A compromise forged between Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic legislative leaders several years ago let undocumented immigrant students living in New Jersey qualify for in-state tuition rates at state colleges and universities. But many haven’t been able to take advantage of the lower rates since they continue to be locked out of state-administered financial-aid programs. John Reitmeyer, NJSpotlight Read more
Obama calls for adding public option to ObamaCare
President Obama is calling on Congress to add a “public option” to ObamaCare to improve his signature health law.
The pitch from Obama comes after he abandoned pursuit of a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers during the long legislative battle over healthcare because of opposition from some Democrats in Congress.
“Public programs like Medicare often deliver care more cost-effectively by curtailing administrative overhead and securing better prices from providers,” Obama writes in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“The public plan did not make it into the final legislation. Now, based on experience with the ACA, I think Congress should revisit a public plan to compete alongside private insurers in areas of the country where competition is limited,” writes the president.
The new embrace from the president also comes amid what appears to be a concerted push by the Democratic Party to rally around the public option.
It’s a shift that reflects how the party has tilted leftward during the Obama years.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/287256-obama-calls-for-adding-public-option-to-obamacare
the stasff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, State lawmakers passed a 23-cent gas tax hike overnight that Gov. Chris Christie is set to sign by Friday saving the Transportation Trust Fund of TTF from running out of money.
There was no mention of auditing the TTF ?
The Christie backed plan is a 23-cent gas tax hike that Gov. Chris Christie is set to sign in to law by Friday.
The vote came early Tuesday came after a day of backroom talks between Christie and legislative leaders such as Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto. In the brokered deal the Democrat-led Assembly passed legislation to hike the state’s gasoline tax by 23 cents per gallon, while cutting the sales tax from 7 to 6 percent.
Motorists could see the hikes take effect by Friday. The state’s gas tax would increase from 14.5 cents per gallon to 37.5 cents per gallon under the plan.
Today the average price of a gallon of gas in New Jersey is $2.10 according to AAA Mid-Atlantic, down a penny overnight and down a penny in the last week.
Christie, in a statement, highlighted the sales-tax-cut portion of the proposal, saying he was “pleased that the Assembly has heeded my suggestion for tax fairness, which I have been calling for for a long time.”
Clinton should not underestimate the anti-establishment mood that makes Trump attractive to voters
After Britain voted to leave the EU, Hillary Clinton issued a statement declaring that America’s “first task has to be to make sure that the economic uncertainty created by these events does not hurt working families here in America”.
While she leads Mr Trump in the polls and has an advantage due to support from demographic groups such as Hispanics and women, the comments underscored that she cannot underestimate the populist mood that has overturned conventional wisdom at every twist and turn of the 2016 White House race.
“As a Democrat you don’t have to be paranoid to be concerned about the similarities between the Brexit vote and our own election,” says Jim Manley, a former Senate aide. “Trump is playing to the same kind of anger that the Leave folks did. [It] doesn’t mean he is going to win — he won’t — but what happened took an awful lot of people by surprise.”
https://next.ft.com/content/6d8fac80-3c7f-11e6-8716-a4a71e8140b0
Democratic Audubon Park mayor Larry Pennock and city councilman John Carpinelli changed parties this week, with Camden County Republican chairman Tom Booth welcoming the two to the GOP. The move marks two rare defections from the deep-blue county’s powerful Democratic organization, which rose to dominate South Jersey politics under insurance executive George Norcross III’s leadership. JT Aregood, PolitickerNJ Read more
Chronic imposter California has long tried to front itself as relevant to the political process as it routinely occupies New Jersey’s primary day air space, which this year falls on June 7th, tomorrow. PolitickerNJ Editor, PolitickerNJ Read more
photo by Dan Glazer
Dear Nattering nabob of negativity,
This is a reminder that primary elections for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees will be held tomorrow in New Jersey. Our polls are open from 6 AM through 8 PM. If you have any questions about the election please contact our Municipal Village Clerk at 201-670-5500, ext 201 or email Heather Mailander at [email protected]
As an additional reminder, there will be another election held on Tuesday, June 21st. This is a Ridgewood election that represents a binding referendum to approve the municipal financing of a parking deck at Hudson Street. If you are considering voting by mail-in ballot for this election, application forms are available at the Municipal Village Clerk’s Office and must be received by the County no later than June 14, 2016. Alternatively you can go directly to the County’s website to obtain a mail-in ballot form:
https://www.bergencountyclerk.
Best,
Roberta Sonenfeld
Village Manager
201-670-5500, ext. 203
BY KEN THOMAS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nearing the end of the primary season, a defiant Bernie Sanders predicted Saturday that the Democratic presidential process would lead to a contested summer convention against Hillary Clinton, pushing back against the likelihood that the former secretary of state will soon declare victory.
Speaking to reporters three days before the California primary, Sanders showed few signs of surrender, vowing to take his bid to the Philadelphia convention in July. He urged news organizations not to anoint Clinton as the presumptive nominee through a combination of pledged delegates and superdelegates.
“It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night,” Sanders said. “Now I have heard reports that Secretary Clinton has said it’s all going to be over on Tuesday night. I have reports that the media, after the New Jersey results come in, are going to declare that it is all over. That simply is not accurate.”
By nightfall, Sanders was rallying supporters outside the entrance of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where he pointed to his differences with Clinton on super PACs, the federal minimum wage and the Iraq War.
EVAN HALPER
The violent protests that erupted outside Donald Trump’s rally in San Jose on Thursday night, which included punches thrown, eggs pelted and Trump supporters’ hats stolen off their heads and set ablaze, are likely to have political fallout for Democrats.
The scene was an unwelcome one for the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Campaign Chairman John Podesta quickly moved to condemn this brand of civil disobedience, admonishing the violence in a tweet in which he included video of a Trump supporter being beaten.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trailguide-trump-violence-1464967115-htmlstory.html
by JOHN FUND June 3, 2016 4:00 AM @JOHNFUND Plan B for November
My NRO colleague Andrew C. McCarthy called my suggestion “increasingly plausible,” and pointed out that Democrats had made just such a switch in 2002 when their one-vote Senate majority was in jeopardy. An ethically challenged senator, Bob Torricelli of New Jersey, was trailing his GOP opponent by double-digit margins following release of a devastating Justice Department report on his involvement in bribery and campaign-finance scandals. Democrats made Torricelli “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” forcing him to leave the Senate race only 36 days before the election and replacing him with former senator Frank Lautenberg. “The lateness of the switcheroo denied Republicans a meaningful opportunity to campaign against Lautenberg, in violation of state election laws,” writes McCarthy. “But New Jersey’s solidly Democratic judiciary predictably looked the other way.” Lautenberg went on to win in November (although Democrats still lost their Senate majority, and didn’t regain it until 2006).
Read more at: https://www.nationalreview.com/article/436160/hillary-clinton-robert-torricelli-precedent-dumping-her
by Cathleen Decker
Hillary Clinton’s popularity has slumped in California under an unrelenting challenge from Bernie Sanders, who has succeeded in breaching the demographic wall Clinton had counted on to protect her in the state’s presidential primary, a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll has found.
As he has done across the country this primary season, Sanders commands the support of younger voters by huge margins in advance of Tuesday’s primary — even among Latinos and Asians, voter groups that Clinton easily won when she ran eight years ago. Many of his backers come from a large pool of voters who have registered for the first time in the weeks before the election.
By A.B. Stoddard – 05/25/16 05:45 PM EDT
Things could be worse for Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy, perhaps an indictment pending in her email scandal, but these are still awful days in her campaign. While there are many threats to her prospects she cannot control, like an FBI investigation, she could surely butter up Bernie Sanders and stop bleeding support from his impassioned supporters. But instead, Clinton is making things worse.
Even though many Democrats are growing increasingly aggravated by Sanders overstaying his welcome in the primary contest, Clinton should leave it to others to throw salt in the wound. Declining a final debate with the Vermont senator and declaring herself the presumptive nominee on CNN last week has only made Sanders more defiant and could further injure Clinton’s own wounded campaign against a surging Donald Trump, who stands to win over some disgruntled Sanders voters on the issue of trade.
As Clinton urges Sanders to wrap it up and “do his part” to unite the party the way she did with thenBarack Obama in 2008, he is requesting a recount in Kentucky over a single delegate, planning floor votes over rule changes at what he predicts will be a “messy” convention in July and insists he is “invigorating” the party.
Sure he is losing staff and his money’s drying up, but it’s full speed ahead to try and win California on June 7 and undermine the former first lady despite knowing her delegate lead is “insurmountable,” as she has reminded him. Unity isn’t top of mind for Sanders these days. As he railed against the presumptive nominee for insulting voters from the nation’s largest state by refusing to debate, Sanders sniffed, he was “disappointed, although not surprised.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/ab-stoddard/281283-stoddard-clouds-loom-for-clinton
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and ERIC LICHTBLAUMAY 25, 2016
WASHINGTON — The State Department’s inspector general has sharply criticized Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying she had not sought permission to use it and would not have received it if she had.
In a report delivered to members of Congress on Wednesday, the inspector general said that Mrs. Clinton “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business” with officials responsible for handling records and security but that inspectors “found no evidence” that she had requested or received approval from anyone at the department to conduct her state business on a personal email.
The report also said that department officials “did not — and would not — approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business.”
It also added new detail about Mrs. Clinton’s motivation for using the private server, which she has said was set up for convenience. In November 2010, her deputy chief of staff for operations prodded her about “putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam.” Mrs. Clinton, however, replied that she would consider a separate address or device “but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.”
The report, as well as an F.B.I. investigation and other legal challenges seeking information about her use of the server, is certain to keep alive a controversy that has shadowed Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for the presidency. The events have all come to a climax just as she is close to defeating Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/state-department-hillary-clinton-emails.html?_r=0
As a whole, women support Clinton over Trump and Sanders, but 49% of women from across the political spectrum give her an unfavorable rating
Anoa Changa is a feminist who isn’t going to vote for Hillary Clinton. Last July, when the 34-year-old Atlanta-based attorney began volunteering with the grassroots organization Women for Bernie Sanders, she received immediate pushback from other women. Over social media, they accused her and other Sanders volunteers of betraying their gender, and of being fake feminists. Even former professors and friends questioned how she could support the Vermont senator over the secretary of state.
“Some women I encounter act as if I’ve betrayed some kind of secret society,” says Changa. “I reject this brand of feminism. I’m not only voting for my gender, I’m voting for other issues.”
For the first time in its history, America is close to electing a female president, yet many women from across the political spectrum don’t like Clinton.
By YAMICHE ALCINDORMAY 21, 2016
Doubling down on his feud with the Democratic Party leadership, SenatorBernie Sanders said that if elected president, he will not reappointDemocratic National Committee chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida.
He made the comments during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper that is set to air on Sunday. Mr. Sanders also said he was supporting Tim Canova, a law professor who has begun an insurgent campaign against Ms. Wasserman Schultz for her South Florida congressional seat. They will face off in a primary this summer.
“Well, clearly, I favor her opponent,” Mr. Sanders told Mr. Tapper. “His views are much closer to mine.”
For months, Mr. Sanders has accused the party of favoring Hillary Clinton, often calling her the “anointed candidate.”
He has criticized the party for a debate schedule that his campaign said favored Mrs. Clinton; an arrangement under which Mrs. Clinton raises money for the party; and the appointment of Clinton supporters as leaders of important convention committees.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/us/politics/sanderss-feud-with-the-democratic-leadership-heats-up.html?_r=0
