Last night’s live finale gave hope and inspiration to all of those people who feel that they have been “categorized” into not losing weight. In other words, those people who feel that they cannot lose weight because they are too old or are within a certain age range for a certain gender see now that it can be done. Jerry is 64 years old for goodness sake!

My only gripe with the finale was that it was too long. A three hour finale is completely unnecessary. The entire show could fit into a 90 minute show, which would be nice since there could either be a 30 minute pre-show or a 30 minute post-show. But NBC relies so strictly on the results it gets from audience testing that it completely misses how to put on a television production that makes viewers comfortable while watching the show. Sure, people tuned into the finale to see who was going to win, but the truth is that watching any NBC show is horrible because of the crappy timing and pacing of their shows.

Subscribe to JerseySmarts.com Newsletter Email: Visit this group

For those of you who are looking for even more commentary presented from a unique New Jersey point of view, be sure to follow JerseySmarts.com on Twitter @JVince81. Also, sign-up for our quarterly newsletter by using the sign-up form in the box to the left. The newsletter is sent four times each year to provide links to just a few of the top stories that you might have missed. That’s it – there’s no random sales pitch and we do not sell our mailing list to any third party advertising companies. The only updates you will ever receive are from JerseySmarts.com with links to the latest updates from this site. That’s it. Period.

Anyway, congratulations to Helen and Jerry as well as everyone who lost a ton of weight. Mike’s (the 18-year-old kid) transformation is also an amazing story. I’m happy for him and I hope that he sticks to a good diet and workout regime because he can now be healthy for the rest of his life.

Jones said that after touring 162 Broadway, he came to a certain conclusion: If there was no redevelopment there, the city still would have condemned the building and demolished it, as an unsafe structure.

A portion of the ground floor, which had been home to a commercial tenant until late in 2007, was in the best shape, but the rest of the building was suffering from a lack of maintenance, he said. There were holes in the walls, ceiling, roof and windows, which had allowed rain to enter, deteriorating the structure further, and the items and materials that had been stored there were literally moldering where they sat.

Yeah…that’s not “blight” at all! Ha! What was most disturbing about this situation was the way that Brown tried to piggyback on the the MTOTSA folks – people who had a real gripe with eminent domain abuse. But (dare I say this), the legal system actually worked in this process! The MTOTSA organization won their battle against Long Branch (as they should have) and Brown lost his battle (as he should have). There is justice in this system!

For more background on this situation and some interesting comments from guests to this blog, feel free to visit a previous post on the subject.

“When people live in the United States, they ought to have their head up – they ought not to live in fear. Everytime they see a police car, they shouldn’t run and hide. Nobody ought to live like that in this country.”

Ha ha ha ha!!! Governor Huckabee!

I like Governor Huckabee – I really don’t have any major gripe against him, but at this point in the campaign I really don’t have a desire to learn much more about where he stands on each issue (remember, as an independent I can’t vote in New Jersey’s primaries without declaring a party – which I won’t do). But let me make this comment about Governor Huckabee’s quote up there…

As a person with a larger-than-normal degree of empathy, I can appreciate the fact that illegal immigrants are forced to live in a manner that many of us find abhorrent. Yet while I find the Governor’s statement to be a great political quote and one worthy of repeating, I wonder when a candidate will step up and make the same, truthful comparison about the good old boy system that has ravaged New Jersey and many other areas of this country.

In other words, I lived through some of the worst abuses of civil liberties that I’ve ever seen when I was a college student renting a home in Ocean Township, New Jersey. Police officers sat outside of our house, they routinely followed my roommates into the driveway of our home and questioned them at all hours of the day (and night), they would open up the front door of our house at 2am and walk through and tell us they were “just checking” even when only 2 people were home. It was a disgusting abuse of power that took place 6 – 8 years ago and to this day my roommates and I have a great disgust for the Ocean Township law enforcement and a much greater disgust for the anti-college student feeling in Ocean Township.

We ARE the people who see police cars with “Ocean Township” on the side of them and we attempt to run and hide because we know that in this town you can be arrested (or at least given a big money ticket) for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s happened to my former roommates, it’s happened to our friends, and it’s happened to me damn it. And I don’t buy the crap that we were “rowdy college students living in family neighborhoods.” Bullshit on that! We weren’t nearly as rowdy as the “family” that lived two doors down from us with the high school-aged daughter who was selling drugs to half of the town. Our rent (our very HIGH rent, I might add) paid the same taxes the rest of the town paid. And, we added a great deal to the local economy.

So I love Governor Huckabee’s comment that no one in America should live in fear of the police. But what happens when the local police (or an entire state’s police system) has turned into nothing more than a civil liberties abusing fundraising arm of the politicians? It’s disgusting and if America really wants “change” then we all need to start by no longer permitting the vast abuses of power that we see at the local level.