Garden State Patriot

Here is yet another stark reminder of how the Democrat machine in New Jersey is destroying this state and ripping off the taxpayer.

BCRO Chairman Bob Yudin is demanding an investigation into funding for the renovation of Bergen County’s Overpeck Park. Under former Republican County Executive Pat Schuber, $1M was proposed for renovations to the park. However, with County Democrats now in control of all freeholder positions and Dennis McNerney holding the County Executive office, that figure has skyrocketed to $70M and has been marked by typical Soprano state tactics.  

HACKENSACK NJ –The taxpayers of Bergen county are entitled to a complete public airing of the county government’s extravagant $70 million renovation for Overpeck Park, said Bergen County Republican Organization Chairman Robert Yudin.  

Yudin is also calling for the U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate the payments to key politically-connected firms working on the Overpeck Park project – some of which received no bid contracts and have been paid millions of dollars by county officials.   

The details of the Overpeck boondoggle were revealed in Sunday’s Record newspaper.  Included in the report on the $70 million price tag for the park renovation is $32 million in payments to Joseph M.  Sanzari Construction CO and $6.7 million to the consulting engineers PMK Associates – both of which are major donors to the Bergen County Democratic Party.  

Sanzari allegedly benefitted from cut rate dumping fees at Overpeck Park, which netted him millions in additional profit — at the expense of taxpayers.   

Sanzari was dumping debris from the Xanadu mall project in the Meadowlands as well as debris from a  construction project at Hackensack University Medical Center, according to the Record.  

Sanzari employs State Sen. Paul Sarlo as his firm’s chief operating officer and manager of the Xanadu project. According to the Record article, Sarlo intervened on behalf of Sanzari regarding and overdue $600,000  bill Sanzari owed to the BCIA for dumping at Overpeck.  

“I was sickened when I read the report; sickened by the absolute waste of public money and the complete lack of accountability for how the taxpayer money is being spent at Overpeck,” said Yudin, a former freeholder candidate. 

The BCRO chairman it appears that the patronage system of rewarding  contributors to the Democratic Party with lucrative contracts is still in place in Bergen County despite the conviction state Sen. Joseph Coniglio and the indictment of former County Democratic Party Chairman Joseph Ferriero. 

“Nothing has apparently changed in Bergen County government,” said Yudin. “The Democrats are as bold and arrogant as ever and are ripping off taxpayers while rewarding their friends and donors. It has to stop.” 

Read the rest here.

Cross-posted at Red County.

This from a poster at the Cape May County herald:

One of my kids rows crew in high school. The boats and equipment are expensive and we have endless fund raisers, donation drives, etc to raise money to buy a new (to us) boat or 2 as well as maintain the equipment and such.

I was at a huge regatta over the weekend. Hundreds of local schools from 4 or 5 states participating. I was there volunteering and saw it all from start to finish for a few hours.

I noticed that a couple of high schools from NJ Abbott Districts were participating. Good for them. Crew is a great sport, it’s tremendous exersize for the kids, etc. I’m happy to see them represented.

I also noticed that the boats these schools had were amazing and obviously brand spanking new. Almost all of them were custom painted to the school’s colors. (95% of the boats are either black or white and all are a little dinged up here and there) and then these boats came along. They looked like Ferraris in a sea of Chevys.

I pointed out one of the boats to a race official and asked about it. He told me they were “Vespoli Rhinos”

So today I’m thinking about it and I look up how much Vespoli Rhino’s cost new. Are you sitting down? $32,900 BEFORE options And options add thousands more. Just the custom paint costs $950.00

And realize that giving a novice crew a boat like this is the same thing as giving a high school freshman bike racer Lance Armstrong’s Tour De France bicycle. It will not make a whit of difference in their perfomance at this level. Way, way down the line it can mean saving seconds in a race. But at this level of competition its meaningless

I’m all for kids having good atheletic equipment. But this is absolutely, positively, outrageous. It’s a situation where “Hey, it’s free money from the taxpayer, so let’s buy a Ferrari when a Chevy is all we need!” (and all every single other school has). They could have bought almost the same boat from the same company for $10,000 less. Or they could do like every other school does and buy boats that the colleges sell that are nearly $20,000 less and only a year or 2 old.

And all the schools had multiple boats. Hundreds of thousands of dollars utterly wasted. Abbott Districts at work. And that money is being taken away from every other kid not in a Abbott school.

I’m sure there are tons of other like examples of this in the Abbott Districts, but this is really an outrage. Not only are parents like this going out of their way to raise money to buy equipment for their children but they are also in essence helping to buy the superior equipment for children in Abbott Districts.

Moreover, where is the accountability? Who is watching how Abbott District monies are spent so that they are not used in such an overtly wasteful manner? I truly hope that if anyone in the legislature is reading this that they push for an in investigation of this matter.

It’s bad enough that taxpayers have to subsidize the Abbott Districts – and with no results to show for it, I might add – but to see taxpayer monies abused in such a way is wholly unacceptable.

Cross-posted at Conservatives with Attitude! and Red County.

The Corzine Administration may be in violation of federal law by using Build America Bonds to fund the widening of the Turnpike and Parkway. Here is the lowdown from Mobilizing The Region:

On Friday, TSTC wrote to Governor Corzine stating that using federal Build America Bonds — authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — to pay for the expansion of the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway would violate federal law. The Build America Bonds were authorized by the federal stimulus package, and offer government subsidies on interest rate costs.

“It is our position that the issuance of Build America Bonds to support the projects would violate the requirements of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 due to the lack of a mandated environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969,” wrote TSTC general counsel Kyle Wiswall.

“We request that you either cancel the bond offering insofar as it includes Build America Bonds or begin the preparation of the applicable environmental review of the projects as required by federal law,” the letter continued.

For the non-lawyers among us, here’s the translation: projects that receive federal funding must receive federal environmental approval.  Neither the Turnpike nor the Garden State Parkway expansions have undergone federal environmental review. Therefore, neither are eligible for federal funding.  Until now, both were slated to receive only state funding, so the cursory state environmental review was all that the law required.

The warnings were not heeded by the Authority. This afternoon, the agency released the bond offerings, totaling $1.375 billion.

This recent move again calls into question the legality of the projects.  TSTC already has a lawsuit pending over the Garden State Parkway widening.

(h/t StreetsBlog)

Cross-posted at Conservatives with Attitude! and Red County.

A couple of new polls are out from Quinnipiac and Strategic Vision.

The Quinnipiac poll confirms that Governor Corzine remains in deep trouble in his bid for re-election. His approve/dispprove is the wors they’ve ever recorded: 37% approve; 54% disapprove. 50% feel the state is worse off since he became Governor and a majority of voters feel he doesn’t deserve re-election (55%-33%). To me this is devastating for Corzine. If most people want you out it will be tough to overcome.

In head-to-head matchups, Chris Christie still leads Corzine by a healthy margin, 45%-38%, while Steve Lonegan is tied with Corzine at 41%.

In the GOP primary, Christie still leads Lonegan but the gap has decreased significantly. In the last Quinnipiac poll, Lonegan trailed Christie 41%-19%. Now, Quinnipiac has Christie and Lonegan separated by just a margin of 46%-37%.

The Strategic Vision poll shows Christie leading Corzine 47%-36% and Lonegan trailing Corzine 44%-39%. Christie leads Lonegan 40%-15% in the Strategic Vision poll – a considerably different result from the Quinnipiac poll. Suffice it to say this makes me a little skeptical of the Strategic Vision results, particularly as the Lonegan campaign indicated recently that their own polling was more in line with the Quinnipiac results.

As a Lonegan supporter, these numbers are a positive sign. The biggest obstacle the campaign has been facing is name recognition and Mayor Lonegan appears to be gaining in that area.

With the debates coming up next month, there is plenty of time for the GOP primary to further tighten. For Mayor Lonegan to win, he will need to continue to build name recognition in these closing weeks and the campaign should continue to stick to its positive pro-taxpayer message. Steve’s message is one that will resonate with voters in this state who are overtaxed and have had enough.

I believe the campaign can and should draw distinctions with the more moderate Christie on the issues, but need not continue to harp on questions about Christie’s ethics. These issues will play themselves out and voters will make up their own minds about Christie’s character. The important thing is for Mayor Lonegan to prove to voters that he is the candidate with better solutions and that he has the fortitude to fight for the ideas he believes in.

Cross-posted at Red County.

A little humor here. I just thought this was hysterical. It’s bad enough being one of baseball’s worst teams, but not even being to spell the team’s name right on their unis? Just too funny…

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Honestly, I’m not even sure where to go with this one. I guess taxes on fatty foods are just around the corner. Maybe mandated vegetarianism?  

THE rising number of fat people was yesterday blamed for global warming.

Scientists warned that the increase in big-eaters means more food production — a major cause of CO2 gas emissions warming the planet.

Overweight people are also more likely to drive, adding to environmental damage.

Dr Phil Edwards, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “Moving about in a heavy body is like driving in a gas guzzler.”

Each fat person is said to be responsible for emitting a tonne more of climate-warming carbon dioxide per year than a thin one.

It means an extra BILLION TONNES of CO2 a year is created, according to World Health Organisation estimates of overweight people.

The scientists say providing extra grub for them to guzzle adds to carbon emissions that heat up the world, melting polar ice caps, raising sea levels and killing rain forests.

The environmental impact of fat humans is made even worse because they are more likely to travel by car — another major cause of carbon emissions.

Battle

And researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine say wealthy nations like the US and Britain are getting fatter by the decade.

Dr Phil Edwards said: “Food production accounts for about one fifth of greenhouse gases.

“We need to do a lot more to reverse the global trend towards fatness. It is a key factor in the battle to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change.

“It is time we took account of the amount we are eating.

“This is about over-consumption by the wealthy countries. And the world demand for meat is increasing to match that of Britain and America.

“It is also much easier to get in your car and pick up a pint of milk than to take a walk.”

The study by Dr Edwards and colleague Ian Roberts is published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Dr Edwards went on: “We are not just pointing the finger at fat people. All populations are getting fatter and it has an impact on the environment.

“UK health surveys estimate fatness has increased from an average body mass index of 26 to 27 in the last ten years.

“That’s equivalent to about half a stone for every person.”

Anyone with a BMI above 25 is overweight, while more than 30 is obese.

A staggering 40 per cent of Americans are obese, among 300 million worldwide.

I don’t know about you but I think this makes me want to run to Mickey D’s and grab a Big Mac and some fries. Or maybe I’ll run to White Manna down the road from me and grab some really greasy grub. Better yet, I’ll save it for tomorrow’s lunch being that it is Earth Day and all. Who’s with me?

MmmmMmmm…

Cross-posted at Conservatives with Attitude!

¿Sabìa usted que…err, I mean, did you know?

In 1977, James Earl Carter, the peanut farmer, lifted travel restrictions on Cuba. These remained in place for 5 years until Ronald Reagan reimposed them in 1982. In 1995, Bill Clinton also eased travel restrictions on Cuba. Here’s a timeline detailing the history of travel between the U.S. and Cuba going back to 1959.

No other country restricts travel to Cuba. Yes, anyone else from anyplace else in the world can go there. And many do.

Next, did you know that the U.S. already exports millions of dollars worth of goods to Cuba? Most people are under the impression that there is a full and complete embargo on the island. Not so. In fact, trade has been on the rise since 2000 — and the U.S. is actually Cuba’s #1 supplier of agricultural products. Here are some facts. 

What is the current level of Cuba’s agricultural trade? What products?

In 2006 Cuba was the 33rd largest market for U.S. agricultural exports, ranking ahead of countries like Morocco, Brazil, Sweden and Denmark.

U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba have grown significantly since trade was authorized in 2000. The United States now is Cuba’s largest supplier of agricultural products, supplying approximately 96 percent of Cuba’s rice imports and 70 percent of their poultry meat imports. U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba peaked at $384 million in 2004 and dropped to $328 million by 2006. The European Union (EU) is the second largest supplier of agricultural products to Cuba, followed by Brazil, Argentina, and Canada. Cuba imports about $1 billion in agricultural products overall.

Basic food products and commodities such as rice, wheat, poultry, corn, soybeans, and soybean products have dominated U.S. sales to Cuba. Although minimal seafood is exported to Cuba, U.S. wood product exports to Cuba now exceed $7 million.

U.S. dairy exports in 2006 were $13 million, down more than 50 percent from 2005. U.S. poultry exports dropped from $58 million in 2005 to $45 million in 2006.

U.S. processed food product exports for Cuba’s growing tourism industry lags far behind exports of these products from competing countries. Major competitors include Argentina, Brazil, the EU, New Zealand, Canada and China.

Top U.S. Agricultural Exports to Cuba
$ million

To see more on U.S.-Cuba trade, check out the USDA site.

So, allow me to sum up. We’ve lifted travel restrictions on Cuba before. We actually trade with them quite a bit and have done so increasingly for the past decade. Other countries already allow travel there and trade with Cuba. Essentially, everything being advocated now by those who want to change our Cuba policy has already been tried or is already really in place.

So my question to those advocating these very policies is quite simply this: why hasn’t the Castro regime changed a bit?

Cross-posted at Conservatives with Attitude!

I’ve been trying to find as much info as I can about tomorrow’s school board elections. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get a feel for the candidates. The best info I came across is from the Hackensack Chronicle.

The information on the budget is as follows:

The candidates are hoping to preside over a system with a proposed budget of just over $85.2 million, an almost 3 percent increase over the last fiscal year. It is based on a tax levy of slightly more than $61.2 million, which reflects a just over 4 percent change from the past fiscal year.

I will emphatically be voting NO on this. Considering the state of the economy I think the budget ought to be, at minimum, held in check. To expect residents to ante up more is a joke.

With respect to the candidates, perhaps I just don’t understand how this works (if someone can explain I am all ears), but it bothers me that there is no party affiliation assigned to the candidates. It makes it more difficult to understand where the candidates are coming from.

A very interesting post from Gateway Pundit. Setting the Record Straight on AIG–

AIG, Citibank and other companies have come under a great deal of pressure these past few months and have been accused of all sorts of things. The people who are making these accusations are the same ones who had a whole lot to do with getting them in that predicament (i.e. Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, etc…). Let’s take a look at what really happened.

Up until the fall of 2009, and for years before this, the big banks and other related companies were lending and making a lot of money in consolidating mortgages and selling and buying them on the free market. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were buying the mortgages and bundling them into larger investments which were purchased by a number of entities worldwide. The Clinton administration wanted to enable all Americans to own a home and implemented policies to encourage home buying. During the Clinton administration, Freddie and Fannie lowered their underwriting standards and encouraged banks and brokers to write loans to individuals based in part on their minority status rather than on their ability to repay the loans. Some of the Clinton cronies, (e.g. Harold Raines and Rahm Emanuel) made millions from Freddie during its heyday.

Then things went wrong. The mortgages turned sour. People had been given loans who were not able to pay them back. This had a domino affect throughout the finance industry. Many huge companies were suddenly insolvent or unable to pay on their promises. The largest money market fund shut down for a week, and companies and individuals worldwide began to hoard money in fear that they would soon be unable to get to it or lose it.

The Bush administration went to Congress more than 10 times in the years preceding this disaster (17 times in 2008 alone), asking for a review and changes to Freddie and Fannie with no avail. Bush then stepped in and offered loans to several of these institutions in order for them to stay afloat. The goal was to push liquidity back in the market place. One of the largest insurance companies in the world – AIG, came calling and the government offered them a loan. Loans were given to other entities as well. The key here is that these were loans to these entities.

Along came the election and the swearing in of the Obama administration. One of their first actions, with the assistance of the Democratic Congress, was to write a historic spending bill greater than anything we have ever seen before on this earth. Over a trillion dollars in spending projects were quickly passed through Congress. The Stimulus Bill was not a loan but included grants and pork spending. Unbelievable amounts of money were given to organizations like ACORN and other entities with close ties to the current democratic Congress.

After this atrocity was put into place, the Congress and individuals from both parties began to focus on bonus’s given at AIG. They said these weren’t fair and that AIG was paying these with the government’s money. In a sense this is true, since the government did loan them money to stay afloat. But in another sense this is not true. The government loaned this money to AIG. It was not a gift and is expected to be paid back. And, of course, it was Senator Chris Dodd who slipped in a provision in the spending bill that quaranteed the AIG bonuses.

The AIG predicament is similar to the Chrysler crisis in 1980. Chrysler came to the Carter administration and asked for a loan to stay afloat. The government gave them a loan. Many people said that this was not fair and none of the government’s business. They claimed that Chrysler would never pay it back and it was a waste of taxpayer money. Well, as you may recall, Lee Iacocca led them out of that quagmire and ended up paying off the government debt before it came due.

AIG had a good point when they argued that they had a legal obligation to pay the bonuses to their corporate team. They also have a great desire to keep their team in place while they work towards paying off their debt. They are led by a new CEO who desires to revive the company.

Also, per a letter received from a Gatewaypundit reader, the banking industry as a whole has felt the burden of bank failures. Their fees from the FDIC have risen tremendously over the past few years, both in cash to the Treasury and in transaction costs. Smaller community banks have taken on the brunt of the costs paying a larger share of FDIC insurance for their size than their bigger (too big to fail) brethren because the assessments are based on domestic deposits which are close to 100% of the deposits at small banks but about 50% of the deposits at large banks.

We don’t know yet whether AIG, Citibank and others will repay their loans. Time will tell. We do know however, that the current administration passed spending bills that will never be paid back- ever. This is the real danger. The greedy are not the corporations who pay 35% on their profits to the US government – one of the highest tax rates in the world. Nor are the greedy the banks who keep the economy running. The real greedy are the current group of government administrators and Congressmen and women who take advantage of their positions and implement spending bills to ensure their hold on the US government and instill their liberal ideas on all Americans. They divert attention from their actions when criticizing AIG, yet look forward to AIG’s tax dollars for spending on radical and wasteful ideas.

I was not aware of this until recently but obviously felt this is important to tell people. The new tower to be built at Ground Zero, for quite some time now, was expected to be called the Freedom Tower. However, the Port Authority of New York, in an effort to help market the office space and bring in tenants, has dropped the name in favor of ‘1 World Trade Center.’

And just who happend to be the first tenant once the name was changed? The Chinese government.

First to sign on

The change came after board members voted to sign a 21-year lease deal with Vantone Industrial Co., a Chinese real estate giant, which will become the first commercial tenant at Ground Zero. It plans to create the China Center, a trade and cultural facility, in 191,000 square feet on floors 64 through 69.

The negotiations with Vantone, which is closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist government, had nothing to do with the name change, PA officials insisted, but was based primarily on bottom-line marketing considerations.

Despite a five-year global hunt and millions of dollars plowed into marketing efforts, until the Chinese deal was inked, the PA had failed to snag a single private-sector tenant at Ground Zero. It has tentatively lined up a number of state and federal agencies to take big chunks of space.

The Daily News editorialized on this a few weeks back. Here is their commentary:

When you’ve broken your promises on everything else to do with redeveloping Ground Zero, it’s no big deal to discard the name by which the public has come to know the iconic skyscraper at the heart of the plan.

When you’ve engaged in massive schemes to lie about costs and when you have failed to meet every solemnly pledged construction deadline, tossing a name like Freedom Tower is child’s play.

You just do it. Because there’s no need to consult the public. Because you’re the mighty Port Authority – and you damn well say and do what you please.

So, when your marketing team says it prefers to sell the building to prospective tenants as 1 World Trade Center rather than as the Freedom Tower, you give them the green light.

Apparently, “Freedom” doesn’t test-market very well when you’re trying to draw tenants from all parts of the globe. Including from Communist China, an arm of which has just leased more than five floors of the building to house a “China Center.” This is planned as a locus of Sino-American commerce.

The name Freedom Tower came into popular use on April 24, 2003, when then-Gov. George Pataki and the Port Authority established a timetable for Ground Zero construction.

The Freedom Tower would soar its full 1,776 feet by Sept. 11, 2005, and be ready for tenants by early 2008.

A permanent PATH train station would be open in 2006.

A new Fulton St. subway complex would be done by 2007.

There would be direct rail service from downtown to Long Island and JFK Airport by 2013.

None of that came true. None of that will be done for years, if ever. The Port Authority made a liar out of Pataki on every project it was responsible for. And now the imperious, unaccountable agency has dropped the last vestige of the past, as if erasing history.

It and its new tenant should be quite comfortable with each other.

To say this is a disgusting, outrageous insult to every person who died on 9/11 and, really, to every American citizen doesn’t even go far enough.

Cross-posted at Conservatives with Attitude!