We're down to 15 hours left in this miserable year of endless war, recession and job loss, harsh weather and environmental peril, and personal loss (My dear departed puppy). It can'T end soon enough, I say.
Let's hope 2009 is better.
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Sent from my Verizon Wireless LGVX9900 device.
Gov. Jon S. Corzine is right to delay introduction of the state’s budget, given that the incoming Obama administration is promising a massive stimulus package that is expected to include money for cash-strapped states.
Consider the mess New Jersey is in and what a lack of federal aid might mean:
Corzine has said declining tax revenues amid the national recession could push next year’s budget as low as $29 billion, down from $32.9 billion this year.
That’s nearly $4 billion — which would only add a lot of formerly employed state, county and local workers to the growing list of out-of-work New Jerseyans at a time when state (and local) services will be in great demand. Cutting state spending, which Paul Krugman rightly raised concerns about in his column yesterday, will do little more than slow efforts at the federal level to staunch the economic decline.
Krugman called the governors “50 Herbert Hoovers,” a group being forced to “(slash) spending in a time of recession, often at the expense both of their most vulnerable constituents and of the nation’s economic future.”
These state-level cutbacks range from small acts of cruelty to giant acts of panic — from cuts in South Carolina’s juvenile justice program, which will force young offenders out of group homes and into prison, to the decision by a committee that manages California state spending to halt all construction outlays for six months.
He’s not laying blame at their feet. On the contrary, he reminds us that many — not all, as New Jerseyans know too well — of the states’ problems stem from the larger economic mess, long-term federal negligence of state issues and the Bush administration’s clueless response to the meltdown.
It’s true that the economy is currently shrinking. But that’s the result of a slump in private spending. It makes no sense to add to the problem by cutting public spending, too.
In fact, the true cost of government programs, especially public investment, is much lower now than in more prosperous times. When the economy is booming, public investment competes with the private sector for scarce resources — for skilled construction workers, for capital. But right now many of the workers employed on infrastructure projects would otherwise be unemployed, and the money borrowed to pay for these projects would otherwise sit idle.
And shredding the social safety net at a moment when many more Americans need help isn’t just cruel. It adds to the sense of insecurity that is one important factor driving the economy down.
That leaves them stuck between a rock and a hard place. I have been very vocal in my criticism of the state — governors and legislators of both parties, including the current crowd — and its willingness across nearly two decades to defer painful budget decisions. The list of bad decisions made with politics and not fiscal health in mind is long and does not need another recounting. Suffice to say that we went over the cliff a long time ago.
That said, “even the best-run states are in deep trouble,” Krugman writes, and “we shouldn’t punish our fellow citizens and our economy to spite a few local politicians.”
So President-elect Barack Obama should listen to Corzine and David Paterson of New York and Ted Strickland of Ohio, who is
pushing for federal aid to the states on three fronts: help for the neediest, in the form of funding for food stamps and Medicaid; federal funding of state- and local-level infrastructure projects; and federal aid to education.
This kind of aid can go a long way to easing the economic pain while building a new foundation for future growth.
The death toll is mounting again in the Gaza Strip, with Israelis and Palestinians lobbing bombs and accusations following the demise of a six-month truce.
An Israeli military offensive that began Saturday already has taken the lives of more than 350 Palestinians, about 60 of them civilians, according to U.N. numbers reported by The New York Times. “Four Israelis — three civilians and a soldier — have died,” the paper also reports.
The two sides are laying blame for the latest hostilities on each other — Isrealis blaming Hamas rocket attacks, while Hamas blames Israeli aggression. It is a chicken-and-egg type argument that ignores the weight of a murky history of aggression on both sides.
A New York Times news analysis earlier this month — a day before the truce was to officially expire — sums up the truce’s failures and predicted the carnage that was to follow:
Israel and Hamas accuse each other of bad faith and of violations of the Egyptian-mediated accord, and each side has a point. Rockets from Gaza never stopped entirely during the truce, and Israel never allowed a major renewed flow of goods into Gaza, crippling its economy. This is at least partly because the agreement had no mutually agreed text or enforcement mechanism; neither side wanted to grant the legitimacy to the other that such a document would imply.
“I think it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” remarked Robert A. Pastor, who has been traveling in the region with former President Jimmy
Carter, meeting with Hamas and other officials. “It did lead to a significant reduction in the number of rockets fired at Israel until November, but the truce had less impact on the goods going in. One hopes both sides learn lessons and agree on a text and publicize it.”
That is yet to be seen. One thing is clear, however, and that there is plenty of blame to go around. The harsh occupation imposed by the Israelis in Gaza and its willingness to use its massive military force at the slightest provocation creates a desperation among Palestinians that now finds voice among Hamas militants. And Hamas uses what power it has — everything from rocks to mortars — to fight back.
A strange dynamic has developed in which both sides take go on the offensive and claim to be playing defense, upping the ante and intensifying the conflict. Only one side is accused of terrorism, however, a failure of language that fans the flames of populist resentment against the West and many of the western-aligned governments of the Middle East.
Nir Rosen, in The Guardian (UK), describes the dynamic this way:
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
The power imbalance contributes to the conflict, as does the ingrained — and earned — sense of victimhood among Israelis. There was a time when Israel was under siege in the region, targeted by the major Arab governments for extinction. That is no longer the case, though the mindset remains and is now focused on the relatively powerless Palestinian organizations Hamas and Fatah (primarily on Hamas).
Nothing will change in the Middle East until this circle of victimhood can be broken.
Ocean Grove cannot discriminate against gays, despite claims that forcing it to allow civil unions to be performed on its pavilion conflict with the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association‘s religious beliefs and first-amendment rights.
The community is a “nearly 1-square-mile section of Neptune Township” controlled by the Methodist organization, according to The Star-Ledger. The group has “used the pavilion for both religious services and public events” for many years, but was sued by a pair of Ocean Grove residents, Harriet Bernstein and Luisa Paster, when it nixed their 2007 request for use of the pavilion for their civil union ceremony.
According to a Civil Rights division press release,
an investigation found that the refusal to permit the civil union ceremony violated the public accommodation provisions of the state’s Law Against Discrimination and did not violate First Amendment Rights. The Division investigation found that the Camp Meeting Association had been permitting the public to use the Boardwalk Pavilion for weddings and secular events and that the Association had gained a Green Acres tax exemption from the state Department of Environmental Protection nearly 20 years ago after a finding that the Pavilion will be open to the public “on an equal basis.” (Following filing of the civil rights complaint, the DEP rejected a renewal of the Green Acres tax exemption for the Boardwalk Pavilion in September 2007.)
The Finding of Probable Cause states in part, “When it invites the public at large to use it, the Association is subject to the Law Against Discrimination, and enforcement of that law in this context does not affect the Association’s constitutionally protected right to free exercise of religion.”
What is striking to me is that the ruling echoes earlier state court decisions allowing protest groups access to public spaces, even if it does not specifically mention those earlier decisions (it focuses instead on properties owned by religious groups).
The ruling once again brings into focus the issue of a privatized public sphere — in this case, a pavilion used by the public but owned privately. The question of what rights the public has in a privatized culture — think of Twin Rivers in East Windsor, shopping malls like Quaker Bridge, privately owned space like Palmer Square — will only grow in importance as more and more of our lives falls under the auspices of commercial entities.
The rule that should apply — summed up by Lawrence Lustberg, cooperating attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in a comment to The Star-Ledger is that “once you open your facility to the general public, then it’s got to remain open on a nondiscriminatory basis.”
We are almost through the holidays, so I a more consistent running schedule is in sight. that said, I did get on the treadmill today, running three miles in 25:54 (8:50/8:30/8:34; average pace of 8:38). I tried to push a little at the top end — to get some time in at 8 mph — but I just didn’t have it in me.
I will try to get on the treadmill tomorrow, but tomorrow is still a day away. In any case, I failed miserably to meet my goal of 900 miles for the year (no idea how many I did run and I really don’t care). The question now is whether I should set a goal for 2009 or leave it unstated and hope for the best. I am leaning toward the following: 800 miles for the year and getting my weight back down into the low 180s.
iPod: Gaslight Anthem, The ’59 Sound
Hank Kalet 