Fire
There was a fire at the Sea Breeze condos in Atlantic City yesterday. Amanda Auble at the Press has many details in a tidy narrative.
Does it seem like there’s been an uptick in these? Maybe it’s just me.
54%
Fifty-four percent of New Jerseyans–including 47% of registered Republicans–favored limited driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants in a survey by Let’s Drive NJ.
They only polled 561 registered voters, but the numbers were 54% pro vs. 29% against with 17% unsure.
Marijuana
Sam Anderson reports that some 45 New Jersey towns have preemptively banned marijuana dispensaries at least partly at the urging of NJ RAMP (Responsible Approaches to Marijuana Policy), an offshoot of Kevin Sabet’s group SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana) which says legalizing marijuana will lead to an increase in homelessness, among other things.
Homelessness. We have galloping, hardcore opioid abuse in Atlantic City and we still don’t have a problem with homelessness per se. If anything, the Taxpayers Caucus would like to see accommodations get a little less cozy for the drug tourists, but SAM or RAMP or whatever is one of the mostly creepily out-of-touch organizations I’ve ever seen, I think. (That time SAM-affiliated individuals came to Atlantic City and talked about scromitting.)
Paying Attention
Former Assemblyperson Joan Quigley raises an interesting question apropos the rejection of Steve Sweeney’s hideous plan to gerrymander state government in favor of the Democrats for the next however many years.
Historically, this has been the kind of thing our political class could expect to get away with because only “office-holders and wannabes” care about things like redistricting, Quigley says.
“But this time everyone cared. Maybe it was just people reading online bulletins while waiting for their favorite shopping sites to upload.”
My step-grandfather grew up during the Depression and 50 years later he still kept all of his money in a shoebox under the bed, and I wonder sometimes if my generation will be the same way. People my age have lurched from one crisis to the next–from the Dot.com Boom to the Global Financial Meltdown to the sh*t-show in the White House to seventeen years of uninterrupted war–for our entire adult lives, because it was advantageous to somebody that we not pay too much attention.
If we ever get our democracy back we’ll be sleeping with it under our pillows for the next 50 years. Dare to dream, my fellow Americans!
For more feats of journalism…
Vacant Kmart strip mall won’t sit empty. County bought it for $5.75M.–Cape May County announced it had purchased the 62,000-square-foot K-Mart shopping plaza in Rio Grande via auction, submitting the winning bid of $5.75 million for the property, $4.65 million less than the appraised value of $10.4 million. www.nj.com
School bus crash in South Jersey sends 14 kids to 5 hospitals–A tractor-trailer carrying sand and a school bus collided in Gloucester County Monday, sending at least 14 students to hospitals, officials said. www.nj.com
Superintendent accused of beating a spy shop employee with bat is back at school–A superintendent accused of using a baseball bat to beat a spy shop employee in Philadelphia returned to his position in December. www.nj.com