Yesterday I had the pleasure of catching up with one of the best public servants New Jersey has ever produced.
He is not well-known even in Democratic circles, let alone the state of New Jersey, and he last served in public office when Leonid Brezhnev was Premier of the USSR.
Frank Herbert, however is definitely not someone to forget, particularly if you're a New Jersey Democrat or - even more so - a progressive.
You see, Frank Herbert did 2 things that New Jerseyans and progressives should forever be grateful for:
1) He pushed for and got the Legislature to pass the law that created New Jersey Transit, a system that provides business and social lifelines for hundreds of thousands of our residents.
2) He is the only candidate in New Jersey history to win a Federal election as a write-in candidate. In doing so, he saved the Democratic Party from nominating a Holocaust-denying, KKK-loving extremist.
Jennifer Beck voted against gay marriage in 2009 claiming that's what her constituents wanted. She swore she'd stand firm on this issue. (Even though as an Assemblywoman in the same 12th District she supported the 2nd class Civil Unions law on behalf of the same constituents).
She claimed she'd never back down.
But that was before Long Branch, Ocean Grove, Asbury Park and other LGBT friendly towns became part of her district.
Now all of sudden Senator Beck is ready to support the very legislation she opposed. Her flip-flop on marriage equality is an insult to the LGBT community.
Are we now expected to believe that these are her true convictions? Or was she voting with her conscience when she voted the first two times around? At that point, Governor Corzine would have signed marriage equality into law. Christie has vowed to veto any such measure.
Beck threw us under the bus when she voted against equality when she thought that that would advance her political career with a Governor-elect Christie.
Earlier today, Douglas Herbert's Congressional Campaign announced they had secured the endorsement of General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander. The announcement, now prominently displayed on the homepages of both the Doug Herbert Campaign and WesPAC, emphasizes Herbert's military service and continued dedication towards service as a human-rights lawyer. The endorsement closed with the message, "I endorse Douglas Herbert not simply because he is the right choice for New Jersey's Eleventh District, but because he is the right choice to help move our country forward."
This endorsement comes at a critical moment for Douglas Herbert, who is locked in a race against eight-term incumbent and fourteenth richest member of Congress Rodney Frelinghuysen for the seat representing New Jersey's eleventh district. Veterans issues, which will surely come to the forefront of this contest following the endorsement, is not an area where Frelinghuysen could claim an advantage after both voting against the GI Bill and receiving low marks from the League of Disabled Veterans. Douglas Herbert has made it a priority of his to ensure that military hospitals and the VA receive the funding they need.
Douglas Herbert's Campaign is quickly gaining traction. What was once a token opposition to a safe Republican seat is quickly gathering momentum in grassroots donors and volunteer-driven campaigning. General Wesley Clark's endorsement, one of just two nationwide as of this writing, is sure to do a world of good for Douglas Herbert.
Each week, Blue Jersey Radio streams LIVE with Jersey's latest political buzz, interviews with newsmakers, and your stimulating calls Number: (646) 652-2773.
Tonight we'll learn all about Douglas Herbert's bid to unseat Rodney Frelinghuysen in NJ-11. In the meantime, even if you live outside NJ's 11th Congressional district, you can join Douglas Herbert's FaceBook group and help spread the word. Or, check out his website.
You won't want to miss an episode - and of course, you never have to. Listen to them all on Blogtalkradio, or download any show on iTunes.
On Friday I held a press conference in Sparta New Jersey on the Education crisis facing our schools.
We cannot continue to ignore the needs of the students and teachers of this state. We have to make real steps towards ensuring that the future of our children is being fought for by our Congressional Representatives.
My opponent has thus far refused to debate me. Its because he and his career politician colleagues dont have solutions for the struggles of real people. I am going to continue to fight for these issues that matter to hardworking Americans.
Sincerely,
Douglas Herbert
New Jersey Eleventh
Please feel free to read an article from the NJ Herald on the event.
(Morristown) - August 10, 2010 - Douglas Herbert condemned Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen's vote today against the 'Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act.' "Instead of helping to keep 138,000 hardworking teachers in their classrooms, Frelinghuysen voted them out of a job," said Doug.
"This type of legislation should not be about partisanship," Doug continued, "this legislation is about insuring that our schools are properly staffed to care for and to educate our children." Along with other long-term Washington incumbents like John Boehner, "Frelinghuysen's vote will increase class sizes and negatively impact the quality of education our kids receive. Without the financial support that this act provides for the states, teachers across the nation will be laid off and our children will suffer for it."
Doug stated after the vote, "I would have voted for New Jersey's and the nation's children. As a father of three, I know that it is vital that we keep our education system strong. My goal in Congress will be to insure that families across my District and across this nation have access to the best public education and healthcare available. This can be done in a fiscally responsible way that does not pass the bill on to future generations."
To learn more about Doug please visit: www.douglasherbert.org
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has just introduced his new "Partisan Propensity Index" (PPI). If you've been following elections closely, you're probably already familiar with the Partisan Voting Index (PVI) from Cook, and similar statistics from Swing State Project. Cook's idea is to look at how each Congressional District voted for President compared to the nationwide average. So, for example, the NJ5 district (Garrett's) is rated R+7, meaning it voted 7 points more Republican than nationwide, while NJ13 (Sire's) is rated D+21. You can see why Democrats had such a hard time even with a good candidate against Garrett, and why Republicans didn't seriously contest NJ13 when Menendez left it. Unlike Congressional races, where often one candidate is hardly covered in the news and has hardly any campaign budget, the two party's Presidential candidates are well known. The PVI index is widely used to identify competitive districts.
Here's Silver's idea:
Are there any systematic differences in the ways that votes tend to fall for the Congress, as opposed to the Presidency? Are certain districts better or worse for Democrats, or Republicans, than PVI alone would suggest?
It turns out that there's one other factor which is fairly useful to look at, which is socioeconomic status. Relative to how they do for the Presidency, Democrats are somewhat more likely to win races for Congress in poorer districts, and somewhat more likely to lose them in wealthier ones. Another way to put this is that a split ticket of Republican for President, Democrat for Congress is more likely to occur in a poor district, whereas a split ticket of Democrat for President, Republican for Congress is more likely to occur in a wealthy one.
Click through for the statistical analysis he uses. Silver expresses his PPI index as the chance for Democrats to win an open seat in an average election cycle, based solely on two factors: the recent Presidential Vote and the percentage of the population with incomes under $25,000/yr. Here are the results for New Jersey:
District
Name
PVI
PPI
NJ11
Frelinhguysen
R+7
2.5%
NJ5
Garrett
R+7
3.2%
NJ4
Smith
R+6
10.9%
NJ7
Lance
R+3
13.9%
NJ3
Adler
R+1
27.9%
NJ12
Holt
D+5
62.9%
NJ2
LoBiondo
D+1
66.0%
NJ6
Pallone
D+8
85.2%
NJ9
Rothman
D+9
88.8%
NJ8
Pascrell
D+10
96.6%
NJ1
Andrews
D+12
97.0%
NJ13
Sires
D+21
99.95%
NJ10
Payne
D+33
99.998%
The main lesson, if you take this ratings seriously, is that New Jersey's wealth makes the battleground Congressional districts lean Republican compared to how they vote at the Presidential level. In many states, the R+3 and even the R+7 districts have a great chance of going Democratic at the Congressional level, but here NJ5 and NJ7 are actually quite unfavorable, and should vote for the House like R+14 districts in the rest of the country. When we evaluate how our candidates did, it's worth keeping this effect in mind.
Frank LoBiondo's district is the poorest in New Jersey, and by this measure is slightly better for Democrats than Holt's district, but we are stuck with the echo of 1994. In case it's not obvious, being an incumbent matters, scandals matter, and cycles can be more or less Republican than the average cycle, and you should always remember that the most likely outcome doesn't always happen. All of our 2010 races have incumbents so the percentages definitely do not apply. Also, this is the last election in the current districts.
Annual Fall Gala Fundraiser for the Morris Democratic Committee.
Come join the Democrats for dinner, speeches, and a big celebration.
Buffet Dinner $100.00 per person. Couples $175.00. Senior, student rate $75.00.
To Benefit The FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties
www.foodbankmoc.org
Most needed items are:
Ready-to-eat canned meals
Canned Meat
Canned Tuna
Canned Fruits
Canned Vegetables
Instant Potatoes
Canned and Dry Soup
Peanut Butter & Jelly
Canned Pork and Beans
Canned Juices
Sip-size Juices
Hot and Cold Cereal
Pasta & Sauces
Nonperishable milk
For every $5 donated, the FoodBank can distribute $25 worth of food for needy families
Hunger Facts:
Did You Know that:
? Over 100,000 people in Monmouth and Ocean Counties live on incomes that place them
at risk of going hungry?
? Out of every four people that receive emergency food is a child?
? Last year, the FoodBank provided 3.9 million pounds of food to people in need through
over 200 pantries, soup kitchens and other food programs in our two counties.
Before the Professor and Maryann got their due in the Gilligan's Island theme song, they were known collectively as "the rest." And that's about how some of NJ's House races, and the Senate race, must have felt this year.
With the Obama campaign sucking up so much of the oxygen (and money, and energy, and ultimately the very PA-bound volunteers themselves), most of what was left over was focused on the "hot" races in NJ-3, NJ-5, and NJ-7. Like so often in the past, if you weren't running in one of the hot races, then you found yourself with scant attention being paid to your campaign.
In the case of Senator Lautenberg, and our 7 Democratic House incumbents, no news was good news. New Jersey's voters delivered a solid double-digit win to its senior Senator, and sent the Magnificent 7 back to Washington with an average margin of victory of over 40%. But for Congressional Challengers in NJ-2, NJ-4, and NJ-11, it was a different story altogether.
We look at each of these races in more detail below the fold.
Many people projected that Somerset County and the NJ7 would go blue as part of the Obama wave. It didn't happen...not even close. Why? How did the Freeholder and NJ7 campaigns go so wrong? Or is this "As Good As It Gets?"
In Republican Counties (see useful table below the fold to see where your county sits in the rank), I think there has been too much focus on county-wide, Legislative, and Congressional campaigns. These county and regional campaigns just don't seem to be winable...not yet. I feel that the focus should be on municipal success. We need to build strong Democratic Municipal Committees (DMCs). Strong DMCs can do grassroots education to make voters understand the importance of local, county, and congressional government positions. And a strong DMC is vital for building the resumes and experience of candidates at the higher levels. We need to crawl before we can walk.
Use this handy-dandy form to post your winners in the NJ races. Winner gets $7 in monopoly money from the old set in their closest. Mine are after the jump.
Tom Wyka always tells everyone that will listen, how he was inspired by the late Senator Paul Wellstone. A graduate of Camp Wellstone, Tom is following in the foot steps of many a great progressive democrats, wishing to run a people powered campaign, a campaign that values boots on the ground over Washington DC consultants and big time media buys. In spite of soliciting small donations from average voters, and not big donars, Wyka for Congress has raised enough money for TV and radio.
Heres the ad that has been playing in NJ-11 this week.
I am asking you to take Election Day off from work and come to Somerset County to make this election as painful as possible for the Republican bosses. We can win this county for Barack Obama and put some serious dents in the Republican hold here.
Just last month Somerset's registration advantage moved from the GOP to the Democrats, we have awesome candidates for Freeholder in Doug Singleterry and Cecilia Xie Birge, have four different Congressional races (Pallone, Holt, Wyka and Stender), and candidates running in just about every town. This is an opportunity we haven't seen in a long time, and we need your help to make it happen.
We will be working out of Bridgewater (Martinsville), Hillsborough, Montgomery and maybe one other town but our goal is to reach every single district in the county at least once. We need you to give us a few hours to make this happen.
This is an amazing opportunity to put NJ7 in the Democrats' pocket, elect Democratic Freeholders in Somerset for the first time since 1979, take some of the wind out of Rodney Frelinghuysen, and win control of at least four towns.
We need challengers at the polls, van drivers for our volunteers, people to go door-to-door to our voters reminding them to get to the polls, and others to staff the staging areas. Anyone 16 years or older can volunteer on election day and make a real difference.
If you can give us one, two, three, four or eight hours on election day, please give me a call at (908) 561-6387 or e-mail me at nathanrudy@gmail.com .
If you can't come to Somerset, please be sure to volunteer in your home town or county. The more workers we have the more votes we'll get!
Turns out Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen is too chicken to let people video his debate against Tom Wyka. Of course, given what happens when Republican House members talk on tape that's probably a good political strategy for him.
If you're feeling overwhelmed by election year politics don't miss this opportunity to laugh it all off and raise money to send Tom to the House of Representatives!
TomObamaRama will bring together some of your favorite progressive political comics in a hilarious night of election year comedy. Headliners Joey Novick (HBO, Showtime) brings his unique New Jersey home town brand of humor and Sam Greenfield (CNN, Huffington Post) brings the funny from across the Hudson River.
STARRING: Joey Novick & Sam Greenfield
HOSTED by Kevin O'Driscoll
WITH SPECIAL GUEST STAR: Alex Adams as Rudy Giuliani
SPECIAL INVITED GUESTS: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Bono, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leonardo DiCaprio and Pope Benedict XVI
Heres chance for everyone to show some Wyka love next Wednesday, come on over to Livingston, bring your video camera because heres a rare chance to get Rodney on video.
Wednesday, Oct. 22 at 8pm
Livingston Senior/Community Center
204 Hillside Avenue, Livingston
"People who paid into the Social Security system depend on that system," Frelinghuysen said, adding that he wants both houses of Congress to work in a bipartisan way when addressing the crisis that funding for both entitlement programs might face a decade from now.
"I think there's a need for a bipartisan commission in both of these area," he said.
Does this mean he's not going to be pushing those private accounts still unless the commission backs him up? According to the Washington Post:
Rodney Frelinghuysen has voted with a majority of his Republican colleagues 87.8% of the time during the current Congress. This percentage does not include votes in which Frelinghuysen did not vote.
Frelinghuysen described the recently approved credit package in excess of $800 billion "the start of a very long process. Just because we gave power to (Treasury Secretary) Henry Paulson ... doesn't mean we're out of the woods."
The congressman again called for a bipartisan solution, saying that Congress should work toward for both reviving and stabilizing the economy while improving consumer confidence.
I guess even the reporter picked up on the word game, but Rodney wasn't done:
Frelinghuysen, during his summation, stuck to his bipartisan theme in promoting the need for the nation to become independent of foreign oil, and to emerge from the current economic stagnation.
"We don't need members of Congress to poison the atmosphere as we're trying to calm the atmosphere (for) true financial progress," he said.
So to recap, we need to talk about very bi-partisan, while not voting in a bi-partisan manner except for when it comes to replacing him with that partisan Tom Wyka to actually fix the mess that Rodney has helped create.
It could happen to you, even if you have health insurance. Illness and medical bills are the major cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States. Although we have 47 million uninsured people, most of the 2 million people per year affected by medical bankruptcy had health insurance when they first got sick. But they weren't really protected, because of exclusions, high deductibles, and copays. Or they lost their insurance when they could no longer work. At the same time, businesses and local governments are struggling to pay the high premiums for their employees' benefits.
When you buy private insurance, about 30% of your premium goes to overhead: dividends for the investors, the high salaries of their officers, and a bureaucracy that picks your doctor for you and tries to find ways to avoid paying for your care. In contrast, Medicare's overhead is only 3%. How could a government program be so efficient? Well, Social Security's overhead is only 1%. No private pension plan can compare to that!
In this video, Tom emphasizes the plight of so many Americans, many of them close friends and aquiantances, who struggle with the high cost of healthcare in our country. These are real people. They could be your friends, relatives, neighbors or their children. Many of us could be one severe illness away from the same situation.
It doesn't have to be this way. No one in any other industrialized country has this problem. What you have to do is elect people to House of Representatives and the Senate and the White House who will solve this problem. It comes down to you. Please go to www.tomwyka.com to see how you can help.
On Monday, July 14, President George W. Bush lifted his father’s ban on drilling for oil and gas off the East and West Coast and in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. But before anyone can drill there, Congress would have to lift its own ban. The President said that “Now the ball is squarely in Congress’s Court.” However, the President knows full well that lifting this ban will do nothing to solve our current problems. The Energy Information Administration estimates that drilling in those areas won’t affect oil production and thus oil prices before the year 2030. In addition, oil companies already have 68 million acres under government leases that they can currently drill, and exploration ships are booked solid for the next five years.
We got a wakeup call about oil back in 1973, with the Arab Oil Embargo. We hit the snooze alarm again after the 1979 energy crisis. Starting in late 1978, a strike in the Iranian oilfields nearly shut off Iran’s oil production. Although other OPEC countries increased their production, the world’s output of oil decreased by about 4% in the short run. I remember the resulting gasoline shortages very clearly. I was a young teenager then, and I made some money selling newspapers at the end of my block to the people waiting in line for gasoline, at a station about half a mile away. We knew then that even a small decrease in oil supply could cause major problems. Yet what is our government doing while our gasoline prices are soaring? President Bush and our current incumbent Congressman, Rodney Frelinghuysen, opposed efforts to shift tax incentives from big oil companies to efficiency and clean energy technologies, such as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. If alternatives are the future, why propose an oil-based solution that will not show any results for years?
Since the beginning of the oil business, the “problem” that the oil companies nearly always faced was overproduction. The big oil fields were discovered early, and it was all too easy to pump too much of that oil too fast. The resulting “oil gluts” would drop prices very low. But conditions have changed recently. There’s still lots of oil, but what’s left is harder and more expensive to produce. As a result, oil production hasn’t increased lately, despite the record prices. And it’s likely production levels can’t increase. Even Saudi Arabia might be able to produce only 10.4 million barrels per day on a sustained basis, and might not be able to produce more than 12 million barrels per day in emergencies. This is far less than recent optimistic estimates. When you combine stagnant supplies with rising world demand, you get today’s skyrocketing prices.
Currently, the rise in gasoline prices is causing real hardship for people throughout the country. We need Congress to do something that will make a difference now. For example, the American Trucking Associations want the national speed limit to be reduced to 65 mph. We also need more funding for public transit, which is having a huge growth in ridership. We also need to plan for the future. Back in 2006, I called for a new “Manhattan Project”—but this time to develop ways to conserve energy and harness alternative sources of energy. During his last few terms in office, your current Congressman has been too busy supporting the Bush administration and the oil industry’s profit margins to do much about these issues. Don’t you think it’s time for a change?
