Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The chief financial officer for Citigroup and the president of Rensselaer both turned down Eliot Spitzer's offer to go for the state comptroller position.

Post editors don't want a sitting Assemblyman for comptroller.

The Daily News opines that whomever makes it through the screening panel "will have weathered a screening process, eliminating the suggestion that he or she is not the best or the brightest."

Rudy Giuliani is staying mum on President Bush's call for more troops in Iraq.

Mike Bloomberg told Congress that Al Qaeda is laughing at us.

A building the was part of the "scandal-plagued program of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development," in Boerum Hill was approved for a 25-year tax break from the city.

Democrats are planning a vote against Bush's Iraq plan.

And Jon Corzine has gotten poetic about New Jersey's problems.

-- Azi paybarah

Sorry, we don't normally do this, but it seems to me that Joe Bruno will have to do more to "court" the gay vote than he did yesterday. When reporters asked him about his having once called homosexuality an "abnormal lifestyle," he responded:

"I'm not going to respond because you're looking for trouble and I'm looking for peace," he said. "That was 12 years ago."

Ten of those years were the ones in which Bruno did not allow the Sexual Orientation Discrimination Act, passed every year by the Assembly, on to the Senate floor for a vote. It finally passed in December 2002.

Do not expect the Empire State Pride Agenda to point this out again--he was their chief villain through much of the 1990's. And why should they? If they've got him now, they may as well try to keep him.

It's just that this courting would seem a little more genuine if Bruno were willing to explain how he came to change his mind so radically on the issue. But then, he'd actually be articulating the case for gay civil-rights legislation. Is that still not a good idea for a Rensselaer Republican?

- Tom McGeveran