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Words certainly aren't everything, but President Obama's speech to the United Nations this morning was an important one. It expressed a foreign policy that was both conciliatory and tough. And it reminded me of one of the reasons I hoped Obama would be elected president: he embraces the need for
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Late last week, I noted that School Board member Cynthia Elliott was being attacked through anonymous campaign flyers sent to Democratic voters. The same is true of County Legislator Carrie Andrews. Andrews is running for re-election, and registered Democrats in her 21st district have been receiving flyers with misleading information -
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There are legitimate reasons to oppose School Board member Cynthia Elliott's bid for re-election. But there is no legitimate reason for the anonymous attack launched against her this week. Among a flood of campaign mail that Rochester Democratic voters have been getting this week was one aimed at Elliott. Headlined "Anyone
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Received in our newsroom this morning: A news release announcing that Mayor Bob Duffy will "publicly endorse" Democratic candidates for City Council and the Rochester School Board. We're all agog here. The news release had the tone of excitement. And yet, we wonder: Our mailboxes have been flooded with campaign material
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All of us will be assessing President Obama's speech on health care more extensively in the next few days, but here are my early thoughts. In our house, as we waited for the president's speech, we asked each other what we hoped he would say. And we agreed: We hoped he would
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Has the country gone berserk? Are we really this nuts? Just how many people bought into the craziness about President Obama's speech to school children? And how much worse can this anti-Obama movement get? The president of the United States wants to encourage the nation's students to work hard, stay in school,
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As many activists have said in the past few days, the time has long passed for compromise on health-care reform. The country needs a single-payer system. It's the only system that makes sense. Single payer was off the table in Washington from the get-go, so we've already compromised. Now members of
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Definitely worth a read: "Cheney Unleashes His Frustration with Bush" in today's Washington Post. Former Vice President Dick Cheney is writing a memoir, and the Post article is based on interviews with people with whom Cheney has discussed the book. The article portrays Cheney as becoming disillusioned with George Bush
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Well, well, well. The most popular part of Ren Square was the new downtown home for Monroe Community College. And now we learn from the Democrat and Chronicle that MCC needed more space than it was going to get in Ren Square. With Ren Square dead at last, MCC - whose downtown
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Looks like everybody's mad at everybody, yes? Ren Square died, at last, this morning, but not without a final, bizarre twist. County Exec Maggie Brooks, transit authority chief Mark Aesh, Mayor Bob Duffy, and City Council member Dana Miller got together one more time yesterday. And they seemed to have revived their patient
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Yesterday's meeting between City Council and Renaissance Square leaders was discouraging, to say the least. Among the most unsettling aspects: the absolute lack of trust between the two groups. If they're not able to get something worked out, far more is at stake than the future of Ren Square. While I was
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Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. That's good news for the Democrats, who are now only one shy of the 60 votes they need to prevent a filibuster in the Senate. (And assuming that Al Franken is finally declared the winner of that
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The landscape has been telling the story, and now a Brookings Institution study of the country's top 98 metro areas quantifies it: Jobs in Rochester have been moving farther away from the city. Between 1998 and 2006 (the latest figures in the study), the Brookings study says, we gained 907 jobs
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Back in the fall, when Democrats were campaigning to take control of the State Senate, our editorial staff wrestled with our endorsements. In general, we like the Democrats' stand on issues - abortion rights, gay rights, death penalty, Rockefeller drug laws, for instance - better than the Republicans'. But we don't
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I've thought all along that Barack Obama's oratorical skills were important, and his speech to Congress last night reinforced that. Certainly we don't want a president who is all charisma and no substance, but there's plenty of substance in Obama. And in this economy, with these challenges, Americans will have to
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I was impressed with Governor David Paterson when he took over from his disgraced predecessor. And I've been inclined to cut him some slack in the past few weeks, even with his handling of Clinton's Senate seat. But good grief: the same governor who is warning of a budget crisis
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Well, words fail me. A Rochester mother has been arrested and charged with two felonies -felonies! - for trying to get a good education for her children. The Democrat and Chronicle's outrageous headline: "Woman arrested in a school scam." According to the charges, the mother, Yolanda Hill, lives in Rochester but has
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We now have an answer we've been waiting for: Officials will go ahead with the construction of two parts of Ren Square - the transit center and the MCC facility. If money can be raised for a theater, we'll get one. If not.... Senator Chuck Schumer joined County Exec Maggie Brooks
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In the continuing conflict over seating a new senator from Illinois, there's a winner and there are losers. The winner is Governor Rod Blagojevich. The losers: Senate Democrats and Blagojevich's pick for Barack Obama's Senate seat, Roland Burris. At first, the Dems tried to portray themselves as the guardians of ethics
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There were few surprises in Governor David Paterson's State of the State address this afternoon. We knew he would say that things are tough in New York State, and he did. "Perilous" was his word. To get out of this mess, he said, will take courage, hope, and action. And it
