Newark West Ward councilman Ron C. Rice makes it official with the release of the video below on his website, issuing a primary challenge to Rep. Donald Payne - first African-American ever elected to Congress from New Jersey - for the seat that's been his since 1989. Payne is 77.
Our Congress is broken. We need new ideas and new leadership to finally tackle age-old problems that have persisted in our nation for far too long. I'm asking for your support. Ron C. Rice (video)
Unlike the northland's other congressional primary contest, Rothman v. Pascrell, this is not the clash of resentful equals and titans that race has apparently gelled into. This is different, the challenge of a young man making waves across generations to an older man in a 22-year incumbency. Donald Payne has a progressive voting record, Ron Rice is a progressive man. That, among other things, will make this an interesting race. Note: Rice's website still lists his as an Exploratory Committee.
(Marie is a public school teacher, a former candidate for the NJ Assembly, and a long time member here at Blue Jersey. I've got more about how the S-L screwed up where Camden St. Elementary is, and why that's important, at my blog. - promoted by Jersey Jazzman)
I'm disappointed to see the Star Ledger Editorial Board miss another opportunity to set the record straight on education 'reform'. I've written previously about their lack of fact-checking, as has Blue Jersey staff writer, Jersey Jazzman.
Yes, editorials are opinions, but they are not the same as water cooler arguments. In order to have validity, the facts supporting the case being made should be accurate. The Ledger has not done its homework for this piece about The Urban Hope Act. As the state's largest newspaper, they reach millions of people who don't know all the issues surrounding education 'reform'. This piece paints the problems Camden and other poor school districts face with broad and misinformed brush strokes.
Given the current culture of ‘blame the teacher’, it’s easy to see how they place the blame for poor performance on ‘disastrous’ instructional programs. Never mind that Camden St. School isn't even in Camden (it's a special education school in Newark), no child can possibly learn and very few teachers can effectively teach in a high school riddled with crime and violence. However, I’ve never heard of any subject—not even math—being responsible for 249 reported incidents of violence. But I do know that things like homelessness, poverty, gang involvement, abuse, drugs, and parents with a history of criminal behavior are—not to mention drastic cuts to the local police force.
Well here's a new and novel way to get into the holiday spirit - a home decoration contest waged between three cities. In what's sure to be a bare-knuckled, knock-down, drag-out fight to have the most kilowatt-hours spent on tiny lights and automated reindeer, the cities of Newark, Jersey City and Roslle are currently embroiled in a friendly competition that just happens to have a great prize: $3,000 for the winning city's library, donated in equal parts by the event's sponsors - Jersey City Councilman Steven Fulop, Newark Councilman Anibal Ramos and Roselle Mayor Jamel Holley.
Ok, ok - back to the fun. Go to this Facebook page, where you can check out all the photos already uploaded by competing citizens - and if you're a resident of one of the participating cities, you can upload your own photos and help boost the chances that your town will win.
(Teacher/candidate Marie Corfield spells it all out: - promoted by Jersey Jazzman)
Before the end of the year Governor Christie wants the legislature to pass the remainder of his property tax ‘tool kit’ including his education ‘reform’ agenda. And the fate of one of the nation’s best public education systems and thousands of its students hang in the balance.
Out of over twenty four hundred schools in this state, about two hundred are not doing a good enough job educating their students. These schools are mostly in the former Abbott districts, some of the poorest cities in this country, where the Black unemployment rate is almost double the state average, and one in five children live in poverty.
The governor and Acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf, along with their education advisors, Better Education for Kids (B4K) and Excellent Education for Everyone (E3), do not address this almost criminal disparity of wealth despite the fact that one of the DOE's earlier Abbott district reports cites poverty as a major roadblock to student achievement:
This was written by Ron C. Rice with Allen Patterson, CEO of Patterson & Fraser, and posted by Newark Councilman Rice. - Promoted by Rosi
Since 1967, the City of Newark has economically struggled. In 44 years, real development did not take place until the early 1990s - the construction of New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The development of this edifice started the energy of citywide "new" construction throughout the '90s. In 2006 and 2007, there were signs of economic retraction possibly leading to a recession and as the recession loomed, the City of Newark began to experience an even more critical condition of its economic pulse: the foreclosure rate elevated to historic highs and the city continued spending more than it was generating despite cutting substantially into the structural deficit.
Recently, the Newark Municipal Council voted for a $616M spending plan thereby ratifying a 2011 budget for the city. In doing so, the council lowered the tax increase originally proposed by Booker's Administration from 7% to 4.6% and maintained the budget's commitment to no furloughs or layoffs. Historically, however, Newark's budget solutions have not tackled the main systemic problems of spending and investing.
It would be easy to say that as the structural deficit grew in our budget, the problem was masked by the use of Port Authority settlement monies to fill budget holes for a decade. It would be easy to say cut all directors' salaries, get rid of all city perks, end all legal contracts, etc. and those cuts alone would annually balance the budget. It would also be easy to merely state that other cities in America are experiencing the same maladies and worse, from laying off half of their police forces to declaring bankruptcy. But all of those arguments hide the fact that we have real assets in our city that we have not had the collective will or the statewide support to use for the benefit of our city's progress.
Despite the snow and slush, there was a good turnout at a Get Out The Vote Rally tonight in Willingboro. The keynote speaker was Newark Mayor Cory Booker (who was introduced by long-time New Jersey resident and Olympic gold medal winner Carl Lewis). Booker spoke in support of our legislative slate (Assemblyman Herb Conaway, Troy Singleton, and Gail Cook). Following his remarks, Booker spoke with Blue Jersey:
Mayor Booker's remarks to the crowd are below the fold.
Today's first public hearing of the New Jersey Congressional Redistricting Commission was a disappointment. Similar meeting for the legislative districts were held earlier this year and spanned several hours with testimony from dozens of advocacy groups. By contrast, today's hearing was concluded in 45 minutes, including the introductory remarks.
Held in a mostly-empty auditorium on the Rutgers-Camden campus, the hearings were chaired by Rutgers-Newark Law School Dean and former State Attorney General John Farmer, Jr . On the stage, Farmer was flanked by the six Democratic and six Republican members of the Commission.
The half dozen witnesses were comprised of politicians, gadflies, and a solitary union leader. There were no representatives from the minority communities or even the ubiquitous Tea Party.
Perhaps the reason for the lack of public input was the fact that the venue was not formally announced until after Blue Jersey poked the Commission on Tuesday of this week, and the meeting was held during working hours.
While the rules for Congressional redistricting are generally stricter than those for the legislature, keep in mind that the work that this Commission does will determine district boundaries for the next five Congressional election cycles. And while redistricting probably won't correct the gender imbalance in our Congressional delegation, the lines that are drawn will have a big impact on minority representation.
Let's hope for a better turnout at the October 11 sessions in Newark and New Brunswick. The commission's web site is njredistrictingcommission.org.
Dean Farmer spoke with Blue Jersey after the session. His comments are below the fold.
In the year since the ACLU of New Jersey sent a battery of grievances to the Department of Justice asking it to investigate the Newark Police Department, a few things have happened: the DOJ arrived, Police Director Garry McCarthy promptly left and, most recently, Director Samuel DeMaio and Chief Sheilah Coley have taken the helm of the department. Together, these facts hold promise that the city may at last enter a new phase of police accountability and reform.
Since May, the DOJ has gathered information on the ground from citizens and police officers. It has met with community groups and heard tragic testimony about the lives and families destroyed by the acts of abusive officers.
In Sept. 2010, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, NJ Governor Chris Christie, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah Winfrey announced an exciting step for education reform in America: Mark Zuckerberg would be donating $100 million to improve Newark public schools, a potentially transformative opportunity. This week, nearly a year later, the ACLU-NJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of a local parents' group to find out how that donation, and the plan for what to do with it to benefit their children, came about, since the City of Newark refused to share.
The city of Newark hasn't responded with details, but the mayor of Twitter has: @CoryBooker: All grants of Zuckerberg $ have been made public. New grant announcements coming in Sept RT @bluejersey Update public on Zuckerberg's gift
The next morning, he told the Newark Star-Ledger that he had disclosed everything, and that the records don't exist. Wait, what? Below, you'll find a detailed q+a to clear up as much as possible on our end.
You're suing over the Facebook money. What does that mean? The Secondary Parent Council, a 30-year-old group of parents and grandparents of Newark schoolchildren, requested records about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's gift to the Newark Public Schools using New Jersey's Open Public Records Act (that's OPRA - not to be confused with Oprah, who hosted Mayor Booker, Zuckerberg and Governor Christie on her TV show to announce the gift Sept. 24, 2010).
What information did the parents ask Newark for? In a nutshell, letters, emails, memos and any other documentation between June 1, 2010 and April 15, 2011 (the date the request was filed) related to Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift supporting the Newark Public Schools.
Shouldn't they just accept the money happily, no questions asked, since it's a gift? What Mark Zuckerberg has done for Newark is incredibly generous, and we don't want to take away from the potentially staggering implications of this donation. But part of what made this gift so extraordinary was the promise from all involved - Zuckerberg, Booker and Christie - to be completely transparent with the public, and many parents and grandparents now feel sidelined and disappointed.
But at the same time, this is a gift to a public institution.
There's more ...
UPDATE 6:10pm:@CoryBooker just answered @bluejersey's Tweet: "All grants of Zuckerberg $ have been made public. New grant announcements coming in Sept RT @bluejersey Update public on Zuckerberg's gift"
So, ACLU, want to dispute that? - - Rosi
Laura Baker, a grandmother of a Newark public school student and a member of the Secondary Parent Council (which sued Newark today), explained why she wanted to go to court for the details of Facebook's $100 million donation to Newark Public Schools.
"The city talks a lot about transparency, but we haven't seen a thing," said Baker.
Right now, in Newark's South Ward, there's an exchange going on - toy guns handed over by small children, exchanged for other playthings, or for books. Mayor Cory Booker, whose story and interaction with Newark police and the street crimes they tackle has been chronicled for two years in a documentary series on Sundance, was planning to speak.
The event - Newark's city council members will also attend - is a project of Stop Shootin' Music and its founder Al'Tarik Onque, who lives in Newark.
You can imagine the power of the symbolism here. Toy guns are more than mere baubles. Between 1979 and 2001, gunfire killed 90,000 children and teens in America. Real loss is felt in Newark. And Essex County has more homicides than the next three counties combined. Newark's police force is likely to come under federal monitor after a federal Justice Department investigation spurred by a formal request from NJ's ACLU, citing inaction in its internal affairs bureau - the police dept. policing itself - and community complaints of excessive force.
Asked whether Christie had ruled out restoring some of the funds, a spokesman for Christie, Kevin Roberts, said the governor "is always ready to work with the Senate president, Assembly speaker and Legislature."
Steve Sweeney's reaction?
"We'd be happy to talk to the governor," Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) said at a news conference Thursday
Talk they will. And give in, on something big, they will.
Here's the deal. The cut in transitional aid to cities - to $10 million, far less than Camden alone received last year - was stunning. It hits very hard core Democratic constituencies - urban mayors, political bosses collected to urban mayors that benefit from the budget. And the reality is that, based on our property-tax heavy system, because places like Camden have lost most of their jobs to the surrounding suburbs, they don't have any other way out.
So the Democrats need to get this money back, really, really badly. There's plenty of room to do it given that Christie left more money unspent in this year's budget than at any time in recent memory. The price will be high, and there is a good chance that it will neuter plans by the Democrats to do any serious oversight this summer. But there is very good reason to believe that the price will be paid.
Watch this story in the coming days and weeks, as Charlie Brown rides again.
Get your caption contest toolbelt and strap on the thought bubbles. This is Mayor Cory Booker at the new corporate offices of The Manischewitz Co., yes the sticky Kosher wine people. Newark's gain is Secaucus' loss; New Jersey's biggest city got Manischewitz without tax incentives, for it's "business-friendly climate". So there's that.
For the happy occasion, there was a blessing by the chief rabbi of Israel and Manischewitz baked a monster matzo. That's 25 feet of unleavened yummy loveliness. And as Chris Pedota, Record photog, snapped this picture, Mayor Cory Booker, in a fetching paper hairnet, had just broken off a big chunk.
In police departments, as in biology, a culture can decide the difference between something that saves your life and something that poisons you.
The culture of a police department determines the extent of misconduct, and this certainly applies to Newark, NJ. After decades of efforts to bring accountability to the long-troubled Newark Police Department, the ACLU of New Jersey last year documented widespread reports of police misconduct, including hundreds of allegations of false arrests, sexual assaults, excessive force and deaths in custody. That thick record of abuse helped bring in the U.S. Department of Justice, which announced in May that it would investigate the Newark Police.
Yet just tallying up the number of incidents fails to illustrate how significantly the attitudes of police brass can reinforce unethical behavior behind the precinct doors. The only way to see the corrosive effects of a dysfunctional culture is firsthand, in the day-to-day operations - such as the ones carried out in this confidential tape recording the ACLU-NJ received.
In this 30-minute recording, a former police officer calls the police department to report that his wife, a current police officer, was sexually assaulted by another member of the force. As we hear the officer who took the complaint report the incident to supervisors, the tone of the conversations range from callous to cruel, but never concerned.
As reported here and elsewhere, the ACLU has convinced the U.S. Justice Department to launch a formal investigation into the Newark Police Department over allegations of civil rights violations.
The Star-Ledger reports that when the charges were first raised eight months ago, Mayor Cory Booker was quoted as saying that those alleging the violations were "casting unnecessary aspersions on the police department through the distortion of facts." Translated, that would seem to mean that Booker does not think his cops ever cross the line. According to the ACLU the systemic problems in the department run deep - maybe Booker truly doesn't know what's going on in his own police department? After all, Newark appears to be particularly unresponsive when fielding complaints about such pleasantries as excessive force or unlawful search. Check out this bit from the Star-Ledger:
...out of 261 complaints in 2008 and 2009 involving excessive force; differential treatment; or improper arrest, entry or search, only one was sustained... records showed the outcome of one of every 10 internal affairs complaints filed against Newark police officers from 2000 to 2008 was not reported to the Attorney General's Office as required by state guidelines.
Background: Henry Velandia and Josh Vandiver were married in Connecticut and now live in New Jersey. Vandiver has filed a petition seeking a marriage-based green card for Henry, who is originally from Venezuela. However, current U.S. law, which permits citizens to sponsor their opposite-sex spouses, does not afford same-sex couples that same right.
So, Henry faces deportation - essentially for being gay.
But, following an 11th-hour signal from Attorney General Eric Holder late yesterday, there was cause for hope going into today's rally and deportation hearing. Specifically, and in furtherance of the Obama Administration's shift against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), Holder vacated a Board of Immigration Appeals decision in another case involving a same-sex couple.
Today, a boisterous crowd gathered outside the Federal Building in Newark, to send a message that it's time to start treating same-sex couples as equals, and to end the discrimination against same-sex couples like Josh and Henry. And, shortly thereafter, the Immigration Judge in Newark "agreed to adjourn the case" til December of this year.
Happy ending?: So Henry gets to stay. For now. It's great personal news for this one couple. But, the idea that a lawfully married couple is still forced to endure the agony of wondering whether, and for how long, they will be allowed to remain together is hideous.
It's situations like this that I'm reminded of when people throw phrases around like "one-issue candidate" or "big picture" or "moderate republican." The continued discrimination against same-sex couples in America should no longer be acceptable. It's not okay. Case closed.
After a life of hardcore politics, a rise to the top of the heap in New Jersey politics, and a harsh comedown in which political scandal was overshadowed by a very public coming out, Jim McGreevey settled into a life in a beautiful house in Plainfield, a relationship with a man employed by his biggest contributor, jailbird Charles Kushner, and a very different life. After he resigned on Nov. 15, 2004, McGreevey's image and life underwent a radical shift. He was seen, relaxed, at ease and besweatered, in the documentary Outrage, speaking as a battle-scarred proponent of gay politicians living openly so their political lives don't make lies of their personal lives. That change, especially, is welcome. He left the Catholic Church he was brought up in after leaving office, and earned a Master's degree in divinity from the General Theological Seminary in NYC a year ago. He began helping former inmates recover their own lives at Integrity House, a mental health and drug addiction center in Newark. McGreevey was steering his life toward becoming an Episcopal priest. The Episcopal Church calls for full civil equality of gay people, and most dioceses ordain openly gay men and women; being gay is not a stumbling block to leadership in that church.
But today, we learn from the New York Post McGreevey's dream of becoming a priest has been dashed by church leaders uncomfortable with McGreevey's behavior during his likewise very public, and very traumatic divorce. This quote is particularly rough:
"It was not being gay but for being a jackass -- [McGreevey] didn't come out of the whole divorce looking good," said a source with the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.
Dina Matos McGreevey was the dazed-looking wife standing by her husband's side during his "gay American" resignation speech. In a tell-all book, Silent Partner, Matos painted a picture of McGreevey as self-important, demanding and insulting, directing her that day to pull herself together for his speech and "act like Jackie Kennedy" and ordered her to move out of the Drumthwacket "so she wouldn't look like white trash". The McGreeveys argued very publicly about whether she knew he was gay, over custody of their daughter, and over alimony. And both of them accused the other of bad parenting. Dina Matos' appearance on Oprah was an hour of revelation designed to sell books (which it did) and maintain some control over the picture McGreevey, consummate politician, painted of himself. She said, among other things, that McGreevey told her "his truth" in "cowardly installments".
Frankly, I have trouble forgiving Jim McGreevey for the political corruption. But I'm glad to see him live more openly. As to the rehabilitation post-politics, I'm for redemption, whether it comes in paths to the priesthood or any other way. I'm glad to see McGreevey work with people rebuilding their lives. McGreevey may yet become a priest, there is a suggestion that further study may yet have that chance. I hope he does. He'd make an interesting priest.
US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is in Newark right now, at a "Town Hall" open only to teachers and other "education stakeholders". He is joined there by Congressman Donald Payne, and Newark's mayor, Cory Booker.
Duncan will be discussing the federal TEACH Campaign to recruit teachers to "high-need" urban and rural school districts. But it's likely other issues, like privatizing New Jersey schools and the role Acting NJ Ed Commissioner Chris Cerf has played in the direction Newark's public schools may take.
