I visited 11 states in 13 days and lived to tell the tale

In Chancellor Phil Murphy’s dystopian dictatorship otherwise known as the People’s Republic of New Jersey his official policy is that Covid-19 is lurking behind every bush and inside every small business just waiting to send you to a slow and ghastly death.

Out in the Real World it’s different. A whole lot different.

On Thursday August 6th Sophie and I set out on a 2500 mile cross country drive, destination Tempe, AZ, more specifically Arizona State University. We needed to arrive by the 12th so she could move into her dorm on the morning of the 13th. We took a northeast to southwest route, I-80 through Pennsylvania into Ohio, I-70 through Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, an interminable, boring stretch of US-54 through Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, before hooking up with I-40 in New Mexico to Arizona, and then taking I-11 south for the home stretch into Tempe.

Along the way we stopped, frequently, to eat, shop, sight see, and of course use the rest rooms. Everything was open. No lines. No capacity restrictions. We ate in restaurants! Inside! We stayed in hotels, where they had coffee and breakfast available every morning, just for the taking!  We met a lot of nice people and ate some great food. We sat at bars and talked to the folks around us. We walked around outside without masks, even in parks! I got to stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona and it was such a fine sight to see. And you know what, the Covid-19 bogeyman didn’t catch us. Imagine that.

Afterward I flew on Southwest from Phoenix to Las Vegas. I gotta say, they make flying fun. Yes everyone had to wear a mask, but they weren’t jerks about it, gently cajoling the passengers to go with the flow. It was an easy, one hour flight. McCarran airport was mostly open, and people were playing the slot machines, eating, and drinking. I got my bags and checked into the Aria hotel for some much needed R&R.

MGM requires masks everywhere, even at the pool, unless you’re actually in the water, walking to/from the water, or actively eating or drinking. They have roving Mask Patrols, gently asking people in chairs to mask up. And as I soon learned, “actively drinking” means “holding a water bottle.” Yup. You could sit maskless for hours, so long as that bottle doesn’t leave your hand. Most of the security dudes carried a supply of water bottles which they slyly passed out with a good natured laugh. The rules are stupid. And everyone knows it.

Nevada has a nitwit Democrat governor, Steve Sisolak, who’s almost as much of pompous jerk as Phil Murphy. So even though restaurants and casinos are open, bars are closed. Which is dumb because that meant none of the drink windows along the strip were available and I couldn’t sit for hours at a bar playing video poker like I usually do. But that didn’t stop people from being out and about! In fact I’d say the crowds on Saturday night were almost at pre-pandemic levels and everyone was having a good time.

I flew home through Houston on Tuesday the 18th. United requires masks too, and they’re a lot more authoritarian about it. Also you could tell that every single person who works for them hates their job. But I landed in Newark safely, took an Uber home, and since almost every state I visited is on our esteemed dictator’s quarantine list, I (mostly) stayed in my house for the past 2 weeks.

Guess what? I’m still not sick. Neither is Sophie, who’s enjoying college life and making friends.

Open the damn state Murphy. The rest of the country is rolling along just fine.

Attack of the Eco-Stasi Cardboard Police

Caldwell’s new Politburo isn’t wasting any time imposing their nanny state ideology on us Kulaks. This past Sunday night, like every other Sunday night in the 22 years I’ve lived in this town, I put my garbage cans out by the curb before hitting the hay. And when I arrived home from work on Monday night I fully expected to see 3 empty garbage cans ready to be brought back up the driveway.

Not this time. Only one can was empty, the other 2 stood there, full of trash, ignored by the garbage men.

OK, maybe they were in a hurry, and forgot to grab the other 2, I said. So I left them there, and refilled the 3rd can on Wednesday night for Thursday’s pickup.

As it turns out I happened to be upstairs near a window when the garbage truck came around the bend. And I watched as the garbage man walked over to my 3 cans, rummaged through each one, opening the trash bags and peering inside them one by one, before leaving all 3 of them sitting, un-emptied, by the curb.

“What fresh Hell is this?”, I exclaimed.

My wife was on her way out to run an errand. She said she’d catch up to them and ask what the problem was.

And they told her. In no uncertain terms. “There’s cardboard in your garbage. We aren’t allowed to take cardboard.”

The garbage men are now the Cardboard Police. They search the trash for errant shoe boxes. Yes, we had disposed of empty shoe boxes, which is apparently now a crime in Mayor John Kelley’s Peoples Republic of Caldwell. Put shoe boxes in the trash? Your garbage won’t get picked up.

I’m living in a Kurt Schlichter novel.

My wife told them she’d fish out the shoe boxes. The guys said they’d swing on back and take the rest of our, for the moment, approved garbage.

And to think for this I pay $16,000 a year in property taxes.

Does anybody here need some empty shoe boxes? I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to do with them now. Maybe I’ll burn them in the fireplace, a sacrifice to Mother Gaia, to appease the Eco Stasi. Cardboard, it’s Public Enemy Number One in the new Woke Caldwell Borough.

Sigh.

Dick Codey and Loretta Weinberg line up to abolish the First Amendment in New Jersey

NJ Democrats’ hysteria over 3D printed “ghost guns” has reached Full Fascism. Two of our most powerful state senators are contemplating banning the blueprints and software which could be used to create one. Which kinda goes against that whole “freedom of speech” thing, but hey, Guns Are Scary! And Gurbir Grewal and his myriad of lawsuits might not succeed, because Trump!

But Senate Democrats aren’t willing to chance the outcome, and tell NJ Advance Media they plan to introduce at least two pieces of legislation that would seek to ban guns made from such downloadable files in New Jersey.

“We have to use whatever ability we have prevent this from getting into the wrong hands,” said Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen.

Meanwhile, state Sen. Richard Codey, D-Essex, will re-introduce a bill calling for their outright ban for the general population.

“We need to ban them,” said Codey on Tuesday.

New Jersey already makes it impossible for average citizens to legally own a gun, so I’m not sure what their motives are here. Except there’s this:

But Codey said it’s not yet clear if the legislation would ban the final “printed” product or even the downloaded plans.

The question turns on at what point a 3D gun file becomes an actual firearm: When it’s blueprint file is loaded into the printer, or only after it’s finished printing.

“I don’t know,” said Codey. “We’d want to reach a consensus on that issue.”

Now I’ve met Dick Codey. And to say that our former Acting Governor In Waiting For Life is a pompous blowhard would be an understatement of megalomaniacal proportions. But he’s not stupid and he ought to be familiar with the First Amendment to the US Constitution. It’s pretty clear, you can’t restrict freedom of speech. You can’t stop people from having information. Unless you’re looking to follow in the footsteps of Josef Stalin.

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.”

The Democrats really do want to create The Peoples Republic of New Jersey, where the government decides what we’re allowed to know.

And sadly our state’s newspapers are on board with this blatant act of censorship and prior restraint. The Star-Ledger’s daily bloviating on the evils of 3D printed guns is already over the top. But to endorse outright censorship of information? From the same people who cheered Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers? Do they know where that sort of tyranny leads?

They don’t want to know. I mentioned it in a comment on one of their pearl-clutching editorials, something along the lines of “I for one await the day when the Trump Administration uses this newfound power to suppress information to order you not to print a story.” Tom Moran and his fellow travelers deleted that one within 5 minutes of it being posted.

The truth hurts.

Or in this case The Ends Justify The Means. Which is why the Founding Fathers wisely instituted the First and Second Amendments in the first place. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Victor Davis Hanson is right, a second American civil war is coming. May God have mercy on our souls.

NJ AG who ignores federal immigration laws says Jersey City can’t ignore state marijuana laws

Recently Jersey City decided to “decriminalize” marijuana, meaning you’ll no longer be arrested for possessing or selling small amounts of pot in their town. Um, OK, go for it fellas. Become the Stoner Capital of New Jersey if that’s what you want.

Or, not. Because NJ Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, taking a break from his daily barrage of lawsuits against President Trump, told Jersey City they can’t do that.

Jersey City spent one day riding high on its new policy decriminalizing marijuana before state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal told the city’s new chief prosecutor on Friday that the policy is void because it violates state criminal laws.

“As a municipal prosecutor, you do not have the legal authority to decriminalize marijuana or otherwise refuse to criminally prosecute all marijuana-related offenses in the municipal courts of Jersey City,” Grewal told Jake Hudnut, the new prosecutor, in a July 20 letter. “The criminal laws of this state are enacted by the senate and general assembly, not determined by municipal prosecutors based on ‘(r)ecent public opinion polling.'”

Now as a law and order guy I absolutely think this is the right call.

But you gotta admire the chutzpah here. After all, Grewal at the behest of Governor Phil Murphy, routinely and flagrantly ignores federal immigration laws. As do most of the cities and counties in our fair state. In fact he’s suing Trump right now for cracking down on NJ’s “sanctuary cities.”

I guess that’s different, because reasons.

Here’s an idea. Jake Hudnut gets one of his Jersey City lawyers to mock-up Grewal’s lawsuit against Trump, change “immigration laws” to “marijuana laws” and serve it on Phil Murphy.

Or, Jeff Sessions takes Grewal’s memo to Jersey City and makes it read something like this:

As a state attorney general, you and your county prosecutors do not have the legal authority to ignore immigration detainers or otherwise refuse to cooperate in the criminal prosecution of immigration-related offenses in the federal courts. The immigration laws of this nation are enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives, not determined by local bureaucrats based on recent public opinion polling.

Either way, hilarity will ensue.

Phil Murphy says, no, I’m not done raising taxes yet

Here’s Phil Murphy’s guiding philosophy of government — Somewhere in NJ there is a guy with an extra dollar in his pocket, and that dollar belongs to me.

The ink isn’t even dry on his state budget “compromise, ” you know, the one that raised taxes on pretty much everything under the sun, and Phil’s already got his eye on raising the sales tax.

The argument about whether to raise New Jersey’s sales tax nearly shut down state government earlier this month.

The effort, pushed by Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, was blocked in the Legislature by members of his own party. A shutdown was averted, in part, after Murphy conceded to drop his push to revert the tax to 7 percent from its current 6.625 percent.

But the governor still wants the bump in the sales tax.

“We did not undo that in the budget (and) that’s one that I still think we should undo,” Murphy said in an “Ask the Governor” event Monday night.

Are you surprised?

Because I’m not surprised. Not in the least.

The only reason he didn’t hike it during the annual kabuki government shutdown dance is because it’s tied to a poison pill that kills last year’s gas tax increase if the sales tax goes back up. The legislature didn’t have enough time to untangle them what with all the other moving parts that make up the state budget. But now, now they’re ready to play Hose The Taxpayers Again.

The angle is superbly devious too — the sales tax hike is needed for, wait for it, Road Construction. As in the very thing that the gas tax is supposed to be paying for. Emphasis on “supposed to be.” I suspect the recent Janus ruling from SCOTUS has forced Murphy to detour the gas tax money into a new “Save The Unions From Political Oblivion” fund, because the NJEA doesn’t take kindly to having their Trenton clout diminished even just a little.

One wag in the comments to the above article put it like this — I’m waiting for Murphy to figure out how to tax the air. Dude, don’t give him any ideas.

NJ’s new state budget “compromise:” Taxes, with a side of taxes, on top of more taxes

And of course wealth redistribution. Because when you rob Peter to pay Paul you can always count on the support of Paul. So, “free” community college! More money for the teachers union! Bump up the Earned Income Tax Credit so more people get paid not to work!

It’s a joke.

Tax Airbnb. Tax Uber and Lyft. Tax vaping. Tax corporations, because they don’t vote. Tax “multi-millionaires,” because fairness.

The millionaires tax became a “multi-millionaires tax,” as Murphy said. It will now kick in for money earned after the first $5 million.

The vast majority of New Jerseyans won’t pay this increased tax. Only 1,760 taxpayers will pay more.

It is my fervent hope that those 1760 targeted folks emulate David Tepper and hit the Turnpike south asap. Get out while you still can. You know Murphy will be back next year to sock it to you again.

Corporations will pay a 2.5 percent surtax this year and next and then 1.5 percent in years three and four before phasing out entirely.

Any chance Newark had of landing Amazon’s new HQ just went down in flames. Unless, and you know this is coming to the table, Murphy gives them a sweetheart deal. Some corporations are more deserving dontcha know.

But hey, there’s “good news” too. The state won’t shut down so parks and beaches will remain open while we celebrate a national holiday dedicated to a rebellion against excessive taxation. Do you think the Democrats see the irony in that?

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.

 

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.