Coda
Bad ideas often take on a life of their own
Greg Bean

Sometimes, a bad idea infects a segment of society and travels through it like an epidemic of Hong Kong flu.

Take the current hysteria about trains fats, for example. One politician, somewhere, gets the idea that he can get some exposure proposing legislation to save us from ourselves, legislation like outlawing trains fats from food and food preparation. It works, the media writes lots of stories, and pretty soon politicians all over the place are trying to cash in on the action. Then, when the hoopla dies down, they're off to the next BIG THING. Remember the big panic about movie popcorn? MSG in Chinese food?

New York City Mayor Michael Bloom-berg recently proposed banning trans fats, and made a big splash for his efforts. And a couple of weeks ago, state Sen. Ellen Karcher (D-Monmouth and Middlesex) followed in his footsteps and said she would propose a similar bill in New Jersey, the Nanny State.

Under her proposal, partially-hydrogenated cooking oil, commonly used in home cooking and food production and laden with trans fats, would be replaced with heart-healthy alternatives like mono and poly-unsaturated vegetable oils. I suppose you could also replace that cooking oil with more traditional cooking substances like butter and lard, but those have their own set of drawbacks.

Karcher's proposal drew the attention of some of the state's radio talk show lunatics, and those lunatics told their moonbat listeners to call the senator and complain. They flooded her office with so many calls that her staff had to close it for the day, and some of those calls, according to the senator, included threats.

The moonbats slapped her around pretty thoroughly, so I don't want to pile on. But I do hope Karcher learns a lesson from the experience.

When the managing editor of Greater Media's publication the News Transcript called Chris Fifis, a partner in Ponzio's Restaurant in Cherry Hill and a spokes-man for the New Jersey Restaurant Assoc-iation, for a comment about Karcher's proposed legislation, Fifis hit the nail on the head. Legislators in Trenton, he said, should stay out of the kitchen.

"The first thing they need to do is trim the fat out of the state government and help reduce our property taxes," Fifis said.

Amen, brother!

If you talk to most of the voters who put Karcher in her seat in the state Senate, I'll bet the ranch almost all of them will say their two top priorities were corruption in government and high property taxes. I doubt you'd find a single one who'd say he or she voted for Karcher so the senator could go to Trenton and outlaw trans fats.

By wasting her time on this nonsense and trying to stick state government's nose where it doesn't belong, Karcher took her eye off the ball and got distracted by a shiny diversion. She shouldn't have been particularly surprised when the proposal backfired and set off a storm of criticism.

Maybe now she'll buckle down and help find a way to reduce property taxes, and leave legislation to save us from our french fries to someone else.

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Speaking of particularly bad ideas, last week Keyport Councilman Joseph Wedick proposed an ordinance that would require people who rent apartments to make sure their renters are not in the country illegally. This bad idea started out in Riverside, N.J., where there were large protests when the law was adopted last month, and infected Hazelton, Pa., where it is now illegal to rent to an illegal alien.

Now, it's spreading to Keyport.

No one denies that this country faces real problems related to illegal immigration, and those problems must be addressed. But I believe this particular legislative tack is flawed on many levels.

First, every community in the state already has code regulations to deal with overcrowding and safety in rental properties, and if problems are brought to the attention of authorities there are code enforcers and police to investigate the situation under the authority of law.

This regulation, however, puts the onus for enforcement not on municipal authorities (who are clearly not enforcing existing regulations), but on the individual property owner, who can face a significant fine if one of his renters turns out to be here illegally.

Would those landlords be responsible for checking documentation from prospective renters to make sure it isn't fake? Could you tell the difference between a high quality bogus passport and a real one? I couldn't, and there aren't many people outside law enforcement who can.

In addition, the law would be discriminatory in its execution. Landlords will certainly require documentation from any prospective renter who appears Hispanic, but how many will require those same documents from a Caucasian renter with a British accent?

While the folks who propose these laws say they are aimed at "protecting" renters from overcrowded and unsafe living conditions - and not at excluding or segregating specific populations - the obvious impetus in nearly every case has been an influx of illegal Hispanic aliens.

That's what's happened in Keyport, where Wedick said his interest was safety, but where a nasty strain of racism became apparent during public discussion of the ordinance.

After a lot of soul searching and discussion, we printed some of those inflammatory comments in last week's edition of Greater Media's publication the Indepen-dent. As we explained in an editorial, we felt "it was important to run a sample of those quotes to alert our readers to the sort of gutter politics hovering about a decision that could uproot entire families and lives."

It is telling that while some residents were making such obviously racist and inflammatory comments, not a single member of the council stood up to de-nounce or refute them.

Maybe now that they've had a chance for reflection, they will. Maybe they'll consign this bad ordinance to the slag heap where it belongs.

Maybe they'll force their code enforcement officers to do the job for which they were hired, and not put that burden on some citizen who only wants to rent his upstairs apartment.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at gbean@gmnews.com.