Last month, some 4,600 families of disabled adults awaiting residential placement were notified by the state where their adults now stand on the list.
Yes, I'm talking about the infamous "waiting list" for placement into group homes or community facilities - and those 4,600 are merely the "priority" clients - people whose care providers are becoming elderly and infirm or who have only one living elderly parent.
Post a comment | View comments (4)Up to this point, the painful cuts that will be forced on New Jersey by the onrushing shortfall in revenue have mostly been theoretical. We know they're coming. But as with most bad things, that's different from seeing their impact.
So one place we might want to keep a worried eye on is New Jersey Network, the public television station that provides critical television coverage focused on our state.
Sarah Palin and familyOrdinarily, I don't get sufficiently riled by opinion pieces to address them in this space. But Amanda Fortini's essay in the current issue of New York magazine on the candidacies of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton got my Irish up.
Fortini's contention is that Election '08's most prominent women candidates so thoroughly reinforced negative female stereotypes that, rather than advancing the progress of women toward American leadership, they sent it into regression.
Or, as her editors cavalierly headlined it: The 'Bitch' and the 'Ditz': How the Year of the Woman reinforced the two most pernicious sexist stereotypes and actually set women back."
As historians and citizens begin speculating on the legacy of George W. Bush, his administration is working on a late entry that could be among his most enduring: changing scads of rules affecting business, the environment and the protection of consumers.
Hint: Don't expect in most cases that he will be coming down on the side of people who want cleaner air or safer toys.
The election of Barack Obama has captured the world's attention in a way that the election of his opponent could not have - and if he plays it right, that will be good for all of us.
Not because Obama has any particular standing in world affairs, where he is a man largely without experience. What has commanded the attention of world leaders is the overnight sea change in what U.S. leadership looks like and what that says about how we think.
Every time an election comes around, stories surface about whether electronic voting machines can be trusted to count ballots accurately. But you have to read the stories fast because they disappear as quickly as they arrive.
Whether that's due to lack of interest or because no one has definitively proven a machine count has been compromised is unclear. For whatever reason, these stories don't get sustained national attention.
Two weeks ago, we'd never heard of Joe the Plumber. Now he's famous.
And infamous.
Joe the Plumber, you'll recall, is Joe Wurzelbacher, the Ohio plumber who became a shooting star in the presidential debate when John McCain brought him up to illustrate what McCain says Barack Obama's tax policy would do to the average American.
In 2006, New Jersey women earned 78.3 cents for every dollar a man earned in comparable jobs. Today that number is down to 77 cents. Granted that's an improvement over the 72 cents it was the first time I wrote about this issue in 1978.
Still, a nickel strikes me as rather pitiful progress in 30 years.
Sen. Diane Allen (R-Burlington), who co-sponsored legislation to create the state Council on Gender Parity, has noted that part of the reason women's pay remains lower is not because of some conspiracy but simply due to circumstances.
Our panic over oil - specifically, our renewed determination to extract as much oil as possible from the waters off our shores - has spawned the mantra "Drill, baby, drill."
We love that phrase. Not just the catchiness of it but what it represents. We're so enamored with the idea of weaning ourselves from foreign oil that we aren't even asking why for almost 30 years we felt the risks of offshore drilling outweighed the potential benefit. Instead, we seem, almost overnight, to have bought the argument that if we can drill, let's. End of discussion. Problem solved. ¶
What does a woman need to be taken seriously on a national presidential ticket?
For a while there, I thought I knew the answer. It was Hillary Clinton.
When I watch the vice presidential debate between Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Biden tomorrow night, I really hope moderator Gwen Ifill asks the governor about something that's intrigued me ever since former Sen. Fred Thompson brought it up at the Republican convention: the declaration that she can field dress a moose.
Frankly, I'd be very interested in hearing her philosophy on this subject because really, when you think about it, how hard can it be? What do you need beyond a credit card and an Orvis catalog?
So, in addition to its regular appropriation, it turns out the Rutgers athletic department has been getting a bonus from the Legislature over the past four years -- $2.25 million in "earmarks," a harmless-sounding term for what used to be called "Christmas tree items," those little extras we aren't supposed to worry our pretty little heads about.
We just pay for them.
If part of our discussion this fall is to be the issue of teen sexuality - which seems inevitable, given that Barack Obama brought up the subject in his acceptance speech and the Republican vice presidential candidate's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant - a couple of television shows need to be in that conversation.
I'm talking about "Gossip Girl," which began its second season last Monday on the CW (Ch. 11) and the resurrected "Beverly Hills, 90210," now simply "90210," which debuted last Tuesday on the same network.
Hurricane Gustav has come and gone, and while it created some serious problems, the direst predictions of its impact on the Gulf Coast fortunately did not come to pass.
At the same time, if its landfall wasn't as devastating as it might have been, neither was the windfall for which some Republicans were hoping.
Until recently, it could be assumed that Rutgers cutting six varsity sports and committing well over a $100 million to upsize the football program was simply the boys in charge selling us on a bigger, shinier toy. Now, in the wake of an investigative series published by this paper, it appears the boys weren't entirely open about it.
