Buck O’Neil deserved to go into the Baseball Hall of Fame before he died. Now it will be up to baseball — meaning the full establishment — to make sure he is enshrined posthumously.
(Read this interview with him from Ken Burns’ famous special.)
Rest in peace, Mr. O’Neil.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
I was going to praise Tom Kean Jr. for taking a stand on Dennis Hastert and calling for some accountability — that is, until I read this morning’s Star-Ledger.
The paper is reporting that the candidate has accepted contributions “from employees of the same firms he wanted to remove from the process: those doing business with the state or its authorities.”
The review, covering all donations from when the bill was introduced Dec. 7, 2004, shows Kean accepted contributions from engineering firms, law firms, undewriters and other state contractors. Two of the firms are among the candidate’s top 10 contributors since his political career began in 1999.
The lion’s share of the campaign cash went to Kean’s U.S. Senate fund-raising committee, which is not regulated by state law. About $5,900 of the contractor cash went to a fund-raising committee Kean set up for the 2007 campaign for his state Senate seat.
Kean, of course, had introduced a bill in the state Senate two years ago that would have banned contributions to political campaigns by government contractors, an inconsistency his campaign seems to have no problem with.
I wonder, can he spell hypocrite?
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Tigers win! The Tigers win! The Tigers win!
(I guess you can I don’t exactly like the Bronx Bombers, eh?)
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
It’s unfortunate — but not unexpected — that the mayors of Monroe and Jamesburg would feel as they do on legislation that could force some towns to merge. But there are a lot of reasons to go ahead with this — or some variant. The reality is that, no matter how much local residents complain about taxes, they will not do anything substantive to fix the system without being pushed.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Steve Adubato, a veteran of the New Jersey political scene, pretty much sums up the ugliness of this year’s Senate campaign, laying a large share of the blame (not all) at Tom Kean Jr.’s feet.
Ironically, many people felt that it would be Bob Menendez, a product of Hudson County — the bastion of dirty Democratic politics — who would drive this campaign into the gutter. And while Menendez has taken his share of potshots (including unfair criticisms of Kean as a “trust fund” kid from a wealthy family), it has been the young state Senator with the “golden” Kean name (and the unassuming face) who has savaged Bob Menendez. Kean has not only implied, but has said that Menendez is corrupt, dishonest and greedy.
As I’ve written before, corruption is a legitimate issue in New Jersey. But the Kean camp’s tactics have been hypocritical to the extreme. He has elevated legitimate questions about Mendenez’s role in an apartment scandal to the same level as the Lynch probe, which resulted in a guilty plea for the former state senator, even though there is no evidence that Menendez violated any laws. And Kean has climbed into bed with convicted felons to find dirt, all the while remaining quiet about the culture of corruption in Republican Washington.
If Kean were to take on his own party’s nefarious activities, then his attacks on Menendez might hold more water. As it is, he just comes off as another cynical politician who will do anything to win.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 