Why should the drudgery of your day job running New Jersey or its largest city keep you from chasing your dream of being a sketch comedian? That’s only one of the questions posed by a recently released video starring Gov. Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

Paid for by the state Republican Party, the video was released at a legislative correspondents’ banquet last week and successfully promoted through social media. It shows Christie wondering if he could raise his profile (though one wonders how much higher it could get) by helping state police respond to emergencies. Suddenly, Booker appears and is dispatched to assist in several dramatic rescues — much as he actually did by leading a neighbor out of her burning house a few weeks ago.

The mayor continues his unlikely heroics, repeating “I got this” as Christie growls “Booker!” (à la Jerry Seinfeld’s “Newman!”). The bit concludes (somewhat nonsensically) with Christie interrupting Booker’s phone call from Mitt Romney regarding the vice presidential nomination, saying, “I got this.”

The pair deserve credit for being funnier than the average politician, even if that’s not saying much — and even if the video handily distracted from new revenue figures blowing a humorless hole in Christie’s budget.

For all its skillful timing, though, the video also reveals why politicians are better targets of comedy than practitioners. Humor tends to be deprecating, often self-deprecating, putting it at odds with the perpetual aggrandizement — often self-aggrandizement — of politics. Christie’s video begins with advisers discussing his great poll numbers and ends with a reference to his being (ostensibly) courted for the second-highest office in the land; its central “jokes,” then, are that Booker is a hero and Christie is beloved.

This has been touted as a refreshing incidence of bipartisanship. If that’s so, the bipartisan project Christie and Booker have agreed on consists entirely of drawing positive attention to themselves.

Jamira Burley has made combating youth violence her mission, driven in part by the murders of her brother Andre in 2005 and her stepfather two years later. Her father is serving life for murder in Virginia.Now, Burley, 23, who started an antiviolence program while a student at Overbrook High, has been tapped by Mayor Nutter to head the city’s Youth Commission.

“I never thought I could rise above my circumstances,” the Temple graduate told more than 200 people at a youth violence forum last week. “No matter how many times I tell my story, I can’t end youth violence alone.”

That statement may have been the most important one Burley made. While the city has a number of worthy programs aimed at reducing youth violence, not one alone, nor a single person, can get the results that a joint effort can.

Nutter, too, has emphasized the importance of a community approach to reducing violence. He  has asked that every Philadelphian find a way to help fight crime. And he has chastised parents for not doing their job when children are violent at school.

Already this year, there have been 127 murders in the city. Last year, there were 316 murders. More than 40 percent of the victims were between ages 11 and 24, which highlights the need to focus on young people. Youth violence often spikes in the summer.

Nutter recently announced the city’s “Fun, Safe, Philly Summer” campaign, which will include free activities around the city that provide structured programs for youths to keep them out of trouble. He also promised that every pool, library, recreation center, and park will be open.

Getting young people off the streets is always a good start, but history shows the impact of summer programs is limited.

»  More On a mission to keep teens safe

Poll: Is Mayor Nutter taking the right approach on stemming youth violence? (218 votes)

Americans are very generous. Even during the worst of the recession, Americans gave about $290 billion annually to charities. The problem is, there are so many deserving causes, it’s often difficult to choose which ones to support.

Not only are there well-known organizations — United Way, the Salvation Army, the Sickle Cell Disease Association, and others — there are smaller, local groups that need funds for causes that touch the lives of people who may live in your community.

Neighborhood efforts become more special when they help people you know — people like 11-year-old Kiarah Bowley, a sixth grader at Williamstown Middle School, who has been battling cancer for four years. She lost a kidney to the disease and had a tumor removed from her abdomen.

Doctors say Kiarah has been diagnosed with Wilm’s disease, which produces tumors that affect her lungs, liver, and abdominal lymph nodes. Chemotherapy and radiation led to remission for a while, but now the tumors are back. They say her prognosis is “guarded.”

Kiarah’s friends call her KiKi. They want to help fulfill one of her dreams by raising enough money for the youngest of four children and her mother to go on a Disney Cruise Lines vacation. For more information on fund-raising events, people may contact Gina M. Zippilli at gzippilli@sternslaw.com.

Whether it’s to make a dream come true for a sick little girl, help a storm-damaged community rebuild, or aid efforts to fight discrimination, it’s good to give. Acts of kindness generate a spirit of togetherness that can weld a community closer than any other bond.

An Allegheny County grand jury’s indictment Friday of state Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin represents a new low for Pennsylvania’s highest court, but it could prove to be a valuable driving force for reforming the state’s discredited system of electing its appellate judges.

Melvin, 56, says she will fight the criminal charges that she misused her taxpayer-funded staff while serving as a Superior Court judge by having it do political campaign work in her 2009 pursuit of a state Supreme Court seat.

Despite her plea of innocence, however, related electioneering charges led to the conviction in March of Melvin’s sister, Republican State Sen. Jane Orie. A third sister and former aide to the justice, Janine Orie, faces trial this summer for allegedly directing both Senate and court staffers to do illegal campaign work.

Not since the 1994 conspiracy conviction, impeachment, and removal of then-Justice Rolf R. Larsen, who was convicted of illegally obtaining prescription drugs, has so harsh a spotlight hit the state Supreme Court over criminal allegations against a justice.

Now that she faces nine criminal counts, Melvin has been forced by her court colleagues to take a step that could help bolster public confidence. Under a state Supreme Court order issued Friday, which cited “a compelling and immediate need to protect and preserve the integrity” of the court, Melvin was relieved of all court duties.

The suspension was overdue, but nonetheless welcome from a court whose administrative stewardship had previously been called into question by its slow intervention in the Luzerne County juvenile court scandal, and for its costly, bungled planning of a new Philadelphia family-court building.

Given trial disclosures leading to Orie’s conviction, Melvin could have faced suspension, or even removal, much earlier under court disciplinary procedures. Witnesses in Orie’s trial told jurors that Melvin and Orie directed an aide to remove materials that might tie Melvin to illegal campaign work done out of Orie’s Senate office.

Indeed, the grand-jury report and the Orie trial testimony portray Melvin as just another scheming pol who “actively condoned and even promoted” illegal campaign-related activity by state-paid workers.

Melvin should heed new calls for her to resign, including one coming Friday from Philadelphia Bar AssociationChancellor John E. Savoth.

Similar to the Bonusgate scandal, which has led to the jailing of a number of former state lawmakers and aides, the allegations against Melvin and her sisters portray politicians as all too willing to break the rules to get elected.

That’s always a risk in politics, which is why Pennsylvania should end partisan judicial elections that require candidates to amass campaign war chests. The Melvin case has become Exhibit No. 1 on the need to enact the judicial merit-selection legislation pending in Harrisburg.

President Obama’s failure to fix the broken Federal Election Commission has helped turn the campaign trail into the Wild West, where the biggest guns shoot any which way they want.

Government contractors have been prohibited for decades from contributing to federal political campaigns, but that hasn’t stopped a super-PAC supporting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney from actively soliciting about $1 million in donations from them.

After the Los Angeles Times broke the story, the super-PAC, called  Restore Our Future, began telling potential donors to seek legal counsel before giving, but it didn’t turn down their money.

Confusion exists because neither the FEC nor the courts has ruled on whether the ban on government contractors making political campaign contributions is still valid.

The ban was created in 1940 to stop politicians from shaking down government vendors and to stop contractors from bribing politicians to get contracts.

The law does permit company political-action committees, funded by employee contributions, to make limited donations to political campaigns.

However, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which said corporations may give unlimited amounts of money to certain political groups, opened a deluge of corporate giving to the super-PACs. Because the decision was silent on government contractors, most major super-PACs took that to mean contractors were still covered by the ban.

But not Restore Our Future, which should be held accountable for testing the contractor ban.

Meanwhile, the president could help clarify matters by reconstructing the FEC, which has five of its six members serving in expired terms. The commission keeps deadlocking along party lines on key issues such as regulating super-PACs.

Obama needs to make appointments that can be approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate, so the FEC can tell Restore Our Future in no uncertain terms that donations from government contractors are still outlawed.

A truck dispensing free ice cream drives around a beautifully appointed 140-acre setting.

Motorists take advantage of a valet service that will park their cars for them.

And, most importantly, there is a concierge desk to take care of all the needs you can’t get to.

Is this a description of some lush resort? No, it is High Point University in North Carolina.

The school’s amenities provide an extreme example of what’s happened at too many American universities in recent years. They have been adding frills left and right to entice doting parents choosing which college to spend their own or borrowed cash on.

Even as the cost of a college education keeps it out of reach for many families, and even as it becomes more and more difficult to turn a degree into a job that pays well, college spending hasn’t received the scrutiny it deserves.

Few would doubt that the colleges’ costs have gone up while their state support has gone down and stock-market dips have eaten into their endowments. Most colleges have tried to trim their expenses to a degree, but too frequently  they just put more of their costs on the backs of students in the form of higher tuition and fees.

Although the colleges are at fault, their enablers have been the federal and state governments that encourage tuition hikes by making it so easy to obtain student-loan funds without asking for much in return.

With so much emphasis being placed on borrowing your way through school, it’s no wonder that college-student debt today stands at $1 trillion, which is more than all the credit-card and car-loan debt in the country.

President Obama has signaled that he would like to steer more government aid to colleges with lower tuitions that are offering degrees that lead to meaningful employment. Now it’s time for his proposal to evolve into policy, with clear and reasonable spending guidelines for universities that will help lower their expenses and ultimately allow more young people to take advantage of higher education.

In this still-uncertain economy, government at both the state and federal levels should provide adequate support for colleges. At the same time, schools should be reassessing their curricula to make sure they are properly educating a workforce ready for the future job market.

Without compromising academic standards, the colleges also must do a much better job of saving money where they can. Free ice cream is great, but parents who succumb to such temptations in helping their children select a college are overdue for a refresher course in economics.

With nearly 300 people across the nation exonerated after being sentenced to death, the risk of executing an innocent person is a reality in the 33 states, including Pennsylvania, where capital punishment remains legal.

That risk alone should be enough to persuade responsible elected officials to scrap the death penalty — as Connecticut did in April, following the lead of Illinois, New Mexico, and New Jersey.

There can be no more compelling reason for taking that step than evidence that the wrong person has been executed for a crime.

And that’s exactly what Columbia University law professor James Liebman and five of his students provided this week with their book-length exploration of the 1983 murder for which a Texan, Carlos DeLuna, was put to death in 1989.

DeLuna’s conviction in the stabbing death of a female gas-station clerk came despite conflicting and uncertain eyewitness accounts, the fact that DeLuna’s clothing at the time of his arrest bore no blood stains, and the fact that prosecutors soon learned of the likely killer — a man who bragged about DeLuna’s paying for his crime.

Despite the thoroughness of the professor and his students, prosecutors dismissed the academics as “crusaders.” In fact, the lead detective in the Corpus Christi case stands by her investigation.

As it happens, the probable killer died in prison several years after DeLuna. But the lesson in this apparent miscarriage of justice should not be lost on public officials — nor the shrinking majority of Americans who  still support capital punishment.

It’s crucial to remember that those backing the death penalty say by wide margins that their continued support rests on the belief that there are legal safeguards to prevent wrongful convictions.

In dozens of cases, fortunately, that safeguard has proven to be the DNA tests that freed many given death-row reprieves.

Yet, it’s clear that there are cases like that of the Texas murder where all safeguards fail. Then, there’s only one assured way to prevent such a horrifying result — which is by outlawing the death penalty.

Connecticut has become the fifth state to take that progressive step in five years. Since Pennsylvanians don’t have the option of a referendum, such as the one that will be before California voters in November, they should demand that their state lawmakers act to make the Keystone State next.

Given that the death penalty is no longer viable in the state — with only volunteers having been executed in recent memory —  Harrisburg officials can’t say there’s a deterrent effect to a system that also brings exorbitant costs with endless legal appeals.

But more than anything else, it’s the specter of killing an innocent person that should mean the death penalty’s days are numbered.

Vindication has finally come to a former Camden principal who was dismissed in retribution after blowing the whistle on rigged test scores, but six years later the school district that fired him is still mired in mediocrity.

Joseph Carruth has not only reached an $860,000 settlement, but an arbitration judge has ordered the district to rehire him by July 1, 2013, even if the Camden school board has to dismiss someone else to create a vacancy.

Carruth said he was fired in 2006 for refusing to alter test scores despite pressure from an assistant superintendent. The cheating scandal was exposed after The Inquirer questioned unusually high test scores in 2005 at two Camden elementary schools and the magnet high school where Carruth was principal.

No one was ever held responsible for what investigators called “adult interference,” but Carruth lost his job. He told the Inquirer Editorial Board this week that in anticipating his return to Camden schools,  “I hope to change things for the better.”

That’s a tall order. Camden’s schools are some of the worst in New Jersey. There has been little improvement under Superintendent Bessie LeFra Young, who is finally stepping down next month after a five-year tenure that was undermined by her own excessive absenteeism — 221 work days in five years — due to a health problem.

It defies logic that, with Camden schools desperate for strong leadership, the school board and Mayor Dana Redd didn’t step in earlier to replace Young. Her $244,083-a-year contract is being bought out, with her receiving three months’ salary.

State education officials, too, should have interceded earlier to give the city’s 16,000 public-school students proper leadership. Then, too, that’s par for the state. It has had a fiscal monitor in the Camden schools for years, but poor spending decisions have continued.

Nearly a third of the poorest performing schools in New Jersey are in Camden. Gov. Christie has promised to fix the schools, but only offers more charters and vouchers, whose legislative approval isn’t guaranteed. A detailed, comprehensive plan to improve Camden’s schools is needed, and a good superintendent to carry it out.

Burnishing his political credentials among the Republican right wing may be the only logical explanation for Gov. Christie’s blocking the creation of state health-insurance exchanges, which would aid not only the 1.3 million New Jerseyans without coverage, but also small businesses and people who don’t have enough medical insurance.

Choosing politics over policy, Christie has caved to party extremists who were calling the exchanges “Christiecare.” The term served as a loosely veiled threat to a potential running mate for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who has his own problems trying to escape references to “Romneycare,” the affordable-health-care plan he created as governor of Massachusetts.

As Romney’s chief booster in New Jersey, Christie obviously felt he couldn’t be caught enabling an Obama administration program, even if he’d already accepted millions of dollars in federal planning grants to do so. So the flash-and-dazzle governor cloaked himself in prudence and said the state should wait until the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of national health care before moving ahead.

He may have calmed the shrill voices of some in his party, and scored some points for himself, but the governor’s job is to attend to the needs of the people of his state. And a March poll of New Jersey residents ages 18 to 64 by the AARP found that 90 percent want the governor to ensure citizens’ access to affordable health-care coverage.

Among the 1.3 million New Jerseyans with no health insurance, 88 percent are adults who are not old enough for Medicare, and most of them have jobs. That makes Christie’s veto especially puzzling. He talks about wanting to help business, but then does just the opposite by stopping the state’s movement toward affordable health care.