A friend of mine sent me this post from Dave Barry’s blog, which links to a story about a deranged squirrel. All I can say is “Evil little Pat Burrell-looking Yankee fan varmints!”
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I’d like to see more towns attempt clean elections at the local level, but Lawrence’s experience shows it will not be easy.
As political as the climate is in Trenton, it can be worse at the local level because of the personal nature of local campaigns.
“Sadly, our request has been ignored,” said (Clean Elections committee co-chairman Doris) Weisberg, who is a Democrat and a former Township Council member. She is representing the Lawrence League of Women Voters on the Clean Elections Committee.
“We come here tonight to say we have found it impossible to work in a true academic manner as a study group and announce we are suspending our meetings until after the November general election. This was a unanimous decision by the committee,” she said.
Let’s hope they can get it back on track.
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz’s first novel, is a powerful, funny, off-putting, crazy, cantankerous, sweet, sexy, violent, crazy bit of prose. It grabs you and refuses to let you go, jamming on politics and cultural stereotypes, ruminating on curses and craziness, asking questions about what it means to be a Dominican, an American. to live in diaspora and what the long-term impact of a brutal, violent dictatorship is on the people who live through it, their children and their children’s children.
It is a novel of many voices filtered through one (a la Faulkner), written in ghetto slang, Spanglish, Dominican Spanish, literary English and mixed throughout with the mythologies of science fiction, comic books, bits of history — a raging stew of a novel with a core so sweet, so tender and so painful it is hard to believe.
Read it and then read it again.
Here is a link to my story on Diaz in Time Off and here is a great interview with him from The Progressive magazine.
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Tom Moran, the state’s best political columnist, explains why so many of us who viewed the election of Jon Corzine to the governorship with hope have been so disappointed. Perhaps he should have let Senate President Richard Codey run and kept his seat in the U.S. Senate, where he had been making a name for himself as a rare voice of reason and liberalism.
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Wally Edge raises an interesting question about the upcoming mid-term election:
If Democrats are successful in bucking the trend of mid-term elections going against the party that controls the governorship, as they were four years ago, it might be a signal of just how blue a state New Jersey has become — or evidence that Larry Bartals’ 2001 redistricting map was, as the GOP claims, truly one-sided.
He lists the last three decades of mid-term results, showing that the party that controlled the governorship has historically lost seats.
I have two issues with his analysis. First, the Florio mid-term and the first Byrne mid-term occurred at times when the electorate was teed off over new taxes. The backlash that created had a lot to do with those results.
My other issue is one of time: Going back 30-plus years is rather meaningless given the drastic demographic changes that have taken place.
I have another theory, however. The Florio mid-term was actually an aberration based on his unpopular tax plan, as was the election of Christie Whitman as governor (she eaked out a win over Floiro and then barely held on against Jim McGreevey — the two smallest margins of victory in memory). Whitman’s first win was a function of lingering anger over Florio, while her second win, I think, came courtesy of her incumbency and little else.
Using these suppositions — and that’s all they are — as a baseline, and adding the recent blue votes in presidential races (and the fact that there has not been a Republican U.S. senator from New Jersey since the Carter administration), one could make the argument that a different trend is in play: That the GOP is slowly disintegrating, consistently losing seats regardless of who is in the governor’s seat.
I’m no political scientist, but this is as plausible a description of the New Jersey political landscape as any other.
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Hank Kalet 