Sarah Palin

Former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, the leader of New Jersey's conservative movement, announced today that he would seek the Republican nomination for Governor in 2009.

EDISON – Standing in front of about 50 supporters and members of the press, former Bogota Mayor and anti-tax advocate Steve Lonegan formally announced his candidacy for governor next year as an uncompromising conservative determined to reduce the size of state government.

“New Jersey was built on that fundamental belief – the belief is individual freedom, defending liberty and letting every individual fulfill their potential,” Lonegan said. “Over the last decades, we’ve seen that philosophy undermined -- undermined by a growth of government that has accelerated the entitlement state and reliance not on opportunity, but on government handouts.”

Lonegan characterized himself as merely the spokesman for a wider movement to roll back what he sees as increased government interference in economic affairs, and said he his executive experience as a former small business owner and mayor of the small town of Bogota especially qualified him to head it. Lonegan used his blue collar roots to lament that the New Jersey middle-class, saddled with high taxes, are struggling to survive economically.

If elected, Lonegan pledged to reduce the size of state government by 20 percent through layoffs, eliminating programs and “devolving government from Trenton to local municipalities.”

Assembly Minority Whip Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield), left, campaigns last year in Atlantic County with Assemblyman John Amodeo (R-Margate) and Assemblyman Vince Polistina (R-Egg Harbor).

Raging moderate state Sen. Leonard Lance’s (R-Hunterdon) victory should serve as a lesson to every downtrodden member of the GOP as the party tries to shake off tough losses from the Nov. 4th election, argues Assembly Minority Whip Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield). 

The pro-choice Republican believes his party gets into trouble when it tries to use the chambers of government to lecture taxpayers about how to behave in their personal lives. 

“The minute you preach morality, you’re done,” Bramnick said. “That sold after Monica Lewinsky, but frankly, I’m offended by it.” 

Bramnick, who’s flirted with going statewide in recent years and emerged as an early favorite to pursue the 7th District Congressional seat Lance just won before standing down, said regardless of the national party's strategies, Republicans in New Jersey shouldn’t run on family values.  

Getty Images Photo

U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), convicted of criminal charges a few weeks ago, is trailing in his bid for re-election to the U.S. Senate seat he's held since 1968

If Republican Ted Stevens loses he'll become the fifth incumbent U.S. Senator to lose re-election in a year when a home state candidate is on the national ticket.  It happened twice in 1916, and again in 1964 and 1980.

Despite Gov. Sarah Palin's presence on the GOP ticket in Alaska, Stevens -- convicted on federal corruption charges last month -- trails Democrat Mark Begich by 814 votes, with 35,000 ballots still to be counted --

The first time that happened was in 1916, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was re-elected to a second term as President.  But in Wilson's home state of New Jersey, Republican Joseph Frelinghuysen, a cousin of U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, ousted Democratic U.S. Sen. James Martine by a 56%-39% margin. And in Indiana, the home state of Wilson's vice president, Thomas Marshall, Republican Harry New unseated incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. John Kern by a 48%-46% margin.

AP Newswire:  

In a scam that falls under the category of "turnabout is fair play" [or maybe ‘se retourner est jouer franc jeu’ in French], today French President Nicolas Sarkozy called former Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey, and pranked her into thinking he was two Canadian radio comedians from Montreal. “Boy, he sounded just like a French Opie & Anthony. Two different voices and everything. I really had no idea he was actually the president of France.”

Perhaps she should have realized that something was not kosher when he said, “We love to watch all the funny shows on NBC, especially ‘My Name is Earl’.” Ms. Fey was on the set of her show, “30 Rock” when she took the call. “I thought that it was actually Canadian comedian Marc-Antoine Audette wanting to get my help as part of a prank call to President Sarkozy, in response to his call to the real Sarah Palin. It is all very confusing.”

A bottomed-out President George W. Bush and losses in New Jersey presidential elections extending to the late 1980s invariably prompt Republicans to designate the Reagan era as a modern touchstone for their party.

The fact that he won here in back-to-back elections still sparks the GOP to pepper their fighting words with Reagan invocations, evidenced by McCain surrogates specifically targeting “Reagan Democrats” at the opening of their headquarters in Woodbridge this summer.

The Gipper remains the man among GOP, going up to the top of their ticket, where Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) repeatedly refers to Reagan as his hero and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin hits a raise the roof crescendo every time she utters the late president’s name on the stump.

Paterson in Jersey City

JERSEY CITY – At an Obama rally here in the student center of New Jersey State University, New York Gov. David Paterson took aim at Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) repeated denunciation of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) economic policy.

McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, refer in their down-the-stretch stump speeches to remarks made by a campaign supporter who told Obama that the Democratic nominee’s tax cuts sound like socialism.

Paterson put that on McCain’s home turf.

Ted Stevens is the first sitting United States Senator to be convicted on corruption charges since New Jersey's Harrison Williams on May 1, 1981.  Stevens, who has represented Alaska in the Senate since 1968, was found guilty on seven counts of making false statements on his Senate financial disclosure.  Williams, who was completing his fourth term, was convicted on nine counts of bribery and extortion charges connected to the ABSCAM scandal. Five U.S. Senators have been found guilty of felony charges; Williams is one of two Senators in U.S. history to serve in prison following a conviction.

Only in New Jersey: Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin goes moose hunting in Hackensack, only to learn a Bergen County Republican freeholder candidate was once a socialist.

The humorous radio ad, produced by the Bergen County Democratic freeholder and county clerk slate, has drawn outrage from the Bergen County Republicans, who called part of it an attack on Freeholder candidate Paul Duggan’s Irish heritage.

The ad, which is interspersed with moose calls, begins with an unidentified male voice asking a Palin impersonator what she’s doing in Hackensack.

“Me and my maverick friends hear that there’s some darn good moose hunting here,” she says, before adding that she’s heard that “the Republican candidates are some pretty serious reformers.”

Former Gov. Tom Kean with John McCain and Joe Lieberman in Hamilton last March: Getty Images Photo
With two polls released this morning showing Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain in the Garden State by between 17 and 23 points, former Gov. Tom Kean acknowledged that winning this state is a long-shot, and that Vice-Presidential Sarah Palin hasn't helped.

"I think one of the problems is there hasn't been much of a campaign in New Jersey, if any. That's always a problem. It's uphill for any Republican to win in New Jersey, and the ones who have won are those who have spent a great deal of time here," he told PolitickerNJ.com from California in a phone interview.

Kean, who governed as a moderate in the 1980s and developed cross-party appeal, was one of McCain's early New Jersey backers. He endorsed him late last year, when most of the GOP establishment - including his son, Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean, Jr. -- was on board with Rudy Giuliani. McCain, Kean said, was the most helpful Senator when he chaired the 9/11 commission - the creation of which McCain often cites as a major policy difference between himself and President Bush.

Kean did accompany McCain on the three public appearances he made in New Jersey this year. While he'd like to see more of McCain here, he understands that, with no chance of winning in New York, it wouldn't make sense to spend his limited campaign cash in that extremely expensive media market to make a play for North Jersey voters.

Politicians spin for a living, but they're rarely held accountable for what they say after the fact. So today I'm taking a look back on what they were saying about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin when she was announced as John McCain's vice presidential running mate.

State Sen. Bill Baroni predicted that Palin would appeal to "a broad spectrum of New Jersey voters," especially the state's "vast independent voting bloc." Asked about accusations that she pressured the former Commissioner of Public Safety to fire a state trooper, Baroni replied: "There's no evidence of it. It will be completely vetted [in] the next 48 hours."

In fact a bipartisan legislative panel found that Palin violated the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act when she "abused her power in pushing for the firing of an Alaska state trooper."

Baroni wasn't as far off on the other point, though. In the latest Survey USA poll, McCain leads among independents in New Jersey by 45 to 40 percent, although voters who identify as "moderate" break for Obama by 58 to 36 percent. Still, Obama has a 15 point lead in the poll.

State Sen. Kevin O'Toole called the Palin pick "a stroke of brilliance." If this is his idea of brilliance, I don't want to know what other good ideas O'Toole has in store.