Assemblyman Parker Space (R-Sussex) perhaps unwittingly provided an opportunity for Democrats to explain the destruction caused by marijuana criminalization when he repeated an apocryphal anecdote painting the affluent university city of Boulder, Colorado, in an interview with the New Jersey Herald as “disgusting” since the legalization of marijuana in that state.

Like a junior varsity football team that finally made a first down, giddy GOP members of Congress held a beer bash Thursday to celebrate House passage of a bill that gives hundreds of millions of tax breaks to the very wealthy and pharmaceutical companies while stripping low- and middle-income, elderly and/or non-healthy people of affordable access to health care, all without holding hearings or researching its effects. Passage in the House is the first step in enacting a new law, but doesn’t guarantee its passage, something you wouldn’t have guessed from watching the hilarity that ensured after Thursday’s vote.

As with so many other progressive measures vetoed at least once by lame-duck Trump supporter Gov. Chris Christie, Democrats in the State House who want to raise the minimum wage in the state are laying the groundwork now but waiting to make a move until January, when Christie is out and, one hopes, a Democrat sits in the gubernatorial chair.

When the feds close a door, the state will open a window.  Or so intends a coalition of progressive activist groups and state Democratic legislators who are coalescing to resist Trump and the GOP agenda, and ensure that voting rights, reproductive rights, environmental protections, education quality and other “amenities” that make life bearable remain strong in New Jersey no matter what the Trump administration hands out.

Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-11), chairman of the powerful House Appropriations committee, is caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, under pressure from the extreme right wing of his party for opposing the first version of Trump/Ryancare, and under pressure from his non-extreme-right-wing constituents for everything else he has done in the past several years, as well as refusing to meet with them face to face in Town Hall-style meetings.

For a variety of reasons, the Great Recession of 2008, which wiped out many retirement accounts, together with the high cost of healthcare, the vast majority of Americans, even those at the tail end of the baby boom who are on the verge of retirement, have little to nothing saved or invested for their “Golden Years.”