After advancing in its first committee hearing Monday, a bill to restrict access to information available through the federal Open Public Records Act in New Jersey is drawing criticism from environmentalists who say it could pave the way for less transparency in the way the state doles out contracts for development.
The bill, sponsored by Assemblyman Wayne P. DeAngelo in a bid to keep businesses and advertisers from using public records for marketing purposes, advanced in a unanimous vote.
Democrats can barely keep up with their problems with Trump, raising some to wonder if their perpetual opposition is undermining a more focused message.
By David Catanese | Senior Politics Writer Feb. 2, 2017, at 5:38 p.m.
In a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared that the early theme defining President Donald Trump’s administration was “incompetence leading to chaos.”
“It’s amazing how poorly done so many things have been that have come out of the White House in the first two weeks,” the New York Democrat said.
A few hours later during a CNN town hall, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California said Trump’s selection of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court was bad “if you breathe air, drink water, eat food or take medicine.”
And in the wake of Trump’s abrupt firing of the nation’s acting attorney general, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a candidate for Democratic Party chairman, rushed so quickly to vilify the president he left out a word in his merciless statement.
“By all accounts, this is looking like failed presidency,” he said.
Kellyanne Conway, President Donald Trump’s top counselor, blasted Senate Democrats on Thursday for attempting to slow down the president’s nominees to top federal posts, including his pick for the US Supreme Court.
Conway expressed frustration on “Fox & Friends” with Democratic opposition to Trump’s supreme court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch, dubbing Senate Democrats “a bunch of crybabies who say that they’re going to oppose Supreme Court nominees before they even know his name.”
“This obstinance and obstruction is the modern Democratic party,” Conway said.
Ridgewood NJ, well well well ,Bill Clinton talking illegal immigration and the problem of border control and being a nation of laws from his 1996 State of the Union which shows a striking comparison to what President Donald Trump has been saying about the subject.
By Susan K. Livio and Carla Astudillo | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on January 25, 2017 at 2:56 PM, updated January 25, 2017 at 7:01 PM
TRENTON — New Jersey’s infamously high property tax bills topped $8,500 per home in 2016, a 2.35 percent increase over the previous year, according to figures released Wednesday by the Department of Community Affairs.
Property owners paid $8,549 — $196 more than they did in 2015 when the average tax bill rose about 2.2 percent, according to the analysis.
The average residential bill has risen from $8,161 in 2014 to $8,353 in 2015 to $8,549 in 2016.
Each year, the average bill set a new high bar for what Garden State property owners
The issue of voter fraud was one of the most heated sources of controversy during the 2016 presidential election, and it continues to be so.
After Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced that it was supporting recounts in several states won by Donald Trump, Trump responded with a series of Twitter posts accusing Clinton of hypocrisy for refusing to accept the results of the election after she insisted that he “must.” He then tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Several major media outlets pounced on Trump’s comment. The New York Times, for example, reported that “virtually no evidence of such improprieties has been discovered.” The Times editorial board then called Trump’s statement “a lie,” and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker declared “this is a bogus claim with no documented proof.”
These media reports and Trump’s comment are all misleading. There is material evidence of substantial vote fraud, though it does not prove that Trump would have won the popular vote if such fraud were prevented. It only shows that this is a possibility.
This evidence is documented in a 2014 paper published by the journal Electoral Studies. Based on survey data and election records, the authors of this paper found that the number of non-citizens who voted illegally in the 2008 election ranged “from just over 38,000 at the very minimum to nearly 2.8 million at the maximum.” Their “best estimate” is that 1.2 million or “6.4% of non-citizens actually voted.”
As detailed below, this paper has uncertainties that the authors readily acknowledge, but attempts to dismiss it have been flawed and deceitful. Moreover, there are several reasons why significantly more non-citizens may have voted in the 2016 presidential election than in the 2008 election.
The Electoral Studies Paper
In 2014, the academic journal Electoral Studies published a paper by three scholars who analyzed the results of a large survey conducted by a group at Harvard University. This study also made use of polling data from YouGov and voter registration and turnout data from Catalist, a firm that equips “progressive organizations” with data to help them “persuade and mobilize” people.
In this 2008 survey of 32,800 respondents, 339 identified themselves as non-citizens, and 38 of these non-citizens checked a box that said “I definitely voted” in the 2008 general election or were recorded in the Catalist database as voting in that election. At face value, this means that 11.2% (38/339) of non-citizens voted in the 2008 election.
Applying this 11.2% figure to the Census Bureau’s estimate of 19.4 million adult non-citizens in the U.S., this amounts to 2.2 million non-citizens who voted illegally in the 2008 election. After weighting these results and accounting for margins of error, the authors estimated that a maximum of 2.8 million non-citizens voted in 2008.
On the low side, the authors noted that only five non-citizens who said they voted were recorded in the Catalist database as voting. If these were the only people who voted, it would mean that 1.5% (5/339) of non-citizens voted. Applied to 19.4 million adult non-citizens, this amounts to 290,000 votes. After weighting these results and accounting for margins of error, the authors estimated that a bare minimum of 38,000 non-citizens voted in the 2008 election.
Using other data from the survey, the authors refined their high and low estimates to produce a “best guess” that 6.4% or 1.2 million non-citizens cast votes in 2008. The survey also showed that 81.8% of non-citizen voters reported that they voted for Obama.
As the authors explain, these figures are “quite substantial” and “large enough to change meaningful election outcomes, including Electoral College votes and Congressional elections.” More specifically, they noted that “non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass” Obamacare. This is because Democrat Al Franken of Minnesota captured this 60th seat:
with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
In the 2016 election for North Carolina’s governor, the current Republican governor recently conceded defeat based on a shortfall of about 10,000 votes. The Census Bureau’s estimate for the adult non-citizen population of North Carolina is 479,000 people. Hence, if 2.1% of them cast added votes for the Democrat, this supplied the margin of victory.
Trump currently trails in the popular vote by about 2.6 million. Hence, in order for his statement to be true, 12.6% of the 21 million non-citizen adults in the U.S. recorded by the Census Bureau would have had to cast added votes for Clinton. This is within the realm of possibility given that the study also found that “roughly one quarter of non-citizens were likely registered to vote” in 2008 and 2010.
Flawed Critiques
Before the 2014 paper was officially published, two of its authors wrote an overview of it for the Washington Post. Criticism was swift and intense, and the Post placed links to four critiques of this article over the top of it, along with the authors’ reply to three of them.
Most of these criticisms were formalized in a paper published by Electoral Studies in 2015, which accused the authors of the original paper of “cherry-picking.” In the context of public policy, cherry picking means to selectively choose only the data that supports a certain conclusion while ignoring any data that does not. It is the equivalent of lying by omission.
This 2015 paper was written by three scholars, two of whom are managers of the Harvard survey cited in the study, and the third a manager with YouGov.
The central argument of their two-page paper is that all of the people in the survey who identified themselves as non-citizen voters either did not vote or were actually citizens. This argument rests on two flawed assumptions.
First, the critics assume that people who stated “I definitely voted” and specifically identified a choice of candidate did not vote—unless Catalist verified that they voted. This is illogical, because Catalist is unlikely to verify respondents who use fraudulent identities, and millions of non-citizens use them.
This is shown in a 2013 investigation by the U.S. Social Security Administration, which found that about 1.8 million illegal immigrants worked in 2010 by using a Social Security number “that did not match their name.” Furthermore, the study found that another 0.7 million illegal immigrants worked in 2010 with Social Security numbers that they obtained by using “fraudulent birth certificates.” Notably, a Social Security number is a common requirement for voter registration.
The Harvard survey and Catalist data evince such identity fraud, because 90% of all survey respondents were matched by Catalist, while most non-citizen respondents were not. In the 2008 and 2012 surveys, only 41% and 43% of non-citizens were matched by Catalist respectively. These low match rates are revealing given that the Catalist database contains reams of data on “more than 240 million unique voting-age individuals.” This amounts to 98% of the 245 million adults who live in the U.S.
Hence, to ignore all votes not matched by Catalist will ensure that most non-citizens are excluded. This is especially true of those who fraudulently use a Social Security number, who are the very same people who have an open door to voting.
Their second irrational assumption is that some citizens in the Harvard survey misidentify themselves as non-citizens, but non-citizens never misidentify themselves as citizens. Hence, they dismiss all votes by people who don’t claim to be non-citizens in two separate surveys. This has the effect of narrowing the field of non-citizens to only those who took the survey in both 2008 and 2010. It also excludes anyone who stated on one survey that they are a non-citizen and stated on another that they are a citizen.
The critics make a legitimate point that random errors by survey respondents will overcount non-citizens. This is because far more citizens were sampled in this survey. For instance, if a survey sampled 100,000 citizens and 100 non-citizens, and 1% of them misidentified themselves, this would mean 1,000 citizens called themselves non-citizens, but only one non-citizen said he was a citizen.
Such logic makes sense in a vacuum where all other evidence is ignored, but the reality is that misidentification of citizenship is not just a random phenomenon. This is because illegal immigrants often claim they are citizens in order to conceal the fact that they are in the U.S. illegally.
This is proven by a 2013 study published in the journal Demographic Research, which compared Census Bureau survey data on citizenship to the number of naturalized citizens recorded by the U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics. The study found that certain major groups of immigrants—including Mexican men of all ages, Mexican women aged 40 and older, and immigrants who have been in the U.S. for less than five years—frequently misrepresent themselves as citizens.
As a worst-case example, the study found that “the number of naturalized Mexican men with fewer than five years of U.S. residence is nearly 27 times higher” in the Census data than the number recorded by the Office of Immigration Statistics. In other words, only about 4% of Mexican men who claim to be citizens and have been in the United States for less than five years are actually citizens.
Now watch how the critics employ their flawed assumptions to claim that “the rate of non-citizen voting in the United States is likely 0.” Again, 38 respondents in the 2008 Harvard survey said they were non-citizens who “definitely voted” in the 2008 general election or were recorded in the Catalist database as voting in that election. Yet:
instead of examining the 2008 presidential election, the critics focus on the 2010 mid-term election when the presidency was not at stake, and turnout was lower. In 2010, 489 people identified themselves as non-citizens in the survey, and 13 of them said they voted or were recorded in the Catalist database as voting. This cuts the number of voters from 38 to 13.
then they dismiss anyone who did not also take part in the 2012 survey, which narrows the pool of non-citizens from 489 to 105, or by 79%.
then they dismiss anyone who did not say they are non-citizens in both 2010 and 2012. This further narrows the pool of non-citizens from 105 to 85, leaving only 6 voters.
then they dismiss anyone who did not appear in the Catalist database as voting, which cuts the number of voters in 2010 from 6 to 0.
The critics do this without spelling out the implications of their assumptions, without providing a comprehensive and transparent accounting of these numbers, and without mentioning that this was a mid-term election.
They also analyze the 2012 presidential election, and their methods are even more problematic. In this case, 695 people identified themselves as non-citizens in the survey, and 61 of them said they voted or were recorded in the Catalist database as voting. Yet:
they dismiss anyone who did not also take part in the 2010 survey, which narrows the field of non-citizens from 695 to 105, or by 85%.
then they dismiss anyone who did not say they are non-citizens in both 2010 and 2012. This reduces the number of non-citizens from 105 to 85. Note that the survey only asked 15 of these non-citizens if they voted in 2012, and 10 of them said they did.
then they dismiss all 10 of these people, because they do not appear in the Catalist database as voting. Moreover, they do this while failing to reveal that all of these people specifically identified their choice for president—nine for Obama and one for Romney.
then, buried in a footnote, they mention that one person who identified herself as a non-citizen in both the 2010 and 2012 surveys was matched by Catalist as voting in 2012. They say that this “appears to be the result of a false positive match with Catalist,” because the person “stated in both the 2010 and 2012 survey that she was not registered to vote.” This argument is based on the unspoken assumption that non-citizens would never lie about voting, even though such an admission could expose them to criminal penalties.
Throughout the body of their paper, the critics consider Catalist to be the only valid measure of voting, but when this does not serve their purpose, they dismiss Catalist in a footnote. Such duplicity pervades their analysis. They level the charge of cherry picking even as they engage in it.
Beyond all of the evidence above, the authors of the 2014 Electoral Studies paper have written a working paper that debunks their critics with many more facts.
Legitimate Caveats
The authors of the 2014 Electoral Studies paper repeatedly explain that there is room for uncertainty in their results. To that end, they provide a wide-ranging estimate for the number of non-citizens who voted illegally in the 2008 election.
However, one major aspect of their analysis does not quantify margins of error, even though it could be a large source of inaccuracy. This is the fact that the Harvard survey does not provide a truly random sample of the American public.
The Harvard survey uses data from an internet poll conducted by YouGov. The weakness of internet polls is that they are extremely vulnerable to selection bias or non-response bias. This occurs because certain people are far more likely to participate in these polls.
As explained in the textbook Mind on Statistics, “Surveys that simply use those who respond voluntarily are sure to be biased in favor of those with strong opinions or with time on their hands.” In other words, such polls are not based on random samples of people, and they can be misleading.
The Harvard survey attempts to correct for this flaw by using a process called “matching.” This entails selecting a portion of the survey respondents that “mimics the characteristics” of the target population. These characteristics include “age, race, gender, education, marital status, number of children under 18, family income, employment status, citizenship, state, and metropolitan area … religion, church attendance, born again or evangelical status, news interest, party identification and ideology.”
Matching is a common and generally accepted procedure for turning non-random samples into random ones. However, as the Harvard survey points out, matching relies on the “assumption” that there is “no difference” in how people would answer the survey if they have the same characteristics (like race, age, and news interest). This assumption may be false in some cases, because people can differ in ways that transcend such characteristics.
The authors of the 2014 Electoral Studies paper acknowledge this limitation by writing that their conclusions apply “if” the weighted survey data “is fully representative of the non-citizen population.” This is a big “if” given that the underlying data comes from an internet poll, even though it has been matched.
Another source of uncertainty is the fact that the study uses survey data from the Census Bureau to measure the number of non-citizens in the United States. As detailed above, this will produce an undercount of non-citizens, because many illegal immigrants conceal the fact that they are non-citizens. In the words of the Congressional Budget Office, figures for the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. “are subject to considerable uncertainty.”
Along the same lines, the Harvard survey may undercount the number of non-citizen voters, because it effectively asks them to admit in writing to a federal crime. Per the authors:
Non-citizen voters have incentives to misrepresent either their citizenship status or their voting status. After all, claiming to be both a non-citizen and a voter is confessing to vote fraud, and the Federal Voter Registration Application specifically threatens non-citizens who register with a series of consequences. … This possible penalty would tend to reduce the proportion of non-citizen voters who would report having voted.
The 2016 Election
The number of non-citizens who voted in the 2016 election may be significantly higher than in 2008, because:
Trump campaigned on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration, and this may have driven non-citizens to vote against him.
the number of adult non-citizens in the U.S. recorded by the Census Bureau has risen from 19.4 million in 2008 to 21.0 million in 2016.
shortly before the election, Obama publicly stated that election records are not cross-checked against immigration databases and “there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating, et cetera.” This let non-citizens know that they stand little chance of being caught if they vote.
Likewise, early in 2016, the Obama administration supported a court injunction to prevent Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia from requiring people to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.
So-Called Fact Checks
Some of the nation’s most prominent fact checkers have scoffed at Trump’s assertion that he won the popular vote if illegal votes are deducted.
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker dismissed Trump’s claim as “bogus” and attributed it to “a self-described conservative voter fraud specialist” who has “declined to provide any evidence to back it up, even though reporters have asked.”
The Post’s analysis, written by Glenn Kessler, completely ignored the fact that Trump’s statement is supported to a degree by the 2014 Electoral Studies paper. Kessler is clearly aware of this study, because he quotes its lead author and links to an earlier Post fact check that cites the study. Yet, Kessler doesn’t even hint at what the study shows. Instead, he provides a link that says “we’ve previously given Trump four Pinocchios for making a number of bogus claims about alleged voter fraud.”
Worse still, in both of these fact checks, the Post declares that Trump took the study “out of context.” This is a blatant falsehood, but Kessler says it is so because the lead author of the study wrote that “almost all elections in the US are not determined by non-citizen participation, with occasional and very rare potential exceptions.” This does not in any way contradict Trump, who quoted the authors of the study word-for-word as follows:
Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and many other reforms, and other Obama administration priorities. … It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina.
Kessler and his fellow Post reporter had good reason to know that these words are accurate and in-context, for the authors of the study wrote them in the Post, and the Fact Checker linked to their article.
PolitiFact, another popular fact checking organization, also published a misleading analysis of this issue. This pertains to the number of non-citizens who are registered to vote, which is another finding from the 2014 Electoral Studies paper. PolitiFact says that “Trump accurately cites the study” but is still wrong, because the study was “rebutted multiple times for the methodology it uses.”
PolitiFact then gives the distinct impression that the people who conducted the study are nobodies who merely wrote an article for the “Monkey Cage” blog of the Washington Post. PolitiFact does this by failing to mention that the study was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and by failing to cite any credentials of the study or its authors, even though two of them, Jesse Richman and David Earnest, are university professors.
In stark contrast, PolitiFact touts the study’s critics with phrases like “three experts,” “peer-reviewed article,” “a political science professor,” “an election expert,” “an associate policy analyst,” and “experts who actually gathered the underlying data.”
PolitiFact’s analysis provides no indication that anyone in this organization read the body of the original paper, read the authors’ replies to their critics, or judiciously examined any of the attacks on the paper. It simply portrays the authors as unaccomplished and their critics as reliable.
This appeal to authority is especially deceitful given that two of the three “experts who actually gathered the underlying data” have made donations to left-leaning political causes. These are Brian Schaffner and Samantha Luks, who are among the three scholars who wrote the 2015 paper in Electoral Studies that criticized the original paper.
In 2004, Schaffner donated to America Coming Together, a liberal organization “heavily funded by billionaire George Soros” that was “on the cutting edge of national politics.” In 2016, Schaffner gave $250 to Hillary Clinton, and Luks donated to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Incidentally, the same federal records show no political donations for the three authors of the original study.
In sum, PolitiFact neglects the actual facts of this complex issue and makes it seem as if this is a case of “the experts” versus people with no credibility. That is not fact-checking but shilling for a particular point of view.
Conclusion
Contrary to the claims of certain major media outlets and fact checkers, a comprehensive analysis of this issue shows that substantial numbers of non-citizens vote illegally in U.S. elections. However, contrary to Trump, the data does not prove that he would have won the popular vote if this fraud did not take place. Instead, it only shows that this is a reasonable possibility.
Ridgewood NJ, Massive peaceful protests marked the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency as marchers converged on Washington and in cities and towns around the globe. Coined the Women’s March on Washington various liberal women’s groups descended on DC,”vowing to keep the pressure on an administration that has sowed worldwide unease”
The Ridgewood blog has one question, what’s with the outfits and Vagina costumes? Were women protesting fashion sense?
by DAVID HARSANYI January 20, 2017 12:00 AM @DAVIDHARSANYI
Betsy DeVos wants better education for minority and low-income kids. There’s something perverse about an ideology that views the disposing of an unborn child in the third trimester of pregnancy as an indisputable right but the desire of parents to choose a school for their kids as zealotry. Watching President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, answer an array of frivolous questions this week was just another reminder of how irrational liberalism has become.
Democrats often tell us that racism is one of the most pressing problems in America. And yet, few things have hurt African Americans more over the past 40 years than inner-city public-school systems. If President Obama is correct and educational attainment is the key to breaking out of a lower economic stratum, then no institution is driving inequality quite as effectively as public schools.
Actually, teachers’ unions are the only organizations in America that openly support segregated schools. In districts across the country — even ones in cities with some form of limited movement for kids — poor parents, typically those who are black or Hispanic, are forced to enroll their kids in underperforming schools when there are good ones nearby, sometimes just blocks away.
By S.P. Sullivan | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on January 19, 2017 at 5:43 PM
TRENTON — The head of the New Jersey State Police on Thursday decried a deal struck between the United States and Cuba because it did not require the return of convicted cop killer Joanne Chesimard.
Earlier this week, the White House announced an agreement on law enforcement cooperation with Cuba, part of President Barack Obama’s effort to normalize relations between the two countries.
The Associated Press reported the State Department and Cuba’s Interior Ministry agreed to share information on international criminal activity including human trafficking and terrorism.
While everyone’s been gearing up for President Trump’s inauguration, the Clinton Foundation made a major announcement this week that went by with almost no notice: For all intents and purposes, it’s closing its doors.
In a tax filing, the Clinton Global Initiative said it’s firing 22 staffers and closing its offices, a result of the gusher of foreign money that kept the foundation afloat suddenly drying up after Hillary Clinton failed to win the presidency.
It proves what we’ve said all along: The Clinton Foundation was little more than an influence-peddling scheme to enrich the Clintons, and had little if anything to do with “charity,” either overseas or in the U.S. That sound you heard starting in November was checkbooks being snapped shut in offices around the world by people who had hoped their donations would buy access to the next president of the United States.
And why not? There was a strong precedent for it in Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. While serving as the nation’s top diplomat, the Clinton Foundation took money from at least seven foreign governments — a clear breach of Clinton’s pledge on taking office that there would be total separation between her duties and the foundation.
Is there a smoking gun? Well, of the 154 private interests who either officially met or had scheduled phone talks with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state, at least 85 were donors to the Clinton Foundation or one of its programs.
Inside a decimated party’s not-so-certain revival strategy.
DOVERE January 19, 2017
Standing with some 30,000 people in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia the night before the election watching Hillary Clinton speak, exhausted aides were already worrying about what would come next. They expected her to win, of course, but they knew President Clinton was going to get thrashed in the 2018 midterms—the races were tilted in Republicans’ favor, and that’s when they thought the backlash would really hit. Many assumed she’d be a one-term president. They figured she’d get a primary challenge. Some of them had already started gaming out names for who it would be.
“Last night I stood at your doorstep / Trying to figure out what went wrong,” Bruce Springsteen sang quietly to the crowd in what he called “a prayer for post-election.” “It’s gonna be a long walk home.”
What happened the next night shocked even the most pessimistic Democrats. But in another sense, it was the reckoning the party had been expecting for years. They were counting on a Clinton win to paper over a deeper rot they’ve been worrying about—and to buy them some time to start coming up with answers. In other words, it wasn’t just Donald Trump. Or the Russians. Or James Comey. Or all the problems with how Clinton and her aides ran the campaign. Win or lose, Democrats were facing an existential crisis in the years ahead—the result of years of complacency, ignoring the withering of the grass roots and the state parties, sitting by as Republicans racked up local win after local win.
“The patient,” says Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, “was clearly already sick.”
As Trump takes over the GOP and starts remaking its new identity as a nationalist, populist party, creating a new political pole in American politics for the first time in generations, all eyes are on the Democrats. How will they confront a suddenly awakened, and galvanized, white majority? What’s to stop Trump from doing whatever he wants? Who’s going to pull a coherent new vision together? Worried liberals are watching with trepidation, fearful that Trump is just the beginning of worse to come, desperate for a comeback strategy that can work.
If you voted for Obama or any Democrat in New Jersey it is your Agenda
This is such bullshit. Why all of a sudden this hysteria of pushing for affordable housing. Whose agenda is this? Why stuff nice towns and villages with buildings that are out of character? Why force villages that people have worked very hard to build and live in to bring low income families who will certainly affect the quality of life? Why urbanize beautiful places that residents are so proud of and care so much about ? This will destroy these places and will provide no value to anyone. If you want affordable housing build in places that are already messed up such Hackensack, Rutheford etc. I am sure I am not the only who is stressed out about this nonsense.
Rising costs are putting basic necessities out of reach for 37 percent or 1.2 million New Jersey households, according to the United Way ALICE Report released by United Way of Northern New Jersey.
“ALICE – Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed; Study of Financial Hardship” shows that the minimum costs to survive in New Jersey rose by 23 percent since 2007, outpacing the rate of inflation of 14 percent. The report finds that it costs a single adult $24,300 to survive annually and $64,176 for a family of four with two children under the age of five.
BY DAVID WEISBERG, CONTRIBUTOR – 12/27/16 01:00 PM EST
Can Obama Save Clinton?
Executive orders barring offshore drilling in most U.S. Arctic waters; an abstention at the U.N. permitting the Security Council to declare all Israeli settlement activity to be illegal and an obstacle to peace; the possibility of further action at the U.N. to formalize the administration’s comprehensive vision of a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — President Obama is sprinting, not jogging, to the finish line.
In dashing through his last few weeks in office, will one of Obama’s final acts be to pardon Hillary Clinton for any violations of federal law she might have committed while she was secretary of State?
Democratic voters are almost three times as likely to have “blocked, unfriended, or stopped following someone on social media” after Donald Trump’s victory, according to a study released Monday.
The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI ) found 24 percent of Democrats distanced themselves from people on social media because of a political postings. Nine percent of both Republicans and independents reported doing the same to those in social media circles.
Additionally, 28 percent of liberals surveyed said they removed someone from their social media circle because of the content that person posted, compared with 8 percent of conservatives.
For moderates, 11 percent said they blocked, unfriended or unfollowed someone due to what that person posted online.
