Tea Parties To Impact Freeholder Race

The Monmouth County area Tea Parties are coming together to in order to make their presence felt in the upcoming county committee election to replace Assemblyman-elect Rob Clifton on the Monmouth County Board of Freeholders.

The Bayshore Tea Party Group, the Jersey Shore Tea Party Patriots and the East Jersey Tea Party will hold a joint meeting to endorse a Freeholder candidate on January 10th, 2012, 7PM at the West Park Recreation Center in Oakhusrt, Ocean Township.   The Monmouth and Colts Neck Tea Parties have also been invited to participate.

Bob Gordon, co-founder of the Bayshore Tea Party Group, says that between the groups there are 25 county committee members eligible to vote on January 14th when the county committee convenes to elect Clifton’s successor.  They are potentially a significant voting block.

The Tea Parties extended invitations this afternoon to each of the declared candidates to speak at the January 10th meeting.   Following the candidates presentations and a Q and A, a secret ballot will be taken.  The winner of the groups’ endorsement will be announced upon the tabulation of the ballots.

Howell Mayor Bob Walsh and Manalapan Deputy Mayor Ryan Green have accepted.  Holmdel Deputy Mayor Serena DiMaso is juggling a scheduling conflict.  Atlantic Highlands Councilman Peter Doyle has yet to respond, according to Barbara Gonzalez, the another co-founder of BTPG.

Gonzalez said she checked the calendars on the Monmouth County GOP Website and the Monmouth County Affiliated Republican Club’s site before scheduling the event, in order to avoid a conflict.

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1 in a million

The 1,000,000th page load on MMM occurred at 3:19:59 PM.

Fittingly, the 1,000,000th hit was from a regular reader, a Comcast subsciber with a Philadelphia IP address and hundreds of recorded visits.  The hit was on the Milestone post.

There was confetti, balloons and fireworks at MMM world headquarters.

The lucky reader wins a lifetime subscription to MMM and an opportunity to meet presidential candidate Buddy Roemer on Saturday afternoon at the Bayshore Tea Party Group’s office in Middletown.

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FDU Poll: Voters Don’t Like Obama, But He Still Wins

Farleigh Dickinson’ Public Mind released a poll this morning showing President Obama beating Mitt Romney 46%-42% and Newt Gingrich by 48%-42%. 

Rick Perry trails the president by 53%-35%,  Michele Bachman tails by 57% to 30%.

The nationwide poll of 855 registered voters says that 70% of voters say the United States is on the wrong track.  46% of the respondents disapprove of Obama’s performance.  45% approve.

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Milestone

Sometime this afternoon MMM will have registered it’s 1,000,000th page load from over 665,000 visitors since we started keeping track on December 31, 2006.  This is a combination of the old site, moremonmouthmusings.blogspot.com and this domain.  Statistics weren’t kept in 2006 because I didn’t know how and I didn’t imagine that my writing would attract a following.

34% of this traffic has arrived on this domain since September of 2010 when we moved here.  70% of MMM’s visitors are repeat users and spend more than two minutes on the site per visit.

Thank you for making MMM part of your routine.  Thank you to the many commenters and contributors who make the site as informative and entertaining as it is.

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Presidential Candidate To Visit Bayshore Tea Party

Former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, a contender for the Americans Elect 2012 presidential nomination, will be visiting the offices of the Bayshore Tea Party Group this Saturday December 10th at 12:30 PM.

Roemer served in Congress from 1981 through 1988 as a conservative Democrat who often supported President Reagan’s agenda.  He served as the governor of Louisiana from 1988-1992 as both a Democrat and a Republican.

A Harvard MBA, Roemer bills himself as the only candidate with executive, legislative and private sector experience.

BTPG co-founder Barbara Gonzalez said Roemer’s visit does not imply the group’s support of his candidacy.  “We received a phone call from Roemer’s office stating that he would like to make our group his first stop while touring New Jersey, we polled our members and there is sufficient interest in meeting him.  We’ve also heard interest from people outside of our group expressed.”

The Bayshore Tea Party Group’s office is at 275 Highway 35, Red Bank (Middletown Twp), NJ  07701

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Did Bill Clinton Help Jon Corzine Loot MF Global?

The JerseyNut makes the case that he did.

I speculated a while back that the Jon Corzine scandal could eventually be the undoing of Barack Obama.  Turns out that Crooked Jon may wind up being the downfall of the Clinton clan as well.

The digging into the rubble of MF Global has only just begun, and what do we find?  Unnecessary  contracts paying inordinate sums to Democratic godfather Bill Clinton:

Even as Jon Corzine’s MF Global was collapsing, a firm that includes former President Bill Clinton in a senior post was raking in huge fees for public-relations and financial advice from the ill-fated brokerage…

 

Read the entire post at Right, Wing-Nut!

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Assembly Urges USDA To Curb Stink Bugs

The New Jersey State Assembly passed a resolution yesterday, 76-3, urging the United States Department of Agriculture and any other relevant federal agencies to fund efforts to reduce or eliminate the brown marmoated stink bug population.

Assembly Minority Leader Alex DeCroce, Assemblyman Jay Webber, the former NJ GOP chairman, and newly sworn in Assemblyman Jack Ciatrelli, all Republicans, were the three legislators voting no.

Tom Weisert, Webber’s spokesman, said that the Assemblyman usually votes against these non-binding resolutions that tell other jurisdictions how they should spend taxpayers’ money.  “It’s not that Jay favors stink bugs,” said Weisert, “besides, there are a lot more important issues that the Assembly should be addressing.”

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Trump Debate

Jon Huntsman increased his name recognition 8000% by turning down the invitation to attend the Newmax ION TV presidential debate to be moderated by Donald Trump.

Huntsman, the former Utah governor and President Obama’s former ambassador to China, is now best known for saying he “won’t kiss his ring or any part of his anatomy,” about Trump while explaining why he won’t attend the debate.

Texas congressman Ron Paul joined Huntsman in turning down The Donald’s invitation, saying through a spokesman that a debate hosted by a reality TV star is beneath the dignity of the presidency.

Trump called Huntsman and Paul joke candidates.

All of the remaining GOP candidates for president have accepted the invitation, even though Trump has not ruled out running for president as an Independent himself.  Trump said he’s leaning toward endorsing a GOP candidate and that he might do so shortly after the debate.

The Trump debate will take place in Des Moines Iowa on December 27,  one week before the Iowa caucus and two weeks before the New Hampshire primary.

Millions will be tuning in to see who gets fired.

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Top American Leaders of 2011

Governor Chris Christie will be named one of the Top American Leaders of 2011 by The Washington Post and Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership tomorrow morning at Ford’s Theater in Washington.

The other honorees are Jared Cohen of Google Ideas, Michael Kaiser, president of The Kennedy Center of Performing Arts, Sheila Bair, former Chair of the FDIC,  Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Ahmed Zewail, Nobel Prize winner and professor of chemistry and physics at the California Institute of Technology, and Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist.

The Washington Post’s profile of Christie is here.

The event, which will be webcast here at 9AM, will consist of an awards ceremony followed by a discussion moderated by David Gergen, Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, Mary Jordan, editor of Washington Post Live, and Steven Pearlstein, columnist for The Washington Post’s On Leadership website.

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Whitman A Leader Of Third Party Effort

Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman will not be joining Governor Chris Christie on the campaign trail for Mitt Romney.

Whitman is a director of Americans Elect 2012, a PAC that converted into an educational group so that it would not have to disclose its donors.   The group wants Americans to nominate a “centrist” Independent presidential candidate via Internet voting. They are working to secure ballot positions in all 50 states.  So far they’re on the ballots in Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and Utah.  There are reports that they’ve submitted petitions in California and Hawaii.

Despite their success in collecting signatures to get on ballots, there is a lot of controversy about the group that will likely hamstring their efforts going forward.  There is a clause in their by laws that allows the group’s directors to disqualify “America’s” candidate.  They’ve got a rule restricting how their nominee selects his/her vice presidential candidate.  The group says it doesn’t support or oppose any particular candidate at this point, but Whitman has been promoting Jon Huntsman as a third party candidate and Mark McKinnon, another director of the group, said Mitt Romney doesn’t have the cojones to be president.

Sounds more like a three ring circus than a third party.  Besides, the Republicans look as though they are going to nominate a centrist in either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich.  

As an aside, how long will it be before a highly paid national pundit writes a column about what it means about America that the three front runners for president have weird first names?

Even without the other controversies surrounding Americans Elect 2012, Whitman joining their board should be a sign of that the group is doomed to fail.  Her legacy as New Jersey’s Governor and as Administrator of the EPA under President George W. Bush is beyond embarrassing. 

The messes that Governor Christie is cleaning up now….the broke pension system, broke transportation trust fund, broke unemployment insurance fund, Abbot and COAH, were all started or made worse by Whitman and her appointees.   Shortly after 9-11, EPA Administrator Whitman declared the air at Ground Zero safe to breathe, thereby sending clean up workers to slow deaths and long term disabilities.

It’s little wonder that candidate Chris Christie declared that he’s not a Whitman Republican.

Despite Americans Elect’s foibles, a third party presidential candidate might be a good news for those who want President Obama to be a one termer.

In modern times, i.e., during the lifetimes of anyone likely to vote in 2012,  there have been only two elected incumbent presidents denied a second term by the voters; Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.  Both had significant third party challengers during their reelection bids.  John Anderson, a Republican Congressman from Illinois ran against Carter and Ronald Reagan.  Reagan won.   Ross Perot, the populist Texas billionaire ran against Bush and Bill Clinton.  Clinton won.

The bad news, from a historical perspective, is that Carter and Bush 41 also faced significant primary challenges prior to being renominated.  Carter was challenged for the Democratic nomination in 1980 by Teddy Kennedy.  Bush was challenged for the 1992 GOP nomination by Pat Buchanan.

Reagan’s primary challenge against Gerald Ford in 1976, preceding Carter’s election, may indicate that an incumbent’s problems within their own party may be more of a detriment to reelection than a third party challenge.  Unfortunately, there is no Democrat seriously challenging Obama.

New York Post columnist John Podhoretz says New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg is “clearly eyeing” a third party run for president.   A Bloomberg run might be America’s best hope of defeating Obama next year.   The Mayor has the resources to make a credible run and a nanny state record to appeal to enough dissatisfied Democrats and left leaning Independents.

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