Huckabee will probably enrage the right with this but he'll probably enrage the right with his criticisms of Arizona's attack on freedom.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/23/huc ... n-arizona/

DUmbass think progress people seem to think Huckabee is from Alaska.

This is just so awesome...

Senior SEC Staff Downloads Porn Amid Financial Crisis

One female accountant tried to access online pornography from her office laptop nearly 1,800 times in two weeks, CNN reports. She also had 600 sexually explicit images saved on her hard drive.

Phan In Phlorida wrote:This is just so awesome...

Senior SEC Staff Downloads Porn Amid Financial Crisis

One female accountant tried to access online pornography from her office laptop nearly 1,800 times in two weeks, CNN reports. She also had 600 sexually explicit images saved on her hard drive.

She sounds like fun.

Phan In Phlorida wrote:This is just so awesome...

Senior SEC Staff Downloads Porn Amid Financial Crisis

One female accountant tried to access online pornography from her office laptop nearly 1,800 times in two weeks, CNN reports. She also had 600 sexually explicit images saved on her hard drive.

A career monitoring financial pornography is stressful & leads the monitors to self-administered relief

QED

Peter Gammons tweet

Myron Rolle isn't drafted because he is a Rhodes Scholar. Ex-con Michael Vick is getting $35-40 to sign his name, if he can. Palin Country

I really dislike liberals

Damn, if I still lived in Arizona, I could have made a ton of money suing the state for not pulling over more Canadians--and there are a ton of Canadian snowbirds.

jerseyhoya wrote:Peter Gammons tweet

Myron Rolle isn't drafted because he is a Rhodes Scholar. Ex-con Michael Vick is getting $35-40 to sign his name, if he can. Palin Country

I really dislike liberals

Ahh, when sports and politics meet. I am not a fan at all but was the Palin bashing really necessary, Peter? You could have had the foundation of a decent point without the stupid political "connection". I would how Gammons feels about Chris Christie?

I have a strong dislike for Christie. His plan isn't going to fix anything, the debt is going to keep growing. As someone ( dajafi I think) pointed out, Christie is counting on the economy to rebound and him being there to reap the political benefits. Even though he will have had nothing to do with it.

traderdave wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Peter Gammons tweet

Myron Rolle isn't drafted because he is a Rhodes Scholar. Ex-con Michael Vick is getting $35-40 to sign his name, if he can. Palin Country

I really dislike liberals

Ahh, when sports and politics meet. I am not a fan at all but was the Palin bashing really necessary, Peter? You could have had the foundation of a decent point without the stupid political "connection". I would how Gammons feels about Chris Christie?

But it's dumber than that. Rolle was drafted. And Michael Vick's core of support isn't exactly found among Palin voters.

traderdave wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Peter Gammons tweet

Myron Rolle isn't drafted because he is a Rhodes Scholar. Ex-con Michael Vick is getting $35-40 to sign his name, if he can. Palin Country

I really dislike liberals

Ahh, when sports and politics meet. I am not a fan at all but was the Palin bashing really necessary, Peter? You could have had the foundation of a decent point without the stupid political "connection". I would how Gammons feels about Chris Christie?

I would guess that depends on whether Christie is a Red Sawx fan.

The Nightman Cometh wrote:I have a strong dislike for Christie. His plan isn't going to fix anything, the debt is going to keep growing. As someone ( dajafi I think) pointed out, Christie is counting on the economy to rebound and him being there to reap the political benefits. Even though he will have had nothing to do with it.

What do you mean it isn't going to fix anything? It fixed a $10.7 billion dollar budget deficit. Going forward the pension reforms and lack of increases in state spending this year will hopefully put the state on firmer financial footing. Every politician counts on the economy to be good, and they only have a little control over that happening.

How exactly is it fixed? Maybe the budget deficit now is fixed, but we are still in huge debt which a significant portion of our taxes have to go to just to pay the interest and maintain it. We need a surplus and you are not going to do that through just cutting. You have to tax.

Is our plan to just try to maintain it at a few billion until inflation makes that chump change even to the states? I guess we could do that.

The first US citizen was pulled over and handcuffed because he didn't have his birth certificate. He was a truck driver who I guess cops felt was 'suspicious' and when they asked him questions they detained him. Wonder why?

The Nightman Cometh wrote:You have to tax.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, New Jersey was experiencing property tax problems in part because the state was sending no money to local school districts. The State Supreme Court, as is its habit to this day, inserted itself into the policy discussion, and said this lack of state funding violated the state constitution, which stipulates kids from the ages of 5-18 are entitled to public education. Kids were being educated, but hell property taxes were getting too high, so the Democratic governor at the time enacted a state income tax with the express purpose of reducing local property taxes and funding education under heavy pressure from the economic policy experts on New Jersey’s State Supreme Court. Luckily this solved New Jersey’s property tax crisis forever.

OK so now we have an income tax. Christie is the sixth governor elected since Byrne left office, and Whitman is the only one who didn’t hike the income tax rates while she was at Drumthwacket. And people are calling for even more hikes to income tax rates among the highest in the country. Meanwhile we still have the highest property taxes in the country. And schools are still whining about being underfunded. And our state sales tax rate is one of the highest in the country.

Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t that taxes aren’t high enough. It’s just that we spend too much damn money. On the NJ Budget website, their budget summary only goes back to 1998, but that was the peak of the boom 1990s so it’s not an unfair starting point. The state budget for FY1998 was $16.4 billion. In 2009 dollars that’s $21.5 billion. Accounting for a 7.5% growth in population since then, the budget would be $23.1 billion if it had increased at the rate of inflation over the past dozen years. Christie’s budget for next year, draconian cuts and all, is $29.3 billion. A bit of the difference is inflation in medical care, which eats up a portion of the budget, is higher than the inflation rate on the whole, but that doesn’t explain the $6.2 billion gap. The state is on track to spend $32.2 billion in FY2010, or almost 50% more than it would have if spending had merely increased at the rate of inflation for the past decade or so. We spend too much damn money. Cuts are necessary.

NJ spending per pupil is 13k per year. Take a nice reasonably sized classroom of 20 kids, and that's 260k. Say you're really generous, and you pay the teacher 100k, including bennies. My question is where does the other 160k go?

And I know my numbers are off--teachers don't typically make 100k, and classrooms generally have more than 20 kids. But the basic question remains the same.

This really begs for some Photoshop. Don't they make a handsome couple?

Labour Danger: Uniform Swing Calculations May Understate Risk to Incumbents

Interesting article from Nate

jerseyhoya wrote:The rise and fall of Charlie Crist

In all of that wide-ranging, swinging-from-the-heels hatchet job, the paper nailed one incontrovertible item:

Had he run for re-election, no credible candidate — Democrat or Republican — would have challenged him.

jerseyhoya wrote:

The Nightman Cometh wrote:You have to tax.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, New Jersey was experiencing property tax problems in part because the state was sending no money to local school districts. The State Supreme Court, as is its habit to this day, inserted itself into the policy discussion, and said this lack of state funding violated the state constitution, which stipulates kids from the ages of 5-18 are entitled to public education. Kids were being educated, but hell property taxes were getting too high, so the Democratic governor at the time enacted a state income tax with the express purpose of reducing local property taxes and funding education under heavy pressure from the economic policy experts on New Jersey’s State Supreme Court. Luckily this solved New Jersey’s property tax crisis forever.

OK so now we have an income tax. Christie is the sixth governor elected since Byrne left office, and Whitman is the only one who didn’t hike the income tax rates while she was at Drumthwacket. And people are calling for even more hikes to income tax rates among the highest in the country. Meanwhile we still have the highest property taxes in the country. And schools are still whining about being underfunded. And our state sales tax rate is one of the highest in the country.

Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t that taxes aren’t high enough. It’s just that we spend too much damn money. On the NJ Budget website, their budget summary only goes back to 1998, but that was the peak of the boom 1990s so it’s not an unfair starting point. The state budget for FY1998 was $16.4 billion. In 2009 dollars that’s $21.5 billion. Accounting for a 7.5% growth in population since then, the budget would be $23.1 billion if it had increased at the rate of inflation over the past dozen years. Christie’s budget for next year, draconian cuts and all, is $29.3 billion. A bit of the difference is inflation in medical care, which eats up a portion of the budget, is higher than the inflation rate on the whole, but that doesn’t explain the $6.2 billion gap. The state is on track to spend $32.2 billion in FY2010, or almost 50% more than it would have if spending had merely increased at the rate of inflation for the past decade or so. We spend too much damn money. Cuts are necessary.

I appreciate your principles and actually I can agree with them to a certain extent. I don't have a problem with cutting programs and waste to balance the budget. I don't like it, but I understand it is most definitely needed in this case.

What I don't like is that we are not taxing enough in my opinion. I understand we are getting close to the point where taxing more starts bringing in less and thats something to be careful of, but what makes me even angrier is that every year a significant portion of our taxes (I honestly don't know what the number is, but it has to be high) goes to paying the interest on our debt just to keep that number the same. In my mind that is essentially wasted money.

I'd much rather feel the pain for however many years to bring that debt back to something manageable and stop wasting our money. So to clarify, I don't want to tax more to bring these programs back I want to tax more to start chipping away at that debt.

As always if I'm missing something or am just wrong please point it out. I'm obviously less educated and informed than most in this thread so I have no problem being wrong.