Paid family leave is a reform that is a long time coming. And the New Jersey bill, which creates a fund from which salaries would be paid, is a good one that should help working families.
It cleared its first hurdle — with state Sen. Bill Baroni, the Republican who represents the 14th District, voting in favor — and now it is on to the Assembly.
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Matthew Yglesias takes a look at the latest storyline to catch on during this year’s Democratic primary race and finds it to be based more on myth than fact. It is true that Hillary Clinton tends to get more focused coverage, but that has less to do with a built-in awe of Barack Obama than with Clinton’s familiarity.
Yglesias offers an interesting thought experiment designed to show that the bias argument is flawed:
I’d say it’s definitely true that, on balance, Obama has gotten better press than Clinton. Still, I think Clinton fans are going more than a little overboard with this monocausal account of the campaign. For one thing, one important exception to this is that if Obama had lost eleven contests in a row, there’s no way he’d still be treated as a viable candidate. Similarly, if Obama had reached a situation where nobody can mathematically see a way for Clinton to catch his lead without altering DNC rules, I seriously doubt the race would continue to be covered as a serious competition.
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One of the big disappointments I’ve had with Barack Obama to date is the way in which he’s addressed the “Muslim question.” Each time it comes up, he trots out his church attendance to prove his Christian bonafides — implicitly endorsing the use of Muslim as a slur. It’s as if he is saying, to echo the McCarthy era response to accusations of communist affiliation, “I am not now, nor have I ever been a Muslim.”
Naomi Klein in The Nation offers the candidate some advice on how to answer the veiled slur without implicitly buying into its use.
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If the other 49 states want to know what happens when they short their pension contributions, just check out New Jersey.
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Opponents of the location of a land swap that will allow a new Monroe high school to be built on land that is now part of Thompson Park need to turn their attention to something else.
Their latest salvo — a letter to the DEP complaining about missed deadlines — is nothing more than a nuisance filing that offers little benefit to anyone. The best they can realistically hope for — as their lawyer, Richard Webster, admits — is to slow down a project down that will be built.
”It is unlikely that this will derail the project, but it is a possibility. At the minimum it should delay it,” Mr. Webster said Thursday. “We fully expect to get a letter from the DEP saying that township will have to go back to the state and get a new approval.”
If that occurs, then no one benefits — not the environmentalists, because the trade will still go through; not the taxpayers, because the delay likely will mean increased costs; and not the students, who will be forced to continue attending class under crowded conditions.
I’m sure there are bigger dragons for the environmental groups to slay.
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Hank Kalet 