Why not just enforce the existing laws

Since it would take too much effort and brains to arrest criminals what politicians do is create new, "stricter" laws to make the bad guys go away.

"Criminal street gangs have become an epidemic across our state," said Assembly Majority Leader Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Mercer), a sponsor of the package. "They are destroying neighborhoods. They are terrorizing residents. They are engaging in crime, violence, and general depravity. Most alarmingly of all, they are corrupting our children." link

Someone sent me this

Can I get this option

The United States Senate, in its immigration bill, will allow illegals to pick which of 3 of 5 years that they are going to pay back taxes on and they get to choose the years. Don't you want that option?

Our country has gone insane. No one cares about the stupidity, corruption or downright incompetence in Washington.

Eminent Domain Under Review

After Kelo v. New London I posted a number of times on the abuse of local New Jersey governments taking land for developers. Finally, yesterday, a new report makes clear that political contributions have a direct impact on who's land gets taken.

As others have testified in re cent months, however, Chen said constitutional protections for property owners have eroded to the point that property is being seized almost without notice, for little compensation and to enrich developers using campaign contributions to win support.

In what may be his most stringent suggestion, Chen zeroed in on the loose definition for deeming a property "in need of redevelopment," thus making it eligible to be seized.

A 1992 change by the Legislature allowed local officials to seize property that is "underutilized." Chen noted that another change in 2003 made his own suburban home in Berkeley Heights subject to condemnation, because it is located in a state-declared growth area. link

Why can't they just get rid of the agency

I guess it's a start.

Inspector General to put agents on SCC
The state Inspector General, whose scathing report on waste and mismanagement prompted widespread reforms at the state Schools Construction Corp. last year, will be invited to install two of her agents in the corporation's offices as part of ongoing reforms at the agency, a task force appointed by Gov. Jon Corzine reported today.

What happens when a bear shows up in your neighborhood

This morning in Short Hills a bear happened to climb a tree in someone's backyard. State officials tranqualized the bear and will kill it. I love this description of the incident as reported in the Ledger.

The bear caused a commotion on the quiet, dead-end street, which borders the Short Hills Country Club and South Pond. Joggers and club members in their tennis whites came to the backyard to check on the commotion, as news helicopters flew overhead.

"I'm glad they were able to tranquilize it," said Ann Shuch, who stayed in her home with her children while the bear was in her backyard tree. "This has never happened before

After all the hate filled comments I got from the East Jersey bear lovers for supporting the bear hunt. Look what they do when a bear comes to town. My police department won't even respond to a bear call.

By the way. Doesn't it seem like there are alot more than 3000 bears in the state based on the number of bears that are roaming the wilds of east Jersey?

The jobs, the jobs

Tom Moran has an excellent column in sunday's Ledger about the flight of quality jobs from New Jersey. New Jersey bloggers have been posting on this issues for the past year and pointing to the ever increasing level of state employees and taxes as the cause. Finally someone at the ledger, Tom Moran, starts getting the mesage out even though it's a puff piece on Corzine.

Gov. Jon Corzine summoned leading executives from the pharmaceutical indus try to a working dinner two weeks ago in the stately library at Drumthwacket, the governor's official residence.

The topic was the dangerous slide in New Jersey's economy.

The problem is that we are rapidly losing ground in the very in dustries that have made New Jersey one of the wealthiest states in the nation over the last generation -- pharmaceuticals, telecommuni cations and other high-tech sec tors.

But that's not all. While the private sector has been stagnant, the public sector has continued to grow, fed by ever-rising taxes. link

New NSA revelation

With the new revelation that the NSA has been collecting call information from the phone companies I keep smiling because of all the three monkey republicans that defended Bush and his program. I'm not sure that this program is illegal and I don't know when it was started, but if you ever needed a lesson in the over reaching of big government between these two programs you have it.

What may be a little more scary for those of us out here in the world is how easily all the big phone companies turned over our personal information. Shouldn't they be on the hook?

For all you guys that like numbers

This is for NJ Fiscal Folly, Enlighten and of course Smadanek. I don't know if you've seen these.

http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/omb/publications/06approp/pdf/debtser.pdf

The post is dated 8/2005 and it shows the debt by funded project. You guys should have a ball with this.


For year ending '05
http://www.state.nj.us/njded/finance/fp/audit/0405/program/2004-05-Sec2-30-50FINAL.pdf

And http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/legislativepub/budget/FY06Sum1.pdf Budget summary

Now roll it back!

It's about time that we start seeing the "most powerful" Governor in the country start standing up to an out of control judiciary.

The New Jersey Supreme Court yesterday allowed the state to freeze aid to its 31 poorest school districts in order to balance the budget, but also gave the districts a right to appeal for more funding.

The unanimous ruling came on the same day acting Education Commissioner Lucille Davy told lawmakers the Corzine administration is working on plans to overhaul the state's school funding for mula completely by July 2007.

Now the State is finally admitting the boondogle that the Abbott districts are.

The justices also ordered the Department of Education to go ahead with planned audits of four special needs districts: Newark, Jersey City, Paterson and Camden. Farber candidly told the justices that the state has "neglected its responsibility to provide sufficient fis cal oversight" and said the audits are needed to ensure that poor districts are properly spending billions of dollars in aid.

It's time to redo school funding in this state.

You can tell that this guy is from NYC

Wjile speaking to reporters about what the disaster that a small huricane would be for the financial district, John Koch a NWS employee had the following to say.

It's not like we can all run down to Home Depot and pick up these two-by-fours to board up windows," said John Koch, lead forecaster at the NWS forecast office in New York.

Two-by-fours? He's right, NYC would be in real trouble.

First gay marriage, then,..

"Big Love" on HBO is about a polygamist. I've noticed that on the news there are a number of feel good (favorable) stories about polygamists, including one about a man who is on the FBI's most wanted list.

Once Gay marriage is allowed where is the line drawn?

When is Corzine going to really cut jobs and programs?

According to the state Treasurer,

The state could be short as much as half a billion dollars in the coming budget year because in come and corporate taxes aren't bringing in as much money as ex pected, state Treasurer Bradley Abelow announced yesterday.

Of course by raising the corporate tax a few years ago we have driven corporations out of the state in droves along with their highly compensated executives... Oh wait we raised their taxes with the "Millionaire tax" a few years ago.

One only has to look at the quote from former acting Governor Codey to realize the mindset in Trenton among the power elite.

Senate President Richard Codey (D-Essex) called the reports "disheartening" and said that "plain and simple, we have to tighten our belts even more."

Tighten our belts even more? The proposed budget is $2 billion more than last year's budget. That's not belt tightening, that's robbing more from the tax payers of New Jersey.

States all over the country are amassing major surpluses, for example,

Hawaii $600 Million
Virginia $1 Billion
North Carolina $600 Million
Texas=$8.2 Billion
New York City=$3.3 Billion

and the list goes on and on with Arizona, and Colorodo article links all the while New Jersey is spending more than it takes in year after year. This must stop and significant cuts must be made to the state payroll and the out of control spending of the politicians in Trenton.

Remember when we were all going to burn

Like global warming, the famous "hole in the Ozone is turning into something taht is a natural phenomena not man made.

Weatherhead and Signe Bech Anderson of the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen analyzed data from satellites and ground stations and information from 14 modeling studies.

They found that ozone levels have stabilized or increased slightly in the past 10 years. But full recovery is still decades away.

The researchers said depletion has been most severe at the poles and to a lesser extent at mid-latitudes covering bands of North America, South America and Europe.
link

You can always tell when scientists are lying (outside the fact that their mouths are moving) or trying to get more grant money for their studies. Almost always they will offer some justification for the phenomena that takes into account the politics of their backers using words like feel, could cause or may cause or host of phrases that you see every day. Dr. Betsey Weatherhead and Signe Bech Anderson are no different. In their press release they had this to say,

We now have some confidence that the ozone layer is responding to the decreases in chlorine levels in the atmosphere due to the leveling off and decrease of CFCs," said Dr Betsy Weatherhead, of the University of Colorado in Boulder.

"Not only is the ozone layer getting better, we feel it is due to the Montreal Protocol," she added in an interview

The real cost of illegals

Over at Enlighten there is an interesting post on what the true cost of illegals are to the New Jersey taxpayer from strickly an education standpoint. The quote from assembly member Micheals

That's one hell of a price to pay for a cheap short order cook.

This quote is the entire crux of the illegal issue. Who really benefits from illegal immigration. I know you think it's the local contractor or your landscaper, and they do, but not nearly as much as Walmart, Perdue, Tyson foods, Barnes and Noble and a hundred other large scale American Corporations. Here's the scam in New Jersey and I'm sure it works like this in other states as well.

An illegal goes to one of the staffing agencies that provides help for the big distribution centers down off of exit 8A or for a cleaning crew of the named above companies. The staffing agencey has the illegal fill out an I9 and copies the illegal's obviously fake S.S. Card and supporting documents and puts the illegal on a van for the drive to the distribution center. The illegal, works for minimum wage and has SS, Medicaid, unemployment and withholding held from his paycheck. Who wins and who loses? Let's take a look.

Winner: Large companies that pay a dollar or two over minimum wage, have no extra costs such as workers comp and other insurances and don't have the extra costs of an American worker. They also have the deniablity of "not knowing" that the workers were illegal because the staffing agencey took care of that end of the deal.

Loser: The illegal who paid taxes under false S.S. number that can't collect any benefits.

Loser: The New Jersey tax payer who now has to fund schools and health care for the illegals and their family through tax dollars just so big corporations can make a few extra dollars.

See, we get cheap goods from big box retail, cheap grass cutting and house cleaning and construction work, but we pay on the back end through expanded social services for the illegals.

If you stop and think about it every homeowner in Jersey should be hiring illegals every weekend to do all their chores, it's better for you economically than for the person that doesn't and still has to pay.

Illegals walking out has little impact

For all of the noise the press made about the great illegal immigrant walkout yesterday, it sure appeared to be quite a bust. The Ledger had to go to the Ironbound in Newark and Speedwell Ave. both in areas highly populated by illegals and immigrants. link .

The national "Day Without Immigrants" boycott that emptied many of the traffic-choked streets of the Portuguese-speaking enclave was felt by businesses across New Jersey with mixed results. Among the industries most affected by the action were construction, hotels, food service and agriculture.

There was scattered evidence of businesses closing for the day -- or calling it quits at lunchtime -- after immigrant workers failed to show up for work. In some cases, businesses worked shorthanded, while others were not impacted at all.

It seems to me that we should really be fining all these businesses, especially the large ones like Goya Foods, Perdue and Tyson foods that had to shut factories because of worker shortage. Clearly, they are admitting that they are breaking the law by hiring illegals. Start fining these companies $25,000 per illegal and this stuff will stop immediately.

Oh boy, is this gonna cost or what?

Medicaid and Social Security are going to go broke sooner than previously thought. As a matter of fact, it looks like medicaid will be broke by 2018 . Accordingly,

The trustees, who include the head of the Social Security Administration and three members of President Bush's Cabinet, painted a sober assessment of the health of the two programs in advance of the looming retirements of 78 million baby boomers.

"We do not believe the currently projected long-run growth rates of Social Security or Medicare are sustainable under current financing arrangements," the trustees said in this year's report.

Seems fitting that the Administration that presided over the biggest increase in government social spending with the medicaid prescription drug plan, now is telling us they don't know how they can pay for it.