The First Amendment is first for a reason - it cannot be ignored by the D.C. City Council.

I've been hearing from people saying they see me more than they do their city council member.

Mayors, city council members, and legislators come and go, but neighborhoods don't go anywhere.

I am joining the government not from the academic position but from St. Petersburg city council.

Rather than hearing from the city council president, you'd hear from sources all across the country.

There is insufficient support for the police and safety and law enforcement, in general, in the city council.

First thing that I put up in my office here at City Hall was a poster from 1971 when my mother ran for city council.

I've been a candidate for office at least eight times. A couple times for mayor, state representative, city council.

I was a member of the Haifa City Council when I was 23 years old, which made me the youngest city councilman in Israel.

If the City Council wants to hold the police accountable, it has the subpoena power and oversight responsibility to do so. They don't have the courage to do it.

I used to be on the Lincoln City Council. You learn that there's never enough money for all of the police officers and fire-fighting apparatus you'd like to have.

What matters is voting for where you live: Who's your mayor, who's your police chief, who represents you, your city council, your judges. That matters that you vote.

It's so worth-while being a judge, because, if I make good, I can help prove that a woman's place is as much on the bench, in City Council, or in Congress, as in the home.

I just want people to question everything. Question what your congressman is doing, your city council. Question what really happened during the Civil War. What happened during 9/11.

I was the first girl in my high school to be chosen as head girl of both my school and my hoste. I was also elected as the Deputy Junior Mayor of the George City Council in grade 11.

I enjoyed the administrative work because it involved working with Congress, city council, and the mayor. I had never been a politician so it was fun - learning political maneuvering.

They divided the city into three electoral wards, and in one ward there was 70 percent of the people, the Catholic population, and they elected eight representatives to the city council.

As the documentary 'True Son' illustrates, my campaign for city council started really small - with eight mostly political neophytes in my living room and with young people knocking on doors.

There had to be something more important than me being comfortable, me being OK, and me being that one person that made it from Stockton. That's why I decided to run for city council in 2012.

I don't think I'll ever fully get over losing the city council seat. I don't know how that happened. But it was less than 1 percent out of 50,000 votes. I'd put in six or seven years into changing L.A.

Since being elected to the City Council, I have been unwavering in my commitment to address issues uniquely impacting women and girls and advance policies that stabilize and strengthen our communities.

Many people vote a straight party line from the president down to city council. Hollywood publicists need to think long and hard about who they are putting forward to lead their awards season campaigns.

And I would like to have a good, productive relationship with members of the City Council, but I'm not going to allow them to undermine what the people's choice was and what the people want, which is change.

The mayor has got to work closely with a wide variety of people, his city council, state legislature, governor, business community, labor community, president and the congress in order to be able to do this.

In my native Boulder County, Colorado, the fracking fanatics are out in force. They are marching door-to-door, petitions and mythology in hand, and they are storming city council and county commissioner meetings.

The problem with the Democratic Party is, we're like, 'If we just get another presidential candidate in there, everything will be OK.' We should be focusing on school boards, city council races, state legislatures.

Things will only improve when the people - all of us - say to authorities, 'I will hold you responsible.' We should all be showing up at city council meetings, lighting up every community with activism and mobilization.

Especially in local elections, because hardly anybody pays attention to those - but it's really important who's mayor and who's on the city council, county commissioners, sheriffs, district attorney, and of course the school board.

If not for food stamps, Medicaid, and various job programs, I would never have gone on to be the first in my family to go to college, the first black woman to represent my ward on the Cleveland City Council, and, ultimately, a State Senator.

But when my mother ran for City Council, that was the moment when I knew I wanted to be a political reporter. Some reporters asked her about being married to my father - they have an interracial relationship - as if that was somehow a negative thing.

When I grew up, and I think about City Council, I look at the men and women then - these were people who just wanted to be a part of the community and give something back. They weren't necessarily trying to use it as a steppingstone to something else. I looked up to those people.

I said I wanted to lay the foundation for my governance and that included building relations with the City Council, with bureau directors, making sure we had the right leaders in place, making sure we're communicating with community groups that have an interest in of policymaking. I feel that we did that.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

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