Race and the birth-certificate non-issue

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The president did something he should never have had to do: Release his birth certificate. As this amazing commentary points out, this is about his citizenship as determined by race. The right is apoplectic over this issue because it believes that someone who looks like Barack Obama should not be allowed to be president. He is not a full citizen, the birthers believe, for no other reason than his race.

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Thoughts on Poly Styrene

I don't exactly remember my first reaction when I hear Poly Styrene scream out, "O! Bondage, Up Yours" as the intro to the X-Ray Spex single of the same name, but I'm sure it wasn't contentment.

The song growls out of Styrene's introductory yawp, an electric charge that shocks the musical soul back to life.

The initial response, however, seems unimportant now, the song's aggressive mauling of rock 'n' roll conventions altered my music-listening DNA longterm, implanting within me a punk gene that has remained alive.

Styrne died Monday at age 53 of cancer, on the eve of the release of a new solo album, her first since 2004.

Pop Matters' Mixed Media blog called her an "always...incisive cultural chronicler and commentator" whose "music was always smart and fun in equal doses, making listeners think about gender politics, while shaking their booty and enjoying her marvelous wit."

Discussions of the punk era always begin with the British movement (don't get me started on how this underplays the role of the artier New York and American punk sound) and tend to founder in a debate over whether the Clash or the Sex Pistols provided the most lasting model for future musical transgressors. But the English sound owed as much to other bands -- Elvis Costello was a punk rocker, remember, hte Gang of Four helped pioneer what might be described as punk-disco or punk-funk -- and other impulses.

Enter Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex. The 1977 single, "O! Bondage, Up Yours!", and the 1978 album Germ-Free Adolescents were precursors to 1990s bands like L7 and Breeder and a feminist prototype within the largely male punk culture.

Poly may be dead, but her influence will live on.

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A coming constitutional crisis?

The governor floated the idea yesterday of ignoring the state Supreme Court if it rules against him. The question, which has no answer at the moment, is what comes next? Would the court step in as it did in the 1970s and close the schools until the crisis is resolved? Would a Democratic Legislature move to impeach the governor? Could it? What might that do politically in a year when the entire Legislature is up for election?

In the end, a constitutional crisis is bad for every single resident of the state.

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The choice seems clear

Admittedly, there is no good solution to the litigation now in front of the state Supreme Court. The Christie administration's gutting of the state school funding law has and will continue to do damage to schools -- not just in the state's cities, but in suburban districts, as well. Reinstating the money, however, will blow a hole in the state budget -- a problem that will have an impact on numerous other programs.

But there is a way out of this, I think, and it starts with a reinstatement of the so-called millionaires' tax, which had provided $1 billion in revenue while it was in place and would go a long way to plugging the $1.6 billion education-funding shortfall.

It is a point that the court -- in the person of Associate Justice Barry Albin -- alluded to in its questioning (from NJ Spotlight):

In one twist, he asked about the so-called millionaire’s tax at the center of political dispute for two years, not calling it that but making it clear in describing the surcharge that Christie let expire, costing the state $1 billion in revenues.

The state said it had no money to provide districts, he said, but this was not the first time it had been in a fiscal hole.

The response from Peter Verniero, the former associate justice representing the Christie administration, was silence, as Robert Braun points out:

Verniero would not answer Albin. He simply would not talk about the millionaire’s tax — in or out of court. He just ran away from the issue.

"I know you are still in a fiscal crisis," Albin said, "but when the promise was made [to fully fund the formula in 2009], there was a $1 billion funding source and now we’re $1 billion less."

Verniero wouldn't comment, but Gov. Chris Christie has made it clear that he believes the surcharge on income is bad for the state. The governor believes it drives high-earners from the state and suppresses job growth, but his critics -- rightly, I think -- ask how the governor can ask nearly everyone else in the state to sacrifice, especially those at the lowest end of the income spectrum, while handing a gift to the handful of people affected bu the surcharge.

Consider this blog post from New Jersey Policy Perspective, the liberal think tank that has reviewed the budget, which sets the governor's slashing of the state earned income tax credit (a 25 percent cut) alongside a $41 million tax break handed to Campbell Soup.

This cutback in tax credits for working families comes even as the Christie administration and the Legislature are expanding tax credits for corporations in New Jersey.

For example, last month the state awarded Campbell Soup a $41 million tax credit to renovate its corporate headquarters, move 49 jobs from Cherry Hill to Camden and hire 50 new employees at the Camden site over the next 10 years. The credit includes $6.3 million for new furniture. Campbell qualifies for the subsidy, officially called the Urban Transit Hub Tax Credit, which is aimed at redeveloping urban centers, because its offices are within a mile of the Walter Rand Transportation Center.

The total cost to the state to fund that tax credit to Campbell Soup is nearly as much as the $45 million in savings gained by reducing the state EITC.

Raymond J. Castro, who wrote the post, asks a question that the court should ask -- and may be asking, if Albin's questioning of Verniero can be applied to the entire court:

So who needs this help the most, one of the largest corporation in America or working New Jerseyans who can barely make ends meet to support their children?

The governor, who talks a lot about making the state more affordable for the middle class, has made it obvious what he believes the answer is.

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Conservative consensus on education includes supposedly liberal president

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was in Princeton today touting education reform that, to put it bluntly, will do little to fix public education.

Duncan, along with President Barack Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, wants to tie teacher tenure to performance ratings -- a questionable practice that is likely to elevate unreliable tests to even greater prominence and leave teachers at the whims of administrators. Tenure needs reform, but tying it and teacher pay to flawed evaluative systems will create more problems than it solves.

And yet, Duncan, who ran the Chicago school system, supports "pending legislation in Illinois that makes teacher tenure requirements more stringent and allows school districts to lay off teachers based on performance."

“This bill could be a blueprint for the country,” said Duncan.

It is a blueprint for change, certainly, but it's not change we should be willing to accept.

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It is about being gay

Rutgers student Tyler Clementi committed suicide after being outed by his roommate. State laws have been passed recently to help prevent bullying. Credit Rick Macri, (Posted to Ridgewood Patch)

The Tyler Clementi suicide was devastating -- an example of how gay teens continue to be subjected to brutality, invasions of privacy and an array of intrusions that would not be tolerated were they done to any other group.

So the announcement of an indictment of the Plainsboro teen accused of videotaping Clementi with another male teen and then streaming it on another computer has led to praise from gay-rights groups and the Clementi family.

Steven Goldstein, head of Garden State Equality, the largest gay rights organization in the state, wrote in a statement that the indictment sends a clear message to bullies across the state and Ravi's actions were anything but a college prank gone awry.

"Today’s indictment, when combined with the recently enacted anti-bullying law which Garden State Equality steered to enactment – widely considered the strongest anti-bullying law in the country – will have an appropriate chilling effect on bullies everywhere," he wrote.

"We continue to mourn the loss of Tyler Clementi deeply. Today is a day of justice," he added.

Dharun Ravi, 19, was indicted on two counts of invasion of privacy, two counts of attempted invasion of privacy, two counts of seond-degree bias crimes, two counts of third-degree bias crimes. three counts of tampering with evidence, three counts of hindering his own apprehension and one count of witness tampering.

According to The Star-Ledger,

Grand jurors found Ravi attempted to mislead investigators and witnesses in various way, Kaplan said. He said the grand jury determined Ravi deleted a post on Twitter that alerted others to view Clementi and another man during their second encounter in a university dorm room on Sept. 21, 2010.   Ravi also tried to convince witnesses not to testify against him and provided investigators with misleading information, Kaplan said.

Authorities say Ravi used a computer in another room to activate a hidden webcam in his dorm room in Davidson Hall, on the Busch campus in Piscataway, on Sept. 19, 2010, and streamed images of his roommate with another man. Ravi allegedly tried to spy on the roommate again two days later using the hidden webcam.

Listening to the yahoos on 101.5, however, makes it clear that there remains a huge number of people

in this state who view homosexuality as a choice and that gays should be treated to fewer protections than the rest of us.

Callers making the claim that this only became a big deal because it involved a gay student were right, but for the wrong reasons. This became a big deal -- and was a bias crime -- because the alleged videotaping was done as part of an antigay prank, a tactic designed to intimidate Clementi.

Critics are right when they say Ravi did not make Clementi commit suicide, but that's beside the point. Ravi is not charged with manslaughter; he is charged with the series of activities that led up to the suicide, which would have warranted indictment even had Clementi not taken his life.

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There is the story and there is reality

Americans, the story goes, are tea-partiers. They want government slashed, taxes cut, have no faith in anything that government does. There is little evidence of this, of course, as Rachel Maddow pointed out last night -- recent tea party events have been sparsely attended while the protests in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan in favor of union rights, and others backing other more progressive policies have been much larger.

Efforts like this, from the Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, while far from scientific, offer evidence of our support for things like health care and education.

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Change for a dollar, maybe, but not a change in our use of force

The last few decades offer a depressing fact: We are addicted to military force. Presidents of both political parties have shown they're unwillingness to take the military option off the table. Hell, they won't even relegate the use of force to a last-resort option.

Even Barack Obama, who won the peace vote based on one speech made in opposition to the Iraq War back in 2002, has proven to be just as addicted to the military option as his predecessors.

The Iraq War has been declared over, but we're still there. Afghanistan has been amped up and now we are fighting with the French and British in Libya in an ill-defined mission -- we talk about protecting civilians but are most likely engaged in an effort to remove the despicable and murderous Qaddafi regime from power.

Protection of civilians, of course, is a ruse -- if it were our primary objective, we would have gone into the Ivory Coast to back a legally elected president and end a civil war that has seen atrocities committed on both sides.

So why Libya? The only reason I can come up with is that Qaddafi's hold on the western imagination was on a par with Saddam Hussein's -- unstable, violent and brutal with a long history of thumbing his nose at the west.

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Quote of the Day: Obama's failure

The quote of the day comes from columnist Bill Boyarsky, talking about President Barack Obama's prevent-defense approach to governing:

It’s hard to rally behind a man who appears willing to give up his principles in order to keep his job.

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More than a humanitarian action

I am hoping that, at some point, cooler heads will prevail and someone will ask the right question about Libya: How deep is the international community willing to dig itself into the civil war?

I should state up front that I believe the Qaddafi regime needs to be chased from power, but doing so with Western military power is likely to fail longterm, exacerbating mistrust of the west in the Muslim world.

The no-fly zone needs to be considered within this context. No matter what we say, it is a declaration of war on the part of the West. We have taken sides militarily, which means we are in this thing for the long haul.

Contrast this with our conscious decision not to take sides in Egypt or in Yemen until recently, a decision based solely on their autocratic leaders being our allies. Qaddafi, of course, is not and has not been -- and only in the last few years has he even been considered a part of the international community.

I'll be honest: I'm not sure what can be done to protect the rebels, but the no-fly zone has been a terrible idea and what is likely to follow as this thing drags on is likely to be worse.

We have to stop fooling ourselves. This is not a humanitarian action.

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What's wrong with college basketball (Hint: It's not the players)

I used to watch college basketball. But it's been years since I've cared -- this year was something like the fifth or sixth in a row in which I went out of my way not to watch the final game.

The reasons: Well, players moving on after a year makes the NCAA hard to stay on top of. But I can't fault kids who come from nothing when the promise of a whole lot of cash is put in front of them.

The real reason is that the coaches play the role of college basketball superstar, making obscene money and signing shoe endorsements and reaping the kudos.

And, as Joe Nocera pointed out yesterday, they also get off far more easily than players who violate rules -- proving that the players are the disposable commodities in the NCAA.

Consider this year's final four: Two of the coaches have been sanctioned -- the winning coach, Jim Calhoun, was sanctioned for violations this year while Kentucky coach John Calipari has had controversy follow him throughout his team-hopping career. The players, however, get dumped on and often see their career prospects end.

The NCAA says it is about amateur student athletes; that's BS. It is, like the professional leagues, greed-driven. But at least the players in the NBA get paid for their services.

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Two parties separated by pennies

There is politics and then there is policy. The Democrats may as yet win politically in the current debate over the budget and a potential shutdown, but the American people already have lost.

The debate has occurred within parameters set by the Republicans, meaning that we are witnessing a massive slashing of spending at a time when the government needs to help prime the economic pump. The two sides already have agreed to $38 billion in spending cuts, according to The New York Times, and are separated by the smallest of margins:

Despite the disagreement over what still divided the two parties, it was clear that the dollar difference had shrunk to only about $1 billion or $2 billion, and that lawmakers would have a difficult time explaining to voters how most of the federal government could come to be closed over such a relatively small sum.

Think about this for a second. For all the talk about the vast divide separating the two parties, the budget debate has come down to essentially a few pennies. All that really separates Democrats and Republicans, despite the rhetoric in Washington and on the chat shows, is the proverbial drop in a bucket.

The debate, of course, should have been about priorities -- about what programs are important to Americans, what kinds of things the government can and should be doing to make the livers of Americans better.

But neither party really takes those concerns to heart. Rather, the two ultimately are beholden to the same corporate master.

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Question for Hall of Fame voters

With Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro trapped in Hall limbo with Pete Rose, we are now facing the prospect that the greatest hitters of the last two decades are likely not to make the Hall.

Consider the man who announced his retirement today, Manny Ramirez. There is no doubt that Ramirez is one of the greatest hitters to ever step in a batter's box -- he hit for average, power and was a flat-out RBI machine for the bulk of his career.

The same can be said for Gary Sheffield and, of course, Barry Bonds, who faces all kinds of legal woes.

Here is a list of the Top 20 homerun hitters in baseball history:

1.	Barry Bonds	762	L	HR Log
2.	Hank Aaron+	755	R	HR Log
3.	Babe Ruth+	714	L	HR Log
4.	Willie Mays+	660	R	HR Log
5.	Ken Griffey	630	L	HR Log
6.	Alex Rodriguez (35)	615	R	HR Log
7.	Sammy Sosa	609	R	HR Log
8.	Jim Thome (40)	589	L	HR Log
9.	Frank Robinson+	586	R	HR Log
10.	Mark McGwire	583	R	HR Log
11.	Harmon Killebrew+	573	R	HR Log
12.	Rafael Palmeiro	569	L	HR Log
13.	Reggie Jackson+	563	L	HR Log
14.	Manny Ramirez (39)	555	R	HR Log
15.	Mike Schmidt+	548	R	HR Log
16.	Mickey Mantle+	536	B	HR Log
17.	Jimmie Foxx+	534	R	HR Log
18.	Willie McCovey+	521	L	HR Log
	Frank Thomas	521	R	HR Log
	Ted Williams+	521	L	HR Log

Seven of them have a steroid asterisk next to their name (or would have were it to exist). Add Sheffield to the list of plus-500 homer guys with an asterisk and then consider this: Only three power hitters of the last 20 years -- Ken Griffey Jr., Jim Thome and Frank Thomas -- are without asterisks and there are writers who question Thome and Thomas' credentials. (This doesn't take into account the pitchers, by the way.)

I am not advocating for voting all of these guys into the Hall, but we have to address this in some way. The reality is that the game was badly tainted by the accusations and its best players, for the most part, were all involved.

So, here is my question: Can we continue to ignore these hitters without ignoring an entire era?

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MLB's opening week will be forgotten in September

Take a look at the standings today in the American League East:

EAST	W	L	PCT	GB	HOME	ROAD	RS	RA	DIFF	STRK	L10
Baltimore	5	1	.833	-	2-1	3-0	29	16	+13	Won 1	5-1
NY Yankees	4	2	.667	1	4-2	0-0	35	30	+5	Won 1	4-2
Toronto	4	2	.667	1	4-2	0-0	35	19	+16	Lost 1	4-2
Tampa Bay	0	6	.000	5	0-5	0-1	8	27	-19	Lost 6	0-6
Boston	0	6	.000	5	0-0	0-6	16	38	-22	Lost 6	0-6

Now, take a look at how the same division finished a year ago:

*-Tampa Bay	96	66	.593	-	49-32	47-34	802	649	+153	Won 2	5-5
y-NY Yankees	95	67	.586	1	52-29	43-38	859	693	+166	Lost 2	3-7
Boston	89	73	.549	7	46-35	43-38	818	744	+74	Won 2	5-5
Toronto	85	77	.525	11	45-33	40-44	755	728	+27	Won 1	8-2
Baltimore	66	96	.407	30	37-44	29-52	613	785	-172	Lost 1	5-5

What should stand out is that the two teams at the bottom of the heap so far this year are the teams and the top and the bottom of the heap. Boston and Tampa were picked by most baseball folks to battle for the division lead, while the Orioles, the perennial basement dwellers, were picked to finish last once again. After a week, however, the roles are reversed.

The Orioles are the surprise team so far. And yet, it really does not matter. The chances that the Orioles will maintain this level of play all season and contend in what many believe to be the toughest division in baseball are slim. And the chances that two teams that have deep rosters and have been among their division leaders for the last three or four years (longer for the Sox) are even slimmer.

I still expect this to be a three-team race between Tampa Bay, Boston and the Yankees, with the Blue Jays hanging along the periphery and the Orioles' hot start forgotten by the All-Star break.

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Name-calling is not an argument

You don't have to like your political opponents. You don't have to speak well of them. You might even call them names, if you like.

But you should not pretend that doing so advances your argument. Someone should tell the governor that.

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More on the class war

It was Warren Buffet who said that America is involved in a class war, "but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The numbers are staggering, as Robert Scheer points out today on Truthdig:

In one of the best studies of this growing gap in income, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during Clinton’s tenure in the White House the income of the top 1 percent increased by 10.1 percent per year, while that of the other 99 percent of Americans increased by only 2.4 percent a year. Thanks to President Clinton’s deregulation and the save-the-rich policies of George W. Bush, the situation deteriorated further from 2002 to 2006, a period in which the top 1 percent increased its income 11 percent annually while the rest of Americans had a truly paltry gain of 1 percent per year. 

The upshot is that the top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the wealth. But few are talking about it.

Instead, we have a debate over how best to cut programs for the middle class and the poor so that we can plug a hole in our budget and not whether to ask the rich to pay. From Scheer, again:

Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.

President Barack Obama is blaming political games for the budget stalemate, refusing to accept responsibility for his enabling of the so-called budget hawks. He should have been fighting hard for a real stimulus that could have jump-started the economy and not just a stop-gap designed to avert disaster. And rather than touting his accomplishments at a time when unemployment remains unacceptably high, he should have been pushing hard for aid to states to keep public workers employed while also empowering labor.


The Republicans make no bones about their priorities. They want to slash spending and gut what's left of the social safety net. And they want to do this even as they find ways to give money to the people who already have it.

And they are likely to win, thanks to the timidity of the Democrats.

Despite the alarming projections of how the House Republican budget would harm the country, it’s the Democrats who have been on the defensive during the budget debate, principally because President Obama has declined to seriously engage in the discussions or outline an alternative narrative on the economy that is distinct from the GOP. Though they hold only one house of Congress, House Republicans act like they’re in control of the entire government, with little pushback from the White House or Senate Democrats. Both parties now endorse the idea that spending cuts are the best cure for our ailing economy, even though there is no evidence that is the case.

Obama has said that he was perceived as too much of a “tax and spend liberal Democrat” in the last election, so his administration has moved to the right as a result—despite the fact that poll after poll shows that the public believes the unemployment rate is a far more pressing problem than the deficit. “The White House, in particular, has effectively surrendered in the war of ideas,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote recently. “It no longer even tries to make the case against sharp spending cuts in the face of high unemployment.” Throughout this budget fight, we’ve been having the wrong economic debate, as my colleague Katrina vanden Heuvel noted this week. Both our political and media class are guilty of focusing obsessively on spending cuts while ignoring the public’s overriding priority: jobs.

But then, the Democrats long ago ceased to represent workers and the middle class. They are beholden to the same money men as the Republicans. The class war is over and the rich have won.

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Obama and best of the worst

Barack Obama announced yesterday that he will seek re-election in 2012 and, like Ted Rall, I can' for the life of me think of why I should care.

We are now nearly 27 months into his presidency and the great liberal hope has proven to be Clinton redux -- a corporate stooge in thrall to the military-industrial complex.

Evidence:

• A health-care law that forces people to give the health insurance companies money -- a law, in fact, modeled on the flawed one put in place by former Gov. Mitt Romney (and perennial Republican presidential candidate) in Massachussetts.
• A weak financial reform bill that has done little to prevent Wall Street speculators to get back to their old games.
• An expanded war in Afghanistan that has been expanding into Pakistan, continued war in Iraq, military intervention (short of war) in Libya without Congressional approval.
• Continuation of Bush-era policies on detention, Guantanamo, interrogation.
• A half-measure stimulus and a cave-in to Republicans on the deficit.
• Support for nuclear power and clean coal and a hands-off approach to Big Oil's requests to expand domestic and deepwater drilling -- even after the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
• An array of broken promises on labor rights issues, tax policy (extending the Bush tax cuts even as he agreed to tackle the deficit).

And yet, Obama is likely to garner support from a good portion of the left because of the downward pressure our first-past-the-post puts on our electoral system. By all rights, the left should walk away from Obama; it's the only thing we have left and the only way we will be able to gain any leverage in the policy arena.

But we won't. The memory of eight years of Bush remains too strong, so the lesser-of-two-evil argument is going to come back, going to play a major role in the discussion on the left flank of the political discussion. Consider the alternative, the argument will go, and it will be effective -- there is not a Republican in the race or on its periphery (i.e., Gov. Chris Christie) who warrants a shot at the Oval Office.

Progressives may not like the alternatives, may indeed opt for Obama over Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, et al. But progressives should also make it clear that any support given to Obama comes with a price tag -- moving progressive goals to the top of the agenda.

More importantly, we need to stop thinking of the electoral arena as the only outlet for political action. It cannot be about candidates and money, but about direct action and protest and the creation of a moral momentum that forces the larger political class to listen.

The history of our political movements makes it clear that it is our only hope. Direct action -- sit-down strikes, general strikes, marches, boycotts -- forced issues like civil and labor rights onto the table, pushing the politicians to act. Protests against Vietnam, including the flight to Canada by those evading the draft, forced politicians to find a way to end that nightmare.

We have hit the same point today.

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When job growth is not job growth

Dean Baker explains what the national business press is unwilling to explain: Why Friday's announcement that the U.S. economy created 216,000 jobs does not feel like the good news the media is making it out to be.

Those who know arithmetic were a bit more sceptical. If the economy sustained March's rate of job growth, it will be more than seven years before we get back to normal rates of unemployment.

Furthermore, some of this growth likely reflected a bounceback from weaker growth the prior two months. The average rate of job growth over the last three months has been just 160,000. At that pace, we won't get back to normal rates of unemployment until after 2022.

That's a long time to make ordinary workers suffer because the folks who run the economy are not very good at their job.

In addition to the job growth numbers, the March data also showed that the unemployment rate slipped down by another 0.1 percentage point. It now stands at 8.8%, almost a full percentage point below its year ago level of 9.7%. This, too, was treated as cause for celebration. While that may sound like progress, a more careful look at the data makes this number less impressive. The percentage of the population that is employed has actually fallen by 0.1 percentage point over the last year.

In order to be counted as unemployed, you have to say that you are looking for work. The unemployment rate did not fall because the unemployed had found jobs; rather, the unemployment rate fell because people have given up looking for work. Only in Washington would this be hailed as good news.

Consider this evidence that the major media and the political classes live in a very different world than the rest of us.

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Budgets and priorities: A GOP assault on the middle class (UPDATED)

And so you have it, a Republican budget plan that would roll back the clock to a time when society's most vulnerable had nowhere to turn.

The budget plan would change the existing Medicaid program -- which guarantees minimum health care for poor and disabled Americans -- into loosely supported block grants to states. it would kill Medicare and shift its responsibilities onto the private health insurance industry, a prescription for higher costs and abuse.

At the same time, it lowers upper-end tax rates -- money that will land in the hands of those who already have it. And it increases defense spending -- though it does so by recategorizing spending to make it look like a decrease.

Budgets are blueprints of priorities. The winners and losers in budget battles are not the political parties -- despite what the Washington chattering classes have to say -- but the American people. The rich, the military sector, the corporate classes -- they get a lot from the GOP budget proposal. The middle class and the poor -- our benefits are going to be slashed. We lose badly.

***
Here is a statement from U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12):

Budgets are moral documents. They reflect, in dollars and cents, our real priorities. Republican priorities are clear: abandoning the most vulnerable in our society by destroying Medicare and Medicaid in order to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans.  They would further shift the cost of government onto the middle class and force students, medical researchers, and small businesses to fight over the remaining scraps. These are not my priorities. My priorities are making smart investments that create jobs and strengthen American competitiveness and reducing the deficit by avoiding wasteful and unnecessary spending and costly tax expenditures.

If the new majority was looking for a formula that would bring back the ‘misery index’, they have succeeded.

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Can the threats and debate the budget

Before anyone gets too hot under the collar, isn't the threat of cuts being pushed by the Christie folks on a par with the same kinds of extortion pushed at other levels of government? Christie says the school money will have to come from somewhere -- which is logical. The question is where and the Christie administration has its ideas -- none of which are good or helpful for the state.

We need to discuss our options -- a millionaires' tax, further service cuts, a rewrite of the tax code, etc.

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New legislative map a result of flawed goals

Democrats are happy with the new legislative map approved by the state's redistricting commission, for no other reason than it is likely to preserve the party's control of both houses of the state Legislature.

The final map, courtesy of the New Jersey Department of State

The Democrats' attitude can be summed up pretty succinctly with this quotation from Mark Magyar's story on NJ Spotlight:

"I’m keeping 24!" said an elated Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester), whose party holds a 24-16 majority.

Alan Rosenthal, the Rutgers professor brought in as the 11th member after it was clear that the two parties had deadlocked, listed his goals for the process early on, so the outcome here should not surprise anyone.

But Rosenthal's goals -- like the entire process --  were badly flawed. Rosenthal privileged continuity of representation above nearly every other goal, which meant that any map he was likely to back would be one that would safeguard incumbents.

In a state as dysfunctional as New Jersey, however, one has to wonder why anyone would want to make it easy for the majority of legislators -- the people who have helped create the mess the state is in -- to keep their jobs.

The result is a map, as Magyar points out,

makes it likely not only that Democrats will continue to hold their majorities in both the state Senate and the state Assembly in next November’s election, but also that 90 percent of incumbent legislators will be reelected with relatively little difficulty.

The goals should have been:

• increased minority representation in the state Legislature
• districts that are compact geographically (there are too many districts under the new plan in which towns -- see South Brunswick in the 16th -- are connected to the rest of their district by only a sliver of common border)
• competition in as many districts as possible

These goals, however, would challenge the status quo and endanger too many sitting legislators.

Republicans, at the moment, are crying foul, but their map was only nominally better -- it was designed to increase the number of Republicans and would have committed some of the same sins committed by the new map.

The effort raises some additional questions about the composition of the state Legislature and whether the static 40-district model makes sense, whether we should experiment with other forms of representation and why we have allowed the public-financing initiative to die.

New Jerseyans might be better served by a constitutional change that ties the number of legislative seats to population rather than apportioning 40 districts across a shifting population. Or, there could be a hybrid arrangement that allows for some members to be selected through proportional representation.

There are numerous possibilities. What the latest round of redistricting proves, unfortunately, is that our system of drawing boundaries is badly flawed and needs to be changed.

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3 players who won't be Mets when the season ends

Jose Reyes was supposed to be, along with David Wright, the long-term face of the New York Mets. But with the franchise in disarray and a last-place finish likely, and with Reyes' due a new contract that the team may not be willing to sign, Jose tops the list of Mets whose days appear numbered.

Here's my list:

1. Jose Reyes
2. Francisco Rodriguez. Why keep a premiere closer when you're not going to use him like you should?
3. Carlos Beltran. If he proves he can hit, he can help a contending team.

Keep in mind that I'm not advocating any of these moves, but we have to acknowledge the realities.

This one shot is our only shot

Democrats are correct when they complain that the governor's transportation funding plan amounts to a one-shot solution. But at least it's a solution.

Democrats have shown little interest in finding a long-term funding arrangement for the transportation fund, which has been broke for several years and funded through a series of other one-shot gimmicks.The fact is, no one in state government has the political backbone to put the one thing on the table that would generate recurring revenue -- an increase in the state's gas tax, which is among the lowest in the nation.

Without it, we are destined to chase one-time funding solutions that will not be able to keep up with our needs and our roads will continue their deterioration.

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Can we hold a bake sale?

Chris Rock sums up the state of the Mets better than any sports writer could.

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• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
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