5 questions for the Kelley, Rodgers, and Schmidt campaign for Caldwell Council

The Caldwell Democrats are plastering social media with their press releases, touting their various endorsements from county and congressional candidates running on the same ticket. So it’s rah-rah when they endorse Montclair Mikie and she endorses them in return, and please don’t mention Bob Menendez.

Not to ruin their little love-fest, but I for one need more substance than that. So I posed five questions to the 3 folks running in Caldwell — John Kelley for mayor, and Frank Rodgers and Christine Schmidt for council.

If a few of these questions look familiar, well, they are. They’re essentially the same questions I posed to Jonathan Lace and Henderson Cole last year. They’re the questions those two fellows refused to answer. But hey, I’m an eternal optimist, so let’s see if the second time’s a charm, right?

1. How will you meaningfully reduce the crushing property tax burden here in Caldwell?

2. Do you support Governor Murphy’s new tax and spend initiatives, including increasing the sales tax, the corporate income tax, and the individual income tax?

3. Do you support Governor Murphy’s initiative to make New Jersey a so-called “sanctuary state,” and if elected will you introduce an ordinance to make Caldwell a “sanctuary city?”

4. Given your pledge to run a positive campaign, what is your position on the recent statements by Congresswoman Maxine Waters encouraging Democrats to harass and intimidate Republicans? Do you agree with Senator Cory Booker that this is a reasonable course of action? What, if anything, will you say if a Caldwell merchant banishes someone for his political beliefs, like the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia?

5. Do you approve of the CWCBOE spending (at last count) in excess of $20 million dollars to implement full day kindergarten?

The ball’s in your court lady and gentlemen. I await your responses, which I will, of course, publish here in their entirety.

NJ Democrats, another day, another tax, this time on plastic grocery bags

These guys never run out of things to tax.

In the battle against litter in the Garden State, plastic bags have been public enemy number one.

Several municipalities, mostly along the Shore, have acted on their own to limit plastic bag use either through fees or bans. But for years, efforts for statewide regulation of the bags has failed to gain traction.

Now, state lawmakers have decided that it is time to move forward.

A new fee on plastic and paper shopping bags is being pushed through the state legislature: The bill cleared budget committees in both the Assembly and Senate on Tuesday and could be passed as early as this Thursday. Legislative leaders expect the proposal to generate $23.4 million, and according to the bill that money will go toward getting lead out of schools and homes.

Why ban ’em if you can tax ’em! It’s for the children!

Lead paint hasn’t been used in going on 60 years now. But gosh-darn-it we need a new funding stream to “eradicate” it once and for all. Or maybe somebody’s brother-in-law needs a new side gig and … spins the wheel … lead paint, that’s the ticket!

The econuts are actually opposed to this tax, not because they’re sane, but because they want an outright ban statewide. And the grocery stores aren’t too keen on socking their customers with a new fee either. Oh, and here’s the best part, the tax won’t apply to anyone on welfare or food stamps. How’s that gonna work? Do they get little “my bags are free” cards? Who thinks of this shit?

Hey Tom Moran, thanks for deleting my comments at NJ.com

I’m gonna come clean. My NJ.com “handle” is Overtaxed15. You can see I’m an active commenter at their site (I’d provide a link, but their new comment system doesn’t allow that). Except, I’m way more active than they give me credit for, because the vast majority of my comments end up in /dev/null.

It’s not that I’m rude. Or crude. Or obnoxious (well, *sometimes*…) Nope. It’s just that I don’t toe the ultra-progressive line. And I call hypocrisy when I see it. That’s a cardinal sin at Tom Moran’s Star-Ledger, and my comments can’t stand.

Take Tommie The Commie’s latest editorial. (Please!) In it he laments Bob Menendez’s ethical lapses, but says Bob Hugin (the GOP challenger) is far worse. As if. Bob Hugin took bribes, or consorted with underage prostitutes. But Menendez is a Democrat, and so Moran and the Star-Ledger must defend him, no matter what.

Which is what I said when I wrote:

Shorter Tom Moran: Menendez is a scumbag, but he’s my team’s scumbag.

The inevitable Star-Ledger endorsement editorial kinda flows from there.

Go ahead, tell me what’s “offensive” about that comment.

Nonetheless, it got hit with the dreaded “Content Disabled” tag.

Thanks Tommie.

I’d blame you directly but I hardly believe you police your own comment threads. That job probably falls to a 20-something Womyn’s Studies major with a subscription to The Journolist. It’s a miracle anything I say survives at all!

So Tommie, if you’ve read this far, read on.

I first encountered the Star-Ledger when you guys bought the Newark Evening News. I was a carrier for the News, running out to deliver the paper after school. I guess my dad bought the Ledger every day, but the only paper I remember being in our house was the Daily News (and look at what happened to them). Oh, right, I had to pick up the Racing Form too. Anyway, I switched to delivering the Herald News, because it was the last of the afternoon papers and I’m not really a morning person. Eventually he Herald News got subsumed into the Bergen Record, and well, I got a Real Job. But my newspaper bona fides are there. I remember Friday nights watching my dad and my uncles bowling and having to run to the corner to get the one-star Daily News at 11:30 so they could check the number. I even wrote up little league sports for the Verona Cedar Grove Times. So yeah, like you Tommie, newspapers are in my blood.

Naturally I subscribed to home delivery of the Star-Ledger. Being a former paper boy I tipped real good too. (Honest, you could look it up, if your accounting department keeps track of that sort of thing.) But then Tommie you launched a vendetta against my friend Archbishop Myers. Oh you could’ve disagreed with him conceptually, but no, you had to make it personal. When you invoked the spirit of your dead mother to slander him, that’s when I cancelled my subscription. Dude, c’mon, that was beyond the pale.

But you’re the only game in town and so I lurked around NJ.com. And I created “Overtaxed15,” so I could respond to your left-wing machinations. Under the old comment system my words of wisdom just disappeared, because it’s your sandbox and you don’t like it when people call out your mendacity. But I gotta say, when I coined the name “Tyler Jo Clementi McAllister” that was a stroke of genius, even if almost no one saw it thanks to your censorship.

But with your site’s transition to Viafora it’s now blatantly obvious just how much you censor the comment boards. My stuff regularly gets dinged as “Content Disabled.” But scrolling thru I see far too many reasonable, yet anti-progressive comments grayed out, because they’re disabled too. You guys are determined to maintain an echo chamber, except the pool of sycophants keeps shrinking.

How do I know you’re circling the drain? The ads. Sorry Tommie but I have to access NJ.com with an ad blocker enabled now. I was willing to throw you some click-crumbs, but geez, every damn day I got shanghaied with another Microsoft support scam. Or a You Have Already Won An iPhone scam. Or a Walmart / Amazon gift card scam. Dude, run some reputable ads. You’re worse than the Puffington Host, or Townhall.com.

So if you’ve read this far, here’s some friendly advice. Lighten up. You and Salant need to calm down. Trump is not the anti-Christ. There’s room in New Jersey for people who have diverse views. I know you value “diversity,” you say it all the time. Unfortunately you can’t believe there are actually decent, reasonable, respectable people out there who disagree with you. There’s a word for that — hubris — and you’d do well to ruminate on the implications of your monolithic worldview.

Or not. Keep on keeping on Mr. Moran, and sooner rather than later your newspaper will go tits up. I won’t shed a tear. And frankly I’m glad I don’t contribute one thin dime to your salary, you don’t deserve my money. But when you’re gone the people of New Jersey will wonder what might have been, if only the journalists entrusted with keeping them informed had not chosen to take a side and delight in alienating half of their audience.

 

500 Days of Winning, here are 2 lists of President Trump’s accomplishments

You won’t find the media telling you any good news about President Trump (or America), so the White House put out their own list of the Trump administration’s major accomplishments. Since CNN is currently camped outside a strip club in Biloxi, Mississippi waiting for Stormy Daniels to weigh in on Trump’s impending impeachment, and Pravda On The Hudson is digging through Robert Mueller’s trash in the hopes of finding a smoking memo, I’ll help you guys out and summarize the list.

First up, massive tax cuts! What’s not to like about that? (Nancy Pelosi, please don’t answer.)

Then we see zillions of federal regulations are being slashed! The Trump Doctrine: They’re from the government and they’re here to leave you alone.

President Trump is well on the way to rebuilding our military, including new aircraft carriers and increased missile defense.

President Trump is taking care of our veterans, installing Real Accountability at the heretofore dysfunctional VA. Is it perfect yet? Nope. But there’s a path, and a plan, and for the first time in a very long time, hope.

On his signature issue — enforcing immigration laws — President Trump is delivering the goods. The DoJ is cracking down on sanctuary cities, prototypes of The Wall are going up on our southern border, deportations are up and illegal entries are down. And MS13 is feeling the heat with law enforcement cracking down on them daily.

The federal judiciary is rapidly reshaping into a bastion of constitutional conservativism, not just at SCOTUS with Neil Gorsuch but at the Appellate and District levels too. I gotta let Mitch McConnell share some of the credit for this, he took Harry Reid’s nuking of Senate precedent and ran with it. Judicial confirmations in Trump’s first year exceeded that of any other president ever.

Is the economy booming, or what? Unemployment is at an all-time low. Consumer confidence is at a 17 year high, and workers are taking home more money in their paychecks.

And last, but not least, the EPA put out their own list of achievements, highlighting their role in making America great again. We’re out of the ridiculous Paris Climate Accords. The inaptly named Obama-era “Clean Power Plan” is gone, and the puddles in your driveway are no longer regulated as “Waters of the United States.” Fracking is booming and the US is now a net exporter of oil and natural gas. Left-wing zealots are no longer setting environmental policy and there are no more “sue and settle” slush funds greasing their sleazy palms. The Keystone XL pipeline is humming, unattainable auto mpg standards are rolled back, and scientists set policy instead of “activists.”

All in all it’s been an excellent start for President Trump. And no, I’m still not tired of winning.

WyBlog endorses Jay Webber for the GOP nod in NJ-11

You didn’t really think I’d give up on passing out the coveted WyBlog endorsements, did you?

And contrary to the Essex County Establishment RINOs I whole-heartedly endorse Jay Webber to replace Rodney Frelinghuysen as our congressman. Look, Tony Ghee might be a Really Nice Guy. But he’s been a Republican for what, 15 minutes? He voted for Obama fer Chrissakes, twice! Does that engender confidence in his conservative bona fides?

No. It does not. Plus the Star-Ledger tried to write a negative assessment of Jay and it came off sounding almost like something his campaign team would put out.

The polished veteran lawmaker has done some solid work in the Assembly, notably the recent “pass the trash” bill that prevents teachers accused of sexual misconduct from getting other teaching jobs. But he is a Trump enthusiast by any measure, supporting the GOP tax cut and the Obamacare repeal, and he refers to Trump opposition as “outlier extremism.” His own record is an outlier anywhere outside of Alabama: Webber has voted against virtually every gun control measure, voted to defund Planned Parenthood, and his contribution to the health care debate was a bill that allows the purchase of cheap policies out-of-state, which would have destroyed our market. He also rejected equal pay for women as an “anti-employer bill.” Chris Christie once called him the “future” of the GOP in our state. The future has arrived, and it’s a fright.

Aside from the gratuitous swipe at Alabama (Roll Tide!) I don’t see anything there that would make me NOT like Jay Webber:

On Team Trump? Check!

Supports tax cuts? Check!

Repeal Obamacare? Check!

Knows who the opposition really is (“outlier extremists”)? Check!

Pro Second Amendment? Check!

Pro Life? Check!

Free market health care? Check!

Not hoodwinked by the “equal pay” chimera? Check!

A man for the future! The Star-Ledger said so! Except they’re afraid of the future because it doesn’t include very many Democrats and their stuck-on-stupid policies. Everything they deride about Jay stands as mainstream thought in most of the country outside of the coastal enclaves inhabited by our media elites. Get out more fellas, and discover life beyond the Acela Express. You’ll find people who believe in limited government, individual liberty, free markets, constitutional rights, religious freedom, and secure borders. People like Jay Webber. And me.

Jay Webber for Congress. It’s the right choice for our district. It’s the right choice for America.

Break out the popcorn, Phil Murphy and NJ Democrats are already planning for a government shutdown on June 30th

Phil Murphy’s budget proposals are too left-wing for Steve Sweeney? Apparently so! They held a budget meeting today, and by golly it didn’t end well.

The meeting was hostile, according to three sources with knowledge of the event who would only speak on the condition of anonymity. It ended with an exchange of expletives.

Oh to be a fly on that wall!

“Shortly thereafter” Murphy’s chief counsel sent out a memo ordering state departments to make contingency plans for a government shutdown starting June 30th. Ayup, we’re a month away from the budget deadline and he’s so far afield from his fellow Democrats he’s already preparing for the worst.

Normally NJ budget negotiations are the stuff of inside baseball, arcane, and conducted in literal smoke-filled back rooms. But not this year. This year Murphy’s minions have launched an ad blitz touting his ultra-progressive policies and urging his loyal followers to pressure Senate President Steve Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin into bending to his will. The new sheriff in town wants things his way, and compromise isn’t a word in his vocabulary.

On the one hand, it’s gonna be fun to watch this play out.

On the other hand, no matter who wins the taxpayers lose. They’re not arguing about how to cut spending or shrink the budget. They’re arguing about how much they can raise taxes and what pet projects they’ll waste the money on. Murphy wants to fund a laundry list of progressive causes — “free” community college, benefits for illegal aliens, offshore windmills, mass transit, and affordable housing. Sweeney would rather throw even more money at urban schools and toss a few crumbs to senior citizens by reviving the homestead rebate program.

Either way we’ll get hosed by higher sales and income taxes, along with the usual collection of new fees and surcharges.

But hey, this is what you voted for Jersey. And if you can’t go to the beach over the Fourth of July weekend because the government is shut down, don’t come crying to me.