The GOP is the natural party of suburban New Jersey.

Matt Rooney is right.  The Democrats’ “unwillingness to end the redistribution of funds from the suburbs to failing urban schools remains the single biggest driver of our state’s nightmarish, neighborhood-killing property taxes.” 

The Democrats could – and should – be challenged on their cruel insistence that economically distressed families in suburban and rural New Jersey be made to subsidize rich corporations and wealthy professionals in places like Jersey City and Hoboken.  The tax breaks with which urban Democrat bosses favor contributors to political campaigns are paid for with subsidies from struggling communities throughout New Jersey.  

There is more than enough corporate and professional money in urban New Jersey to cover the education of the children who live there.  If those interested parties were made responsible for the children of their communities the educational systems there would be subject to a greater degree of local oversight and on-the-spot scrutiny by those stakeholders.  Absent that, under the current system of subsidy from afar, those subsidized stakeholders are more than content to allow political corruption to flourish, just so long as they keep getting their discount.

It is shameful for One Percenters like Phil Murphy, Steve Fulop, Lacey Rzeszowski, and Saily Avelenda to don their pussy hats and try to argue that their tax breaks are about “helping poor children”.  Not when their “philanthropy” is paid for by over-taxed, working class families trying to stay out of foreclosure. There is nothing LIBERAL about screwing over working class families to pay for propping-up corrupt urban political machines. 

As far back as the administration of Governor Jim McGreevey, the Democrats knew that half of the state’s economically disadvantaged children lived outside the over-funded urban Abbott school districts.  More than a decade has passed since the state Supreme Court issued its report on this – and NOTHING has been done to overturn the fundamental unfairness of the state’s system of funding education.  

Since the economic crash of 2008, suburban and rural poverty has grown in New Jersey and throughout the United States.  That’s what the liberal to centrist Brookings Institute has argued in their published studies.  Brookings’ experts also note that, since the 1960’s, most of the nation’s anti-poverty programs have been aimed at the cities.  

Rural and suburban New Jersey lack even the basic infrastructure to help get people back on their feet – on top of which local municipalities are robbed of the property taxes that could help with this.  Everything is taken from them – in the name of the urban poor – but for the use of the One Percent and the corporations they control.   

Corrupt urban political machines, corrupt vendors, rich corporations, and wealthy professionals all make out under the Abbott regime.  The genuinely poor remain trapped in schools that, for all the money spent per pupil, fail to educate their students or prepare them for the working world.  The kids are used as pawns, as an excuse, for the corruption and those getting rich from it. 

More than a decade ago a prescient writer by the name of Paul Mulshine argued that the life of every child mattered and that the state needed to provide a uniform baseline of funding.  Instead, the Democrats have ensured that the money continues to miss those poor children living outside the Abbotts, while failing to help those living within the Abbotts.   

The question is, will those currently charged with leading New Jersey Republicans into their next battle recognize these stark facts starring them in the face?  Will they make use of them?  If not for their own political ambitions and those of their party – Republican leaders should be urged to do so on behalf of over-taxed working people, their children, and for the child pawns being used but not served.

New Jersey Republicans face extinction.  Their fighting prowess is minimal.  It has reached the point where any plausible Democrat candidate with a modicum of funding can expect to simply march in and take most of their remaining legislative seats. Not in Northwest New Jersey mind you, where every Democrat on the ballot was just ruthlessly slaughtered and where the Democrat who challenged Senator Steve Oroho in 2017 lost her school board seat. This is where the pussy hats run into a phalanx of flannel shirts (and those are the women!).   

In his column (https://savejersey.com/2018/11/n-j-republicans-are-letting-sweeney-appropriate-their-strongest-argument-rooney/), Matt Rooney raises the question of whether Assembly Republican Leader Jon Bramnick is up to the task of fighting the Democrats next year.  Whether he is a “wartime consiglieri” or not.  We hope that he is, but at the present, he appears to be more concerned about how he is perceived within the “bubbles” of Trenton and Westfield (whose median income is double that of Sussex County).   

Assembly Leader Bramnick would do well to break out of this bubble.  “Bubble land” doesn’t understand America.  It is too rich, too privileged, too unconcerned with the basics of shelter and debt to worry about those who are.  Bubble land never understood the rise of Donald Trump.  Never got the levels of pain and disappointment that the eight gray years of Barack Obama brought to those working class people who voted for him in 2008.  They put it down to “racism” when it was really about the threat of foreclosure – of losing… everything. 

We urge Jon Bramnick and the other leaders of the NJGOP to embark on an experiment in listening and learning. Not the usual photo-op in Newark… go to where the newpoverty is.  Visit a food pantry in what everyone thinks is a middle class town.  Watch the people who once had a good job, with benefits and a pension, but who now work three without.  Notice the high priced automobiles, now over a decade old.  Drive around and take note of the “for sale” signs.  Visit an encampment of working people who have lost their homes. 

This isn’t a time for rallying around a corrupt Establishment that – uses poor people as an excuse to rape working people to make rich people richer.  No matter how you personally feel about the Democrats responsible, these are bad policiesand they must be challenged.  The choice must be one of clear-blue-water between the parties.  Again, if not for your own political ambitions and those of your party, do it for the over-taxed working people, for their children, and for the child pawns being used but not served.

Matt Rooney makes the point very clearly:  “Taxpayers want an advocate… not a mediator.” Amen.

Tom Moran shits the bed again. NJ.com editorial goes nuts with the name-calling (again).

By Rubashov

At what point did Star-Ledger/NJ.com editor Tom Moran go from a somewhat reasonable – albeit excruciatingly liberal – man of journalism, to New Jersey’s own Julius Streicher, throwing invective and hate at anyone who doesn’t see the world through the increasingly dark and confused lens he does.  Like Streicher, who edited a newspaper called “The Attacker,” Moran discards journalism and adopts a political role as the state’s leading propagandist for what has come to be known as “The Resistance.”

Of course, what he is “resisting” is the outcome (under long established rules) of a national election in the world’s foremost democracy.  Moran and his movement are not only threats to the political and economic stability of United States, but of the World.  It takes humility to live in a democracy, to preserve a Republic.  But Moran and his movement place their will above all else – and if their will should triumph, all future elections would be fought after the fact, regardless of outcome, endlessly, the way they are fighting this one.

To Moran and his movement, we are in year three of the 2016 presidential election.  This election will not be over until they get their way.  Only then will they permit us to move on to the next election. 

But who is this movement?  They are the permanent Establishment Party of government.  That’s what they would be called if they were honest about it.  In Mexico, where honesty rates higher than in Washington, DC, the longtime ruling political party calls itself the Partido Revolucionario Institucional – the Institutional Revolutionary Party.  They held power for 71 uninterrupted years – until the corruption and economic decline got so bad that voters, in their pain, sought other answers (both good and bad).  Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, like Ralph Nader and Ron Paul before them, are symptoms of a corrupt institutional party producing more pain than benefits.

Tom Moran is a chief propagandist for global corporatists, like those who publish his newspaper, and for all those who are made comfortable and secure by government and the largesse of the taxpayers.  These include the crony capitalists, pay-to-play government vendors, the Wall Street operators (like Moran’s heroes Jon Corzine and Phil Murphy), and the legions of lobbyists and senior bureaucrats who might as well be interchangeable.  It includes too, those well-off academics, like Brigid Harrison of Montclair State University.  A failed Democrat candidate, Harrison was provided a second life as an Establishment propagandist whose work has been pushed as required reading.    

The permanent Establishment Party straddles both established political parties in America – where our political choices are limited to faux chocolate and faux vanilla – and where propagandists like Tom Moran direct members of the working class to battle each other over race, ethnicity, and gender.  Using the last, they are now in the process of endlessly expanding the opportunities for internal division amongst the 99 percent.  

Candidates like Mikie Sherrill are the face of this “Resistance” to working class pain – to those same voters who bet on Barack Obama to rescue them in 2008, and who, in their pain, reached for Donald Trump in 2016.  A wealthy, expensively trained, representative of the Elite – whose career path was to “check the boxes” on the way to being given “power” as a safe pair-of-hands for those who actually wield it.

The means to Sherrill’s rise to celebrity are notorious.  Along with her Antifa-inspired thugs, she stalked and hounded the aged Congressman and Vietnam War Vet, Rodney Frelinghuysen.  They spat insults at him and lied about his record – acting as if this most bi-partisan and gentlemanly of public servants was akin to David Duke.  In this, they are not so different from Tom Moran and the NJ.comeditorial board who over the weekend used words like “fraud” and “fanatical” to describe those who oppose their nurtured-by-hand celebrity, Mikie Sherrill.  If anything, they are using others as a mirror to reflect back what they see in themselves… frauds and fanatics. 

Over the next two weeks and beyond – until they get their way and the result from the 2016 presidential election that they believe they are entitled to – Tom Moran and company will continue to behave the way they have been, calling names, spitting hatred, urinating down their own trousers.  They are like beings possessed, confirmed in their certainties, their righteousness and indignation.  They can not think outside of it… just ask Jonathan Salant. 

Grassroots groups hit anti-religious bigotry in Democrat Murphy administration.

Two grassroots organizations have stepped up today and spoke out in defense of religious liberty.   The New Jersey Conservative GOP has joined the New Jersey Coalition of Pastors and Ministers in calling for the firing of Governor Phil Murphy Staffer Noemi Velazquez, for her anti-Christian, anti-Evangelical remarks. Noemi Velazquez referred to Republican policymakers in Washington as “Evangelical assholes!” 

In a press release today, Paul Danielczyk – President of the NJ Conservative GOP – noted:  

“Such a vile bigoted anti-Christian remark by a state employee has no place in New Jersey government! Velazquez was given a 10-day suspension and will be required to undergo a sensitivity re-training!  A ten-day suspension is not feasible or acceptable for such disgusting remarks and she should be removed immediately!” 

“This would send a clear-cut message that New Jersey government has no tolerance for anti-Christian bigotry. I’m stunned by the lack of attention given to this ugly bias from the legislature’s leadership of both parties!” 

“Our organization calls on party leaders Sweeney, Coughlin, Kean and Bramnick to call on the governor for the removal of Noemi Velazquez. No religious affiliation should be treated to such revolting prejudice and that INCLUDES Christianity. ” Danielczyk concluded.

For further information, please contact Paul Danielczyk at njcgop@aol.com

Words of advice to Governor Phil "Bon Jovi" Murphy

What is it about New Jersey Governors and rock stars that turns the former into superannuated groupies? 

Someone from Art Gallagher's shop over at More Monmouth Musings caught an apparently worse for the wear Phil Murphy out on the town.  What do you think?

http://www.moremonmouthmusings.net/2018/04/08/governor-murphy-has-no-public-schedule-today/#more-40391

Sure looks like him, doesn't it? 

Here's some classic sage advice for the chief executive...

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.