Blue what? The only NJ Dem legislator elected to Congress was endorsed by the NRA!

There’s a lot to be said for not having a record. 

For a start, you can lie about who you are and what you will do when you get elected.  You can even target your lies to different audiences – like pretending you have a war record and appealing to suburban voters with your anti-tax broadcast advertising, while using your grassroots to find and target liberals with a message especially for them.  That’s how the Democrats did it. 

Republicans… they did it ass backwards.  They invested millions to tell their grassroots to go to hell and then broadcast an explicitly liberal message to those cultural leftists who hate the word “Republican” the most.  And they did it in the midst of the most divisive national election since 2010 – on par with 1994.  They invested even more millions in turning out the very people who loath them – all the while doing their utmost to convince their base that they think of them the same way they think of dog excrement.  See, in this way you lose everybody! 

New Jersey Republicans desperately needed a unified message to take to war in 2018.  After Donald Trump and the GOP leadership in Congress screwed them by passing a tax package that arguably raised property taxes in the state with the worst property tax problem in the nation – somebody should have got everyone in a room to figure out a message.  Hey, it’s a small state so if you don’t want to come off like a cacophony, you’d better all be singing the same tune.

Instead, half argued that screwing with the state’s property tax deduction was a net positive, half said it was a net negative – and the Democrats, they just loved it!  For once, they got to be the party defending the beleaguered property taxpayers of New Jersey.  What passes for the media in New Jersey backed them up on it.  And more importantly, so did the instincts of the average property taxpayer.  Donald Trump or no Donald Trump, when it comes to trusting the promises politicians make about property taxes, they don’t.  Period.  Somebody should have remembered that.

After handing the property tax issue to the Democrats – the issue that has consistently tested as the top concern of New Jersey voters for at least the last decade – it is amazing the NJGOP did as well as it did on November 6th.  A large part of the electorate already hated Donald Trump (and therefore, the Republican brand) and wanted to show it – but by miscalculation, the remainder were granted permission to hate the GOP too… over property taxes!  Gagged and gagged again.

But it wouldn’t have worked so well if the Democrats hadn’t been such clean slates.  Just think of it.  All those Democrats in the Legislature with all those perfect liberal voting records… and the only guy who is acceptable to the electorate to move up and go to Congress is the state’s most conservative Democrat legislator… the one who is endorsed by the NRA.  The one who voted against same-sex marriage.  Heck, Jeff Van Drew is more Pro-Life than many Republicans and has opposed both RGGI and increasing the minimum wage!  But he moved up, and all the rest stayed behind. 

Meanwhile, DC residents Andy Kim and Tom Malinowski simply move into the state, take out six month leases on rental properties, run and win.  And the silly fools who spent years as Democrat committee members, in local governments, running for Freeholder and then for Assembly… they just suck ass.  You can’t get elected because your liberal records won’t let you.

Where did Mikie Sherrill come from?  The “Navy pilot – Prosecutor – Mom” fell out of the sky and landed in Congress.  In the new politics of congressional elections, she’s one of the Houyhnhnm.  Back in the trenches, the time-serving yahoos can only snort and envy her advancement. 

Yesterday, Rutgers put out a new poll showing that – once again – taxes top the state’s issues grid (with a sizeable number volunteering “property” taxes as their big concern).  The Eagleton poll noted that people are generally happy with the state’s economy and, as it is part of a generally buoyant national economy, that shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it does appear Democrat Governor Murphy is taking more credit than the state Republican leaders.  One “research professor” drew attention to “a new phenomenon” of voters not having quite formed an opinion of Phil Murphy, after nearly a year in office.  It’s like they don’t know him and it’s taking some time. (Maybe they will now… after yesterday’s snow job?)

A phenomenon is it?  Why is anyone surprised, given the state of political news coverage in New Jersey?  Just ask anyone on press row… oh, that’s right, it’s not there anymore.  If it’s a national election like we just had, the coverage will be driven by national outlets.  If not… good luck.  And that is something our campaign gurus are going to need to consider when planning what used to be called “earned media” campaigns. 

Meanwhile, back at madness central, a couple of juvenile delinquent Democrat Assemblywomen invited “pro-death penalty for American military members” activist Jane Fonda to place a feather in her patouee and lead a conga line from the Speaker’s office to the Governor’s den.  Not a word yet from Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill about the appropriateness of Fonda’s appearance – or from Andy Kim or Tom Malinowski, for that matter.  But hey Assemblywomen, keep it up.  If that’s the fashion, keep it up and you’ll soon find yourself in… Congress?  NOT!

Mikey Puzio joins Mikie Sherrill and the Democrats in a time of Antifa

What an asswipe!

No, we take that back… a festered asswipe!

Mikey Puzio, who somehow got over on the voters of Rockaway Township and passed himself off as a member of the GOP, was an elected member of the Rockaway Council.  He agreed to sell out to the Democrat Party of Governor Phil Murphy and Bob “I didn’t traffick those girls” Menendez. 

The reason he gave is rich.  

Puzio said:  “Our community needs a leader with a proven record of working with people from both parties.”  Yeah, well you had one, his name was Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen. 

Yep, you had one until Mikie Sherrill set her “Resistance” pals on Rodney.  They screamed and shouted down old Congressman Frelinghuysen – spat insults at him, called him vicious names, trashed his name and all the good works that he stood for.  Just as Rodney Frelinghuysen was about to secure mass transit service for Sussex County… Mikie Sherrill’s loudmouths tortured the old fellow, drove up his blood pressure, rattled his nerves, to the point that he quietly exited the stage.

Mikie Sherrill knew that Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen was getting up there in age and that his health was in decline.  She also knew that he was one of the most bi-partisan members of Congress… known for his mild, gentlemanly demeanor, respected by both parties, willing to work with all sides to find solutions.

This was the man Mikie Sherrill set her Antifa hoodlums on.

Mikie Sherrill lost New Jersey one of its most powerful advocates in Congress – no, not with press releases, but in his quiet way, he knew how to get things done in Congress. He secured the post of Chairman of the Appropriations Committee in 2017.  In this powerful position, Rodney Frelinghuysen would have been able to accomplish so much for our state.  Now that’s all gone.  You killed the guy who was in the best position to serve our state and don’t think for one moment that some wet-behind-the-ears freshman is going to make a patch on Rodney’s arse.

Standing with his new far-Left friends, Puzio signed a press release that read more like a hostage letter:  “The partisanship that plagues Congress hurts Rockaway, and prevents New Jersey from moving forward.  I’m endorsing Mikie Sherrill because I know the letter that comes after my name is less important to Mikie than the fact that I am a resident of this community.”

Sure.  The “Resistance” is just sooooo bi-partisan.  How did anybody miss that?  Yep, we are all just supposed to forget where Mikie Sherrill came from.  The radical crowd she hung out with. 

That’s what Mikey Puzio wants us to do.  He wants us to forget who Mikie Sherrill really is and the radical soil she has sprung from.  He wants us to forget what Sherrill’s radical followers did to a genuinely bi-partisan leader – Rodney Frelinghuysen – and how they trashed his good name and good works.

No way, handjob… we will not forget.

Banning menthol cigarettes is the road to Eric Garner

There is a certain kind of busybody who is just born to be a legislator.  That's all he is good for.  He -- or she -- exists to "do something" every time someone utters the phrase, "Something must be done!"

Of course, every law or regulation... every "something" that this guy does, will at some point involve a man with a gun to showing up to enforce it.  Everybody forgets that.  Laws aren't designed to be benign.  To mean anything, at the back of them there must be mean force -- enough to take your money, your freedom, your life. 

But the busybodies keep on making laws -- telephone books full -- because "something must be done!"

Reporting out of committee in the Assembly earlier this week was a bill -- A2185 -- to prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes.  Welcome to the era of Phil Murphy!  

New Jersey is a state that won't kill you if you sodomize, torture, and murder a dozen children.  But increasingly, the state practices a form of ad-hoc execution -- a death penalty meted out without benefit of legal process.  And the lawmakers know that this grows more likely every time they make a new law.  Yet they keep making things illegal... even as they thump their chests and congratulate themselves for abolishing the kind of death penalty in which you get a trial and an appeal or two or three. 

In one of his most famous essays, columnist George Will argued that "overcriminalization" was responsible for the death of Eric Garner, a sidewalk merchant who was killed in a confrontation with police trying to crack down on sales tax scofflaws.  

Will raised the question of how many new laws are created by state legislatures and by Congress in the rush to be seen to be "doing something"?  Will's brilliant column is a must read for legislators thinking about proposing their next round of ideas that will end up being enforced by men with guns.  An excerpt is printed below:

America might at long last be ready to stare into the abyss of its criminal-justice system.

By history’s frequently brutal dialectic, the good that we call progress often comes spasmodically, in lurches propelled by tragedies caused by callousness, folly, or ignorance. With the grand jury’s as yet inexplicable and probably inexcusable refusal to find criminal culpability in Eric Garner’s death on a Staten Island sidewalk, the nation might have experienced sufficient affronts to its sense of decency. It might at long last be ready to stare into the abyss of its criminal-justice system.

It will stare back, balefully. Furthermore, the radiating ripples from the nation’s overdue reconsideration of present practices may reach beyond matters of crime and punishment, to basic truths about governance.

Garner died at the dangerous intersection of something wise, known as “broken windows” policing, and something worse than foolish: decades of overcriminalization. The policing applies the wisdom that when signs of disorder, such as broken windows, proliferate and persist, there is a general diminution of restraint and good comportment. So, because minor infractions are, cumulatively, not minor, police should not be lackadaisical about offenses such as jumping over subway turnstiles.

Overcriminalization has become a national plague. And when more and more behaviors are criminalized, there are more and more occasions for police, who embody the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, and who fully participate in humanity’s flaws, to make mistakes.

Harvey Silverglate, a civil-liberties attorney, titled his 2009 book Three Felonies a Day to indicate how easily we can fall afoul of America’s metastasizing body of criminal laws. Professor Douglas Husak of Rutgers University says that approximately 70 percent of American adults have, usually unwittingly, committed a crime for which they could be imprisoned. In his 2008 book, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law, Husak says that more than half of the 3,000 federal crimes — itself a dismaying number — are found not in the Federal Criminal Code but in numerous other statutes. And, by one estimate, at least 300,000 federal regulations can be enforced by agencies wielding criminal punishments. Citing Husak, Professor Stephen L. Carter of the Yale Law School, like a hammer driving a nail head flush to a board, forcefully underscores the moral of this story:

Society needs laws; therefore it needs law enforcement. But “overcriminalization matters” because “making an offense criminal also means that the police will go armed to enforce it.” The job of the police “is to carry out the legislative will.” But today’s political system takes “bizarre delight in creating new crimes” for enforcement. And “every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence.”

Carter continues:

It’s unlikely that the New York Legislature, in creating the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, imagined that anyone would die for violating it. But a wise legislator would give the matter some thought before creating a crime. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they’re so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.

Garner lived in part by illegally selling single cigarettes untaxed by New York jurisdictions. He lived in a progressive state and city that, being ravenous for revenues and determined to save smokers from themselves, have raised to $5.85 the combined taxes on a pack of cigarettes. To the surprise of no sentient being, this has created a black market in cigarettes that are bought in states that tax them much less. Garner died in a state that has a Cigarette Strike Force.

George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist at The Washington Post.  To continue reading... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394392/plague-overcriminalization-george-will 

Being what they are, some of the legislators now pushing this newest, "something must be done" ban on menthol cigarettes, will be quick to blame the police when the law that the legislators send them to enforce inevitably produces resistance.  Someone will be shot or choked and the honorable busybodies will take to going down on one knee or crying on the television or shouting "it's the cops fault" whilst hopping up and down with a featherduster lodged firmly in the bunghole. 

The blue-collar police always get blamed -- not the white-collar legislators who make the law and then send them to enforce it.  The kick in the balls is that it's some of those white-collar legislators who made the law who end up leading the protests against the police for enforcing the law they made.

Police officers come in all races, creeds, and genders.  It is the best job available to folks of their class in a job market that has grown increasingly thinner (courtesy of the politicians and their paymasters).  If the politicians could find a way to outsource the work, they would... and maybe, they will, someday.  But for now, our police are our neighbors, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, moms and dads.  For now, they are just ordinary members of our communities called upon to do some very important and often unpleasant work.  Blue-collar work at blue-collar pay.  Hey, how many of Phil Murphy's One-Percenter friends would perform CPR on a homeless man if he needed it?  A cop will.  A firefighter will.  They're honor bound. 

Why would you give them anything more to do?

Memo to Legislators:  The next time something goes wrong with a law that YOU made... get out there and lead the chants against YOU.  Identify the culprit that is YOU.  Do the right thing.  Don't blame the guys YOU sent to enforce it.

Republican Assemblywomen join labor unions in standing up to Murphy

Better get used to it, Governor Murphy!

At this week's Assembly Health Committee hearing two Republican Assemblywomen took on Governor Murphy's plans to pour taxpayers' money back into crony capitalist groups like Planned Parenthood.  Yeah, yeah, we know that for the uneducated few, Planned Parenthood is synonymous with "women's health."  But it's not.  It is only one of many providers all jostling for market share.

No, you say?  It's a non-profit organization?  Sure, and so was the NFL.  And so are a lot of organizations that make billions and pay their executives millions.  Setting up as a "not-for-profit corporation" is simply a business model -- it's not an "I'm not greedy" pass.

And Planned Parenthood is greedy.  It wants total market share.  That's why it organized the way does -- to spend millions on lobbyists and even more on grassroots marketing -- to convince American women that only they provide the services that, in fact, hundreds of other organizations provide.  We're sure Macy's would like to have the same deal.

Planned Parenthood uses well-paid lobbyists and political pressure to secure government money with as little questions asked as possible.  They want to keep all the vittles for themselves and starve their competition.  Planned Parenthood wants to have a monopoly -- and we all know what that does to consumers and taxpayers.  Consumers pay more and have less choice.  Taxpayers get ripped-off.

Well not when Assemblywomen Holly Schepisi and Nancy Munoz are around!

Holly Schepisi is like a Bergen Bulldog when ripping into a bureaucrat.  The Assemblywoman asked for Planned Parenthood's financial details -- its annual budget, annual revenue and executive compensation, none of which the group's political director could provide during the hearing.  

We can only suppose that Murphy told the director to drop by and pick-up a blank check.  But Schepisi wasn't having it.

"If it was that important, how could the head not be able to explain any of these items?"  Schepisi asked the Health Committee's Democrat Chairman.  "If it wasn’t just a political football, if it was that important to women’s health, how do we not have these answers?" 

Schepisi told the group:  "We have a lot of phenomenal organizations in this state that approach us for funding. The amount of money that you guys want is more than every school that I represent gets for school funding every year."

Assemblywoman Munoz advocated using the funding for organizations that aren’t supported by billions of dollars like Planned Parenthood, such as federally qualified health centers and other clinics.

“Why don’t we give this money to the New Jersey Coalition for Sexual Assault?” she asked.

Munoz noted that there are 279 walk-in clinics, 37 retail clinics, 187 urgent care clinics and 9 pediatric urgent care centers throughout the state that perform women’s health services without public funding.  Why should they be left high and dry with all the funding going to Planned Parenthood?

The efforts by the Republican Assemblywoman to keep the process honest was matched by the efforts of some labor union leaders to question why a former Lehman Brothers executive was going to get a no-questions-asked Murphy appointment to head the state's Economic Development Authority.  

Led by the redoubtable Bill Mullen, of the New Jersey State Building & Construction Trades Council, many blue-collar unions questioned the priorities of Murphy-pick Tim Sullivan, late of Lehman Brothers and currently the deputy commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Economic & Community Development.

Like the Wall Streeter he is, Sullivan has steered a decidedly anti-blue collar course in Connecticut, giving priority to more fashionable projects in what he called the "six key business sectors" he wants to focus on: "insurance and financial services; digital media; green technology; advanced manufacturing; bioscience; and tourism. " 

A state like New Jersey, with a new Governor who is committed to bringing in tens of thousands of sanctuary seekers -- many of whom lack language and job skills, should be looking to invest in projects that more broadly employ blue-collar workers and those who, through blue-collar apprenticeship, can learn the skills they need to get onto the employment ladder.

Stay tuned...

Inside scoop: Phil Murphy practicing for his Women's March speech on Saturday

Like they say, a picture really is worth a thousand words...

Credit to Art Gallagher of More Monmouth Musings