The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
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Continue reading A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words , in Ridgewood
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Trenton NJ, a state grand jury today voted to indict 14 corrections officers who were charged after a January 2021 incident at the Hunterdon County-based Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, in which inmates were forcibly removed from cells and some were beaten, leaving two of the victims severely injured.
July 8,2018
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Teaneck NJ, Acting Bergen County Prosecutor Dennis Calo announced the arrest of SHANNELL GRIGGS (DOB: 04/16/1990; single; and employed as a receptionist) of 354 Bryant Avenue, Syracuse, NY and GIVONNI BUTLER (DOB: 08/21/1989; single; and unemployed) of 27 Pine Street, Passaic, NJ on charges of Computer Related Theft, Theft By Deception, Impersonation, Money Laundering, Receiving Stolen Property, and Conspiracy. The arrests are the result of an investigation conducted by the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office under the direction of Chief Robert Anzilotti and the Teaneck Police Department under the direction of Chief Glenn M. O’Reilly.
In December 2017, the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Financial Crimes Unit received a complaint of theft from the bank accounts of a recently deceased Teaneck resident. The executor of the decedent’s estate reported that the decedent’s bank accounts had been accessed by an unknown party and that approximately $375,000 had been stolen between 2015 and 2016.
During the course of the investigation, it was determined that Shannell GRIGGS, a bank employee, had unlawfully used the bank’s computerized account and customer service systems to access and take over the victim’s bank accounts. Shannell GRIGGS and her boyfriend, Givonni BUTLER, then stole approximately $375,000 through a combination of illicit debit card purchases, cash withdrawals, wire transfers, and cashier check purchases.
Shannell GRIGGS was arrested on June 29, 2018 in Syracuse, NY and charged with one count of Computer Related Theft, in an amount greater than $250,000, in violation of N.J.S.A. 2C:20-25c, a 1st degree crime; one count of Impersonation For The Purpose Of Obtaining A Benefit, in an amount greater than $75,000, in violation of N.J.S.A. 2C:21-17a(1), a 2nd degree crime; one count of Theft By Deception, in an amount greater than $75,000, in violation of N.J.S.A. 2C:20-4a, a 2nd degree crime; and one count of Financial Facilitation Of Criminal Activity, in an amount greater than $75,000 but less than $500,000, in violation of N.J.S.A. 2C:21-25b(2), a 2nd degree crime. GRIGGS was taken into custody in Syracuse, NY on the New Jersey warrant and is awaiting extradition proceedings.
A warrant for the arrest of Givonni BUTLER was issued on July 3, 2018 and served on July 5, 2018 as a detainer, since BUTLER is currently serving a prison sentence in Pennsylvania on an unrelated matter. He was charged with one count of Receiving Stolen Property, with a value greater than $75,000, in violation of N.J.S.A. 2C:20-7a, a 2nd degree crime; and one count of Conspiracy To Commit Computer Related Theft, in an amount greater than $5,000, in violation of N.J.S.A. 2C:5-2a(1) and N.J.S.A. 2C:20-25c, a 2nd degree crime.
Acting Prosecutor Calo states that the charges are merely accusations and that the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Acting Prosecutor Calo would like to thank the Teaneck and Syracuse Police Departments and the Onondaga County District Attorney’s Office for their assistance with this investigation.
July 20,2016
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Teaneck NJ, Was TWA Flight 800’s fiery crash part of a massive cover-up?, on the 20th anniversary of the crash . According to Arthur Jack Cashill ( TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover Up, The Conspiracy) the answer is a definitive yes .
TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic shortly after takeoff from JFK airport on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 passengers on board. Although initial reports suggested a terrorist attack, FBI and NTSB investigators blamed a fuel tank explosion. But skeptics have long questioned the official story, and new evidence has surfaced that suggests a widespread conspiracy.
In TWA 800, historian Jack Cashill introduces new documents and testimonies that reveal the shocking true chain of events: from the disastrous crash to the high-level decision to create a cover story and the attempts to silence anyone who dared speak the truth.
Cashill maintains that the plane was brought down by external forces and that the government has engaged in a decades-long cover-up.
According to Michele Talamo who hosted a book signing for Jack Cashill at the Teaneck American Legion for the NJ Tea Party Coalition, “Jack Cashill is by all accounts a JERSEY guy. Jack was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, graduated from Regis High School in New York City and Siena College in Loudonville, New York. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University.
Jack has written for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, AmericanThinker.com, and regularly for WorldNetDaily. He is Executive Editor for Ingram’s Magazine.
Jack has written eleven books of non-fiction — First Strike, Ron Brown’s Body, Hoodwinked, Sucker Punch, What’s the Matter with California, and Deconstructing Obama. His books have cracked Amazon’s top ten list. Jack has produced a score of documentaries for regional PBS and national cable channels, including the Emmy Award-winning, The Royal Years.
Jack has taught media and literature at Purdue and at Kansas City area universities, and served as a Fulbright professor in France.
One could say Jack is a detective by the way with hard work and true perseverance he gathers the facts and details them for us, “We the People”, and for this we are fortunate.
Jack’s most recent book is TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover Up, The Conspiracy”
https://www.amazon.com/TWA-800-Crash-Cover-Up-Conspiracy/dp/1621574717
Why Worry About Conspiracy When Incompetence Will Do?
APRIL 21, 2014 10:44AM
By MICHAEL D. TANNER
Last week, the New York Times reported that the Census Bureau would be significantly changing the questions and methods it uses to determine who has health insurance. The redesign is an attempt to address some of the flaws in the current design that have long troubled the agency. A working paper from the Census Bureau had found that it provided an “inflated estimate of the uninsured” and was prone to “measurement errors” that diminished the reliability and usefulness of the measure.
The timing of this change could hardly be worse. The massive coverage provisions of the health care reform have just taken effect, and these new changes could make comparisons to past years difficult, or meaningless. Another document from the agency explains that the questions would elicit such different responses that “it is likely the Census Bureau will decide that there is a break in the series for the health insurance estimates.”
As the Times reports, the differences in responses between the two sets of questions are significant; in a trial run last year, the percentage of people without health insurance was 10.6 percent with the new questionnaire, compared with 12.5 percent using the old version, with similar effects across all demographic groups.
Some defenders of the decision have pointed out that these new questions will also give data for 2013, so there will be at least one year of pre-ACA data to compare to. This is true, and having at least one data point will be helpful to some extent, but what we really want to evaluate when analyzing the law would be the longer term trend, for two reasons. One, there is a decent amount of variation in these surveys that make single data points less informative. Two, while the major coverage provisions of the law take effect in 2014, the law has already been influencing the insurance market in smaller ways since its passage, and more than half of the reduction in the uninsured will occur after 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This is why having a stable baseline would be useful, so we could examine the longer term trends in insurance coverage, and why now is close to the worst time to incorporate this change. The Census Bureau acknowledged as much in a paper, admitting that “[i]deally, the redesign would have had at least a few years to gather base line and trend data.”
Some critics of the law have voiced some suspicion as to possible political motivations for the timing of this change, seeing it as an attempt to obscure the effects of the law and make it harder to get reliable estimates. They cite the fact that some of the new questions were requested by the administration, and that senior officials had knowledge and approved of these pending changes.
I do not think conspiracy is the answer, but the real reason for this Census change is just as troubling, if not more so: incompetence.
The sheer amount of negative attention that these planned changes have gotten likely outweighs whatever political gains the administration could have hoped to capture in the first place. Aside from that, there are numerous other organizations, like Gallup, that measure health insurance coverage, so skeptics of the law will have other sources of data to turn to. If anything, it would appear that the White House was trying too hard to make sure they did not appear to be meddling in the affairs of the Census Bureau, which had unwisely planned to roll out these changes at an inopportune moment. Why this change was the line in the sand that the administration dared not cross when it has shown no such restraint in delaying many aspects of the law itself, such as the employer mandate, is hard to comprehend, but paints a picture more of an administration flailing to put out fires as they arise, rather than one even capable of pulling of the long term planning and coordination required for such a scheme.
While it appears the administration could have intervened and delayed the rollout of the new questions, they were not the driving force behind the changes. If anything, this was a mistake of what they chose not to do, rather than what they did.
These problems of coordination and competence within the government, where one government agency appears to be proceeding along with little to no regard or understanding for the broader context in which it operates, is in some ways more troubling, especially when we are talking about the massive new government foray into a sector that consumes almost 18 percent of our economy.
If they cannot even coordinate the measurement of health insurance effectively, how can they implement the law itself?
The administration has a chance to partially remedy their mistake. Republicans in both chambers have already introduced legislation to either delay the new questions or to use both sets concurrently for the next few years to establish a better baseline to look at the effects of the law on health insurance coverage.
Government, as inefficient and incompetent as it often is, can sometimes make honest mistakes, which I think this likely is; however, these mistakes should raise serious concerns about government’s abilities as it seeks to spread into even more aspects of the economy and our lives.
