Lt. Governor Guadagno, Madam Speaker, Mr. President, members of the Legislature, fellow New Jerseyans:
I am pleased to present to you my budget for Fiscal Year 2014.
The budget continues a journey you began with me three years ago – to get New Jersey’s house in order; to turn Trenton upside down; to make hard but better choices so that we could put our state back on a path to growth.
For the fourth year in a row, the budget maintains the fiscal discipline we need to restore New Jersey. Fiscal sanity has indeed returned to Trenton.
For the fourth year in a row, this budget is balanced and imposes no tax increases on the people of New Jersey. I want every New Jersey citizen to remember just how different things were before we arrived. 115 tax and fee increases in eight years. Skyrocketing spending. $13 billion in deficits left on our doorstep by the irresponsibility of the past.
We must never take for granted what we have already achieved. Reduced spending. New jobs. Balanced budgets four years in a row. And lower taxes. It is truly a new day for New Jersey.
Documentary Photographer/Artist Mike McLaughlin was profoundly impacted by Superstorm Sandy. He’s a Jersey Shore Guy who grew up in the Bayshore.
Mike has spent the last few months, at night and in the wee hours, creating art out of the destruction of Sandy. Through a process called “light painting,” long exposures lit with ambient light, moonlight and a flashlight, McLaughlin created 41 images that fellow photographer Joe Sharp calls, “some of the most moving imagery I have ever seen.”
Last week, utility provider JCP&L announced it was investing $200 million this year to improve it electric support system in an effort to improve service reliability. Deputy Assembly Republican Leader Amy Handlin today asked why JCP&L did not disclose at the same time that it had filed for a 4.5 percent rate increase to recover costs from Superstorm Sandy and other storms which was revealed the next day.
“On Thursday, JCP&L was out front with the news that it was investing $200 million to improve its infrastructure and that ratepayers wouldn’t be affected because the costs were already part of the company’s yearly budget,” said Handlin, R-Monmouth. “At the end of the day on Friday, the utility then informs the public it is filing for a 4.5 percent increase to cover cleanup costs from previous storms. JCP&L is badly misinformed if it thought that tidbit would escape public notice.
“Good public relations starts with being upfront about everything, including an increase request that will be passed onto ratepayers,” said Handlin, who has been critical of the utility’s efforts in restoring lost power over the last two years. “Ratepayers deserve to see improvements to the critical framework in JCP&L’s system and have assurances that their infrastructure is reliable before a rate increase is even entertained.
“JCP&L should focus on improving its performance to its customers,” stated Handlin. “On Wall Street, bad news is often revealed after the closing bell. For customers of JCP&L, there is no closing bell. They just want to know the lights are on.”
Last year, the Division of Rate Counsel filed a petition contending JCP&L is earning a profit exceeding 12 percent in New Jersey – far above the allowable 8.5 percent.
Handlin pointed out that PSE&G, the state’s largest utility provider, recently announced it was seeking the BPU’s approval to spend $3.9 billion over the next 10 years to protect and improve its electric and gas systems against severe weather conditions.
Will Senate Democrats continue to give Menendez cover if he lied to them?
The reporter who first broke the Menendez sex scandal storyposted an eyewitness account of Senator Robert Menendez dining with Dr. Salomon Melgen one mile from Teterboro Airport on Easter morning of 2012, while Melgen’s private plane was being refueled for a direct flight to the Dominican Republic.
Menendez has admitted to taking three flights to the DR on Melgen’s jet. One was paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Committee. The other two were reported and paid for personally by Menendez…almost three years after the fact…as a result of NJ State Senator Sam Thompson’s ethics complaint filed in November of 2012. Menendez paid $58,500 for the two flights last month.
The Dominican prostitutes who first fingered Menendez said they met him during Easter of 2012. Menendez’s and Melgen’s friend, Dominican politician Vinicio Castillo Seman admitted that the senator was the Dominican Republic on Easter of last year, according to Breitbart.
In addition, Menendez’s and Melgen’s friend–powerful Dominican politician Vinicio Castillo Seman–recently slipped up and admitted the senator was in the Dominican Republic on Easter Sunday in 2012, at the scene of where the original alleged wrongdoing took place. “I’ve known Menendez as a friend and of my cousin Salomon Melgen,” Castillo said while attempting to defend Menendez amid the scandalous allegations that currently plague him. “No one has come forward on the allegations and evil accusations, we spend every Easter together in Casa de Campo.”
Though it is now known Menendez spent Easter in Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic with Melgen and Castillo, it is unclear how he got there. He and his staff have continually refused to answer that question.
But it has appeared for a long time that Menendez got there via Melgen’s plane. Flight path data obtained by Breitbart News and published in early February shows Melgen’s plane flew from Melgen’s home city West Palm Beach, Florida, to Teterboro, New Jersey, on Easter Sunday morning. It stayed there at Teterboro from its landing at 11:30 a.m. until taking off to head straight to the Dominican Republic at 12:50 p.m.
It is during this timeframe Melgen’s plane was on the ground in New Jersey, refueling and preparing for the flight to the Dominican Republic, that Breitbart News’ eyewitness in the area said he saw Menendez and Melgen brunching together at Arena Diner a mile or so away from the airport.
If Menendez was on the Melgen’s flight to the Dominican Republic last Easter, he’s been lying to the American people, and the Senate Ethics Committee, since early January when he paid $58,500 for the flights he’s admitted to belatedly.
Menendez and his office continue to refuse to answer whether the senator was on that flight, or if he got to the Dominican Republic that Sunday another way.
Fresh from his trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. Senator Bob Menendez attended a Black History Month celebration in Trenton yesterday. During his remarks at the Shiloh Baptist Church, the senator invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and the Gospel of Luke to fend off the allegations of financial impropriety, prostitution and abuse of power, according to a report in The Star Ledger.
“Dr. King said that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,’” Mendez said, prompting calls of “alright” from some in the audience at the Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton. “In the end, I believe that justice will overcome the forces of darkness. Scriptures — scriptures tell us that he who ‘puts his hand to the plough and looks back is not fit for the Kingdom of God.’
“I have my hand on the plough,” he said, “and I am going to continue to look forward and to work to make that plough lead us to the fulfillment of educational, economic and health care opportunity in this country.”
You probably won’t read about it in The Star Ledger or The Asbury Park Press, unless The Washington Post or The New York Times picks it up.
The Daily Caller posted another Bob Menendez pay for play story last night. A women in her 30’s, a “professional escort” who travels between Miami and Boston to service her clients told DC that Menendez and several other U.S. senators paid her for sex.
A professional escort who travels the East Coast seeing clients in cities from Miami to Boston has identified a photo of Senator Bob Menendez as a man who paid her for sex. The woman, in her late 30s, told The Daily Caller prior to seeing Menendez’s photo that she had been paid to provide sexual favors to several U.S. senators, including a New Jersey Democrat and other politicians who are no longer living.
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Menendez, she said, is “quite a hobbyist. He sees a lot of girls and doesn’t seem to have the skills to have a relationship.”
“Hobbyists,” she explained, are men who “‘hobby’ in seeing many girls, as many as they can,” referring to escorts who offer companionship and sexual favors in exchange for what they euphemistically call financial “donations.”
If the allegations are true, Menenedez has set a high standard for what should happen:
Following up on the story of the Purcells from Toms River posted last week, my friend Ken Braswell of ShoreGrafx and I visited the Purcells at what is left of their home.
Kim and Jay were sold a flood insurance policy with a $206,000 dollar limit, well in excess of the value of the home. A engineer they hired at their own expense (because their insurance adjuster told them it may take a year for the insurance company to send a engineer) and a contractor told them their house could not be rebuilt and must be torn down. Their insurance company said their house can be rebuilt for $28,000. The insurance company adjuster said he was sending the check and closing the file, regardless of what the Purcells or the public adjuster they hired had to say about it.
Since we visited Kim and Jay, the insurance company has reopened the file and is sending an engineer out to inspect the home. Let’s hope the insurance company does the right thing.
If they don’t, we’ll have a lot more material to publicize.
Maybe he was doing research in the Dominican Republic
U.S. Senator Bob Menendez is co-sponsoring the Real Education for Healthy Youth Act, a bill that would expand comprehensive sex education programs in schools, while ensuring that federal funds are spent on “effective, age-appropriate and medically accurate” programs, according to The Hill.
The Real Education for Healthy Youth Act aims to reduce unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and expand sex education programs at colleges and universities. The bill would also prevent federal funds from being spent on “ineffective, medically inaccurate” sex-education programs.
“Research has shown that programs which teach abstinence and contraception effectively delay the onset of sexual intercourse, reduce the number of sexual partners, and increase contraceptive use among teens,” Lee said. “These programs also reduce unintended pregnancy and the transmission of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.”
Senator Frank Lautenberg and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) are the primary sponsors of the legislation.
U.S. Senator Bob Menendez is co-sponsoring the Real Education for Healthy Youth Act, a bill that would expand comprehensive sex education programs in schools, while ensuring that federal funds are spent on “effective, age-appropriate and medically accurate” programs, according to