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6 Great Affordable Imperial Stouts from California
Seeking out the best in malty, hoppy refreshment.
I'll drink a stout any day of the year, but it's impossible to argue with dark beer in winter. Considering stresses that can accompany December, you're forgiven for reaching for stouts with a bit more nerve-soothing booze than usual. Enter imperial stout, or as I like to describe it to Irish stout loyalists: "three Guinnesses in one glass."
Since legend has it highly alcoholic stout was originally produced for Catherine the Great, the original full name is "Russian imperial stout." (Some say there's a difference between stouts labeled "imperial" vs. "Russian imperial," but I don't have time to argue about it and neither should you.) The first imperial stouts were English, and Washington state is credited with producing the first American version in 1984, but California makes some of today's best.
Ask the Internet for a list of the best imperial stouts and you may find yourself hunting down beers that are both limited-edition and crazy expensive—and perhaps aged in a booze barrel past the point where a novice can tell it's still beer. I love Firestone Walker Parabola and Deschutes The Abyss, and it's always pretty sweet (literally and figuratively) when someone pops a bottle of Bruery Black Tuesday in my presence, but let's talk about more everyday treats this time. The most expensive of the stouts below will barely scrape the $10-per-bomber mark at a reasonable store and you won't have to wait in line for any of them.
Imperial stout is my favorite beer style to cellar, but go ahead and drink any of these tonight. Letting them warm up out of the fridge for a few minutes before drinking is enough of a time investment for me.
North Coast Old Rasputin
The bearded Russian who wouldn't die is the gateway imperial stout for many, but that's only because North Coast is available pretty widely around the country. But believe this: Old Rasputin is in no way a training wheels beer. It's seriously roasty and hoppy (75 IBUs), with a long, dry, lingering bitter coffee finish. It's not hot and boozy despite it's 9% ABV, and while "balanced" is the wrong word, it's not too much of anything, either. This will be among the easiest big stout for new beer fans to track down, and novelty-seeking beer hunters should do themselves a favor and revisit this 1996-born classic.
Drake's Drakonic
Drake's, a Bay Area favorite slowly making inroads in other parts of California, is mostly known for its hop monsters. Drakonic, though it has a moderate hop bitterness, is all about the malt. Neither espresso-ish nor desserty, Drakonic hits it right down the middle as a dry, roasty, robust yet approachable imperial stout. There's a touch of caramel and licorice to keep things interesting along with the usual coffee and chocolate, and it's all in good balance for a beer that's almost 9%. If I was throwing a one-night imperial stout tasting with all six of the beers in this article, I'd serve this first.
Sierra Nevada Narwhal
This mega-craft brewery could coast on its flagship lineup, but instead they give us presents like Narwhal, newly released in October. Unsweetened chocolate, coffee beans, and warming alcohol are all present and accounted for but none dominate. A clean hop bitterness with a long, tingly finish tie it all together. Like Old Rasputin, this is available in 4-packs of 12-ounce bottles instead of imperial stout's dominant paradigm, the bomber. Forget the after-dinner espresso, just drink one (or two) of these.
Cismontane Black's Dawn
Coffee coffee joy joy! This relatively new coastal SoCal brewery has produced an excellent breakfast beer, if that's how you roll. Many stouts contain roasty malts that evoke coffee flavors, but this one also contains fair trade beans. I'm guessing this would make a fine entry-level imperial stout for the coffee snob in your life. Black's Dawn comes in a 16-ounce bottle, making it a wise choice for solo tasters who struggle to get through a 22-ouncer. It's also the poster child for how much a beer can change and evolve as it warms up, so sip slowly.
Port Santa's Little Helper
Santa's Little Hangover...er, Helper...has been making merry since 1997. It's among the more chewy, viscous stouts on this list and the one that most requires a glass of water alongside it. From the ridiculously huge head (pour carefully) to the smooth finish, this SoCal sipper is not foolin' around. The label gets bonus Christmas cheer points for its depiction of a shadowy Santa and Rudolph enjoying a beer at an an elf-manned bar. A bourbon barrel-aged version comes out in July—look for Santa at the same bar in his boxers.
Ballast Point Victory At Sea
OK, Victory at Sea is technically an imperial porter, but close enough for government work. I don't usually dig vanilla beers—they tend to be unbalanced and make me feel like an alcoholic grandmother slugging a bottle of vanilla extract in the pantry. This is an exception. Perhaps the addition of cold brewed San Diego coffee steers this one away from cloying and into amazing, and the thick, velvety body doesn't hurt. Though Victory at Sea is not overly sweet, the vanilla flavor does evoke ice cream, and you could make a much worse choice for the base of a beer float.
Of course there are many other great beers that could be included on this list. Tell us: what are your favorite imperial stouts from California or beyond?
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


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Islam in Bosnia is the new stepping stone
Lee Jay Walker – THE MODERN TOKYO TIMES
This may appear absurd to some people, however, in the mindset of the former Muslim leader and radical Islamists then this is the case. For many moderate Muslims in Bosnia or secular minded Bosnian Muslims this may also seem groundless but history tells us something different.
After all, in modern day southern Thailand the Muslim insurgency once was based on nationalism or identity but today many Islamists want to cleanse southern Thailand of all Buddhists and many Buddhist monks have been killed. Therefore, within a few generations in southern Thailand it is clear that radical Islam is growing and any accommodation with Buddhism is no longer warranted and instead it is pure Islamization.
Therefore, current events in places like southern Thailand can be linked to places like Bosnia because it is like a re-run of past history. After all, it is clear that the Islamic ideology often rises up from the ashes and the logical conclusion of this is the complete destruction of all things not deemed to be Islamic.
In my article called Southern Thailand and Islamization, which was published by the Assyrian International News Agency, (http://www.aina.org/news/20100414212354.htm) I stated that "In the past the conflict in southern Thailand was mainly an internal struggle between the majority Muslim community of three southern provinces (Pattani, Narathiwat, and Yala) and the government of Thailand. Therefore, for many decades you had the desire for an Islamic state but nationalism was also a core base for demanding independence. However, in recent times it is clear that the Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO); the Barisan Revolusi Nasional-Coordinate (BRN-C); Bersatu; Gerakan Mujahadeen Islam Pattani (GMIP); and others, desire an Islamic state and they have a jihadist agenda."
"In the past the Muslim insurgency was aimed at the government and military of Thailand but times have changed. Therefore, since 2001 it is clear that you now have an overwhelming Islamic jihadist agenda and this is aimed at forcing the Buddhists to flee and moderate Muslims are also being killed because they are deemed to be traitors."
If we return back to Bosnia it is also clear that Alija Izetbegovic had a pan-Islamic dream and he welcomed Islamic terrorists from all over the world and accepted funding from nations like Saudi Arabia in order to Islamize society. Izetbegovic was fully aware that Saudi Arabian funding and other forms of Islamic funding was part and parcel of his dream which was to Islamize Bosnia.
After all, Saudi Arabia is not interested in supporting all the communities of Bosnia because this does not serve their Sunni Islamic Wahhabi cause. Therefore, irrespective if Orthodox Christian or Roman Catholic, both are deemed to be infidels. The bigger agenda is the creation of an Islamic state and then for this state to be the foundation of a pan-Islamic super-state.
Izetbegovic stated that "… Muslim nations will never accept anything that is explicitly against Islam, because Islam here is not merely a faith and the law, Islam has become love and compassion. He who rises against Islam will reap nothing but hate and resistance. …"
Alija Izetbegovic therefore shared a common thread with the global jihad movement because he also stated"… In one of the thesis for an Islamic order today we have stated that it is a natural function of the Islamic order to gather all Muslims and Muslim communities throughout the world into one. Under present conditions, this desire means a struggle for creating a great Islamic federation from Morocco to Indonesia, from the tropical Africa to the Central Asia. …"
Vojin Joksimovich who is the author of "The Revenge of The Prophet" stated that "The jihadists, from their bases and support facilities in Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, did not come to Bosnia only to fight against the 'Serbian aggressor,' but for the first European religious state at large, for the establishment of the only faith among the European Muslims." (Page 145)
This clearly rings true because this is what Izetbegovic believed in and Vojin Joksimovich continues by stating that the "Creation of Islamic states, so-called Jamahirya states, was the ultimate objective of all these movements. With the Koran in their hands the jihadists did not distinguish between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, only between believers and unbelievers." (Page 145)
According to Western media the war in Bosnia was about the Serbian aggressor against the innocent Muslim lamb. However, the innocent Muslim lamb invited Islamists and terrorists from all over the world and clearly Izetbegovic had an important agenda and this was the Islamization of Bosnia because he laid down his theories
Izetbegovic had written "The Islamic Declaration" ("Islamska deklaracija") and he clearly had an agenda because he desired to start the stepping stone and major Western nations either fell into "the trap" or had "covert interests" in order to further their ambitions in the Balkans? Either way, for radical Islamists and Izetbegovic it became apparent that major Western nations would do their bidding and on the ground it would be up to the Islamic community to make the most of this golden opportunity.
This "hidden agenda" was kept from people because it did not fit the media image of an innocent community which was being victimized. However, if the truth had been told then clearly serious questions would have been raised and the Western media would have been forced to have given a neutral version.
Yet the "hidden agenda" and the reality of thousands of Islamic terrorists entering Bosnia and killing and slaughtering innocent Christians remained hidden from the general public. The same applies to major funding from Saudi Arabia and other nations, and the real motives of Izetbegovic were never stated.
Turning back to the writer Vojin Joksimovich he states that "The Saudi Wahhabists, as a part of Wahhabi proselytism, lavishly funded penetration of Islamism into the Balkans. As an example, Saudi scholar Ahmed ibn-Nafi of Mecca circulated a summon to all centers of the Pan-Islamic Salvation Committee at the outset of the conflict in Bosnia." (Page 144)
Ahmed ibn-Nafi of Mecca stated "We entrust you to see to the imminent establishment of the Caliphate in the Balkans, because the Balkans are the path to the conquest of Europe. Every individual imam in our states, and especially Turkey, is ready to help. Know, therefore brothers, that the time is working for us. Let us help our brothers who are fighting for the holy cause in Bosnia. Let us help them for the sake of Allah, by sending them money and weapons as we can, by sending them new mujahideen……The Caliphate is at hand." (Page 144 – Israeli, 2002)
Therefore, radical Islamists in collusion with certain Western governments had a shared interest and the mass media acted shamelessly by denying these facts. Islamists obviously had a different long-term agenda but surely Afghanistan should have been a learning curve for Western governments which had special vested interests because the same forces which were unleashed could not be contained.
Pakistan today is paying the same price because Islamists were welcomed and supported in order to defeat communism in Afghanistan but the very same Islamists today have turned on their master. Therefore, in modern day Pakistan you have many terrorist attacks and Islamization is a threat to the central state and all religious minorities, notably Christians, Hindus, Ahmadiyya Muslims, and Sikhs, suffer daily persecution.
Despite this, the Izetbegovic agenda and Islamic dream was supported and in a strange irony you had the democratic world supporting an ideology which desires to defeat and destroy democracy.
Izetbegovic had stated that "… In perspective, there is but one way out in sight: creation and gathering of a new intelligence which thinks and feels along Islamic lines. This intelligence would then raise the flag of the Islamic order and together with the Muslim masses embark into action to implement this order. …"
Therefore, just like Osama Bin Laden it is clear that Izetbegovic desired to raise "the flag of the Islamic order" and while secularists may deny this in modern day Bosnia, it is clear that others have a different agenda.
If we turn back to southern Thailand then it is clear that you once had a nationalist movement but today we are talking about the systematic annihilation of Buddhism in southern Thailand by radical Sunni Islamists. At the same time we are witnessing the destruction and marginalization of Hinduism and Buddhism in modern day Bangladesh.
The Islamic agenda may ultimately fail in Bosnia and the same applies to an Islamic caliphate in the Balkans. However, one thing is for sure and this is that Islamists and funding from Saudi Arabia and other nations will certainly try. After all, their version of the world is based on an Islamic ideology which desires power and to enforce dhimmitude on non-Muslims.
Vojin Joksimovich: The Revenge of the Prophet

subset: commoncrawl


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Clay County, FLHome Home Menu
Below is the overall County Calendar of Events. Please either select your criteria to filter what is shown or Select one of our filtered calendars on the left.
Planning Commission
- Date: 07/02/2019 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
- Location: Administration Building
477 Houston Street
Green Cove Springs, Florida 32043
Please be advised that the Planning Commission will meet on Tuesday, July 2, 2019 at 7:00 P.M., in the Board of County Commissioners Meeting Room, Fourth Floor, Administration Building, 477 Houston Street Green Cove Springs. The meeting is open to the public and all interested persons are invited to attend and be heard at the meeting.
Pursuant to Section 286.0105, Florida Statutes, a person deciding to appeal any decision made by the Board with respect to any matter considered at the meeting or at any subsequent meeting to which the Board has continued its deliberations is advised that such person will need to insure that verbatim record of all proceedings is made, which must include the testimony and evidence upon which the appeal is to be based.
In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, any person needing a special accommodation to participate in this matter should contact the Clay County ADA Coordinator by mail at Post Office Box 1366, Green Cove Springs, FL 32043, or by telephone at number (904) 269-6347 no later than three (3) days prior to the hearing or proceeding for which this notice has been given. Hearing impaired persons can access the foregoing telephone number by contacting the Florida Relay Service at 1-800-955-8770 (Voice), or 1-800-955-8771 (TDD).
To view or download the agenda, please visit our site at: https://claycounty.novusagenda.com/agendapublic/MeetingsResponsive.aspx


text:
The purpose of the Apollo
11 mission was to land men on the lunar surface and to return
them safely to Earth. The crew was Neil A. Armstrong, commander;
Michael Collins, Command Module pilot; and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr.,
Lunar Module pilot.
After launch, the spacecraft
was inserted into lunar orbit about 76 hours into the mission.
After a rest period, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the Lunar Module
preparing for descent to the lunar surface. The two spacecraft
were undocked at about 100 hours, when the Command and Service
Modules separated from the Lunar Module. The spacecraft landed
in the Sea of Tranquillity at 4:18 p.m. EDT. Afterwards, they
ate their first meal on the Moon and decided to begin the surface
operations earlier than planned.
A Lunar Module camera
provided live television coverage of Armstrong setting foot on the
lunar surface at 10:56 p.m. EDT. Just as he stepped off the Lunar
Module Neil Armstrong proclaimed, "That's one small step for a man,
one giant leap for mankind." Aldrin emerged soon after, setting
foot on the lunar surface at 11:16 p.m. EDT. Aldrin evaluated his
ability to operate and move about and was able to move about rapidly
and with confidence. Forty-seven pounds of lunar surface material
were collected to be returned for analysis. The surface exploration
was concluded in 2½ hours, when the crew re-entered the lunar
After lunar ascent, the
Lunar Module docked with the Command and Service Modules at 128
hours. The crew transferred into the Command and Service Modules,
the ascent stage was jettisoned and they prepared for trans-Earth
injection. Only one midcourse correction was required, and passive
thermal control was used for most of trans-Earth coast. Bad weather
made it necessary to move the splashdown point 346 kilometers
(215 miles) downrange. Atmospheric entry phase was normal, and
the command module landed in the Pacific Ocean at 195¼
hours. The landing coordinates, as determined from the onboard
computer, were 13 degrees 30 minutes north latitude and -169 degrees
15 minutes east longitude.
With the success of Apollo
11, the national objective to land men on the Moon and return
them safely to Earth had been accomplished.
Curator: Kim Dismukes | Responsible NASA Official: Amiko Kauderer | Updated: 07/01/2009
Privacy Policy and Important Notices


text:
Packers suffer blow on offensive line
Bulaga placed on injured reserve
Right tackle Bryan Bulaga's season is over, and the Green Bay Packers are one more offensive line injury away from having to play an undrafted rookie free agent.
Bulaga was placed on injured reserve Monday, becoming the Packers' fifth significant contributor to be lost for the season. He joins linebackers Desmond Bishop (hamstring), D.J. Smith (knee) and Nick Perry (wrist), along with running back Brandon Saine (knee). Running back Cedric Benson is on IR but could return next month.
Bulaga suffered a dislocated hip against Arizona on Nov. 4, and the team's medical staff determined it was too risky for Bulaga to return.
"His long-term health is always at the forefront of these decisions," coach Mike McCarthy said. "If you ask Bryan . you walk in there Monday morning, he's out there working out, no crutches, not saying nice things about the doctors, which is nice to hear. (He's saying) he wants to play and he's going to be fine."
McCarthy said the early diagnosis is that Bulaga will not need surgery, but a final decision will be made in several weeks.
When Bulaga went out early in the second quarter against the Cardinals, the Packers shifted left guard T.J. Lang to right tackle and brought Evan Dietrich-Smith in off the bench to replace Lang at left guard. The only backup offensive linemen currently on the 53-man roster are undrafted rookie free agents Don Barclay and Greg Van Roten.
The team's 2011 first-round draft pick, Derek Sherrod, is on the physically unable to perform list because of the broken leg he suffered last December and he practiced on Monday for the first time in almost a year. The Packers must decide whether to activate him or place him on season-ending injured reserve by Nov. 28.
In the meantime, if something happens to another starter, Barclay or Van Roten would be pressed into service.
"Green Bay always seems to find one or two of those free-agent guys that maybe played tackle in college, they move them around, put them at center or guard or whatever. These guys have come in and done a nice job of fitting in with us and playing different positions," right guard Josh Sitton said. "They've grown over the course of the year. ... They're both good players, both real smart. We would feel confident having them out there."
Green Bay (6-3) is coming off a bye and will play Detroit (4-5) on Sunday.
Barclay was a three-year starter at left tackle at West Virginia and played in a school record-tying 52 games in four years for the Mountaineers. He moved around in training camp but is now the top backup at right tackle, according to Dietrich-Smith. Barclay said he's been taking snaps at right tackle and both guard spots over the past six weeks, with a few additional snaps at right tackle on Monday.
"You've always got to be ready, and that's kind of the position I've been in the first nine weeks. You're just waiting on a chance," Barclay said. "It's sad to hear that about Bryan. He's a close friend of mine; we've gotten close as the time's gone on. But he understands stuff like that happens and I've just got to be ready."
Van Roten, who was a two-time first-team all-Ivy League selection at Pennsylvania, was cut at the end of training camp but re-signed to the practice squad. He was promoted to the 53-man roster last month. He would seem to be the primary backup at the center and guard spots at this point.
"You're always kind of on call and ready to go. When Bryan went down, it was like, 'The good life's over. You're going to have to get ready to play,'" Van Roten said. "I don't think it changes as far as preparation. You always have to be ready to go. I've been at center mostly, so I'm going to stay there, and I'll be both guard spots and we'll kind of see. Wherever they need to plug me in, I'm sure I can perform."
That's apparently how the team feels about both youngsters, too. There were no indications Monday evening that the team, which kept only seven linemen on the 53-man roster coming out of training camp, intended to add a veteran free agent off the street.
"I know one thing: They've gotten a lot of better just practicing," veteran defensive tackle Ryan Pickett said of Barclay and Van Roten. "From when they first got here to now, it's a big difference. The guys can play."


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Cemo Cube 1000 Indoor Basic Bunded Diesel Tank
Product Overview
The Cube Diesel tank from German storage tank specialist Cemo, provides customers with a safe, secure, fuel storage and dispensing solution.Featuring a designed-in stability with a moulded hexagonal matrix for integral polymer strength, supported by twin steel bands at the point of greatest load.
All equipment is positioned at the optimum level over the bund for ease of access. An integral 110% bund gives added environmental protection. The outdoor models feature a robust lockable lid, which is secured by toggle latches and supported by gas struts to allow access from three sides.
Plastic bunded storage and fuel dispensing tank suitable for use with Diesel (D) and Biodiesel with a bio element not exceeding 10% concentration (B10), at agricultural, commercial, industrial and institutional installations
Every Cemo Cube fuel tank is fully compliant with all current and expected fuel storage tank regulations in the United Kingdom and European Union.
Installation Requirements
This fuel tank must be installed by a suitably competent person in accordance with supplied instructions and statutory requirements. All mains electrical connections must only be undertaken by a qualified electrician in accordance with prevailing statutory requirements. It is recommended that all 230v fuel tanks are connected to an RCD protected mains power supply.
Delivery and Payment
Price(s) stated are inclusive of delivery to most UK addresses, however for some Cemo products, Highlands and Islands and Northern Ireland may incur additional costs, Please contact us before ordering to confirm. Delivery is subject to adequate access for an articulated lorry.
If access to your premises is restricted please advise at time of order placement. Please note it is the customer's responsibility to arrange for all fuel tanks to be offloaded from the delivery vehicle to the customer's premises. Please allow up to 10 working days for delivery.
TankDepot.co.uk accepts Delta, Maestro, Mastercard and Visa. Your credit / debit card will be charged at time of order placement.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION Please note that all images are supplied for reference purposes only. All tank dimensions and capacities stated are approximate. Maximum capacity stated is equivalent to the brimful capacity of the tank. Nominal capacities stated are equivalent to 95% of actual tank capacity. Consistent with TankDepot.co.uk's policy of continual improvement, the right is reserved to amend product specifications without notice. E&OE


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We haven't done this in a while, so let's do it now. For the next 90 minutes or so, I'll be answering reader questions. Want to know stuff about Kotaku, about what we're covering, what we're hearing, which Zelda is the best and so on?
Want to complain about stuff you don't like and ask for change? Want to talk about what you like and ask for more? Fire away.
I'll answer as many as I can.
To stave off repeat or old-timey questions, please do take a glance at this.
UPDATE: Gotta run, folks! Thanks for the questions. I'll see if I can get to any more later tonight, but I need to head out now. I don't want to tick off Nintendo (that much). They're waiting for me...
Perry White image via the DC Wiki. I'm pretty sure Dan Jurgens drew it.


text:
Very nice stone. Excellent seller. 5 star service.
|Dimensions (mm)
|5.38 x 4.17 x 3.62mm
|Weight (carats)
|0.68 carats
|No Treatment
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Beautiful diamond. Love it. Thank you
Absolutely stunning ruby. Thank you for quality business and service. I will be back! A++++
This sapphire sparkles. Deep rich pink colour, excellent cutting and polish.
The Gemstone Sheriff program allows our members to request an audit on any auction, which is completed by an independent Gemologist who assesses the accuracy of the item description and pictures.Request Audit
|Auction ID
|0 watching
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|14th Sep 2019 3:09am PDT
|Standard Shipping - Tracked
|21 days
|Shipping Insurance all providers $0.00 (optional)


text:
Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs, Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey, places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state's public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn't pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.
And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers' union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.
"The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers' union," Christie says, "was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey." Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. "Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, 'Mom.' " Pause. " 'Dad.' " Another pause. " 'Please. Stop the madness.' "
By this point the audience is starting to titter, but Christie remains steadfastly somber in his role as the beseeching student. " 'Just pay for my teacher's health benefits,' " he pleads, " 'and I'll get A's, I swear. But I just cannot take the stress that's being presented by a 1½ percent contribution to health benefits.' " As the crowd breaks into appreciative guffaws, Christie waits a theatrical moment, then slams his point home. "Now, you're all laughing, right?" he says. "But this is the crap I have to hear."
Acid monologues like this have made Christie, only a little more than a year into his governorship, one of the most intriguing political figures in America. Hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers linger on scenes from Christie's town-hall meetings, like the one in which he takes apart a teacher for her histrionics. ("If what you want to do is put on a show and giggle every time I talk, then I have no interest in answering your question.") Newly elected governors — not just Republicans, Christie says, but also Democrats — call to seek his counsel on how to confront their own staggering budget deficits and intractable unions. At a recent gathering of Republican governors, Christie attracted a throng of supporters and journalists as he strode through the halls of the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel like Bono at Davos.
While Christie has flatly ruled out a presidential run in 2012, there is enough conjecture about the possibility that I felt moved to ask him a few weeks ago if he found it exhausting to have to constantly answer the same question. "Listen, if you're going to say you're exhausted by that, you're really taking yourself too seriously," Christie told me, then broke into his imitation of a politician who is taking himself too seriously. " 'Oh, Matt, please, stop asking me about whether I should be president of the United States! The leader of the free world! Please stop! I'm exhausted by the question!' I mean, come on. If I get to that point, just slap me around, because that's really presumptuous. What it is to me is astonishing, not exhausting."
There is, in fact, something astonishing about the ascent of Chris Christie, who is about as slick as sandpaper and who now admits that even he didn't think he would beat Jon Corzine, the Democrat he unseated in 2009. Some critics have posited that Christie's success in office represents merely the triumph of self-certainty over complexity, the yearning among voters for leaders who talk bluntly and with conviction. Yet it's hard to see Christie getting so much traction if he were out there castigating, say, immigrants or Wall Street bankers. What makes Christie compelling to so many people isn't simply plain talk or swagger, but also the fact that he has found the ideal adversary for this moment of economic vertigo. Ronald Reagan had his "welfare queens," Rudy Giuliani had his criminals and "squeegee men," and now Chris Christie has his sprawling and powerful public-sector unions — teachers, cops and firefighters who Christie says are driving up local taxes beyond what the citizenry can afford, while also demanding the kind of lifetime security that most private-sector workers have already lost.
It may just be that Christie has stumbled onto the public-policy issue of our time, which is how to bring the exploding costs of the public workforce in line with reality. (According to a report issued last year by the Pew Center on the States, as of 2008 there was a $1 trillion gap, conservatively speaking, between what the states have promised in pensions and benefits for their retirees and what they have on hand to pay for them.) Then again, he may simply be the latest in a long line of politicians to give an uneasy public the scapegoat it demands. Depending on your vantage point, Chris Christie is a truth-teller or a demagogue, or maybe even a little of both.
To say that New Jersey has a budget problem wouldn't really be accurate. The state has at least three major budget problems related to the costs of the public workforce, all of which contribute to a shortfall that the state's legislative accounting office projects to be almost $11 billion this year — an amount that's more than a third of the state's total budget. And in order to understand what's happening in statehouses all over the country, and what Christie is trying to do about it in New Jersey, it helps to have some sense of how these problems tie together.
First, there's the local aid. New Jersey sends 40 percent of its annual budget to an overlapping tangle of 566 municipalities and 600-plus school districts, in order to help them slow the mutantlike growth of local property taxes, which are among the highest in the country. Each of these little hamlets and districts negotiates its own labor contract with the police and firefighters, sanitation workers and, most consequentially, teachers, which means the contracts established by the most affluent communities end up setting a statewide standard — a process that drives up everyone else's costs to a level that the local governments simply can't sustain by themselves.
Second, in the long term, New Jersey doesn't have nearly enough money on hand to cover its pension obligations to teachers and other state workers. At no time in the last 17 years has New Jersey fully met its annual obligation to the pension fund, and in many of those years, the state paid nothing at all. (That didn't stop one governor, Donald DiFrancesco, a Republican, from increasing payouts by 9 percent and lowering the retirement age before he left office, which would be kind of like Bernie Madoff writing you a $1 million check before heading off to jail.) Even had the state been contributing faithfully to the fund as it was supposed to, however, there would still be trouble ahead. That's because New Jerseyans, who are glass-half-full kind of people, have assumed an improbably healthy return of 8.25 percent annually on the state pension fund. The actual return over the last 10 years averaged only 2.6 percent.
Finally, the state will pay close to $3 billion this year in health care premiums for public employees (including retired teachers), and that number is rising fast. New Jersey has set aside exactly zero dollars to cover it. All told, in pensions and health care benefits, New Jersey's "unfunded liability" — that is, the amount the actuaries say it would need to find in order to meet its obligations for the next 30 years — has now passed the $100 billion mark.
There was little in Christie's uninspiring campaign to make anyone think he would address these issues with more tenacity than the governors who preceded him. A U.S. attorney whose only overtly political experience entailed serving on the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders (seriously, they still call it that), Christie had only a fraction of Corzine's public exposure or personal fortune. About the only thing he had going for him was that Corzine was pervasively unpopular. And so rather than come up with a lot of actual ideas, which Corzine would then be free to oversimplify and distort in a barrage of television ads, Christie simply offered up a bunch of conservative platitudes and tried to make the campaign a referendum on the Democratic governor. (When we talked during the campaign, Christie could articulate little by way of an agenda, except to say that he would "get in there and make it work.") Even a lot of Republicans thought Christie was underwhelming as a campaigner.
In the end, Christie won by about four points on Election Night in 2009, with little notion of what he was going to do next. When I asked him if there was any one moment of clarity that put him on the path from cautious candidate to union-bashing conservative hero, Christie pointed to a meeting about a month into the transition, when his aides came to him brandishing an analysis of the state's cash flow produced by Goldman Sachs. They advised the governor-elect that, without some serious action, the state could fail to meet payroll by the end of March. After scrutinizing the budget, Christie told me, his team came to the conclusion that the only way to get control of local taxes and state spending was to go after the pension and health care benefits that the public-sector unions held sacrosanct. From that point on, it seems, Christie has conducted his governorship as if he were still a grandstanding prosecutor, taking powerful unions on perp walks with evident enthusiasm.
The centerpiece of Christie's frenzied agenda, which passed the Democratic-controlled Legislature last July, is a strict cap on local property taxes, which will be allowed to rise no more than 2 percent every year. When combined with a reduction in state aid, what this means, practically speaking, is that New Jersey's townships and cities will have to hold the line when negotiating municipal labor contracts if they want to remain solvent, because they can't rely on either their residents or the state for more money.
To help them do that, Christie has put forward 33 measures that are part of what he calls his "toolkit" for reform. These include, for instance, a proposal that would allow localities to opt out of the civil-service system altogether, giving them more control over hiring and firing local officials, and another that would limit the cash payouts that retiring workers can take for their unused sick days. On the pension front, if Christie has his way with the Legislature, most union members would contribute more to their plans than they have up to now, and all of them would retire later and receive lower benefit payments.
The crux of Christie's argument is that public-sector contracts have to reflect what has happened in the private sector, where guaranteed pensions and free health care are becoming relics. It's not surprising that this stand has ingratiated Christie to conservatives in Washington; advocacy groups and activists on the right have carried out a long campaign to discredit the ever-shrinking labor movement in the private sector, and what Christie has done, essentially, is to blast his way into the final frontier, taking on the public-sector unions that have come to wield enormous political power. More surprising is how the governor's proposals are finding sympathy from less-partisan budget experts, if only because they don't see obvious alternatives. "I've tried to look at this objectively, and I just don't know of any other option," says Richard Keevey, who served as budget director for a Democratic governor, Jim Florio, and a Republican governor, Tom Kean. "You couldn't tax your way out of this."
Union leaders, on the other hand, are howling. The heads of the police and firefighters' unions say that Christie's cuts to local aid have already cost the state several hundred firemen and police officers, and they warn that his 2 percent cap on property taxes will have dire effects on public safety, as more towns and cities try to shave their payrolls to conform with the cap. "I don't think they're going to get it until the body bags pile up," Anthony Wieners, president of the police union, warns darkly.
Leaders of the teachers' union, meanwhile, are apoplectic about Christie's proposed changes to their pension plan, which they say will penalize educators for the irresponsibility of politicians. After all, they point out, it wasn't the unions who chose not to fund the pension year in and year out, and yet it's their members who will have to recalibrate their retirements if the benefits are cut.
When I made this same point to Christie, he simply shook his head. What's done is done, he told me, and it's time for someone to tell these workers the truth, which is that the state is simply never going to have the money to make good on its commitments. "Listen, if they want to travel in the Michael J. Fox time machine and change time, I guess we could try that," he said. "We could get the DeLorean out and try to go back there. But I think realistically that that was just a movie and make-believe. So we've got to live with what we've got."
Chris Christie is fat. You can use nicer words if you want — rotund, portly, big-boned — but it is what it is, and the governor will be the first to tell you so. And because he's fat, a lot of people, consciously or not, tend to assume certain things about Christie — that he's undisciplined and impulsive, graceless and bullying. (Corzine's most brutal campaign ad accused Christie of "throwing his weight around.") At times, Christie seems to exploit this persona. He likes to present himself as the proverbial bull in the china shop, the ungainly, somewhat boorish guy who lacks the artifice to keep from saying whatever obvious truth pops into his head. "I don't think you elected me because of my charm and good looks," Christie likes to say, just to show he's in on the joke.
And yet, to portray Christie in this cartoonish way, as so many critics do, is to vastly underestimate his skill as a politician. The most sophisticated communicators of the modern era hammer at a consistent argument about their moment and the response it demands, and they choose carefully constructed metaphors to make the choices ahead seem obvious — think of Ronald Reagan's morning in America, or Bill Clinton's bridge to the 21st century. And Christie's communications strategy is about as sophisticated as any you will find in American politics right now.
Take Christie's choice of a somewhat mundane image, the "toolkit," as a unifying frame for his proposals. As a metaphor, the toolkit works on two levels, depending on the audience. You can visualize it either in the sense of screwdrivers and hammers or, if you work in an office all day, you might envision it more as a software suite. Either way, the toolkit symbolizes flexibility and local control. It's a way of saying that Christie isn't putting unwieldy restrictions on towns and cities, as the cops and firefighters charge — he's just empowering those towns and cities with a variety of implements and gadgets with which to attack their budget problems themselves.
In sustaining his assault on the public-employee unions, Christie knows he has to make his subject comprehensible. One reason that leaders in a state like New Jersey haven't been able to get a handle on pension and benefit costs, despite years of dire warnings from good-government advocates, is that the subject is agonizingly dull and all but impossible to explain. There are myriad plans for all the different public-employee unions, various contribution formulas for each one and actuarial projections that require an advanced degree to unravel.
Christie, it turns out, has a preternatural gift for making the complex seem deceptively simple. Last month I saw him hold forth at a town-hall meeting in Chesilhurst, a South Jersey borough of about 1,600. Chesilhurst is about half African-American, and I sensed more curiosity than enthusiasm among the racially mixed crowd as it flowed into the little community-center gymnasium. An unusually large number of folding chairs were empty. About 20 minutes after the program was supposed to start, there came over the loudspeakers the kind of melodramatic instrumental that might introduce a local newscast, or maybe an Atlantic City magic show, and in came Christie, taking his position in the center of the crowd. The theme of the week was pension-and-benefits reform, and in his introductory remarks, Christie explained the inefficiency in the state's health care costs not by wielding a stack of damning statistics, as some politicians might, but by relating a story.
When he was a federal prosecutor, Christie told the audience, he got to choose from about 100 health-insurance plans, ranging from cheap to quite expensive. But as soon as he became governor, the "benefits lady" told him he had only three state plans from which to choose, Goldilocks-style; one was great, one was modestly generous and one was rather miserly. And any of the three would cost him exactly 1.5 percent of his salary.
" 'You're telling me,' " Christie said he told the woman, feigning befuddlement, " 'that no matter which one I pick, the good one or the O.K. one or the bad one, I'm going to pay 1½ percent of my salary?' And she said, 'Yes.'
"And I said, 'Then everyone picks the really good one, right?' And she said, 'Ninety-six percent of state employees pick the really good one.'
"Which led me to have two reactions," Christie told the crowd. "First, bring those other 4 percent to me! Because when I have to start laying people off, they're the first ones!" His audience burst into near hysterics. "And the second reaction was, of course I would choose the best plan," Christie said, "and so would you.
"Now listen, I don't think this is groundbreaking stuff," Christie added. "I don't think this means that instead of being governor, you know, I should be at NASA, working on the space shuttle. I'm no genius. Just seems to me that if you give people an option to get something for nothing, they'll take it." Scanning the nodding faces around me, it seemed there wasn't a person in the gymnasium, at that point, who wouldn't have voted to make state workers and teachers pay more for the better plan.
Another thing Christie understands about political messaging, especially when your adversaries are out there portraying you as callous, is that it has to be grounded in the personal. "If you're asking people to do some really difficult things, which I am asking them to do," Christie told me, "then I think they feel more comfortable doing those things if they know you."
And so the 48-year-old Christie makes a point of sharing intimate details of his life and times — that he uses an asthma inhaler, that he has struggled with dieting and exercise since his days as a high-school catcher came to an end, that his mother told him on her deathbed that he should go back to work because nothing between them had been left unsaid. That last one, which elicited audible gasps of sympathy from the audience in Chesilhurst, is his way of saying that he wants to leave nothing unsaid between him and the voters, either, even if they both occasionally get hurt.
"My mother said to me all the time, 'Christopher, you're going to have choices in your life between being loved and being respected,' " Christie told his rapt audience, strains of emotion creeping into his voice. " 'And you should choose respected. Because if you're respected, love can come.' She said, 'But seeking love without also being respected — well that love doesn't last.' " It was as if some weird brain-switching experiment had taken place, and somewhere, at that very moment, Oprah was giving a talk about state budgets and tax policy.
There's one more piece of political narrative that Christie seems to grasp, which is that every story has both a protagonist and an antagonist, someone who stands for change and someone who plays the foil. Christie never had to look far to cast his ideal antagonists. They sit just across the street and one block down from the State House, in the building occupied by New Jersey's major teachers' union.
WITH 200,000 MEMBERS and more than $100 million in dues, the New Jersey Education Association is easily the most powerful union in New Jersey and one of the more powerful local unions in the country. In Trenton, the union's organizing might — and its willingness to use that might to intimidate candidates and lawmakers — has sunk a small shipyard of promising careers. So it's not hard to see why the twilight struggle between Chris Christie and "the bully of State Street," as he likes to refer to the teachers' union, has transfixed New Jersey's political observers for the last year. It's as mesmerizing as an episode of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey," only harder to watch, mostly because Christie can be so unrelentingly brutal.
"We have similar personalities," Stephen Sweeney, the Democratic president of the state Senate, told me recently, when ruminating on Christie's style. "The difference between he and I is, I have an off switch and he doesn't. You know, if I knock you down, I'll pick you up, brush the dirt off your back, try to build a relationship and go forward. He knocks you down, like with the teachers, and he'll stomp on you, kick on you until he can kill you."
The war between Christie and the union has two fronts, so closely interrelated that it's hard to separate them. First there's the fight over budgeting issues like pensions and benefits. And then there's the "year of education reform," as Christie has proclaimed 2011, in which he intends to push his case for merit pay, charter schools and the abolition of teacher tenure — all of which are, of course, anathema to the union.
At times in this epic clash, it can be hard to know where personal animus leaves off and political gamesmanship kicks in. All that's clear is that Christie seems to be winning at every turn. Last April, for instance, Christie claimed to be infuriated by a joke memo circulated by the president of the Bergen County chapter of the union. "Dear Lord," it read in part, "this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor."
In a 15-minute meeting, the union's president, Barbara Keshishian, apologized to Christie for the memo, but she refused to fire the Bergen County president, which further infuriated the governor. If his chief of staff had sent out such an e-mail, Christie told her, he would have been fired immediately. "That conversation embodies the elitism and the double standard that the teachers' union thinks applies to them," Christie told me last month, recounting the confrontation. We were sitting in the restaurant of the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, where state troopers and aides with cellphones buzzed around the empty dining room. Christie was in town to headline a dinner for the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce. "And you know what? I can't entirely blame them for it, because politicians have treated them differently than everybody else, because they've been scared of them. And so part of the blame goes on the political culture of New Jersey that has helped to enable this elitist, double-standard attitude."
The death-wish incident instantly became lore in Trenton and proved politically advantageous to the governor. It gave him a pretense to break off all communication with the union; he has refused to meet personally with Keshishian or her deputies since. And he has repeatedly used the ill-advised memo to portray himself as the courageous victim of unhinged union activists. At least once a week, it seems, he reminds some audience that the union once "wished for my death," as if he were Robert Kennedy staring down the Teamsters.
Perhaps the most consequential episode between Christie and the union, at least as far as public perception was concerned, had to do with the pay freeze. Almost as soon as the scope of the budget problem became clear, the governor called on teachers, who received scheduled raises during the recession, to accept a one-year freeze. He reminded the teachers that a lot of private-sector workers felt lucky if they could keep their current salaries, and he said a voluntary freeze would enable the union to avoid widespread teacher layoffs in cash-poor school districts. Most local chapters of the union ignored him. Ultimately some 10,000 union members — teachers and support staff — saw their jobs eliminated. Christie hasn't stopped talking about it since.
The union maintains that Christie's plea was mere gimmickry, because the layoffs would have happened even if its local chapters acceded to the demand for a freeze. But even if this is true, it would seem to reflect a staggering lack of political calculation. Had the teachers agreed to take the short-term hit by acquiescing to a temporary freeze, it would have been worlds harder for Christie to then run around the state demanding longer-term concessions on pensions and benefits. And when the layoffs did materialize, the governor would most likely have shouldered most of the blame. Instead, the whole affair seemed to prove Christie's point about the union's self-involvement, and it enabled him to blame the teachers themselves for the layoffs.
During our conversation at the Hay-Adams, I suggested to Christie that the teachers had given him a valuable political gift by refusing to compromise. "I don't look at it as a gift to me," he replied. "I look at it as a huge mistake by them, and also a window into who they are.
"Let's assume that they're smart, because I think they are," he went on. "So then, why don't you do it? Because they believe they are entitled to it. They believe they are special and different and that they shouldn't have to share the sacrifice. And that's, I think, what's ultimately driving public opinion against them."
One afternoon last month, at the modern, airy headquarters of the N.J.E.A., I sat with Barbara Keshishian, the union's president, and Vincent Giordano, its executive director, and listened as they tried to puzzle out why it was that Christie seemed so determined to humiliate them.
"Frankly, I for one don't say we're always 100 percent right on every single issue, and certainly neither is the administration across the street," said Giordano, a bald and goateed organizer who has been at the union for 40 years. "The difference is the tone and the mean-spiritedness of the way he talks about us. He has made us basically the whipping boy for anything that goes wrong in New Jersey and the country and in Bangladesh if there's an earthquake. It seems that we're just the cause of all the problems in our society today.
"I don't know what he's got buried down there inside of him that causes him to be this totally driven," Giordano said. "I don't think he's really supportive of a public-education system. If he was, he might send his kids to public school, which he doesn't." (Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, a bond trader, have four children, ages 7 to 17, and all attend Catholic schools.) "I think he's not very enamored with public services in general. Public employees, public education, public pension systems — somehow he's allergic to the word 'public.' Somebody ought to get him some kind of medication that gets him off of that allergy he has to anything that's public."
The two union leaders made several points in defense of their stances against pension reform and the pay freeze. They pointed out that despite all Christie's talk of shared sacrifice, he refused to renew a tax on millionaires in New Jersey that would have raised about $800 million this year — not enough to solve the state's fiscal problems, certainly, but enough to restore most of the school aid that was slashed from the budget. They noted that they already made concessions on teachers' pensions in 2007 and 2008, when they agreed to increase contributions by 10 percent and to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. They mentioned that the average salary of a New Jersey teacher is about $67,000, and the average pension is between $35,000 and $40,000. "Try living on that in the state of New Jersey," Giordano said. "I don't see why we've suddenly been identified as fat cats."
In the union's view, Christie is simply trying to exploit the downward spiral of the American labor movement. First, greedy companies, claiming pressures from the new global market, began rolling back the pensions and benefits that private-sector unions negotiated over a period of decades. And now, instead of trying to find a way to restore those hard-earned benefits for all workers, politicians like Christie are using corporate America's bad behavior as an excuse to take benefits away from the last set of union members who managed to cling to them — those in the public sector. Christie is pitting one set of middle-class workers against the other, perhaps in the hope that private-sector unions will ultimately turn on their brethren in the public workforce, or that the public unions will turn on one another. And the end result will be that everyone loses.
All of this seems to add up to a reasonable counterargument to Christie's main indictments against the teachers' union, and so I asked Keshishian and Giordano why they thought they were having such a problem making their case to the public. After all, according to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted this month, most voters in New Jersey still admire teachers themselves, but only 27 percent have a favorable view of the union, while 44 percent say their view is unfavorable. By contrast, Christie's job approval has been consistently hovering above the 50 percent mark.
"He is the governor!" Keshishian said, her voice rising. "People listen to him! You know, he could be in a crowd of people, and they're going to interview the governor! And people, I guess, believe that what the governor says is the truth." Keshishian taught high-school math for 29 years, but her grasp on civics sounded a bit shaky. It doesn't seem especially likely that Christie is breaking through because he is a politician and therefore people take to heart his every word.
What the union's leadership seems not to have considered is that public sentiment around budgets and public employees has shifted in a fundamental way. For decades, as Keshishian and Giordano were rising up through the union, it probably made sense to adopt a strategy of "no surrender," to dig in and outlast the occasional politician who might dare to threaten the union's hard-earned gains. But over the last 10 years or so, most American workers have come to expect less by way of benefits and security from their employers. And with political consensus building toward some kind of public-school reform, teachers' unions in particular have lost credibility with the public. Forty-six percent of voters in a poll conducted by Stanford and the Associated Press last September said teachers' unions deserved either "a great deal" or "a lot" of blame for the problems of public schools.
And so, when the union draws a hard line against changes to its pay and benefit structure, you can see why it might strike some sizable segment of voters as being a little anachronistic, like mimeographing homework assignments or sharpening a pencil by hand. In a Pew Research Center poll this month, 47 percent of respondents said their states should cut pension plans for government employees, which made it the most popular option on the table.
Some unions are more attuned than others to this gradual changing of the climate. The American Federation of Teachers, for example, which is by far the smaller of the two major teachers' unions nationally, has consciously tried to position itself as a more pragmatic union and has proposed a lot of its own classroom reforms in a campaign to get out in front of public opinion. In Newark, New Jersey's largest city, A.F.T. organizers have signaled that they will work with Christie on changes to the pension and health care system, in addition to negotiating on issues like merit pay. "Better to be seated at the table than to be on the menu" is how Joseph Del Grosso, the union's leader in Newark, explained the strategy to me.
But the larger and mightier N.J.E.A. has made the decision to hunker down and fight all comers. And because of that, its leaders run the risk of confirming the public's darkest suspicions about them, whether they have salient points to make or not. "They may have dug themselves a hole that will be very difficult to dig themselves out of," Del Grosso says of his competitor. "They are on the menu."
And so this is why Christie has gone out of his way to anoint the teachers' union as the most sinister force in the galaxy — not because he has some long-buried torment with a teacher to work through, but because the union does a very capable job of representing for him everything about the public sector that voters don't like. He knows there is a risk in using this strategy: he has to make sure his war on the union doesn't ultimately come to seem like a war on individual teachers, which is why he tries constantly to draw a distinction between the union and its members. ("I love teachers — I just can't stand your union," is one of Christie's signature lines.) For now, though, even some of labor's strongest advocates will tell you that Christie has the teachers and other public-sector unions backed up against a hard wall of political reality.
"My politics are union politics," Sweeney, the Senate president, assured me when I visited him in his State House office. He reminded me that he is not only the state's top elected Democrat, but also a union ironworker. And yet, he said, "what I think that public-sector employees have to do is look at what's going on around them, look at all the pain around them, and understand that no one hates them, but they want them to sacrifice like everyone else. It's that simple."
THE POLITICAL DYNAMIC in New Jersey tells you a lot about what's driving similar conversations all over the country. Last year alone, 18 states either raised the pension-contribution levels for public employees or reduced benefits for their retirees, according to Susan Urahn, the managing director of the Pew Center for the States. Three states — South Dakota, Colorado and Minnesota — decided to eliminate cost-of-living raises for state workers who have already retired. (As a result, all three states are now ensnared in court challenges over whether they can alter benefits for current retirees — cases that could have a huge impact on state budgets, depending on how far states are ultimately allowed to go in rolling back already-promised benefits.) Illinois raised its retirement age to 67, and Vermont, Michigan and Utah introduced "hybrid" retirement plans that are a step away from the defined-benefit pension plans that were the standard for much of the 20th century.
Now a new class of governors from both parties is promising to revisit union contracts in order to put their states on firmer fiscal ground. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker, an aggressive new Republican governor, just proposed legislation that would limit the rights of public workers to collectively bargain. "You can't have one group who are the haves," Walker told me recently, meaning government workers, "and one group, the private-sector workers, who are the have-nots." Walker's move led to protests in Madison, drawing President Obama into the debate and raising the prospect of French-style labor uprisings among public workers across America.
In part, the viral movement against public-sector unions is a result of political necessity. In states all over the country, balancing the budget has become an annual exercise in Copperfield-like illusion. Over the past decade, governors have exhausted all the easy options for eradicating, or at least hiding, deficits — building casinos and adding new fees, issuing bonds and securitizing tobacco revenue. Now, facing a painfully slow recovery and the end of stimulus spending from Washington, governors from both parties are finding that there are simply no more gimmicks left to exploit. They have to deal with what has long been an unspoken reality — that state governments have made a mountain of promises they can't keep.
It's also true, though, that what used to be unspeakable, politically, simply isn't anymore. It's not as if the problem of public pensions suddenly got so much worse than it was before (the shortfalls have been building steadily for years, after all), nor is this new crop of governors somehow genetically bolder than their predecessors. If politicians of both parties are suddenly willing to go after the pensions and health care plans of teachers and cops and firefighters, it's probably not only because they're out of budgeting options, but also because suddenly they see it as politically advantageous. In other words, not only are public employees' contracts no longer untouchable for any politician who wants to stay in office, but it turns out that the opposite is true; taking the fight to the unions is a good way to bolster your credentials as a gutsy reformer with voters who have been losing faith for years in public schools and government bureaucracies.
This, more than anything else, is the lesson that Chris Christie has impressed on his contemporaries. The question now, and what a lot of these other governors are watching to see, is whether Christie can convert his anti-union riffs into a revised social contract for public servants. While he has enacted several pivotal pieces of his agenda, Christie has yet to pass more than a handful of the measures in his toolkit. This year will mark a major test of his staying power. The question a lot of political observers are asking, in New Jersey and nationally, is whether Christie's argument will begin to lose its resonance as voters inevitably grow weary of the hostility and the rhetorical smack downs. Sooner or later, most people tend to tire of the boorish guy at the party, even if he's entertaining, and even if he has a point.
Christie waves away such concerns. "When I run out of fights to have, I'll stop fighting," he told me. Until then, you will find him out on the town-hall circuit, play-acting, berating and emoting his way toward some kind of public reckoning, leaving nothing unsaid.


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Boss Knelly Live At The Congress Theater [Label Submitted]
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Vigil honors victims of Who concert tragedy
Survivors, families work to create permanent memorial
A special candlelight vigil was held Monday night to honor the 11 people who died at a concert by the Who 33 years ago.
Survivors and family members of the victims are urging for a permanent memorial to remember the victims.
News 5's Courtis Fuller spoke with the son of one of the victims about his quest to make that happen.
"Thirty-three years ago on this night, I lost my mom in one of the worst rock concert tragedy in American history," Kasey Ladd said.
Ladd's mother, Teva, was among 11 people who were crushed in an effort to get through the doors of the then Riverfront Coliseum.
"I have no recollection of my mom, just what family members tell me or close friends of the family tell me," Ladd said.
He has been working to get a permanent marker made to memorialize the tragedy.
Craig Ransom was at the concert the day when the incident happened. He still has his ticket.
"I was scared on the way," Ransom said. "Once I got through the doors I was against the railing, but your feet were off the ground and you were just being shoved."
Ransom and other survivors said they haunted by the memorials of people being crushed in an effort to get through the doors of coliseum.
"You never get over something like that. I was 17 when it happened. You get used to it," survivor Tom Brown said.
The people at the vigil said the effort to get a memorial is slowed by limited organization and funds, but their resolve to see it through is unwavering.
Peggy Wilson's sister also died at the concert. She said she hopes officials will do something to honor the victims.
"I don't need a reminder of anything to remember Connie everyday but it would be nice for them to acknowledge 11 people died here," Wilson said.
Ladd said although there is a lot of red tape, public officials have been supportive of the movement.
He said he's hoping his dream becomes reality in the foreseeable future.


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Exclusive RightOn Adjustment System (RAS) that lets you adjust the strap to suit your playing style perfectly and securely, providing you with the longest adjustment range on the market. RAS system could be external or internal depending on the style you choose.
Adjust the length of your strap with a practical and simple buckle.
Metal Tri-Glide Adjustment
Tri-glide adjustment system. Your guitar strap length can be adjusted with the simple and practical system of sliding. Probably the most common and tried and tested length adjustment system on guitar straps.
Padded With Latex
Padding is provided with the highest quality latex that provides not only comfort but does not absorb sweat keeping the strap fresh. The latex is coated with a thin microfiber that provides you with a soft touch and the perfect grip to your shoulder stopping that most annoying of things during your perfect solo….the guitar slipping!!
End Tab Pick Holder
Pick holder located on the front allows easy and quick access to them. This double accommodation for plectrums is compatible with most existing plectrum models in the market.
Pick Pocket Inside
Internal Pick holder located on the back of the strap near tip. Ideal for storing a handful of plectrums, allows quick and easy access to them.
Fast Pick Dispenser
Pick Holder located in the tail of the strap. They are 3 simple cuts to introduce the plectrums, allowing faster and more intuitive access to them. Features • Width: 2,75" (7 cm)
• Adjustable Length: 37,4" (95 cm) - 59" (150 cm)
• Material: Leather + Textile
• Color: Brown
• Instruments: Acoustic Guitar + Banjo + Bass Guitar + Guitar
Please note your statutory rights are not affected.
For further information regarding Scan's warranty procedure please see our terms and conditions
- Duration:
- 12 months
- Type:
- Return to base
- DOA Period:
- 28 days
- RTB Period:
- 12 months
- Manufacturer:
- Scan Computers International Limited
- Telephone:
- 0871-472-4747


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Gadgets like the iPhone and iPad are considered cool by most kids in America, but learning about science and technology is decidedly not cool as far as most of them are concerned. Ask a kid about LeBron James and he'll most likely perk up and say, "Yeah, he's cool!" Mention the name Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple , and that same kid will set the ringtone on his iPhone to crickets chirping.
Many of the world's greatest inventions have come from America, including the light bulb, telephone and mobile phone, but America's role as a leader in innovation is slipping. And you can't just "Tiger Mom" kids in America into loving science and technology.
"Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers – they were all here!" exclaimed Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway personal transporter. "But today, because of the great wealth of this country, instead of becoming great creators, we've become great consumers."
"Kids in this country, they're worried about who's winning in the NBA or who will win the Super Bowl. They don't care about the race to the superconductor," he said.
So Kamen decided to fight cool with cool: He created FIRST, an organization that encourages innovation by kids through a nationwide robotics competition.
The competition is based on the sports model, only instead of playing basketball or football, the teams build robots that compete against each other. There are bleachers set up, just like in a stadium, with stadium lights and referees. The teams bring their fans, who wave signs and pom poms and some who even paint their faces in the team colors, plus cheerleaders and mascots that they share with their sports teams.
"We wanted to package science and technology into something kids can understand," Kamen said. "Girls have to stop being ashamed of how smart they are — and guys have to realize how cool it is to be smart."
The cool factor seems to be working: The competitors walk tall when they're on the robot-competition field, more like basketball players than the shy kid in the science lab.
And their classmates are starting to take notice. At this year's regional competition in New York City, a cheerleader from the CS 21 elementary school in Brooklyn, who cheers for both sports and robotics, was asked which was cooler — cheering for her school's sports team or cheering for the robot-building team. She replied: "Both."
In the beginning, Kamen had to tap his network of friends in the corporate world to help coach the kids and give them guidance. But today, so many companies have realized the benefits of investing in innovation at the kid level, there are more than 30,000 teachers and professionals who mentor kids in the FIRST competition and more than 3,000 companies sponsor teams and events, including defense giant BAE and toy maker Lego.
These companies not only donate their time and manpower but they also offer more than $20 million in scholarship money.
BAE is one of the biggest sponsors of the FIRST competitions — they sponsor more than 180 teams and donate $2 million each year in the form of team sponsorship and scholarships for winners. The company also works with the 4H and participates in TARC, the Team America Rocketry Challenge, and SeaPerch, a robot-building program that teaches kids how to build underwater robots that can then go on to perform different problem-solving tasks.
Doug Coffey, vice president of executive communications, says the company's main objective isn't just to produce future employees of BAE, but also to help develop a large population of students who are "STEM literate," which means that they have a grasp on science, technology, engineering and math.
There are always some kids who are naturally STEM literate, but one of the coolest things about programs like FIRST is that they draw the interest of the kids who aren't naturally drawn to STEM.
MIT hosts high school kids interested in science and technology each summer, where they take college-level classes for six weeks. They have a special program, adorably called "You GO! Girl," which is a four-day program designed for girls about to enter 9th grade to give them an introductory view of science and engineering that includes some hands-on experience.
Not only are these programs targeting girls and other underrepresented groups but they're also targeting kids at a younger age.
FIRST initially started as a robotics competition for high-school students, but now they have four levels of competition, starting with the Junior FIRST Lego League, for kids ages 6 to 9.
"I think, if you wait until high school to get kids interested in science and technology, you've waited too long," Coffey said.
The FIRST Lego competitions for the younger kids lets them create robots and solve real-world problems using materials that are familiar to them – brightly colored Legos.
"This is a really fun way for them to realize I can invent things, I can solve problems," said Michael McNally, director of brand relations for Lego. "You take Legos, which they're familiar with and then say, 'Imagine this is a string of DNA.'"
Chip giant Intel has several programs aimed at fostering innovation by kids, including the Intel Science Talent Search and the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Among the recent winners were a young woman who proposed using the gravitational pull of the planets as a "power slingshot" for commercial space travel, and a 15-year-old girl who came up with a cutting-edge cancer treatment: to use light shining through the skin to activate cancer drugs. They also sponsor after-school programs and programs for elementary-school teachers.
"Little kids come into kindergarten, fascinated with how the world works. But the longer they spend in school, sadly, the less interested and excited they are about science, technology, engineering and math," said Wendy Hawkins, executive director of the Intel Foundation. "We realized we needed to get more involved in those kids' lives much sooner to get them interested and doing science. We sponsor the two competitions because the best way to hook kids on science is to get away from how it is traditionally taught."
Technical colleges like MIT also run programs to help foster the innovators of tomorrow.
MIT gives out $10,000 in grants to high school students who identify problems and develop a prototype of an invention to solve it. They also participate in the FIRST competitions and work with the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and 4H.
Among the inventions to come out of that are an electrical cord that lights up, so when your cords get tangled and you need to unplug one, you can identify where it came from and where it goes. Another was a watermelon ripeness evaluator, which would evaluate the sound when you thump the watermelon to determine the decay rate and sugar content in the melon.
Every summer, Lemelson MIT holds a Eurekafest, where they invite kid and adult inventors as well as teachers to celebrate their inventions.
Like the companies that sponsor such events, Schuler said MIT doesn't put on these programs for recruiting purposes, though many of the students do go on to study at MIT. Rather, he says, "It's a recruiting tool for high school students to consider science, technology, engineering and math fields and to be creative in their lives."
The programs are aimed at encouraging kids who are naturals at exploring science and technology, but also reaching out to girls and other groups who tend to be underrepresented in the fields. It seems to be working: MIT said last year 46 percent of undergraduates were women.
Kids spend much of their formative years being told what they can't do (Stop touching that!) but Kamen and the scores of volunteers and companies that sponsor programs like this are focused on teaching kids what they can do.
"Science has opened up another dimension to them," Leslie Frazier, the assistant principal of CS 21, said while watching her school's team compete in the FIRST Junior Lego League competition in New York. "They think: I can do this … It shows them the possibilities and stretches their minds."
The Inventioneers, for example, are a group of six teens from LondonBerry, N.H., who won FIRST Robotics' "FIRST Lego League" competition (for ages 9 to 14) several years in a row and went on to invent a device to help curb distracted driving called the "Smart Wheel," which can tell when you've taken one or both hands off the wheel. This year, they'll be competing in the First Robotics competition for high school students.
"First has given us an opportunity to see an idea through to the end," said Tristan "T.J." Evarts, a 15-year-old member of the Inventioneers. "Before, you would come up with an idea but have no idea what to do next. This has shown me how you can make an idea a reality."
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Dr. Mario E. Martinez is a clinical neuropsychologist. In 1998 he developed his theory of Biocognitive Science based on research that demonstrates how thoughts and their biological expression coemerge within a cultural history. Academic science continues to divide mind and body, as well as ignore the influence cultural contexts have on the process of health, illness and aging. For example, cultures that support growing older as a positive development associated with increased wisdom and abilities have higher numbers of centenarians living healthier lives, than cultures that view aging as a process of inevitable deterioration.
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(PECL imagick 2.0.0)
Imagick::getImageChannelExtrema — Gets the extrema for one or more image channels
This function is currently not documented; only its argument list is available.
Gets the extrema for one or more image channels. Return value is an associative array with the keys "minima" and "maxima".
Provide any channel constant that is valid for your channel mode. To apply to more than one channel, combine channeltype constants using bitwise operators. Refer to this list of channel constants.
Returns TRUE on success.
Throws ImagickException on error.


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Caught On Tape: Cops Raid Canadian Rapper Belly's Home & Cause $40K Worth Of Damage! [WSHH Exclusive]
Ottawa police say they were helping an Ontario Provincial Police guns task force when they raided an Ottawa rapper's home on Friday. Police stormed Belly's home in Greely, south of Ottawa, and found no illegal weapons. They did find three pellet guns. "It's crazy, you feel violated when this happens," Belly told CTV Ottawa. "If I was here, it would be different." A surveillance camera outside Belly's home captured the raid by tactical officers and the canine unit. The rap star says police caused about $40,000 damage during their search. Police have not said what information prompted their search. No charges will be laid.
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Replies to This Discussion
I've been trying so HARD to ignore this thread. I mean, does anybody even play with a wood racquet anymore?!?
http://tennisopolis.com/video/bronx-tennis-championships-bronx-tenn... me and my 5.0 friend playing a match. Im using a woody.
okay...i was wondering if this was just a joke... a pun... but if you can, try it. we once had a wood racquet tournament, and the thing you find... you can't put the ball away--you can't hit hard enough so the serves aren't big, there are returns, and the ball stays in play... it's hilarious...
if you can't get woodies, get kid racquets... same concept... and HILARIOUS...
Tennis racquet: Woodie (Prince): Ash & Maple with graphite inlays & overlays;
Recommended string tension 70-76 Lbs.
coach i used to play with a prince woodie in high school .... My best friend had a pro kennex golden ace which was a midsize version of this racquet. Your'e right, it takes skill to play with a wood racquet. I played some of my best tennis with one !
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#9 Florida State (18-12, 9-9 ACC) vs. #8 Maryland (17-14, 9-9 ACC)
Eighth-seeded Maryland begins its final ACC Tournament Thursday as it takes on Florida State at noon in Greensboro Coliseum on ESPN. The winner will play top-seeded Virginia Friday at noon.
Watch: ESPN – Sean McDonough (Play-by-Play), Jay Bilas (Analyst); ACCN – Tim Brant (Play-by-Play), Mike Gminski (Analyst)
Listen: Terrapin Sports Radio Network – Johnny Holliday (Play-by-Play), Chris Knoche (Analyst)
• Maryland is 4-0 all-time against the Seminoles in the ACC Tournament.The Terps have won by an average margin of 19.5 points in the series, including an 85-59 victory in the last meeting in 2002. Maryland has never been less than a 3-seed in those four games, however.
• This is the Terrapins' sixth appearance in the ACC Tournament as the 8-seed, which last occurred in 2012. Maryland has won at least one game as the 8-seed in four out of six appearances, including in 2012, when it defeated the 9-seed Wake Forest in the first round, 82-60.
• This is the 10th anniversary of Maryland's historic run to the 2004 ACC Tournament title, when it shocked the conference by defeating the top-3 seeds after entering the tournament with a 7-9 record. The Terps have three ACC Tournament titles: 1958, 1984, 2004.
• Junior Dez Wells was recently named Third Team All-ACC by both the media and coaches' polls, in addition to earning All-District III Team honors. Wells leads Maryland with 14.8 points per game, including a 9.6 point per game average in the second half.
• Maryland picked up its first signature victory of the season Sunday in front of a soldout Comcast Center crowd as it defeated ACC regular season champion Virginia, 75-69, in overtime. Sophomore Seth Allen scored the first five points in overtime to finish with 20 overall, while Dez Wells added 18 points.
Terps Secure Marquee Victory
Maryland closed out its 61st and final Atlantic Coast Conference regular season in stunning fashion, outlasting No. 5 Virginia 75-69 in overtime Sunday to end the Cavaliers' 13-game winning streak.
After losing the lead in the closing seconds of regulation, the Terrapins never trailed in the extra session in front of an emotional sellout crowd of 17,950 at the school's final home basketball game in a conference it joined as a charter member in 1953.
Seth Allen scored five of his 20 points in overtime and Dez Wells finished with 18 for the Terrapins (17-14, 9-9 ACC), who will play in the Big Ten next season. Maryland had lost six straight to Virginia, including a 61-53 decision in February that was part of the Cavaliers' school-record winning streak against ACC competition.
Maryland dominated in the overtime frame, with Allen making two straight layups for a 68-64 lead, and then adding a free throw.
Scouting Florida State
The Seminoles closed out the regular season by winning three of their final four games, most recently falling to Syracuse, 74-58. Maryland and Florida State split the regular season series, with both teams winning their respective home contests.
Florida State is the best shooting team in the ACC, ranking first with a .465 field goal percentage. The team is strong defensively, as well, ranking second in the conference (23rd nationally) in field goal percentage defense (.397).
Three players average more than 13 points for the 'Noles: Aaron Thomas (14.1/g), Ian Miller (13.7/g) and Okaro White (13.3/g). White also leads the team with 6.6 rebounds per game.
Season Series Rewind: FSU
Maryland fell victim to a hot-shooting Florida State team that made 16 3-pointers to win, 85-61, in the first meeting on Jan. 12. Ian Miller made six 3-pointers on his own for 20 points, while the Terps shot just 33 percent.
The Terrapins flipped the script in the second meeting at Comcast Center on Feb. 8, shooting 52 percent and winning, 83-71. Seth Allen dazzled the Maryland crowd, scoring a career-high 32 points on 11-of-15 shooting (7-of-10 from 3-pt range) to lead the Terps.
Allen's 32-point night made up for the first meeting, when he had only one point on 0-of-8 shooting. Dez Wellsscored 15 points in both games.
By the Numbers: Maryland in the ACC
- 1953-54 – Maryland joins the ACC, winning its inaugural basketball game, 53-49, at South Carolina on Dec. 3, 1953
- 3 – ACC Tournament titles (1958, 1984, 2004). The Terrapins shocked the conference in 2004, having entered the tournament with a 7-9 ACC record.
- 5 – ACC regular season titles (1975, 1980, 1995, 2002, 2010)
- 101 – All-ACC Selections, including five ACC POY's (Albert King, Len Bias (2x), Juan Dixon and Greivis Vasquez)
- 448 – Wins in ACC regular season play (448-435 overall record)
- 25 – 20-win seasons during time in ACC, and 24 NCAA Tournament appearances
Wells Garners Postseason Accolades
Junior Dez Wells was named Third Team All-ACC by both the media and coaches' polls on March 10 as announced by the ACC. He also earned All-District III honors from the USBWA on March 11.
Wells has done it all for the Terps in 2013-14, leading the team with 14.8 points per game on 49 percent shooting. He has scored double-figures in all but four games, including 14 of his last 15 outings. Wells is also first on the team in total assists (69), blocks (26) and free throw percentage (.813), and second in steals (32).
Wells earned First Team All-ACC Tournament honors in 2013 after averaging 22.0 points and 6.7 rebounds in three games. He poured in 30 points on 9-of-13 shooting to down No. 2 Duke in the ACC Quarterfinals.