There are a lot of ways you can judge a draft, but i think I like Dave Zirin‘s approach best.
Dispatches: Defending freedom of the press
Here’s this week’s Dispatches, on the right-wing attack on The New York Times. Here is The Washington Post on the same thing.
Pass the budget
The Record is right here. The budget standoff needs to come to an end and everyone concerned — the governor, Senate and Assembly Democrats, state Republicans and all the varied interests, taxpayers included — need to understand that the solution to years of bad budget votes will be painful. It will involve even more painful cuts than included in the proposed tab, and possibly even more tax hikes down the road.
Politicians of both parties have been balancing the budget with borrowing and gimmicks for so long that this state faces an enduring financial crisis — a crisis that would only be exacerbated in the long run by the plan floated by Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts, D-Camden.
For example, the Assembly plan would carve $300 million out of a proposed $1.4 billion contribution to the state pension fund. That doesn’t sound like a bad cut — until you realize that the state hasn’t made a significant pension fund contribution in a decade and that it now faces pension obligations that total an estimated $23 billion and growing.
What’s more, there’s talk of using the penny sales tax hike to help relieve property taxes instead — although that would merely take money out of one pocket instead of another.
The sales tax is only one part of the bitter medicine and tough measures ahead if this state is to get its financial house in order. The state pension system is in desperate need of reform. State employee pay and benefits are out of control, and a new contract must be negotiated next year.
And it will require real tax reform — perhaps a shift from property taxes to income and corporate taxes, maybe a state property tax, significant government consolidation, etc. But that will have to wait until this budget is adopted.
Get on with it.
Court reaffirms limits on executive power
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the president today and for the U.S. Constitution.
The Supreme Court today delivered a sweeping rebuke to the Bush administration, ruling that the military tribunals it created to try terror suspects violate both American military law and the Geneva Convention.
In a 5-to-3 ruling, the justices also rejected an effort by Congress to strip the court of jurisdiction over habeas corpus appeals by detainees at the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
And the court found that the plaintiff in the case, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, could not be tried on the conspiracy charge lodged against him because international military law requires that prosecutions focus on specific acts, not broad conspiracy charges.
I don’t have muc to say about it yet — it is too early and I need to take some time to digest it — but I’d suggest this bit of analysis from the SCOTUS blog (courtesy of Talking Points Memo, the single-best political blog out there).
Budget follies
OK. This is getting weird.
The Star-Ledger reported that Assembly Democrats staged a sit-in earlier today, demanding that the state treasurer meet with them because of comments made by the governor yesterday. Gov. Jon Corzine is threatening a veto of the budget if it does not include his proposed sales tax hike.
The day, as the Ledger reported, was “strange … even by Trenton standards.”
(T)he Assembly Budget Committee convened this morning, demanded the state treasurer come to them, waited all day and then recessed at 5:30 p.m. — without taking a vote on any bills, or on a version of the state budget.
The sit-in left budget negotiations “in a state of emergency of their own” — a reference to the flooding hitting the western part of the state.
Here’s the Ledger’s description of the fun and follies:
This morning, the Assembly Budget Committee staged a sort of sit-in. The committee, led by chairman Louis Greenwald (D-Camden), was scheduled to vote on a budget bill that does not include Corzine’s proposed rise in the state sales tax from 6 percent to 7 percent. But when committee members assembled in a room filled with lobbyists just after 11 a.m., they said there would be no vote.
Instead, they called on state treasurer Bradley Abelow to come to the meeting room and explain in detail Corzine’s statement the night before that he would veto the Assembly budget plan.
The committee even sent a Sergeant-at-arms to the treasurer’s office and then the governor’s office — but he was rebuffed at both places.
Corzine, who was holding a news conference about the flood preparations, criticized the Assembly committee’s action.
“My treasurer has been made available over and over again now doing things on the spur of the moment — which is, by the way, one of the major problems we have in this whole budgetary process,” Corzine said.
Seems pretty obvious that neither side is in a mood to compromise. So don’t expect a deal on this budget anytime soon.
Hank Kalet 