The Morning Briefing - November 3, 2016
TRENTON – If you have the distinct honor of having a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop named after you, could there really be a higher accolade to achieve? Apparently so, for three, super-dead New Jerseyans, who could be voted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Among the nominees are poet Joyce Kilmer from New Brunswick, Molly Pitcher from Trenton and Richard Stockton from Galloway, all of whom are honored every time you stop to pee on the Turnpike. Unclear how to beat that. Voting began yesterday at the Hall of Fame website.
NEW BRUNSWICK – With all this debate about the gas tax this entire year, one must assume that peeved motorists are now livid as they head to the pump and are forced to pay an additional 23 cents a gallon, as they check off which lawmakers they will vote out of office. So, a reporter from TapInto New Brunswick headed out last night to service stations in the Hub City to chronicle all the rage. What he found was gas selling for $2.19 a gallon and motorists who seemed to barely notice a difference. Read all the fury here.
ROSELAND – Will a discount on pizza make paying more at the gas pumps easier to swallow? That’s what the owner of Rezza Trattoria here is hoping. And, if not, heck, it’s still a clever gimmick to get into the Morning Briefing. The owner is offering customers with a receipt for gasoline a month-long discount on food orders equivalent to the state's 23 cent-a-gallon gas tax hike. Bendokas tells NJ.com he concocted the idea because: “I don't like it when anything gets more expensive … and was thinking about the effect it would have on my drivers, my customers and everything.” He estimates the average discount will come to about $2.50 per order.
STATEWIDE – With all this talk about the gas tax, no one has seemed to complain about the state pension crisis in recent months. So, let’s thank Bloomberg, out with a report today that New Jersey now has the distinction of having the worst-funded public pension system in the U.S. – even worse than Kentucky and Illinois. Last year, New Jersey had a $135.7 billion deficit in the system, a $22.6 billion bigger hole than 2014. Sure, feel free to blame bargain-basement bond yields and sleepy stock-market gains. But it is more fun to blame politicians, none of whom have come up with a solution to such a mess. Perhaps our gubernatorial candidates will be talking about it next year. Or not.
IN THE MEDIA
With the sad, chronic decline in newspaper readership over the past 20 years, it seemed the most well-written products in the country still maintained a strong fan base. But even the Wall Street Journal is now taking its lumps, announcing it is gutting its staff and cutting pages out of the newspaper to help make ends meet. So, basically, it is embarking on that same formula for newspaper failure: Offer less, charge more. The changes hit the “Greater New York” coverage the hardest, with “more concise” news as part of the restructuring. Translation: the WSJ is cutting down the stories New Jerseyans actually read.
IN OTHER IMPORTANT NEWS
BERLIN – In what must be the quickest beverage service ever known in a commercial flight, an Austrian airline has launched a route that takes only eight minutes. The flight transports passengers from St. Gallen-Altenrhein in Switzerland to Friedrichshafen in southern Germany, at an average cost of about $44. In other news, a chronically-cancelled eight-minute flight from Newark to Teterboro would somehow take three hours to complete, at a cost of $498, featuring $6 bottled water and no bagged peanuts.
THIS DAY IN HISTORY
It was this day in 2010 the U.S. Border Patrol discovered a sophisticated tunnel used by drug smugglers between Tijuana, Mexico and Otay Mesa, California. With this discovery, only 1,000 or so other tunnels to go.
WORD OF THE DAY
Echelon [ESH-uh-lahn] – noun
Definition: A group of individuals at a particular level or grade in an organization
Example: To every echelon of the Cubs organization: Congrats!
WEATHER IN A WORD
Warm