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Good morning Free Republic and good morning to the GREAT STATE of NEW JERSEY! Get up and go to you polling place!! VOTE FOR STEVE LONEGAN TODAY!! And with that -- I am off to do my civic duty and to make America proud!! (hope this isn't a repeat thread!)

President Obama is reminding New Jersey voters to vote for Cory Booker in the state’s special Senate election Wednesday. Just one day before the election Obama appeared in a video for the Booker campaign encouraging New Jersey residents to support the popular Democratic Newark mayor. “Voters in New Jersey have the opportunity to vote for a leader with uncommon character, Cory Booker,” Obama said in the video.

TRENTON, N.J. (CBSNewYork/AP) – The New Jersey U.S. Senate race was in a fight to the finish Tuesday, a day before voters were set to head to the polls in a special election. As CBS 2’s Christine Sloan reported, Democrat Cory Booker is hitting the Democrat-favoring communities of Belleville, New Brunswick, Hoboken and Newark, where he is mayor. Republican Steve Lonegan is campaigning Tuesday in Basking Ridge, Flemington, Belvidere, Morristown and Middletown — all places where Republicans usually get the most votes. He’s also stopping in Jersey City. Lonegan also received the endorsement of former Jersey City Acting Mayor Joe...

For the first time in his political career, Cory Booker is dealing with a hostile/skeptical national media. He's winning by 10 points in the Monmouth poll, when the pollster tells reporters Booker really should be up by 20. Conservative media have found people who can contradict Booker's most dramatic tales of derring-do, and schlepped to Newark to talk to activists who hate the guy and claim he doesn't live in the city. The MSM, belatedly, has caught up and asked if Booker's star has already faded. There's a rhythm to campaigns, and once a front-runner gets into the "problem-plagued" stage...

Steve Lonegan has dedicated his time in public life to fighting for New Jersey taxpayers. When he became mayor of Bogota, NJ in 1996, Lonegan immediately cut municipal spending, eliminated wasteful and duplicative services, privatized some functions and instituted a more cost-efficient, user-friendly government. As a result, Bogota’s municipal spending remained constant for the entire 12 years of Steve’s tenure. He also kept debt and tax increases far below inflation despite massive state mandates and aid reductions to suburban towns like Bogota. Thanks to Steve’s strong, conservative leadership, Republicans kept council control for 11 straight elections, and Steve was reelected...

ATLANTIC CITY — Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Cory Booker once again linked Republican opponent Steve Lonegan to the federal government shutdown today, suggesting some Republicans are playing politics with public safety. Booker, the mayor of Newark, stopped in Atlantic City where 51 firefighters will be laid off at the end of November due to local budget cuts. The city is hoping a federal grant may avert some of those layoffs, but its application is not being processed during the shutdown, according to union officials. “It could mean that some of the people behind me — or who are represented by...

Today’s U.S. Senate primary in New Jersey is – like so many elections these days – a representation of many of the most destructive trends that define modern politics. It is, for instance, a case of politics as a celebrity-driven coronation – one where one candidate’s media- and Twitter-driven celebrity (Cory Booker) is depicted as more important than other candidates’ far more impressive public policy experience. It is also a commentary on how such a celebrified politics tends to intensify when voters are paying the least attention. As the Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s Adam Green notes, this most certainly is...

Filmmaker Joel Gilbert and investigative journalist Charles C. Johnson hit the streets of Newark to discover where Mayor Booker actually lives. His neighbor say he doesn't live there.

One police officer, who said his name was Officer Martinez, told us that 435 Hawthorne was Booker’s home but property records show that the home is owned by Ife Okocha. Cassandra Dock, a community activist critical of both Mayor Booker and Governor Christie, told us that the home on Hawthorne was actually a police station.

As Cory Booker looks set to win the junior Senate seat in New Jersey Wednesday, his supposed neighbors in Newark say Mayor Booker doesn’t live in the Gateway City. Multiple residents of Newark told The Daily Caller that the longtime mayor doesn’t live at any of the addresses he has claimed as home. The mayor is believed to live in New York even though he is registered to run for New Jersey’s special senate election. Booker, who filed to run for the U.S. Senate from a B.O. Box in Newark, is registered to vote at 435 Hawthorne Avenue but his...

Independent journalist and researcher Charles Johnson recently visited Newark, N.J. to see if he could find out if Mayor Cory Booker actually lives in the city he governs. Independent journalist and researcher Charles Johnson recently visited Newark, N.J. to see if he could find out if Mayor Cory Booker actually lives in the city he governs.

**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...

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...

Sarah Palin delivered another one of her great campaign speeches for Steve Lonegan today at his campaign rally. You can watch the full speech below:

Mark Levin gave a great speech today in support of Steve Lonegan who is running for US Senate in New Jersey. You can watch the full speech below:

While I'm loathe to fold-up Reagan's Republican 'big tent' for good, the Rove-Boehner-RNC-Fox-WSJ axis has taken the choice out of our hands, as they are clearly out to exterminate -or at least neuter- the TEA Party, particularly it's emerging new leadership i.e. Cruz, Lee, et. al... so it's kill or be killed (and I know which I'd prefer). But these losers can't win elections: Rove famously tanked in 2012 with those he and his Big Bux donors chose to back. Many of these GOP candidates were squirelly tools willing to do as he and the ole Bush gang tell them...

Watch the livestream of Sarah Palin and Mark Levin at the Steve Lonegan campaign rally. It begins at 4PM ET and should run until around 6PM or so.

Visit the site, see the poll, 76% to 21% Star Ledger readers think Lonegan won! http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/10/poll_did_booker_or_lonegan_win_second_us_senate_debate.html

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Steve Lonegan today urged House Republicans "not to capitulate to the president's unreasonable demands. When I win, Obama will fold." Lonegan says his internal polling shows a neck-and-neck race in the U.S. Senate contest and that all the momentum is in his favor. "My victory in this election on Wednesday will send a message to Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that the American people want an end to Obamacare and the rest of the President's radical agenda." The former three-term Bogota mayor called on Republicans to stop listening to the same consultants and pollsters...

A few chapters back in the Cory Booker story, the dashing young mayor of Newark, New Jersey was actually dashing into a burning building to save a helpless woman. Now here we are, a few plot twists later, and Cory Booker's halo is looking kind of mucky. Take those flirty tweets he sent to an impressively tattooed stripper... Did the public react to this naughty news with prudish gasps of disgust? Nope. Instead, cynics, who were getting used to Booker's antics, pointed out he may have deployed those tweets to scotch rumors of certain other.... proclivities. Now, really, tell me....

Link

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.

FLORHAM PARK -- Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Cory Booker visited Fairleigh Dickinson University's College at Florham Tuesday to share his plan of affordable education. But first the 44-year-old Newark mayor weighed in on Congress’s failure to pass a budget, a move that forced a federal shutdown. Booker told the standing room only crowd jammed into Lenfell Hall that he stayed up late Monday night to see what would happen. When it became apparent no accord could be reached, he understood why a recent opinion poll showed Americans' approval of Congress fell somewhere "between cockroaches and colonoscopies." "You cannot govern from...

Is New Jersey’s Steve Lonegan the next Scott Brown? A one-time sure-GOP-loser turned winner in a blue state special Senate election? Made a winner over “sure-thing” Democrat and Newark Mayor Cory Booker by popular revulsion with ObamaCare? And a truly riveting personal story that is turning heads all over the state of New Jersey? (Here is Lonegan telling the story of his blindness that has captured so much attention.) The question is suddenly being asked as a 35-point Booker lead in a September 11 Rutgers-Eagleton poll eroded by 9 points in just 12 days to a 26-point Booker lead in...

Mayor Cory A. Booker has a high schooler’s affinity for Twitter, reveling in its ceaseless flow of affirmation and infinite space for self-promotion. But the occasional perils of his reliance on the social media service became evident on Wednesday when a 26-year-old stripper from Oregon revealed her private online correspondence with him. In a message to the stripper, named Lynsie Lee, Mr. Booker wrote that “the East Coast loves you, and by the East Coast, I mean me.”

Disclaimer: I’ve always liked Newark mayor Cory Booker. I disagree with him about nearly everything, wouldn’t vote for him, and find his actual record as mayor rather depressing, but I just plain like the guy. His hands-on adventures with helping constituents have been worthy of celebration… to the extent that they’re true. And that’s the big problem with Cory Booker. He’s a phony. He makes up stories and spends years insisting they’re true, to the point where he’s either stunningly dishonest, or maybe could benefit from time spent with a therapist. Neither scenario bodes well for someone who wants to...

A poll on the race to represent New Jersey in the U.S. Senate finds Newark Mayor Cory Booker 12 points ahead of conservative underdog Steve Lonegan with two weeks to go until the special election.

At his press conference Wednesday outside Cory Booker's old law firm, Steve Lonegan charged that the Newark mayor violated the law by accepting payments from the firm while it has contracts with subdivisions of city government. For his part, Booker has always insisted that he terminated his relationship with his old firm when he became mayor and that therefore there is no conflict of interest. An excerpt from David Giambusso's article: The Booker campaign recently shared the Newark mayor's tax returns with reporters and it was revealed that Booker made $688,500 from the firm while he was mayor. Meanwhile, the...

In paid speeches and high-profile public appearances, Newark mayor and New Jersey senatorial candidate Cory Booker has often invoked the name of Wazn Miller, the 19-year- old gunned down between a set of housing projects in Newark nine years ago. I got interested in the 2004 case after reporting on “T-Bone,” the Newark drug pusher and alleged Booker friend whom the mayor often mentioned on the stump; but Booker had told Rutgers University professor Clement Price that T-Bone was, in reality, a composite character. It wasn’t the bare outlines of Booker’s account of the shooting’s aftermath that piqued my curiosity...

A 14-year-old boy was fatally shot in Newark Wednesday evening, making him the city's 10th homicide victim in the last 10 days. The incident happened at the Riverview Terrace Housing Complex on Riverview Court, where the boy lived. Police identified the victim as Ali Rajohn Eric Henderson, who was gunned down in the courtyard area. Friends and family members of the victim have been gathering and lighting candles at the scene. No motive has been identified in the shooting, although sources have told Eyewitness News that a large amount of heroin and weapons were found inside the 14 year old...

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.

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...

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...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie finds himself in an awkward situation as he mulls whether to offer any support to his party's tea party Republican Senate nominee, Steve Lonegan, against his Democratic friend and off-and-on political ally, Cory Booker. Lonegan, who cruised to victory in Tuesday's Republican primary, has a frosty relationship with Christie, dating back to his primary challenge to the governor in the 2009 campaign. Just this week, Lonegan earned a public scolding from the governor for his campaign's racially-tinged Tweet attacking Booker. "This is a governor who calls it like he sees it." said a source close...

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....

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...

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...

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...

In between bowls of chicken poodle soup and deciding to provide air cover for al-Qaeda in Syria, our Dear Leader, Barack Hussein Obama, found time to meet with mayors from our crumbling major cities. From Justin Sink of The Hill: *** "President Obama told a collection of big-city mayors Tuesday at the White House that he would continue to use executive actions to combat gun violence plaguing major cities. In the meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder and the mayors of 18 cities from across the nation, Obama discussed commonly applicable strategies to reduce youth violence. 'He also vowed to...

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,...

It’s bye-bye, Beltway for Cory Booker. Newark’s mayor, who was gunning for a spot in President Obama’s Cabinet, lost the chance after he shot his mouth off during a blunderingly honest TV appearance last month, sources told The Post. “He’s dead to us,” one ranking administration official said of the prevailing feelings at the White House and Obama headquarters in Chicago. Booker had been angling for the housing secretary gig in a second Obama term, according to sources in the administration and close to the mayor. The job was certainly a possibility, given Booker’s work in New Jersey’s biggest city,...

’s bye-bye, Beltway for Cory Booker. Newark’s mayor, who was gunning for a spot in President Obama’s Cabinet, lost the chance after he shot his mouth off during a blunderingly honest TV appearance last month, sources told The Post. “He’s dead to us,” one ranking administration official said of the prevailing feelings at the White House and Obama headquarters in Chicago. Booker had been angling for the housing secretary gig in a second Obama term, according to sources in the administration and close to the mayor.

@SethAMandelYesterday, Alana noted the latest fallout from Cory Booker's critique of the Obama administration on "Meet the Press" and the subsequent, utterly ridiculous "hostage" video he recorded after the Obama campaign reminded him that independent thinking is strongly discouraged in the Democratic Party. Booker's communications director, Anne Torres, resigned, citing “different views on how communications should be run.”It wasn't clear whether Torres objected more to Booker's defense of capitalism or the cringeworthy apology video–which would have been embarrassing for any communications shop to have on its record–or whether this was merely the last straw in a simmering dispute (possibly about...

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat, co-starred in a new video made for the state's recent Press Association Legislative Correspondents Club dinner. It's funny and it highlights some of the positive things for which both men are known (Governor Christie's New Jersey Comeback, Mayor Booker's heroism when a neighbor's house caught fire), but it also shows something else.

There have been some great feuds in the history of the world: Mary Queen of Scots and the Queen of England. Bugsy Moran and Al Capone. The Hatfields vs. the McCoys. But do any of these really beat what’s going on in Newark right now between the mayor and the owner of the New Jersey Devils?

" warning " comeing to a neighbor near you

Newark Mayor Cory Booker will hold a press conference Monday afternoon, calling on the state Senate to pass a bill that imposes a barrier on intrastate handgun trafficking. The bill has already passed the Assembly. The legislation would limit the number of guns an individual can buy to one a month. Gun-control advocates argue the bill would prevent straw buyers from making bulk purchases and selling them on the streets to people who cannot pass background checks.The press conference will take place at 2 p.m., at Elwood Park, located at Elwood and Summer avenues in Newark's North Ward. The...

Go back and listen to Cory Booker’s stump speeches over the years, and, as in those of any politician, you’ll hear many of the same stories. But Booker’s are more dramatic and heart-rending than most. They draw heavily on his experiences in Newark, N.J., where he moved in 1995 after his second year at Yale Law School. They have also helped to make him a political celebrity and put millions of dollars into his campaign war chest and Newark’s coffers. Booker’s tales of his trials and travails on the streets of Newark, the city that twice elected him mayor, are...