The poet H.L. Hix is hosting a special postcard project on his website. The idea, it appears, is to create an intellectual and emotional landscape by using a variation of a medium usually designed for short, pithy notes.
Here is my contribution, a very brief poem about Beach Haven.
There has never been much of a difference between with the New Jersey State Police did in the 1990s — racially profiling minority drivers on the Turnpike, which resulted in court oversight of the state cops — and what Bloomberg’s police were doing with New York’s stop-and-frisk program. Even the arguments that Bloomberg and the police made in defending stop-and-frisk sounded eerily like those made by New Jersey officials when they defended profiling practices.
It is good to see that the courts, at least in New York, are skeptical of the arguments.
In a blistering decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that on hundreds of thousands of occasions since 2004, the police have systematically stopped innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. She further found that the Police Department had “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling” that targeted young minority men for stops.
In the words of The New York Times, the city — and not just police officers — were responsible for “a battery of constitutional violations” and that stop-and-frisk amounted to a “checkpoint-style policing tactic, with the intent of deterring minorities from carrying guns on the street.”
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The American economy remains mired in what likely is a massive transformation that is fast leaving workers behind. As Floyd Norris writes today in his Off the Charts column,
AMERICAN companies are more profitable than ever — and more profitable than we thought they were before the government revised the national income accounts last week. Wage earners are making less than we thought, in part because the government now thinks it was overestimating the amount of income not reported by taxpayers.
The rest of the column explains some changes in the way income and gross domestic product are calculated, but the point is pretty clear. We are not in the midst of a magical economic rebound.
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I have a piece today at NJ Spotlight on the governor’s signing of 10 gun-safety-related bills. Check it out.
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Recent endorsement editorials in The Record and The New York Times reinforce a decision I made when I was writing editorials for The Princeton Packet: Never endorse in a primary.
Why? Because you either will have to jump through hoops to make the endorsement — as The Record did yesterday — or you will have to contradict your endorsement later on when you endorse in the general election.
Consider what The Record has to say about Steve Lonegan in its endorsement of him to be the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. Lonegan “clearly is the stronger Republican candidate” and “an anti-government social conservative to the core.”
His priorities include repealing “Obamacare,” reducing entitlement programs and opposing putting “left-wing radicals” on the federal bench. Lonegan opposes abortion, marriage equality and spending money to combat global warming, which he repeatedly questions. He says he would have opposed the emergency aid package for Sandy relief.All of this puts Lonegan at odds with The Record’s more liberal approach to governing.
Lonegan, however, “can display a reasonableness that sets him apart from some of his soulmates on the Republican right,” The Record writes.
He opposes spending huge sums to construct a fence along the nation’s border with Mexico, calling that yesterday’s technology. He also supports raising the number of immigrants who can be legally admitted to the country. Nor would Lonegan spare the nation’s military from his budget ax.
Good things, of course, but I think it is a stretch to use these positions as evidence of his reasonableness.
The Record then does something that undercuts its argument, essentially setting itself up for what is likely to be a November endorsement of Lonegan’s opponent — most likely Newark Mayor Cory Booker:
We are less pleased with the overall philosophy Lonegan would bring to the Senate. Rather than seek common ground with Democrats, who are a majority in the Senate, Lonegan says a more important priority for him would be staying true to his principles. That’s noble, but at a time when political gridlock in Washington is pervasive, the public is better served by politicians who compromise to get things done.
Basically, they argue, he is the wrong choice for the Senate, but the best of a bad Republican lot. While this may be accurate (and incredibly sad), it also did not have to be written. There is no reason for newspapers to weigh in on intra-party primary fights — except in those cases where there is no functioning opposition party (say, New Brunswick), and the primary is the de facto general election.
The party faithful understand this — does anyone thing that hardcore Republicans, the ones who vote in primaries, are going to listen to what The Record has to say in this case?
In the end, the paper looks wishy-washy (at best) or duplicitous (at worst). It puts itself in the position of backing a candidate for whom it has little use, and it would be like me, a non-observant Jew, telling a Catholic the best way to observe Ash Wednesday.
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Hank Kalet 