Updated on June 13, 2017 at 1:36 PMPosted on June 13, 2017
BY PAUL MULSHINE
Columnist, The Star-Ledger
My liberal friends have worked themselves into a fever anticipating the impeachment of President Trump.
They think they’ve got a second Watergate going.
Have your fun while you can. But the next trial likely to affect the political lineup won’t be happening before the U.S. Senate in Washington.
It will be happening before the U.S. District Court in Newark.
In the dock will be U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, faced with 22 counts of ethics charges alleging he took illegal gifts from a Florida Miami eye doctor who was recently convicted on 67 counts of Medicare fraud.
If convicted, the 63-year-old senator would almost certainly be booted from the chamber. In that case, the Republicans might be able to add a seat to their slim, 52-vote majority.
Or maybe not. It’s a matter of timing – some of the most intriguing timing I’ve seen in politics.
Ridgewood NJ, According to the NJ Department of Homeland Security the election infrastructure subsector is complex and includes both physical and cyber assets, including voter registration databases, voting machines, and other systems to manage elections and report results, as well as storage facilities, polling places, and centralized vote tabulation locations.
In advance of the New Jersey primary on June 6, Erin Henry, Principal Planner in the Preparedness Bureau at NJOHSP, sat down with Michael Geraghty, State Chief Information Security Officer, and Robert Giles, Director of the State Division of Elections, to discuss New Jersey election systems security and efforts in New Jersey to keep these election assets secure and the voting process free from interference.
Although there are no specific or credible threats to election systems in New Jersey, the FBI confirmed cyber attacks on voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.
New Jersey’s primary elections will be held on Tuesday, June 6, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Your polling location is listed on the front of your sample ballot, which you will receive by mail prior to each election. Only registered voters are issued a sample ballot.
Primary elections, held in New Jersey each June, are the only elections where party affiliation affects the candidates for which someone can vote. In all other elections, a voter’s party affiliation is not even listed in the poll book.
New Jersey has “closed” primaries. This means that only Republican voters can nominate Republican candidates, and only Democratic voters can nominate Democratic candidates. Voters registered with any of the other political groups recognized by the State of New Jersey (Libertarian, Green Party, etc.) cannot vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary.
Unlike some other states with closed primaries, voters in New Jersey who are unaffiliated with any political party or group can declare either Republican or Democrat at the polls on the day of the primary and vote in that party’s primary.
A $1.1 billion bond offering to help complete construction of the American Dream mall in the New Jersey Meadowlands went forward this week, nine months after the sale was originally planned.
In the story of the mall’s creation, the delay was a minor speed bump. Thirteen years after it was first announced, the project is on its third developer and is being built in the face of growing doubts about the viability of shopping malls and retail stores across the country. The associated-risks section of the bond offering runs to 38 pages.
But the current developer, Triple Five Group, contends that American Dream’s blend of retail stores and entertainment venues — the sprawling complex is to include a six-acre indoor water park, a Ferris wheel, movie theaters and an indoor amusement park, as well as Saks Fifth Avenue, Hermès, Toys “R” Us and Old Navy — is the future and the “complete opposite of a traditional mall.”
Ridgewood NJ, so far left “comedian” Kathy Griffin Channels ISIS, and the Democrat Mayor of New York City sponsors a convicted terrorist as grand marshal of the Puerto Rican day parade .
In July of 2016 Democrat critic and Center for Security Policy founder Frank Gaffney said on SiriusXM radio , “I’m sorry for Democrats – I used to be one myself – who are now being completely disenfranchised by a party that is aligned with our enemies, and not with America,” Gaffney declared. “They will doom all of us, if they had their way.”
In Dinesh D’Souza: The secret history of the Democratic Party , D’Souza says Andrew Jackson established the Democratic Party as the party of theft. He mastered the art of stealing land from the Indians and then selling it at giveaway prices to white settlers.
D’Souza goes on Democrats like Senator John C. Calhoun invented a new justification for slavery, slavery as a “positive good.” For the first time in history, Democrats insisted that slavery wasn’t just beneficial for masters; they said it was also good for the slaves.
Later the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee by a group of former confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”
So I guess it is no surprise that the Democrat party of today represents anti American sentiments of ISIS , supports terrorism, pro illegal immigrant, is anti free speech, pro state-ism, and anti freedom . While the Democrats along with their union allies are deeply entrenched in New Jersey it may behoove many readers to remember that New Jersey voted for George B. McClellan for president and not Abraham Lincoln . Yes in the election of 1864 McClellan won only 3 states , and yes one state was New Jersey.
Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Phil Murphy wants to raise New Jersey’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, but his canvassers are working for $12.50, Assemblyman John Wisniewski said Tuesday, rolling out a new line of attack as the June 6 primary nears.
Wisniewski, a rival candidate for the Democratic nomination, caught the $2.50 discrepancy in Murphy’s campaign reports filed with the state Election Law Enforcement Commission and cut a new web ad accusing Murphy of hypocrisy. He called on Murphy to give his canvassers $45,000 in back pay and a salary hike.
Why liberal conspiracy theories are flourishing in the age of Trump.
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@[email protected] May 19, 2017, 8:30am EDT
President Donald Trump is about to resign as a result of the Russia scandal. Bernie Sandersand Sean Hannity are Russian agents. The Russians have paid off House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz to the tune of $10 million, using Trump as a go-between. Paul Ryan is a traitor for refusing to investigate Trump’s Russia ties. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was a secret Russian agent charged with discrediting the American conservative movement.
These are all claims you can find made on a new and growing sector of the internet that functions as a fake news bubble for liberals, something I’ve dubbed the Russiasphere. The mirror image of Breitbart and InfoWars on the right, it focuses nearly exclusively on real and imagined connections between Trump and Russia. The tone is breathless: full of unnamed intelligence sources, certainty that Trump will soon be imprisoned, and fever dream factual assertions that no reputable media outlet has managed to confirm.
Twitter is the Russiasphere’s native habitat. Louise Mensch, a former right-wing British parliamentarian and romance novelist, spreads the newest, punchiest, and often most unfounded Russia gossip to her 283,000 followers on Twitter. Mensch is backed up by a handful of allies, including former NSA spook John Schindler (226,000 followers) and DC-area photographer Claude Taylor (159,000 followers).
There’s also a handful of websites, like Palmer Report, that seem devoted nearly exclusively to spreading bizarre assertions like the theory that Ryan and Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell funneled Russian money to Trump — a story that spread widely among the site’s 70,000 Facebook fans.
Apparently we’re all going to die. We’re all going to die here in short order and we’ll all have Republicans, who were elected to Congress in record majorities, to blame. Good job everyone.
That’s the message coming out of Democrats and duly picked up by national media after yesterday’s House passage of the amended American Health Care Act. “Families will go bankrupt. People will die,” Chief Elizabeth Warren signaled on Twitter. ““This will cost American lives if it ever becomes law,” claimed Cory Booker on MSNBC. “This will mean death, pain, and suffering to people’s families.” Chris Murphy, never one to be outdone in using death to exploit, tweeted: “House GOP, I hope you slept well last night. Because after this vote, you will have the death of thousands of your conscience forever.”
The Daily Kos shouted: “House Republicans vote to sentence millions of Americans to death!” The newly ‘elected’ head of the DNC, Tom Perez said: “Trump and Republicans will own every preventable death.”. Perez is somehow allowed to go unchallenged on what constitutes a preventable death.
WASHINGTON — A group of top Democratic Party strategists have used new data about last year’s presidential election to reach a startling conclusion about why Hillary Clinton lost. Now they just need to persuade the rest of the party they’re right.
Many Democrats have a shorthand explanation for Clinton’s defeat: Her base didn’t turn out, Donald Trump’s did and the difference was too much to overcome.
But new information shows that Clinton had a much bigger problem with voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Trump four years later.
Those Obama-Trump voters effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters.
For all the roiling anger and energy at the grassroots, the party still fell short in Georgia and Kansas. And Democratic prospects in upcoming elections aren’t promising. (??????????????? grassroots anger …nice try)
By GABRIEL DEBENEDETTI
04/19/17 05:06 AM EDT
As it became clear late Tuesday evening that Jon Ossoff would fall just short of the 50-percent mark in the first round of voting in a suburban Atlanta special election, Democrats back in Washington started leafing through their calendars and asking: When does the winning start?
Ossoff’s moral victory — capturing 48 percent of the vote in a conservative-oriented district — was welcome, but after two successive close-but-no-cigar finishes in House special elections in Georgia and Kansas, a new worry is beginning to set in.
Sick pay is for those who get sick. If you don’t get sick, you shouldn’t get sick pay. Period.
The same goes for all fringe benefits. If you’re not disabled, you don’t get disability. If you’re not unemployed, you don’t get unemployment. This is not complicated.
Until you put politics into the mix.
New Jersey, the state with the highest property taxes in the nation, still allows public workers to collect big payouts for their unused absences. It’s a perk unheard of in the private sector, but we’re all paying dearly for it.
New Jersey politicians just can’t seem to leave Jon Corzine alone.
The former Democratic governor and U.S. senator, bounced out of office by Republican Gov. Chris Christie in 2009, has tried to keep a low profile in recent years, even as the GOP has portrayed him as the boogeyman. Christie used him to explain away the slow growth of the state’s economy and Republican lawmakers sought to tie their “Corzine Democrat” opponents to a governor viewed as hapless, uncharismatic and ineffective.
Seven low income housing units are planned for the Chestnut Avenue development that was just approved. How the heck does Ridgewood make any sort of real dent in its preposterous court-imposed low income housing deficit, seven units at a time?
Judicial fiat in any area of life over a time span measured in decades is utter lunacy. In this case it constitutes a naked denial to New Jersey citizens of their right under the U.S. Constitution to a republican (small ‘r’) form of government. The Municipal Law course at Rutgers Newark offered at the turn of the millenium featured a hands-upturned, shoulders-shrugged admission of all of the above by the part-time prof and active municipal law practitioner (who, of course, supported the system despite its unconstitutionality, but why? Because the prof was a reliablly progressive statist drone who agreed with the POLICY!).
The issue of affordable housing is based on a NJ Supreme Court decision over 10 years ago that requires EVERY municipality in the state to provide affordable housing in their community. The towns then essentially passed that burden along to developers who wished to build new housing units in their community by requiring that a percentage of the new units be dedicated to affordable housing. Nonetheless the legal obligation to provide affordable housing ultimately rests with the municipality and not developers..
It doesn’t. The way the ‘settlement’ has been structured, it never will.The settlement isn’t designed to address low income housing availability. It is designed as a club developers can hold over the heads of affluent communities. No prizes for guessing who the driving force behind the settlement was.
If they REALLY cared about affordable housing, they would insist that developers build 100% affordable housing, instead of giving ‘credit’ for a few units in a giant multifamily building. But there the $$$$$ are just not there for developing pure affordable housing, you see!
The part I can’t understand is that to get the seven we have to get a lot more of the “non-low-income” kind, thereby increasing the proportion of those. At that rate, the more affordable units we build, the farther behind we’ll get. By the way, Aronsohn promised the disabled community that he would make sure appropriate housing became available. Why isn’t his name invoked when complaints are made that Ridgewood needs this? No–instead, he’s thanked.
That was the fallacy and lunacy of the Mayor Arohnson approach – – the last council approved close to 400 new family units downtown with only a small percentage addressing our coah requirements. But, the new council does not seem any more intent on doing what we need to do in a rationale manner. Now we have these new units going forward, our schools and other village services will be innundated with new people and we still have the problem we had before — where do we put hundreds of new coah units??
Editorial: The last thing N.J. needs is another entitlement
April 2, 2017 at 3:00 AM
State Senate President Steve Sweeney, the sponsor of New Jersey’s 2009 paid family leave law, wants to expand the program. Giving workers paid leave from their jobs to care for a sick relative or a new baby — and paying for it with a small, capped payroll deduction — proved to be a sound idea.
Abuse has not been widespread, employers’ worst fears have not been realized and some studies have contended that companies benefit from the program.
But there is no compelling reason to expand this new entitlement, as Sweeney (D-West Deptford) is unfortunately proposing now.
Oh, wait. There is one compelling reason: To boost Sweeney’s and fellow Democrats’ chances in November, when the entire Legislature is up for election. The Democrats shouldn’t need that much help this year. But Jersey pols, Democrat and Republican, never forget what keeps them in office — giving gifts to prized constituencies.
Sweeney, in particular, is in a bit of a jam, with the powerful New Jersey Education Association, miffed by his pushback on teacher pensions, vowing to fight him. Hence, a renewed commitment by lawmakers to dangle popular proposals in front of voters — like, say, expanding the paid family leave program.
By Steven Nelson, Staff Writer | March 31, 2017, at 5:15 p.m.
Sen. Bob Menendez may call a federal prison home if prosecutors prove he accepted bribes to do favors for a wealthy businessman.
But you wouldn’t know that if you tuned in to Bloomberg TV last week to watch the New Jersey Democrat discuss a Securities and Exchange Commission nomination.
The reporter didn’t mention the case.
And there was nothing remarkable about the omission. Menendez regularly appears on cable news programs without viewers being told he faces felony corruption charges.
CNN’s Jake Tapper didn’t mention the prosecution during a 10-minute interview on March 13 that focused on health care policy. Nor did MSNBC’s Katy Tur in a March 3 interview about investigation of Russian actions during the 2016 presidential election.
An investigation originally undertaken by NJ Spotlight pays off as new property tax data will be posted on state’s governmental services website
What is going on: High property taxes have long been a top complaint of New Jersey homeowners, and a new law enacted by Gov. Chris Christie earlier this month following a compromise with lawmakers aims to help residents gain a better understanding of how their bills come together — and how state property-tax relief programs may help to offset them.
Thanks to the compromise, information about the state’s most popular property-tax relief program, as well as others, will be added to the comparative property-tax figures that are published each year on the website of the state Division of Local Government Services.
How we got here: The origins of the bill that was signed into law by Christie following an initial conditional veto go back to 2014, when lawmakers grew upset that Christie’s administration decided to remove a column from the DLGS website that depicted “average net-property taxes” being paid by homeowners in every town in New Jersey. The change was made as Christie, a second-term Republican, was preparing to run for president, and as he faced criticism for not doing enough to combat the property-tax burden, especially for low-income homeowners and seniors and the disabled.
Lawmakers took action after NJ Spotlight first reported on the change. Earlier reporting also tracked increases in average net-property taxes that occurred during Christie’s tenure.
The issue with average net property taxes: The state for years had calculated average net-property taxes by subtracting the average property-tax rebate provided through the state’s popular Homestead benefit program from the average property-tax bill that was paid on an annual basis by homeowners in every town. The information was released for each year on the DLGS website along with reams of other data, including detailed tax rates and property valuations broken down by county and town.
But Christie’s administration argued that the average net-property tax category was based on faulty math, since not every homeowner in every community qualifies for the Homestead benefit, which was converted from a rebate into a direct credit on property taxes shortly after Christie took office in 2010. The net property-tax bill was also determined using the average property-tax bill for all homeowners in a given town, and not using an “apples-to-apples” comparison of just the average property taxes paid by recipients of the Homestead program.
