Off Year Election Results Signal Warning to Democrats

Tuesday’s elections left the Democratic Party reeling after one Republican won the governor’s race in Virginia and another posed an unexpectedly strong challenge to New Jersey’s incumbent governor, with the race still too close to call.

The twin blows raised alarms about the Democratic Party’s fortunes heading into next year’s midterm elections, with President Biden’s approval ratings sagging and Republicans eager to wrest back control of Congress.

The most surprising unknown on Wednesday morning was the fate of the governor’s race in New Jersey, a state that Mr. Biden carried by 16 percentage points last year. Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat seeking a second term, was locked in a razor-thin contest with a little-known Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, a former assemblyman.

Mr. Murphy pulled ahead of Mr. Ciattarelli on Wednesday morning, but by a small margin. With 88 percent of the expected vote counted, Mr. Murphy was ahead by 1,408 votes, according to The Associated Press.

The other governor’s race on Tuesday, in Virginia, offered foreboding signs of the political environment for Democrats more than nine months into Mr. Biden’s presidency.

A year after Mr. Biden won Virginia by 10 percentage points, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, failed in his quest to win back his old office, losing to the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, in a contest that was closely watched for what it could signal about voters’ satisfaction or lack thereof with the incumbent president and his party. Mr. McAuliffe conceded to Mr. Youngkin on Wednesday morning.

The setback in Virginia was the latest in a series of stumbles for Mr. Biden, who came under sharp criticism for his handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and who has struggled to unite Democratic lawmakers behind his domestic legislative agenda.

A number of other notable races remained unresolved.

In Minneapolis, where residents rejected a bid to disband and replace the Police Department, the mayor’s race was still too close to call because of ranked-choice voting. Mayor Jacob Frey received nearly 43 percent of first-choice mayoral votes, far more than any challenger but short of the majority threshold needed to win outright. Election officials planned to tabulate ranked-choice selections on Wednesday.

The race for mayor of Atlanta was headed to a runoff. Felicia Moore, the City Council president, was the top vote-getter. But it remained unclear whom she would face in the runoff; Andre Dickens, a councilman, was vying with Kasim Reed, a former mayor trying to make a comeback, for the other spot in the runoff.

In Seattle, a Republican candidate for city attorney and a pro-police candidate for mayor each held large leads, as voters appeared to reject rivals who had sought more aggressive overhauls of policing and the criminal justice system.

If the results hold, Seattle would elect a Republican to citywide office for the first time in three decades, with a city attorney candidate, Ann Davison, who has vowed more prosecutions for low-level crimes in a traditionally liberal city grappling with homelessness.

The debate over policing also figured prominently in the race for mayor, with one candidate, Lorena González, endorsing steep cuts to the police budget last year and another, Bruce Harrell, advocating the hiring of more officers. Early results showed Mr. Harrell in the lead.

Read the rest here.

Property Rights vs Public Safety on the Jersey Shore

SURF CITY, N.J. — Anchor Produce Market sells homemade mozzarella, its own fresh salsa and what many regulars swear is the best sweet corn on Long Beach Island.

But, a sign on the counter declares, it will not sell anything to the owners of 63 Long Beach Boulevard, 7 Coast Avenue, 12 Sea View Drive South or 34 other nearby oceanfront properties. 

Those owners have refused to grant easements to allow the federal government to build a massive dune along a 35-mile stretch of the Jersey Shore. Without the protective ridge of sand, engineers predict it is only a matter of time before homes, neighborhoods, even entire communities are wiped out by rising seas — a reality brought into stark relief by the devastation from Hurricane Sandy. 

 So until they sign the easements, holdouts should buy their groceries elsewhere. 

Read the rest here.

I loathe eminent domain. As in I really detest it, because it has an incredibly long history of abuse wherever it is legal. But I have never quite been able to bring myself to call for its complete abolition, Mainly because in the back of my mind I have always accepted that there are very rare cases where it can be justified. This might be one of them.

As much as I hate to side with the statists, this really does sound like a handful of people invoking property rights over public safety. And even libertarians will generally concede that your rights end if and when they threaten someone elses. It's a bit like invoking property rights in a refusal to abide by the fire code. My guess is many of these same people who are screaming about their "view" took public money to help repair the damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy or will happily file claims when their house is devastated by the next big storm. Speaking as one of the people who will have to foot that bill I think their position is hard to stomach. 

Even so, I would likely side with them if it were just their property or lives they are endangering. They could be told to sign the easement or renounce any and all future claims to disaster aid, end of story. But it's not just their property at risk. They are endangering other people's property, and potentially even lives on a significant scale. 

Sorry. No one has that right. 

Further, the inconvenience and loss of property value is relatively minor compared to the potential public dangers of failing to build the sand barriers. So yea, this has dragged on long enough. Ask the holdouts nicely one more time. But if they still say no, then invoke eminent domain and expropriate the property required to protect the local community from a major hurricane.

My fingers actually hurt typing that last sentence.

Camden NJ Plans To Fire Its Police Force

One of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. is getting rid of its police department.

Amid what they call a “public safety crisis,” officials in Camden, N.J., plan to disband the city's 141-year-old police department and replace it with a non-union division of the Camden County Police.

Camden city officials have touted the move as necessary to combat the city’s growing financial and safety problems. The entire 267-member police department will be laid off and replaced with a newly reformatted metro division, which is projected to have some 400 members. It will serve only the city of Camden starting in early 2013.

Read the rest here.

Former Rutgers student convicted of hate crime, invasion of privacy in webcam suicide case

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — A former Rutgers University student accused of using a webcam to spy on his gay roommate’s love life was convicted Friday of invasion of privacy and anti-gay intimidation in a case that exploded into the headlines when the victim threw himself to his death off a bridge.

Dharun Ravi, 20, shook his head slightly after hearing guilty verdicts on all 15 counts against him. He and his lawyers left the courthouse without comment, his father’s arm around his shoulders.

Read the rest here.

My take: There is no question of harassment and invasion of privacy. That's a given. But I am not a fan of so called "hate crime" laws. Anything which places a thought or opinion, no matter how odious, under the ban of public law is unconstitutional in my opinion. I think the family of the victimized young man has a very good civil case here (wrongful death), but the criminal charges are hugely overblown. This was a legal lynching. Look for a vigorous appeal.

New Jersey's Chris Christie; is he or isn't he?

Leading Republican strategists say that if he is serious about a presidential race in 2012, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is running out of time to build the kind of national campaign and fundraising organization he will need. But, they added, the tough-talking governor immediately would become a top-tier candidate with a real chance of winning the GOP nomination.

While there is no timetable for him to make up his mind, the realities of the political calendar dictate that Christie must do so in short order.

Read the rest here.

Christie Says No to 2012 Bid, but G.O.P. Keeps Calling

So many people want to talk to Gov. Chris Christie about the 2012 presidential campaign that he probably could not drop the subject if he wanted to.

Not that he wants to.

Despite months of insisting that he will not enter the race, the New Jersey governor has become an increasingly busy presence on its fringes. Conservative politicians and talk-show hosts are still clamoring for him to jump in, and he has agreed to meet this month with a group of fund-raisers from Iowa who want to persuade him.

While Republican consultants say he would be a leading contender, and journalists keep asking whether he will run, Mr. Christie keeps finding new and ever more provocative ways to say no. The Republicans who have considered running want his imprimatur, lining up for dinner dates at the governor’s mansion in Princeton.

Candidate or not, Mr. Christie is a force to reckon with in the contest, someone who political analysts say could influence his party’s nomination, or make a splash as a choice for running mate — another prospect he rules out. The governor shows no sign of fading into the background, and by his own admission, he loves the attention.

“I’m a kid from Jersey who has people asking him to run for president,” he said last week in a radio interview, laughing off the idea that he had “become tired and annoyed” by the subject’s coming up time and again. “I’m thrilled by it. I just don’t want to do it.”

Read the rest here.

How Chris Christie Did His Homework

Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs, Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey­, places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state’s public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn’t pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.

And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers’ union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.

“The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers’ union,” Christie says, “was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey.” Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. “Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, ‘Mom.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Dad.’ ” Another pause. “ ‘Please. Stop the madness.’ ”

By this point the audience is starting to titter, but Christie remains steadfastly somber in his role as the beseeching student. “ ‘Just pay for my teacher’s health benefits,’ ” he pleads, “ ‘and I’ll get A’s, I swear. But I just cannot take the stress that’s being presented by a 1½ percent contribution to health benefits.’ ” As the crowd breaks into appreciative guffaws, Christie waits a theatrical moment, then slams his point home. “Now, you’re all laughing, right?” he says. “But this is the crap I have to hear.”

Acid monologues like this have made Christie, only a little more than a year into his governorship, one of the most intriguing political figures in America. Hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers linger on scenes from Christie’s town-hall meetings, like the one in which he takes apart a teacher for her histrionics. (“If what you want to do is put on a show and giggle every time I talk, then I have no interest in answering your question.”) Newly elected governors — not just Republicans, Christie says, but also Democrats — call to seek his counsel on how to confront their own staggering budget deficits and intractable unions. At a recent gathering of Republican governors, Christie attracted a throng of supporters and journalists as he strode through the halls of the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel like Bono at Davos.

While Christie has flatly ruled out a presidential run in 2012, there is enough conjecture about the possibility that I felt moved to ask him a few weeks ago if he found it exhausting to have to constantly answer the same question. “Listen, if you’re going to say you’re exhausted by that, you’re really taking yourself too seriously,” Christie told me, then broke into his imitation of a politician who is taking himself too seriously. “ ‘Oh, Matt, please, stop asking me about whether I should be president of the United States! The leader of the free world! Please stop! I’m exhausted by the question!’ I mean, come on. If I get to that point, just slap me around, because that’s really presumptuous. What it is to me is astonishing, not exhausting.”

Read the rest here.

New Jersey's governor kills a boondoggle

The largest public transit project in the nation, a commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River connecting New Jersey to Manhattan, was halted on Thursday by Gov. Chris Christie because, he said, the state could not afford its share of the project’s rising cost.

Mr. Christie’s decision stunned other government officials and advocates of public transportation because work on the tunnel was under way and $3 billion of federal financing had already been arranged — more money than had been committed to any other transit project in America.

The governor, a Republican, said he decided to withdraw his support for the project on Thursday after hearing from state transportation officials that the project would cost at least $2.5 billion more than its original price of $8.7 billion. He said that New Jersey would have been responsible for the overrun and that he could not put the taxpayers of the state “on what would be a never-ending hook.”

The tunnel was a project of New Jersey Transit. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which gets its money from tolls, committed $3 billion for the plan after committing billions of dollars for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site.

In scrapping the project, Mr. Christie is forfeiting the money from the federal government and jeopardizing as much from the Port Authority. The state may also have to repay the federal government for its share of the $600 million that has already been spent on the tunnel.

The tunnel, which would have stretched under the Hudson from North Bergen, N.J., to a new station deep below 34th Street in Manhattan, was intended to double the number of trains that could enter the city from the west each day. The project’s planners said the additional trains would alleviate congestion on local roads, reduce pollution, help the growth of the region’s economy and raise property values for suburban homeowners.

The tunnel was also supposed to provide jobs for 6,000 construction workers just as some other big transit infrastructure projects in the city, like the Second Avenue subway, were winding down.

Instead, the contractors hired to dig the tunnel will soon start laying off workers.

“This was the project that I think everyone was counting on to revitalize the public-works sector,” said Denise M. Richardson, managing director of the General Contractors Association of New York. “For construction workers that were counting on job opportunities, it’s a real blow to them.”

Mr. Christie admitted that the cancellation would be costly but he said it would be more prudent for the state to withdraw sooner rather than later. He said he also expected to be able to redirect the Port Authority’s $3 billion to other projects in the state, though he did not identify any.

When Mr. Christie told Ray LaHood, the federal transportation secretary, about his decision, Mr. LaHood demanded to meet with the governor to discuss the matter further. The two were scheduled to meet on Friday afternoon, but Mr. Christie gave no indication that he could be swayed.

Read the rest here.

Wonders never cease. I have heard good things about this guy and am beginning to believe at least some of them may be true.

Feds accuse New Jersey of fraud (state bonds)

Federal regulators accused the State of New Jersey of securities fraud on Wednesday for claiming it was properly funding public workers’ pensions when it was not.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said the action was its first ever against a state, and only its second against any government over the handling of a public pension fund. The city of San Diego was the first.

The S.E.C. settled its civil complaint with New Jersey by issuing a cease-and-desist order, which the state accepted without admitting or denying the findings.

The agency did not impose a financial penalty. The S.E.C.’s powers of enforcement against the states are tightly limited by states’-rights concerns and constitutional law, and it has standing to get involved only when there is a clear-cut case of fraud.

Nor did the S.E.C.’s order name the bond underwriters whose job it was to vouch for the state’s financial statements. That raised the possibility that investors might decide to file suit.

The action could also put pressure on other states and cities that have used various accounting maneuvers to portray their pension funds as healthier than they currently are. Actuaries have been raising questions, for example, about the plans Illinois has laid out for strengthening its pension funds.

The S.E.C. said in its cease-and-desist order that investors bought more than $26 billion worth of New Jersey’s bonds, without understanding the severity of the state’s financial troubles.

Read the rest here.