Here’s the sidebar from the USA Today article detailing the arrests made in New Jersey yesterday:
| ARRESTED | |
 |
|
| • Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano, 32: Lawyer and former Hoboken City Councilman since 2005, he was elected mayor of Hoboken in June.• Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, 64: Served more than two decades as mayor and a member of the town council, and is a former Secaucus Board of Education member. A Vietnam combat veteran, he is also the president of a family owned trucking company.• Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini: One of three deputy mayors for New Jersey’s second-largest city.
• State Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt, 44: Elected to the Legislature in 2008, the Republican from Monmouth County is also the mayor of Ocean Township, a post he has held since 1998, and is the Lumberton Township administrator. |
Oddly, the article does not give the total number of people arrested in the operation, although it does note in the body of the story that “most of the officials charged were Democrats.”
Here’s one of them:
Ralph Marra, the acting U.S. attorney here, said Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano, a Democrat, told the undercover agent that “I could be indicted and still get 85 to 95% of the vote” in his election race.
Cammarano, 32, won a runoff last month and was considered a potential rising political star. He’s charged with accepting $25,000 in bribes.
In the campaign, “there’s the people who were with us, and that’s you guys,” the complaint says Cammarano told the informant. “There’s the people who climbed on board in the runoff. They can get in line. … And then there are the people who were against us the whole way. … They get ground into powder.”
Why is it that New Jersey and Illinois have such corrupt politicians? Because Cammarano is right. An electorate that will vote for any person with the correct letter after his name will end up with a corrupt government.
Print
Digg
StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
Facebook
Yahoo! Buzz
Twitter
Google Bookmarks
Google Buzz
LinkedIn
MSN Reporter
MySpace
Orkut
Ping.fm
Reddit
RSS
Slashdot
Technorati
Tumblr
Webnews.de
I noticed on the television news that no party affiliation was mentioned, so I assumed they were all Democrats. I’m glad that USA Today was good enough to straighten me out on that.
P.S. I think it’s been more than a year since I last bought a newspaper.
One of my favorite online games of all time, beats Tower Defense!
They’re just using the fact that everyone assumes by default that an indicted politician has to be a Dem. So newspapers can save column-inches by only identifying the occasional Republican, especially when you got a whole herd as in this case. That frees column-inches that can be sold as ads and keep them from going bankrupt. Just a matter of economics.
“Why is it that New Jersey and Illinois have such corrupt politicians?”
Because the birth of modern politics (late 19th century) in their major cities started when gang members realized they’d be more powerful by getting their own into local offices, or a candidate they could control, and those candidates went from local to city, and then to state level politics. Power transferred from those street gangs, to semi-organized gangsters, to graft machines, to the mob, and now to people like Soros. The corrupt politics of certain areas are legacies.
>>The corrupt politics of certain areas are legacies.>>
Unless the legacy in question is a tool, like Fred.
Who’s Fred?
Good,Matt…am reading “Boss Tweed” by Kenneth Ackerman.What he describes about NY circa 1870 is more or less what you describe