Free Republic

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,...