Urban critic: Gov. Murphy’s Convenient Scapegoat
Faced with his first real crisis as New Jersey governor — last Thursday’s snowfall that created statewide commuter chaos — Phil Murphy blamed Trenton’s ineffective response on the weatherman, notes City Journal’s Steve Malanga. Murphy “complained that the National Weather Service had surprised the state by switching the forecast at the last minute.” To which a top meteorologist, pointing to “clear predictions of what was about to unfold,” told reporters: “You’re being scammed.” Murphy’s press conference during the emergency went so badly that he actually cut it short. The head of the State Police also drew fire when he “decided at the same press conference to lecture residents” about their own lack of preparedness. Garden Staters “can only wonder what’s next,” but it “sounds like New Jersey’s government is telling residents: you’re on your own.”
Foreign desk: Germany Doesn’t Really Want an EU Army
Ignore all the transatlantic debate about creating a joint European army, suggests Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky: Germany “has little interest in setting up any kind of supranational force under the EU’s command.” What Defense Minister Ursula van der Leyen proposes is “keeping in place the existing procedures for deploying troops,” which decision “lies with each member state.” It also means getting approval from a joint committee, a process that “has already de-fanged the closest thing the EU has to a common army — the two EU Battlegroups.” In fact, they’ve never been deployed, because “EU members have never reached unanimous agreement to do so.” But European nations want to show President Trump “they are investing in their own defense rather than, as Trump has put it crudely, paying the US to defend them.”
From the left: Unanswered Questions on Amazon Deal
Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have just given what Richard Brodsky at the Albany Times-Union calls “the mother of all giveaways to the richest corporation in the world, Amazon.” Are the subsidies too rich? No one — not even Cuomo and de Blasio — knows for certain if they “cut the best deal they could” or instead got snookered. But Amazon probably will “undo the Queens of Mario Cuomo and Archie Bunker forever.” Frankly, “a borough that has become a vibrant home for immigrants and strivers will likely resemble Park Slope pretty soon.” Approve or disapprove, “it’s a likely outcome.” Even more disturbing, “the state Legislature and the City Council have been read out of any decision-making role.” Apparently, we’re only a democracy “until big money deals are made.”
Libertarian: ACLU Declines To Defend Civil Rights
The American Civil Liberties Union has just issued what Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic charges is “a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.” The issue is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ new guidelines on Title IX, particularly in more fairly handling allegations of student sexual misbehavior. The ACLU actually approves of those guidelines’ due-process protections — provided they’re for someone facing criminal charges. But it “opposes the new rules for campuses.” Indeed, the ACLU said something especially “shocking to civil libertarians,” charging the guideline “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Given its historic mission, says a lawyer quoted by Friedersdorf, those last four words, “are the ACLU’s epitaph.”
Crime reporters: No Accountability in Parkland Shooting
Nine months after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., in which 17 people were killed, only a few low-level employees have faced consequences, report the Sun-Sentinel’s David Fleshler and Megan O’Matz. This, despite “an extraordinary series of governmental failures leading to the bloodshed” that “may have cost lives.” Among those facing no consequences at agencies where “leaders have been quick to pat themselves on the back for their work”: “the school administrators who failed to act on warnings of weak security” and those “who mismanaged gunman Nikolas Cruz’ special-education needs”; the sheriff’s deputies “who took cover while children were shot” and their supervisors; and no one at the FBI, “which fumbled compelling, back-to-back tips about Cruz in the months before his rampage.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
