Bob Hennelly, Insider NJ

This article originally appeared in InsiderNJ.

NEPTUNE, N.J. — Last month, an American flag was still blowing in the January breeze on Lincrest Terrace as police gathered evidence.

The scene: a murder-suicide that took the lives of Reuben Alarcon, 51, and Andrea Alarcon, 41, and their two daughters, nine-year-old Scarlett and six-year-old Emma, who attended Hannah Caldwell Elementary School....

This article originally appeared in InsiderNJ.

This Martin Luther King Day comes just weeks after a year that’s been dubbed "the year of the strike" because in 2023 there were well over 300 such work stoppages involving 450,000 union workers willing to take the risk of walking out on their employer — a 900 percent increase from just a few years earlier.

Automakers, actors, writers, nurses and a long list of other occupations were fed up enough that they walked off their job by the tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board reported in 2022 receiving over 2,500 applications for workplace union representation, a 53 percent increase over the previous year....

This article originally appeared in Insider NJ.

The parking below the New Jersey State House that accommodates all of the legislature’s late model SUVs and cars was filled to capacity on Nov. 30 during a jam packed lame duck session day. Out in front of the Legislative Annex here in Trenton, N.J., a couple of hundred labor, social justice and environmental activists protested Gov. Phil Murphy’s plan to let the state’s 2.5 percent Corporate Business Tax Surcharge lapse on entities that post more than a million dollars in annual profits.

Activists from New Jersey Policy Perspectives, NJ’s Working Families Alliance, the CWA, HPAE, the state’s largest nurses’ union, Citizens Action, Make the Road New Jersey, the Domestic Workers Alliance, Immigrant Resource Center, and the League of Conservation Voters all stood behind a larger than life mock check made out to Walmart, Amazon, and ExxonMobil for $1 billion from the State of New Jersey....

As a large guy myself, I really appreciate other guys who are on the larger size but are nimble on their feet. You haven’t known anxiety until you’ve been an obese father of the bride expected to dance like Fred Astaire with your daughter with all eyes on you.

It encourages sobriety.

So, yesterday, I really appreciated former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s graceful pirouette from the position he took early in the morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that he wasn’t going to weigh in on the Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) candidacy for House speaker to a position he took just hours later that Jordan should stand down....

This article originally appeared in Insider NJ.

In this summer of Trump indictments, there’s so much that’s being eclipsed by this essential multi-faceted effort to hold him accountable for trying to derail the peaceful democratic transfer of power. This internal myopic fixation on all things Trump is happening as the larger world around us continues to turn whether or not we are engaged in it.

This introspective national dynamic creates dangerous blind spots that can be exploited like they were on Sept. 11 when those hijacked passenger airliners were turned into weapons of mass destruction we did not see coming.

And then for 20 years all we saw was red....