Shame on You, Shame on Us

Every resident of Matawan-Aberdeen should be disgusted and disgraced by the below story.

What kind of staff does the district employ that nobody is willing to loan $2 to a five-year old boy in our schools so that he can eat lunch? Shame, Shame, Shame!

The following - as reported by ABC Eyewitness News

MATAWAN, N.J. (WABC) -- Parents in New Jersey are outraged after learning their autistic son was forced to go hungry all day at school.

That's because the school denied the boy his lunch over a billing issue.

So the 5-year-old just sat there at Cliffwood Elementary in Matawan and watched others eat.

It was John Robert Caravella's fourth day of kindergarten in a new school.

But no one, not the principal, not the teachers, and not the aides, helped this 5-year-old autistic child get his lunch Tuesday. So he sat in the cafeteria and ate nothing.

"Really, for $2, you couldn't feed the kid?" said Silvia Caravella, John Robert's mother.

John Robert left for school at 8:45 a.m. and didn't get home until 4 p.m. And all that time, all he ate was a bag of mini muffins his parents packed him for a snack.

John Robert is a non-verbal autistic child. I pray someone in the administration find someone for that school who cares enough to notice a 5-year old child doesn't have lunch and does something about it. >>> Read more!

Obama the Small

Ronald Reagan famously said, "Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong." The projection of power is critical to America’s national defense. People around the world knew there was no better friend and no worst enemy. How then do we explain the Obama Doctrine?

As America’s newly elected president, Obama launches his “World Apology Tour”. He apologizes to the French (the French!) for the times “where America's shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” Obama also promised to slash America’s nuclear arsenal so that we would have "the moral authority to say to Iran, don't develop a nuclear weapon, to say to North Korea, don't proliferate nuclear weapons."

Obama then stripped Poland of its promised missile shield, and remained silent as Russian invaded Georgia and Iran brutally suppressed the Green Movement. He later told then Russian President Medvedev to wait until after the U.S.  elections for more treaty negotiations when Obama will have more “flexibility”.

In Cairo, as part of Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world, he said the trauma from 9/11 sometimes “led us to act contrary to our ideals”.  

Obama’s justice department then investigated and threatened to prosecute the CIA interrogators who got the information that lead to SEAL operation that killed Bin Laden.

>>> Read more!

The Debt is $16 Trillion and Rising Fast

Mr. President, what part of bankrupt don’t you understand?

You promise us more teachers, more cops, more road building, more Pell grants, more food stamps, more industry bailouts, more, more, more . . . How are we going to pay for all this? With more borrowing? Is $16,000,000,000,000 of debt not enough? Why does your budget propose spending over $10,000,000,000 a day with trillion dollar annual deficits as far as the eye can see?

You think taxing the rich will pay for everything? You could confiscate every penny of income from every person on the Forbes 400 and you still wouldn’t cover one day of expenses. You talk about cutting $4 trillion dollars over ten years but that would still leave us borrowing over a trillion dollars a year once Obamacare hits. Besides, nobody believes you’ll cut spending on anything but national defense because you haven’t.

We’re paying over $20 billion a month in interest on our existing debt and that assumes interest rates stay low because you’re unwilling to pay a bit more to lock in 30-year interest rates. What happens if interest rates creep up? Is the Federal Reserve going to keep printing money forever?

And please stop trying to sell us another stimulus plan. We’ve already had the Bush stimulus (remember those checks?), cash for clunkers, the Obama stimulus, and an explosion in federal spending. And each time we were promised it would stimulate the economy.

We blew $800 billion on the Obama stimulus. According to your projections, unemployment is higher today than it would have been without a stimulus.
>>> Read more!

Upcoming School Board Elections

I write this piece with some reluctance.  If Aberdeen residents won’t protect themselves from their elected leadership, why should I?

Last February, two-thirds of the Matawan-Aberdeen School Board voted to strip residents of their right to vote on the school budget and nobody showed up to protest.

Last July, the school board voted to approve a Memorandum of Agreement with the teacher's union regarding the terms of a new teachers contract and nobody asked to see the memorandum. No residents, no reporters, nobody. Nobody but me, that is, and I no longer live in Aberdeen. At first glance, it's a good deal for the district with 7.5% increases over a four-year period and the lion's share of increases going to new teachers. I'll comment further once I see the signed contract.

Nor did anyone complain when the school board voted to increase spending by $1.64 million during a sustained period of high unemployment. Or when the school business administrator comment he could have cut $200,000 from the budget but preferred to spend that money rather than allow the residents to keep it.

While on the school board, I worked hard to implement new goals, such as how to objectively measure progress. Now that I'm gone, so are those measurements. No longer do we report where our graduates go or how likely they are to complete any post-high school education. No longer do we compare ourselves to high-achieving districts.

Still, I have many dear friends in Aberdeen and I continue to hope someone will step forward to lead.

Regarding the upcoming school elections, it's sometimes hard to determine who will better serve the community but it's relatively easy to look at a candidate's experience and determine if he was part of the solution or part of the problem.

This year, Aberdeen is fortunate to have more candidates than available seats -
>>> Read more!

The Patch Interview

My thanks and appreciation to Chelsea Naso of the Matawan-Aberdeen Patch for her yeoman’s work and, on this occasion, for interviewing Mayor Fred Tagliarini and Town Manager Holly Reycraft. I happen to like Mayor Tagliarini and Ms. Reycraft. They’re both good people trying to do right by their community. However, I’m also opposed to many of the town council’s actions and feel compelled to respond to some of their answers.

Below are parts of the interview with my comments:

Q: In January 2009, the town council introduced a Pay-to-Play ordinance. Then the council never discussed or approved it. What happened and why won't the town council end the practice of awarding contracts to their largest campaign contributors? The most egregious example is the township engineer, CME, who contributes tens of thousands of dollars to the political campaigns and receives over a million dollars a year from the township. When was the last time the township had competitive bidding for a professional services contract? 

Fred: To the best of my knowledge, all candidates of all parties follow the guidelines set forth. 

Holly: We have a pay to play ordinance that is the same as the state requires. They [CME] get appointed each year. I appoint the engineer, based on recommendations from the council. They [CME] are mostly paid through escrow funds. Everything goes out to bid as per law. We don’t pick them based on their contributions. If you keep changing firms, there’s no continuity. 

Fred: A lot of engineering firms will contribute to both campaigns. Engineering firms donate, businesses donate. I don’t know an engineering firm that doesn’t make donations. I know engineering firms that will contribute to both campaigns.

The township does not request nor receive competing bids for “professional services” such as engineering, town planning, legal, or accounting. Engineering alone (CME) receives over a million dollars a year from the township. 

Furthermore, these professional service providers donated tens of thousands of dollars to the democratic town council’s campaigns and it’s been well documented on this blog using public records.
>>> Read more!