These poll numbers are interesting — showing, over a couple of weeks, relatively little change. The next week or so will be interesting, once these expensive advertisements that we call conventions recede from view.
You should have asked
I love this story.
Ann and Nancy Wilson are hoping the Republicans change their tune—and aren’t planning on waiting until November to find out.
The sisterly duo known as Heart sent a cease-and-desist notice to the McCain-Palin campaign Thursday afternoon after their hit “Barracuda” was used—twice—without permission as the official rallying cry for the vice presidential candidate after her nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
Apparently, the Wilsons are not fans of John McCain or Sarah Palin, saying that “permission to use the song was never requested, nor would it have been granted.”
“Sarah Palin’s views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song ‘Barracuda’ no longer be used to promote her image…[It] was written in the late ’70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women…There’s irony in Republican strategists’ choice to make use of it there.”
Obviously, someone dropped the ball on this. Shouldn’t someone tell the candidates — who say they are ready to lead and run a massive federal bureaucracy — that the little things do matter?
Toll hikes back on the table
One thing you can’t say about Gov. Jon Corzine is that keeping his office is more important than his vision for the future.
The governor is proposing to hike tolls on the N.J. Turnpike and Garden State Parkway by 50 percent in 2009 — the year he is expected to seek re-election. That’s a gutsy move, consider how unpopular his earlier toll-hike plan was.
The governor’s plan, which is expected to be unveiled by the N.J. Turnpike Authority next week, would use the added cash for transportation upgrades.
If enacted, it would mean the cost of a typical 23-mile trip on the Turnpike would jump from $1.20 to $1.80 next year. It would rise to $2.70 in 2012 and reach $3 after 2023.
Tolls on the Garden State Parkway would rise at a similar pace. The current average of 35 cents per passenger car would rise to 50 cents next year, 75 cents in 2012 and reach 85 cents in 2023. The hikes would be the first since 2000 and would be used to widen the Turnpike and Parkway, invest $1.25 billion in a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River and repair and replace decrepit bridges.
The proposal will be a difficult one to sell, but it has support from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a nonpartisan transportation and environmental group that advocates for mass transit and using money to maintain existing infrastructure, which believes that it should be scaled down and the highway widenings eliminated. It says that the “plan ultimately falls short by including $3.3 billion for wasteful expansions of these two roads.”
“This plan recognizes that Access to the Region’s Core is essential to New Jersey’s economic vitality and will help reduce traffic congestion throughout the state,” said Kate Slevin, Executive Director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a regional policy watchdog organization. “But chaining it to wasteful, old-fashioned, and poorly planned road projects is the wrong move.”
The Turnpike Authority has not made the case that the Turnpike or the Parkway widening projects are needed. As currently designed, neither will provide long-term congestion relief. In fact, according to state data, parts of the new lane on the Parkway will be filled with traffic as soon as construction is complete. Alternatives like congestion pricing and cashless tolling have not been examined in the environmental documents, though they could provide long-term traffic relief at a fraction of the cost of highway expansion.
“Decades of road widening have shown that highway expansion doesn’t ease traffic congestion in the long run. New Jersey needs projects that look to the future, not the past,” said Slevin. Alternatively, the Campaign recommended a smaller toll increase to pay for necessary road maintenance and bridge repair and ensure that the ARC tunnel remains on track.
NJ Future also is backing the plan. A press release quoted NJ Future Executive Director Peter Kasabach, called “the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) tunnel project and continued improvement and expansion of our mass transit system toward sustaining and enhancing our state’s economy, environment and quality of life.”
We welcome the Turnpike Authority’s proposal to use new funding proceeds for both the Trans-Hudson tunnel project and funding for mass transit.
Fiscally, the proposal makes more sense than the earlier plan to borrow against tolls to pay debt, but I think in the end it asks Turnpike drivers to foot the bill for improvements that probably should be paid for by a larger swath of people — through a gas tax increase, through development fees, etc.
But as practical as this plan may be, the politics may trump things in the end. The Legislature plans hearings on it — though it is not directly under the Legislature’s control — and the governor will have to run his re-election campaign with the toll hikes fresh in voters’ minds.
One thing is for certain, though, the state needs to fix its infrastructure sooner rather than later. We don’t need to have another Minneapolis bridge collapse and, while the business lobby might claim otherwise, the business community is more likely to flee a state with aging and nonfunctional infrastructure than it is a state that has to ask its businesses to pay a little more in taxes.
Unfortunate news
Jamesburg Borough Councilman Thomas Bodall was arrested yesterday and faces charges related to an investigation by the Bergen County prosecutor’s office. According to a release he allegedly
engaged in conversations via the Internet, specifically chat and instant messaging, with what he believed to be a 14-year-old girl. During the course of those conversations Bodall initiated sexually explicit dialog. On several occasions, Bodall transmitted pictures of his exposed penis to the presumed child.
I don’t want to prejudge this, especially since we have not spoken to Mr. Bodall. But I would encourage Mr. Bodall to end his re-election bid and give the Democrats a chance to replace him on the ticket (they have until Sept. 14).
My reasoning in simple: It will keep the charges from being an issue in the campaign. This would allow Mr. Bodall and his family to deal with what has happened and allow borough residents to maintain their focus on that issues that are most important to them.
Brief thoughts on McCain’s speechthe morning after
The punditocrisy — or the portion that can be described as the purveyors of conventional wisdom — is gushing over John McCainls acceptance speech last night as if it erases the last eight years of his pandering to the rulers of his party.
The speech was a long — and rather tedious — exposition of cliches about his life, playing up his POW creds and revisiting the maverick motif. It was long on personality and short on substance– which makes sense, because personality is the turf on which he wants to battle for the White House.
This focus, of course, plays to the so-called McCain base (the media), which was the villain of Wednesday night's program.
But the base is fickle and only too glad to come home. So we get people like Chris Matthews gushing over the return of the maverick, convinced that McCain has now rewritten the campaign script, has transformed the political landscape and has taken the lead on points in what they are describing as a political boxing match.
I don't buy it. But then, I'm just one of those Eastern elitist Sarah Palin was railing against the other night.
(More on the speech later when I get the chance to digest it further — providing it doesn't give me indigestion.)
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Sent from my Verizon Wireless LGVX9900 device (while sitting in Small World Coffee in Princeton.).
Hank Kalet 