The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Trenton NJ, After reports of N.J. kids stranded in schools, on buses late into the night and Troopers responding to at least 555 vehicle crashes as of late Thursday along with impassable roads across New Jersey NJGOP Chairman Doug Steinhardt offered the following comment:
Her reliance on Hollywood endorsements reflected a deeper problem in the Democratic Party: superficial progressivism packaged as real social justice.
BY SARAH JONES
November 10, 2016
Hillary Clinton will not be our first woman president, a symbolic blow made more painful by the fact that she lost to a raging misogynist and sexual predator. Donald Trump is now set to preside over a unified Republican government deeply antagonistic to abortion rights, marriage equality, and healthcare access. This will almost certainly be disastrous for women, but according to exit polls, 53 percent of white women voted for him anyway.
https://newrepublic.com/article/138624/hillary-clintons-celebrity-feminism-failure
BY KATHLEEN LYNN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
New Jersey workers paid an average of $4,900 for family health coverage last year, up from about $3,000 in 2006, a new report from the Commonwealth Fund said on Tuesday.
That increase came even though the growth of health premiums slowed in the years after the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — was enacted in 2010.
https://www.northjersey.com/news/business/health-coverage-costs-rising-1.1682825
September 23,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, readers seems to fall into two major groups when it comes to terrorism ; either they are just losers with no friends or the more malevolent view that they are true believers in the fundamentalist cause .
“Dude failed in life, tried to find a purpose in religious extremism, and failed at that too. In a weird way, I pity him (that must be the latent Christian in me). Having said that, it would have been better for him to have died during his arrest. He’s obviously too stupid to have been trusted with any valuable information, and that’s assuming he’s ever been in contact with someone who would have such information. Highly doubtful. Right now he is spending a lot of time with people who know how to get answers, but they’ve probably already discovered they’re dealing with a bottom rank idiot.”
or….
“He was not radicalized. He was merely activated. Active or passive, they are all on the same page. Islam is a religion of peace only in regions or countries of the world where they have achieved utter political dominance. Every other place on earth is a war zone. Motivation? To terrorize and kill infidels, and die a martyr for Allah. Why must we feign ignorance when these thugs are so clearly telling us why they do what they do?”
The bike lane to nowhere was was an idiotic attempt by Roberta to show she could do something, ,anything , constructive and it turned into a nightmare, It was a complete waste of money and it failed to achieve the goals of increased safety and increased vehicle thru-put that were touted by Village Management as a major goal. The fact is this project turned into a giant waste of taxpayer money with no identifiable benefit to the Village, All who were involved in planning ,executing, managing and promoting this stupid project should be let go immediately. We need smart people to solve our problrms not idiots who have no idea what they are doing.
Will the speaker’s resignation lead to a better, more effective House of Representatives?
Nick Gillespie|Sep. 25, 2015 1:37 pm
So John Boehner is stepping down as Speaker of the House. To paraphrase various Monty Python bits: And there was much rejoicing.
Pretty much from across the spectrum, I’d say. To conservatives, Boehner was a squish on all the things they care about (the Ohioan had the temerity to want to avoid a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding). Earlier today, Donald Trump greeted Boehner’s resignation by saying, “I think it’s wonderful, frankly.” That sentiment is widely shared by many, perhaps most Republicans pols.
To liberals, Boehner was always ready to help defend war, surveillance, No Child Left Behind, the unpaid-for Medicare expansion under Bush, you name it.
And for libertarians, he was terrible in virtually every possible way. He was a go-along, get-along kind of guy always willing to do the bidding of state at the expense of the individual. And despite professions on his part of having a small-government vision, he could never quite get around to naming a program he was, you know, actually willing to cut or even trim in any sort of way that might impact things.
As it happens, in my latest Daily Beast column, which went live just a few hours before Boehner announced his resignation, I wrote this about his lack of vision and clarity when it came to minimizing the size, scope, and spending of government:
https://reason.com/blog/2015/09/25/boehner-is-the-type-of-guy-who-couldnt-g
by Elan Journo | September 11, 2014
Thirteen years have passed since jihadists rammed jetliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Doubtless the images of the Twin Towers collapsing are indelible, and the toll in human life was achingly massive. In time, though, memory fades. By themselves, our impressions of the past are insufficient to guide our thinking and action. We need consciously to identify lessons from our experience.
What should we learn? Here are three crucial lessons, still unlearned.
Lesson #1: America’s selfless foreign policy encouraged Islamist aggression.
Writing days after the attacks, Leonard Peikoff explained that: “Fifty years of increasing American appeasement in the Mideast have led to fifty years of increasing contempt in the Muslim world for the U.S. The climax was September 11, 2001.” My talk, “The Road to 9/11,” looks at several episodes of pre-9/11 Islamist aggression and the self-effacing responses of the Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton Administrations. Standing apart from conventional thinking, ARI advocates for a foreign policy guided by the moral ideal of rational egoism, a policy that resolutely protects the lives and freedom of Americans.
What does that look like? Peter Schwartz’s monograph, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America lays out what an egoist approach looks like in theory and practice (purchase Kindle ebook or paperback). My book, Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism, analyses the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and applies Ayn Rand’s ethics to foreign policy, defining a path to victory against the enemy. (Read the introduction.)
Lesson #2. The enemy is not just Bin Laden, or Al Qaeda, but the Islamist movement.
“Know your enemy” is a necessary condition for figuring out how to defeat the threat. Tragically, neither before nor after 9/11 did American policymakers understand the enemy. It is hopelessly superficial to think of the enemy as “terrorists” (many groups use that tactic) or “haters” or “hijackers of a great religion,” or Al Qaeda, etc. Bin Laden has been dead three-plus years, and Al Qaeda has been damaged — but clearly the threat persists.
https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/foreign-policy/middle-east/After-911-Lessons-Unlearned#filter-bar
Six Reasons Why Vermont’s Single-Payer Health Plan Was Doomed From The Start
Avik Roy , Forbes Staff
Last week, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin (D.) announced that he was pulling the plug on his four-year quest to impose single-payer, government-run health care on the residents of his state. “In my judgment,” said Shumlin at a press conference, “the potential economic disruption and risks would be too great to small businesses, working families, and the state’s economy.” The key reasons for Shumlin’s reversal are important to understand. They explain why the dream of single-payer health care in the U.S. is dead for the foreseeable future—but also why Obamacare will be difficult to repeal.
Leading left-wing economists worked on Vermont plan
Shumlin’s predecessor in Montpelier was a Republican, Jim Douglas. In 2009, Douglas announced that he would not be seeking a fifth two-year term; five Democrats joined the contest to replace him. Progressive activists demanded that each candidate promise to enact single-payer health care if nominated; all five complied. Shumlin got the nod, and assumed office in January 2011.
Shumlin got right to work. In Feburary 2011, a trio of health economists, including Harvard’s William Hsiao and MIT’s Jonathan Gruber, sent Vermont a 203-page report describing the feasibility, and the alleged virtues, of single-payer in the state. Gruber signed a $400,000 contract to work with Vermont on the project.
Hsiao has spent a good chunk of his career helping governments install single-payer systems; for example, he helped the Taiwanese government install “Medicare for all” in 1995. He’s also responsible for Medicare’s Byzantine price-control scheme known as the Resource-Based Relative Value System, or RBRVS.
Gruber you know; at a hearing to discuss the Vermont report, the Obamacare architect was confronted by a letter from a former state senator, who argued that “any Hsiao-Gruber type health care mega-system will inevitably lead to coercive mandates, ballooning costs, increased taxes, bureaucratic outrages, shabby facilities, disgruntled providers, long waiting lines, lower quality care, special interest nest-feathering, and destructive wage and price controls.” In response, Gruber wisecracked: “Was this written by my adolescent children by any chance?”
file photo
War against Isis: US strategy in tatters as militants march on
America’s plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group’s fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad.
The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.
Isis reinforcements have been rushing towards Kobani in the past few days to ensure that they win a decisive victory over the Syrian Kurdish town’s remaining defenders. The group is willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories it has won in the four months since its forces captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on 10 June. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/war-against-isis-us-strategy-in-tatters-as-militants-march-on-9789230.html
Political crisis deepens in Iraq
BAGHDAD — In a surprise speech late Sunday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki resisted calls for his resignation and accused the country’s new president of violating the country’s constitution, a speech that plunged the government into a political crisis while it battles advances by Islamic State militants. (Yacoub, Salama/Associated Press)
https://www.northjersey.com/
Ouch! Hillary Clinton Blames Rise of Islamic Militants on Obama Policies
Posted by Jim Hoft on Sunday, August 10, 2014, 7:30 PM
In September 2011 in an interview with VOA Hillary Clinton said,
“Al-Qaeda was on the path of defeat.”
Posted by Jim Hoft on Sunday, August 10, 2014, 7:30 PM
In September 2011 in an interview with VOA Hillary Clinton said,
“Al-Qaeda was on the path of defeat.”
This was before the Benghazi massacre one year later.
But now she’s singing a different tune…
In an interview published Sunday, Hillary Clinton blamed the rise of Islamic militants in Iraq-Syria including ISIS on Barack Obama’s foreign policy.
AFP reported:
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton blamed the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria on failures of US policy under President Barack Obama, in an interview published Sunday.
Clinton specifically faulted the US decision to stay on the sidelines of the insurgency against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad as opening the way for the most extreme rebel faction, the Islamic State.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad —- there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle -— the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton told the Atlantic.
Barack Obama has already checked out of his job
The degree to which Barack Obama is now phoning it in – sleepwalking perfunctorily through his second term, amid golf rounds and dinner parties – is astonishing
By Matt K Lewis
12:04PM BST 26 Jul 2014
President Obama has emotionally checked out of his job a couple of years early, it seems. How can one tell?
Candidates for president who brazenly assume they are the inevitable victor are sometimes accused of “measuring the drapes” for the White House.
Obama, conversely, seems to be prematurely packing his bags in hopes for an early departure.
Just last week, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported that “The First Family is believed to be in escrow on a contemporary home in a gated community where entertainers Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby once maintained estates”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/10992654/Barack-Obama-has-already-checked-out-of-his-job.html
The Supreme Court Vs. Eric Holder
John Fund / Hans von Spakovsky / @HvonSpakovsky / July 13, 2014
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative.
If Eric Holder were a baseball player, he’d have been benched long ago — if not kicked off the team. His batting average before the Supreme Court is abysmal, losing again and again in his efforts to undermine the Constitution.
This term featured four big strike downs.
First was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the Supremes tossed out ObamaCare’s contraceptive abortion mandate and upheld the First Amendment rights of several family-owned businesses to make their living in conformance with their religious beliefs.
Although the government was not party to another case, Harris v. Quinn, the Justice Department filed an amicus brief on the side of Illinois and the SEIU, arguing that unwilling home health-care workers could be forced into unions (and made to pay compulsory dues) simply because their services are paid for through Medicaid.
Fortunately, the Court ruled against Illinois’s heavy-handed attempt to help bolster its political allies, public sector unions.
On June 26, in National Labor Relations Board v. Canning, all nine Justices ruled that President Obama’s “recess” appointments to the NLRB violated the Constitution.
Not only did Obama’s own judicial appointees vote against him (including his former solicitor general), but the majority opinion was written by Stephen Breyer, a liberal stalwart of the Court.
The Administration also lost United State v. Wurie, in which the Holder Justice Department claimed that the police and federal authorities did not need a search warrant to seize all of the information stored in the cellphone of someone who had been arrested.
Once again, the administration lost all nine justices.
The basic invasion of privacy and violation of Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful searches and seizures represented by the administration’s position is in line with its frightening view of governmental power over its citizens.
Canning and Wurie are only the latest losses of the administration in which all nine Supreme Court justices ruled against the government.
In fact, there have been 20 such cases during this administration — and even more if you include cases in which the administration filed an amicus brief, such as in McCullen v. Coakley, the free-speech case that was handed down the same day as the recess appointments case.
The Obama administration filed an amicus brief in that case supporting the Massachusetts law in question and helped argue the case before the Supreme Court.
But all nine justices found the Massachusetts law, which created a 35-foot “buffer” zone around abortion clinics, violated the First Amendment by restricting speech in public areas “that have historically been open to the public for speech activities.”
It is no surprise that the administration supported a law that restricted the voice of pro-life supporters.
That is in accord with its general attack on the political speech and activities of disfavored conservative advocacy organizations through the IRS and other government agencies. The positions taken by this administration in the other 9-to-0 cases are just as overbroad.
In 2012’s Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, DOJ displayed an open hostility to religious freedom by claiming that the federal government had the right, as the Supreme Court termed it, to “interfere” in a church’s employment decisions on the hiring and firing of its ministers and religious teachers.
The Supreme Court was clearly astounded at the arguments being made by the Justice Department and unanimously rejected it.
In Sackett v. EPA, the administration tried to prevent a family from defending itself in court and contesting a punitive order from EPA bureaucrats imposing a fine of $75,000 a day for trying to develop a lot in a residential neighborhood which the EPA considered a wetland. The administration lost.
In US v. Jones, just like in the Riley/Wurie cases, the administration claimed that law enforcement could attach a GPS device to your car without a warrant or even any suspicion of criminal activity.
The Court unanimously rejected this position and, in a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the administration was trying to invade “privacy interests long afforded, and undoubtedly entitled to, Fourth Amendment protection.”
Typically, the Justice Department does very well before the Supreme Court. Holder has made that a losing record.
That’s because, as legal scholar Ilya Shapiro says, the administration has “relied on outlandish legal theories that pushed a constitutional interpretation of extreme federal power.”
Holder and Obama have argued that we as Americans don’t have the right to free speech, the right to privacy, the right to due process or the freedom of religion.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court has become the last defense for those who still believe in those rights.
Originally posted on the New York Post.
Christie jabs Obama: ObamaCare a ‘failure’
In what could be the latest move toward a 2016 presidential bid, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) offered a wide-ranging critique of President Obama’s domestic and foreign policies.
Speaking to reporters at the National Governors Association on Saturday, Christie labeled Obamacare, the administration’s signature legislation, a “failure on a whole number of levels” and said it should be repealed.
“But has to be repeal and replace with what. It can’t just be about repeal,” Christie told the audience. “What I’ve said before is, what Republicans need to be doing is putting forth alternatives for what should be a better healthcare system.”
He also urged his GOP colleagues to keep bringing up their opposition to same-sex marriage, even though a series of court decisions have overturned many statewide gay marriage bans.
“I don’t think there’s some referee who stands up and says, ‘OK, now it’s time for you to change your opinion,’” according to Christie.
Christie also said the latest outbreak of violence between Israelis and Palestinians was partly the White House’s fault because the administration “does stand up for our friends.”
The president should be “speaking firmly and forcefully on behalf of Israel,” he said.
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Read more: https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/212071-christie-jabs-obama-obamacare-a-failure#ixzz37LhJWPeD
Obama is driving the country to ruin
By Michael Goodwin
June 7, 2014 | 10:22pm
If you think of the United States of America as a store, its recent decisions and scandals resemble a sale, perhaps a fire sale. Or maybe even a “Going Out of Business” sale.
The list of dramatic markdowns is breathtaking. They include trading away five murderous terrorists for a likely Army deserter, an open invitation to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to cross the Mexican border, and a decision to recognize the terrorist group Hamas as part of the Palestinian government.
On the home front, environmental regulations will cost thousands of coal miners their jobs and drive up the cost of electricity for millions. The ObamaCare mess is hardly resolved, and the Veterans Affairs scandal keeps getting worse. The acting agency head reported the deaths of 18 more vets who were kept off the official waiting list in Phoenix.
Ticking quietly in the background is the mother of all threats — an Iranian nuclear bomb. That ticking grew louder last week as the ayatollah mocked our nation by standing in front of a banner that proclaimed, “America cannot do a damn thing.”
https://nypost.com/2014/06/07/obama-is-driving-the-country-to-ruin/