Category: Village of Ridgewood

>I am sorry I was unable to attend the meeting. Please organize some way for those of us who don’t support changing Graydon at this time to show our alliance with your efforts.

Now is not the time to be spending money on “wants”, we must concentrate our dollars on “needs”. Do you as an individuals spend your money on “wants” before your needs are met? Do you sign up for credit cards to finance your projects and purchases? If so I can understand why you think it is ok to float a bond to pay for something that is a nice to have, not a need to have.

Ridgewood would be spending money on an improvement to an existing facilty that is only used 2 months a year by a small group of residents. How does this make sense?

Ridgewood residents can swim in town during the summer, that is what Graydon is for, an “improved” Graydon wouldn’t change that, it would only make it more expensive.

Finally, who cares if people go to other towns to use their pools. I use the libraries in other towns, I shop and eat in other towns, I even attend cultural events in other towns. Is that a problem we should spend $10 million on to solve?

>As you may know, Congressional Representatives in Washington, D.C. are currently working with the Obama Administration on legislation that would completely reshape our country’s health care system. I wanted to take the opportunity to update you on this important legislation and share with you three areas of concern I have about the current legislation under consideration in the House of Representatives, H.R. 3200, the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act: innovation, spending, and taxes. Additionally, I would like to take the time to introduce you to my health care principles.

Along with my colleagues in the House of Representatives, I firmly believe that our health care system is in need of reform. But I also acknowledge that, in many respects, our health care system is the envy of the world. As we consider legislation to reform health care, it is important that we build on what works, and try to fix what is not working.

Innovation
One of the hallmarks of American medicine is its innovation. Our nation’s doctors and hospitals have access to the most advanced, cutting edge research, medical devices, and pharmaceutical products in the world. The medical achievements of the last sixty years have been amazing: polio is confined to the history books; death by cardiovascular disease has fallen by two-thirds; childhood leukemia, once a death sentence, is now treatable. Furthermore, American medicine has been uniquely innovative when compared with the rest of the world: according to a survey of physicians, four of the six most important medical innovations of the past 25 years were developed in the United States. Unfortunately, I fear that current the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act would seriously dampen medical innovation in the United States.

I believe the central tenet of H.R. 3200 is the creation of a new government-run insurance plan that would pay health care providers at Medicare’s reimbursements rates. A well-respected, independent research firm, the Lewin Group, estimates that within 10 years, 114 million individuals would lose their current health care coverage and be placed on the government-run plan. Because this plan would account for over one-third of the entire health care system and pay at Medicare’s rates, it would also, unfortunately, exacerbate many of the problems Medicare has had in stifling innovation.

Over the years many observers, including President Obama, have noted that “accountable care organizations,” such as the Mayo Clinic or the Geisinger Health System, provide high quality health care at significantly less cost. Unfortunately though, medical innovators such as these, who find ways to treat diseases at less cost, are punished by a perverse government reimbursement system. As the CEO of the Mayo Clinic, Denis Cortese, recently wrote in the Chicago Tribune:
“Many doctors and hostpials that offer [high-value] care are reaching the point where we cannot afford to provide it to patients with government-sponsored insurance such as Medicare and Medicaid. We worry that the same could hold true for patients in a new government-run public insurance plan.

Despite the fact that we strive to give patients the right level of care…we consistently suffer huge financial losses due to the government price-controlled Medicare payment system, which financially punishes providers who offer higher quality care at a lower cost.

“Last year alone, Mayo Clinic lost hundreds of millions of dollars caring for Medicare beneficiaries…Because of this shortfall, our other patients pay more to make up the difference. Someday soon, neither Mayo Clinic nor those other payers will be able to afford this situation.”

Additionally, H.R. 3200 contains a section regarding so-called comparative effectiveness research. Comparative effectiveness research is a government analysis to determine which treatments are more “effective” than others in terms of medical application. Many have expressed concern that comparative effectiveness will lead to government-run health care programs refusing to provide certain prescriptions or other treatments if they deem them not effective enough. This could have a profound chilling effect on researchers attempting to discover new ways to treat patients through innovative new treatments or drug therapies.

This is the case in other countries, where entities such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England, which has infamously denied expensive cancer drugs to its citizens because of cost considerations. I recently learned from a former colleague in the House of Representatives who survived abdominal cancer in 2005 that the drug used to treat his cancer at the time was not available at all in England at the time. In other words, he survived because of access to innovative treatments that could be stifled under H.R. 3200.

Spending
One of the biggest issues facing our health care system is its high cost. In 2007, an estimated $2.26 trillion was spent on health care in the United States, or $7,439 per person. Health care costs have risen faster than wages or inflation for decades, and this is expected to continue into the future. In as soon as 2017, almost one-fifth of the entire U.S. economy is expected to be expenses and spending related to health care.

But if this is a problem for the private sector, the situation is much worse for the federal government’s public health care plans: Medicare and Medicaid. In Congress, I have the pleasure of serving on the Budget Committee. Ever since I first arrived in Congress, witness after witness–Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative–who have appeared before the Committee have all noted the serious long-term funding issues that these programs face. As the 2009 Medicare Trustees Report noted:
“The financial outlook for the Medicare program continues to raise serious concerns. Total Medicare expenditures were $468 billion in 2008 and are expected to increase in future years at a faster pace than either workers’ earnings or the economy overall. As a percentage of GDP, expenditures are projected to increase from 3.2% in 2008 to 11.4% by 2083…Growth of this magnitude, if realized, would substantially increase the strain on the nation’s workers, Medicare beneficiaries, and the Federal Budget.”

If anything, these estimates might actually understate the problem. According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, America’s three biggest entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, are projected to consume over 80% of the federal budget within a generation. The single biggest driver of this increased cost is health care inflation. Medicare alone has a $36.3 trillion unfunded liability, which means that every baby born in America in 2009 has a health care debt of $121,000 as soon as it takes its first breath.

Unbelievably, in my opinion, the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, would actually make this problem significantly worse. In its early estimate of the cost of H.R. 3200, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that enactment of H.R. 3200 would result in $1.042 trillion of new federal spending. Additionally, the bill would raise taxes by $583 billion. And despite a desire expressed by many to see that the bill is “paid for,” H.R. 3200 would result in a net increase in the federal budget deficit of $239 billion from 2010-2019.

Over the long-term, though H.R. 3200 could potentially drive health care costs even higher. In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee this month, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf said: “In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.”
In other words, the CBO says H.R. 3200 would create trillions of dollars in new unfunded obligations on top of the already unsustainable federal health care programs without doing anything to slow the rate of growth of Medicare and Medicaid. I believe this is, to put it mildly, a recipe for fiscal disaster of the first order, and is not worthy support. I hope in the coming weeks to work with my colleagues to try to correct these problems, but please rest assured that I will not support any legislation would worsen our nation’s fiscal health.

Taxes
While I have many objections to this legislation, I feel one of its worst components is the inclusion of a $544 billion surtax on people earning more than $280,000. Aside from the fact that almost nobody believes it is a good idea to raise taxes in the middle of a recession, I have serious concerns that these tax increases would unfortunately fall disproportionately on small businesses.
According to the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) 2002 Statistics of Income, 64% of households filing individual tax forms with Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) above $250,000 filed as an S-Corporation or partnership or filed a Schedule C sole proprietor tax form. Further, of all small businesses 75% are S-Corporations where the business income is passed through to the business owners’ individual tax return, increasing the chances that it will be impacted by the proposed surtax.
According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), small businesses generate 60-80% of net new jobs annually and employ approximately half of all private sector employees. Numerous economic studies show that higher marginal tax rates discourage small businesses from expanding and hiring more workers. Especially in a recession, it is important not to levy a new tax against the job creators who will sow the seeds of our recovery.

These tax increases will be particularly devastating to American manufacturing. According to IRS Statistics from 2006, there were 196,000 manufacturers who paid taxes at the individual rate. The average net income per return for these small manufacturers was $570,000, a full 300% higher than the average small business income. It is clear that these tax increases would be felt disproportionately in the U.S. manufacturing sector.

Even Bill Gale, the Vice President and Director of Economic Studies at the progressive Brookings Institution, notes, “Choosing to finance health care reform by taxing the rich is bad economic policy, bad health policy, bad budget policy and poor leadership.”

Furthermore, under President Obama’s budget submitted earlier this year, the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 are scheduled to expire in 2011. When theses expiring tax cuts are combined with the new surtax proposed in H.R. 3200, the top marginal tax rates in 39 states would exceed 50%, with a 52% national average. According to the non-partisan Tax Foundation, this would be higher than just three of the 30 most economically developed countries in the world.

Finally, H.R. 3200 contains an “employer mandate” for the purchase of health insurance. To me, this means that any business not currently offering health insurance must either offer a government approved plan, or pay a penalty equal to 8% of an employee’s payroll tax. For small businesses not currently offering health insurance, this would be a massive new cost per employee. A 2007 study by Harvard Professor Kate Baicker found that “33% of uninsured workers”—5.5 million total—“earn within $3 [per hour] of the minimum wage, putting them at substantial risk of unemployment if their employers were required to offer insurance.” The study also found that “among the uninsured, those with the least education face the highest risk of losing their jobs under employer mandates.”

Health care reform should be good for individuals, families, and small businesses. Unfortunately, my reading of this legislation is that it would have a tremendously adverse impact on job creators, families, and our medical professionals. For these reasons, I do not think H.R. 3200, as it is currently written, merits support.

Garrett’s Health Care Principles
I do not support the rationing of care, and I do no support the creation of a plan that will allow bureaucrats and special interests to stand between patients and the care they need. Our current health care system is unsustainable, and the prohibitive costs leave far too many without adequate health insurance. Reform to this system is necessary if we want to remain competitive in the global market place. I’d like to introduce to you my prescription for health care reform that I will be telling you about over the next couple of weeks:

• Portability: Allowing individuals to keep their health care coverage while between jobs would provide a safety net for those who become uninsured because of unemployment or disability.

• Affordability: Health care costs have become unmanageable, both for families and for governments, and has left many uninsured or under-insured. Removing burdensome state coverage mandates and opening up the health care marketplace to competition across state lines could dramatically reduce health care costs in New Jersey and across the country.

• Sustainability: We should not add to the government health care programs until we are able to fix the existing government programs – Medicare and Medicaid. Unless we are able to fix these entitlement programs, as well as Social Security, the cost of the entire federal government will double within three decades due to entitlement growth alone. Tax hikes to fix this problem is not the solution, nor is adding a new government-run health care bureaucracy.

• Effectiveness: The current health care system reimburses the number of procedures rather than the quality and efficacy of the care. While doctors are compensated for extra tests and hospitals visits, they are not paid for offering telephone consultations or implementing health care IT. By encouraging quality over quantity of care, we can down on over testing and strengthen the doctor-patient relationship. Moreover, protecting doctors from frivolous tort lawsuits will significantly reduce the cost of primary care and remove a significant burden from doctors’ shoulders.

• Innovation: The United States has been home to more life-saving drugs, ground-breaking research, and innovative medical procedures than anywhere else in the world. Any health care reform must continue to encourage medical and pharmaceutical research and not enforce price controls, which would destroy the American pharmaceutical market.

The American people deserve the freedom to choose the health care that is best for their families. I believe we need meaningful health care reform that would increase accessibility, decrease costs, and improve on what is already the best health care system in the world. In the coming weeks I will continue to work with my colleagues in the House of Representatives to try to improve the bill. In the meantime, I welcome your comments. I have set up a special email account so that you can share your thoughts and concerns about health care reform at: [email protected].

Should you have any further questions or comments about this or any legislative issue, please do not hesitate to contact me in my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 225-4465. Also, please visit my website at www.house.gov/garrett to sign up for my e-newsletter with the latest updates.

Sincerely,
Scott Garrett
Member of Congress

>Dear Fan of Graydon Park:

If so, and you haven’t scrutinized the architect’s rendering of the Ridgewood Pool Project’s latest concept design for a concrete pool that is significantly smaller than the swimming area we enjoy now, we suggest that you pop into the Ridgewood Public Library and take a look before walking next door to the Village Hall for our meeting.

Two drawings, an overhead view and details of the main swimming area, are propped on easels just inside the front lobby of the library, on the left side. The library is open until 9 PM on Thursdays.

See you later!

Sincerely,

Suzanne Kelly and Marcia Ringel
Co-Chairs, The Preserve Graydon Coalition
“It’s clear—we love Graydon”
[email protected]

>Mises Daily by Thomas J. DiLorenzo Posted on 7/28/2009

The government’s initial step in attempting to create a government-run healthcare monopoly has been to propose a law that would eventually drive the private health insurance industry out of existence. Additional taxes and mandated costs are to be imposed on health insurance companies, while a government-run “health insurance” bureaucracy will be created, ostensibly to “compete” with the private companies. The hoped-for end result is one big government monopoly which, like all government monopolies, will operate with all the efficiency of the post office and all the charm and compassion of the IRS.

Of course, it would be difficult to compete with a rival who has all of his capital and operating costs paid out of tax dollars. Whenever government “competes” with the private sector, it makes sure that the competition is grossly unfair, piling costly regulation after regulation, and tax after tax on the private companies while exempting itself from all of them. This is why the “government-sponsored enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were so profitable for so many years. It is also why so many abysmally performing “public” schools remain in existence for decades despite their utter failure at educating children.
America’s Healthcare Future?

Some years ago, the Nobel-laureate economist Milton Friedman studied the history of healthcare supply in America. In a 1992 study published by the Hoover Institution, entitled “Input and Output in Health Care,” Friedman noted that 56 percent of all hospitals in America were privately owned and for-profit in 1910. After 60 years of subsidies for government-run hospitals, the number had fallen to about 10 percent. It took decades, but by the early 1990s government had taken over almost the entire hospital industry. That small portion of the industry that remains for-profit is regulated in an extraordinarily heavy way by federal, state and local governments so that many (perhaps most) of the decisions made by hospital administrators have to do with regulatory compliance as opposed to patient/customer service in pursuit of profit. It is profit, of course, that is necessary for private-sector hospitals to have the wherewithal to pay for healthcare.

Friedman’s key conclusion was that, as with all governmental bureaucratic systems, government-owned or -controlled healthcare created a situation whereby increased “inputs,” such as expenditures on equipment, infrastructure, and the salaries of medical professionals, actually led to decreased “outputs” in terms of the quantity of medical care. For example, while medical expenditures rose by 224 percent from 1965–1989, the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population fell by 44 percent and the number of beds occupied declined by 15 percent. Also during this time of almost complete governmental domination of the hospital industry (1944–1989), costs per patient-day rose almost 24-fold after inflation is taken into account.

The more money that has been spent on government-run healthcare, the less healthcare we have gotten. This kind of result is generally true of all government bureaucracies because of the absence of any market feedback mechanism. Since there are no profits in an accounting sense, by definition, in government, there is no mechanism for rewarding good performance and penalizing bad performance. In fact, in all government enterprises, exactly the opposite is true: bad performance (failure to achieve ostensible goals, or satisfy “customers”) is typically rewarded with larger budgets. Failure to educate children leads to more money for government schools. Failure to reduce poverty leads to larger budgets for welfare state bureaucracies. This is guaranteed to happen with healthcare socialism as well.
Costs always explode whenever the government gets involved, and governments always lie about it. In 1970 the government forecast that the hospital insurance (HI) portion of Medicare would be “only” $2.9 billion annually. Since the actual expenditures were $5.3 billion, this was a 79 percent underestimate of cost. In 1980 the government forecast $5.5 billion in HI expenditures; actual expenditures were more than four times that amount — $25.6 billion. This bureaucratic cost explosion led the government to enact 23 new taxes in the first 30 years of Medicare. (See Ron Hamoway, “The Genesis and Development of Medicare,” in Roger Feldman, ed., American Health Care, Independent Institute, 2000, pp. 15-86). The Obama administration’s claim that a government takeover of healthcare will somehow magically reduce costs is not to be taken seriously. Government never, ever, reduces the cost of doing anything.

All government-run healthcare monopolies, whether they are in Canada, the UK, or Cuba, experience an explosion of both cost and demand — since healthcare is “free.” Socialized healthcare is not really free, of course; the true cost is merely hidden, since it is paid for by taxes.

Whenever anything has a zero explicit price associated with it, consumer demand will increase substantially, and healthcare is no exception. At the same time, bureaucratic bungling will guarantee gross inefficiencies that will get worse and worse each year. As costs get out of control and begin to embarrass those who have promised all Americans a free healthcare lunch, the politicians will do what all governments do and impose price controls, probably under some euphemism such as “global budget controls.”

Price controls, or laws that force prices down below market-clearing levels (where supply and demand are coordinated), artificially stimulate the amount demanded by consumers while reducing supply by making it unprofitable to supply as much as previously. The result of increased demand and reduced supply is shortages. Non-price rationing becomes necessary. This means that government bureaucrats, not individuals and their doctors, inevitably determine who will get medical treatment and who will not, what kind of medical technology will be available, how many doctors there will be, and so forth.

All countries that have adopted socialized healthcare have suffered from the disease of price-control-induced shortages. If a Canadian, for instance, suffers third-degree burns in an automobile crash and is in need of reconstructive plastic surgery, the average waiting time for treatment is more than 19 weeks, or nearly five months. The waiting time for orthopaedic surgery is also almost five months; for neurosurgery it’s three full months; and it is even more than a month for heart surgery (see The Fraser Institute publication, Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada). Think about that one: if your doctor discovers that your arteries are clogged, you must wait in line for more than a month, with death by heart attack an imminent possibility. That’s why so many Canadians travel to the United States for healthcare.

All the major American newspapers seem to have become nothing more than cheerleaders for the Obama administration, so it is difficult to find much in the way of current stories about the debacle of nationalized healthcare in Canada. But if one goes back a few years, the information is much more plentiful. A January 16, 2000, New York Times article entitled “Full Hospitals Make Canadians Wait and Look South,” by James Brooke, provided some good examples of how Canadian price controls have created serious shortage problems.

A 58-year-old grandmother awaited open-heart surgery in a Montreal hospital hallway with 66 other patients as electric doors opened and closed all night long, bringing in drafts from sub-zero weather. She was on a five-year waiting list for her heart surgery.

In Toronto, 23 of the city’s 25 hospitals turned away ambulances in a single day because of a shortage of doctors.
In Vancouver, ambulances have been “stacked up” for hours while heart attack victims wait in them before being properly taken care of.
At least 1,000 Canadian doctors and many thousands of Canadian nurses have migrated to the United States to avoid price controls on their salaries.
Wrote Mr. Brooke, “Few Canadians would recommend their system as a model for export.”
Canadian price-control-induced shortages also manifest themselves in scarce access to medical technology. Per capita, the United States has eight times more MRI machines, seven times more radiation therapy units for cancer treatment, six times more lithotripsy units, and three times more open-heart surgery units. There are more MRI scanners in Washington state, population five million, than in all of Canada, with a population of more than 30 million (See John Goodman and Gerald Musgrave, Patient Power).

In the UK as well — thanks to nationalization, price controls, and government rationing of healthcare — thousands of people die needlessly every year because of shortages of kidney dialysis machines, pediatric intensive care units, pacemakers, and even x-ray machines. This is America’s future, if “ObamaCare” becomes a reality.
[VIEW THIS ARTICLE ONLINE]
________________________
Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute. He is the author of The Real Lincoln, Lincoln Unmasked, How Capitalism Saved America, and, more recently, Hamilton’s Curse. Send him mail. See his article archives. Comment on the blog.

>At least bring a designated texter along: This should be a no-brainer. Simple common sense should tell us that trying to text while driving is as stupid and dangerous as trying to crochet. We shouldn’t need a bunch of studies calculating and quantifying the risk to goad us into a response, but if that’s what it takes, here’s the latest.

A Virginia Tech study that outfitted the cabs of long-haul trucks with video cameras found that when the drivers were texting, their collision risk was 23 times greater than when they had their attention on the road — a figure far higher than the estimates coming out of lab research and a rate by far more dangerous than other driving distractions. And at the University of Utah, research on college students using driving simulators showed texting raised the crash risk by eight times. The variance in the figures is beside the point. “You’re off the charts in both cases,” said Utah professor David Strayer. “It’s crazy to be doing it.”
And the heck of it is, people already know that and they keep doing it anyway. “As mobile technology evolves at a breakneck pace, more and more people rightly fear that distracted driving — phone calls, e-mails and texting — is a growing threat on the highways,” said Peter Kissinger, CEO of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, which has just released its second annual safety survey. “The 2009 Traffic Safety Culture Index shows that people today fear distracted drivers almost as much as drunk drivers.” The study drives home the disconnect between knowledge and behavior:

* 80% of motorists rated distracted driving as a very serious threat to their safety, yet many admitted performing distracted behaviors like talking on the cell phone or texting or e-mailing while driving within the last month.

* Over two-thirds admitted to talking on a cell phone and 21% admitted to reading or sending a text message or e-mail while driving in the past month.

* Nearly 90% said that texting or e-mailing while driving was a very serious threat to safety, yet 18% of those same people admitted texting in the past month.

* 58% said that talking on a cell phone while driving was a very serious threat to their safety, yet 55% of those same people self-reported talking on cell phones while driving in the past month.

So what do you do with people who are fully aware of the risks and still make a conscious choice to put innocent lives in danger? Bust ’em. Bust ’em hard. And while 14 states, including California, have passed bans on texting while driving, it shouldn’t require new, specific laws to crack down. Texting at the wheel is reckless and unsafe operation of a motor vehicle, plain and simple, and it calls for zero tolerance.

from : Good Morning Silicon Valley

>From the Bergen Record:

“An agreement that would allow coed teams was signed late Friday by the Ridgewood Biddy Basketball program, the state Division on Civil Rights and the parents of Caitlin Alvaro, 12, who was barred from playing with boys even though she was considered as good as many of them. … In late October, Caitlin signed up for the fifth- and sixth-grade boys team mostly because they use a regulation hoop that is 10 feet high. The fifth- and sixth-grade Biddy girls teams shoot at an 8�-foot hoop, which Caitlin said would throw off her game, since she played with a regulation hoop in two other girls basketball leagues.

The board denied Caitlin’s request, saying her participation would “undermine the program and would, over time if not immediately, have a negative effect on the quality of opportunity of play with the various leagues,” according to papers filed with the state.

Her parents – Joseph Alvaro and Frances Edwards – filed a complaint with the state Division on Civil Rights. After a two-month investigation, the division found that Biddy prohibited Caitlin “simply because she is a female and not for any reason associated with ability or other non-discriminatory basis.”

This part of the article really irks me, given that it was the school district that I’d had to fight:

… The civil rights division petitioned the Ridgewood school district in January to intervene, since the games were played in school gyms.

State officials said the school system did not agree to the settlement, and that part of the dispute will be heard by an administrative law judge. District officials would not comment Tuesday.”

Seems like Caitlin won the war. even if the battle with the BOE only yielded an apology. Perhaps it was that apology that prevented the alvoros from filing an appeal for an appelate court hearing.

The BOE never apologizes. Wonder why they did in this case?

>Bergen, NJ (August 02,2009) – Call-Us-Clowns, Inc. presents a fundraiser for the “Doodles Memorial Fund” is happening in Bergen, New Jersey! Twenty clowns will be displaying their talents in face painting, balloon sculpture, puppetry, magic, juggling, walk-around humor, and clown shows. Come see these colorfully attired funsters at their very best at the air-conditioned Ridgewood Village Hall, 131 N. Maple Street, Ridgewood, NJ from 1 to 4 p.m on Sunday, August 2, 2009 . The $10 admission fee provides a comfortable afternoon inside the Ridgewood Village Hall. Admission also includes a clown photo book, beverage, and snack. Face/hand painting and a balloon sculpture can be purchased for an additional $5. All proceeds from this fundraiser will be going to the “Doodles Memorial Fund”. The “Doodles Memmorial Fund” is used to support caring clowning activities for children and adults interested in learning more about therapeutic humor thrugh our S.M.I.L.E.S program. S = scholarships to enhance clown skills; M = mentoring new clowns; I = involvement in our communities; L= laughter, loads of it; E= educating people about the value of caring clowning; S =smiles spread all around! Come join us on Sunday afternoon, August 2nd for a memorable experience! Let us put a Smile on your Face and Joy in your Heart!. This event will take place in Bergen County on August 02,2009 at Ridgewood Village Hall, 131 N. Maple Street, Ridgewood, NJ . To find out more information about this event, please visit the Clowns at Doodle Memorial Fund website. Be sure to tell them you found out about Clowns at Doodle Memorial Fund on GoKidsNJ, the best place to find out what to do in New Jersey.

>

>Valley Hospital just rolled out two new websites :

https://www.valleyhealth.com/

https://www.ValleyHealthMarketplace.com/

The Sites look great and are very informative ,but whats happens if the President gets his Nationalised Health care passed PJ ,I mean whats the point of Valley spending all this money what bother ?

>

https://www.jstandard.com/index.php/content/item/art_in_tenafly6/9177

>The Preserve Graydon Coalition will hold its first organizational meeting on Thursday, July 30, 2009, in the Youth Lounge at Village Hall, 131 N. Maple Avenue, Ridgewood.

Enter Village Hall, turn left in the lobby, and walk to the end of the hall.

The doors will open at 6:30 PM. The meeting will begin at 7:15 PM sharp.

Our time will be limited. This will not be a “town meeting.” Comments will be limited to members of the Coalition who agree in principle with the aims stated on the website, www.preservegraydon.org.

Tempers must remain calm and suggestions thoughtful.

We seek volunteers for the following tasks (for that evening only):

Meet and greet (help people fill out name tags, etc.) starting at around 7 PM
Take notes at the meeting
If you can do either of these tasks, please contact us asap.

Urgent: we need one or more marketing, public relations, or related communications professionals who can help with specific publicity-related projects right away.

Hoping to see you on Thursday,

Suzanne Kelly and Marcia Ringel
Co-Chairs, The Preserve Graydon Coalition
“It’s clear—we love Graydon”
[email protected]

Note: Those who attend the meeting will have snared a prime parking spot for the evening’s Band Shell performance, “The McVey Family and Friends: Broadway and Beyond,” which starts at 8:30 PM. Walk to your car after our meeting, pick up your lawn chair or blanket, and relax at Veterans Field in time for the show–like Graydon, a longtime Ridgewood tradition.

>Natural Swimming Pools BBC Inside Out

>Jersey Mayors Stung in Graft Probe

By AMIR EFRATI, SUZANNE SATALINE and DIONNE SEARCEY
WSJ

New Jersey has never been short of corruption scandals, but the one that unfolded yesterday was surprising even by the standards of the state that inspired “The Sopranos.”

Federal agents swept across New Jersey and New York on Thursday, charging 44 people — including mayors, rabbis and even one alleged trafficker in human kidneys — in a decadelong investigation into public corruption and international money laundering.

https://www.linkedin.com/news?actionBar=&aIdx=5&articleID=52637593&gid=1906747&trk=news_brkout&goback=.nvr_1906747_1248438170622_1

https://www.linkedin.com/news?actionBar=&aIdx=5&articleID=52637593&gid=1906747&trk=news_brkout&goback=.nvr_1906747_1248438170622_1

>Tea Party Patriots participation in the July 4th Parade in Ridgewood NJ was a success….. thanks to all who came out to march!!

A very special thank you to Congressman Scott Garrett, who took time out of his schedule to visit the Tea Party Patriots Pre-Parade Rally. Not only did he stop by to shake hands and take a few pictures, but he listened to our opinions, answered questions, spoke about the Constitution and discussed what happened on the floor of the House during the Cap and Trade Vote.

Tim gives a pre-parade pep talk with the words of our Founding Fathers.

Thank you to Dana Thomas for taking the video of our July 4th adventure!
Dana can be reached at [email protected]