HAMILTON (Atlantic County) — A police report claims the deputy mayor of Hamilton Township in Atlantic County was charged with drunken driving after a January incident where he pleaded with police for "professional courtesy," according to a report on PressofAC.com.
New Jersey residents were the highest-taxed in the country in 2009, giving 12.2 percent of their income to state and local taxes.
Wednesday’s report covers former Gov. Jon Corzine’s last full year in office, and it was New Jersey’s third consecutive year with the dubious honor.
Angered by what he says is a failure of Trenton Mayor Tony Mack’s administration to give out information on the city’s budget deficit and the whereabouts of confirmed business administrator Sam Hutchinson, Council President George Muschal is prepared to use subpoena power to get answers.
Muschal said Tuesday that both acting business administrator Elaine Adams and the mayor's communications director Lauren Ira have failed to respond to repeated phone calls made by himself and other council members requesting information.
The now-retired former head of the New Jersey Association of Counties has decided she doesn't need unemployment benefits to supplement the $99,000 per year public pension she receives, according to a report on NorthJersey.com.
Celeste Carpiano said she plans to withdraw her request for unemployment because "it's not necessary," the report said. Although Carpiano was not a state worker, she was part of the government health and pension plan as result of a 1956 law that allowed some lobbyists to join because their work was deemed valuable to the public. She also received a Lexus for use as part of her job and cashed out more than $53,000 in unused sick and vacation time when she retired Dec. 31.
Wisconsin public-sector union leaders have offered Governor Scott Walker and the Republican-majority state legislature a deal. The unions will accept all of the fiscal aspects of Walker's bill: Henceforth members will pay 5.8 percent of their salary toward their pensions and 12.6 percent of their health-care premiums, up substantially in both areas. All they ask in return is that Walker and the legislature not gut their collective bargaining rights. Sounds statesmanlike, right?
I have my doubts. Certainly, this offer undercuts the unions' claim that there is no budget crisis in Wisconsin, and that Walker manufactured one as a pretext for union-busting. If there's no budget crisis, on what possible basis can union leaders instruct their members to give up an estimated $330 million worth of hard-earned, contractually guaranteed benefits over the next couple of years? Are they saying that the rank and file is better off giving up their money now, even though it isn't necessary to fix the state's budget, as long as they still have the chance to get the money back at the bargaining table later, maybe?
Several weeks after Kwame R. Brown was elected D.C. Council chairman in November, city officials were asked to order for him a "fully loaded" Lincoln Navigator L with a DVD entertainment system, power moonroof and polished aluminum wheels.
It had to be black - all black, inside and out - and it had to arrive in time for his inauguration Jan. 2, never mind the District's projected $400 million budget shortfall.
Later, when he was asked on television why taxpayers should foot the $1,900-a-month lease payments, Brown (D) said he had merely requested a black sport-utility vehicle and was driving the vehicle that the District had procured for him.
The indictment of a top Northern Virginia fundraiser last week is the latest in a series of criminal cases that have ensnared campaign donors to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who relied heavily on wealthy bundlers in her failed 2008 bid for the presidency.
Federal grand jury indictments handed up in Alexandria allege that Galen Capital Group Chairman William P. Danielczyk Jr. and his treasurer illegally reimbursed nearly $190,000 in donations to Clinton's 2006 and 2008 campaigns, sometimes with corporate funds.
MADISON, WIS. - President Obama thrust himself and his political operation this week into Wisconsin's broiling budget battle, mobilizing opposition Thursday to a Republican bill that would curb public-worker benefits and planning similar protests in other state capitals.
Obama accused Scott Walker, the state's new Republican governor, of unleashing an "assault" on unions in pushing emergency legislation that would change future collective-bargaining agreements that affect most public employees, including teachers.
The president's political machine worked in close coordination Thursday with state and national union officials to get thousands of protesters to gather in Madison and to plan similar demonstrations in other state capitals.
TRENTON — Mayor Tony Mack is proposing a tax hike beyond the increase already approved by city council in order to close Trenton’s budget deficit, and he is applying for a waiver from the state cap on municipal tax increases.
The city council previously approved a rate increase of 30 cents per $100 of assessed value to raise an extra $5 million. Mack now wants to boost the rate by 43 cents to $3.76, which would raise $8.5 million, he said in a press release last night. For a home valued at $100,000, that would represent an annual increase in the city portion of the owner’s tax bill of $430, to $3,760.
BURLINGTON COUNTY — Two Burlington County officials who were elected to office as Democrats have decided to become Republicans, according to a report on PhillyBurbs.com.
Surrogate George Kotch of Burlington Township and Clerk Timothy Tyler say their values are now more aligned with with the Republican party. Only Kotch is expected to seek re-election.
Interest payments on the national debt will quadruple in the next decade and every man, woman and child in the United States will be paying more than $2,500 a year to cover for the nation's past profligacy, according to figures in President Obama's new budget plan.
Two years ago, the popular new president had Democratic majorities in Congress as he released a sweeping budget plan that introduced a New Deal sequel with dramatic proposals on health care, energy and the economy and a full embrace of government's central role.
The Obama of 2011, as demonstrated by Monday's budget rollout, seems resigned to operating in a far more constrained fashion as he plunges into policy combat for the first time with the GOP's House majority.
In declining to embrace the most difficult ideas proposed by his bipartisan deficit commission, such as cutting Social Security benefits, eliminating a home mortgage tax deduction or making structural changes to the tax code, the president deferred tough decisions that many in both parties say are necessary to fix the country's fiscal problems.
According to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, all was well in the Persian Gulf emirate of Bahrain just two months ago, when she paid a visit. "I am very impressed by the progress Bahrain is making on all fronts -- economically politically, socially," she enthused at a town hall meeting. Speaking of the ruling al-Khalifa family, she said, "I think the commitment to democracy is paramount."
Now, however, Bahrain is at the forefront of the continuing Arab uprising -- the only Persian Gulf state where the popular protests of Tunisia and Egypt have spread. On both Monday and Tuesday thousands of protesters gathered in the center of Manama, the capital, only to be frontally attacked by riot police. So far, two have been killed. The demonstrators nevertheless managed to reach a central square, dominated by a statue of a pearl, that they are calling "Tahrir," or "Liberation" square in honor of the Egyptian revolution. Their demand is the same as that in Cairo: genuine democracy.
ATLANTIC CITY — Atlantic City Councilman Marty Small said he told a campaign worker who was secretly recording conversations with him that his 2009 mayoral campaign was to be "open, honest and above board."
Small and 11 others are on trial on voter fraud and other charges relating to Atlantic City's 2009 mayoral primary in which Small was trounced by incumbent Lorenzo Langford.
The defendants are accused of tampering with or manipulating absentee ballots designed for voters too sick or frail to make it to the polls.
Mayor Tony Mack ordered a change at the Trenton Water Works utility in mid-September that gave his half-brother Stanley Davis and another crew chief the ability to authorize emergency overtime for repair jobs, a power that led authorities to arrest and indict Davis two months later, according to a former administration official.
Davis, 49, was arrested in December and charged along with two other water utility workers with taking cash from an undercover detective for an unnecessary repair job and billing the city for emergency overtime under the new rules.
BEIJING — The railway minister of China, Liu Zhijun, has been removed from the top post in the ministry because he is being investigated for corruption, according to a report on Saturday by Xinhua, the state news agency. Mr. Liu is the most senior Chinese official to come under such investigation in years.
The inquiry raises questions about China’s deep investment in high-speed railways, a vast nationwide initiative that has been a favorite project of Mr. Liu, who has spent his entire career in the ministry.
TRENTON — New Jersey’s bond rating was downgraded Wednesday by Standard & Poor’s, a move that could add significantly to the state’s borrowing costs and focuses even more attention on public-employee pension and health care payments.
The agency dropped New Jersey to a rating that is among the lowest in the country. According to S&P, the only states with worse credit ratings are California and Illinois, widely considered to be in the steepest financial trouble.
...when it comes to keeping racial statistics, the nation is in transition, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand. Changes in how Americans are counted by race and ethnicity are meant to improve the precision with which the nation’s growing diversity is gauged: the number of mixed-race Americans, for example, is rising rapidly, largely because of increases in immigration and intermarriage in the past two decades. (One in seven new marriages is now interracial or interethnic.)
WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans on Wednesday opened a formal assault on the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases, raising doubts about the legal, scientific and economic basis of rules proposed by the agency.
The forum was a hearing convened by the energy and power subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to review the economic impact of pending limits on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. But much of the discussion focused instead on whether climate science supports the agency’s finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to health and the environment; that finding is what makes the gases subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.
Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, was subjected to more than two hours of questioning, some of it hostile, about proposed limits on emissions from factories, refineries, power plants and vehicles.
MEXICO CITY — Haitian officials issued a diplomatic passport on Tuesday for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president and — even after years in exile — one of the country’s most popular and divisive figures.
Speaking about the need for high-speed rail, Vice President Joe Biden commented that, "If we don't get a grip, folks, they'll not only be teaching us, they're gonna own our kids."
What?
Caught flat-footed and totally unprepared for Egypt’s uprising, the Obama administration has been offering a series of excuses. It was, officials claim, quietly supporting reform all along. The CIA never warned that Egypt might blow up. No one could have anticipated what has happened in Cairo since Jan. 25.
The claim on reform is easily dismissed. Anyone who has been following Egypt for the last two years knows the administration’s record of coddling President Hosni Mubarak, cutting funds for Egyptian democracy programs, and eschewing criticism of the regime’s repression.
But another part of the record also needs clearing up: In fact, the White House was warned, publicly and repeatedly, that Egypt was approaching a turning point and that the status quo was untenable — not by an intelligence agency, but by a bipartisan group of Washington-based experts who pleaded, in vain, for a change of policy..
Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling striking down the health-care law’s individual mandate and, with it, the rest of the statute, may or may not stand up in higher courts. But it’s more convincing than some arguments I’ve read on the other side…
The only consideration is whether Congress has enacted the mandate pursuant to one of its enumerated constitutional powers.
The Senate majority leader made an impassioned plea on behalf of the new health-care law on the Senate floor Tuesday, one day after a federal judge struck it down as unconstitutional….
Reid argued that it is time to “stop re-fighting yesterday’s fights” and ticked off the benefits that he said were already flowing from the bill, including the claimed $4 billion in restitution and fines. He also argued that repealing the law would “add a trillion dollars to the deficit,” which is a claim we have debunked before. But is it possible that a bill that passed just 10 months ago has already yielded $4 billion from health care fraudsters?
…it is clear where the figure came from—an announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services that a new report showed that health care fraud prevention and enforcement efforts had recovered more than $4 billion in fiscal year 2010. The agency said this figure was a single-year record. The government’s fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, so that would mean the health-care law would actually have been in effect for just six months in the time period covered in the report. But the HHS news release never claims the new health-care law had anything to do with the successful enforcement efforts. It instead attributes the success to action taken in 2009 — the creation of a Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team focused on preventing waste and fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Florida freshman Republican Rep. David Rivera hasn't had a smooth first month in office. To say the least.
Last Friday, the Associated Press reported that Rivera paid himself nearly $60,000 in unexplained campaign reimbursements over the eight years he served in the state legislature. He's already under criminal investigation for failing to disclose $137,000 in loans from a company co-owned by his mother.
