While I was watching Bill O’Reilly earlier he had a “Talking Points” memo about President Bill Clinton tearing apart some complete lunatic who was screaming the extremist mindset that 9/11 was an inside job. Bill O’Reilly’s compliments to President Clinton (and condemnation of Hillary) aside, I absolutely loved Clinton’s response to the whack job in the audience:

I’ve never been more proud of President Clinton! Good for this man! And I agree - how DARE the lunatics in this world say that 9/11 was an inside job. The problem here, folks, is that these idiot losers who are out there spreading these moronic lies used to be the people that you never saw out in public. Why? Because they generally live in their parents’ basement playing Dungeons and Dragons and cutting themselves all day.

Good for President Clinton! If this is his stance towards these extremist lunatics, then maybe it won’t be the end of the world when he moves back into the White House in January 2009!

Thanks goes to GGL for sending me this joke. Hopefully you enjoy!

Halloween Story

A bald man with a wooden leg gets invited to a Halloween party. He doesn’t know what costume to wear to hide his head and his leg so he writes to a costume company to explain his problem. A few days later, he received a parcel with the following note:

Dear Sir,
Please find enclosed a pirate’s outfit. The spotted handkerchief will cover your bald head and, with your wooden leg, you will be just right as a pirate.
Very truly yours,
Acme Costume Co.

The man thinks this is terrible because they have emphasized his wooden leg and so he writes a letter of complaint. A week goes by and he receives another parcel and a note, which says:

Dear Sir,
Please find enclosed a monk’s habit. The long robe will cover your wooden leg and, with your bald head, you will really look the part.
Very truly yours,
Acme Costume Co.

Now the man is really upset since they have gone fro m emphasizing his wooden leg to emphasizing his bald head so again he writes the company another nasty letter of complaint. The next day he gets a small parcel and a note, which reads:

Dear Sir,
Please find enclosed a bottle of molasses and a bag of crushed nuts. Pour the molasses over your bald head, pat on crushed nuts, stick your wooden leg up your ass and go as a caramel apple.
Very truly yours,
Acme Costume Co.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Here’s a quick follow-up op-ed that appeared in today’s Daily Record newspaper with respect to finding some way to lower property taxes in Mount Arlington. For those of you that are not up to curve on this issue, here is a previous entry that talks about what the proposal was in Mount Arlington (to eliminate their police force and share services with a neighboring squad). The op-ed as it appears in the Daily Record:

Mount Arlington officials have regrettably caved to pressure and tabled a reasonable idea to seek a cost savings by contracting with a larger town for police services. The plan would have eliminated the borough’s 13-member police force.

Opposition to the idea, which was intense, largely was based on misconceptions, the biggest being a belief that police service in the borough would have been reduced. Officials had no intention of doing that.

Of course, some criticism was legitimate. The report, which was done by former Washington Township Police Chief Ted Ehrenburg, seemed a little light for its cost of $43,500. Also, the council at times irritated opponents by not being more forthcoming with information about the plan.

Notwithstanding those problems, Mayor Art Ondish and the council were right to raise the issue. The mayor says he thinks he was ahead of the curve, and we agree with him.

If property taxes are ever going to be reduced, officials and residents have got to accept the fact that it can not be business as usual. The majority of residents who came out on this issue lacked vision, opting to remain trapped in traditional thinking. And politics being what it is, they got their way.

Over time, however, pressure to consolidate services, or even towns, is bound to increase. We may even see a day when such consolidations are ordered by the state.

“It’s going to happen in the future, It’s just not going to happen with this council in Mount Arlington,” Ondish said. That’s a shame.

Sorry, I had to post the entire thing because these Gannett newspapers are not making their online archives available any more. Rats!

Last night I decided to add a new category to this blog called “Sustainable Living.” One of my pet interests is the concept of green living and sustainable communities. In fact, one of the reasons why I got into the community and economic development fields is because I think that there is a large opportunity (especially in New Jersey) to redevelop some of our existing communities in vibrant, sustainable centers.

Sustainable communities are described in different ways, but to break it down into the most simplest of terms - imagine a community where you can walk to work, walk to the grocery store, and then walk to the gym at the end of the day. Imagine a community where you have all of your life’s needs within your reach and in a setting that is earth-friendly: solar energy being used, wheat board instead of sheet rock, little congestion on the roadways (and thus less pollution), renewable energy sources, and renewable organic food sources (also known as local farms).

There is so much more to a sustainable community when you get into the nitty gritty such as appropriate income levels to maintain local businesses, which create jobs for local people, which creates the income that is recycled back into those businesses, etc. I could go on forever…

In any event, since this stuff is catching my eye more and more these days, I added a new category for such entries. Enjoy!

Last week the Mount Arlington, New Jersey, Township Council released a report from an independent consulting firm called Blue Shield Consulting Services. The purpose of commissioning the report was to ascertain whether or not the Mount Arlington Police Department should be merged with one of the surrounding localities. Since I grew up in Mount Arlington and my family still lives there (and I visit there quite often and have even thought about moving back at some point), I have some comments on this issue. But first, the rest of the story….

The report suggested that it would save Mount Arlington multiple millions of dollars to consolidate their police force with an adjoining municipality. There is a grassroots organization based out of Roxbury that disagrees, though (I think it’s Roxbury - the founder lives in Roxbury, but is a former Mount Arlington resident - not sure what the deal is here). On their website (saveMAPD.com), they show that they’ve got around 1140 signatures on an online petition. The problem with this, though, is that some of these petition signers are not Mount Arlington residents, but instead they are former residents like I am.

The folks behind saveMAPD.com commissioned a counter report that (obviously) disagreed with the Blue Shield Consulting Services report. As a side note, this just goes to show you that in the academic and consulting worlds you can get anyone to write you a report using facts that support your case! I think that’s obviously what happened with the saveMAPD.com folks, but I wonder if that’s how the Township Council prefaced their conversation with Blue Shield Consulting Services. Who knows this information besides those who are actually behind closed doors, right?

Anyway, that’s not my gripe with this situation. In fact, I don’t think I have a gripe with the situation as much as I have two comments to make about it all. First, the fact that consolidation of a police department that covers a few square miles is a debated issue has got to have our friends out in the Midwest and South rolling over with laughter. To those folks I say, “Welcome, friends, to New Jersey! This is a state that is made up of 566 fiefdoms that each fight, scratch, and claw for their territory! This is the state of the political bosses and good old boy system. This is - New Jersey!”

My second point is that you have to wonder about the legitimacy of the Township Council’s position on the consolidation. They’ve taken the stance that consolidating will save the township money. Okay, fine. As a student of public policy the very first thing you learn about taxes and local municipalities (and state governments for that matter) is that once they raise a tax rate, they NEVER lower it! Sure, you may have a few extreme examples from around the nation, but the chances of this “saved money” from the consolidation equating to a lower tax rate is slim at best.

So you have to competing sides arguing for two inherently awkward positions. New Jersey should be much more regionalized when it comes to service provisions. If done correctly, this would ease costs and (more importantly for those of us who live in the state) put an end to the abuse of power that is prevalent in the local police forces around New Jersey. At the same time, there will always be people who fight against regionalization because it means that some jurisdiction is going to lose some measure of power. Further, some folks will have hurt feelings about losing fiefdom-specific services.

My issue is that no matter what happens the one thing that you can be sure of is that the tax rate will NOT go down - and THAT, folks, is something worth getting mad about.

Over in Detroit they are switching all of their downtown street lights to light-emitting diodes (LEDs). I think this is really cool! No, not because I’m some sort of environment whack job (believe me, I’m not), but what a cool concept.

You can get the same exact lighting from a source that uses much less than half of the power of the current source. Forget about the better-earth ramifications (though they are vast), think about the ability to use that excess energy towards other purposes! Think about the ability to offer extremely low-cost electricity services to the rural areas of the country - or to distressed markets that could use a month of free electricity to bolster a local economy.

No, I’m not looking to have the government start giving away these free handouts, but I am definitely looking for private electric companies to give away some electricity instead of making a big profit.

So…now I’ve cleared my buddy list down to 139 people. How low can I go?!? I just find it amazing how many people I had on that buddy list that I haven’t spoken to in years (and that hadn’t signed on in just as long). Again, I encourage everyone to do a cleaning out - besides, if you’re into seeing what people are doing you can get a better idea from Facebook and MySpace.

Professional sports is an interesting field to watch. As most of you know by now, I think the majority of professional sports are fixed. You see it in the NFL with completely ridiculous calls, you see it in the NBA with struggling “markets” all of a sudden having tremendous teams to drive fans into the buildings (a la the NJ Nets), and you see it in baseball with the creation of drama between various teams.

Sometimes, though, the stuff that goes on “behind the scenes” is absolutely crazy. Take the Joe Torre debacle with the New York Yankees. Here is a man who would be revered in any other city in the country if he performed as well as he performed for the Yankees as manager. Yet, in New York, the Steinbrenner Machine won’t work for Torre. That’s ridiculous. They insult him with their contract offer and then they have the audacity to make comments about him over the weekend?

What are they crazy?

That punk bitch Hank Steinbrenner said the following in a recent article in the New York Post:

“Where was Joe’s career in ‘95 when my dad hired him? My dad was crucified for hiring him.”

What a dumb bastard this guy is. Who in the world doesn’t know that Torre’s career was in the crapper before he came on as the Yankees’ manager? That’s like saying, “Where was the United States before the Revolution?” Any blockhead knows that we were in a bad spot.

Does his previous career make Torre’s performance over the last 12 years any less remarkable? Absolutely not. But this is the Steinbrenner way - classless and defamatory. It’s a real bummer that one of my favorite sports franchises is owned by such low-rent people. Punk Steinbrenner goes on:

“You can’t take credit for success when you’re going good, and then not take at least some of the blame when things change.”

Tell me one time when Joe Torre said that he was not to blame for the team’s inability to get out of the first round of the playoffs. Torre has stressed time and time again that it’s a team effort and that it’s not the fault of any one person in particular, but a group failing that costs the Yankees the big games. Hank is trying to say that by offering Torre incentives to win, he is making sure that Torre knows that some of the blame rests on him when they lose.

That’s the most arrogant, ignorant thing I’ve ever heard. The right thing to do here is for the Steinbrenners to eat their hats, apologize, and try their damnedest to get Torre back. Oh (and for good measure), get rid of Mattingly - he’s a curse!

Rutgers football deserves to be ranked in the Top 25 in the nation. Not only have they put together a winning format over in New Brunswick, but they’ve showed dominance over the teams that they’ve defeated each week.

Today’s USA Today Coaches’ Poll doesn’t rank Rutgers at all. That’s a shame. The Associated Press Top 25 lists Rutgers as #25 and I can deal with that for now, but the BCS doesn’t mention Rutgers at all and that’s just not right.

This is a good team with great potential and they deserve a BCS ranking.

There are a few reasons why I absolutely hated the Republican Presidential Debate on Sunday night. For me the biggest problem was the fact that the FOX News question askers are in such an inherently awkward position that they can’t help but to ask stupid questions that voters don’t care about. I shall explain.

Most of the techno-public and younger generations think that FOX is a conservative news station. Forget about the fact that every single study that reviews FOX’s reporting from a nonpartisan perspective (I stress NONPARTISAN, though it doesn’t really matter for this argument) finds that it is actually less partisan than the other news channels - no one seems to care about that. People believe that because the commentators on the channel are conservative (Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity), then the entire channel is skewed to the right. That’s not only ignorant, it’s downright dumb.

Okay, so that’s the base that these question askers are sitting on. They want to change that portion of the public’s view, so what do they do? They completely attack the Republican candidates for the first 30 - 40 minutes of the debate. How can guys like Chris Wallace and Carl Cameron have any respect for the voting public when they spent the first half of the debate trying to pit one candidate against another? That’s ridiculous! Why not spend this time to ask the candidates straight out, “Hey - let’s say you are President tomorrow. What do you do about [insert issue here]?” Why did their line of questioning have to be, “Candidate A says this about you. Candidate B said you’re a bonehead. How do you respond?”

Ugh. Give it up already! If the folks at FOX think that they’re going to break their stereotype as a conservative news station by trying to make the Republican candidates fight against each other during a debate, then they’re sadly mistaken. At this rate, who can blame the Democrats for not wanting to face such a pathetic line of questioning on FOX?

Thank God for Wendel Goler and Brit Hume asking decent questions!

Aside from the fact that the first half of the debate was consumed by a manufactured type of politicking that the vast majority of Americans hate, I don’t think that the candidates had good nights. Ron Paul made a few good points as he usually does (even though those points are sometimes few and far in-between). John McCain did more of his straight talking, but should NEVER have referenced the fact that he was “straight-talking.” Giuliani had a bad night - no question about it. The post-debate interviews spun the debate in Rudy’s favor, but the way he bungled the very first question of the night left a lot to be desired. Romney had a moderately okay night as did Thompson (who looks very tired and not-up-to-the-challenge on the stage).

Huckabee did a good job to get his viewpoints across and I think that he probably had a better showing that the rest of the crew. Tancredo and Hunter are footnotes at this point.

All in all we had a debate with blase candidates and poor, poor questioning by Carl Cameron and Chris Wallace. Let’s hope for a better debate next time around.