Wayne’s World

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Neptune Township Gets $725K For Cops. Pallone Had Nothing To Do With It

Phoney Palloney Is At It Again,  Asbury Park Press  Falls For It (Willingly?) Again

By Art Gallagher

The United States Department of Justice announced their Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants on Thursday.  They awarded $298 million to fund the hiring and retaining of 1,388 state, local and tribal law enforcement officers by 379 police and sheriffs departments in 49 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.  The funding will be administered by the department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), and is being awarded under the COPS Hiring Program.  

The Neptune Township Police Department was among the 379 departments nationwide to get a grant, $725,000.  They applied and met the criteria.

Phoney Palloney told the Asbury Park Press about the grant and they wrote a storythat made it sound like Pallone had something to do with Neptune getting the grant.

New Brunswick, also in Pallone’s 6th congressional district, got almost $1.6 million in COPS funds.  That amount wasn’t mentioned in the APP article, nor did Gannett’s outlet that covers New Brunswick, mycentraljersey.com mention it.  Pallone must have polling data that tells him he needs free press support in Monmouth, but not in Middlesex.

Just as we saw with the coverage of Pallone’s Fish Tales , his $400 million fish counting stimulus that will never be passed by congress, the Asbury Park Press is in the tank for Frank Pallone.  They’re not fair and biased.  They’re just biased, pretending not to be.  They’re unfair and biased.

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Conservatives Are Crazy

Editors Note: When I relaunched this blog on September 7 I announced that dissenting views were welcome, in the comments and via submissions.  Until now, only my friend Vin Gopal has taken me up on a submission.

 This piece was sent to me by “NJ Team Obama” and written by “Danny Democrat”

A 2003 study published by the American Psychological Association concluded that political conservatism is rooted in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity” and other psychological factors.

According to the article, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature report that the core of the right-wing ideology is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality.  http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml

The emergence of the Tea Party movement has ignited passion among the most extreme adherents of conservatism in Republican politics, a phenomenon ending the careers of many longtime GOP establishment politicians.

Terror management is another psychological factor that influences conservatism, along with a need for certainty and cognitive closure.   These primal instincts help define what makes a political conservative at a time in history when human survival probably depends upon a greater adherence to logic and reason.

Research has shown that people in a state of distress by nature are prone to the allure of charismatic leaders but it’s hard to imagine what would have happened if unbridled emotions drove the Kennedy white House in October 1962 instead of cool intellect.  http://library.thinkquest.org/11046/days/index.html

Tea bag conservatives reject science as part of their blind loyalty to discredited anti-intellectual ideas and self-righteous faith-based morality, because by not allowing facts to dillute their perspective, they achieve the certainty they prize. http://silentmajority09.com/2010/09/24/conservatives-assault-science/

The leading tea baggers exhibit ultra-conservative craziness that seems to be overlooked by many voters who would normally object the their agenda: Ken Buck, Christine O’Donnell, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle,Carl Paladino, Mike Lee, Joe Miller, Marco Rubio and others.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/15/september-14-primary-elec_1_n_717242.html

Colorado Republican Ken Buck wants to outlaw birth control and a common fertility treatment and he says teenage rape victims should be forced to have babies.  http://www.9news.com/news/elections/article.aspx?storyid=151144&catid=140

Republicans advocate a regressive 30 percent sales tax on everything you buy – which they call ‘the fair tax’ — while cutting income taxes again for the richest three percent of the people, tax breaks for multinational corporations that export American jobs.  http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/unspinning_the_fairtax.html Regressive taxes make the poorest pay higher rates than the wealthy so Republicans are entirely disconnected from the American people, even if some Democratic incumbents have disappointed many people.

Republicans want to repeal President Obama’s Wall Street reforms, repeal the new rules that stop insurance companies from dumping sick children, repeal changes  helping America’s war veterans — and then they want to tie down the administration with subpoenas and investigations that will preclude the president from solving any real problems facing Americans.  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20011464-503544.html

Social Security and Medicare are one again in the Republican crosshairs, with Rep. John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, planning to cut benefits and raise the retirement age.  http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/106135-boehner-raise-social-securitys-retirement-age-to-70

The author of the GOP agenda, Paul Ryan, has put a plan on the table would end Medicare as we know it and leave the nation’s seniors to the private insurance industry.  http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/paul_ryans_plan_would_end_medi.html

Most of these ideas are well outside the main stream but if Democrats keep pushing for health reform, jobs creation, restrictions on Wall Street and credit cards — essentially all the things they stand for — then they could be in for more than a political fight.

Nevada Republican Sharron Angle said armed rebellion against the federal government saying, “if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies…”  and she sought support from members of a right-wing extremist group, “The Oath Keepers,” whose members are police or military personnel who believe they need not follow orders and which was formed “In response to the obscene growth of federal power and to the absurdly totalitarian claimed powers of the Executive…” http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/06/reid-opponent-embraces-patriot-group-that-warns-of-giant-concentration-camps.php

Perhaps to enable ‘those Second Amendment remedies,’ for political New Jersey state Sen. Jeff Van Drew wants to make it easier for residents to carry handguns.  http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/09/nj_senator_pushes_law_allowing.html

The bizarre policy positions are weighted with even more extreme anti-government craziness. According to a Sothern Pverty Law Center report: “U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said she feared that the president was planning ‘reeducation camps for young people,’ while U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), evoking memories of the discredited communist-hunter Sen. Joseph McCarthy, warned of 17 ’socialists’ in Congress.”  http://www.splcenter.org/images/dynamic/main/The_Second_Wave.pdf

The same report stated:

[Fox News host Glenn] Beck is just one of the well-known cable TV news personalities to air fictitious conspiracies and other unlikely Patriot ideas. CNN’s Lou Dobbs has treated the so-called Aztlan conspiracy as a bona fide concern and questioned the validity of Obama’s birth certificate despite his own network’s definitive -debunking of that claim. On MSNBC, commentator Pat Buchanan suggested recently that white Americans are now suffering “exactly what was done to black folks.” On FOX News, regular contributor Dick Morris said, “Those crazies in Montana who say, ‘We’re going to kill ATF agents because the U.N.’s going to take over’ — well, they’re beginning to have a case.” 

The insane ideas are being backed up by action. The Second Wave includes a chapter outlining 75 right-wing terrorist plots, conspiracies and racist rampages since 1995, when conservative Republican Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people, including 19 children in a day-care center, and injuring another 500.  http://www.splcenter.org/images/dynamic/main/The_Second_Wave.pdf

In March 2010, after the report was published, nine Hutaree militia members were arrested in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, for alleged involvement in a plot to murder a law enforcement officer and then attack police officers at the funeral using illegal explosives and firearms in order to incite revolution against the government.  http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hQlDq4d5Js2bVnV83z7R1ORbsZPA

People who make up the Tea Party movement are largely conservative and get their news from Fox; they’re generally old and of moderate to low income; and they’re fairly convinced that their taxes are going to rise in the next few years, even though they won’t. 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/01/tea-party-survey-old-cons_n_522336.html

“It’s the type of group that would likely benefit the most from Democratic governance, with commitments to Social Security, Medicare, and middle-class job creation,” said that report.

Tea baggers also have exceedingly poor views of President Obama. In the aforementioned poll, 81 percent disapproved of his job performance.

The scientific research identified the paranoia and obsession with certainty associated with conservatism but here are some hard examples of how they depart from reality and embrace delusion:

Fueling the myth mongering that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in a recent interview that the president may follow a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/246302/gingrich-obama-s-kenyan-anti-colonial-worldview-robert-costa

Southern Baptist Pastor Carl Gallups suggests Obama isn’t just Kenyan — he’s also the Antichrist.
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/feature/2009/07/31/antichrist/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHUZXgNAWo
http://www.hickoryhammockbaptist.org/interview.html

Such lunacy is not being immediately rejected by voters. Crazed tea baggers won Republican nominations for seven U.S. Senate seats, for New York governor and for dozens of seats in Congress. They are all over the place on ballots for city council, mayor, plus county and state offices.

A Harris poll cemented the notion of the scary conservative who believes that President Obama is many things that, factually, he is not.

The Harris Poll of 2,320 adults surveyed online between March 1 and 8, 2010  finds that large numbers of Tea Party supporters have not just extremely hostile opinions of President Obama but believe many of the false statements about him circulated on cable news and the internet.

The numbers among Tea Party supporters are scary, indeed: 67% believe the President is a socialist, although Harris didn’t do anything to verify that respondents knew what that word meant. More than half believe he is a Muslim,

The real sizzlers, are the 45% who believe he wasn’t born in the US, and the 25% who say he “may be the Antichrist” and 24% who say he wants the terrorists to win.  These people think our president is  a Nazi-esque Muslim Antichrist. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/mid/1508/ArticleId/117/Default.aspx

The Republican leadership’s willingness to flirt with ideas like the birth certificate conspiracy, or their insistence that health care reform is an “apocalypse,” paints all Republicans as unhinged loons and obliterate conservative credibility.

If you are still thinking about voting Republican, please see a mental health professional at once.

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Spending Just Got Personal

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Funeral For Petty Officer Denis Miranda

By Grace Cangemi

If you saw the group that formed an honor guard outside the Anderson and Campbell Funeral Home in a bar, you might think it was a tough place.  Today, the tough place was on Main Street in Toms River as Petty Officer 3^rd Class Denis Miranda was laid to rest.

The honor guard was made up of about sixty bikers, all of them riding today for the Patriot Guard.  They flanked the driveway of the funeral home and held a flag line there and at the cemetery.  They came to show respect for a young man who made the ultimate sacrifice and a family mourning an unimaginably tragic loss.

Dressed mostly in jeans and leather vests, the riders assembled at American Legion Post 129 at eight a.m. and awaited a Toms River Police escort that met up with members of the Dover police, State Police and several fire companies.  Most rode motorcycles, while about a dozen rode in trucks and SUVs.

As the service was held inside the funeral home, I spoke to Rich Baumann of the Patriot Guard.  Members of several organizations were represented by riders this morning.  Rolling Thunder, American Legion Riders Posts 129 and 348, and the Blue Knights all joined together to honor a fallen soldier.

“Today everyone rides with the Patriot Guard,” he said, explaining that on “these missions” the Patriot Guard includes all the riders.  “It’s the brotherhood of what we do.”

This was Rich’s 90^th funeral and he is a Senior Ride Captain, coordinating the honor guard, flag lines, and escort.  At times in the past, they have had to deal with what Rich calls “uninvited guests.”  While that was thankfully not the case today, Rich explained that when such folks do show up, the Patriot Guard creates a flag line between these people and the family so that the family doesn’t see or hear them.

“If you have a problem with the politics,” he says “go stand in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Leave the families alone.”

Joe Ryan of the Legion Riders Post 348 in Brick has been involved in veteran’s causes for nearly as long as he can remember.  His daughter’s have both served.  His eldest completed four years in the Navy and his youngest is in her eighth year in the Air Force.  Like many other riders, Joe took the day off.

He rides as many of these as he can.  “Some things,” he said “are more important than money.”

Robert Bianchini of Toms River also has a passion for helping troops.  He was at a wedding and met some servicemen.  Thinking that they might enjoy a weekend at the beach, he opened his home to them for a getaway.  Since then, he continues to host veterans and servicepeople who are referred to him.  A veteran himself, Robert said that it’s important to remember that as long as even one serviceman is deployed, we still have people in harm’s way. 

About twenty people stood across the street from the funeral home, some with flags, all there to honor a fallen warrior.  Elaine Horan and her sister didn’t know that Miranda family, but had seen the procession pass the house when Denis Miranda was escorted from McGuire Air Force Base and read about the young man in the paper.  They stood holding small flags. 

Elaine said,” We live locally and thought we should come to honor him and his family who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

As the Miranda family waited outside the funeral home, Denis Miranda’s flag draped casket was placed in the hearse by his SEAL teammates.  The procession, once again lead by state police and the Patriot Guard, would drive past Denis Miranda’s home, his high school, and his YMCA, finally arriving at the interment at Ocean County Memorial Park.

Capt. Tim Szymanski, commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group Two spoke about Denis Miranda.

“Miranda was a man who touched the lives of so many of us … a man who willingly made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the freedom and liberty of his fellow citizens … and a man who lived his life for the cause greater than himself.”

After these remarks, the flag draping Miranda’s casket was folded and presented to his mother.  Following the flag presentation, Navy SEALs from across the country lined up and one-by-one, removed the Tridents from the left chest of their uniforms and pounded them into Miranda’s coffin.

One cannot help but be humbled by the service this young man offered us and by the sacrifice made by his loved ones.  Those who took time off work and came to honor him know that by comparison, what they do is small, but they know it’s important too. 

The next time you think “I support our troops,” think about how you can truly put forth a helping hand.  And think about the Miranda family –  a mother, a father and two younger brothers who buried a precious young man who was an accomplished Navy SEAL when he was killed at the age of 24.  And say a prayer for Petty Officer Denis Miranda and all of those like him who stand ready to sacrifice their lives for us.

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Honoring One Who Served

By Grace Cangemi

Petty Officer 3rd Class Denis Miranda

 

If you watched network television today, you might think that the biggest story out of the Seaside Heights/Toms River area is about a guy who calls himself “The Situation” and whether or not he’s continuing to dance with the stars.  Not even close.

 

Here’s the name we should be hearing about today – DENIS MIRANDA.  Petty Officer Third Class, son, brother, fiance’, friend, Navy Seal, not quite 25 year old Denis Miranda has been brought back to his hometown after a little more than a week in Afghanistan.  He will be laid to rest tomorrow.

 

Petty Officer Miranda was a graduate of Toms River East High School serving us overseas when he was killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Afghanistan on September 21st along with 8 other young men.  As friends, family, and fellow servicemen and women arrived at the Anderson and Campbell Funeral Home on Main Street in Toms River, small flags lined the sidewalks and a half a dozen men from the Patriot Guard stood outside holding American flags.  In declining to comment, one  gentleman simply said, “There’s not much to say.  We’re here because he was there.”

 

Later, I spoke to Patriot Guard Senior Ride Captain Rich Baumann of Bayville.  He told me that members of the Patriot Guard are motorcyclists from all over the country.  Some are veterans, some have family who are serving, but all have one thing in common – “a desire to show honor and respect for our fallen troops.”  The Patriot Guard escorted Petty Officer Miranda from McGuire Air Force Base to the funeral home and has been keeping an honor guard there during visitation.  Tomorrow, they will join several other groups in escorting the procession from the funeral home to the cemetery.  Baumann told me that the Patriot Guard will also have flag lines at both locations. 

 

“It is,” he said, “our honor that we can do this.”

 

While we hear a great deal from people who say that they support our troops, I spent a good part of the day with people who are actively involved in doing just that for Denis Miranda and his family. 

 

American Legion Post 129 (alpost129.com) is preparing for a long day tomorrow.  Wendy Sharkey, founder of the post’s Legion Riders, told me that the post was expecting up to 1000 people.  The post will be hosting the repast for the family following the interment and will also be a staging area for many of the supporting organizations.  She expects them to include Warrior Watch Riders (warriorswatch.org) and Rolling Thunder (rollingthunder1.com).  All of these organizations have been working together to provide escorts, honor guards, and support. 

 

American Legion Post 129 is providing the food and drink for the repast.  Dennis Grella, one of the Sons of the American Legion, was in the kitchen where a crew was busy preparing for tomorrow. 

 

“We give back to our country,” Grella told me, echoing the sentiments of nearly everyone I spoke to.  “When it comes to troops, everything stops.  Everything stops for the troops.”

 

And that’s the way it should be.

 

Between now and January, approximately a thousand men and women will be deployed from New Jersey.  For them and their families, we are still very much at war.  And for the organizations and volunteers who serve them, the challenge is ongoing.  At deployments, at returns, at family information briefings, and, maybe most importantly, at funerals, these people show up time after time – in rain, in snow, at all hours of the day and night to honor and serve our men and women in uniform.  These organizations need all the support they can get.

 

As Ronnie Micciula of the American Recreational Military Service (ARMS – supportarms.org) says, “There’s a lot of troops going and it’s going to be tough to provide for it, but we’ll find a way.  How can we let our soldiers and their families down? We owe it to them.  They work so hard to serve us.  It’s an honor to serve them.”

 

Tomorrow morning, as  dedicated men and women from these organizations help lay to rest an American hero, the Miranda family will bury their oldest son.  Perhaps we should keep in mind the words of Thomas Paine:

 

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

 

And we should all take a moment to thank and remember Petty Officer 3^rd Class Denis Miranda.

 

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NJ Should Exit RGGI Now

By “Firesign58”

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In Memory Of Donald Charles Unsworth

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Happy Birthday Anna Little!

Today is GOP CD-6 candidate, Highlands Mayor Anna Little’s birthday.
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Friends, family and supporters will be gathering at Bahr’s Landing in Highlands this evening from 7-11 to celebrate.

The event is not a fundraiser, though I suspect if you bring your checkbook and would like to make a contribution to Little’s congressional campaign that somebody there will accept it.  Ray and Jay Cosgrove are setting up a buffet dinner for $25 per person including their newest menu item, Clams Anna Little.  You can also order off their fabulous menu.

All are welcome.  If you are planning to attend please respond to [email protected] .

Respond early.  If the response is enormous as expected, Wayne Pomanowski will be spending the afternoon digging clams

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61% Favor Repeal of Health Care Law. Pallone Doesn’t Care

61% of likely voters favor repealing  Obama Pallone Care, including 50% who strongly favor a repeal, according to a poll released by Rasmusssen  this morning.

Just as he said at his town hall meetings last August, Frank Pallone doesn’t care what his constituents think.  He knows better.  Just ask him.

Last Friday at the MODC candidates lucheon, Pallone spoke favorably about his health care bill, calling it one of the two accomplishments of the current congress.

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