DioGuardi will have a formal campaign kick-off at Grand Central Terminal on Tuesday.

The windows in Cono’s Restaurant, in the dwindling Italian section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are lined with snake plants. Mother-in-law tongues, they are sometimes called. Their green stalks fill the restaurant windows from top to bottom and keep anyone from peering inside. Cono’s is a white tablecloth, Italian red sauce kind of place. It is where Brooklyn Democratic powerbroker and party boss Vito Lopez receives the politicians who come from all over the state to pay tribute to him.

Consider, for a moment, the end days of 2009: After spending a sum that would make the Prince of Dubai blush, Mike Bloomberg won re-election by 10 points under the predictions of the day-of polls. The New York City Council then spent an afternoon overriding three mayoral vetoes, a legislative trick they had turned to just 10 times in the previous four years. The week before, the Council voted to kill Bloomberg’s plans to redevelop Kingsbridge Armory after the administration refused a guarantee of living wage for all future employees there. It was the first time the Council had derailed a major Bloomberg administration land-use initiative.

After skipping law school to run, Levin proud to emerge as Lopez point man At City Hall

There are 258 Democrats in the House of Representatives, 81 more than there are Republicans. Forty-nine of them represent districts won by John McCain in 2008. Thirty-one of them—and 39 Democrats overall—voted against the health care bill that is now getting carved up on either side of Capitol Hill. Only one of them represents a major American city: Mike McMahon.

Yesterday’s stunning defeat of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to redevelop Kingsbridge Armoy—the first time the City Council has rejected a major administration land use initiative&

For nearly a decade, the Kingsbridge Armory, a striking red brick hulk built in 1917 to house the National Guard, has sat vacant amidst the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of the northwest Bronx.

Brad Lander comes to the Council with more of an activist/academic pedigree than a political one.

Post primary, one of the biggest questions this fall has been the fate and future of Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

Council Members Mike Nelson of Sheepshead Bay and Domenic Recchia of Coney Island, both Democrats, will once again support Michael Bloomberg for re-election, as they did in 2005. The official announcement will come by the end of the week.