MomsRising’s Senior National Campaign Director, Donna Norton presents a Superhero award to Senator Robert Menendez
Mayor Felix Roque: Senator Bob Menendez is ‘the superhero’ of Hudson County
May 31, 2015 – News, North Bergen/Guttenberg, Union City, West New York – Written by John Heinis
West New York Mayor Felix Roque offered heavy praise for U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), shortly after North Hudson’s 15th annual Cuban Day Parade concluded, calling Menendez “the superhero” of Hudson County – adding that the residents here don’t put any stock into the indictment against him.
Ridgewood NJ, During the sixth annual “Go the Distance for Autism,” volunteers from the World Mission Society Church of God in Ridgewood provided a torch of encouragement for the cyclists riding for autism awareness and education. Lending a helping hand at the largest charity cycling event in New Jersey, about 100 of the volunteers worked in their well-known yellow shirts from early in the morning to the end of the event, held yesterday at Bergen Community College.
“We’re here to cheer, we’re here to win, so push that bike on till the end!” Volunteers stationed at each of the checkpoints shouted with one voice, while also providing cyclists with water, fruit and energy bars.
Even themed costumes were in the order of business for some of the volunteers. One volunteer in particular sported a renaissance outfit and a plastic light saber, yelling, “We are proud of you, we are proud of you!” Cyclists couldn’t help but smile as they passed him by.
“It takes a huge effort to put on this event,” said Chantelle Walker, director of development for Alpine Learning Group, an educational and behavioral center for individuals with autism and beneficiary of the event. “We have never had a volunteer effort like this church group. We’re stunned. We really are completely stunned about how wonderful they are.”
Walker continued to rave on about the great difference the Church of God volunteers made. “I think your crew has definitely changed the tone of things,” she said. “I’ve had comments from people here today, that they feel a different feeling than in years past. They felt a welcome from the minute they came through the entrance.”
The event raised more than $800,000 for the four participating autism programs: Alpine Learning Group, EPIC, Garden Academy, and REED Academy. All four are located in New Jersey, where autism affects 1 in every 45 children, and particularly 1 in every 24 boys.
After being shocked by the unity and selfless of the volunteers of the Church of God during past charity events in Washington, D.C. and Virginia, Eventage, an event planning company, was eager to work with them again and invited the Church to join this event.
“They’re pretty much heaven-sent, actually, because we couldn’t have done any of this stuff without you guys,” said Joey Farmer, director at Eventage. “When the team showed up this morning – a hundred people in the yellow shirts – we were just like, ‘thank goodness.’”
JUNE 1, 2015 LAST UPDATED: MONDAY, JUNE 1, 2015, 9:57 AM
BY MARK KRULISH
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
In conjunction with Building Safety Month events that happened all over the United States, the Ridgewood Building Department staff presented a public forum in May, which focused on home safety along with changes being implemented within the village.
Over the course of about two hours, Building Department Director Thomas Yotka presented the audience with a history of building codes, demonstrating how they have evolved over the course of the past 2,000 years, before bringing the conversation back to the new initiatives happening in Ridgewood.
Oftentimes, changes in building codes happened in reaction to major disasters such as the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston in 1942 and the Station Nightclub in Rhode Island in 2003.
Up until the mid-1970s, each municipality had its own unique set of building codes. Then in 1975, the legislature wrote a new law that went into effect on Jan. 1, 1977, bringing uniformity to codes throughout New Jersey.
These codes are what give the Building Department the blueprint to ensure that any structure standing within the village is safe for occupancy.
As thorough as the Transportation Security Administration screeners may be as they rifle through your belongings, the agency isn’t performing where it counts.
In a series of trials, the Department of Homeland Security was able to smuggle fake explosives, weapons and other contraband past airport screeners in major cities across the country, according to ABC News. Officials briefed on the Homeland Security Inspector General’s investigation told the station that the TSA failed 67 out of 70 tests conducted by the department’s Red Teams — undercover passengers tasked with identifying weaknesses in the screening process, NJ.com reports.
During the tests, DHS agents each tried to bring a banned item past TSA screeners. They succeeded 95 percent of the time.
The internal investigation was designed to find the TSA’s most egregious vulnerabilities. The TSA has said Red Team agents are “super terrorists” who “push the boundaries of our people, processes, and technology,” but DHS officials told ABC the test results were frustrating at the very least.
Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776 by jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1863-1930. (Photo: World History Archive/Newscom)
COMMENTARY BY
Thomas West
Thomas G. West is Paul Ermine Potter and Dawn Tibbetts Potter professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
Which approach to welfare policy is better for the poor: that of the Founders or that of today’s welfare state?
The more we spend on the poor, the harder it seems for them to attain decent, productive lives in loving families. The federal government has spent $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs since the beginning of the War on Poverty in 1965, but the poverty rate is nearly the same today as in 1969, fluctuating between roughly 11 and 15 percent over that time period.
As I argue in a new essay on “Poverty and Welfare in the American Founding,” these results are bound to continue unless we rethink welfare policy from the perspective of our Founders. Neither the contemporary left nor right in America properly understands their approach.
The left often claims the Founders were indifferent to the poor—suggesting that New Deal America ended callousness and indifference. Indeed, high school and college textbooks frequently espouse this narrative. Many on the right think the Founders advocated only for charitable donations as the means of poverty relief.
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Neither is correct. America always has had laws providing for the poor. The real difference between the Founders’ welfare policies and today’s is over how, not whether, government should help those in need.
The Founders
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin believed government has an obligation to help the poor. Both thought welfare policies should support children, the disabled, widows and others who could not work. But any aid policy, they insisted, would include work-requirements for the able-bodied.
Rather than making welfare a generational inheritance, Franklin thought it should assist the poor in overcoming poverty as expediently as possible: “I am for doing good to the poor.…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
Moreover, local, rather than federal, officials administered this welfare, since they were more likely to know the particular needs of recipients and could distinguish between the deserving poor (the disabled and involuntarily unemployed) and the undeserving poor (those capable of work but preferring not to).
The Founders sought to provide aid in a way that would help the deserving poor but minimize incentives for recipients to act irresponsibly. They wanted to protect the rights of taxpayers by preventing corruption and abuses in welfare aid.
Above all, the Founders saw the family and life-long marriage as the primary means of support for everyone, rich and poor alike.
Modern Welfare
By the mid-20th century, intellectual opinion began to peel away the stigma attached to the behavioral aspects of poverty, and progressive politicians increased the benefits and number of welfare recipients.
During the New Deal, despite major expansions of welfare programs, the Founders’ approach remained intact at least to this extent: These programs still distinguished between the deserving and undeserving poor—a distinction based on moral conduct.
Until the mid-1960s, free markets, secure property rights, strong family policy and minimal taxation and regulation supported a culture of work and entrepreneurship. But through the rise of modern liberalism’s redefinition of rights and justice, welfare was officially reconceived as a right that could be demanded by anyone in need, regardless of conduct or circumstances.
Among the most destructive features of the post-1965 welfare regime has been its unintentional dismantling of the family. By making welfare wages higher than working wages, the government essentially replaced fathers with a government check. The state became many families’ primary provider.
Even more perverse, for many single mothers, marrying a working man may actually be a financial burden rather than a support because the marriage can diminish government benefits.
Though modern welfare programs grant more benefits to a greater number of individuals than the Founders ever fathomed, the Founders’ approach to welfare policy was effective in providing for the minimal needs of the poor and dramatically reducing poverty over time. Based on today’s living standards, the poverty rate fell from something like 90 percent in the Founding era to 12 percent by 1969.
If the goal of welfare is to provide for those in need while respecting the rights of all, Americans would do well to ponder the Founders’ outlook on welfare as a limited system, concerned with helping the poor who truly are in need and encouraging those who are able to work to leave their poverty behind as soon as possible.
Big news coming from Donald Trump. Big. Uuuuge. I have the news before anyone else. Donald Trump is running for president.
When Trump declared to the Republican Party of Iowa’s Lincoln Dinner that he is going to make an announcement in June that’s “going to surprise a lot of people,” he wasn’t preparing to launch his long-awaited candidacy. He was simply doing what he always does: Promote the Donald. Generate headlines. Get people talking.
His June announcement is guaranteed to raise all of the excitement of such previous bids for publicity as “Donald Trump Announces Men’s Fragrance” (March 24), “Donald Trump Announces Phil Mickelson Villa at Trump National Doral” (March 5), “Donald Trump Announces Florida International University as new Home for Miss Universe” (Dec. 11) and the game-changing, envelope-pushing, earth’s-orbit-reversing, “Donald Trump Announces Partnership with Prestwick Airport” (Nov. 14).
The consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’ are already appearing. The main victims of growing violence will be the inner-city poor.
By HEATHER MAC DONALD
May 29, 2015 6:27 p.m. ET
The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.
In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.
Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.
There’s a myth among Hillary Clinton supporters that decades of experience has made the former secretary of state the most pragmatic choice for president in 2016. And like most fairy tales, it conveniently glosses over the heroine’s flaws: her 31,000-plus missing emails (the subject of a lawsuit by the Associated Press), questions about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, and direct donations to Ms. Clinton from big banks, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.
But there is an alternative. Rather than rallying around someone who can’t seem to elude perpetual media scrutiny, the person all Democrats should pay close attention to is former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley who is poised to officially join the race Saturday. The former Baltimore mayor and two-term governor offers a genuine alternative to the status quo within Washington and a real threat to any GOP challenger — especially Jeb Bush.
Mr. O’Malley, unlike Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, isn’t linked to perpetual scandal and criticism, nor is he beholden to foreign donors, investment banks or a family surname. He rightfully stated that the presidency isn’t “some crown to be passed between two families” and compared to Ms. Clinton, Mr. O’Malley offers a genuinely progressive outlook on American politics. When both candidates are analyzed, it’s apparent that one caters to poll-driven centrism while the other is far more confident in a progressive vision for America.
Who is running for president in 2016?
While Ms. Clinton voted for the invasion of Iraq, Mr. O’Malley has been a longtime critic of the Iraq War. As governor, Mr. O’Malley sponsored and signed a same-sex marriage bill when Hillary Clinton was overtly against gay marriage. He also signed a marijuana decriminalization bill, while Ms. Clinton has said she was against the decriminalization of marijuana. Martin O’Malley wants to bring back Glass-Steagall, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership a “bad trade deal,” and urged the Senate in 2014 to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, once referred to TPP as “the gold standard in trade agreements,”and she still hasn’t taken a stance on the Keystone XL pipeline.
A tense religious confrontation at a Phoenix mosque avoided violence Friday, despite concerns the standoff would escalate.
Law enforcement officials kept watch over about 500 protesters at the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, The Associated Press reported.
That total divided into roughly 250 participants for each side, AP said.
The initial rally was organized by a Phoenix Marine who fought in the Iraq War and sees Islam as a religion promoting violence, according to AP.
The Marine and his supporters arrived at the mosque with American flags, assault rifles, pistols and cartoons depicting Muhammad, Islam’s holiest prophet.
The event sparked a counter-protest, AP said, made up mainly of supporters of the Phoenix Muslim community and other demonstrators preaching tolerance.
That group carried signs that advocated for peace and love in the community.
Dozens of law enforcement officials served as a buffer between each side.
Liberals side with Islamists who threatened to drink blood of mosque protesters
On Friday, hundreds participated in a protest held at a Phoenix mosque that reportedly included a “draw Muhammad” contest. Islamists, however, issued threats on Twitter, including one that threatened to drink the blood of protesters if Muhammad was drawn, Breitbart.com said. Meanwhile, a number of liberal counter-protesters took a stand in support of the Islamists on Friday, both in front of the mosque and online, using the hashtag “#NotMyAmerica.”
“WARNING IF U LOVE UR CHILDREN DONT BRING THEM IN THE EVENT TODAY THE WILL SPLIT OF BLOOD IN THE EVENT OF MUHAMMAD SAW DRAWINGS (sic),” said a Twitter account that has since been suspended. “WHO EVER LOVE HER OR HIS CHILD DONT TAKE THEM IN THE EVENT WE PROMISE U WE WILL DRINK UR BLOOD (sic),” the account said Thursday.
The same person also issued a threatening tweet promising the event would not finish without bloodshed. “WE WILL PAY U BACK TODAY THE EVENT WONT FINISH WITHOUT KUFFAR BLOOD WE PROMISE U DAT,” the Twitter account said.
“If an attack happens at that contest and loads of people die you brought upon yourselves, I won’t care in the slightest,” said a tweet from an account called Shariah will Rule. “You stupid kuffar clearly did not take from the Charlie Hebdo attacks. You guys are truly deaf, dumb & blind,” the same account said.
The #NotMyAmerica campaign, the Huffington Post said, was organized by the Campaign to Take On Hate, a group Antonia Blumberg said “works to challenge misconceptions of Muslims and Arab Americans.” The group even went so far as to provide sample tweets for those who couldn’t think of something to say. The group, however, said nothing about the threats leveled at event organizer Jon Ritzheimer and his family.
MAY 28, 2015 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, MAY 28, 2015, 9:18 AM
BY DARIUS AMOS
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Interest in Ridgewood’s annual dog rabies clinic, already one of the most popular events on the village calendar, has increased exponentially this spring, largely in part to recent, uncommon wildlife encounters.
A lengthy line of leashed pooches and their masters snaked across the Recycling Center property two Wednesdays ago, each four-legged creature waiting for its free inoculation against a virus that, if contracted, is oftentimes fatal for domestic pets once symptoms occur.
The booster shot is considered the best protection against rabies. Nearly 120 dogs registered by the village received the vaccination during the clinic, according to Dawn Cetrulo, Ridgewood’s supervisor of health.
Though the final tally was slightly less than the number of canines vaccinated last year, dog owners preached the ongoing importance of safeguarding their best friends.
“You’ll never know what might happen,” Rachelle Thomsen said, while rubbing the squared head of her retriever mix, Ronnie. “[Dogs] can be out exploring in the backyard, and at the same time, an animal with rabies can wander back there, too. You want to make sure your dog is safe.”
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina argued that “titles are just titles” and Hillary Clinton’s “track record” includes the collapse of the Middle East and the failed Russian reset on Wednesday’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on MSNBC.
Fiorina said, “I come from a world where titles are just titles, and talk is just talk. It’s only in politics where titles and words mean a lot. In the rest of the world, it’s actually about what have you done, actions speak louder than words. People want to know are your words and your actions consistent and are they consistent over time. And so, I think when 82% of the American people now believe that there is a professional political class more interested in preserving its own power and privilege than it is in serving the American people, people expect basic questions to be asked of anyone running for president. ‘What have you done, are you trustworthy, are you transparent, will you answer questions?’”
Fiorina said that while Hillary Clinton has said some “wonderful things” as Secretary of State, “it’s also true that as Secretary of State she took women’s rights and human rights off the table for discussion with China. It’s also true as Secretary of State that she called Bashar al-Assad a positive reformer. It’s also true that in 2011, when she was Secretary of State, she said that Iraq was a free, stable, sovereign nation. And now we have a nation falling apart, Iranian influence growing, ISIS growing. It’s true that she said that she could reset our Russia — our relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin is on the march. So, I think all of those things I just named go fundamentally to what is her track record.”
AMONG liberals, it’s almost universally assumed that of the two major parties, it’s the Republicans who have become more extreme over the years. That’s a self-flattering but false narrative.
This is not to say the Republican Party hasn’t become a more conservative party. It has. But in the last two decades the Democratic Party has moved substantially further to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On most major issues the Republican Party hasn’t moved very much from where it was during the Gingrich era in the mid-1990s.
To see just how far the Democratic Party has moved to the left, compare Barack Obama with Bill Clinton. In 1992, Mr. Clinton ran as a centrist New Democrat. In several respects he governed as one as well. He endorsed a sentencing policy of “three strikes and you’re out,” and he proposed adding 100,000 police officers to the streets.
In contrast, President Obama’s former attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., criticized what he called “widespread incarceration” and championed the first decrease in the federal prison population in more than three decades. Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has chosen to focus on police abuses.
One of the crowning legislative achievements under Mr. Clinton was welfare reform. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, loosened welfare-to-work requirements. Mr. Obama is more liberal than Mr. Clinton was on gay rights, religious liberties, abortion rights, drug legalization and climate change. He has focused far more attention on income inequality than did Mr. Clinton, who stressed opportunity and mobility. While Mr. Clinton ended one entitlement program (Aid to Families With Dependent Children), Mr. Obama is responsible for creating the Affordable Care Act, the largest new entitlement since the Great Society. He is the first president to essentially nationalize health care.
Mr. Clinton lowered the capital-gains tax rate; Mr. Obama has proposed raising it. Mr. Clinton cut spending and produced a surplus. Under Mr. Obama, spending and the deficit reached record levels. In foreign policy, Mr. Obama has shown himself to be far more critical of traditional allies and more supine toward our adversaries than Mr. Clinton was. Mr. Obama has often acted as if American strength is a problem to which the solution is retrenchment, or even retreat.
Another bellwether: Hillary Rodham Clinton, in positioning herself for the 2016 election, is decidedly more liberal than she and her husband once were on illegal immigration, gay marriage and incarceration. She has called to “end the era of mass incarceration” and spoken about the importance of “toppling” the wealthiest 1 percent. She has remained noncommittal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that has drawn ire from the left.
The Democratic Party, then, has moved steadily to the left since the Clinton presidency. In fact, since his re-election, Mr. Obama’s inner progressive has been liberated. (An exception is the administration’s conditional approval of oil drilling off the Alaskan coast, starting this summer.) Other examples are his executive action granting temporary legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, his claim that gay marriage is a constitutional right, and his veto of legislation authorizing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Rep. Garrett urges Congress to let the Ex-Im Bank expire at a press conference on Tuesday morning
Garrett Pushes to End Crony Capitalism and Shut Down Export-Import Bank
Garrett: Congress Should Put the Export-Import Bank Out of Business
May 27, 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ-05) issued the following statement after joining fellow members of the House Freedom Caucus and other concerned lawmakers at a press conference this morning to urge Congress to let the Export-Import Bank expire on June 30:
“It’s hard to imagine anything more unfair and un-American than having the government financially support mega-corporations at the expense of small businesses and American workers. But that is exactly what has been happening, and it will continue to happen if we don’t let the Export-Import Bank expire next month. It rewards those with close relationships with Washington bureaucrats and makes victims of startups that dare to compete against them—literally picking winners and losers in our economy.
“Ex-Im has transformed the role of government from a disinterested referee that guarantees a free and open marketplace into a biased actor that tilts the scales in favor of its friends in businesses. We have the opportunity to save capitalism from cronyism and to fulfill a promise to the American people to work for them instead of a select few with special connections in Washington. For the sake of the American taxpayer and the preservation of the free enterprise system, Congress should put the Export-Import Bank out of business.”
That’s the question asked in this week’s New York Magazine cover story by journalist Lisa Miller. The short answer, of course, is that it all depends on how you define racism.
At the Fieldston Lower School, a $43,000-per-year Riverdale institution, the administration sees racism everywhere. Just consider the “microaggressions” that have been uncovered.
According to the piece: “A girl puts her hands in another girl’s hair; a boy asks his Asian friend where he’s really from. A number of years ago, a white student in a fourth-grade biography unit delivered a presentation on Jackie Robinson while in blackface.”
Here’s a news flash, folks: This is not racism. It’s children being curious about the way their friends look and trying their best to look like an American hero.
If you want it to stop, you can tell them that it’s not appropriate to touch other people without their permission, that many people who look different were born in this country. and that if you’re going to dress up as someone else, you don’t have to change the color of your skin.
You want to know what real racism looks like? Try this. In response to these incidents, as well as a whole bunch of multi-culti-educational mumbo-jumbo, Fieldston has decided to institute a policy of … segregation. Yes, that’s right. We have finally come full circle.
Former President George W. Bush did not lie about the presence of weapons of mass destruction to justify the Iraq War, journalist Bob Woodward said Sunday.
The argument has been used for years by Democrats and other detractors, but Woodward said on “Fox News Sunday” that his own 18-month investigation showed that Bush was actually skeptical that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had WMDs as Saddam claimed.
Though plenty of mistakes were made in the invasion of Iraq, Bush actually told CIA Director George Tenet, “Don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD,” Woodward said.
The reason the United States went into Iraq was “momentum,” he said.
“That war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end people were saying, ‘Hey, look, it’ll only take a week or two.'”
