ACLU fights crime-fighting cameras

The New Jersey ACLU has a problem with installing crime-fighting surveillance cameras in dangerous neighborhoods of cities such as Newark and Trenton.
Maybe these lawyers should live in one of these neighborhoods for a month before taking a position on this issue!
The editorial in tomorrow's Trentonian takes aim at this issue. Here's a taste:
"The ACLU of New Jersey has found another windmill to tilt at in this one.
"Not so concerned about the people getting murdered, raped and assaulted in places like Trenton, the ACLU is worried that the cameras will infringe on the rights of citizens to, and we’re not making this up, attend a strip club in anonymity.
"Newark Mayor Cory Booker told the AP that “people are willing to trade some of their anonymity for increased security.”
"In today's world, there's a presumption that you give up a certain amount of privacy when you're in public space," he said. "I don't think this is an over-broad step. It's not like declaring a citywide curfew for adults or calling in the National Guard or state troopers."
"We agree. Bring the cameras to Trenton, too, the more the better, and make sure that they actually work."

Check out The Trentonian's local videos

Click on the links below for local video by Trentonian photographer Jackie Schear:

Mercer County Italian American Festival

A Day at the City Market

A Day at the Hopewell Skate Park

Q&A in Princeton: Why Do You Visit Trenton?

Trenton Arson Fire Investigation

Jena 6 Justice March in Trenton

Features Editor Scott Frost takes a ride in an F-16

Jeff Edelstein's version of the New Jersey State Song

Health Fair

Shad Fest

Masters of Percussion

Why is Palmer against police referendum?

You've heard by now that the New Jersey Supreme Court yesterday overturned Mayor Doug Palmer's 2004 attempt to block a referendum that challenged his decision to do away with the city's deputy police chiefs.
The move solidified the power that Trenton's controversial civilian police director has over the department.
Critics of the move used a provision in New Jersey law that allows voters to collect signatures and force a citywide referendum asking that a particular city ordinance be overturned.
Palmer and the city council went to court to block that vote in 2004, and the case culminated yesterday with the Supreme Court restoring sweeping rights for voters to use this referendum process throughout the state.
Why did Palmer spend so much taxpayer money challenging this? Why did he care in the first place if voters had a say?
The best theory we can come up with is that Doug Palmer knows that the civilian police director system in Trenton has fallen out of favor. That may or may not be tied directly to the personality and performance of the person who has the job.
Putting this referendum out to voters could be the first step in a groundswell among the public to going back to the old days of having a traditional police chief.

Whack-job world leader

OK, so some lowest-human-life-form moron carved a giant swastika in a corn field in Washington Township.
Pretty disgusting. Pretty stupid. But until the police tell us different, we’ll assume some out-of-state redneck was to blame and not one of our slightly more intelligent local punks.
Of bigger concern to us and the rest of the Free World yesterday was a crazy little man named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was for some reason let into an institute of “higher” learning up in New York City.
Now stop and picture whatever redneck was out knocking down cornstalks the other night. Picture them mating with their sister, the sister smoking crystal meth all nine months of the pregnancy, then the baby being fed nothing but lead paint chips for the first eight or nine years of childhood.
Convert the kid to the most radical perversion of Islam you can come up with, and then put him in charge of a large, radical Middle Eastern country that’s cooking up nuclear weapons.
And that’s how we imagine you get someone like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
From denying the Holocaust to wanting to wipe Israel off the face of the planet. From denying women every basic human right to claiming that there are no homosexuals in Iran.
This guy is not simply a dangerous religious extremist leading a militantly anti-American, anti-Jewish and anti-everything-but-fundamentalist-Islam dictatorship.
He is, literally, mentally ill.
You can’t negotiate with that or trust it, and you can’t, if you’re the greatest super power on the globe and looked to as an upholder of security and democracy, give it one inch of legitimacy or serious standing in world politics.

L.A. Parker on urgency

L.A. Parker writes in Saturday's Trentonian about why there is not a bigger sense of urgency in addressing the city's problems.
Here's a taste:
"Missing but crucial agendas in the City of Trenton are a sense of urgencyand unflappable honesty.
"Does anyone else see the garbage pigeonholed on South Broad Street?
"Why do teachers outnumber parents at "Back to School Night?"
"Should not education be the one goal that we push our children towardwhether the classroom offers standard or vocational studies?
"It's almost as if our houses are ablaze and we choose to extinguish theflames with saliva rather than break out the heavy hoses.
"That stuff hitting the fan right now is anything but spit; we are engaged ina great civil war regarding education, violence, guns, gangs, homelessness, abandoned houses and a litany of other issues.
"Some issues need time for solutions, but for others the time for action is now."

Why do you visit Trenton?

New to http://www.trentonian.com/ is local video produced by photographer Jackie Schear.
On the site right now is a question-and-answer session she shot in Princeton, asking passerby when the last time they visited Trenton and why, and what would get them to visit the city more.
Check it out by clicking here.

Rally for the working man!

The fact that Rider University professors may go on strike is one of the most hilarious - but sad in the light of this area's real problems - stories we've read in quite some time.
An editorial in Wednesday's Trentonian takes aim, and here's a portion:
"...First of all, Rider professors apparently have a union.
Second, negotiations are going so badly that Dr. Jeff Halpern, a leader of this union, said in a story for The Trentonian’s Web site yesterday that professors will go on strike soon if some key issues aren’t resolved.
Cue Norma Rae.
These guys have got it bad.
Paper cuts, whiny students, actual teaching occasionally getting in the way of all that time a professor needs to sit around and think great thoughts about the universe.
How is someone with only a doctorate degree like Halpern going to survive?
How will he feed his family?
Maybe they’ll all be living out of the back of the Mercedes if the strike goes on too long...
This isn’t a coal mine. This isn’t even a public elementary school.
One of the main sticking points in negotiations, in fact, is whether the administration of the college should have final say over promotions and academic programs.
Huh? They’re debating over whether the people in charge of the college should be in charge of the college?"

Happy Constitution Day! Trentonian kicks off series for kids

The Trentonian kicks off a series of special pages for children with today’s paper in connection with Constitution Day, a federally mandated day of study of the U.S. Constitution in the nation’s schools.
The serialized story “Thomas Paine: An American Patriot,” is based on the manuscript of a book originally written for the New Jersey Newspaper Foundation.
Each Monday for eight weeks, a full page will be devoted to a new installment of the series.
Join us for a look at the creation of one of this country’s most famous documents, “Common Sense,” written by Paine, a journalist, writer and revolutionary.
Learn how his writing influenced the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The story takes you into his life with the New Jersey and Pennsylvania connections that brought him immortality.
Each installment of the story will include questions and essay assignments that can be used in the classroom.
The series starts with a full page installment on page 13 today.
Next week, the story will include Thomas Paine’s connections to Pennsylvania’s most famous resident, Benjamin Franklin.
To order copies of The Trentonian for your classroom, or for more information about sponsoring this program, call The Trentonian at (609) 989-7800 or e-mail Jim Lindsey at jlindsey@trentonian.com.

Blogging from a blowout

If you're a Rutgers fan and you haven't discovered Trentonian staff writer Ben Doody's blog yet, be sure to check it out. Here's the link.
Ben brings you Rutgers football news throughout the week that's in addition to his excellent daily beat coverage in The Trentonian's print edition.
The blog is especially cool on game day, when Ben updates with insights and insider information right from the sideline.
He updated the blog 14 times today, with plenty of good things to talk about in the Scarlet Knights' 59-0 victory over Norfolk State.

Look Who's Talking Monday: Weedman!

Check out Monday's Trentonian for the latest installment of Jeff Edelstein's interview feature, "Look Who's Talking."

This week, Jeff sits down with New Jersey's own Weedman!

A taste of some of his comments ...

"I always thought lawyers had to be super-smart. I don’t think that’s true anymore."

"...sometimes I wish I could go back to being incog-negro."

"I’m also a cannabis connoisseur. A weed snob. And blunts? Why would you take good-tasting marijuana and putting it in a smelly 50 cent cigar?"

Hot air on global warming

Mayors from across the country will be in Trenton Friday to address the problem that's most imminently facing our inner-cities.
What's that, you say ... gang violence, drugs, poverty, homelessness, urban decay?
Wrong.
Come on, get with the program.
The biggest concern of the nation's mayors, led by Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer these days, is ... global warming.
That's right. Global warming.
Hey, while Rome is burning, maybe it's good to stop and think about how those flames are affecting incremental temperature change over the next 1,500 years.

The country's mayors arrive in Trenton

Thursday's Trentonian will include an editorial on the arrival of 38 mayors from across the country for a two-day meeting in Trenton of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, led by Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer.

It’s tempting to join Palmer’s critics at this high-profile time and say, how can the mayor of a city with so many problems, and so little going for it after more than a decade of his leadership, be held up as a leader among city leaders from across the country?
The instinct of Palmer, his staff and his supporters, on the other hand, is to put some lipstick on this pig and try to highlight our small city’s good parts before we shuttle these bigwigs back out of town on Friday. Take them to a Trenton Thunder game, show off a nice restaurant or two, talk about the Broad Street Bank building, maybe. (OK, we’re grasping here.)
Oh, and enact some swift, meaningful changes to make Trenton look better, like requiring taxi drivers to wear collar shirts and maybe some deodorant ... at least for a few days.

The editorial goes on to suggest that instead of pretending Trenton is something that it's not, or blasting Palmer again, we should urge the mayor to put his colleagues from across the country on a bus, take them around our city, and ask THEM for advice on how they would tackle our problems and opportunities.

A man called Freedom

Coming in Thursday's Trentonian, L.A. Parker brings you the story of a young city man named "Freedom," a group called Fathers and Men United for a Better Trenton and local people choosing a more positive approach toward themselves and the community.
Here's a taste:
If persons of color become successful like many of the aforementioned, many of us ridicule them by describing them as “sellouts” or inquire “Are they black enough?”The inference is that if blacks succeed in this current system, if we speak well, learn well and rise to the levels of teachers, doctors and corporate executives, that we somehow have abandoned our blackness, culture and other rights.
Such beliefs suggest that we have exchanged our metallic ropes for a worse prison, a mental incarceration that, unless changed, will lead to the destruction of ourselves by ourselves.

Lofton's response

In Tuesday's Trentonian, you'll read about Trenton School Superintendent Rodney Lofton's response to the fiasco that left hundreds of city students corralled into a gym rather than attending classes the first few days of school last week.
We were pretty harsh with our school superintendent-as-a-clown front page, and Lofton - as the school district's top official - deserved it.
But you've got to respect his response to such harsh criticism, and Mayor Doug Palmer's subsequent public flogging of him.
Rather than cry about being picked on unfairly, scream racism, or point the finger at someone else, Lofton's only public statement has been to own up to the problems, apologize to students and parents, work as fast as he can to fix the problem, and pledge to do better in the future.
That was the public response.
Let's hope the behind-the-scenes response is the only thing that's going to make a dent in problems like this in Trenton's schools ... a take-no-prisoners assault on the tenure system and protection of incompetence.
Lofton needs to fire some people ... maybe a lot of people ... and he needs Doug Palmer's support to do it.

Vote for your favorite Page 6 girl

Another cool addition to trentonian.com debuts today.
Now you can vote for your favorite Trentonian Page 6 girl.
The girl with the most votes at the end of the month will be included in a Trentonian Page 6 girl calendar.
And you can get a calendar ... register your name when you vote for a chance to win.
Don't want to register your name? You don't have to. You can still vote for your favorite Page 6 girl. It's easy, and it's up on our site right now.

Trentonian football picks contest

Check out a cool new addition to our trentonian.com Web site:
U-Pickem Football 2007 is an NFL football picks contest with great weekly prizes to be won. It costs nothing, and it's easy to play.
And don't worry if you've missed the first week. You can register anytime and start playing.

Who's running this circus?

Where do we even begin when it comes to the disaster that was the first day of school in Trenton?

Hundreds of students show up for the first day of school, and are corralled into the gym to twiddle their thumbs because ... AGAIN ... the school district was unable to do something as basic as schedule classes for everyone.

And that's after the district spent $500,000 of taxpayer funds to hire an outside firm to handle scheduling.

Apparently, the scheduling of classes ... something that's been done in every school district in the country every year since the beginning of modern public education ... is too complicated for the bozos running the Trenton School District.

And that's why we ran with the front page you saw on today's Trentonian. Hard-hitting? Yes. But also well-deserved.

And if we did anything to help create an environment that led to Mayor Doug Palmer going ballistic and ordering an immediate fix to this problem, that's great.

His outrage today and our front page are an understatement of the anger that this situation ... the latest in a long string of failures by the Trenton School District ... has sparked among parents and taxpayers.

Morons for peace

Coincidentally, the computers in Congressman Chris Smith's office were tampered with and damaged for days immediately following the visit by a group of rowdy anti-war protesters last week.
It doesn't matter to these bozos that Smith is one of the most progressive members of his party in many areas, a maverick who represents his constituents before any kind of special interest or Republican leadership thug.
These people are complete ideological morons. It proves that any cause -- including some that might have noble principles at the heart or inception of them -- can have idiots following along for the wrong reasons or who don't even understand the reasons.
Want proof of how stupid these people are? Watch the videos they posted of themselves.
Click here for part one of the video.
Click here for part two of the video.

McGreevey headlines

Jim McGreevey is going to seminary to become a priest.
That's the kind of story a paper like The Trentonian lives for.
And a lot of thought and fun goes into coming up with a headline for a story like that, more so when it's going to be the front page, which it was yesterday until some local fishermen pulled a human head out of a local body of water.
The brainstorming process for front page headline writing can come up with some good, some bad, and some that don't look quite so appropriate after sleeping on it.
Here are some of the McGreevey headlines we considered last night:
- LOVING HIS FELLOW MAN
- ALTAR BOY
- JUDAS PRIEST
- JESUS FREAK
- McGREEVEY ENTERS SEE-MEN-ARY
- HELL, NO!
- HEAVEN CAN WAIT
- REV. STRANGELOVE
- GAY GOV'S AFTER-WIFE

ACLU fights crime-fighting cameras

The New Jersey ACLU has a problem with installing crime-fighting surveillance cameras in dangerous neighborhoods of cities such as Newark and Trenton.
Maybe these lawyers should live in one of these neighborhoods for a month before taking a position on this issue!
The editorial in tomorrow's Trentonian takes aim at this issue. Here's a taste:
"The ACLU of New Jersey has found another windmill to tilt at in this one.
"Not so concerned about the people getting murdered, raped and assaulted in places like Trenton, the ACLU is worried that the cameras will infringe on the rights of citizens to, and we’re not making this up, attend a strip club in anonymity.
"Newark Mayor Cory Booker told the AP that “people are willing to trade some of their anonymity for increased security.”
"In today's world, there's a presumption that you give up a certain amount of privacy when you're in public space," he said. "I don't think this is an over-broad step. It's not like declaring a citywide curfew for adults or calling in the National Guard or state troopers."
"We agree. Bring the cameras to Trenton, too, the more the better, and make sure that they actually work."

Check out The Trentonian's local videos

Click on the links below for local video by Trentonian photographer Jackie Schear:

Mercer County Italian American Festival

A Day at the City Market

A Day at the Hopewell Skate Park

Q&A in Princeton: Why Do You Visit Trenton?

Trenton Arson Fire Investigation

Jena 6 Justice March in Trenton

Features Editor Scott Frost takes a ride in an F-16

Jeff Edelstein's version of the New Jersey State Song

Health Fair

Shad Fest

Masters of Percussion

Why is Palmer against police referendum?

You've heard by now that the New Jersey Supreme Court yesterday overturned Mayor Doug Palmer's 2004 attempt to block a referendum that challenged his decision to do away with the city's deputy police chiefs.
The move solidified the power that Trenton's controversial civilian police director has over the department.
Critics of the move used a provision in New Jersey law that allows voters to collect signatures and force a citywide referendum asking that a particular city ordinance be overturned.
Palmer and the city council went to court to block that vote in 2004, and the case culminated yesterday with the Supreme Court restoring sweeping rights for voters to use this referendum process throughout the state.
Why did Palmer spend so much taxpayer money challenging this? Why did he care in the first place if voters had a say?
The best theory we can come up with is that Doug Palmer knows that the civilian police director system in Trenton has fallen out of favor. That may or may not be tied directly to the personality and performance of the person who has the job.
Putting this referendum out to voters could be the first step in a groundswell among the public to going back to the old days of having a traditional police chief.

Whack-job world leader

OK, so some lowest-human-life-form moron carved a giant swastika in a corn field in Washington Township.
Pretty disgusting. Pretty stupid. But until the police tell us different, we’ll assume some out-of-state redneck was to blame and not one of our slightly more intelligent local punks.
Of bigger concern to us and the rest of the Free World yesterday was a crazy little man named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was for some reason let into an institute of “higher” learning up in New York City.
Now stop and picture whatever redneck was out knocking down cornstalks the other night. Picture them mating with their sister, the sister smoking crystal meth all nine months of the pregnancy, then the baby being fed nothing but lead paint chips for the first eight or nine years of childhood.
Convert the kid to the most radical perversion of Islam you can come up with, and then put him in charge of a large, radical Middle Eastern country that’s cooking up nuclear weapons.
And that’s how we imagine you get someone like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
From denying the Holocaust to wanting to wipe Israel off the face of the planet. From denying women every basic human right to claiming that there are no homosexuals in Iran.
This guy is not simply a dangerous religious extremist leading a militantly anti-American, anti-Jewish and anti-everything-but-fundamentalist-Islam dictatorship.
He is, literally, mentally ill.
You can’t negotiate with that or trust it, and you can’t, if you’re the greatest super power on the globe and looked to as an upholder of security and democracy, give it one inch of legitimacy or serious standing in world politics.

L.A. Parker on urgency

L.A. Parker writes in Saturday's Trentonian about why there is not a bigger sense of urgency in addressing the city's problems.
Here's a taste:
"Missing but crucial agendas in the City of Trenton are a sense of urgencyand unflappable honesty.
"Does anyone else see the garbage pigeonholed on South Broad Street?
"Why do teachers outnumber parents at "Back to School Night?"
"Should not education be the one goal that we push our children towardwhether the classroom offers standard or vocational studies?
"It's almost as if our houses are ablaze and we choose to extinguish theflames with saliva rather than break out the heavy hoses.
"That stuff hitting the fan right now is anything but spit; we are engaged ina great civil war regarding education, violence, guns, gangs, homelessness, abandoned houses and a litany of other issues.
"Some issues need time for solutions, but for others the time for action is now."

Why do you visit Trenton?

New to http://www.trentonian.com/ is local video produced by photographer Jackie Schear.
On the site right now is a question-and-answer session she shot in Princeton, asking passerby when the last time they visited Trenton and why, and what would get them to visit the city more.
Check it out by clicking here.

Rally for the working man!

The fact that Rider University professors may go on strike is one of the most hilarious - but sad in the light of this area's real problems - stories we've read in quite some time.
An editorial in Wednesday's Trentonian takes aim, and here's a portion:
"...First of all, Rider professors apparently have a union.
Second, negotiations are going so badly that Dr. Jeff Halpern, a leader of this union, said in a story for The Trentonian’s Web site yesterday that professors will go on strike soon if some key issues aren’t resolved.
Cue Norma Rae.
These guys have got it bad.
Paper cuts, whiny students, actual teaching occasionally getting in the way of all that time a professor needs to sit around and think great thoughts about the universe.
How is someone with only a doctorate degree like Halpern going to survive?
How will he feed his family?
Maybe they’ll all be living out of the back of the Mercedes if the strike goes on too long...
This isn’t a coal mine. This isn’t even a public elementary school.
One of the main sticking points in negotiations, in fact, is whether the administration of the college should have final say over promotions and academic programs.
Huh? They’re debating over whether the people in charge of the college should be in charge of the college?"

Happy Constitution Day! Trentonian kicks off series for kids

The Trentonian kicks off a series of special pages for children with today’s paper in connection with Constitution Day, a federally mandated day of study of the U.S. Constitution in the nation’s schools.
The serialized story “Thomas Paine: An American Patriot,” is based on the manuscript of a book originally written for the New Jersey Newspaper Foundation.
Each Monday for eight weeks, a full page will be devoted to a new installment of the series.
Join us for a look at the creation of one of this country’s most famous documents, “Common Sense,” written by Paine, a journalist, writer and revolutionary.
Learn how his writing influenced the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The story takes you into his life with the New Jersey and Pennsylvania connections that brought him immortality.
Each installment of the story will include questions and essay assignments that can be used in the classroom.
The series starts with a full page installment on page 13 today.
Next week, the story will include Thomas Paine’s connections to Pennsylvania’s most famous resident, Benjamin Franklin.
To order copies of The Trentonian for your classroom, or for more information about sponsoring this program, call The Trentonian at (609) 989-7800 or e-mail Jim Lindsey at jlindsey@trentonian.com.

Blogging from a blowout

If you're a Rutgers fan and you haven't discovered Trentonian staff writer Ben Doody's blog yet, be sure to check it out. Here's the link.
Ben brings you Rutgers football news throughout the week that's in addition to his excellent daily beat coverage in The Trentonian's print edition.
The blog is especially cool on game day, when Ben updates with insights and insider information right from the sideline.
He updated the blog 14 times today, with plenty of good things to talk about in the Scarlet Knights' 59-0 victory over Norfolk State.

Look Who's Talking Monday: Weedman!

Check out Monday's Trentonian for the latest installment of Jeff Edelstein's interview feature, "Look Who's Talking."

This week, Jeff sits down with New Jersey's own Weedman!

A taste of some of his comments ...

"I always thought lawyers had to be super-smart. I don’t think that’s true anymore."

"...sometimes I wish I could go back to being incog-negro."

"I’m also a cannabis connoisseur. A weed snob. And blunts? Why would you take good-tasting marijuana and putting it in a smelly 50 cent cigar?"

Hot air on global warming

Mayors from across the country will be in Trenton Friday to address the problem that's most imminently facing our inner-cities.
What's that, you say ... gang violence, drugs, poverty, homelessness, urban decay?
Wrong.
Come on, get with the program.
The biggest concern of the nation's mayors, led by Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer these days, is ... global warming.
That's right. Global warming.
Hey, while Rome is burning, maybe it's good to stop and think about how those flames are affecting incremental temperature change over the next 1,500 years.

The country's mayors arrive in Trenton

Thursday's Trentonian will include an editorial on the arrival of 38 mayors from across the country for a two-day meeting in Trenton of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, led by Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer.

It’s tempting to join Palmer’s critics at this high-profile time and say, how can the mayor of a city with so many problems, and so little going for it after more than a decade of his leadership, be held up as a leader among city leaders from across the country?
The instinct of Palmer, his staff and his supporters, on the other hand, is to put some lipstick on this pig and try to highlight our small city’s good parts before we shuttle these bigwigs back out of town on Friday. Take them to a Trenton Thunder game, show off a nice restaurant or two, talk about the Broad Street Bank building, maybe. (OK, we’re grasping here.)
Oh, and enact some swift, meaningful changes to make Trenton look better, like requiring taxi drivers to wear collar shirts and maybe some deodorant ... at least for a few days.

The editorial goes on to suggest that instead of pretending Trenton is something that it's not, or blasting Palmer again, we should urge the mayor to put his colleagues from across the country on a bus, take them around our city, and ask THEM for advice on how they would tackle our problems and opportunities.

A man called Freedom

Coming in Thursday's Trentonian, L.A. Parker brings you the story of a young city man named "Freedom," a group called Fathers and Men United for a Better Trenton and local people choosing a more positive approach toward themselves and the community.
Here's a taste:
If persons of color become successful like many of the aforementioned, many of us ridicule them by describing them as “sellouts” or inquire “Are they black enough?”The inference is that if blacks succeed in this current system, if we speak well, learn well and rise to the levels of teachers, doctors and corporate executives, that we somehow have abandoned our blackness, culture and other rights.
Such beliefs suggest that we have exchanged our metallic ropes for a worse prison, a mental incarceration that, unless changed, will lead to the destruction of ourselves by ourselves.

Lofton's response

In Tuesday's Trentonian, you'll read about Trenton School Superintendent Rodney Lofton's response to the fiasco that left hundreds of city students corralled into a gym rather than attending classes the first few days of school last week.
We were pretty harsh with our school superintendent-as-a-clown front page, and Lofton - as the school district's top official - deserved it.
But you've got to respect his response to such harsh criticism, and Mayor Doug Palmer's subsequent public flogging of him.
Rather than cry about being picked on unfairly, scream racism, or point the finger at someone else, Lofton's only public statement has been to own up to the problems, apologize to students and parents, work as fast as he can to fix the problem, and pledge to do better in the future.
That was the public response.
Let's hope the behind-the-scenes response is the only thing that's going to make a dent in problems like this in Trenton's schools ... a take-no-prisoners assault on the tenure system and protection of incompetence.
Lofton needs to fire some people ... maybe a lot of people ... and he needs Doug Palmer's support to do it.

Vote for your favorite Page 6 girl

Another cool addition to trentonian.com debuts today.
Now you can vote for your favorite Trentonian Page 6 girl.
The girl with the most votes at the end of the month will be included in a Trentonian Page 6 girl calendar.
And you can get a calendar ... register your name when you vote for a chance to win.
Don't want to register your name? You don't have to. You can still vote for your favorite Page 6 girl. It's easy, and it's up on our site right now.

Trentonian football picks contest

Check out a cool new addition to our trentonian.com Web site:
U-Pickem Football 2007 is an NFL football picks contest with great weekly prizes to be won. It costs nothing, and it's easy to play.
And don't worry if you've missed the first week. You can register anytime and start playing.

Who's running this circus?

Where do we even begin when it comes to the disaster that was the first day of school in Trenton?

Hundreds of students show up for the first day of school, and are corralled into the gym to twiddle their thumbs because ... AGAIN ... the school district was unable to do something as basic as schedule classes for everyone.

And that's after the district spent $500,000 of taxpayer funds to hire an outside firm to handle scheduling.

Apparently, the scheduling of classes ... something that's been done in every school district in the country every year since the beginning of modern public education ... is too complicated for the bozos running the Trenton School District.

And that's why we ran with the front page you saw on today's Trentonian. Hard-hitting? Yes. But also well-deserved.

And if we did anything to help create an environment that led to Mayor Doug Palmer going ballistic and ordering an immediate fix to this problem, that's great.

His outrage today and our front page are an understatement of the anger that this situation ... the latest in a long string of failures by the Trenton School District ... has sparked among parents and taxpayers.

Morons for peace

Coincidentally, the computers in Congressman Chris Smith's office were tampered with and damaged for days immediately following the visit by a group of rowdy anti-war protesters last week.
It doesn't matter to these bozos that Smith is one of the most progressive members of his party in many areas, a maverick who represents his constituents before any kind of special interest or Republican leadership thug.
These people are complete ideological morons. It proves that any cause -- including some that might have noble principles at the heart or inception of them -- can have idiots following along for the wrong reasons or who don't even understand the reasons.
Want proof of how stupid these people are? Watch the videos they posted of themselves.
Click here for part one of the video.
Click here for part two of the video.

McGreevey headlines

Jim McGreevey is going to seminary to become a priest.
That's the kind of story a paper like The Trentonian lives for.
And a lot of thought and fun goes into coming up with a headline for a story like that, more so when it's going to be the front page, which it was yesterday until some local fishermen pulled a human head out of a local body of water.
The brainstorming process for front page headline writing can come up with some good, some bad, and some that don't look quite so appropriate after sleeping on it.
Here are some of the McGreevey headlines we considered last night:
- LOVING HIS FELLOW MAN
- ALTAR BOY
- JUDAS PRIEST
- JESUS FREAK
- McGREEVEY ENTERS SEE-MEN-ARY
- HELL, NO!
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