Hiep Nguyen, a Dorchester community activist, is running for an at-large city council seat, the Dorchester Reporter reports.

The Dorchester Reporter reports that Ego Ezedi, director of the Roxbury YMCA, is running for an at-large seat on the city council this fall. Ezedi ran a close race for the District 4 seat against Charles Yancey in 2003.

On his campaign Web site, Chuck Turner says he will run for re-election this year and again in 2011, but says that 2011 will be his last race for his district-7 seat. He isn't ruling out running for something else in 2012.

So City Council President Mike Ross wants to require local colleges to help the city figure out if more than four students are living in apartment, because it seems that since the city passed its five-students-and-you're-out regulation, not a single student swarm has been broken up, since ISD can't legally tell who's a student and who isn't.

Paul Flannery passes along word that the student paper at Emerson editorialized that this is just the sort of thing Hitler would have done:

Suppose some Boston city councilor proposed to ban more than four gay people from living together, claiming that such large gatherings of gays was a public nuisance. Or imagine if a councilor proposed such a Gestapo-like imposition on the city's Jews, or such a nouveau-Jim-Crow decree on Boston's blacks. ...

If the council president is serious about his cap on coed cohabitation, history provides a number of examples from effective tyrants. For instance, forget forcing colleges to report off-campus students' addresses. Hitler had Warsaw's Jews wear armbands for easy identification by the SS. Tattoos were effective, too.

Yeah, that's just what the son of a man who survived ten Nazi concentration camps while the rest of his family was wiped out would do. But, hey, Emerson teaches kids how to be DJs on indie FM stations, not how to do research or make rational arguments.

The West Roxbury (and JP) city councilor tells Wicked Local West Roxbury he's not running for either mayor or an at-large seat.

Mike Ball reports on a Chuck Turner rally at the Park Square Radisson today that opened with the dulcet a-capella stylings of the LaRouche Jugend:

... At the Radisson before the meeting, it was clear that this was a mandated event for the LaRouche youth. They knew each other and outnumbered the rest of us considerably. Under 100 attended and the 20-somethings dominated. Each was obviously trained to engage, gathering names and contact info on the way in, offering dozens of tracts as stapled magazines or perfect-bound booklets. ...

Ball provides a summary of Turner's speech, which not only brought up the hypocrisy angle of the case against him (why is the U.S. Attorney attempting to keep Turner from speaking truth to power when the guy himself released evidence before the trial?), but even veered into LaRouchist territory, when Turner ran with some of ol' Lyndon's anti-British rhetoric.

The first sentence of Rule 34 needs to be clear language... the enjammed way it's written obscures our municipal government.

On 1/16/09, Reuben.Kantor at cityofboston.gov wrote:

Rule 34.
No meeting,
working session,
or hearing of any committee,
except the committee on ways and means,
in accord with the limitations of the state's open meeting law,
shall be called upon less than fortyeight (48) hours notice
(exclusive of legal holidays and Sundays),
unless otherwise allowed by the president

0153 Order requesting certain information under Section 17F re: a list of all [Boston] city commissions and boards as of January 7, 2009, names, conditions of appointment and time period length, salaries and all meeting minutes from 2008.
http://www.cityofboston.gov/cityclerk/hearing/see....

Amy Derjue, late of Boston Magazine, is now City Councilor Mike Ross's communications director, Boston Magazine reports.

Hmm, if Ross runs for mayor against John Tobin (hey, it could happen), we'd have blog wars: She'd be competing with blogger Steve Garfield, who put together Tobin's campaign site.