Garden State Equality tries to muzzle concerns about sexualizing children

By Rubashov

Two recent events offer a contrast in different religious outlooks.  On the one hand, we have the Mayor of Hoboken.  On the other, a School Board Trustee in Hackensack.  Both made comments about the beliefs of others.

In April, the Mayor of Hoboken used the phrase “hateful rhetoric” to describe the display of a bible verse at a peaceful demonstration to protest the efforts by self-described “drag queens” to introduce children as young as three to their belief system.  Not to be outdone, the Hudson County Democratic Organization LGBTQ Caucus attacked the Roman Catholic group that organized the protest, calling their beliefs “a hateful and discriminatory ideology.”

Now you can bet that neither the Mayor or the LGBTQ Caucus would have had the guts to attack the verses from a different religious book – say, the Koran – with quite the same viciousness.  And yet, the respective books of Christians, Jews, and Muslims all lay down the same prohibitions in these matters.  They are all “People of the Book”. 

A few years ago, a very few, there was a general consensus about all those marketing categories represented by all those letters.  Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama… they all opposed things like same-sex marriage.  That was until the day before yesterday, when our masters suddenly switched and embraced all that they once opposed.  We are experiencing something like the confusion Rome found itself in when, towards its end, the Emperor decided to ditch the old Roman gods and ordered his people to embrace Christianity.  The old ways were still practiced in private, but in public, it became more and more necessary to conform to the “new” religion.   

Some call this “progress” but others, with a longer historical perspective, can draw parallels that mark it a new paganism.  Whatever it is, it is certainly faith-based, resistant to science and debate. 

Whether this is our new “public” religion, or simply a pseudo-religious cult, all the elements are there.  Proselytizing to children is a part of all religious groups who make the oppression of the cult central to their ideology.  This was so with Jim Jones, David Koresh, the “Children of God” cult, and many others.  Did they not all operate under the banner that children be sexualized at the earliest possible moment?  Did they not preach endlessly about “Love”?  That “Love is the Answer”, “Love is Love”?   

Sex is as addictive as tobacco and like the sellers of cigarettes (or narcotics) they like to get them while they’re young.  So they come for the children.  Public libraries host “drag queen story hours” for little children, with readings by folks with names like “Lil Miss Hot Mess”.  Isn’t “hot” an explicitly sexual term?  School curriculums now include such varied activities as “condom races” – in which 10 and 11 year-old girls compete to be the first to put a condom on a model of an erect adult male penis.  All watched by their male classmates.  Magazines like Teen Vogue – specifically marketed to children – argue that prostitution is just a job, work like any other, with no moral or psychological concerns whatsoever. 

This is all part of our “new” public religion.  So a new law, signed by Democrat Governor Phil Murphy, mandates the teaching of people from history based on how their alleged sexual practices conform to one of a series of letters in the marketing code of our “new” public religion.  It’s a rather shallow way to teach, for how can the endless ways in which human beings order their lives really be bound and categorized by a half dozen letters – or indeed, a thousand? 

Within the last few days, a School Trustee in Hackensack had the temerity to express an opinion on the new mandate that failed to conform to the new public religion.  In response, Garden State Equality (GSE) – the “LGBTQ” equivalent of Hezbollah – went all jihadist on the trustee, demanding that she be forced into submission or made to resign and shunned thereafter. 

An email from GSE made it clear that they weren’t stopping with her:  “It’s imperative that each and every education official across New Jersey understands that our curriculum law must be faithfully implemented.”  Each and every.  There is no place for religious dissent. 

This is the new “public” religion and it allows no public expression of older religions.  All must conform.  Such “conformity” rubs those of us, like your humble scribe Rubashov, the wrong way.  They can stick their conformity. 

If you are interested in standing up for the American Bill of Rights, Free Speech, Religious Liberty… or if you just want to tell our new masters to shove their conformity, you can do so TOMORROW.

GSE has called for an all-out jihad.  On Tuesday, June 25th, at 7:30pm, you can show up to the Hackensack City Council Meeting at Hackensack City Hall, 65 Central Avenue, on the 3rd floor.  Perhaps there will be an honest and open discussion on free speech and the new conformity?  Instead of dishonest conformity – the child of oppression – maybe GSE will embrace the diversity that is not confined by a mere handful of letters?  Will they embrace the common humanity that they share even with those who do not “celebrate” their beliefs?

Maybe… but it will be a snapshot of at what stage we are in the hegemony of our new public religion.  It should make for an interesting spectacle. 

If you want to contact the Hackensack City Council, you can do so by following the links on this page…

http://www.hackensack.org/content/6819/7221/7772/default.aspx

The GOP is the natural party of suburban New Jersey.

Matt Rooney is right.  The Democrats’ “unwillingness to end the redistribution of funds from the suburbs to failing urban schools remains the single biggest driver of our state’s nightmarish, neighborhood-killing property taxes.”

The Democrats could – and should – be challenged on their cruel insistence that economically distressed families in suburban and rural New Jersey be made to subsidize rich corporations and wealthy professionals in places like Jersey City and Hoboken.  The tax breaks with which urban Democrat bosses favor contributors to political campaigns are paid for with subsidies from struggling communities throughout New Jersey. 

There is more than enough corporate and professional money in urban New Jersey to cover the education of the children who live there.  If those interested parties were made responsible for the children of their communities the educational systems there would be subject to a greater degree of local oversight and on-the-spot scrutiny by those stakeholders.  Absent that, under the current system of subsidy from afar, those subsidized stakeholders are more than content to allow political corruption to flourish, just so long as they keep getting their discount. 

It is shameful for One Percenters like Phil Murphy, Steve Fulop, Lacey Rzeszowski, and Saily Avelenda to don their pussy hats and try to argue that their tax breaks are about “helping poor children”.  Not when their “philanthropy” is paid for by over-taxed, working class families trying to stay out of foreclosure. There is nothing LIBERAL about screwing over working class families to pay for propping-up corrupt urban political machines. 

As far back as the administration of Governor Jim McGreevey, the Democrats knew that half of the state’s economically disadvantaged children lived outside the over-funded urban Abbott school districts.  More than a decade has passed since the state Supreme Court issued its report on this – and NOTHING has been done to overturn the fundamental unfairness of the state’s system of funding education. 

Since the economic crash of 2008, suburban and rural poverty has grown in New Jersey and throughout the United States.  That’s what the liberal to centrist Brookings Institute has argued in their published studies.  Brookings’ experts also note that, since the 1960’s, most of the nation’s anti-poverty programs have been aimed at the cities.   

Rural and suburban New Jersey lack even the basic infrastructure to help get people back on their feet – on top of which local municipalities are robbed of the property taxes that could help with this.  Everything is taken from them – in the name of the urban poor – but for the use of the One Percent and the corporations they control. 

Corrupt urban political machines, corrupt vendors, rich corporations, and wealthy professionals all make out under the Abbott regime.  The genuinely poor remain trapped in schools that, for all the money spent per pupil, fail to educate their students or prepare them for the working world.  The kids are used as pawns, as an excuse, for the corruption and those getting rich from it.

More than a decade ago a prescient writer by the name of Paul Mulshine argued that the life of every child mattered and that the state needed to provide a uniform baseline of funding.  Instead, the Democrats have ensured that the money continues to miss those poor children living outside the Abbotts, while failing to help those living within the Abbotts. 

The question is, will those currently charged with leading New Jersey Republicans into their next battle recognize these stark facts starring them in the face?  Will they make use of them?  If not for their own political ambitions and those of their party – Republican leaders should be urged to do so on behalf of over-taxed working people, their children, and for the child pawns being used but not served.

New Jersey Republicans face extinction.  Their fighting prowess is minimal.  It has reached the point where any plausible Democrat candidate with a modicum of funding can expect to simply march in and take most of their remaining legislative seats.  Not in Northwest New Jersey mind you, where every Democrat on the ballot was just ruthlessly slaughtered and where the Democrat who challenged Senator Steve Oroho in 2017 lost her school board seat.  This is where the pussy hats run into a phalanx of flannel shirts (and those are the women!).  

In his column (https://savejersey.com/2018/11/n-j-republicans-are-letting-sweeney-appropriate-their-strongest-argument-rooney/), Matt Rooney raises the question of whether Assembly Republican Leader Jon Bramnick is up to the task of fighting the Democrats next year.  Whether he is a “wartime consiglieri” or not.  We hope that he is, but at the present, he appears to be more concerned about how he is perceived within the “bubbles” of Trenton and Westfield (whose median income is double that of Sussex County). 

Assembly Leader Bramnick would do well to break out of this bubble.  “Bubble land” doesn’t understand America.  It is too rich, too privileged, too unconcerned with the basics of shelter and debt to worry about those who are.  Bubble land never understood the rise of Donald Trump.  Never got the levels of pain and disappointment that the eight gray years of Barack Obama brought to those working class people who voted for him in 2008.  They put it down to “racism” when it was really about the threat of foreclosure – of losing… everything.

We urge Jon Bramnick and the other leaders of the NJGOP to embark on an experiment in listening and learning.  Not the usual photo-op in Newark… go to where the new poverty is.  Visit a food pantry in what everyone thinks is a middle class town.  Watch the people who once had a good job, with benefits and a pension, but who now work three without.  Notice the high priced automobiles, now over a decade old.  Drive around and take note of the “for sale” signs.  Visit an encampment of working people who have lost their homes.

This isn’t a time for rallying around a corrupt Establishment that – uses poor people as an excuse to rape working people to make rich people richer.  No matter how you personally feel about the Democrats responsible, these are bad policies and they must be challenged.  The choice must be one of clear-blue-water between the parties.  Again, if not for your own political ambitions and those of your party, do it for the over-taxed working people, for their children, and for the child pawns being used but not served.

Matt Rooney makes the point very clearly:  “Taxpayers want an advocate… not a mediator.”  Amen.

The Democrats' moocher towns strike again

Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-05) claims that some places "mooch" off other places when they get back from government more than they pay in.  According to Gottheimer, the country's top "moocher" is Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of African-American residents -- 37 percent and growing -- because the state gets more back than they pay in. 

Is Gottheimer a racist?  Last Friday, Gottheimer was joined at a press conference by Democrats Phil Murphy and Tim Eustace to discuss ways to redress this "moocher" situation.  Are they coddling Gottheimer's racism?  If so, has anyone told the incoming First Lady?  New Jersey's answer to Madame Mao will not be amused.

If there are "moocher states" as Democrat Gottheimer claims, can we apply Gottheimer's measurement to other cases -- such as the relationship between municipalities or school districts within a state?  If, as the Democrat Congressman claims, there are places that "mooch" off the federal government, does it not also follow that there are places that "mooch" off state government?

We've already learned that towns like Sparta get back just 15 cents on every dollar they pay in state income tax to Trenton.  That's right, in what Congressman Gottheimer would call a clear case of mooching, Asbury Park paid in just a sixth -- in income taxes per person -- of what Sparta did, but got back 17 times more!

            Sparta Twp  $5,611,989 (received) / $36,267,481 (paid) = $0.15

            Asbury Park $57,632,816 (received) / $3,835,809 (paid) = $15.02

We've also learned how poor families in suburban and rural New Jersey are subsidizing rich people in chic urban hotspots.  Their cut of the revenue from the state income tax allows these hotspots to keep their property taxes comparatively low.  For example, despite being clearly being economically better-off, Hoboken gets its property taxes underwritten by the income tax revenue paid by rural Warren County:

 Warren County has double the population of Hoboken City (107,000 to 52,000) but the population of Hoboken has been growing while Warren is shrinking (5% vs. -1%).  And while Hoboken has just 800 veterans, Warren County has over 7,000.  The per capita income of Hoboken City is over $70,000.  This compares with Warren County, at $33,000.  The median value of an owner-occupied home is $550,700 in Hoboken but only $271,100 in Warren County.  The U.S. Census reported that 5.5% of the people in Hoboken are without health insurance vs. 12.5% of those in Warren County.  73.5% of those 25 or older in Hoboken have graduated from college.  In Warren County that figure is 29.6%.

Enter the State Highlands Act... Passed by a Democrat-controlled Legislature and signed into law by Democrat Governor Jim McGreevey, the Highlands Act undertakes the worthy cause of preserving the aquifer that supplies the drinking water for a large urban population in Northern New Jersey.  Unfortunately, it does so at the expense of rural and suburban property owners -- who saw their land rights seized and the use of their land forcibly regulated -- without compensation. 

The Highlands Region encompasses nearly 859,267 acres across seven counties -- including Sussex and Warren Counties.  In the phrase coined by Democrat Gottheimer -- upscale urban areas are "mooching" off economically disadvantaged rural areas and the state is refusing to provide compensation to those being "mooched" upon.

On Monday, in one of the last legislative acts of the year, Congressman Gottheimer's fellow Democrats made it a point to further piss on the hopes and property rights of the economically disadvantaged communities under the boot of the Highlands Act, by undoing a Christie administration rule that allowed a small measure of development in those areas affected.  With incoming Governor Phil Murphy urging them on from the sidelines, the Democrat-controlled Legislature rescinded the Christie rule and, in so doing, made the property in question next to worthless. 

As Josh Gottheimer would say, the Democrats once again gave more to the "moochers" and took away more from those being "mooched" upon.

Republicans like Senator Steve Oroho and Assemblyman Parker Space gave it their best, but with Phil Murphy's full support for the "moochers" and a Democrat-controlled Legislature, the resolution overturning the Christie rule barely passed the state Senate with the minimum 21 votes needed and the Assembly with 42 votes.  One of those votes to help the "moochers" at the expense of those "mooched" upon was cast by Assemblyman Tim Eustace -- who was at last Friday's press conference with Phil Murphy and Josh Gottheimer -- to complain about the "moochers"!  How is that for hypocrisy!

Why do Trenton Democrats continue to support allowing rich people in towns like Hoboken to "mooch" off poor families in places like Warren County?  Somebody needs to ask Democrats like Phil Murphy and Tim Eustace next time they hold a press conference with Josh Gottheimer to complain about "moocher states."

The Quinnipiac Poll: Manufacturing Consent

If you want a picture of how the establishment manufactures a false consensus, you need go no further than the Quinnipiac University Poll released last month:

https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/nj/nj02012017_Nu673pkc.pdf/

Let's start with the subject line.  It read:  "Quinnipiac University Poll shows NJ Majority Favors Affordable Housing."

Sure.  And how many people support un-affordable housing?  That's a thumb on the scale for a start.

We suspect that if you were to switch the term "affordable" for terms like "taxpayer-subsidized" or "builder-subsidized" or just plain "subsidized" housing, you would get a very different response.  Try the phrase "Section-8" if you really want to get a howl!

And you are never going to get a true picture by wording the question this way:

12. As you may know, the New Jersey Supreme Court recently ruled that all New Jersey communities must allow the development of affordable housing for middle class and low income people.  Do you agree or disagree with this New Jersey Supreme Court decision?

Most people think of themselves as middle class.  This is like asking, "the New Jersey Supreme Court recently ruled that all New Jersey communities must allow the development of affordable housing for people like you.  Do you agree or disagree with this New Jersey Supreme Court decision?"

That's an elbow on the scale for sure.  Go ahead, test it without the "middle class" and see what happens.  We dare you.

And here is a muddle designed to achieve a predetermined outcome: 

19. Do you think the state should provide every school district the same amount of funding per student, or do you think the state should continue to provide low income school districts with additional funding per student to make up for lower funding from property taxes?

Is Hoboken a "low income" school district?  Is Jersey City?  Is there not enough wealth present in those communities to support the education of the children who live there?

And what is meant by "additional funding"?  A little vague isn't it?  Let's see what happens when you plug in a figure like $15,000 per student or $20,000 or more?

Here is a question that you will never see in a Quinnipiac University Poll:  "Do you think low income taxpayers from rural and suburban New Jersey should subsidize urban school districts in communities like Hoboken and Jersey City?" 

This is how the establishment avoids discussion of the topics it would rather not discuss.  The State Supreme Court's own Doyne report showed that half of the state's economically-disadvantaged children fell outside those so-called "low income" school districts presently served by the status quo.  The Brookings Institute has studied and warned of the explosion of suburban poverty since the Great Recession, but in New Jersey, we don't discuss such things.

Academic polling, once used to ignite conversation, is being used to stifle it in New Jersey.  Even putting a finer point on a question, for instance, by identifying the "unelected" State Supreme Court as "ordering" the "elected" Legislature, would cause respondents to consider the question differently and produce a different set of results.  As academics, you would think such considerations would excite the intellectual curiosity, but apparently not.  That's not what they do.  Their job is to club all non-conformers into the prescribed patterns of thought.

Instead of providing an outlet for alternative points of view, much of the polling done by the political class in New Jersey is conformist by design too.  Keep your head down, get paid, and do not question the shibboleths.

We have just been through a national election in which the weaknesses of conformist polling were stunningly exposed.  We found that not only could you think the unthinkable, you could say it too, and you could be elected President of the United States by saying it.  It wasn't the populists who elected Donald Trump, it was the pollsters and academics who had confidently told people for years that they could safely ignore everything he talked about.

Something for the GOP Senate caucus to think about as it tries to deep six the "fair school funding" argument in favor of a more conformist message.  You might want not to believe it, the profs at Quinnipiac might not want to believe it either, but Donald Trump really did happen.  Reality does have a way of giving La La Land a rude wake up.