Gov. Chris Christie’s administration has made it a point to try to effectively scuttle the state’s medical marijuana law. While the Democrat-ruled Legislature legalized medical marijuana, Christie’s camp has created unnecessarily restrictive rules for implementation of the law clearly designed to prevent practical application.
This week, legislative committees in the Assembly and Senate approved measures that begin the process of invalidating those regulations and forcing them to be rewritten to better reflect the intent of the law. Full Assembly and Senate votes come next.
The "I Am a Patient" campaign helped lawmakers see patients until proven criminal still lacks respect for patient's rights.
A MISS for the Christie administration for trying to assure the law doesn’t work.
MISS: A dark day
You may remember the tempest in recent years over New Jersey state workers routinely receiving Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving — off even though they already wererecipients of a bloated number of paid holidays. Under pressure, former Gov. Jon Corzine struck a deal with unions allowing them to trade Lincoln’s Birthday to get Black Friday off. But Gov. Chris Christie wanted to eliminate Black Friday as a holiday entirely, forcing workers to take a vacation day. The state’s Public Employment Relations Commission, however, won’t allow Christie to break the deal with Corzine. We can understand the commission’s position — but it did itself no favors in the public eye by claiming that workers would be “irreparably harmed” by not getting Black Friday off. That’s just plain ridiculous.
MISS: Money makers
Piscataway is the latest Central Jersey community joining the red-light camera parade. And once again we’re hearing all the requisite rhetoric about this being a safety measure. It’s not, or at least that’s not the main reason so many local officials are clamoring for them. This is about generating revenue, a lot of it, based on what’s been happening so far in some communities that already have the cameras operating. And that means the revenue production will inevitably trump any safety considerations.
