The recent win, of Darrell Aubertine, in NY’s 48th was not only a big step in turning the NY Senate from red to blue, but also in helping to turn the US congress to cobalt. From Real Clear Politics:

After 2010, representatives of the Governor, the Assembly Speaker and the State Senate President will meet to redraw congressional and legislative district lines. Democrats hold the governor’s mansion, though incumbent Eliot Spitzer will have to seek re-election in 2010, and own a wide majority in the Assembly. Taking back the Senate would put control of redistricting entirely in their party’s hands.

Should that happen, not only will Democrats be able to redraw Senate borders to help their party win a new majority there, they will also be able to redraw Congressional borders and endanger some of the state’s six Republican delegates to Washington. New York will lose two seats next year, meaning at least a few members of Congress will be forced to run against fellow incumbents.

[snip]

Republican seats currently held by Reps. Jim Walsh, who is retiring, John McHugh, Randy Kuhl and Tom Reynolds could be in danger. All three represent upstate New York, where Democrats have seen a resurgence and have captured both legislative and Congressional seats in recent years.

This is an opportunity to get rid of the gerrymandering and to have fairly created districts who have their common interests represented. It didn’t happen with the Republican leadership. Let’s see what the Democrats do with it.

Now, I’m hoping that by the time redistricting becomes a reality, we have already defeated these scoundrels, but it is nice to know that there will be a “plan B” to keep the Dems safely seated.

Fresh off of our EPA post about Monroe County being #1 in toxic industry releases in NY, the D&C posted a story today proclaiming Rochester as 27th environmentally friendly city out of 50 based on the findings from PopSci.com website. I went to the source and read the online Popular Science article. What I came away with is that both the D&C and Popular Science are practicing fuzzy math.

The parameters of this report are not comprehensive. The data seem to have been culled haphazardly with certain larger cities receiving higher marks for having park acreage whereas smaller cities with greater park acreage receive lower marks. Cities smaller than 100,000 (often with better green practices) are not even included. Basically the list reflects a movement toward becoming green rather than actually being green. For example, the PopSci.com article starts out with this statement (bold mine):

Austin has pledged to meet 30 percent of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2020, aided by planned wind-power installations that will surpass their predecessors in efficiency. Seattle has retrofitted its municipal heavy-duty diesel vehicles with devices that will reduce particulate pollution by 50 percent.

Notice the absence of words such as “has met” or “did reduce.” This indicates that these cities are planning on becoming green and are working toward it but they have not achieved it. This is the case with Rochester. We have begun the work to improve our environment but we’re not there yet if the EPA lists us as #1 in NY State for toxic industry releases. Air quality cannot be minimized in defining “environmentally friendly.”

The study’s categories for being green are Electricity, Transportation, Green Living and Recycling, yet Rochester only scores well on one, a 4.1 out of 5 for Recycling. We don’t even make the 50% threshhold for Electricity and Transportation, scoring 4.5 and 4.4 out of 10, respectively. Green Living was determined by the number of buildings deemed green and Recycling was determined by the recycling programs in use, but Electricity and Transportation, which are directly tied to the number of persons living on the planet via their energy use and car ownership (hence emissions), have a greater impact on the environment than buildings and recycling.

Which is more bothersome, the fact that we’re less than 3 points higher on this so-called “environmentally friendly” list than Pasadena, CA, or that it was reported without reference to the EPA’s findings released just yesterday, 2/28/08? Any city in Southern California (notorious for its smog) listed on an “environmentally friendly” list should give anyone pause. This study lists at least four cities in Southern California. Do we want to be a member of this club?
The real problem here is reporting one side of a story because it reflects more positively on our city. Wouldn’t the truth actually spur more corrective environmental action?

As Ladkiddo said Greece is getting sued. Fine - excellent - Glad to see it let’s settle it once and for all. So, let’s review.

There is nothing legally wrong with a prayer at a government meeting. As Government does not sponsor religion only a nonsectarian prayer is acceptable.

“Blah blah blah, in Jesus Christ’s name [or any other specific deity's name] we pray, amen“. That is a secular or denominational prayer and it is wrong at a government sponsored event.

Something like “blah blah blah in God’s name we pray, Amen.” is acceptable at a government sponsored event because it doesn’t mention a specific deity.

So, what does Greece do? We have been over this before. There was this post, or this one, City News covered it, why it is wrong, Heck Greece even had a forum about prayer.

Here is the D&C’s article (with my emphasis).

The U.S. Supreme Court has determined that governmental bodies may open their sessions with prayer, but only if the prayer is nonsectarian and does not reference a particular deity or the language and symbols specific to one religion.

The Americans United lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of Greece residents Linda Stephens and Susan Galloway, seeks to have the court declare that Greece’s current practice violates the Constitution and issue an injunction prohibiting sectarian prayer before the board meetings.

According to the suit, Galloway is Jewish and Stephens is an atheist, and both object to, are offended by and feel “unwelcome at board meetings because of the town’s alignment with Christianity through the board’s persistent presentation of Christian prayers.”

Can’t you just hear the arguments now? Unwelcome? But we are a Christian nation, majority rules and all that non-sense. I’ll have more later but, now pay attention… Majority rules doesn’t mean trampling on minority rights. The Constitution applies equally to every citizen.

We’ve commented before on Randy Kuhl’s weak fundraising the past few quarters and how it has helped fuel speculation that he will retire.  Well, it looks like his fundraising is finally kicking into gear: he’s holding a fundraiser in Penn Yann next weekend and possibly another in Canandaigua.

I hope this means he’s not retiring  The NY-29 race would be a lot less entertaining without him in it.

Continuing in our series - where we were a year ago…

While early 2007 lacked the raw excitement of pre-November 2006, there was still a lot going on here at RT. I’ll divide things into a few rough categories

State elections

The most significant political news in 2007 was probably the special election for an open New York State Senate seat. What’s that got to do with Rochester you ask? The answer is that the change of a few Senate seats would put FBI investigatee Joe Bruno out of business and allow Spitzer (and like-minded state pols in both parties) to institute real reform in Albany.

We ran our first advertisement in this race, in support of Craig Johnson who ultimately prevaileld (which was big news), bringing Democrats one seat closer to a majority.

Democratic State Assembly leader Shelly Silver continued his devious ways as well, sabotaging Spitzer’s efforts to pick a new Comptroller in a fair, transparent manner. There was some speculation that Silver would lose this battle, but that appears to have been very premature. Spitzer was steaming mad at the State assembly, though.

Locally, there was some discussion of whether Joe Robach would switch parties (again)…

Congress

Jim Walsh’s support for the Iraq war was starting to waver, as he felt the heat over his record of voting with Bush over 80% of the time. He ended up voting in favor of an anti-escalation resolution, which other local Republican Congressmen opposed (Louise Slaughter, by contrast, gave a rousing speech in favor the anti-escalation language). Kuhl, in particular, was very slow to explain to constituents why he continued to support the occupation of Iraq. He was one of only 9 Republicans who failed to speak about the anti-escalation resolution on the floor of the House. He did, however, start robocalling voters to solicit their opinions. The Walter Reed scandal and other such things were starting to hit home as well. Things were getting so tough for local Congressional Republicans that even Jim Walsh started holding town halls.

It was no wonder that both Maffie and Massa were edging ever closer (here’s a great Massa clip) to declaring their candidacies for 2008. As the month drew near a close, Massa’s entry into the race seemed imminent. The fact that national publications were writing about this underscored the competitive nature of the races.

County muck-a-muck

The County water authority scandal continued to loom large in the minds of many — the D&C actually did a pretty job of covering this. The county lej also made a great effort to prevent us, and others, from covering their backdoor dealings. Jon Greenbaum had a nice article about one of our favorite of these — COMIDA grants.

Maggie Brooks was getting all hot-and-bothered about computer screens in libraries. It was pretty tough not to make fun of this.

Joe Morrelle surprised some by returning to his post as head of MCDC.

Miscellaneous fun

A big state Republican donor was busted for funneling money to terrorist in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We had quite a lot of fun with this.

BTP has a great post about local history.

Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president.

As always, our friends throughout the local progressive blogosphere were churning out great posts. It’s all about progressive infrastructure, as btp wrote.

Some exciting village elections were right around the corner. More on that when we discuss March!

This is very good writing from the D&C editorial board:

Nearly two weeks ago, Zyra presided over the mangling of First Amendment guarantees to public assembly and petitioning. But his mishandling of the process leading up to the Republican-controlled legislature’s selection of Tim Donaher as Monroe’s new public defender is just one of Zyra’s offenses to open government.

[...]

He allowed County Executive Maggie Brooks’ F.A.I.R. plan to be ramrodded through the legislature last fall. The plan, which resulted in suburban school districts losing significant sales tax revenue, was introduced and adopted by the legislature, all in a few hours.

More recently, Zyra refused to use a community-based merit selection process to choose the new public defender. Never mind that the process worked well in the past without the kind of unnecessary political intervention that Zyra insisted on.

But perhaps the most egregious offense was Zyra’s heavy-handed approach in limiting public access to the legislature meeting at which the new public defender was approved. Citizens were treated like suspected criminals based on alleged security threats that neither Zyra nor any other county official has satisfactorily explained.

Zyra has repeatedly refused to return calls from this page over the past few months.

We’ll be revisiting this later. It’s good to see the D&C taking a strong stand against Zyra’s outrageous misbehavior.

Robert Harding over at TAP has the goods on Minarik and asks that question with regards to Wahl Media and discusses the implications to everyone’s favorite conservative (until they learn about his record) Joe Robach.

For the record, Wahl Media made a pretty penny for their efforts. According to Will Barclay’s campaign finance filing, Minarik’s Wahl Media made $643,833 through February 8. Meaning, they could have made more money, which we will know with the post-election filings.

What will this mean for Minarik? The talk in Albany circles is that Minarik’s role in the 56th Senate District race might be limited by the state GOP. In fact, the state GOP might try to play a more dominant role in SD-56 because of Minarik’s failures in SD-48.

SD-56 is Robach’s district.

Yesterday, Angel wrote about the Rochester area being #1. Here’s another something that I’m not sure that we want to be famous for:

Americans United for Separation of Church and State today filed a lawsuit in federal district court against a town council in New York that opens its public sessions with Christian prayer.

Americans United sued the Greece, N.Y., Town Board and its supervisor, John Auberger, on behalf of two local residents who object to government-sponsored religious activities that favor one faith over others. The lawsuit alleges that almost all of the board’s opening prayers are explicitly Christian, and that since 2004, only a single non-Christian has been invited to deliver the opening prayer.

We wrote about this back in November when we attended the open forum in Greece. Ever since George bush took office, this has become a national trend-Faith Based Initiatives were all the rage to help muddy the waters in the separation of church and state. Now public prayer is assumed to be ok too. It’s all a ploy to woo the Christian Right, and it will no longer be tolerated. There is a price to pay for trampling on the constitution once again.

(Edit by Itchy: It’s important to remember that the Supervisor and Town Board are all orthodox Christians.)

Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno gathered his Republican colleagues today for what they are deeming their “Come to Jesus” moment.

From The New York Times:

In his sprawling suite in the Capitol, a humbled Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, gathered an aging coterie of fellow Senate Republicans on Wednesday morning to commiserate over a fresh defeat and plot a last stand for their beleaguered party.

(snip)

On Tuesday, with the backing of the governor’s political operation, Assemblyman Darrel J. Aubertine, a Democrat, won a special Senate election in an overwhelmingly Republican district in the northern part of the state.

The victory meant that a single Senate seat now stands between the Democratic Party and full control of state government. And many on both sides of the aisle were left wondering: If the Republicans could not win in this district, where they have a 78,454 to 46,824 enrollment advantage, could they win anywhere?

(snip)

One top official called the election results the Republican “Waterloo at Watertown,”

(snip, bold mine:)

Democrats have not occupied the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature since the days of the New Deal. The Republicans captured the Senate in 1939 and have held it for all but one year since. The last time Albany was under one-party control was 1974, when Nelson A. Rockefeller was governor.

I think Governor Spitzer has been underestimated, his political wounds have been overestimated and now he’s showing his resilience.  (And how funny is it that the year 1974 is when ABBA released their song “Waterloo”?  Ah, the prescience of Swedish rock groups.)

The ownership society envisioned by George Bush, where there is no common land for everyone to enjoy, just took a reality hit in NY-48th this week. Score one for the common man.

Republicans underestimated the lure of the fish in Oswego County, and as predicted, the anglers liked the Democratic angle a bit better. Dairy farmer Aubertine beat land owner Barclay in part because Barclay owned land that included part of a river and was charging anglers $30 to fish there. The land was previously public.

Political lesson #1: Do not mess with the (fishing) proles.

It’s as if every sportsman/sportswoman in Oswego heard what Barclay was charging and asked “You talkin’ to me?” Then they voted for Auberdine. Do not mess with the proles.

The “ownership society” is like some kind of Republican Xanadu code word for “sticking it to the masses,” all the while touting it as the great elixir for society’s ills. It was in actuality bad medicine, or as Naomi Klein put it in The Nation:

“yesterday’s ownership society has morphed into today’s members-only society.”

Americans are wising up. Take a look at this dissection (bold mine) of Bush’s ownership society from David Morris at AlterNet:

He [Bush] firmly believes that we don’t own those things that most of us would indisputably believe we do own — our bodies, our privacy, our dignity, our bedrooms. And to add insult to injury, he just as firmly believes that we can own those things that most of us would argue are not ours to own — air, words, folklore.

It is a losing strategy for Republicans. America is a free society so when people begin divvying up public lands, words, ideas, etc. for private monopoly the citizens are going to fight back with their most effective weapon: their votes.

It’s a great time to be a Democrat.

So, the Comptroller is not completely satisfied with what the accounting IDAs, like COMIDA, do in terms of job creation. Fair enough. Heck, even the Editorial Board got into the act.

In a report released today, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said industrial development agencies “continue to report project, job creation and other data that is inconsistent, incomplete and not independently verified.”

Um, yeah. But here is the rub, Check out this news summary by the D&C. Read for yourself

A study by the Center for Governmental Research think tank this month found that the state’s IDAs actually created many more jobs than had been estimated in a May 2007 study by the activist group Jobs With Justice.

So in this corner - the Center for Governmental research. In that corner the Jobs with Justice group. Notice how one is a “think tank” and the other is an “activist group”? Interesting.

Today there was an expanded article so let’s look a little deeper shall we?

First off - here is the Web site of New Yorks Jobs with Justice (NYJWJ), and here is their report -Here is the Center for Governmental research report (CGR) that was commissioned by New York State Economic Development Council.

Read both reports. Here is a summary - some IDA’s create some jobs, IDAs don’t always fulfill their promise of job creation. The issue is how much. Yeah, shocking isn’t it?

What is interesting is the CGR report doesn’t discuss the TYPES OF JOBS created and treats jobs as all things created equal. I mean a job is a job isn’t it? I didn’t see discussed at all - retail jobs or grants from business’ that are bound geographically say the Midtown Athletic Club, Wellesley Hotel, Harley School. Seabreeze, various Dental offices, and others.

Predictably Maggie Brooks - quotes the CGR reports

“illustrates that throughout New York state, industrial development agencies are helping communities create jobs,” she said.

What is interesting is that both reports say that IDA create jobs, the discussion is over how many.

The CGR report (from a table on page three) says the percentage of projects statewide falling short of their job creation goal was 45% (NYJWJ says 47%). So almost half of the funded projects fall short of their goals.

It has been my experience in life that there is a grain of truth in both reports. But as you pour through these reports.

Ask yourself these questions

• Are all jobs equal?
• Are the tax breaks given to these companies worth the jobs created?
• Who benefits?

IDA reformers simply want Accountability. They want IDAs to deliver on promised job creation. They want companies who receive benefits to earn them by delivering on growth. Most importantly they want OUR TAX DOLLARS SPENT WISELY with the appropriate oversight - something IDAs do not have now.

IDAs reformers don’t want repeats of the Wellesley Hotel where citizens object, the project fails, taxpayer funds are diverted and possibly recovered via a tiresome process . A process, mind you, that would not have been started had the affected town not aggressively pursued the issue. The IDA (COMIDA) didn’t think it to be an issue until the Town of Brighton uncovered diverted tax funds, and actively sought to recoup money for both the Town of Brighton and the County of Monroe.

Unfortunately as both these reports indicate there are a lot of Wellesley Hotels out there.

One of the reports talks about it the other doesn’t.

After Tuesday’s special election in NY’s 48th, Albany’s, Three Men in a Room becomes Two and a Half Men in a Room. From Rising Hegemon:

NYT:

In a major victory for Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his party, a Democratic assemblyman won a stunning upset in a State Senate election on Tuesday in a district that has been in Republican hands for a century.

The win reduces the Republicans’ majority to one seat and will intensify pressure on the majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, as he tries to maintain his party’s grip on the Senate, which it has controlled for more than 40 years.

That’s five pieces of great news in two short paragraphs: (1) Spitzy wins; (2) Democratic upset (although The Albany Project says it doesn’t really qualify as an upset); (3) 100+ year Republican district goes Dem; (4) Republican majority reduced to one; (5) Bruno under pressure.

I’m thinking about having a party.

We commenced coverage of this audit issue on February 6th, and continued on the 8th. Tuesday, with Exile’s post, the impact on Tom Reynolds began to be exposed. Today we observe the domino effect, as the Republican toy soldiers fall, giving new meaning to the term, “trickle down economics”.

From The Buffalo News:

House Republicans were informed of the situation earlier this month, and sources said they were deeply concerned about what they heard — particularly because several lawmakers employed Ward as the treasurer for their political action committees.

Some Republicans fear that the situation could hamper fundraising at the NRCC, which has struggled to raise money for the fall election. The GOP committee had $6.4 million on hand at the end of January, compared with $35.5 million for its Democratic counterpart.

Quite a change from “Grand Old Party” to “Broke Old Party”!

As ladkiddo posted earlier in the week, MetroJustice has set up a convenient website where you can email Maggie Brooks to let her know how you feel about her fighting equal rights.

Apparently there’s been such a huge number of people emailing, the folks at MetroJustice need help with this effort. From their email to MJ members:

 We’ve seen an incredible, unprecedented response to Maggie Brooks appeal on the Martinez case. HUNDREDS of people have emailed her.

(snip)

In the meantime we need help in the MJ office wading through the pile of responses. We need somebody to help fax them to the Brooks administration (we have enough faxes to keep the Brooks office busy changing fax paper and film for an entire day). We also need some help with data entry so that we can notify all these people of the next steps.

Anyone available to come and help them out during the day Thursday (today - 2/28) or next Monday?  Give the MJ office a call at 585.325.2560.

Then go to the City Paper website and take the poll about the county’s decision to appeal the gay marriage ruling. (It’s under the calendar.)

Then check out this lovely k.d. lang tune, in honor of all the great work that’s being done by Monroe County progressives to promote equal rights!

As I predicted, the D&C blogs are picking up the Obama middle name smear.