FBI, once again, raids offices of friend of Menendez
Federal law enforcement officials once again have raided the offices of a West Palm Beach, Fla., eye doctor who is personal friends with U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.
The raid, reported in the Palm Beach Post, took place Tuesday morning. The news organization’s website said about 15 to 20 agents from both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent nearly three hours at Dr. Solomon Melgen’s offices before carting off several boxes in a van.
Melgen’s offices also were raided in January, and reports said the raid centered around irregularities with Medicare billing. He has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
The doctor has a personal relationship with Menendez and has contributed to his campaign. The Post said that since the early 1990s, Melgen has contributed more than $450,000 to Florida and federal candidates.
Early this year, reports alleged that Menendez had pushed legislation that aided businesses in which Melgen was involved. The senator and Melgen denied those allegations.
Even more salacious accusations that Melgen had supplied Menendez with prostitutes in the Dominican Republic were publicized by conservative websites in 2012. Menendez condemned those allegations as “smears.” (Staff Report/Asbury Park Press)
Ridgewood church hosts first same-sex marriage in village
Tuesday October 22, 2013, 3:37 PM
BY DARIUS AMOS
STAFF WRITER
The Ridgewood News
There was a certain historical significance to Monday’s ceremony at the Unitarian Society of Ridgewood, but Marijan Por and Christian Reinhardt were understandably caught up thinking about their future as a married, same-sex couple in New Jersey.
The two longtime Ridgewood residents are the first gay couple to marry in the village, and their celebration was the first same-sex wedding to take place in Bergen County since the state Supreme Court last Friday rejected Governor Christie’s request to postpone them while his office appealed a lower court ruling. By early Monday afternoon, the governor had lifted his appeal.
Same-sex marriage requests met with confusion, frustration in some N.J. towns
Whether the first day of same-sex marriage in North Jersey was a joyous celebration, or a heartbreaking disappointment, depended on location and a sympathetic ear.
In Hawthorne, Jeff Gardner was able to say “I do” Monday to Ari Lash, his partner of 13 years, after he showed the proper paperwork to a Passaic County judge, who waived the state’s 72-hour waiting period for nuptials. Christian Reinhardt and Marijan Por did the same in Bergen County court and tied the knot hours later, as their 8-year-old daughter looked on.
A Bergen County judge dashed the hopes of high school sweethearts Sophie Papanikolaou and Teri Noel, of Fair Lawn, telling them they didn’t meet the legal requirements and had to wait until Thursday to make their 34-year relationship a legal marriage.
“I’m frustrated, I’m furious, I’m hurt,” Papanikolaou said. “We expected a rubber stamp. We’ve been together 34 years. Why would [the judge] give a flying leap?”
Confusion over how New Jersey’s marriage laws apply to gay couples seemed to be the key problem in local communities, as municipal officials and eager couples tried to make sense of it all. As of Thursday, there was no gay marriage in New Jersey. On Friday, suddenly there was, after the state Supreme Court rejected Governor Christie’s request to hold off on allowing same-sex marriages while his administration appealed a lower court ruling. (Baker/The Record)
Opponents of Valley Hospital expansion in Ridgewood leave hearing frustrated
Wednesday October 23, 2013, 8:00 AM
BY BARBARA WILLIAMS
STAFF WRITER
The Record
RIDGEWOOD – It was another night of frustration for residents opposed to The Valley Hospital’s plan to expand as testimony from one of their representatives was blocked, interrupted and delayed during a planning board meeting that had residents fleeing long before it ended.
John Hersperger, an advisor to Concerned Residents of Ridgewood, was trying to make a few points he wanted the board to consider when it decides whether to allow the hospital to nearly double in size on its 15-acre lot. But by the end of the three and a half hour meeting Tuesday night, his testimony was limited to a few sentences.
He had been trying to present to the board with what opponents consider to be conflicting statements Valley made about the need for expanded healthcare in Bergen County.
Ridgewood Library’s 11th Annual Reel Voices Film Festival
Wednesday, Oct. 23 at 7:30 pm
(free preview screeing)
Fridays at 7:30 pm:
October 25;
November 1, 15 & 22
Ridgewood Public Library
125 N. Maple Avenue,
Ridgewood, NJ 07450
(201) 670-5600, ext. 114
JoDay Library Cafe opens at 6:45 pm
on Festival Nights
Festival at a Glance – all films begin at 7:30 pm Wed., Oct. 23 Stories We Tell Fri., Oct. 25 The Invisible War Fri., Nov. 1 The Central Park Five Fri., Nov. 15 Blood Brother Fri., Nov. 22 Big Men
Stories We Tell Wednesday, October 23 at 7:30 PM
Free preview event; no speaker
Film’s Website
(2012/US; 108 mins; PG-13 for adult material) Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Sarah Polley tells the moving portrait of her family–her many siblings, actor/writer father, and actress/mother–and a legacy of secrets and lies. As with many families, there are a multitude of stories that have been told through the years. Polley, the youngest child, mines this oral tradition in this groundbreaking film, seamlessly blending past and present, the real and the imagined.
Polley’s characteristically unflinching yet compassionate gaze delivers an exceptional level of depth and emotion. As Polley says, “If I have learned anything from making this film, it is that we can’t all be right and we can’t all be wrong. So we must be unintentionally distorting things to varying degrees in order to feed our own version of what we need the past and history to be, and in our way, we must all be telling the truth as well.” Pictured above: Director Sarah Polley
Study Says Ridgewood rated among best towns for raising a family
The Best Towns in New Jersey for Young Families
by Mike Anderson on October 21, 2013
New Jersey families look for good opportunities for their kids as well as a strong job market, both in and outside of the New York City metro area.
We wanted to identify the communities that offered the best opportunities, so we asked the following questions as we analyzed cities and towns across the state:
Does the town have good public schools? We measured schools’ academic performance with ratings from GreatSchools. This non-profit compares a given school’s standardized test scores to the state average to obtain a rating on a 1 to 10 scale (10 representing the highest score). Higher ratings led to a higher overall score.
Can you afford to live there? We looked at both median home values in each town and ongoing monthly home costs, including mortgage payments, real estate taxes, insurance costs, utilities, fuel and other bills. Lower costs led to a higher overall score.
Is the town growing and prospering? We assessed a town’s economy by looking at median household income and income growth over the last decade. Higher income and greater growth led to a higher overall score.
Check out our cost of living calculator here as well as our mortgage rates calculator for more information.
The Best Towns for Young Families
1. Sayreville
Sayreville is located on the Raritan River, in Middlesex County. The county boasts the ninth-highest weekly wages in the entire United States. Sayreville itself is known as an industrial town, and it also boasts a developing tech sector and a growing residential population.
2. Ridgewood
Ridgewood is a village in Bergen County, near Manhattan. In 2011, CNNMoney named it the 26th best place to live in the entire country, thanks in part to a steady income provided by the financial services industry. The village’s downtown district also features more than 50 restaurants.
3. Fair Lawn
Fair Lawn is a suburb of New York City in Bergen County. The schools here are among the best in the state. Earlier this year, the state Department of Education named Lyncrest Elementary a Reward School – one of only 57 in the state to earn the distinction – because of school-wide performance and a high graduation rate.
4. Westfield
Westfield is a 30,000-person town in Union County. Westfield High School sent 95 percent of its recent graduates to continuing education, and 93 percent of that group went on to a four-year college or university. Westfield’s downtown district features 40 restaurants as well as independent stores and boutiques. Over a third of these shops and restaurants have been established for the last two-and-a-half decades.
5. Old Bridge
Old Bridge is in Middlesex County. All together, the county offers 21 county parks that amount to over 6,625 acres of recreational space. Many working men and women commute to New York City during the day, and the county itself includes 100 business parks.
6. Bergenfield
Bergenfield is a borough in Bergen County, and it is located just 13 miles from Manhattan. In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek named it the second-best place in the state to raise children. The Washington Post also named Bergenfield Schools among the most challenging in the nation, an analysis based on students’ participation in AP courses and performance on exams.
7. Toms River
Toms River is the seat of Ocean County, which features over 50 miles of beaches. Downtown Toms River includes riverboat dining on the River Lady, a 130-passenger boat, and waterfront concerts. Since Hurricane Sandy hit the area hard last year, small businesses in the community have had the opportunity to apply for grants to help re-build.
8. Summit
Summit is a city in Union County. The community’s 21,000 residents speak over 35 languages. Its six square miles include parks and fields, a nine-hole, par-three golf course and an aquatics center. From May to November, there is also a farmer’s market at DeForest and Maple.
9. Somerset
Somerset is an unincorporated area in Franklin Township. The surrounding area is home to big employers, and commuters drive an hour to get to Manhattan. Top industries include pharmaceuticals, technology and communications. The county also includes 13,000 acres of parks, where residents can play golf, picnic, hike, bike and swim.
10. Cliffside Park
Cliffside Park is a borough in Bergen County. The town is one square mile and home to 23,000 people. The larger area has a thriving healthcare industry. Top employers include Hackensack University Medical Center – a 900-bed research and teaching hospital – and Valley Health Systems.
Rank City Nearest big city GreatSchools rating Median home value Monthly owner costs Median household income Growth,’99-’11 Overall score for young families
1 Sayreville New York City 9 $338,900 $2,310 $73,937 25.5% 60.8
2 Ridgewood New York City 9 $702,900 $3,986 $154,348 48.0% 56.9
3 Fair Lawn New York City 8 $419,500 $2,827 $95,725 32.7% 56.3
4 Westfield New York City 9 $649,800 $3,511 $127,658 29.7% 54.3
5 Old Bridge New York City 7 $365,300 $2,491 $95,188 28.9% 54.3
6 Bergenfield New York City 7 $374,700 $2,890 $86,191 38.6% 53.7
7 Toms River New York City 6 $315,500 $2,174 $73,796 32.6% 52.3
8 Summit New York City 9 $758,400 $3,833 $118,565 27.5% 49.8
9 Somerset New York City 4 $337,600 $2,382 $93,589 42.2% 47.0
10 Cliffside Park New York City 5 $421,500 $2,822 $68,780 48.6% 46.8
Methodology
The overall score for each city was derived from the following measures:
GreatSchools city rating. GreatSchools city ratings are calculated by averaging the weighted overall rating for each school in the city (weighted by the number of students enrolled at the school)
Median home value from the U.S. Census (2011 ACS, data set DP04, half-weighted)
Monthly homeowner costs from the U.S. Census (2011 ACS, data set DP04, half-weighted)
Median household income from the U.S. Census (2011 ACS, data set DP03, half-weighted)
Income change between 1999 and 2011 from the U.S. Census (data sets P053 and DP03, half-weighted)
140 New Jersey cities and areas designated as places by the U.S. Census were included in this analysis. Only places with a population greater than 10,000 were considered.
In one of your famous #Obamacare speeches you stated, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
Well, as evidenced by the below letter, which my wife and I just received, you lied. We did “like our plan” and were informed in this letter that our plan will no longer exist and we will be forced to purchase a new plan, from a website which doesn’t work, for a higher monthly premium, for services we don’t want.
Now, I know I am not one of your connected cronies and insiders, who were all given waivers from this disastrous piece of legislation. I was just one of the Secret Service agents who put my ass on the line for you every day, but I was still praying that given our middle-class existence, operating a small-business, that your “fundamental transformation” of America would have stayed out of our home. Apparently that is not the case as my public battle against your disastrous presidency has just become personal.
Marc Faber: Fed could up QE to $1 trillion a month
Faber said there’s been incredible asset inflation. “We are the bubble. We have a colossal asset bubble in the world [and] a leverage or a debt bubble.”
By Matthew J. Belvedere | CNBC
Marc Faber, publisher of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, told CNBC on Monday that investors are asking the wrong question about when the Federal Reserve will taper its massive bond-buying program. They should be asking when the central bank will be increasing it, he argued.
“The question is not tapering. The question is at what point will they increase the asset purchases to say $150 [billion] , $200 [billion], a trillion dollars a month,” Faber said in a ” Squawk Box ” interview.
The Fed-which is currently buying $85 billion worth of bonds every month-will hold its October meeting next week to deliberate the future of its asset purchases known as quantitative easing .
Faber has been predicting so-called “QE infinity” because “every government program that is introduced under urgency and as a temporary measure is always permanent.” He also said, “The Fed has boxed itself into a position where there is no exit strategy.
WASHINGTON — President Obama offered an impassioned defense of the Affordable Care Act on Monday, acknowledging the technical failures of the HealthCare.gov Web site, but providing little new information about the problems with the online portal or the efforts by government contractors to fix it.
With Republican critics seizing on the Web site’s issues as evidence of deeper flaws in the health care law, Mr. Obama sought to deflect attention from the continuing problems by focusing on ways to get coverage without going online. Like a TV pitchman, the president urged viewers to call the government’s toll-free number for health insurance, acknowledging that “the wait times probably might go up a little bit now.”
In remarks in the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama acknowledged serious technical issues with the Web site, declaring that “no one is madder than me.” He offered no new information about how many people have managed to enroll since the online exchanges opened on Oct. 1. And he did not address questions about who, if anyone, might be held responsible for the failure. (Shear/The New York Times)
file photo Thanksgiving Eve Auto Crash by Boyd Loving
New Jersey promoting Teen Driver Safety Week
The state is promoting a driving orientation seminar for teenagers about to get their driver’s license and their parents as part of an awareness campaign during Teen Driver Safety Week.
The effort is geared toward battling the lead killer of young people in New Jersey: From 2008 through last year, 216 17- to 20-year-olds were killed — and more than 113,000 drivers under the age of 20 were injured — on the state’s roadways, according to the Division of Highway Traffic Safety.
“Parents have spent their entire lives trying to protect their kids, but then they hand their teens the keys to a 2-ton machine, and expect them to know what to do,” the division’s acting director, Gary Poedubicky, said in a statement. “We want to remind parents that they still have a lot to teach their teen drivers.”
To that end, the orientation, Share The Keys, is a data-driven tutorial that teaches parents and teenagers with driving permits the laws of the road, how parents can lead by example and enforcing rules such as curfews and passenger limits. The 90-minute seminar was developed by Kean University and the Division of Highway Traffic Safety. For information on how to bring the program to a local school or community, visit https://www.nj.gov/oag/hts/downloads/STK_Program_Desc.pdf. (Patberg/The Record)
Bergen County GOP closing the campaign funding gap with Democrats
Monday October 21, 2013, 6:13 PM
BY JOHN C. ENSSLIN
STAFF WRITER
The Record
Bergen County Republicans are raising campaign funds at a much more competitive pace than they have in several years, according to state election reports released Monday.
After two election cycles in which Democrats out-raised Republicans — often by a better than 2-to-1 ratio — the two parties are not as far apart this year with Democrats raising $182,333 in the third quarter of 2013 compared to $157,224 raised by Republicans.
And when funds raised by individual candidates is factored in, the combined totals show the two parties within about $6,000 of each other with the Democrats holding a slight edge.
That is a major turnabout for the Bergen County Republican Organization, which as recently as April 2012 had to rely upon a $10,000 loan from County Chairman Bob Yudin in order to pay its bills.
Instead, the most recent report filed with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission shows the Republicans with $152,279 cash on hand as of Oct. 15 compared to the Democrats who reported $38,372 in cash on hand.
“I’m very optimistic,” Yudin said Monday. “Bergen County is still a competitive county where there are more registered ‘Ds’ than registered ‘Rs’ and the unaffiliated voters decide who wins or loses.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/Bergen_County_GOP_closing_the_campaign_funding_gap_with_Democrats.html#sthash.C7AtXfI9.dpuf
‘Duck Dynasty’ Star: ‘It Ain’t Gun Control We Need, It’s Sin Control’
October 21, 2013 11:48 AM
WEST MONROE, La. (CBS Houston) — One “Duck Dynasty” star made his stance on gun control known in an interview with Men’s Journal.
“It ain’t gun control we need, it’s sin control,” Si Robertson said.
In a wide-ranging interview with Men’s Journal, the man known as Uncle Si described how he used to be a “sinner” during his younger days when he was drafted into the Army and heading off to Vietnam.
“I kept a fifth of whiskey in my pocket everywhere I went,” he said. “I tried dope one time, okay, like marijuana, but why would you smoke something that makes you feel 100 years old? So, drugs wasn’t it for me. In my mind, it was alcohol and whoring around.”
Robertson said he was worried about the pedestal the family has been put on since the reality show took off.
Same-sex couples get the financial benefits of marriage
Monday October 21, 2013, 7:11 PM
BY KATHLEEN LYNN
STAFF WRITER
The Record
Now that same-sex couples can legally marry in New Jersey, major financial benefits open up to them, North Jersey experts said Monday.
“It will absolutely change tax planning and financial planning for same-sex couples,” said Ted Carnevale, a certified public accountant in Oradell.
With the Christie administration’s decision Monday to stop trying to block same-sex marriage, gay couples in New Jersey can now file their income tax returns jointly, which can often mean a lower tax bill. In addition, they can leave an unlimited amount of money to their spouses when they die.
Two Montclair women who were married Monday, Meredith Greenberg and Leora Perlman, said they were still unsure of all the financial implications. The two were married on the Jersey City waterfront by Mayor Steven Fulop, surrounded by family, friends and their three young sons.
“We’ve been trying to figure out how to be two women raising three children with a house and two cars and how to deal with tax returns for many years,” said Greenberg. “I think our tax attorney has a lot of work to do.”
The Internal Revenue Service announced in late August that “same-sex couples, legally married in jurisdictions that recognize their marriages, will be treated as married for federal tax purposes” – even if they move to a state that does not recognize same-sex marriage. The announcement followed the June 26 Supreme Court decision tossing out the Defense of Marriage Act.
White House deems health exchange glitches ‘unacceptable,’ GOP calls Obamacare DOA
Republicans battered by the shutdown debacle are quickly gearing up to bash Obamacare by touting troubles with the rollout, and the President on Monday will address problems with the health exchange system.
In New York, one of only 16 states that has its own exchange, not one person had succeeded in using the site to enroll in a plan as of Friday.
By Bill Hammond In Albany AND Dan Friedman In Washington / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Monday, October 21, 2013, 12:45 AM
Updated: Monday, October 21, 2013, 6:00 AM
President Obama will speak Monday to acknowledge a new potential political disaster — the glitch-laden federal health care exchanges.
Administration officials have no time to waste as they race to find a prescription to heal the sickly exchanges while Republicans, battered by the government shutdown debacle, quickly gear up to tout troubles with the Obamacare rollout.
“The President will directly address the technical problems with HealthCare.gov — troubles that he and his team find unacceptable,” a White House official said.
The remarks are part of an administration push to inject a new urgency into efforts to fix the site, which made its debut on Oct. 1 — the day the government was shut down as the Republicans sought to defund the 2010 law.
The Health and Human Services Department, which oversees HealthCare.gov, announced over the weekend that it has hired experts from the private sector and other federal agencies to rewrite flawed computer code that has hampered the site and left most users unable to sign up for health insurance plans available under Obamacare.
Readers debate if village manager should be informed on confidential police investigations
Because it’s a police investigation which could be compromised if that information is released prematurely. That includes the Acting Village Manager. She may be notified that an investigation is taking place, But she does not have to be given the details….
Suggesting the investigation would have been compromised if Ward had told Mailander suggests everyone outside of the police department are blabbermouths. Hey guys your doo doo stinks just like everyone elses….
Village Manager and mayor and council are supposed to be kept out of the loop until the investigation is complete, because they’re not covered by secrecy regulations and could not be prosecuted if they were to accidently reveal pertinent information….
