Vin Gopal: We need curriculum transparency

By Rubashov

We need transparency and open government. Patrick Henry said, “The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”

We need transparency about what is being taught to school children and what government is paying contractors to create the materials to teach them. The concealment of the truth exposes government’s lack of respect for parents and taxpayers.

Democracy is impossible without transparency.

Senator Vin Gopal seems to agree. This is important, because Senator Gopal is the Chairman of the Senate Education Committee. He recently posted:

In response to multiple articles relating to curriculum education in our schools, I have read through the 66 pages of the Department of Education Guidelines '2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards - Comprehensive Health and Physical Education' as well have spoken in detail with New Jersey Acting Commissioner of Education Angelica Allen-McMillan. Here is what I have learned:

1) Much of what I read in these articles is not in the guidelines. There is generic language on identifying gender roles and treating all kids, regardless or their gender, with respect. Anything that is more specific than that is coming from a specific Board of Education locally.

2) According to the Department of Education Commissioner, these guidelines are not being mandated - they are recommended. It is up to a local board of education to use them if they want but they don't have to.

3) According to the Department of Education Commissioner, any parent can opt their kids out of this if they choose to. I have re-confirmed this with our Monmouth County representative to the State Board of Education which approves the adopted guidelines.

Given the amount of misinformation out there and questions coming from parents, as Senate Education Chair, I have formally called on the Department of Education and the Governor's office to provide clarity on all of these items and issue it publicly before any further action is taken on implementation.

This is an important public admission from a majority party politician. You can read the full post here:

https://www.facebook.com/100003265460331/posts/4911458728972927/?d=n

As a starting point, let’s remember how we got here. After extensive lobbying by activists – including Governor Phil Murphy's wife, Tammy – the New Jersey State Board of Education, in a split vote taken in 2020, adopted new “Comprehensive Health and Physical Education 2.1 Personal and Mental Health by the End of Grade 5” learning standards. The New Jersey Department of Education instructed local boards of education to consider this new curriculum a mandate for the 2021-2022 school year.

What is the New Jersey State Board of Education? It is a state government agency. According to its website (www.nj.gov/education/sboe/):

The New Jersey State Board of Education has 13 members who are appointed by the Governor with the advice and consent of the New Jersey State Senate. These members serve without compensation for six-year terms. By law, at least three members of the State Board must be women, and no two members may be appointed from the same county.

The Commissioner of Education serves as both the secretary and as its official agent for all purposes. The State Board also has a nonvoting student representative selected annually by the New Jersey Association of Student Councils.

The State Board adopts the administrative code, which sets the rules needed to implement state education law. Such rules cover the supervision and governance of the state’s 2,500 public schools, which serve 1.38 million students. In addition, the State Board advises on educational policies proposed by the Commissioner and confirms Department of Education staff appointments made by the Commissioner.

The State Board conducts public meetings in Trenton on the first Wednesday of each month. The State Board Office publishes an agenda in advance of each meeting to notify the public of the items that the State Board will be considering.

The public is invited to participate by providing comments on proposed rules either at a public testimony session or by submitting written comments on proposed rules.

Proposed rules for education in the state are also published in the New Jersey Register. Written comments on proposed rules are accepted 30 to 60 days following publication in the Register and may be sent to the State Board office at the Department of Education.

The Minutes of the June 3, 2020, meeting of the New Jersey State Board of Education read:

Resolved, the State Board of Education reaffirms its commitment to ensuring the Standards both set expectations for and meet the needs of New Jersey’s students and by adoption of this resolution hereby directs school districts to integrate the New Jersey Student Learning Standards – Visual and Performing Arts, Comprehensive Health and Physical Education, Science, Social Studies, Computer Science and Design Thinking, World Languages, and Career Readiness, Life Literacies, and Key Skills in kindergarten through grade 12; and be it further

Resolved, the State Board of Education hereby directs that the revised New Jersey Student Learning Standards – Visual and Performing Arts, Comprehensive Health and Physical Education, Science, Social Studies, Computer Science and Design Thinking, World Languages, and Career Readiness, Life Literacies, and Key Skills will serve as standards of quality for public school students in kindergarten through grade 12 programs in New Jersey; and be it further

Resolved, district boards of education shall fully comply with this resolution and shall implement the revised New Jersey Student Learning Standards for Science, Visual and Performing Arts, World Languages, and Career Readiness, Life Literacies, and Key Skills by September 2021 and Comprehensive Health and Physical Education, Social Studies, and Computer Science and Design Thinking by September 2022, align their curricula with the standards, and ensure students learn and are assessed as required by federal law; and be it further

The entire Minutes of the June 3, 2020, Meeting can be accessed here:

www.nj.gov/education/sboe/meetings/minutes/2020/June%203,%202020.pdf

If the above sounds like religious training, that's because it is.

Taxpayer-supported, faith-based assumptions.

A revolutionary Elite is getting paid by government to erase the past and replace it with some pseudo-religious vision of how things should be.

Nobody voted for this. It isn’t popular.

To paraphrase Joseph Stalin (and this is the view from Trenton): A single act of bullying is a tragedy, a million people bullied is a statistic.

Lonegan: Sitting in on a Sussex County Commissioners' meeting an eye-opener

ditor’s Note: Steve Lonegan was a Mayor for 12 years. He took a town that was nearly bankrupt and turned it to an efficiently run success story. When Lonegan left office, his budget was lower than the budget he inherited 12 years earlier.
 
Lonegan’s reputation for finding fraud, waste, and abuse in a public budget was such that other towns in northern New Jersey hired him to review their budgets and make recommendations. Lonegan not only achieved savings and efficiencies for taxpayers, on two occasions he uncovered criminal activity that resulted in the arrests and convictions of four public officials.
 
Lonegan serves on the Sussex County GOP’s candidate screening committee. He is also chairman of the Cost Cutting & Savings Committee. It was in the latter role that he visited last evening’s meeting of the Sussex County Board of Commissioners. What follows are his observations.
 
By Steve Lonegan
 
The first thing I noticed is that the Commissioners lacked an understanding of Robert’s Rules of Order. They know enough to ask for a motion and a second before each agenda item, but it disappears after that. Two moments are noteworthy:
 
When neither the Board nor the County Administrator could explain why a $1.6 million no-bid contract was handed to an out-of-state election machine company that has made national headlines with its problems, Commissioner Herb Yardley quietly suggested that the contract be held for further review. Yardley’s suggestion was drowned out and then ignored by others on the dais. Can you imagine members of Congress shushing each other like that?
 
The correct procedure would have been to ask Commissioner Yardley to make a motion to table, ask to have it seconded, and then vote on it. Now, the Board will have itself – and the County Administrator – to blame if something goes wrong in the next election, the way it has in the last two elections in Sussex County. This “nothing to see here, move on” attitude towards election integrity is all too familiar but nevertheless tragic.
 
The second incident was when Commissioner Carney wanted to end Sussex County’s mask mandate for county buildings. In the “new business” section of the meeting, Carney noted that other counties had done away with their mask mandates. He was immediately interrupted by a board member who said “I think that there’s discussions going on within administration on that” – that’s right, when you lack political courage, punt it to the bureaucrats. Blue state Governors and Mayors are ending mask mandates all across America, but in supposedly red Sussex County the Commissioners go a wimpy shade of violet when the idea is raised.
 
Commissioner Director Anthony Fasano called ending the mask mandate “a topic the Board is interested in pursuing” – suggesting the Board needed the eventual approval of the County Administrator – to which Carney replied, “Well, if there’s not a problem, why don’t you do it now?”
 
Fasano replied with a sort of “Mooo” and Carney pressed him with, “What’s the hold up?” Then Commissioner Sylvia Petillo jumped in with the claim that it was the County Administrator’s call, not the Board’s call (which is just stupid). The correct procedure would have been to have a motion for a vote, ask to have it seconded, and then vote on it. Put every Commissioner on the record as to where he or she stands in ending the mask mandate. That’s how it works in a representative democracy.
 
Taxpayers can only see who the county pays after the checks have been cut.
 
A double-dipping scam has been taking place in Sussex County. It works like this: A favored worker can retire in their 50s, start collecting a pension, and then get rehired to their old job as a temp through a temporary employment agency.
 
Christina Marks is the President of the CWA union representing most of Sussex County’s day-to-day workers. She asked the Board about the absence of a detailed Bill List in the agenda. This led Freeholder Director Fasano to admit that taxpayers cannot review the county Bill List prior to the Commissioners voting on it.
 
When I was mayor, we always included a detailed list of everyone we were going to pay and posted it 48 hours before a meeting. This is common practice throughout New Jersey and most everywhere else. Sussex County doesn’t do it that way. Instead, they just post totals being paid out but not to whom or for what or any line items at all.
 
Apparently, four of the five Commissioners don’t get to know what bills they are voting for because only the Commissioner Director has the detailed Bill List in his “binder”. This is a terrible system because it allows scams like the one just mentioned to go on. If nobody catches the fact that the county is paying a temp agency, then nobody will know to ask questions.
 
There is also the gross lack of transparency to consider. Let’s look at two counties named Sussex. If you live in Sussex County, Delaware, and you want to know where your tax dollars are going, you simply access this page…

https://sussexcountyde.gov/bills-approval-list

 
Then you click on an individual meeting/approval date and up comes this…
 

https://sussexcountyde.gov/sites/default/files/bills/Invoices%20Paid%20Through%202.11.22.pdf

 
If you live in Sussex County, New Jersey, you fill out an Open Public Records Act form and hope their email system hasn’t crashed that day. Maybe they’ll get back to you in a couple weeks with an acknowledgement and maybe you’ll get an answer some time after that. Or maybe you won’t.
 
This lack of transparency raises the question: What are they hiding?
 
For a local representative democracy to function, the involvement of those the people have elected to represent them is of primary importance. That’s important to keep in mind when judging the efficiency of county governments. Our committee is continuing its review and I will keep you informed of its progress.   

Steve Lonegan is the Father of the Conservative Movement in New Jersey.

Democrats keep public out of “open” meeting to make State House VAX only

By Rubashov

In the coming battles between authoritarianism and democracy, what the State Capitol Joint Management Commission pulled yesterday will be pointed to again and again – used as a cudgel to demonstrate the hypocrisy, lust for unchecked power, lack of rational balance, use of fear, and general bad faith that define the authoritarians. The culprits here are partisan authoritarian bureaucrats – paid by the taxpayer, with benefits superior to those of average taxpayers, and pensions that working people can only dream of.

On a 5 (D) to 2 (R) party-line vote, the Commission voted to block any citizen from entering the public legislative areas of the capital complex if they cannot show proof of vaccination or the negative results of a COVID test from the preceding 72 hours. This includes the public areas of the legislative chambers and the committee hearing rooms, where members of the public once had the right to testify for or against legislation under consideration. All citizens will be required to wear a mask inside the building.

New Jersey now has a vaccine-or-test mandate for entry into public political and policy forums. Citizens not in compliance will be blocked and confronted by men with guns. Any citizen wishing to speak his or her mind to power, whether individually or assembling as a group, to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, is no longer free to do so. Their papers must first be in order. Journalists will likewise be unable to provide the scrutiny that the powerful require.

When it comes to exercising the freedoms contained within the Bill of Rights, five members of a Commission have unilaterally decided that a proof of vaccination card is now more important than a passport. Indeed, the primacy of the proof of vaccination card rises as the need for a passport is diminished.

If this was really about public health, the Murphy administration would not welcome, support, and promote undocumented immigrants residing in the United States in violation of federal law. Especially as so few come from nations that have had the opportunity to offer their people vaccination against COVID-19.

In this segment, anti-authoritarian Democrat Krystal Ball examines the collusion between the Biden administration and the pharmaceutical industry to keep most of the nations of the world unvaccinated and vulnerable – while pursuing a policy of open borders. If this was about public health, the members of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission would be demanding that the national borders be as tight as are the borders they police – the doors of the state capitol building.

Of course, they will not make such a demand because they are aiding and abetting an act of hypocrisy. Now watch this video and listen to a fellow Democrat, a woman of the Left, and a believer in democracy (true to her party’s name):

“The consequences for our own population – of this greed, cowardice, and corruption – will be deadly. We can get every last solitary soul in our own country vaccinated and it is not going to matter much in the end if new variants are constantly emerging from an unvaccinated global south. The pandemic will never end so long as billions of people remain vulnerable as a laboratory for COVID to mutate and jump the vaccines that we’ve already created.”

“Stop worrying about the anti-mask Karens and start worrying about the real COVID criminals, the CEOs and the politicians who would let millions die to protect their profits.”

If Black Lives Mattered as much to the five Democrats on the State Capitol Joint Management Commission as their political bosses say they do, they would issue a statement demanding that American pharmaceutical firms drop their patent protections and allow nations in Africa to produce the vaccine. This would save a lot more lives than any Assembly resolution or protest-turned-riot-turned-looting-turned-arson ever has.

The five Democrats on the State Capitol Joint Management Commission really don’t believe in mass vaccination. This is about power, about crushing the Bill of Rights and bringing a formerly democratic people to heel. They ignore the billions of unvaccinated waiting to come to the United States illegally but demand full compliance from every citizen who wishes to exercise the Bill of Rights.

But the actions of the Democrats who run the State Capitol Joint Management Commission were actually much worse than that described so far. Apparently, someone with the keys to the State Legislature’s website was concerned enough to block access to the Commission’s virtual/remote meeting yesterday morning. We heard from numerous people who looked for the usual link on the Legislature's website to sign-up and provide public input and it wasn’t there. It had been removed.

This went against both the policy of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission and the Open Public Meetings Act. In an October 22nd memorandum to Commission members that was not publicly posted on the Legislature’s website, the Commission Chairman wrote:

Due to the current public health emergency, the State Capitol Joint Management Commission meeting will be conducted remotely. The next meeting of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission will be held on Tuesday, October 26th at 10:00 a.m. in Committee Room 4. All Commissioners will receive instructions for remote access. For anyone who wishes to submit comments on any agenda item, or to participate in the meeting, please have them contact Roger Lai at rlai@njleg.org. For anyone who would like to view the proceedings, they will be live streamed at https://www.njleg.state.nj.us. Enclosed is an agenda and briefing material for this meeting.

In other words, an average citizen, wishing to comment or provide perspective, would need to be invited by one of the Commissioners to do so, as this notice was not made public on the Legislature’s website where members of the public generally go if they wish to testify or comment. The October 26th meeting of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission was posted on the legislative calendar in the usual place on the Legislative website, but all links to testify were removed and the Commission Chairman’s October 26th memo was not publicly posted there.

In effect, public comment was suppressed by the Commission’s actions and indeed, no member of the public was heard from despite dozens going to the legislative website to sign-up to be heard from. Remembering those large numbers of citizens who showed up to the State Capitol to protest attempts to do away with religious exemptions to vaccination, perhaps this is the purpose of the new rule and not “public health” after all?

“The people in charge are intent on replacing our free democratic system with an authoritarian system, where they don’t convince you of anything, they simply make you do things. And they benefit from that.”

Tucker Carlson

After RICO conviction of Opioid maker, Trenton should come clean on Big Pharma connections

By Rubashov
 
On Monday, as Trenton Democrats failed in their attempt to forcibly mandate a Big Pharma product, federal prosecutors in Boston were securing tough sentences in their first Big Pharma conviction in an opioid crisis that has resulted in more than 400,000 deaths.
 
NPR called the criminal trial of top executives at Insys Therapeutics a “landmark case” and the “first successful prosecution of high-ranking pharmaceutical executives linked to the opioid crisis, including onetime billionaire John Kapoor.” 
 
Kapoor and his four co-defendants were found guilty of racketeering and conspiracy – a charge that is often used to prosecute drug dealers and mob bosses.  In this case the federal government used racketeering to go after corporate executives.
 
The Big Pharma executives were found guilty of running a nationwide bribery scheme. According to court documents, from 2012 until 2015, the pharmaceutical company paid doctors to prescribe opioids in high doses and give it to patients who did not necessarily need it.
 
To facilitate their scheme, the Big Pharma executives created a sham "speakers program” where doctors were paid if they wrote a lot of prescriptions.  It’s the same kind of scam that was used by special interests to pay-off friendly politicians. 

Senate President Steve Sweeney and Senate Democrat Leader Loretta Weinberg have promised their political bosses that they will remove the rights of people to have religious and conscientious objections to the use of Big Pharma products, in this session of the Legislature.  There is a real concern here, because pharmaceutical companies like the one sentenced in federal court on Monday have used their billions to shout down average voters.
 
In 2016, Insys Therapeutics underwrote an effort to defeat a ballot initiative in Arizona.  This included an advertising campaign claiming that opposing the measure was to "protect children".
 
Insys Therapeutics’ allies included major state politicians, the Association of County School Superintendents, the Hospital and Healthcare Association, and several other community organizations.  Big Pharma won… defeating the ballot initiative 51.3% to 48.7%. 
 
That’s why it is so important for New Jersey reformers to demand that a fully transparent website be created that details all of Big Pharma’s influence in New Jersey.  There have been too many deaths as a result of that influence and the resulting lax oversight by government.  400,000 dead and counting…
 
The time for transparency is now.

Regina Egea: Why can’t NJ do what Massachusetts did?

Regina Egea is one of the smartest thinkers on public policy in New Jersey.  An M.B.A., former AT&T executive, state Treasury Department official, and Governor’s Chief of Staff – Egea also served in local government as a Deputy Mayor and School Board Member.  As President of the Garden State Initiative, she is collecting the data, studying the issues, and coming up with solutions to New Jersey’s most pressing fiscal concerns.

For New Jersey Republicans, she’s a breath of fresh air in a political culture too often dominated by stale thinking.  If the NJGOP wants to seriously contest for power again, it will be folks like Regina Egea who will provide the policy prescriptions that will inform the narrative on why Republicans should be elected.

Egea recently wrote:  “It is clear that we are at our ‘fork in the road’ in New Jersey and there’s a clear path to improve our economy. Massachusetts decided a generation ago to shed its ‘Taxachussetts’ label and cut its taxes by 25% between 1977 and 2014 while growing its economy and maintaining a public school system at the top of national rankings at a lower cost per pupil than New Jersey… we need leadership now willing to make the necessary reforms to reduce spending in Trenton and throughout New Jersey governments before ‘it’s over.’”

Below are excerpts from Regina Egea’s op-ed published yesterday in the Star-Ledger and on NJ.com:

“New Jersey… is losing income tax revenue. Using 2015-16 IRS data, the Bank of America analysis indicates that high tax states – such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California – are currently experiencing a net loss of high income earners (defined by the Internal Revenue Service). Florida, which has no state income tax, experienced a net gain of over $17 billion in income between 2015 and 2016… In this same time period, New Jersey experienced a loss of approximately $3 billion.”

“The research firm Wealth X reported New Jersey lost 5,700 people with liquid assets between $1 million-$30 million in 2018 – and that’s before the implications of the state and local tax (SALT) cap on federal taxes have truly been felt.”

“The Bank of America also references a February TheHill.com article citing U.S. Census data that states growing in population are usually ‘the same states with lower tax and regulatory burdens, lower government debt and greater transparency and accountability for government spending.’”

“Ironically, New Jersey is turning being home to a relatively high number of ‘millionaires’ into a strategic vulnerability. The top 2 percent of all N.J. income tax filers (who make more than $500,000 per year) account for over 40 percent of all income tax revenue to the state. Since close to 40 percent of state revenues are from personal income taxes, that means more than a third of all state revenues come from the top 1 percent of residents. Increasing dependence on revenue from this group exacerbates our vulnerability. An individual loss in this income category reverberates throughout the state.”

“Now we’re at New Jersey’s ‘Fork in the Road.’ An example of one alternate path is just up I-95 in Massachusetts, where the highest marginal personal income tax rate is just 5 percent, compared to New Jersey where the rate is 10.75 percent (third-highest in the nation). Our second highest in the nation corporate income tax rate of 11.5 percent will inevitably lead to market share loss to not just Massachusetts’ 8 percent rate but other attractive states like North Carolina’s 2.5 percent rate, which helped to lure Honeywell from New Jersey.”

“Massachusetts solidly outflanks the Garden State when it comes to property taxes ($37 versus $51 per $1,000 of personal income) as well as the size of public workforces: theirs is 8 percent smaller than New Jersey.  And Massachusetts, whose annual K-12 education performance closely rivals New Jersey’s, spends nearly 20 percent less on a per pupil basis.”

To read Regina Egea’s entire op-ed, click the link below:

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2019/04/nj-is-at-a-fork-in-the-road-policy-group-says-its-time-to-take-the-less-taxing-path.html

For more information on the Garden State Initiative, explore their website:

https://www.gardenstateinitiative.org/

Better Not Call Slippin’ Johnny Cesaro Until You Check the List

By Scott St. Clair

The “lawyer with baggage” theme is a staple of TV crime dramas. The Law & Order franchise used it as a  plot twist a couple times – here and here – to juice up stories where bogus legal credentials threatened convictions. And the current hit series Better Call Saul has strip mall lawyer protagonist Jimmy McGill aka Slippin’ Jimmy aka Saul Goodman suffering a suspension of his law license for engaging in off-center and dubious shenanigans against his brother.

So it’s hardly surprising that New Jersey politics, always looking to sink to new depths, has gotten into the act with its own slippin’ character, LD-26 Assembly hopeful and current Morris County Freeholder John “Slippin’ Johnny” Cesaro.

You see, it turns out that ol’ Slippin’ Johnny ran afoul of the rules and became “administratively ineligible” to practice law after he failed to comply with state bar association reporting requirements having to do with the Interest on Lawyer Trust Accounts program. As one report described it:

Cesaro was listed as administratively ineligible due to non-compliance with the IOLTA program, a non-profit program that helps disabled and low-income people resolve civil legal matters.

Slippin’ Johnny’s name first appeared on the IOLTA Ineligible List on October 21, 2016. According to Mary Waldman, the newly appointed executive director of the IOLTA Fund of the Bar of New Jersey, attorneys in the state are notified of their filing obligations in December, but those who fail to comply don’t have their names placed on the list until October of the following year, 10 months later. He remained on the list for seven months, not rectifying the situation until just recently.

Waldman said there are close to 90,000 attorneys in New Jersey. The most recent IOLTA Ineligible List had approximately 1,300 names, or 1.45 percent of the total, one of which was Slippin’ Johnny’s who was, per the list, originally admitted to practice in 2001.

It’s not like annual registration and IOLTA reporting requirements are rocket science, especially for someone who was admitted to the bar almost an entire generation ago.  So what was it about Slippin’ Johnny that made him…slip?

Media reports appear to have Slippin’ Johnny talking out of both sides of his mouth on whether he did or did not file his paper work in a timely manner. One quoted him as saying he did – “’This was a clerical error on my part,’ said Cesaro. ‘I send my paperwork in every year, and I sent them in this year,’” – while another has him saying he didn’t – “John Cesaro told Parsippany Focus he registers every year but he apparently failed to do so last year.”

How slippin’ is that, Johnny?

There’s enough slip sliddin’ away already in Trenton, so should Slippin’ Johnny slip down the slippery slope to sloppy legislative details? After all, the devil is always in them, and it’s a pretty significant detail that Slippin’ Johnny botched.   

But what exactly does it mean to be “administratively ineligible”? Admittedly, it’s a far cry from being disbarred or even suspended for an infraction of the rules of ethics. But it does make an attorney who’s on that list legally unable to practice law.

“Administratively ineligible” is defined by the state bar as:

“The attorney is not currently eligible to practice law in New Jersey for one or more reasons, including failure to pay the annual attorney assessment to the New Jersey Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection, failure to register with IOLTA or maintain IOLTA accounts, or otherwise failing to meet the requirements of Rule 1:21-1(a).Administrative ineligibility is not the result of discipline, but attorneys who are administratively ineligible are not allowed to practice law in New Jersey.” (emphasis added)

In other words, if you don’t comply with the IOLTA reporting requirements, you may not pass Go, you may not offer legal advice, you may not collect fees, you may not practice law. If you continue to practice law while ineligible for whatever reason, the state bar association can pile on additional sanctions, as it has done to other attorneys in the past.

Ineligible by any other name – disbarred, suspended or administratively -- is still ineligible. Again, this ain’t rocket science. 

Yet for months Slippin’ Johnny did practice law, which arguably also means he violated the legal canons of ethics for the state bar association, which state:

“RPC 5.5 Lawyers Not Admitted to the Bar of This State and the Lawful Practice of Law

(a) A lawyer shall not:

(1) practice law in a jurisdiction where doing so violates the regulation of the legal profession in that jurisdiction…”

And he did so as a prosecutor or public defender for several townships. Elected officials in jurisdictions for which he provided legal services have expressed concerns over the consequences of Slippin’ Johnny’s ineligibility on criminal and other matters he might have handled for them as well as cases that were strictly within his own private law practice. It just gets curiouser and curiouser.

A call to the state’s Office of Attorney Ethics to ascertain the full ethical ramifications of Slippin’ Johnny’s bungling of his paperwork resulting in being placed on the Administratively Ineligible list had not been returned as of late Thursday, June 1.

For someone who promotes himself on the Morris County Freeholder’s website as a strong proponent of transparency, when it comes to his eligibility to practice law it looks like Slippin’ Johnny has been as transparent as mud.

According to reports, Slippin’ Johnny squared himself away with the state bar association so his name was recently removed from the Administratively Ineligible list. That removal, however, is not retroactive – whatever legal work he did between the deadline for filing his paperwork and his removal from the list he did while ineligible to practice law.