however she continued to slam De Blasio's wife for allegedly attacking her for not having children, a charge angrily denied by the De Blasio camp, which pointed out that the New York Times has corrected their story which misquoted De Blasio's wife.  In one of the evening's lighter moments, Anthony Wiener got one of the biggest laughs when he admitted that he had texted whiled driving. (The question was asked of all candidates.)

Slapping At Quinn Press Conference

A mayoral campaign press conference for New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn turned violent yesterday when an anti-Quinn protester slapped openly gay state Sen. Brad Hoylman in the face. The protester, seen above shaking his fist at openly gay former state Sen. Tom Duane, said that he blames Quinn for the closure of St. Vincent's Hospital in the West Village, forcing him to travel ninety minutes to the Bronx to visit his wife, who he said died in a hospital there on Saturday.

Ironically, Hoylman and Duane, both Quinn supporters, were at the press conference to back Quinn's claim that rival mayoral candidate and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio "had done nothing" to prevent St. Vincent's closure. But also there was the usual contingent of anti-Quinn activists that have dogged her every public appearance for years.  Politicker has more on the fracas:

“Shame, shame, shame on you,” the group chanted as the press conference was set to begin, drowning out Ms. Quinn’s supporters. As the press conference continued, the voices grew louder, with the protesters proclaiming that Ms. Quinn–who was not present at the event–had “blood on her hands.” At one point, George Capsis, reportedly the publisher of the WestView News, who is known for causing scenes at local meetings, leapt in front of Mr. Duane, screaming: “You’re a fatuous idiot!” as he shook his fist.

The situation grew more intense as spokespeople for Ms. Quinn’s campaign attempted to get the man to leave. Instead, Mr. Capsis struck Mr. Hoylman in the face as he made his way out through the crowd. After rejoining the protesters, Mr. Capsis hit another Quinn supporter in the face, prompting the supporter–an intern–to leave the scene in tears. Later, Mr. Capsis tried to explained why he’d hit Mr. Hoylman. “He’s a vacuous idiot. He never supported saving the hospital,” Mr. Capsis charged.

Politicker notes that Capsis was charged with slapping a police officer last year.  No charges have apparently been filed for his assaults on Hoylman or the Quinn staffer. The Quinn campaign says they did file a police report, but the NYPD says it has no record of such. The New York Daily News adds that a member of the anti-Quinn group also taunted Duane, a recovering alcoholic, by shouting, "Have another drink, Tom!"

The anti-Quinn group, Anybody But Quinn, which has blanketed local television with ads all summer long, issued a statement lauding its members for "unleashing a bold counter-protest" at the press conference but made no mention of the assaults. It is unclear if Capsis is a member of the group.

NEW YORK CITY: Bloomberg Suggests Fingerprinting Public Housing Tenants

Speaking on his weekly radio address, yesterday New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested fingerprinting the city's public housing tenants.

“What we really should have is fingerprinting to get in. And of course there’s an allegation that some of these apartments aren’t occupied by the people who originally have the lease,” said Mr. Bloomberg during his weekly radio sit-down with WOR’s John Gambling. The mayor noted that, while New York City Housing Authority building house about five percent of the city’s population, they account for about 20 percent of city crime. “We’ve just gotta find some ways to keep bringing crime down there,” he said, arguing that most people who live in the buildings want more police protection. “If you have a stranger walking in the halls of your apartment building, don’t you want somebody to stop and say, ‘Who are you? Why’re you here?’ Because the locks on these doors, with so many people coming and going, you really can’t,” he said.

Democratic mayoral candidates immediately slammed the idea.

Within an hour of Bloomberg's radio appearance, the mayoral hopeful Bill Thompson derided the fingerprinting idea as "disrespectful" and "disgraceful." "Just like stop-and-frisk, this is another direct act of treating minorities like criminals," said Thompson, a former city comptroller, in a statement. "Mayor Bloomberg wants to make New Yorkers feel like prisoners in their own homes." The public advocate Bill de Blasio, who is one of the front-runners in the mayoral race, called Bloomberg "out of touch" and urged the mayor to instead install security cameras within such public buildings, which house more than 400,000 people.

Christine Quinn also issued a statement.

“It’s a completely ludicrous and outrageous notion that NYCHA residents and their guests should have to be fingerprinted to gain access to their own homes and to visit family and friends,” she said in a statement. “Rather than go after law abiding citizens who live in public housing, the City needs to provide residents with the security systems they have been promised for years.”

A spokesman for the mayor dismissed privacy concerns, because...iPhones.

“All security is moving towards biometrics – even the next iPhone will have fingerprint security. Every day the Mayor logs into his computer by placing his finger on the keyboard to login. Why wouldn’t we want to think about providing the highest level of security possible for NYCHA residents?” he asked via email. “You place the strongest security measures on things of most value – what is more valuable than their homes?”

RELATED: The city is about to retrofit 20 public housing towers with hotel-style key cards that will replace standard locks. That project is costing $11M.

New Wall Street Journal-NBC Poll

From the Wall Street Journal:

With nine candidates on the Democratic primary ballot, there is next to no chance anyone will win the contest outright, and so the top candidates have focused their efforts on securing a spot in the runoff. While Ms. Quinn has spent most of the race as the front-runner, the poll showed she will be the underdog in a runoff, Mr. Miringoff said. In a hypothetical face-off with Mr. de Blasio, he leads against Ms. Quinn 44% to 42% among registered democrats. If the runoff were between Mr. Thompson and Ms. Quinn, he leads 44% to 43%. Mr. de Blasio would also beat Mr. Thompson in a runoff, 44% to 36%, the poll showed. The margins in all three cases were slightly wider among likely voters.

The primary is in three weeks.

Chat Show Caller On Stop-And-Frisk

I don't even know how to properly set this clip up, so maybe you should just watch it. The host totally slams Christine Quinn at the end of the call. More about this at New York Magazine.

Just In From The NYPD

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has issued a statement via press release:

This kind of an anti-gay attack is unacceptable anywhere, but for it to happen in Chelsea which has such a large LGBT population is particularly shocking. And what's worse is that this is happening after a summer of repeated attacks on members of the LGBT attack just because of who they are. People who commit hate crimes are cowards. This is not who we are. We are a city that knows that diversity is our greatest strength and we need to show that by helping the police by apprehending these attackers. We need to send a message that this type of hate crime is not acceptable, will not be tolerated, and needs to come to an end. We thank the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force for taking immediate action to investigate this incident, and urge anyone with any more information on these sketches to contact the Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS.