Iron Room is Nice to Coast Guardspersons
We generally tend to avoid this kind of feel-goody brand-enhancement story, but The Iron Room is offering free dinner to Coast Guard members who don’t get paid because of the government shutdown.
I’ve never had the meatloaf, the midweek special on offer, but Chef Kevin makes a mean taco so I suspect it’s great.
Basketballs
Elsewhere in positivity, two basketballsmen from Pleasantville passed the 1,000-point milestone in the finals of the Seagull Classic yesterday.
Pleasantville duo hit milestones as Greyhounds cap Seagull Classic with rim-shaking victory
Marijuana
Here’s a very wonkish piece on the state-of-play in marijuana reform. I’m not sure I understand it, but Phil Murphy wants one thing and the Steve Sweeney/Craig Coughlin axis want another, different thing. Probably the farting around is just due to the time-honored ‘transactional’ nature of New Jersey politics.
Segregated Schools
Elsewhere in wonkishness, CityLab has a kind-of-amazing report on New Jersey school segregation. We’re number six in the nation, as in sixth-most segregated, with nearly half of all Af-Am and Latinx students attending schools that are 90% nonwhite. But a lawsuit seeking to upend all that and has a weird chance at succeeding because New Jersey, in 1881, banned segregated schooling based on race. We also have a clause in the state constitution banning segregation in public schools. Also the state courts have knocked down the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, which has stopped federal lawsuits in the past, and the courts empowered the state education commissioner to do things to “foster racial balance.” Not that any of that has mattered much but hey the law’s the law. Still, the plaintiffs might very well settle.
The fascinatingest stuff, imho, has to do with the tension between the the organizers and the lawyers, who favor different approaches to the problem, which is intimately connected to the issue of consolidation.
Maintaining segregation costs hundreds of millions of dollars, but of course it’s perfectly possible to spend boatloads on redundant services while simultaneously blaming poor people/POC for your high taxes.
$55,000
Politico’s Matt Friedman and Danielle Muoio have a very fun story about how PSE&G (cool, clear nuclear) tried to give $55,000 to a Norcross-affiliated political group that does not disclose its donors and instead gave $55,000 to a Norcross-affiliated political group that does disclose its donors, which is how Friedman and Muoio found out about the donation, which happened four months after PSE&G got that big subsidy that Steve Sweeney spent a year or so pushing through the legislature, despite its resounding unpopularity.
NJ craft brewery scene has grown more than any other state. Here’s why–There's no place in the country where the popularity of craft beer is booming faster than the Garden State. www.courierpostonline.com
A ‘grand’ gesture: Local church donates piano to Salem Community College–A baby grand piano donated to the Salem Community College Foundation by the Memorial Baptist Church of Salem made its concert debut recently at the college’s Oak Singers' holiday concert in the Sol and Jean Davidow Performing Arts Theatre on the Carneys Point campus. www.nj.com
Hundreds were buried in unmarked graves in this N.J. cemetery. Now, we know why.–Alexander Ivan was just an infant in 1918. Ivan and his family lived in what is now Middlesex County, during the time of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's second term, the women's suffrage movement and the beginning of airmail service. www.nj.com
The 25 N.J. towns where people earn the most money, ranked–While the state's doing better since the Great Recession, household income remains nearly the same, according to fresh Census data released in December. www.nj.com