Ridgewood Nj, Democrat Senator Bob Menendez says on Twitter what may have felt is the real purpose for illegal immigrants.
Earlier today the Senator commented on Twitter, “A #DayWithoutImmigrants means Senators & Senate staff couldn’t get their coffee because immigrants are part of our everyday lives”
It is clear from this Tweet that the Senator feels legal and illegal immigrants amount to nothing more than personal servants and flunkies .
Yes, #DayWithoutImmigrants, Senator it is a very difficult day for you, no one to fetch your paper, get your coffee, shine your shoes.
The Menendez tweet was met instantaneously derision
Vince Brunda @VinceForNJ
@SenatorMenendez Wow, I’m sorry you were so inconvenienced, and please don’t stereotype immigrants as cafe workers. #daywithoutimmigrants
The On Blast Show @TheOnBlastShow
@VinceForNJ @SenatorMenendez LOL too funny, make your own coffee them! Give them everyday off
Tony Buero @BueroTony
@SenatorMenendez so what you are saying is you use them as slaves or personal servants? U have lost your mind!
Michael Novack @mdnovack
@SenatorMenendez That’s horrible. However, as a mere commoner, I managed to get my own coffee this morning. Wasn’t difficult.
Spanish mayor urged to call in exorcist over town hall haunting
The mayor of a small town outside Granada is facing calls to bring in an exorcist after workers became convinced that the council offices were haunted – and the ghost was even caught on camera.
Let’s compare what President Trump has accomplished since the inauguration (with that enormous crowd!) with what congressional Republicans have done.
In the past three weeks, Trump has: staffed the White House, sent a dozen Cabinet nominees to the Senate, browbeat Boeing into cutting its price on a government contract, harangued American CEOs into keeping their plants in the United States, imposed a terrorist travel ban, met with foreign leaders and nominated a Supreme Court justice, among many other things.
(And still our hero finds time to torment the media with his tweets!)
What have congressional Republicans been doing? Scrapbooking?
More than 90 percent of congressional Republicans kept their jobs after the 2016 election, so you can cross “staffing an entire branch of government” off the list. Only the Senate confirms nominees, which they’ve been doing at a snail’s pace, so they’ve got loads of free time — and the House has no excuse at all.
Where’s the Obamacare repeal? Where are the hearings featuring middle-class Americans with no health insurance because it was made illegal by Obamacare?
The House passed six Obamacare repeals when Obama was president and there was no chance of them being signed into law. Back then, Republicans were full of vim and vigor! But the moment Trump became president, the repeals came to a screeching halt.
After the inauguration (gigantic!), House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put out a plan for repealing Obamacare … in 200 days. They actually gave their legislative agenda this inspiring title: “The Two Hundred Day Plan.”
Ridgewood NJ, The following is a statement from James Goodness, Vice Chancellor and Director of Communications for the Archdiocese of Newark.
While the unfortunate situation at Saint John’s School in Clark has affected many, the Archdiocese of Newark has special concern for the students involved – the two girls and the boys on the Saint John’s JV Black team, and all other students participating in the league – who have been upset through no fault of their own. The CYO basketball program is organized not only for the enjoyment of the students involved, but also to teach them the importance of fair play, good and healthy competition and how faith can be expressed through sports and in community.
By their very nature, competitive sports call for rules and regulations. What is more, the educational purpose of CYO athletics needs policies that create a safe and healthy environment for the athletes, while serving the goals of the Catholic Youth Organization.
For more than two decades, the rules and practices in the Archdiocese of Newark CYO call for boys-only and girls-only teams in older grades. The rule recognizes that some sports, like basketball, feature greater physical contact and aggression as student players age and mature. The logic is similar to the rules requiring the separation of players by age groupings. Both rules seek to reduce the possibility of injury to a younger, smaller child by older and more physically developed athletes.
While he recognizes that the recent decisions by CYO officials were aimed at an appropriate and consistent application of the organization’s rules, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the Archbishop of Newark, believes that the Saint John’s JV Black team should not have been penalized for mistakes that adults responsible for following the league rules may have made.
Consequently, the Cardinal has directed that the Saint John’s JV Black team may retain its current team roster as a co-ed team for the remainder of the current season, and have its win/loss record restored. The league will attempt to reschedule the final two games of the season that the JV Black team had forfeited, and the team will participate in the league playoffs.
Further, the Cardinal has directed that CYO officials, under the aegis of the Archdiocesan Secretariat for Catholic Education, convene a working group to study the current league rules regarding participation and team makeup in all age groups.
“We want the children to play for the very reasons CYO sports leagues were established: to provide a source of both recreation and reaffirmation of our Christian faith,” Cardinal Tobin said.
We regret the difficulty, disappointment and discouragement that have affected the children, whose growth remains our highest priority and concern.
In a separate matter dealing with litigation brought by a family against St. Theresa School in Kenilworth, Cardinal Tobin has directed Archdiocesan legal counsel to cease seeking to enforce the school’s Parent/Student handbook provision about removal of students because of litigation. The two girls in this matter will continue to attend St. Theresa for the remainder of the year. It should be noted, however, that St. Theresa Parish and School will continue to defend itself in the lawsuit brought against it by the family.
Updated February 16, 2017
Posted February 14, 2017
Housing prices in New Jersey have suffered from the recession, and have yet to hit pre-recession levels. Most housing prices fell between the 2005-2009 Census and the 2011-2015 Census. To balance out those effects, NJ Advance Media looked at Zillow data comparing the 2012-2013 average home sale price with the 2014-2015 sale price.
The Worst and Best States to Be a Homeowner in 2017
February 16,2017
the staff of the Ridgewood
Ridgewoood NJ, for many buying a home is one of the biggest investments of your life, according to Craig Casazza at the consumer site ValuePenguin it’s ideal to buy within a state where housing is relatively affordable and the value of your home is likely to appreciate strongly over time. It’s also desirable to avoid paying more than you can manage in ongoing costs, from taxes to insurance to damage from major storms. Finally, it’s best, of course, if the state where you’re buying boasts low rates of property crime, good schools, and a healthy proportion of homeowners compared with renters.
Casazza rolled together ten key metrics that quantify those factors, and ranked states on how successfully (or not) they offer the optimal factors for home ownership while skirting the attributes you’d want to avoid.
Here is the list of the 10 worst homeowner states and the homeowner scores assigned to them:
The 10 worst states to be a homeowner have some combination of a weak housing market, a heavy burden of costs to maintain a home, and a propensity for calamity and crime. The three worst states are in the south, and specifically from the Gulf region, where yearly storms batter homes and can cause millions of dollars in property damage:
Louisiana 20.97
Mississippi 29.32
Tennessee 29.59
New Mexico 34.69
Alabama 35.04
Missouri 36.64
Texas 39.21
New Jersey 39.54
California 39.97
Georgia 41.53
The 10 best states to own a home generally are less urban overall, with a higher proportion of homes in rural areas, where costs and crime can be lower. Our highest-ranked state for homeownership is Iowa, where it’s very affordable to own a home. With low insurance rates, low mortgage rates, and few calamities that cause insurance claims, South Dakota is another notably inexpensive state in which to own a home.
Iowa 82.60
South Dakota 81.38
Wyoming 79.49
Nebraska 78.17
Maine 77.44
Minnesota 75.37
West Virginia 76.03
Michigan 75.74
New Hampshire 72.28
Wisconsin 71.25
Mark Krulish , Staff Writer, @Mark_Krulish6:02 p.m. ET Feb. 15, 2017
There will be a few more places residents on the west side of Ridgewood cannot park if an introduced ordinance is passed next month.
Brought to the table at the Feb. 8 council meeting, the ordinance would prohibit parking at several points along the northern side of Sherman Place – most notably near the corner the curb line of westbound Godwin Avenue, an intersection at which a man and his 10-year-old child were struck last September.
Keep it two way. The posts asking for better signage are legit. And while the HS student story is sad, making it one way won’t change the danger of crossing the tracks. This is one more case of the Village Engineer’s idiocy! The average vehicle is 6′ wide. North Monroe (25mph) is approximately 29′ from curb to curb, between Fairmont and Patricia Ct – but No Parking on either side (even though there’s 17′ of clearance). Most cars coming up Glenwood from HoHoKus turn onto Hillcrest.. Whether you turn left or right on Hillcrest, between Hamilton and Fairmont the road average 21′ – 23; But there’s Parking on both sides of the street!!!. So if there’s a truck (which is wider than 6′) is parked on both sides of the street (like landscapers do in the summer) you have less than a foot of clearance – God forbid that a fire truck has to get through! So the same “brain trust” that puts this into place now wants to screw around with Glenwood.
The political response to last Friday’s tragic terrorist attack in Paris has been woefully predictable.
President Obama has vowed renewed commitment to his current ISIS strategy – whatever that may be.
Republicans in Congress have railed against the President’s strategy and called for a stronger response – whatever that may be.
Governors and State legislatures have responded to public concern about Syrian refugees by taking vocal stands resisting refugees enter their states by any means at their disposal – whatever that may be.
While there is a great deal of moral indignation in the media – including among libertarian publications – about the response of these governors, this sort political posturing is inevitable. As long as America is a democratic country whose people lack any confidence in their government to accomplish simple tasks – much less separating good guys from bad guys – fear will drive public policy. After all, if Washington had demonstrated any competence in this area, maybe ISIS wouldn’t be quite so well armed.
While I find it much more useful to focus my outrage on America’s continued militarism in the Middle East than the predictable pandering of politicians, I did find a Huffington Post article on Syrian immigration quite interesting. It details the efforts of a coalition of humanitarian organizations that have appealed to President Obama to allow for private organizations and individuals to personally sponsor refugees.
As Omar Hossino of the Syrian American Council told HuffPo:
Every single day we get phone calls from Americans who want to privately sponsor a refugee. But since the private sponsorship is not legal, it’s not an option, the government doesn’t permit that, they’re unable to do that.
The article goes on to outline the success Canada has had with its own private sponsorships program.
Private sponsorships in Canada have helped resettle more than 200,000 refugees since the program was created in 1979, according to the Canadian Council for Refugees. Groups there can sign on to sponsor refugees, typically with a commitment to provide for them for 12 months or until they become self-sufficient, if that happens first.
Of course this idea of immigration-by-invitation is a very libertarian concept.
In his paper The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration, Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe touches on immigration-by-invitation when he outlines the inherent differences between the libertarian arguments for “free trade” and “open borders”:
For free in conjunction with trade then means trade by invitation of private households and firms only; and restricted trade does not mean protection of households and firms from uninvited goods or services, but invasion and abrogation of the right of private households and firms to extend or deny invitations to their own property. In contrast, free in conjunction with immigration does not mean immigration by invitation of individual households and firms, but unwanted invasion or forced integration; and restricted immigration actually means, or at least can mean, the protection of private households and firms from unwanted invasion and forced integration.
The ability for private organizations and individuals to personally sponsor refugees would create a framework for a policy of immigration-by-invitation. While such a solution is sure to not satisfy everyone, it at least offers a meaningful step forward and allows us to start detangling an incompetent Federal government from a complex and important humanitarian issue.
Unfortunately, there seems to be little hope that the Obama Administration will take this practical step.
Anthony B. Kim researches international economic issues at The Heritage Foundation, with a strong focus on economic freedom. Kim is the research manager of the Index of Economic Freedom, the flagship product of the Heritage Foundation in partnership with The Wall Street Journal. Read his research.
It’s already been eight years since the Great Recession, yet the U.S. economy has been just inching along, with its productivity flagging and millions being locked out of the labor market.
One critical underlying factor for this lack of economic dynamism has been the startling decline of America’s economic freedom, an unfortunate legacy of Barack Obama’s eight-year presidency.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index of Economic Freedom—an annual global study that compares countries’ entrepreneurial environments—highlights the urgent need for the U.S. to change course. For the ninth time since 2008, America has lost ground.
According to the 2017 index, the U.S. ranks 17th out of 180 rated economies, lagging behind other comparable advanced economies such as Switzerland (fourth), Australia (fifth), Canada (seventh), and the United Kingdom (12th).
The U.S. remains mired in the ranks of the “mostly free,” the second-tier economic freedom status into which it dropped in 2010.
Since 1995, the index has measured a nation’s commitment to limited government and free enterprise on a scale of 0 to 100 by evaluating four critical policy pillars, including rule of law and regulatory efficiency.
These commitments have powerful effects: Countries achieving higher levels of economic freedom consistently and measurably outperform others in economic growth, long-term prosperity, and social progress. Those losing freedom, on the other hand, risk economic stagnation, high unemployment, and deteriorating social conditions.
In fact, America’s standing in the index had dwindled steadily during the Obama years. This largely owed to increased government spending, regulations, and a failed stimulus program that enriched the well-connected while leaving average Americans behind.
Registering its lowest economic freedom score ever, America continued its string of discouraging trends in the 2017 index. Obama’s Washington-first, government-centric approach to policymaking has inflicted long-term damage to U.S. economic growth.
A substantial expansion in the size and scope of government under the Obama administration—including through new and costly regulations in areas like finance, health care, and the environment—has hit wide swaths of the economy, affecting almost every American in some way and reducing opportunities for nongovernmental production and investment.
The growth of government has been accompanied by increasing cronyism that has undermined the rule of law and perceptions of fairness.
Our nation’s fiscal health has been grossly dented as well. The national debt has nearly doubled since 2009, growing from $10.6 trillion to around $20 trillion. In dollar terms, this is the largest increase in the national debt in U.S. history.
In practice, all of these negative developments that undercut America’s economic freedom have amounted to a gradual slide toward a more heavily bureaucratic state and an increasingly politicized economy over the past eight years.
Today, the imperative to restore America’s economic freedom and thereby revitalize vibrant entrepreneurial growth is stronger than ever. Americans deserve better, and they can do better.
It should be noted that free-market capitalism built on the principles of economic freedom does not just conserve the status quo. In many cases, it overturns and transforms. It pushes out the old to make way for the new so that real and true progress can take place. It leads to innovation in all realms: better jobs, better goods and services, and better societies.
The 2016 election was a game-changer. America has been given an incredible and unique opportunity to move away from Obama’s failed liberal policy agenda and toward an agenda that strives to restore America’s economic freedom and spur dynamic growth.
The Heritage Foundation has introduced such a plan, called “Blueprint for Reform: A Comprehensive Policy Agenda for a New Administration in 2017.”
It is time to act on this plan and once again unleash economic freedom and flourishing in America.
Ridgewood NJ, the New Jersey pension crisis in 60 seconds . Reader says ,” the unions rule NJ and the politicians are at their beck and call. They’re bankrupting the state and municipalities, and taxpayers get screwed at every turn. Benefits should be diminished big time, but the unions get the vote out to keep the good times rolling. You keep voting in theives and you’re gonna get robbed. Any time the unions want something, assume it’s bad for state and local tax payers”
Aetna CEO: Obamacare markets are in a ‘death spiral’
By PAUL DEMKO
Updated 02/15/17 10:28 AM EST
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Obamacare is in a “death spiral,” the influential CEO of Aetna, Mark Bertolini, declared Wednesday morning.
Bertolini’s doomsday prophesy: More insurers will pull out of the government-run marketplaces in the coming weeks and many areas will have no insurers to provide Affordable Care Act coverage in 2018.
“It’s not going to get any better; it’s getting worse,” Bertolini said in an interview at a Wall Street Journal event. But he declined to say whether Aetna would completely pull out of Obamacare markets next year.
Humana, which had already significantly limited its exchange footprint this year, announced Tuesday that it would completely pull out of the exchange markets next year after determining its customer base would still be unprofitable. That followed major pullbacks this year from other national insurers, including Aetna and UnitedHealth Group.
Washington DC, Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump signed legislation (House Joint Resolution 41) eliminating a costly regulation that threatened to put domestic extraction companies and their employees at an unfair disadvantage.
This creates a level playing field with companies like BP who were formed solely for the purpose of bribing, ie political contributions, PILOT, jobs, taxes and so on foreign governments to exploit the natural resources.
Critics of the Gulf Oil spill have long claimed BP bribed its way out of trouble in the gulf with a huge payment to the Obama Administration.
H.J. Res. 41 blocks a misguided regulation from burdening American extraction (oil )companies.
By halting this regulation, the President has removed a costly impediment to American extraction companies helping their workers succeed. This legislation could save American businesses as much as $600 million annually in regulatory compliance costs and spare them 200,000 hours of paperwork. The regulation created an unfair advantage for foreign-owned extraction companies.
BUILDING ON PRESIDENTIAL ACTION: President Trump has been steadfast in his commitment to reducing the regulatory burden on everyday Americans, their pocketbooks, and their businesses.
President Trump has required that for every new Federal regulation, two existing regulations be eliminated.
President Trump will initiate fundamental changes to the United States healthcare system to reduce the financial burden on Americans by getting the government out of the way.
President Trump has placed a moratorium on all new regulations by executive departments and agencies that are not compelled by Congress or public safety.
President Trump directed his Secretary of Commerce to streamline Federal permitting processes for domestic manufacturing and to reduce regulatory burdens on domestic manufacturers.
President Trump signed an Executive Order expediting the environmental review and approval processes for domestic infrastructure projects.
President Trump directed the Secretary of the Treasury to conduct a full review of Dodd-Frank to ensure associated, burdensome regulations receive proper scrutiny.
President Trump ordered re-examination of the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, to make certain that it does not harm Americans as they save for retirement.
Pharma lobbyist Evan Morris helped Jersey Dems but also helped himself
The must-read story for the political class this week is “The Rise and Fall of a K Street Renegade” from the Wall Street Journal. In brutal, delicious detail—the $2,000 bottles of wine (buy one and the second is free!), the $300,000 mahogany speedboat called Mulligan (a golf term to go with the eight private golf club memberships)—Brody Mullins details the spectacular rise and tragic fall of pharma lobbyist Evan Morris. Morris lived a life that would make Jack Abramoff blush and the article suggests that consultants who participated in the kickback scheme could face “fraud or other charges,” with federal prosecutors already showing evidence to a grand jury.
The lobbyist himself, however, won’t be facing any charges. Morris, just 38 and with a bottle of Petrus by his side, shot himself in July 2015, just as Roche lawyers finally noticed massive amounts of money being paid to consultants who seemed to be lining Morris’ pockets in return.
Naturally, for a political story this juicy, there’s a Jersey angle. The story includes a passage in which Morris helps the Washington trade group Biotechnology Innovation Organization hire former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for its 2014 convention. She received $335,000 for her appearance and he arranged additional six-figure donations to the Clinton Foundation. But that largesse was simply a continuation of earlier Clinton-reflected glory, which brings us to Hudson County.
