Free Republic

**SNIP** On Saturday, Palin told a rally at the New Egypt Speedway that Lonegan, a former mayor, would fight against ObamaCare and stand with Tea Party senators including Ted Cruz of Texas. "You have the momentum with Steve's campaign," she said. "The rest of the country knows." The 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and former Alaska governor told the crowd to vote to defy the "fallacy" that a conservative Tea Party candidate cannot win in a Democratic-leaning New Jersey. Lonegan, who spent the weekend campaigning across the state, wants to repeal ObamaCare and "join those conservatives who stand up for...

Immigrant-rights activists say New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reversed himself Saturday and endorsed giving illegal immigrants in-state college tuition rates, and said he will try to get the issue through his legislature in a lame-duck session. Mr. Christie, who is up for re-election in November, is also seen as eyeing a bid for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination, but his support for in-state tuition could complicate that. “We need tuition equality for everyone in New Jersey,” the activists said the governor said in a speech to the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey. Afterward, the activists said, Mr. Christie told...

Our question for today is: What does next Wednesday’s Senate election in New Jersey mean to those of us who don’t live in New Jersey? Lonegan says that if he wins, President Obama will instantly “fold” on health care reform. Actually if Lonegan wins, President Obama will probably faint. Along with a lot of other people, including every Republican senator who has not been yearning for a new friend who’s even crazier than Ted Cruz. White men of New Jersey, we understand that you’re irked about the way the world is going and that it makes you feel better to...

TRENTON — Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor, is set to become the latest conservative to endorse Steve Lonegan in New Jersey's special U.S. Senate race, The Star-Ledger has learned.

TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie continued to press his case for a voter referendum on gay marriage in New Jersey, saying on national television today that “good people of good will have a difference of opinion.”

The net household property tax burden in New Jersey rose 13 percent during Gov. Chris Christie’s first three years in office—a number that reflects both his success in reining in local government spending and his inability to restore a relief program that was gutted by his predecessor during the Great Recession, an Associated Press analysis of tax data has found. The growth is only slightly lower than it was in the last three years of Democrat Jon Corzine’s time as governor, when the net tax bill went up 15 percent. But it reflects a different approach: Christie, a Republican, has...

The Council on the American Islamic Relations (CAIR) excoriated many of its critics in their "Islamophobia" report, but the group also had a "Best List Inductees" which included New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. CAIR says the list was compiled as a way to recognize those who "deserve recognition for their outstanding contributions to pushing back against Islamophobic trends in 2011 and 2012." The report says Christie is receiving the accolade primarily for his nomination of a Muslim judge and statements in the ensuing controversy: Following Islamophobic criticism of his nomination of Sohail Mohammed as a New Jersey Superior Court judge,...

The Council on the American Islamic Relations (CAIR) excoriated many of its critics in their "Islamophobia" report, but the group also had a "Best List Inductees" which included New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. CAIR says the list was compiled as a way to recognize those who "deserve recognition for their outstanding contributions to pushing back against Islamophobic trends in 2011 and 2012." The report says Christie is receiving the accolade primarily for his nomination of a Muslim judge and statements in the ensuing controversy: Following Islamophobic criticism of his nomination of Sohail Mohammed as a New Jersey Superior Court judge,...

The first eight-plus months of 2013 have convinced us of one thing: Rand Paul acts and the rest of the potential 2016 Republican presidential field reacts. On drones, Paul led a 13-hour-long filibuster that drew Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (among others) to the floor in support. On Syria, Paul was out front in his opposition to a military strike — a position that 30 of his Senate Republican colleagues shared as of this writing. Those 30 include both Rubio,who voted against the use-of-force resolution in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. ... Below are our rankings...

<p>WASHINGTON — It was bound to happen eventually. Two tea party allies angling for president can’t agree on everything, and Tuesday, a gaping foreign policy schism came into focus as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul went out of his way to critique Sen. Ted Cruz’s approach to Syria.</p>

Newark mayor Cory Booker has a very active imagination. Eliana Johnson demonstrated that with her report on Booker’s moving, highly detailed accounts of his involvement with “T-Bone,” a hard-luck drug dealer who Booker admitted to a friend is a fiction. So count us as a little skeptical about heart-wrenching stories told by Cory Booker that happen to serve his rhetorical purposes. That is why Eliana has gotten interested in the case of Wazn Miller. In the sort of tragedy all too common in our cities, Miller was gunned down in Newark in 2004 in a murder that has never been...

TRENTON — New Jersey's special U.S. Senate election is a little more than a month away, but for whom would you vote if the polls opened today: Cory Booker or Steve Lonegan? A Rutgers-Eagleton poll released today shows Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark, leading Lonegan, the Republican candidate and a former Bogota mayor, by 35 points — 64 percent to 29 percent — heading into the Oct. 16 election. The two are running to fill the final 14 months of the term left vacant by the death of U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg.

Cory Booker pocketed $689,500 in payouts from his former law firm while he served as Newark’s mayor and the firm pulled down millions in government contracts, he revealed Friday. Booker, the front-runner in the race for New Jersey’s US Senate seat, received the payments in annual allotments from 2007 to 2011. At the same time, the Trenk DiPasquale law firm held lucrative contracts with several local government agencies over which the mayor had influence — raking in more than $2 million in fees, records show. When questioned last month by The Post, Booker refused to say how much money he...

Imagine a radio station that does an interview and a video of it goes viral on the Web. Of course, you would expect such a station to feature that video on its website, probably its front page. Well, radio station 1010 WINS in New York City had such a video but instead of featuring it, they completely ignored it despite the fact that the video was highlighted on such websites as the Drudge Report, the Daily Caller, and many others. As of this writing you won't find that video, which was originally posted on YouTube by tvnewsnj anywhere on the...

Poverty in New Jersey continued to grow even as the national recession lifted, reaching a 52-year high in 2011, according to a report released today. The annual survey by Legal Services of New Jersey found 24.7 percent of the state’s population — 2.1 million residents — was considered poor in 2011. That’s a jump of more than 80,000 people — nearly 1 percent higher than the previous year and 3.8 percent more than pre-recession levels. "This is not just a one-year or five-year or 10-year variation," said Melville D. Miller Jr., the president of LSNJ, which gives free legal help...

WASHINGTON — Sen. Rand Paul was in the middle of one of his trademark takedowns of the “right-wing hawks” in his party who “have never met a war they didn’t want to get involved in,” when he suddenly paused and began grinning. “There was a funny article the other day in Mother Jones — did you see it? About one of my colleagues?” he asked. He was trying to do the polite, senatorial thing by not mentioning his “colleague” by name. But when his vague prompt was met with a blank look during an interview with BuzzFeed, he scrapped the...

Paul accused Booker of having an “imaginary friend,” referring to a story in the conservative National Review magazine that questioned whether T-Bone — a drug dealer Booker frequently talks about in stories — was real. A 2007 Star-Ledger story also cast doubt on the character’s veracity. “I’ve been reading a lot about Cory Booker’s imaginary friend and I wanted to come up there and see if New Jersey would elect real workers or someone with imaginary friends,” Paul said. Booker and Lonegan are running in the special Oct. 16 election to fill the remaining year-and-a-half of the late U.S. Sen....

Marco Rubio Sinking in New Hampshire 2016 Poll BY: KEVIN DERBY | Posted: August 7, 2013 8:59 AM The latest Granite State poll by WMUR and the University of New Hampshire was released late on Tuesday and it shows U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., sinking in New Hampshire, home of the first presidential primary. Rubio is expected to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. In recent months. Rubio has drawn fire from conservatives for his prominent role in supporting immigration reform. The poll finds New Hampshire Republicans divided on who they want to see as their party’s nominee...

On Jan. 20, 1981, Michael Deaver, a political aide, peered into a bedroom in Blair House, across from the White House, and said to the man still abed, “It’s 8 o’clock. You’re going to be inaugurated as president in a few hours.” From beneath the blankets, Ronald Reagan said, “Do I have to?” Some are so eager to be inaugurated in 2017 that the 2016 campaign has begun 28 months before the 1.4 percent of Americans who live in Iowa and New Hampshire express themselves. It is, therefore, not too soon to get a head start on being dismayed. Consider two...

It's no secret that New Jersey's governor and potential future presidential candidate Chris Christie is a huge Dallas Cowboys fan — something that might irritate the citizens of the state in which he governs over. It's something he's not ashamed of and really, didn't care how other fans thought, as he told Mary-Ann Spoto of the Newark-Star Ledger this week. “I am a Dallas Cowboys fan. I know that that disturbs Eagles fans, Giants fans, Jets fans and probably fans of almost every other team in the NFL,” Christie said today at an unrelated press conference in Beach Haven, where...

OUR country is about to make the most excruciating kind of decision, the most dire: whether to commence a military campaign whose real costs and ultimate consequences are unknowable. But let’s by all means discuss the implications for Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Iowa, New Hampshire and 2016. Yea or nay on the bombing: which is the safer roll of the dice for a Republican presidential contender? Reflexively, sadly, we journalists prattle and write about that. We miss the horse race of 2012, not to mention the readership and ratings it brought. The next election can’t come soon enough. So...

Syria's butcher Bashir Assad could end up toppling British Prime Minister David Cameron and not the other way around, while also giving Russia a big boost back on to the Great Power stage and green lighting Tehran's most ambitious and sparky plans in its mountain tunnel complexes. Along the way he has exposed President Obama as feckless and fearful. The president and his team are scrambling to remind lawmakers of what the Commander-in-Chief ought to have long ago argued to the country: When the good guys blink, the bad guys notice. Lots and lots of blinking. Most of the people...

When Chris Christie signed a law against conversion therapy directed at counseling teens experiencing homoerotic feelings, he probably didn't think he had just put New Jersey on a path similar to countries like Saudi Arabia, which forbids conversion from the prevailing Muslim faith. But forbidding efforts to convert is essentially what the governor did. He expressly forbade conversion from the prevailing progressive religion, whose chief doctrine is that sexual behavior, including the homoerotic behavior of some children, is a sacred, infallible, and therefore unchangeable indicator of what human identity entails. He forbade moral suasion. He forbade attempts to persuade young...

Will New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul finally bury the hatchet after their apparent feud?The Daily Caller has learned that Christie has been invited to join Paul when the libertarian-leaning Republican travels to New Jersey for a campaign appearance next month.Paul is heading to Clark, N.J., on Sept. 13 to campaign for Steve Lonegan, the Republican nominee in the state for the U.S. Senate. Lonegan, a former mayor, is running against Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark.A spokesman for Lonegan confirmed to TheDC on Monday that Paul will attend the ”Victory and Liberty Rally.” The campaign event is being...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was met with enthusiastic cheers from an "adoring" audience during his address at a conservative summit on Saturday, the friendliest of any of the potential 2016 presidential hopefuls to speak at the Defending the Dream summit. The event, hosted by Americans for Prosperity, drew a handful of other conservative stars and would-be presidential contenders: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R ) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R ) all spoke. But according to The Washington Post, none received so warm a welcome as Cruz. He was met with chants of "Run, Ted, run!"...

ORLANDO — There was no question who was the favorite among the crop of possible 2016 Republican White House candidates who wooed conservative activists at a two-day conference here this weekend. Loud chants of “Run, Ted, run!” filled a hotel ballroom packed with more than 1,500 people Saturday after Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) finished excoriating President Obama’s administration and challenging Republicans to use an upcoming budget vote to try to force through a measure to defund the Affordable Care Act. “How do you win this fight?” he asked, and the audience responded in unison with him: “Don’t blink!” Cruz was...

Dear Patriots. Though apprehensive upon hearing Obama tell Joe the Plumber that he wanted to spread the wealth around, I understand America’s extremely emotional response to electing its first black president. White America naively thought, finally, we can never be called a racist nation again. My 100 year old black grandmother wept. Never in her wildest dreams could she imagine a colored man sitting in the president’s chair in the Oval Office. But little did America realize that the beautiful articulate shiny golden black man that they opened the gates of our country and housed in the White House was...

By Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow In Constitutional Sudies and Editor-In-Chief, Cato Supreme Court Review As we head into a potential government shutdown over the funding of Obamacare, the iconoclastic junior senator from Texas — love him or hate him — continues to stride across the national stage. With his presidential aspirations as big as everything in his home state, by now many know what has never been a secret: Ted Cruz was born in Canada. (Full disclosure: I’m Canadian myself, with a green card. Also, Cruz has been a friend since his days representing Texas before the Supreme Court.) But...

This week, I published a profile of Booker,  who is likely to be the next junior senator from New Jersey, after sitting down with the Newark mayor for a long interview in a Union, New Jersey  diner. Yesterday, while I was out reporting a story about how Maine’s governor hates words,  the National Review suggested that Booker likes them a little too much. It depicted Booker as a fabulist and accused him of inventing a drug dealer named T-Bone, who served as a fixture in his early political stump speeches.This is an old complaint, first lodged by the Newark Star Ledger,...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has undergone lap-band surgery, vetoed gun control bills and banned anti-gay conversion therapies for minors — all while touting his ability to push conservative principles in a blue state. With three months to go before he faces voters in his quest for another term as governor, the rotund Republican looks poised to run away with a double-digit victory that could build momentum for a 2016 presidential bid. “It is vital for Gov. Christie to run up a big margin in order to make his story work,” said Charlie Gerow, an American Conservative Union member...

When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signed a law last week banning therapists for troubled teenagers from trying to help the teens rid themselves of unwanted homosexual attraction, he may have opened the door to the state to remove children from parents’ custody for getting them therapy the state doesn’t like. That’s what Democratic Assemblyman Tim Eustace indicated Wednesday when he likened Christian parents who enroll their children in “gay conversion therapy” or “reparative therapy” to abusers who don’t deserve custody of their own offspring. “What this [laws] does is prevent things that are harmful to people,” the openly gay...

Is he, or is he trying to possibly compensate for a strain of GOP-e military interventionism? Is he trying to offset one issue with another (and regain among some libertarians with one issue what he loses with other libertarians on another issue), thus basically pandering for votes?

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, the Republican Party will explode. When the smoke clears, there’ll be four (4!) new parties. First, there will still be the Republican Party, sort of, but it will change its name to the GOPPPP (Grand Old Party of Perennial Pathetic Putzes). The new name, though, won’t change the fact that the party has failed to win a majority of America’s voters in five of the past six elections or that it keep running candidates even its own members don’t like! It’s top contenders? Sen. Marco Rubio; Rep. Paul Ryan; Gov. Rick Perry;...

The problem of poverty now can be equated to racial injustices at the time of the March on Washington 50 years ago, Newark Mayor Cory Booker said Sunday. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders were fighting against issues like income inequality as well as racial inequality, the Democrat said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Something clearly I learned from the generation before me and the civil rights movement is that the power of the people is greater than the people in power," said Booker, who's running for Senate in New Jersey. "The challenge I often see in...

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, faced CNN’s Candy Crowley on Sunday, defending his plan to defund Obamacare and what he would do to fix health care in America. Cruz praised the power of grassroots activists, suggesting that a “grassroots tsunami” was about to hit Washington D.C. “It’s going to take a tsunami and I’m going to do everything I can to encourage that tsunami,” Cruz asserted. Watch the entire interview above in which Cruz discusses his birth certificate, 2016, Gov. Chris Christie, and the battle for Republicans to win a majority in the U.S. Senate in 2014

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has endorsed fellow Republican Steve Lonegan in his bid for the U.S. Senate — but on Saturday, Lonegan threw his support to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in his contentious war of words with the outspoken governor. During an appearance on MSNBC's "Up with Steve Kornacki," Lonegan praised Christie as a "strong leader," but said he disagrees with the state executive on issues including recovery funds for Hurricane Sandy. "I disagree with Gov. Christie and President Obama on Hurricane Sandy funding," he said. "I thought it was over the top. I thought it was too much...

Few people doubt that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie hopes to become president in 2016. Unfortunately for him, he may have just signed away any chance of that. On Monday, Christie signed A3371, a draconian piece of legislation that bars licensed therapists from helping children overcome unwanted same-sex attractions, behavior or identity. This law bans help for minors even when – as is so often the case – those same-sex attractions arise from childhood sexual abuse by the likes of a Jerry Sandusky. This law will prohibit minors and their parents from receiving counseling they desire and will force counselors...

With another presidential cycle starting in just two years, battle lines are being drawn - not between the two parties, but within the Republican Party itself. Interestingly the differences being aired this summer seem less about ideology than approach: Whether compromise with Democrats is ever okay; even more broadly whether government can or even should try to solve problems through policy or lawmaking. So while most Americans reflexively say they want "something done" there's plenty of difference in defining what that means, and these debates have huge potential to shape the GOP's brand in 2014 and certainly in 2016....

A savior or a sell-out? A compromise or compromised? -snip- “HE DOESN’T GIVE a s—- what people think,” a Republican “close” to Chris Christie told Politico after the governor denounced the Republican House and Speaker Boehner (yes, by name) for voting down a pork-laden aid bill in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. We pretty much knew Christie felt that way, though it was good to see it confirmed in writing. The bigger question, one that should concern Christie, is what people think about him. We know he’s home safe in New Jersey, cruising toward re-election this November as he enjoys...

HOBOKEN -- An endorsement popped out of the oven today, as Hoboken's celebrity baker, "Cake Boss" Buddy Valastro Jr. threw his support behind Gov. Chris Christie for re-election. Joined by the Republican governor in front of Carlo's City Hall Bake Shop on Washington Street, Valastro said this is the first time he's ever endorsed a politician. "I've been so impressed with what he's done for the state. Before Christie took office, small businesses were suffering," said Valastro. "I can't tell you how much of an improvement I have seen since he was governor." . Christie said if re-elected, he plans...

Donald Trump, Stuart Stevens, and Richard Viguerie In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s disastrous 2012 Republican presidential campaign CHQ Chairman Richard Viguerie said this about Romney’s campaign team; “…in any logical universe establishment Republican consultants, such as Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, Romney campaign senior advisor Stuart Stevens and pollster Neil Newhouse would never be hired to run or consult on a national campaign again and no one would give a dime to their ineffective Super PACs, such as American Crossroads.” But the Republican establishment doesn’t live in a logical universe – it lives in a universe governed by cronyism and...

Chris Christie is ditching the Jersey Shore for the Hamptons this weekend to woo big GOP donors for his re-election campaign, far away from South Carolina where other star Republican governors will gather Monday to support Nikki Haley. Bill Palatucci, a longtime Bush family donor, and the New Jersey governor’s brother, Todd Christie, are hosting a Southampton soiree Saturday at the home of Clifford Sobel, an ambassador during former President George W. Bush’s administration. Tickets start at $3,800 a person. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sofia Vergara’s fiance, Nick Loeb, will also be attending....

First of all, I am not aiming to disparage Chris Christie because of his weight, as I have had to battle my own propensity to overeat for many years. And I do hope that his diet/surgical plans for losing weight is successful. I must say that I did lose some confidence in Christie ever since  I saw him canoodling and schmoozing with President Obama in order to squeeze a few extra billion dollars out of Uncle Sam (other taxpayers) in order to rebuild his state of New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy. I once thought Chris Christie would be as...

Will New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie go to Kennebunkport, Maine, on his summer vacation? You know he would like to. You can tell by the way he thumps his foot when Jeb Bush scratches his neck. Obama goes directly to Camelot’s spa on The Cape. “Camelot” is what we unabashedly called the place when Jack Kennedy was the first king of America, because it reminded Jackie Kennedy of King Arthur. Really. Frankly, I did not think my aunties were ready for democracy; even the televised "Wheel of Fortune" type we play in our time, pretending we are still a republic....

Gov. Chris Christie today delivered a strong endorsement of Republican Steve Lonegan, a former rival, for the U.S. Senate special election in October. Despite the fiery attacks the two have traded over the years, Christie pledged to help Lonegan on the fundraising circuit, on the stump, and by deploying two of his top surrogates on the campaign trail: Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and interim U.S. Sen. Jeffrey Chiesa (R-N.J.), who is slated to endorse Lonegan on Wednesday. "We still have too many people across America who have too much government in too much of their lives," Christie told a jam-packed...

Gov. Chris Christie today will endorse Republican candidate Steve Lonegan, his former rival, for the U.S. Senate special election in October. Christie, who is running for re-election this year in the gubernatorial race, will appear with Lonegan today at the headquarters of the Hunterdon County Republican Committee to make his endorsement at 4 p.m. U.S. Sen. Jeffrey Chiesa (R-N.J.), Christie's pick to fill the seat temporarily after Sen. Frank Lautenberg's death in June, is slated to endorse Lonegan on Wednesday. The Christie endorsement -- coveted by GOP politicos across the country, including presidential candidate Mitt Romney last year -- marks...

Chris Christie’s darkest moment, at least in the eyes of some members of the Republican establishment, came on a chilly Sunday night in early November of last year, just days before the presidential election. What Christie and his team did that evening, in a series of terse e-mails and calls with the pleading Romney camp, remains murky. On Capitol Hill, insiders still treat the episode like the Zapruder film, analyzing it and trying to discern, from limited context, what exactly happened. But what didn’t happen is indisputable: Christie didn’t attend Mitt Romney’s rally at Shady Brook Farm in Lower Makefield,...

A conservative legal group has stated its intentions to file a lawsuit against New Jersey over a recently signed law banning sexual orientation conversion therapy for minors. Mat Staver, founder and chairman of The Liberty Counsel, confirmed to The Christian Post on Monday his organization's plan to file the suit. "We will be filing suit," said Staver, adding that the suit should be submitted "later this week." On Monday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed into law A-3371, a bill that would ban the controversial practice of reparative therapy (also called conversion therapy) for minors. A-3371 enjoyed bipartisan support in...

Despite his “concerns about [the] government limiting parental choice on the care and treatment of their own children,” Governor Chris Christie signed into law a ban on ex-gay therapy for minors, thereby committing an outrageous act against both the people of New Jersey and his own Catholic faith. Buying into the standard gay activist talking points, Christie explained that “on issues of medical treatment for children we must look to experts in the field to determine the relative risks and rewards,” because of which he felt this government intrusion into doctor-patient relationships was justified. As for Christie’s personal views, he...

Turns out the Brick City is not all hard. Named the most unfriendly city by readers of a travel magazine earlier this month, Newark took a punch. But courtesy of two of its denizens — and a few dozen of their friends — pugnacious Newark showed it can take one on the chin, and follow up with a righteous combination of ingenuity and spirit.