No GOP Platform: Kushner and Stepien got their way.

By Rubashov  

The Republican Party Platform – the platform that grew out of the Reagan movement – died today.  It has ceased to exist.  It is no more.

Conservatives saw this coming.  Over the Memorial Day weekend, John Robert Carman posted a story from the website Axios, regarding “secret talks to overhaul the GOP platform.”  The Axios article – which was picked up by a number of national publications – details the efforts of Jared Kushner and Bill Stepien in minimalizing the Republican Party platform from its current 58 pages down to a one page document with ten bullet-points.  

According to those present at the on-going meetings held “in the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the West Wing of the White House”, Kushner wants words like “freedom” removed from the platform, as well as statements of principle like: “We support the right of parents to determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children.”

You can read the full Axios story here:
https://www.axios.com/republican-platform-jared-kushner-56cb19ee-d6c7-409e-93e5-088eebd82825.html

Jared Kushner is the President’s son-in-law.  Bill Stepien is his campaign manager.  Various apologists have argued that Kushner and Stepien are simply attempting to “dumb down” the platform to “make it more relevant” to people accustomed to social media like Twitter.  Maybe, or perhaps something else is going on.
 
Jared Kushner has not been a registered Republican for very long.  The scion of a wealthy Democrat family, his father was the fundraising muscle behind Democrat Governor Jim McGreevey.  He got caught up in the corruption and went to prison.
 
Kushner wasn’t a registered Republican when his father-in-law was on the ballot in the primaries and General Election of 2016.  He became a registered Republican only in 2018.  Before that, he was a major fundraiser for the Democrat Party and promoted the candidacies of some very socially liberal Democrats. 

Bill Stepien owes his political redemption to Kushner, who assisted him after the Bridgegate scandal in which he was dismissed by Governor Chris Christie.  He is a talented political operative. 
 
Stepien is not a movement Republican, or movement conservative, or movement anything.  He is singular in his focus – and that focus is always on the candidate who employs him.  When he worked for Governor Christie, the NJGOP steadfastly refused to support the platform of the Republican Party.  The argument put forward was that having ideas on paper and committing to them got in the way of the politics of power.  One wonders what America would be like if gentlemen like these had written – or rather, not written – the Constitution and Bill of Rights. 
 
Of course, this had its downside.  The 2013 re-election campaign Stepien ran for Governor Christie was successful, but that 20-point win did not result in a movement victory.  The Republican Party did not gain ground in the Legislature.  The victory was singular, contained, it went no further than the top-of-the-ticket.
 
Stepien’s method of campaigning runs like this:  We did a poll. The voters say they like cheesecake.   Our donors are not adverse to cheesecake, so we can safely say we like cheesecake.  It was summed up very well earlier this year, by a former executive director of the NJGOP, who rejected the idea of arguing for the Second Amendment and who found it “ridiculous” to fashion language and arguments with which to defend this Constitutional right. 
 
So now the Republican platform is simply a man.  Where once there were ideas, now there is a photograph that may be conveniently pointed to.  Kushner and Stepien have won.  They got their way.  Now here is the full sum of what you need to know about the Republican Party in 2020…

Here is the full edict, released today, announcing the demise of the Republican Party Platform.  You can judge for yourselves as to the tone and the excuses made.  Does it sound as authoritarian to you, as it does to us?  A sadden day.  
 
  RESOLUTION REGARDING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM

  WHEREAS, The Republican National Committee (RNC) has significantly scaled back the size and scope of the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte due to strict restrictions on gatherings and meetings, and out of concern for the safety of convention attendees and our hosts;
 
WHEREAS, The RNC has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement;
 
WHEREAS, All platforms are snapshots of the historical contexts in which they are born, and parties abide by their policy priorities, rather than their political rhetoric;
 
WHEREAS, The RNC, had the Platform Committee been able to convene in 2020, would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration;
 
WHEREAS, The media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not adopting a new platform in 2020 and continues to engage in misleading advocacy for the failed policies of the Obama-Biden Administration, rather than providing the public with unbiased reporting of facts; and
 
WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it
 
RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda; RESOVLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;
 
RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration; and
 
RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.
 

"Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

George Orwell
(Eric Arthur Blair)

Speaker Tip O’Neill: “Reject obstructionism”

Many of the people in politics today weren’t around to actually witness the Reagan Revolution.  They have had to rely on hearsay and myth. 

There is a myth going around that President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, never had a harsh word for each other.  This simply isn’t true.

The truth is, they behaved like adults of their generation did at the time.  A less sensitive time than ours… before trigger words and safe spaces.  Men like President Reagan and Speaker O’Neill didn’t take the rough and tumble of politics personally, the way everyone appears to today… not that it didn’t hurt (but you sucked it up to get the job done). 

Here’s President Reagan himself on the subject… 

And here’s an ad the Republicans used on Tip O’Neill…

Being of men of their time, we have no idea what they would make of Congress and Washington today.  Indeed, America might look foreign to them.  But they got things done, despite their differences, and in the words of Democrat Tip O’Neill, “We expect conflict, but I hope we will reject any obstructionism.”

Who is NJ's conservative conscience?

Looking at a popular GOP blog today we came across a paid advertisement on said blog by Assemblyman Jay Webber.  The paid advertisement featured a quote from the blog's owner, calling Webber "The Conservative Conscience of the State Legislature." 

Well, OK, fair enough -- but we remember when that blog was the chorus for the campaign of an establishment GOP gubernatorial candidate named Chris Christie, and we remember when Assemblyman Jay Webber was so besotted with candidate Christie that he wouldn't appear in public with then-AFP State Director Steve Lonegan, because he thought the movement conservative was going to challenge Christie in the primary.

On the whole, Jay Webber has been a fine Republican legislator, but he has often straddled the line between being an establishment politician and a movement conservative.  An admirer of President Ronald Reagan, in October of 2014 Webber wrote a strong argument for increasing the user tax on gasoline in return for the elimination of the estate tax.  It was a classic conservative argument that showed how much he understood conservative policy and the effects of different types of taxation. 

Unfortunately, Webber would later reverse himself in order to bask in the kind of alt-right populism served up by "Red-Shirt" broadcaster Bill Spadea -- a Reagan critic who rejected Reagan Republicanism for third-party populism way back in the 1990's.  As evidenced by Spadea, the alt-right isn't so much an ideology or a set of policies, as it is an attitude and an anger. 

We have heard from members of the alt-right who think all government sucks and who say they are taxed too much and then reveal themselves to be public employees and go on to complain that their taxpayer-funded benefits are not enough and their pensions are not secure.  Where do they think the money comes from?  We have heard from alt-righters who live off government disability complain about the government that taxes others to pay them.  Anyone who can engage us all day in social media debates is certainly employable as something in today's economy.  Instead of bitching, go find a career, a job, and get to work.

Many of the same people who want tax cuts see nothing strange in concurrently asking for more "free" stuff from the government.  They aren't thinking balance sheet.  They aren't thinking at all.  It is emotion.   They are the same who believe that they should get paid more for what they do while everyone who provides the services they take for granted should be paid less.  The military who guards them should be paid less, ditto for the police and firefighters, bridges and roads should appear miraculously and for a minimal cost, ditto for clean water, electricity, and on and on.  And if they don't get their way, all that they want, for as cheap as they want it, then they can always tune in to the man on the radio and throw something.

Those who proselytize or celebrate this juvenile anger, this rejection of adult reasoning, are calling for the end of rational government.  We will end with two sides -- each appealing to deranged emotion, each perpetually lying to their followers, each refusing to belief in anything the other side says --  governance as a kind of thug life.

Rob Eichmann could see all this.  Elected to the Republican State Committee from Gloucester County -- on movement conservative Steve Lonegan's ticket -- Eichmann rejected the emotional pap put out by some and always carefully weighed the various attributes of any given policy.  He looked to the Republican Party Platform for guidance -- and to the conservative policies of Republican leaders like Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and Newt Gingrich.  Eichmann was the NJGOP's conservative conscience.

Shortly after Chris Christie won the Republican nomination, Christie and the NJGOP were asked by Rob Eichmann and other members of the State Committee to embrace the platform of the national Republican Party that was debated and passed at the Republican National Convention in 2008.  Christie declined to endorse that platform and his appointed State Party Chairman -- Assemblyman Jay Webber --  got quite nasty towards Rob Eichmann and those pushing the NJGOP to embrace basic Republican principles. 

Under pressure, NJGOP Chairman Webber promised to put a committee together to draft a "statement of principles" for the NJGOP.  That was in 2009.  That committee has yet to meet.

Another Republican National Convention came in 2012 and an updated party platform was debated and passed by the assembled delegates.  Governor Christie was the keynote speaker at that convention.  Nevertheless, he did not endorse or to allow his state party to adopt the platform that was democratically chosen at that convention.

In 2013, the NJGOP went a step further and launched a campaign to defeat sitting members of the State Committee who supported the national Republican Party platform and candidates who said they would do so.  They used state party funds, supposedly under the control of the State Committee, to defeat sitting members of the State Committee, without any formal vote allowing them to do so. 

One of their chief targets was Gloucester County State Committeeman Rob Eichmann.  At the time the  conservative was hospitalized, suffering from cancer, and was in no position to fight back.  The NJGOP ignored pleas to take this into consideration and launched an aggressive and negative campaign to defeat Committeeman Eichmann using the State Committee's own money.  Eichmann was defeated along with the other conservatives who supported the Republican Party platform.  Rob Eichmann, the conservative conscience of the NJGOP, died a few months later, aged 48.

Last year was 2016 and yet another Republican National Convention has come and gone.  The NJGOP has still not formally adopted the platform of the national Republican Party as its own.  The NJGOP and its candidates have no guidance as to the principles and policies that inform their party.  And so we get the case of Kim Guadagno, candidate for Governor, see-sawing between the gross pragmatism she openly practiced for over seven years and the dishonest "cover" she has accepted from the alt-right in an attempt to quickly "re-make" herself. 

If Assemblyman Jay Webber wants to earn the title "The Conservative Conscience of the State Legislature," he needs to stand up and start demanding that the NJGOP adopt the RNC platform as its own.  Without a written explanation of what the Republican Party stands for and what it means to be a Republican, our ability to recruit and train others to recruit new members is limited.

It is time for the NJGOP to declare what it is and what it stands for.  If it is informed by the principles of the national Republican Party and the platform of every Republican President from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, then say so.  If it is not, then please explain what it is that you stand for and the policies that you intend to pursue if elected.  Simply having the word "Republican" in your name is not enough.

AFP supports Planned Parenthood

How does ANY organization worthy of the name CONSERVATIVE give someone an "A+" who voted to pass a formal state commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the abortionist Planned Parenthood?  Well, the New Jersey chapter of American for Prosperity did.  Whether this was because of AFP State Chair Frayda Levy's personal position on abortion or the time AFP Executive Director Erica Jedynak (nee Klemens) spent with W.A.N.D. (Women's Action for New Directions) we cannot tell. 

Jersey Conservative is unique among political blogs in New Jersey in that we never pick fights.  That cannot be said about other blogs.  And that goes for groups like Americans for Prosperity (AFP) too.  You know the way they operate.  Some innocent conservative is just minding his or her own business when one of these wind-bags just has to start slinging crap.  They start the crap because they want to be noticed (basic primate behavior) or because someone somewhere has some grand stupid plan to take us back to 1991 or something or other (advanced primate behavior). 

So now the innocent conservative is under attack -- the victim of a drive-by -- and so off we go, to place things in perspective, provide some balance, and set the record straight.  Of course, this is perceived as an attack by the handjob who started it in the first place, because handjobs firmly believe that they and only they should be permitted to talk crap about other people.  And under no circumstances should anyone be permitted to talk crap about them.  See, this is the lack of balance that we seek to correct.

A lot of smiling goes on in Trenton.  Smile, smile, smile. . . but don't let those smiles fool you.  There are lots of smiling Jacks and Jills who when you're not looking are eyeing up the back seat of your trousers.  They go around with these barbed-wire enemas and they'd like nothing more than to stick them where the sun doesn't shine.  So back away if someone is smiling too earnestly at you. 

AFP has long been purveyors of the barbed-wire enema.  But back when its guiding mind was Steve Lonegan, an economic and social conservative, its annual scorecard was a means of rewarding conservative friends while dissing members of the GOP establishment.  All that has changed now.

Whereas an event under Lonegan's tenure would have featured a renegade like New York's Lt. Governor Betsy McCaughey or someone like Michelle Malkin, now AFP rallies around that enduring figure of traditional values and conservative principles. . . Senator Tom Kean Jr.???   Really?  Back when AFP meant something in New Jersey, back when Steve Lonegan was running it, they knew who was and who wasn't a "movement" conservative and there were just three "movement" conservative legislators in all New Jersey. 

No, not Jay Webber.  He had the chance but ended up taking a dump on Ronald Reagan's platform. 

Under Lonegan, AFP used its scorecard to shepherd legislative efforts -- like repealing the RGGI energy tax -- and to help legislators articulate conservative principles.  Yes, it was built around those "movement" legislators who were so often shit on by the establishment -- and it often employed vote "searches" in order to find ways to reward a legislator who was "trying" to be a conservative. 

These are certainly corruptions of a kind, but under Steve Lonegan, AFP never turned its rating system over to the GOP establishment -- to bestow a "seal of approval" on their moderate economic mush and social issues assbanditry.   And Lonegan never participated in the mass screwing of Republicans that the two "handmaidens of the establishment" now running AFP just allowed to happen.

So when does a pig get to call itself a sheep?  When it grows a wooly covering.  When do liberal Republicans get to call themselves "conservatives"?  When they get AFP to grossly corrupt its process to provide that covering.

So this is where we come in.  A corruption has occurred.  There are victims of this corruption.  Republicans have been injured (and injured by other Republicans, on purpose, mind you).  We are the corrective.  We seek to bring things back into balance.

We would like to have seen AFP take responsibility for their craven sell-out, for the flip-flop on the "success" story they put out just a few weeks ago.  But these rich social liberals are so used to getting their way that we feel it would take too long to educate them that we are not the typical American working people that they are used to screwing.

So here is what we propose.  AFP assigned high grades to certain people.  We will make sure that they earn them -- every voting session.  We will report on EVERY bad vote, every voting session, every week, by every phony.  We will report on your bad votes in committee.  Every committee, every week, every phony.

You will be exposed for who you really are, week upon week, or you will become good conservatives -- at least on paper.  You may have found it easy to corrupt AFP and engineer a phony grade, but you will find that it is a much more difficult thing to live up to.

Stay tuned. . .

Lyon supporter claims Reagan "destroyed" the GOP

Those of a certain age (GOP primary voters?) may remember the movie "Wild in the Streets."  The soundtrack from the 1968 cult classic included "Shape of Things to Come" and other hits.

The movie covers the events leading up to and after the election of a 25-years-old Republican as President of the United States.  He embarks on a campaign of intergenerational warfare that transforms America into "the most truly hedonistic society the world has ever known."

"Wild in the Streets" came to mind after reading an opinion piece by yet another Morris County YR.  This one has turned his personal Facebook page into a homage to Freeholder Hank Lyon, a candidate for Assembly in legislative district 26. 

The title of the young man's column was:  " Why Reagan Destroyed the Republican Party."  Yep, you read that right.  We kid you not.

First of all, for anyone with sensory perception, the Republican Party is not "destroyed."  It controls the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.  There are 33 Republican Governors to 16 Democrats and one Independent.  As for State Legislatures, the map below illustrates how tilted to the GOP that is:

Destroyed???  Is this strange perception due to this young man coming from a state like New Jersey?

Perhaps.  But we believe that what is at work here has more to do with age.  The young man who wrote this did not live in that time before Reagan, when the Democrat congressional softball team was called "The Permanent Majority."  After Reagan, that boast would never be heard again.

And thanks to President Ronald Reagan, that young man was born into a world in which the Soviet Union was a memory, not a menace.  That's not the case for most Republican primary voters.  For them, the Soviet Union was a very real psychological disturbance, always in the background, hovering, waiting.  The civil defense drills and the threat of nuclear war, was something to be absorbed and then compartmentalized, away from daily life but always someplace there.

The 1950's...

The 1960's...

The 1970's...

The 1980's...

Today's young Republicans never experienced any of that, because Ronald Reagan beat the Soviet Union, destroying their economy along with their ideology, and doing it so thoroughly that even "Red" China went capitalist.  Reagan's greatness is assured because he kept his most important promise -- to leave Marxism/Leninism on the "ash heap of history" -- and he did so without it costing a million American lives.

The young Hank Lyon supporter's indictment against Ronald Reagan is that the President did not sufficiently rein in spending.  Lyon's supporter appears to forget what President Reagan was spending that money on:  The largest peacetime military buildup in history, whose goal it was to overtax the Soviet economy into oblivion.  With the alternative a nuclear exchange, it was money well spent.

To write a critique of Ronald Reagan's presidency without mentioning the Cold War or the Soviet Union, is like writing about Abraham Lincoln and leaving out slavery and the Civil War.  It's a non-starter.

The Lyon supporter who so cavalierly trashed the memory of President Ronald Reagan can do so because he has never held any form of public responsibility at all.  Once he holds public office of some kind, and we sincerely hope he does, he will gain some humility.  He will learn that in a representative democracy, perfection is unachievable.  That there are always trade-offs and muddle-throughs.  The young writer will learn this from life as well.  He will learn that no marriage goes exactly as wished for, or children, or career.  He will learn that the expectation of perfection is the enemy of happiness. 

Time and that river, life, will work away his stoney sharpness and his certainties.  And he will be a better human for it.

Steve Lonegan defends President Trump

Donald Trump is getting the Reagan treatment

By Steve Lonegan

Shortly after taking office in January 1981, Ronald Reagan's national security adviser found himself accused of taking a bribe from a foreign government. That man was Richard Allen, a native of Collingswood.  The investigation was “leaked” to the press. President Reagan called the whole thing an act of political sabotage. In the end, Allen resigned but was later cleared.

Sound familiar? Welcome to being a conservative Republican in a country dominated by a liberal media.

In 1981, thousands of protesters marched in a movement that came to call itself the “Days of Resistance.” The New York Times reported that among the group’s concerns were the “equal rights for racial minorities, women and homosexuals, nuclear disarmament, abortion rights, sterilization abuse, unemployment, cuts in Federal social programs and disparate treatment of refugees and undocumented aliens.”

This was followed by even larger anti-Reagan marches in September 1981 and June 1982.

Nothing new here. either. This is the standard leftist response to conservative leadership.

And as for Donald Trump’s first days on the job? Domestic policy, foreign policy, Cabinet appointments and tax cuts … what’s not to like?

After eight years of a gray economy – eight years of the media celebrating every little downtick of unemployment, while trying to ignore losses in workforce participation, upsurges in underemployment and a grinding foreclosure rate – working America, business America, is excited and hopeful about the future.

Look at the stock market.

Investor confidence is up and business is looking toward a boom. Trump has moved quickly to get to work on infrastructure – like the Keystone pipeline project – even as liberal naysayers attempt to delay it and pour cold water on the blue-collar workers who will benefit from employment the project will create.

What is it with these liberals? What is inside their heads and how must they view a world in which building a wall is impossible? We are the nation that built the Erie Canal with picks and shovels! We built the Panama Canal, too, railroads coast to coast, the Empire State Building and the interstate highway system.  We sent a man to the moon and brought him safely home. Now they want us to believe we cannot bring manufacturing jobs back to America. They want us to give up and go down without a fight.

That is why there are large numbers of people who support the president. They want to believe that we, as a nation, still have it. They want to believe that if we decide to do a simple thing – like secure our borders against terrorism, illegal drugs and human trafficking – that we can accomplish it. That having defeated slavery once, 150 years ago, that we can defeat this new slavery called human trafficking. That we are still as good men and women as our grandparents were.

For all the dark appraisals of the situation in which we find ourselves, the appeal of Donald Trump is essentially an appeal to America’s inner optimism. That we can figure out a way to move forward – to make America great again.

The liberal elites in this country would prefer it if Americans behaved like content consumers of the products, culture and ideas they fed them. Optimism is an emotion that leads to growth and emancipation, and for the elites, this is dangerous thinking.

It is important to remember that Trump has been in office one month, during which time he has challenged policies thought unchangeable and spoken frankly about what was formerly unmentionable.

Yes, the Washington establishment has pushed back. Its members want the intractable to remain so. Their world is a “Catch-22” world, because in a “Catch-22” world, change is impossible and only the status quo endlessly remains.

It’s been a month and it has taken the whole of the establishment just to deal with the burst of effusive, optimistic energy that is Donald Trump. Even with an adversarial media and all the rest, it has not stopped him or driven him out or turned him from his course. And that is because of the support Trump gains from a broad group of forgotten Americans who are forgotten no longer.

And as his first month passes, remember that at least 47 months – and more likely, 95 – remain.

Steve Lonegan, Republican, is a former mayor of Bogota, former state director of Americans for Prosperity and was a national surrogate spokesman for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign.

This column was originally published in the Record of Bergen County.

Happy Birthday President Reagan

Today is the 106th birthday of Ronald Reagan.  Enjoy...

Bateman embraces the Big Lie (who will follow?)

Senator Kip Bateman has held elected office since 1983.  He's been in the Legislature for over two decades.  During all that time, while the fund that pays for our roads and bridges was running out of money, Kip Bateman did nothing but borrow more and kick the can down the road.

The gas tax has remained at 14 1/2 cents since 1988.  While every other state in America raised its gas tax to keep up with inflation, while President Ronald Reagan increased the federal gas tax to keep up with inflation, people like Kip Bateman did the politically popular thing of not raising the gas tax and instead borrowed more and more -- and New Jersey fell deeper and deeper into debt.

While everything else was adjusted for inflation again and again, the gas tax was not.  Why?  Because politicians like Kip Bateman could point to low gas prices whenever a property taxpayer complained about having the highest in the nation property taxes. 

As property taxes doubled and then doubled again -- costing taxpayers thousands upon thousands each year -- politicians like Kip Bateman would point to the gas tax and tell them that he'd save them a couple hundred. 

But he hadn't.  He just passed the taxes on to their children and grandchildren. 

The last time the gas tax produced enough revenue to pay for New Jersey's transportation needs was in 1990.  Because of the debt politicians like Kip Bateman allowed to accumulate, by 2015 the annual cost of that debt to taxpayers was $1.1 billion -- outstripping the $750 million revenue from the gas tax.

If Kip Bateman wants to know why it was necessary to raise the gas tax by 23 cents, he should look into a mirror and ask the question, because the answer is:  Senator Kip Bateman. 

23 cents a gallon, all in one hit, is what you get when politicians suspend the iron rules of economics and tell people that they can have something for nothing.  This is what happens when you don't adjust the cost of something for inflation.  A business would have gone bankrupt, but Kip Bateman knows that he can be a hero today and get re-elected, by passing the bill to a future generation.  It will be their problem, not his.

What Bateman and the other "Red Shirt" Republicans are doing to children, piling debt upon them so that their future begins in a hole, is made worse by the current lie coming out of the "Red Shirt" camp:  That the 23-cents increase applies to baby oil. 

This lie is up there with the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the "Flat Earth" movement, and George Bush "is responsible for September 11th."  What makes it even more disgusting is that those who are spreading this lie have consistently voted to kill unborn babies in the womb and have resisted humanitarian legislation to recognize (as does almost every other civilized nation outside of North Korea, China, and Vietnam) that 20-week old unborn babies feel pain. 

Europe recognizes this medical fact.  So does Latin America, Australia, most of Asia, and Africa.  But not New Jersey.  And it is because of those "baby oilers" that this state doesn't

With no facts, AFP is left with parables

On the TTF crisis they have now helped to create, AFP assures us that it is holding something  firm or firmly holding or something like that.  Look, we all get it that Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is owned by the Koch Brothers -- those Trump hating, Hillary embracing petroleum industry (as in G-A-S-O-L-I-N-E) billionaires.  

AFP was on record its whole existence as opposing the job-killing, business destroying Estate Tax -- until the price of ending it was raising the tax on the Koch Brothers' favorite product.  Then it was all hands firmly opposed to raising the gas tax.  And to this end they have thrown a lot of shit against the wall hoping that some of it stuck.  The latest is a parable from New Jersey's answer to Ayn Rand herself.

Look, we don't need silly parables with clunky characters like "Uncle Sam State."  What is that about?  With a polity that worships political beings as if they were gods on earth, "Uncle Hand State" would be far more appropriate.

Once upon a time, New Jersey's answer to Ayn Rand sold books wholesale to public and private entities.  Nothing wrong in that.  We love books.  But selling a product over time presumably introduces you to the concept of inflation.

The gas tax hasn't kept up with inflation.  Since 1988, New Jersey has charged drivers just 14 1/2 cents a gallon of gas to maintain and repair our roads and bridges.  The price hasn't gone up in 28 years.  

What business doesn't raise its prices in 28 years and survives?

Other states have raised their prices in line with inflation.  New York charges over 40 cents a gallon and Pennsylvania over 50 cents.  If New Jersey had raised its price little by little, in line with inflation, that 14 1/2 cents would be 29 cents today.  

What happened instead was that TTF spending was uncapped in the 1990's and successive administrations extended the life of the debt so they could borrow and spend more.  They spent and spent but didn't raise the tax to pay for it.   Today it will take all of that 14 1/2 cents and the first 10 1/2 cents of any gas tax increase just to pay the interest on that debt.

That's why the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) is broke and road and bridge maintenance and repair has stopped.  There is simply no money to pay for it.  And now, because of the mistakes made in the past, the gas tax or some other tax will have to be raised or roads and bridges will have to close.

The gas tax is a users' tax.  President Ronald Reagan believed it was the fairest way of paying for road and bridge maintenance, repair, and construction -- charge the drivers who use it.

The gas tax is also fairer to the taxpayers of New Jersey.  

New Jersey is a pass-through state on the busiest travelled corridor in the East Coast.  I-95 is the nation's busiest road.  35 percent of those who use New Jersey's roads and bridges are from out-of-state.  Instead of raising the gas tax, for years New Jersey has borrowed more and paid more and more interest on that debt.  In-effect, New Jersey taxpayers are paying interest on debt in order to subsidize out-of-state drivers who continue to use our roads and bridges at the 1988 price per gallon.

The ONLY way to get out-of-state drivers to pay their fair share is through a users' tax on gasoline.  Without an increase in this users' tax -- the gas tax -- local road and bridge maintenance and repair will have to be paid for in higher property taxes.  Now who wants that?

Webber should follow Reagan, not Koch

Assemblyman Jay Webber, born February 1972.  First eligible to vote in 1990.

For many, Ronald Reagan is only remembered as "The President" -- never as the conservative outsider who was a royal pain-in-the-butt to the GOP establishment.  It might be forgotten now, but even after 1980, New Jersey was a hot bed of GOP resistance to the Reaganization of the party.  It could be argued that the Reagan Revolution -- at least as far as the Republican Party was concerned -- never took hold in New Jersey.

What did take hold in New Jersey was the Darwinian vision of Charles & Donald Koch -- that screw-the-poor, devil-take-the-hindmost brand of economic libertarianism which holds that if you have enough money, your will should trump all.  And that goes for electing members of Congress, as well as destroying the traditional folkways of communities to suit your business model or personal preference.

But that wasn't Reaganism.   Ronald Reagan stood for the traditional conservative values of the small community.  One of those values is paying your own way.  Like most good conservatives of that period, Ronald Reagan supported user taxes over broader tax schemes.

Of the gas tax, Reagan said:  "Good tax policy decrees that wherever possible a fee for a service should be assessed against those who directly benefit from that service. Our highways were built largely with such a user fee - the gasoline tax. I think it makes sense to follow that principle in restoring them to the condition we all want them to be in."

The Koch Brothers have never believed in paying their own way.  The Kochs' lobbying operation -- of which Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a part -- have been successful in steering $10.5 billion of taxpayers' money their way.  NJ AFP recently put out a press release calling the gas tax "regressive" and claiming that it hurt the poor.  That's the same argument the Left uses against the Flat Tax and in support of our complicated, corrupt "progressive" income tax. 

As late as October 2014, Assemblyman Jay Webber stood with Reagan when he wrote:

"New Jersey leaders are grappling with three major problems: New Jersey has the worst tax burden in the nation, our economy suffers from sluggish growth, and our state's Transportation Trust Fund is out of money. There is a potential principled compromise that can help solve all of them.

Of the three problems, the Transportation Trust Fund has been getting the most attention lately, and for good reason — it's broke. There is just no money in it to maintain and improve our vital infrastructure. Without finding a solution, we risk watching our roads and bridges grow unsafe and unusable and hinder movement of people and goods throughout the state. That, of course, will exacerbate our state's slow economic growth.

Proposals to fix the trust fund have included a mix of cost cutting, reallocation of current spending, borrowing and increasing taxes. While I prefer some combination of the first three options if done smartly, more and more it sounds as if that last option, in the form of an increased gas tax, is a popular choice for many legislators on both sides of the aisle.

But increasing the gas tax in isolation will only worsen New Jersey's biggest problem — an already-too-high tax burden. So any gas-tax increase should only be accompanied by measures that will help alleviate, or at least not increase, the overall tax burden on New Jerseyans. To that end, we should insist that if any tax is raised to restore the trust fund, it be coupled with the elimination of a tax that is one of our state's biggest obstacles to economic growth: the death tax. By any measure, New Jersey is the most extreme outlier on the death tax, with worst-in-the-nation status.

... The good news is that New Jersey's leaders finally are realizing that our confiscatory death tax is a big deal. A bipartisan coalition of legislators has shown its support for reforming New Jersey's death tax, and Gov. Christie has pledged to sign a proposal to reform the death tax if the Legislature sends it to him.

Which brings us back to the Transportation Trust Fund. Given the recent public statements by bipartisan leaders on both the death tax and the trust fund, there is a very real opportunity to forge a consensus that can address all three of the problems outlined above. We can replenish the trust fund and achieve a net tax reduction for New Jersey. (Taxpayer savings from the elimination of the death tax would eclipse the gas-tax increases currently proposed.) Doing both, in turn, would help improve our economic competitiveness and stimulate job creation."

Now it appears that some conservatives, like Webber, might be shifting their allegiance to Koch.  Why?  Maybe it's just that they don't remember when Donald Koch ran for Vice President on the libertine ticket against conservative Republicans Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.  Koch ran on a party platform that called for the "elimination of all restrictions on immigration, the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, and a declaration of full amnesty for those people who have entered the country illegally."

The Koch platform supported abortion at all stages of pregnancy, the legalization of narcotics, legalized prostitution, and allowing children the same legal rights as adults in these and other matters.  Donald Koch despised Ronald Reagan and everything he stood for. 

Ronald Reagan was a social as well as an economic conservative.  He believed in an America built on Judeo-Christian values and the Western tradition of free speech and free markets. 

If Donald Koch had been elected in 1980, instead of Ronald Reagan, that famous "It's Morning in America" ad (1984, re-election) would have featured chirpy abortionists, hard-working drug dealers, and child prostitutes.  So why are conservatives like Webber bending low to Koch now?

Once Ronald Reagan was safely out of office, the Kochs stepped in to start a project that changed the nature of conservatism in America.  From using their wealth to dominate libertarian think tanks -- like the Reason Foundation -- their money opened doors into more traditionally conservative venues.  While it might seem as though it's been around forever, the Kochs' political flagship, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) was founded in 2004 -- twenty years after Ronald Reagan last appeared on a ballot.

AFP is not a grassroots organization.  Its so-called "members" do not have a vote on electing who runs AFP -- either at the state or national levels.  AFP gets its money from Koch Industries and Koch Industry apparatchiks hire coordinators for each state, whose job it is to "motivate" and "activate" the "members."  In short, it is a very effective astroturf lobbying model. 

And what do they lobby for?  Koch Industries is owned by the Koch brothers, Charles and Donald Koch.  It is the second-largest privately held business in America.  Its core business is petroleum.  Koch Industries owns and operates oil refineries across America and overseas.  They control enough pipeline to crisscross our nation.  The petroleum lobby adamantly opposes a tax on the products they sell, whether that tax is at the retail or wholesale level.

The question that conservatives should now ponder is whether or not they will follow the Koch brothers in undermining the candidacy of presumptive Republican nominee for President Donald Trump.  One Koch brother has already suggested that liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton would be preferable to Trump, and now the other has announced that he will donate to the GOP but not to the Trump campaign.

The continuing metamorphosis of the Republican Party into a pro-amnesty for illegals, pro-tax breaks for corporations that send jobs overseas, pro-crony capitalism, pro-corporate welfare, pro-LGBT everything, anti-American worker, anti-Middle Class, anti-Christian, anti-traditional values, anti-Bill of Rights, and increasingly open to repealing the Second Amendment , was achieved in a great part through the hostile takeover of the conservative movement by big money.

It is time we found our roots again.

The Way of the Baboon (or why Spadea pissed on Reagan)

Baboons don't hunt other species.  Instead, they employ their ferocious looking teeth to attack and injure other baboons.  Some Republicans are like this too.

Unlike so many conservative websites in the past, this website has made a point to refrain from focusing on the sins of those in the nominally right-of-center party.  We figured they have problems enough, and there is so much ready trade amongst the Democrats, so much to criticize, that... why bother the GOP?  And so we have generally given Republicans a free ride, made them exempt from the focus of our criticism -- even as some of them have adopted social policies that would have made "the gimp" from Pulp Fiction wince.

If anything, we preferred the softly, softly approach with Republicans.  We tried to talk with them, even when our meetings were cancelled and our points of view dismissed. Once we even had to suffer a chief of staff whose demeanor towards us was akin to that of Miss Beulah Ballbreaker from the movie Porky's.

But even when showered with such rude affections from the leaders of our own party, we refrained from finger-pointing. 

Others have taken a different path.  Fox News and NJ 101.5's news host Bill Spadea -- a former candidate for Congress and the Legislature who collected tens of thousands in political contributions from his fellow Republicans , and who very recently fronted for a political action committee devoted to electing local members of the GOP, blithely accused a Republican legislator of criminal misconduct the other day.  And he did so with all the gravity one uses to direct someone to a toilet. 

To be fair with Spadea, he's been dumping on Republicans for some time.  Back when he ran the national College Republicans, then RNC National Chairman (and future Governor) Haley Barbour felt obliged to unfund Spadea's organization after it attacked both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for not being Republican enough.  It takes some kind of balls for a college kid to call out the father of the modern conservative movement for not being "pure" enough.

Some of the people Spadea had on his show are even worse.  They're members of a 16-person caucus.  Just 16.  It's like a big family.  16 is small enough that you should -- after 8 or 9 years -- get to know each other and be able to talk to each other.  But instead of talking, one of these 16 legislators put another one up to call out a third.  So this involved about a fifth of the caucus.  And what did the one put up to call the other one out accuse him of -- gross criminal misconduct and political corruption.  And the joke of it is, the one called out is probably the biggest boy scout in Trenton.

So this was just egregious, nasty, damaging behavior for its own sake:  Hurt and injure your own rather than going after the other side.  It's the way of the baboon.