Free Republic

BARNEGAT, N.J. – Teachers unions during the past decade have known their share of scandal. Add the case of Wayne Wedderman Jr. to the list. This Monday, June 29, Wedderman, treasurer of the Barnegat Education Association, pleaded guilty in Ocean County, New Jersey Superior Court to theft from the union. He had been arrested last November for stealing roughly a combined $23,000 from two union accounts in the wake of a county probe begun the previous month. A grand jury in February subsequently indicted Wedderman on two counts of thefts and one count of computer theft. Sentencing is scheduled for...

Chris Christie gives good speech. He definitely is a professional at passionately communicating and effectively donning “I’m a regular guy who’s pissed off about what’s going on” attire. In his announcement speech on Tuesday he certainly showed that, but there were two comments he made that are worthy of great concern–and may indicate that he is not ready for battle. Within the speech, he duly mentioned the issues that most Republicans care about: a politician who remembers for whom he works, an acknowledgement that Washington is lying and stealing from the American people, the need for the federal government to...

A 32-year-old Lyndhurst woman, a second-grade teacher, has been arrested and charged with aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a 15-year-old girl from the Jersey City school where the woman is employed, authorities said Friday.Bergen County John L. Molinelli said Lauren H. Mitchell was arrested after an investigation by his office’s Special Victims Unit and the Lyndhurst Police Department.Molinelli said several teachers at the Dr. Lena Edwards Academic Charter School in Jersey City observed what they believed was inappropriate behavior between Mitchell and the girl during a class trip and reported what they had seen to school...

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and his wife, Jeanette, will join New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Christie's wife, Mary Pat, tonight at the Romney estate on New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee, the Washington Post reports. The two couples will be overnight guests of Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at his 11-acre estate in Wolfeboro, N.H., the Post said. The newspaper quoted an unnamed Romney aide as saying the former GOP presidential candidate heard the Rubios and the Christies would be in Wolfeboro for the holiday weekend, so he invited them to spend the evening with him and his wife, Ann....

2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney will be hosting two rival Republican presidential contenders at a holiday sleepover Friday evening. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will both be staying over at Romney’s property in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, an aide to Romney confirmed. The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of what the aide called the private nature of the event, said the former governor and his wife opened their home to the Christie and Rubio families after hearing they would be in town for the holiday weekend. Both candidates are scheduled to march...

Editor’s note: "2016 Debate Watch" is a running, bi-weekly series. This week we’ve seen Jeb Bush and Donald Trump gain some momentum. Carly Fiorina, meanwhile, recently turned some heads as well, cracking the top ten for the first time ever. If the August 6 Fox News debate were held tonight, however, only the following candidates would make the (prime-time) cut. (See the debate rules here): (1) Jeb Bush: 15.0 (2) Scott Walker: 10.6 (3) Marco Rubio: 9.4 (4) Ben Carson: 9.4 (5) Mike Huckabee: 8.0 (6) Rand Paul: 8.0 (7) Donald Trump: 6.0 (8) Ted Cruz: 4.8 (9) Chris Christie:...

Donald Trump is surging in New Hampshire, and Chris Christie’s back on the hunt, sounding like a born-again contender. They’re both long shots — the Donald is off the board — but they’re making the kind of noise the wiseheads say they can’t make. Bernie Sanders is the October surprise for Hillary, drawing the crowds of autumn a year early, and all the Queen of Avarice is collecting now is the stuff you get on your shoes on a stroll through the barnyard. It’s not a race, not yet, and the Gestapo, some of them decked out in the Nazi...

A top GOP strategist and pollster for newly re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is warning that New York Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, "will pay a heavy price" at the polls next year if they don't break with President Obama's policies on Israel and reject any deal he makes with Iran. "Hillary Clinton, [Sen.] Chuck Schumer, [Reps.] Nita Lowey, Steve Israel, Jerry Nadler, Eliot Engel and others are about to get a whole new wave of pressure from Republicans on whether they agree or not with Obama on Israel," New York-based national GOP pollster and strategist John McLaughlin told The Post....

I heard this "theory" from a friend, and decided to throw it out to Free Republic. My friend (no proof) said that he believes Donald Trump is a Trojan Horse.... Trump's is only there to pull people away from the other campaigns of Cruz, Walker, Paul, etc.... in order to eliminate them. Then once it's down to Trump and Bush in the Primaries, then he will step down. Leaving us with Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton will easily defeat Jeb Bush, and she will be the next President. Hopefully this nightmare scenario will never come to pass. Thoughts,...

FULL TITLE: Brigham’s Transfer Ownership for 7 Abortion Clinics Was A Sham, Says New Jersey Attorney General’s Office Trenton, NJ – A complaint filed by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office alleges that the notorious abortionist Steven Chase Brigham continues to illegally operate seven abortion facilities in New Jersey, having never actually transferred ownership to his long-time associate, abortionist Vikram H. Kaji. A complaint was filed by the Attorney General’s office on June 16, 2015. It charged Kaji with fraud for claiming he had taken over ownership of Brigham’s New Jersey abortion businesses after Brigham’s medical license was revoked last...

“He never apologizes, he’s never wrong…he’s the white Kanye!” – Bill Maher On the last HBO “Real Time with Bill Maher” episode before the July vacation hiatus, host Bill Maher was joined by mid-show interview guest Judd Apatow, and panelists Kristen Soltis Anderson, Michael Eric Dyson and Mary Katharine Ham, who hashed over the viability of Donald Trump as a GOP contender. During the segment, Maher quips he was waiting for the “Trump-Christie” GOP ticket. Now that Christie has thrown his hat in the ring too, this is actually a remote possibility. Despite the unvarnished remarks slung by Donald Trump,...

Are you Jersey proud? The rest of the country doesn’t seem to understand why. A new survey by YouGov ranks New Jersey as the least liked state in the nation. “New Jersey is the only state in the country which people tend to have a negative opinion of,” YouGov said in its summary. According to YouGov’s findings, 40 percent of Americans have a negative opinion of New Jersey, the highest of any of the 50 states.

John Whitman, the husband of former Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and the state's first-ever first gentleman, died Thursday. He was 71. He died at Morristown Medical Center after suffering a catastrophic brain injury in mid-June, said Heather Grizzle, a spokeswoman for Todd Whitman. John Whitman was an investment banker who served as a managing partner at Princeton-based Sycamore Ventures. He served as New Jersey's first gentleman from 1994 to 2001.

Bill Cosby will not be charged in connection with actress Lili Bernard’s allegations that the comedian sexually assaulted her in Atlantic City in the early 1990s. “The office of the Atlantic County Prosecutor has terminated its investigation, closed its file and so notified Ms. Bernard’s lawyer,” Edwin J. Jacobs, Jr., Cosby’s New Jersey attorney at Jacobs & Barbone, said via a release. When Bernard first spoke with police this past May, her case appeared to be a lynchpin in the ongoing Cosby scandal due to New Jersey’s lack of a statute of limitations on rape. However, that change in law...

HOBOKEN—A North Bergen man kneed several detectives in their groins on Wednesday to avoid being arrested for selling drugs, according to police reports. Javier Gomez, 37, kneed Hoboken detectives' groins and tried to throw them into a four-foot gate in an attempt to escape arrest, police said. Detectives determined that Gomez was likely selling drugs after they saw him riding his bicycle to meet various people, according to police reports.

Bobby Jindal’s office assured Louisiana clerks that they can invoke his executive order on religious freedom if they have a conscientious objection to issuing a license to a gay couple, but that’s a risky proposition for a middle-class civil servant. Now that marriage is a constitutional right, a government official who attempts to deny that right is vulnerable to being sued for damages under federal law. One such suit has apparently already been filed against a clerk in Texas. Christie, a former U.S. Attorney, is offering them better legal advice than Jindal is here: If the new regime bothers...

With Governor ChristieÂ’s splash in the pool, the population pining to be POTUS is now large enough to hold a special Republican Primary: only the declared wannabes would participate, each egotist getting three votes. Naturally, weÂ’d eliminate all their first choices and zero in on the next two, thereby distilling a much tighter cluster of potential electables.Seriously, we now have a candidate for almost every splinter view imaginable, and good people though each of them are, they collectively exemplify a party in confusion and dysfunction. As one wag pointed out, the last time there were this many declared candidates, a...

After the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, many Republican 2016 candidates tacked to the right, vowing to fight for religious freedom next. Everyone from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee promised social conservatives they'd use their increasingly limited means to prevent religiously conservative government employees from being forced to issue same-sex marriage licenses, or to grant protections for religiously conservative wedding photographers from having to shoot a same-sex wedding. Let them fight over those folks, says Chris Christie. And he might be onto something. At a New Hampshire town hall Wednesday night, the New Jersey Republican...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie broke with many in his party’s social conservative wing Wednesday, telling reporters that government employees who have objections to issuing same-sex marriage licenses should not be allowed to opt out. While many conservatives have called for steps to protect government employees who have objections to Friday’s same-sex marriage ruling from the Supreme Court, Christie said those who work for the government should abide by their oaths.

Chris Christie is running for president, he announced today at his alma mater, Livingston High School in New Jersey, becoming the 14th Republican candidate to enter the 2016 presidential race. "America is tired of handwringing and indecisiveness and weakness in the Oval Office," the New Jersey governor said today to a cheering crowd. "We need to have strength and decision-making and authority back in the Oval office and that is why today I am proud to announce my candidacy for the Republican nomination for president of the United States of America." Standing beside him were his wife, Mary Pat, and...