A letter to the editor gets published by the Courier-Life, but mention of my blog and EB-5 series gets excised.

So I wrote a letter to the Brooklyn Paper and Courier-Life chain in respond to the year-end round-up.

The Brooklyn Paper doesn't have a letters page this week, but the Courier-Life does. However, the paragraph that mentioned my blog, italicized below, somehow got excised. So much for serving the readers. (Click on graphic to enlarge.)

Also, oddly enough, they changed my rhetoric from "Shouldn't Brooklynites care?" to "Brooklynites should care." (They also changed "committed by" to "committed to," which misleads.) At least we know that a two paragraph letter from the editor's father in the Westchester suburbs merited a four-column headline.

The original letter:

I was amused to read, in your year-end round-up, a fanciful tale involving me on the final night of Freddy’s Bar and Backroom. I was less amused to recognize that the Brooklyn Paper has not covered some important Atlantic Yards news, notably Forest City Ratner's effort to raise $249 million from immigrant investors seeking green cards.

Shouldn't Brooklynites care that Borough President Marty Markowitz, in a video message taped for potential investors in China, claimed that "Brooklyn is 1000 percent behind Atlantic Yards"? Shouldn't Brooklynites care that tax money already committed by city and state agencies is apparently being used to help calculate the jobs "created" by such investors? Shouldn't Brooklynites care that the spirit, if not the letter, of a federal immigration program is being violated?

The tape of Markowitz's statement and extensive coverage of this controversy appears in the "Anatomy of a Shady Deal" series on my Atlantic Yards Report blog (AtlanticYardsReport.com).

Norman Oder
Park Slope