Day two with the pups is winding down. They went for a walk out in our backyard and played in the snow. But Sophie's not feeling well and not eating. Rosie's just bushed.
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I hate car shopping. Every three years, because we've been leasing, we've been forced to deal with the discomfort of showrooms and salesmen.
Our lease is up next month on our Nissan Murano — a car that gets terrible gas mileage and was costing us too much in monthly payments. My Nissan experience has been OK, but not great, due mostly to several annoying issues with the automatic windows, the CD player and some other minor things.
In fact, we only went with the Nissan after we wrecked our three-month-old Toyota Highlander and couldn't arrange an affordable replacement.
So today, we bought a Toyotaa RAV4, figuring that Toyotas have good repair ratings and we didn't have to negotiate much — Toyota rarely plays numbers games. It wasn't perfect, but we were out in 90 minutes.
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Assemblyman Louis D. Greenwald (D-Camden) today issued a multimedia package on his legislation to overhaul the way the state cares for individuals with developmental disabilities by refocusing money from costly institutional care toward community-based services.
Greenwald’s measure (A-3625) aims to reduce the population of New Jersey’s seven
developmental centers by 80 percent within five years.
As Greenwald said during a recent press conference,
“The time has come for us to end this warehousing of human life and to give the consumers and the patients what they require, what they have asked for, what their families have dreamed of, which is the opportunity to live independently and in a way and in a means with the dignity and respect that they deserve.”
So, Chris Christie makes it official — he’s in the race and mainstream Republicans are ecstatic.
But should they be? New Jersey has become a consistently Democratic and Republicans, when forced to run in a contested primary, are forced to run to their right, making them less palatable to the general public.
And while the public is angry over the state of the state and not particularly pleased with Jon Corzine’s efforts, he doesn’t face the kind of deep anger we’ve seen directed at Jim Florio.
I want to point readers toward this quote from today’s Star-Ledger:
Christie could face trouble in the GOP primary, political experts said, drawing a parallel between a Christie-Lonegan matchup and the 2001 primary battle, when the party favorite, Bob Franks, was defeated by conservative Bret Schundler.
“The Republican primary can be captured by a conservative with a grassroots organization” like Lonegan’s Americans for Prosperity, said Joseph Marbach, a political scientist at Seton Hall University. He said Christie needs to “show he’s conservative enough” and has a good chance to beat Corzine.
What’s missing? A paragraph that explains what happened to Schundler in the general election. What happened? He lost in a landslide.
That was followed by Corzine’s rather convincing defeat of Doug Forrester — just one year after a sitting Democratic governor resigned the governorship.
Republicans, in fact, have won only two statewide races since Republican Gov. Tom Kean’s two terms in office ended in 1989 — and those races, won by Christie Whitman, were won by slim margins following a massive tax revolt that shifted control of the state Legislature to the GOP. That shift lasted just eight years.
We fed them and have been trying to train them using a book by Tamar Geller, The Loved Dog, that our friend Carol recommended. It argues for training your dogs in a non-violent or aggressive manner, eschewing striking the dogs or shouting in anger. The idea is to praise them and encourage them, getting your dogs to behave because they want rather than because they fear misbehaving.
It’s only been a few hours, of course, and we have no illusion that this is going to be easy. But we’ve been won over by these amazing little mutts and look forward to the effort.
