>Disgruntled top talent deserts AOL By David Gelles in New York
High quality global journalism requires investment.
AOL is facing an exodus of top executive and editorial talent even as the owner of the Huffington Post and TechCrunch says it is betting on premium content to resurrect the fading internet brand.
At least three top names from the company have departed this month, including Brad Garlinghouse, head of the company’s Silicon Valley office, who quit last week. Mr Garlinghouse’s departure came on the same day that Sarah Lacy, a senior writer at TechCrunch, said she was leaving, and just days after Saul Hansell, a former New York Times reporter who was a senior editor at the Huffington Post, quit his job.
>Democratic Pollsters: Obama Should Abandon Run for Second Term By Michael Catalini Updated: November 20, 2011 | 8:34 p.m. November 20, 2011 | 7:58 p.m.
President Obama should abandon his run for a second term and turn over the reins of the Democratic Party to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, two one-time Democratic pollsters wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, which appeared online Sunday.
Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen argued that just as Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson decided not to pursue additional runs though they could have, Obama should do the same.
“He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president’s accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,”Caddell and Schoen wrote.
>Supercommittee Expectations Wane on Tax Divide By Kathleen Hunter and Laura Litvan – Nov 20, 2011 6:07 PM ET
The deficit-cutting congressional supercommittee is expected to announce tomorrow that it has failed to reach agreement on at least $1.2 trillion in federal budget savings, a Democratic aide said.
The aide, who wasn’t authorized to discuss internal matters publicly and requested anonymity, said in an e-mail this afternoon that it was highly unlikely that the talks could be salvaged. Tomorrow is the deadline for the Congressional Budget Office to receive a plan that it can analyze before the committee’s Nov. 23 target date for reaching an agreement.
>BREAKING: Terror bomb plotter arrested in NYC By POST STAFF
The NYPD and Manhattan DA’s office have arrested a terror suspect who was planning to bomb city police facilities and US military sites, where he plotted to target returning war personnel and the families who gathered to welcome them home, The Post has learned.
The suspect, who lives in Manhattan, was arrested after he actually purchased bomb-making materials, sources said. He’d been on the authorities’ radar for about a year, the sources said.
It wasn’t immediately clear exactly where he planned to attack.Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly will host a press conference tonight about the alleged bomb plot.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie issued a conditional veto on a measure that would have imposed a permanent ban on hydraulic fracturing — a/k/a “fracking” — in the Garden State. Instead, Christie has suggested a year-long moratorium on the practice.
The debate over fracking in New Jersey is mostly symbolic. New Jersey has exactly zero oil and gas wells. It is, however, the nation’s #7 natural gas consuming state (5% of the nation’s total consumption), ranking ahead of Texas. Since 90% of gas wells are completed with a frac treatment, an anti-fracking New Jersey is a little like an obstetrician who promotes total celibacy among his patients.
Village Council Special Public Meetings Concerning Proposed Valley Expansion
The Ridgewood Village Council will be holding Special Public Meetings concerning the proposed Valley Hospital expansion in the Ridgewood High School Campus Center, 627 East Ridgewood Avenue, on the following dates: November 22, and November 29, 2011.
The meetings will begin at 8:00 p.m. The doors will open at 7:45 p.m. and seating will be on a first come, first served basis. The meetings will also be televised on Cablevision Channel 77 and through computer video streaming (limited viewers due to bandwith limitations). Agendas for each meeting will be posted on the Village’s website prior to the meeting.
At www.cato-at-liberty.org, Wally Olson sums up the accomplishments of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Helping the disabled feels so right and necessary that it is hard for the public to understand why we libertarians view the ADA:
“as a coercive and fabulously expensive government venture into what ought to be private decision-making.” But Olson lays out some good reasons:
“in recent months a New Jersey jury ordered a rheumatologist [3] to pay $400,000 for not providing a deaf patient with a sign language interpreter at his own expense… a federal appeals court ruled that [5] the nation’s paper currency unfairly discriminates against the disabled and must be redesigned (thus taking a different view from the National Federation of the Blind, which doesn’t think there’s a problem); a police dispatcher won a settlement [6] in her lawsuit saying she was unfairly discriminated against because of her narcolepsy (tendency to fall asleep at inappropriate times…”
Few public officials dare fight back. It is political suicide.
You have no idea what Jack may have went through, or what they are capable of. What, did Jack dare to speak out or disagree with them , and all their friends and relatives they hire? They hire friends and relatives at enormous salaries, while they cut program after program for our kids. One example, they made the Board Secretary the Boss over the receptionist (another BS job DeSimone invented) why? because she’s a friend, and when administrators get a raise, she gets a raise. Instead of 10 vacation days a year, she now gets 22 a year. My other favorite is when DeSimone invented a job for a man to take job descriptions for HIS staff at 600/day. Paid out over 30,000. It was rumored he was Desimone’s son’s father in law. Keep paying all those taxes, they know a lot of people, and the Board Members go along with everything, and Fishbein owes DeSimone because he hired him. Governor Christie are you listening?
>Other towns nearby – even with larger populations – pay less for the same functions we pay more for here
I don’t know much about Aronsohn, many on this blog say he has another agenda, but I don’t know about that.
What I do know is that mistakes of the past aren’t nearly as impt as not making them over and over again. At least he objects – often the only one– and is “put down” by the others – for what reasons I have no idea.
Many of the top VH officials are paid much higher than their counterparts in other nearby towns of similar size. That can be shown by lookups using public databases.
Other towns nearby – even with larger populations – pay less for the same functions we pay more for here.
Whether similar mistakes were made in the past doesn’t mean nearly as much as stopping this practice going forward.
Is the job of Clerk (as one example) here really so much more challenging than the same job in Mahwah or Paramus that it justifies paying $110,640 while Mahwah paid $67,940 and Paramus paid $62,000 for that same position?
Same question re Tax Collector, who here was paid $103,344 – while Mahwah paid $67,436 and Paramus paid $82,420. Is that job really so much more complex here to justify the big diff in pay?
Those are just 2 examples – many more can be found easily.
If you analyze more top positions and compare them, you wind up with a very large savings to taxpayers that other towns are able to achieve for providing the same services and functions– because they pay the top officials less than we do here.
So, why can’t we do that too? With the money saved, you could have funds to hire more people to get out and do all the needed work, couldn’t you?
Population of both Mahwah and Paramus per 2010 census data is just slightly higher then Ridgewood’s population. Mahwah:25,890 Paramus: 26,342 Ridgewood: 24,958.
Note: numbers from 2010 and sourced from: https://php.app.com/NJpublicemployees11/search.php Numbers do not include perks, pensions, bonuses, overtime and any other benefits, per that link.
Interesting quote from Dec 8 2010 Village Council meeting where officials from other towns were objecting to Ridgewood Water rate increase is below. Perhaps this is just an error in the minutes, but they ARE the “official” minutes. Supposedly the Clerk reviews them and the Council approves them prior to being published. (link for full minutes:) https://www.ridgewoodnj.net/minutes/PUBLIC12.810.htm
QUOTE FROM MINUTES: Councilman Riche thanked everyone for their comments and emphasized that he understands the hardships facing all residents, not only in Ridgewood but in neighboring towns as well. He stated that everyone is doing less with more. END QUOTE
Yeah, over at VH that last sentence seems to be all too true. At least Riche seems to have recognized it – IF the minutes are right. Now, why not do something to change it?
>Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census
WASHINGTON — They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as barely scraping by.
Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes called “near poor” and sometimes simply overlooked — and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.
When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.
> NJ Senators support Bill encouraging more irresponsible federal spending
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2011 BY HERB JACKSON WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE RECORD
Congress kept Amtrak running another year and gave the railroad $15 million to plan a new Hudson River tunnel, but high-speed rail funding was eliminated in a spending package that passed both houses on Thursday.
Bigger mortgages will also qualify for government backing under the bill, a grant program for hiring local police survived possible elimination, and several disaster aid programs got extra money.
The spending bill provides $1.4 billion to keep trains rolling. That includes $15 million Sen. Frank Lautenberg sought to start planning a two-tunnel project under the Hudson, known as Gateway.
“The existing tunnel is more than a century old and not capable of adequately servicing our state’s growing number of commuters,” said Lautenberg, D-N.J. “I’m pleased this bill includes funding to move forward.”
Lautenberg originally sought $50 million for the project, which would ease a bottleneck blamed for frequent delays on NJ Transit commuter trains. But many programs were cut: President Obama sought $8 billion for high-speed rail projects nationwide that Congress did not fund at all.
> Foreign hackers targeted U.S. water plant in apparent malicious cyber attack, expert says By Ellen Nakashima
Foreign hackers caused a pump at an Illinois water plant to fail last week, according to a preliminary state report. Experts said the cyber-attack, if confirmed, would be the first known to have damaged one of the systems that supply Americans with water, electricity and other essentials of modern life.
Companies and government agencies that rely on the Internet have for years been routine targets of hackers, but most incidents have resulted from attempts to steal information or interrupt the functioning of Web sites. The incident in Springfield, Ill., would mark a departure because it apparently caused physical destruction.
Celebrate our anniversary and Black Friday with a SALE! Buy 1st item and get the 2nd item 50% off. From November 19th to November 26th.
It’s the time of year when we say thank you to our customers for supporting us for the last few years. It has been an amazing journey and we have loved every minute of it.
Just visit our store and you get to enter your name in the draw for an exclusive piece of jewelry.
We will be serving coffee and breakfast on Black Friday (November 25th) from 10am to 12 noon. Don’t forget to share this offer with your friends and family!
>Ridgewood council’s decision time nears on Valley proposal
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2011 BY KELLY EBBELS STAFF WRITER THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
After five years of strained and divisive hearings on the Valley Hospital “Renewal” project, Village Council members are readying to decide the fate of the proposal.
This Tuesday, council members will, for the first time, publicly voice their thoughts on the proposal; they are expected to vote at the following meeting on Nov. 29.
The question of “Renewal,” which has taken the local limelight since it was first proposed in 2006, has been an acrimonious one for Ridgewood. Last June, when the Planning Board voted 6-1 to allow an amendment to the Master Plan that would permit the hospital to expand, police were called in from neighboring towns to handle an overflowing crowd outside George Washington Middle School.
