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!