In the week or so since the election, the rat bastards in Trenton have shown the agenda that they played close to the vest until the election was over, lest they arouse the sleeping electorate, which, once properly informed just might have sent their miserable asses packing.

Since the election we have been treated to the following:

1.The Death Penalty. Just a few days after the general election in the state, the average newspaper-reading Joe in Jersey learned that the [democrat] Assembly will vote on doing away with New Jersey’s death penalty. Sure, if you’re a political junkie who is seriously plugged in to what is going on in Trenton on any given day, you might have seen this coming, but for those who get their news from the newspapers and the television, this was quite a shocker.

As a practical matter, the legislative rescission of the death penalty is irrelevant, because New Jersey hasn’t executed anyone since 1963, nine years before then-existing death penalty laws were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972.

In 1982, New Jersey reinstated the death penalty by revising its statute to pass muster under the 1972 United States Supreme Court decision. The Legislature probably should not have wasted its time fixing the statute, because the New Jersey Supreme Court has never missed an opportunity to read the law in a manner that would keep the most brutal murderers (often of police officers) alive. Now, we have a Governor who has opposed the death penalty for many years and continues to do so.

As such, the death penalty in New Jersey is toast and it will become so while the voters sit home and watch Oprah.

2. The Stem Cell Baloney. I wrote about it here. The incumbents figured that their Stem Cell Bond Referendum (authorizing $450 million in yet more borrowing) would pass. After all, the sheeple in New Jersey hadn’t said “No” to a bond issue in some 17 years. Well, as we know, the bond issue was flatly rejected by the thirty percent of voters who bothered to show up at the polls. Only after the election did we learn that the $450 million was really intended to pay the expenses of running the FOUR stem cell research facilities that the state had already planned to build with $270 million more in borrowed money that the voters didn’t get to vote on.

Look, if voters nixed $450 million in borrowing, they sure as shit would have nixed an honestly worded referendum that would have sought authorization to borrow $720 million ($450 million + $270 million=$720 million).

It now appears that at least three of the facilities may not be built, due to the lack of funds to run them. The fourth facility will likely be built, using the excess from the $270 million to run the facility. “Excess?” Please. Not in Jersey. Ever.

3. The Sale/Lease of the Garden State Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike. Governor Corzine has been hinting at this “Asset Monetization Plan” for months, but he and his cronies in the legislature made sure to keep it relatively quiet until after the election. Now, he and they are ready to rock. Under this “plan” the state would sell or lease our main highways to a third party (although the type of third party remains a mystery) for a large chunk of front money, which will be used to “reduce the cost of debt service” (a fancy way of saying “reduce the interest the state has to pay on previously BORROWED money), and presumably reap the benefits from increased tolls (I think, anyway).

The Governor is so enamored of this “plan” that he is “prepared to lose his job” getting it passed. (Check out the comments to the linked post to see how this horseshit is being received).

I have done my damndest to understand how this “plan” will work to the advantage of New Jersey’s citizens, but for the life of me, I don’t see it. That’s largely because the Governor has not shared any of the details of his “plan.” I urge Jersey peeps to check out THIS SITE for more information on this subject, and if you can make sense of how the “plan” will benefit the citizens of Jersey, please let me know. Seriously.

While each of the foregoing schemes is enough to make one’s hair hurt, what really frosts my stindeens is the calculated effort on the part of the incumbents to wait until after the election was over to pull this crap. (Notably, I didn’t hear incumbent Republicans squawking about any of this prior to the election.) No, the incumbent rats in Trenton knew goddamned well that these issues would have caught the attention of the electorate and that electorate would have demanded that they take *gasp* a position on these very issues.

Of course we all know that having to take a position on a hot issue is absolutely toxic to political rats.