A telephone survey conducted Sunday of likely voters in the Florida GOP primary has Newton Gingrich leading Mitt Romney, 41%-32%, according to Rasmussen Reports.
Two weeks ago Romney lead by 22%.
Romney is leading among those who have already cast their votes by 11 points. Gingrich leads by 12% among those who have not yet voted. 14% of likely voters have already cast their ballot.
United States Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has been detained by TSA at Nashville Airport, according to posts of the senator’s facebook page and on his father’s, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, facebook page.
According to the elder Paul’s post, there was an anomaly in Paul’s initial electronic body scan. He asked for a second scan. TSA demanded a full body pat down. The senator refused.
The Senate Education Committee approved the bill along a party line vote. Democrats Teresa Ruiz, Shirley Turner and James Beach voted yes. Republicans Diane Allen and Michael Doherty voted no.
Your children and grandchildren will be asked the following questions in surveys taken at public schools, without parental consent, if a bill, S454, is passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor:
Are you bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, or not sure?
Have you had sex with males or females, or males and females?
Do you use contraception when you have sex?
How many people have you had sex with?
Die you drink or do drugs before having sex?
The survey explains that a child could become so depressed about the future that they may consider suicide, and goes on to query:
Have you seriously attempted suicide?
Do you plan to attempt suicide?
How many times have you attempted suicide in the past?
A similar bill was killed in the State Assembly after a huge public outcry last June. Now its back, this time in the Senate.
Call NJ Senate President Steve Sweeney:
(856) 251-9801 (West Deptford)
(856) 455-1011 (Bridgeton)
(856) 339-0808 (Salem)
Call the Members of the New Jersey Senate Education Committee:
Ruiz, M. Teresa – Chair (973) 484-1000
Turner, Shirley K. – Vice-Chair (609) 530-3277
Allen, Diane B. (609) 239-2800
Beach, James (856) 429-1572
Doherty, Michael J. (He will vote NO!; Thank him.) (908) 835-0552
We defeated this only last June – and it’s back again!
Will be discussed in the Senate Education Committee Today.
This morning The Asbury Park Press argues in an editorial that public labor contracts should be posted online. They argued that municipalites that don’t have websites that can handle such postings should post them on the Department of Community Affairs’ site.
We agree. While we’re at it, why not public notices that municipalities, school boards and private sector zoning and planning applicants now pay millions per year to advertise in newspapers where very few people see them?
During the last legislative session a bi-partisan bill that would have given jurisdictions the option of advertising legal notices in newspapers or online was passed in committee and scheduled for a vote in both houses of the legislature on the last day of the session. It met fierce resistance from the newspaper industry in committee and before that scheduled vote.
The corporate welfare recipients of the newspaper industry argued that politicians would use the choice to punish newspapers who didn’t give them favorable coverage, and that the savings wasn’t that much, if anything. In their final push to kill the bill, which worked, they argued that some towns don’t have websites that could handle the ads.
The legislature’s Democratic leadership, Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Shelia Oliver, killed the bill by not letting their chambers vote on it.
Well, thanks to the good nudniks of Neptune, The Asbury Presseditorial board, we now have a solution to the problem of a small number of towns not having websites that can handle posting legal notices. Notice publication could be a shared service hosting by the Department of Community Affairs or by the counties.
Sweeney has already announced that the legal notice bill will not be a priority in the legislative session that just started, signaling to the reformers that support they bill that they shouldn’t bother. Now that The Asbury Park Press has come up with a solution to the newspaper industry’s latest objection, maybe Sweeney will reconsider.
Governor Chris Christie went on Meet the Press this morning and called Newt Gingrich an embarrassment to the Republican party.
“I think Newt Gingrich has embarrassed the party over time,” Christie said. “Whether he’ll do it again in the future I don’t know, but Gov. Romney never has.”
“We all know the record, I mean he was run out of the speakership by his own party, he was fined $300,000 for ethics violations. This is a guy that’s had a very difficult political career at times and has been an embarrassment to the party. I don’t need to regale the country with the entire list again … but sometimes, past is prologue.”
What do you think MMM readers? Is Newt Gingrich an embarrassment to the Republican party or will Governor Christie being singing a different tune come August?
I was curious about why Gingrich’s first wife’s name was omitted from many news reports about his marriages this week. I thought she died of cancer.
I always thought it was curious that Gingrich would ask his wife for a divorce while she was “in the hospital on her dealth bed,” as legend has it. Why wouldn’t he just wait for her to die? Then he could be a widower rather than a grossly insensitive cad.
Turns out that the first Mrs. Gingrich is still alive. Also turns out that the famous death bed request for a divorce never happened. Newt filed for divorce in July of 1980. The hospital conversation happened in September, 1980 when the Mrs. was recovering from surgery for a non-life threatening benign tumor. Mrs. Gingrich had been battling cancer since 1978. Source: FactCheck.org
The first Mrs. Gingrich is Jackie Battley. She was Newt’s high school geometry teacher. They dated secretly until they wed on June 19, 1962. The 19 year old Newt was at student at Emory University in Atlanta. Jackie was 26. Source: About.com
The other thing I didn’t know about Gingrich is that he had a different last name as a child. He was born Newton Leroy McPherson to his 16 year old mother, Kathleen, and his 19 year old father, Newton Searles McPherson. The McPherson’s marriage ended shortly after young Newton’s birth. Kathleen married Army officer Robert Gingrich a year later. Gingrich adopted Newt and gave him his name.
Robert rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel in the Army. He served in Korea and Viet Nam. He also served in Germany and France, where Newt lived with him. Source: Wikipedia
If Gingrich wins the GOP nomination, America will be choosing a president between two products of broken homes who had different names in their youth and spent significant portions of the childhoods overseas.
Overcoming an 18 point deficit in the polls, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich soundly defeated former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in the South Carolina GOP presidential primary by 12%.
The Speaker ended the night with 40% of the vote compared to Romney’s 28%.
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum earned 17% of the vote. Texas Congressman Ron Paul got 13% and Herman Cain, who dropped out of the race weeks ago got 1%.
The race for the GOP nomination moves on to Florida which holds its primary on January 31. Recent polls give Romney a 20%+ edge in the Sunshine State. As we saw tonight, there’s only one poll that counts.
U.S. Senator Robert Menendez reacted to State Senator Joe Kyrillos’ formal campaign announcement with a statement of his own, issued to Politickernj.
“New Jersey’s voters will have a very clear choice if Senator Kyrillos becomes the Republican nominee- Senator Bob Menendez who fights every day for middle class New Jersey families or long-time Trenton insider Joe Kyrillos- who sides with corporations and special interests over working families and seniors and panders to the most extreme elements of the Washington Republicans,” Menendez campaign strategist Brad Lawrence said in an emailed statement today.
Clearly, Menendez has read the polls and knows his job is at risk. Recent polls indicate that Kyrillos has low name recognition outside of Monmouth County. For an incumbent Senator to react like he did guarantees that Kyrillos’ announcement will get press conference. Menendez, knowing he is vulnerable, has decided to try to define Kyrillos at the risk of increasing his name ID.
Menendez’s recent reversal on Magistrate Patty’s Shwartz’s nomination to the Third Circut Court of Appeals and his back peddling on the Internet Censorship Bill he is a sponsor of, are other indications that he knows his support is soft at best with New Jersey voters.
Menendez’s use of senatorial courtesy to block Shwartz’s nomination to the Appeals Court was met with fierce opposition in the legal community and speculation in the media that he was acting punitively because Shwartz’s boyfriend was the prosecutor who investigated him during his first campaign for Senate. The senator latter reversed himself, saying that after a second interview Shwartz was satisfactory after all.
After the enormous outcry this week against the Protect IP Internet censorship bill sponsored by Menendez in the Senate, lead by Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist and other major web sites, he tweeted, ”
Governor Chris Christie will be interviewed by David Gregory Sunday morning on the NBC show, “Meet the Press.”