Author: hankkalet

Still no budget, though the Star-Ledger is reporting that the governor has placed a new compromise on the table in the hopes of ending the impasse and getting the state back to work. According to the Ledger,

Aides to the governor said Corzine has offered a new plan that would provide 50 percent of the sales tax increase to property tax relief each year if voters approve it in a constitutional amendment. Using a constitutional amendment would mean lawmakers would be forced to use half the sales tax for property tax relief even if there is a big budget crunch. The new plan modifies a deal offered by Senate President Richard Codey (D-Essex).

It seems like a logical plan, one that might address all of the concerns out there. And it is similar to one proposed by the Ledger in an editorial called “A budget impasse answer“:

Instead of placing the $550 million in a fund that wouldn’t be tapped for year, why not add that to the property tax rebates this year? The current proposed budget allocates slightly more to property tax rebates than last year but considerably less than Corzine promised in his campaign.

If some of the sales tax increase went to property tax re bates — instead of the fund for future relief — Democrats could campaign next year on the strength of the enhanced re bates. And if the Legislature ever gets around to addressing property tax relief, the funds at hand would amount to about $1.6 billion. This should appeal to Roberts because last year he successfully fought to retain the re bates after Codey, then the governor, proposed eliminating them to help balance the budget. At the time, Roberts was concerned that if the rebate program went away, so too would the money. That would make finding a way to lower property taxes that much more difficult. That’s a justified concern.

The key, utimately, is ending what The Record calls the “Trenton’s train wreck” — one it blames — rightly, I’d say — on Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts.

Mr. Roberts has had 3½ months to offer a fiscally responsible alternative to Governor Corzine’s $30.9 billion budget plan, but as of late yesterday afternoon, most of the Assembly speaker’s proposals were still sketchy. Indeed, for all the talk about open government in Trenton, the most recent budget talks have been held behind closed doors, as Mr. Roberts and his Democratic allies in the Assembly try to find a way to avoid Mr. Corzine’s proposed penny sales tax increase.

While the governor solicited all sorts of public input on his budget plan, Mr. Roberts has played it far too close to the vest. Although Mr. Roberts and the Assembly have had months to respond to Mr. Corzine’s proposals, all that anybody has gotten is trial balloons that may or may not get off the ground.

The governor has made major concessions on the budget already, without compromising the basic goal of imposing fiscal responsibility on a state that has begged and borrowed over the years so it could avoid making tough decisions. The ball is in the Assembly’s court. Let’s see if Speaker Roberts and his allies are willing to keep it in play.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

“Why is this man an all-star?” asks Record columnist Adrian Wojnarowski — essentially taking the same tack I’ve been taking since Bud Selig in his infinite wisdom decided to attach home-field advantage in the World Series to what should be a fun, but meaningless exhibition showing of the games’ stars.

Do we need a reprise of the Pete Rose-Ray Fosse incident, when Rose barrelled over the unprepared catcher, a man poised for serious stardom but spent the next handful of years as a journeyman because of his injuries?

Do we need a serious injury to Albert Pujols or David Wright or Dontrelle Willis?

Should Jim Leyland have to worry that Ozzie Guillen will overuse one of his young pitchers, causing him problems later in the year?

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

I really like this poem by Tony Hoagland, published in teh Summer issue of the Three Penny Review. The language fairly explodes, taking the mundane act of filling the tank up and imbuing it with a metaphysical air.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

But the bickering continues as the governor stands firm:

“We can’t give the public false impressions that the answers are both easy and painless,” Corzine said. “Leadership is not about telling the public what they necessarily want to hear. Leadership is standing up and telling the public how things really are.”

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Dispatches: Waving the flag for the true patriots — a reprint of a June 2003 column:

“Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may.” — Mark Twain

I have a small flag hanging from a post in the flower bed in front of my house. It’s a Colonial-style flag — 13 stars in a circle and all that.

I put it up Saturday in honor of Flag Day and as a way of commemorating what I think is important about this country as we approach the 227th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

This small act may surprise some who read this column regularly. I am no nationalist, not someone predisposed to a knee-jerk “my country right or wrong” response to world events. I didn’t support the war with Iraq, do not support the direction President George W. Bush is taking our country and find the incessant flag waving and belligerent attitude of people like country singer Toby Keith distasteful.

Some would say I am un-American, but I see myself as a patriot in the truest sense of the word.

To those who ask why, I offer this comment from the novelist James Baldwin:

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

But my form of patriotism has been out of style in these jingoistic days when talk-show hosts – and some in the presidential administration – stamp any dissent as treason (the only crime specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, one punishable by death) and brand as traitors any public figure who disagrees with the president.

It is a “chill wind” that blows, as Tim Robbins said in April to the National Press Club in Washington shortly after the National Baseball Hall of Fame canceled the 15th anniversary of his great film, “Bull Durham,” because he and his common-law wife — and film co-star — Susan Sarandan were outspoken in their opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

It is this chill wind, this deformed version of patriotism that calls for boycotts of French products because the French government refused to support our war with Iraq. It is this chilly patriotism that leads radio stations to boycott the Dixie Chicks for comments critical of the president.

It is this patriotism that forces critical journalists off the air or to the back of the White House pressroom where they can be ignored during presidential press conferences.

It is an unthinking patriotism, one that ignores what has made the United States a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world. It comes from the same dangerous place that has engendered some of the worst violence in our history, a crowd mentality that brooks no dissent and that despises protest.

It is just this sort of patriotism that the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was lampooning when he wrote, “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.”

And it is the kind of patriotism that Albert Einstein was thinking about when he wrote:

“Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!”

Who can blame him, really, having witnessed the brutality of all the various nationalisms that, like a plague, infected Europe and then the rest of the world during the middle of the last century.

Every German who gave his life for the Third Reich, who participated in the genocide of the Jews and other ethnic groups in Europe, saw himself as a patriot, as defending the sanctity of the fatherland. Every Italian who got swept up in the terror of Mussolini’s fascism saw himself as a patriot. Osama bin Laden sees himself as a patriot to his extremist Islamic cause. The Taliban saw itself as patriots, the defenders of Afghan’s religious purity.

But this is fascism and nationalism masquerading as patriotism and degrades the true patriotic impulse, which grows not just from love of country but respect for its ideals.

“Patriotism,” as journalist Sydney J. Harris wrote, “is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues,” he wrote in 1982.

“The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country’s virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, ‘the greatest,’ but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.”

Elsewhere he wrote:

“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.”

That is why I view Tim Robbins as a greater patriot than Attorney General John Ashcroft, why I think U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich and U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold maybe among the most courageous and patriotic politicians in America.

They understand, as the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote, “America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation. Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past while we silence the rebels of the present.”

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press