Staffs

This weekend will be a moving experience for the New Jersey Legislature. With their quarters nearly completed, lawmakers and their partisan staffs are starting to set up shop in the new legislative wing of the Statehouse, renovated to the tune of $90 million, including an addition for the staffs. For the last five years they have been working out of the Statehouse Annex.

Remember the city budget deficit? It could be as high as $80 million this year. Remember the job freeze and the early retirement programs that were supposed to help reduce the red ink? Well, the freeze and early retirement programs are lowering employment levels in the Police, Fire and Streets departments, health centers, the parks and recreation programs. Elsewhere in city government - the mayor's office, anti-graffiti office, city solicitor's office, City Council - it's business as usual.

Knight Ridder, the company that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, yesterday announced plans to cut staff at most of its 32 daily newspapers. Tony Ridder, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, said he felt "we have no choice" because advertising revenue was falling while the cost of newsprint was increasing. "There will be reductions at most newspapers," Ridder said in a statement. "The number will vary according to local market conditions.

Doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel throughout the country are becoming increasingly concerned that they might get AIDS from the blood of their patients. The signs of this concern are subtle, but they can be seen everywhere - especially on the maternity floors of inner-city hospitals. There, many of the patients are intravenous-drug users, and delivering babies is a bloody business. Consider a recent visit to the obstetrics service at the Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hospital, one of the busiest units in the city.

A worldwide effort to wring the fat out of U.S. military headquarters' staffs by eliminating several thousand troops and dozens of generals and admirals actually produced a few more members of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. Two years ago, then-Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci ordered that 3,000 positions be cut, but when the military carried out that directive, three of the branches ended up with nine more positions than when they started, according to Pentagon documents recently released by Congress.

Last week, while members of Congress were spending the Independence Day holiday break taking soundings back home, there was no vacation for some of their staff employees. Those on the committees that had voted last month to send different versions of health legislation to the full House and Senate were working with leadership staff aides to prepare for the floor debate beginning later in July. It was - and is - a huge task. Four committees, two in the House and two in the Senate, cleared five different health-care measures - one of them preferring to approve two, rather than one. No two are identical and many have provisions that are flatly incompatible.

Dinner and drinks at Lorenzo's, a pricey Trenton watering hole that caters to lobbyists and government officials. Tickets to the Baltimore Orioles, the Mets and the Yankees. An expense-paid trip to a luxury Florida resort last October. Special interests, including hospitals, liquor companies, casinos and utilities, shelled out more than $117,000 last year to wine and dine lawmakers, their staffs and officials in the governor's office, according to a report released yesterday by New Jersey Common Cause.

Nurse manager Pat Fetterman was asked to do two jobs for the salary of one after Mercy Haverford Hospital scaled back its workforce this spring. She now supervises a staff of 65 instead of 15. Randall Williams was relieved when he recently landed work as an emergency-room medical clerk after having been laid off twice in the last nine months from two other hospital jobs. He celebrated by filling up his refrigerator. And Sucorea VanBrunt searched for a job for six months before realizing she probably would not find another one in a hospital.

VILLANOVA IS NOT up to its recent standards this season. That, however, does not mean the city dynamic has changed all that much. Whenever they are going after a local recruit, the coaching staffs at the other scholarship Big 5 schools - Temple, Saint Joseph's and La Salle - always hope that Villanova is not interested. The reality is that if Villanova wants somebody local, it almost always gets that player. Other programs can be involved for years with a player, but if Villanova starts to show interest, they shudder.

WE DEFINITELY need term limits. Politicians get stale and feel like Tiger Woods - entitled to everything! And during a financial crisis like we are in now, we should be able to lay off City Council and their staffs. Council and their staffs should get minimum wage - they'll be working for the people, and with all the perks they get, they'll be just fine. Politicians argue that the salaries are needed to keep out corruption, but they get high salaries and are still corrupt. We need to stop voting for incumbents until they start serving us and not the special interests.

HARRISBURG - The top staff aide to Gov. Corbett is leaving the administration for a new job. Corbett said Thursday he would nominate his chief of staff, William F. Ward, to fill a vacancy on Allegheny County Common Pleas Court. Ward will be replaced by Stephen Aichele, a lawyer from Chester County who currently works as Corbett's chief counsel. The governor made his announcement in a prepared statement that gave no hint of the political turmoil that was said to have preceded the moves.

WHILE THE Phillies finished their 10-game West Coast trip with a much-needed dose of offense, their pitching staff is still the reason they will head back to Citizens Bank Park within one game of .500. Heading into Wednesday's 7-2 victory over the Diamondbacks, Phillies starters had pitched at least seven innings in half of their 18 games, tied with Texas and Oakland for the most in the majors. Combined, the rotation had logged 117 innings (an average of more than six per start)

The new bats in high school baseball should mean fewer hits and runs. The new bats also should mean more innings. "Any high school coach who is not prepared for extra-inning games is going to get burned," University of Pennsylvania coach John Cole said. Cole and other college coaches saw what the switch to BBCOR bats from BESR bats did to the college game in 2011. Not only was batting average in Division I down to its lowest level since 1976, but also, lower scores led to a big uptick in extra-inning games.

PITTSBURGH - Republican State Sen. Jane Orie, accused of using her state-funded legislative staff to perform campaign work for herself and a state judge who is her sister, was convicted Monday of 14 counts of theft of services, conflict of interest, and forgery, and she will likely be forced from the Senate. Orie, acquitted of 10 other counts, including perjury and election-code violations, declined to comment after the verdict but appeared shaken. Her attorney, William Costopoulos, said after leaving the courtroom: "I can tell you we're disappointed, and there's no positive spin I can put on it. " Orie, 50, was elected to the Senate in a 2001 special election to fill an empty seat and was reelected three times.

PITTSBURGH - Republican state Sen. Jane Orie, accused of using her state-funded legislative staff to perform campaign work for herself and a state judge who's her sister, was convicted Monday on 14 counts of theft of services, conflict of interest and forgery, and likely will be forced from the Senate. Orie, acquitted of 10 other counts including perjury and election-code violations, declined to comment after the verdict but appeared to be shaken. Her attorney, William Costopoulos, said after leaving the courtroom: "I can tell you we're disappointed, and there's no positive spin I can put on it. " Orie, 50, was elected to the Senate in a 2001 special election to fill an empty seat and was re-elected three times.

KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder, a capital offense that could lead to the death penalty in the massacre of Afghan civilians, the U.S. military said. Bales, 38, is accused of walking off a U.S. military base with his 9mm pistol and an M-4 rifle fitted with a grenade launcher before dawn on March 11, killing nine Afghan children and eight adults, and burning some of the bodies. It was the worst allegation of civilian killings by an American, and it has severely strained U.S.-Afghan ties at a critical time in the decade-old war. It's unclear what prompted the killings, but the case has drawn new attention to the debate over mental-health care for the troops, who have had record suicide rates and high incidences of post-traumatic stress and brain injuries during repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Former FBI chief Louis Freeh and his investigators have conducted 200 interviews in their extensive probe of the child sex abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University, asking questions that go beyond the charges against Jerry Sandusky and into the relationship between the football program and the administration. Since November, when the school's trustees hired his group to examine the Sandusky case, Freeh's team has talked to people ranging from high-level administrators and retired secretaries to current and former staffers in the athletic department.

This is a post by David Murphy on High Cheese, the Daily News' Phillies blog, available at www.philly.com/highcheese . FORGET FOR A second about how transparent the Nationals' attempts at legitimizing their existence have been: It's still fun to have something to talk about, isn't it? While conventional wisdom suggests that a perceived underdog should do everything in its power to maintain its status, Washington realizes that its biggest opponent is still fan apathy.