Kevin O'Toole

State Sen. Minority Whip Kevin O'Toole (R-Cedar Grove), left, confers with state Senator and Union City Mayor Brian P. Stack.

UNION CITY - Among the Republican faithful accompanying GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie as he walked New York Avenue hugging and touching hands in a crowd of 100s of mostly Latino Union City residents Tuesday, was state Sen. Minority Whip Kevin O'Toole (R-Cedar Grove).

Long an ally of Christie's, O'Toole and state Sen. Brian P. Stack (D-Union City) have forged a State House relationship while serving together on the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, and as Stack has for the most part played it coyly up the middle in an ongoing North-South war for control of his party's caucus between Senate President Richard Codey (D-Roseland) and Senate Majority Leader Steve Sweeney (D-Gloucester).

Hoping to nudge Stack over to the Sweeney side and keep him there to get rid of old foe Codey - who also appeared in Union City tonight with Stack at the mayor's National Night Out event, incidentally - O'Toole tonight relished Stack's gamesmanship of the gubernatorial race as a street version of how Stack works in Trenton.

When is a 3 percent cap on college tuition and fees really a 12 percent cap? When it's enforced by the Corzine administation. 

The six Republican members of the Senate Budget Committee have sent a letter to Chairwoman Barbara Buono that asks her to call the committee into session this summer. The committee's task would be to develop a plan to close an unprecedented $8 billion structural deficit and a more than $2 billion deficit in the unemployment fund. The letter points out that Governor Corzine is avoiding questions about how he plans to do to deal with this $10 billion crisis. "When there is a gap in leadership at the top, others must step in to fill the void, " said Senator Anthony Bucco, senior Republican member on the budget committee and Republican budget officer.

It’s been less than two hours since Republican gubernatorial nominee Chris Christie announced his pick of Monmouth County Sheriff Kim Guadagno for lieutenant governor, but a Republican narrative has already begun to take shape comparing the way Christie and Gov. Corzine have gone about their search to fill the number two spot on the ballot.  

It goes like this: Christie focused early on a shortlist of candidates, quietly and methodically vetting them based on their merits.  Corzine, the narrative goes, spastically floated trial balloons about candidates that ranged from veteran legislators to a political neophyte most famous for his role on a reality television show, apparently taking the feedback of other prominent Democrats and interest groups into account.  

The GOP spin was expressed succinctly this morning by state Sen. Kevin O’Toole (R-Cedar Grove), who in a phone interview called Corzine’s selection process a “three ring circus.”  

“I think you’ve got to admire the way that Christie’s people professionally vetted,” he said.  “They weren’t sending out trial balloons every 13 seconds, like somebody from ‘Survivor’… I thought that was really a preposterous way for people to be parading themselves in a contest on [PolitickerNJ].” 

Urban Republican" Assembly Candidate Bloschak Will Attend GOPAC SessionBelleville Resident Is The "Non-Traditional" Candidate GOP Is Looking To For The Future Belleville-Andrew Bloschak, a lifelong union member and community activist, will attend a GOPAC candidate training session at Bergen County Republican Headquarters on Saturday. Bloschak is particularly excited to go because his candidacy in the heavily urban and ethnically diverse 28th District represents exactly the kind of campaign that GOPAC wants to support as it looks to grow the Republican Party.

Senator Kevin O'Toole asks why Governor Corzine seems to be  concerned only about horse racing when the state's entire sports entertainment industry is in trouble. 

Republicans appear to be testing out a new campaign issue: The New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority’s (NJSEA) growing financial troubles.

State Sen. Kevin O’Toole (R-Cedar Grove) yesterday issued a release claiming that Governor Corzine has not addressed the Sports and Exposition Authority’s growing debt, which was outlined in a Sunday article in The Star-Ledger.  The paper said that the agency is “effectively operating at a deficit” from losses in horse track betting and disappearing stadium revenues.

“The Sports & Exposition Authority, once a source of pride and generator of revenue for the state of New Jersey, now sounds as if it’s overleveraged, losing money and at risk of bankruptcy,” said O’Toole in a statement. “One can’t help but wonder how much of this fiscal crisis is due to eight years of shameless political wheeling and dealing over bungled arena, stadium and Meadowlands development projects.”

Sen. Marcia Karrow (R-Flemington)

TRENTON - Now the session is in gear, with the promise of no surprise ending - it's a given the budget will ultimately pass in the hands of the majority Democrats - undercutting longterm suspense and compressing drama into short-burst senatorial speeches. 

State Sen. Kevin O'Toole (R-Cedar Grove) just did an Essex County Marc Antony impression, building sections of oratorical drama on top of one another, the impact of which Democrats tried to blunt by murmuring throughout.

Senate President Richard Codey (D-Roseland) finally intervened when O'Toole amplified outrage over New Jersey taxes to include the banks on Wall Street with the unmistakable line: "they're stealing our money."

O'Toole agreed to yield at last.

Both sides began trading.

Speaking after O'Toole, state Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Newark) just announced that he plans to support the budget. He'd been an ornery holdout to the end.

State Sen. Kevin O'Toole (R-Cedar Grove)

TRENTON - There's state Sen. Kevin O'Toole (R-Cedar Grove) railing against the proposed 2010 budget.

"There are seven new taxes in this budget," exclaims O'Toole, chair of the Essex County Republican Party and chair of the Republican chairs. "That adds up to $1 billion in this budget, and it's bad enough, it's evil enough, it's anti-business enough.

"But it's on top of 103 new taxes since 2002," he adds incredulously. "It's mind-numbing. It's crippling. We have built this problem brick by brick, tax by tax."

American Journalists Reporting from China-North Korea Border Charged, Convicted and Sentenced to 12 Years of Hard Labor

Senator Kevin O’Toole (R-40) has written letters to officials of both the United States and China appealing for their assistance in ongoing efforts to obtain the release of a pair of American journalists who were arrested, convicted and sentenced by North Korea to 12 years of hard labor. The reporters, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were working on a story about the human trafficking of women across the China-North Korea border at the time of their arrest for committing what has only been described as a “grave crime” by the insular nation.

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