Kryillos Confident, Working It Hard

Sen. Joe Kyrillos and Mayor Fred Rast greeting voters in Atlantic Highlands. Photo by Art Gallagher. Click for larger view.

State Senator Joe Kyrillos said he won the U.S. Senate primary without the Bayshore Tea Party support, “by the largest margin in half a century,” and that he is confident that 13th legislative district Republicans will nominate him for another term in the June 4th primary election.

“We’re working hard,” Kyrillos said of himself and his running mates, “probably harder than we need to, but it is energizing and gratifying to meet with so many constituents.”

Kyrillos left the Golden, Arnone and DiMaso Armed Forces Day ‘friend raiser’ yesterday to hit the streets of Atlantic Highlands with Mayor Fred Rast.

Rast was a supporter of Bayshore Tea Party backed candidates in previous GOP primaries.  “Not this time,” said Rast as he and Kyrillos greeted residents at garage sales along Highland Ave.

Kyrillos said he saw no evidence that the BTPG backed challengers were making an impact on the campaign trail.

The challengers cancelled their door to door efforts today due to the weather.  Instead they made phone calls and had a picnic at Assembly candidate Edna Walsh’s house.

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Bennett: “We’re fighting this primary as if we’re down 25%”

Monmouth County GOP Chairman John Bennett sounded a rallying cry to about 125 Republican faithful on Saturday morning in Hazlet at a Armed Forces Day ‘friend raiser’ held at the Red Oak Diner for county candidates Sheriff Shaun Golden and Freeholders Tom Arnone and Serena DiMaso.

“We’ve had primaries before in Monmouth County that we did not take seriously,” Bennett said,”and bad things happened.  This time we’re running as if we are 25 points behind.”

State Senator Joe Kyrillos asked the assembled Republicans to make sure their friends and families come out and vote on June 4 for himself and Assembly members Amy Handlin and Declan O’Scanlon, in addition to Golden, Arnone and DiMaso.

Deputy Freeholder Director Serena DiMaso, former mayors Eddie Farve or Bay St. Louis, MS and Brett Warr of Gulfport, MS and former CNN correspondent Kathleen Koch

DiMaso introduced former CNN correspondent Kathleen Koch, former mayors Eddie Farve of Bay St. Louis, MS and Brett Warr of Gulfport, MS, as well as former Congressman Gene Taylor.  The group was visiting New Jersey to support the Bayshore Conference of Mayors, touring the destruction of Superstorm Sandy in Mantoloking and the rebuilding of the Seaside Heights boardwalk.

Golden used the presence of the guests from Mississippi to talk about his department’s response to Sandy. “We had no deaths or serious injuries in Monmouth County.  In Katrina, there were almost 2000 deaths,” he said.

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Leadership We Can Depend On

Tony Fiore

By Tony Fiore, Former Middleotown Mayor and Current Township Committeeman

I am writing today to ask you to join me in support of three extraordinary county leaders who deserve our support on June 4^th; Sheriff Shaun Golden, Freeholder Director Tom Arnone and Freeholder Deputy Director Serena Dimaso.  As the Mayor of the largest municipality in Monmouth County, it should come as no surprise that I have had many first hand experiences working with Shaun, Tom and Serena on a number of issues and initiatives.  While I can point to a number of needed improvements that they have helped to bring to Middletown, it is not my intention.  Instead, I’d like to share with you my experience working with them during one of the most difficult and challenging times in our township’s history.

Superstorm Sandy’s impact on Middletown was unprecedented. Thousands lost their homes and everyone lost power for almost two weeks.  When we needed to secure our devastated bayshore for safety and security, we couldn’t depend on the federal government to get us the necessary resources.  However, we could depend on Sheriff Golden.  Each day Sheriff Golden would hold a personal call with both myself and the Township Police administration.  Through his efforts, officers from as far as Mississippi came into Middletown to help us secure our most affected areas.  At his direction helicopters with night vision flew over our bayshore to prevent and catch looters and others who came in to prey on our victims.  Through his leadership, we were safe.   I received a call or text message from him every day asking for our needs until power was 100% restored and we were back to some semblance of normal. 

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Hypocrisy and the Bayshore Tea Party, Perfect Together

Phil Russo, facebook photo

By Phil Russo

Back in February 2009 I had the honor of being one of 10-15 people in the country that was on the conference calls that planned the first round of tea party protests.  There were only 50 cities and in Orlando, where I was organizing our rally, we only had about 100 people.  From the beginning we developed a set of core values for the tea party that many groups ended up adopting.  It was actually Justin from Cincinnati that came up with “fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets”.  Many tea party web sites you visit will have those core values listed.  I don’t know if the bayshore group uses the core values or not but it doesn’t matter if they do or not because those values become the core of the movement.  How the bayshore group could so ignore these core values in their selection of endorsements astounds me.

The fact that they have decided to run against Declan O’Scanlon shows that they have different reasons for picking their endorsements.  Our group in Orlando, and most tea party groups I know, encourage people to learn about all the candidates and talk to them. Ask them questions. Then decide.  We avoided telling people who to vote for because that is the very thing that the establishment we hate so much does.  Full disclosure:  I worked for Declan for about 2 years in his legislative office.  But I am not writing this article because I worked for Declan.  In fact, it is quite the contrary.  I worked for Declan because he is the kind of legislator about whom I would write such an article. 

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Bayshore Tea Party Backed Sheriff Candidate Worked For A Red Light Camera Company

O’Scanlon calls on Bayshore Tea Party and their slate to withdraw support for Peters

Dan Peters

Three time Monmouth County Sheriff Candidate Dan Peters worked as an Account Executive for RedFlex, the ‘traffic safety’ company that has been implicated in an ongoing federal criminal investigation into a $2 million bribery scheme in Chicago.

Peters’ LinkedIn profile included the job on his resume from 2010-2011 yesterday afternoon.  Today, the job has was removed from his LinkedIn profile.  MoreMonmouthMusings called Peters twice yesterday and once this morning to ask him about his resume and education.  He did not return the calls.

Peters admitted to working for the company on Saturday May 4 while speaking before a group of activists from Campaign for Liberty, according to Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon.  O’Scanlon, the New Jersey champion of the fight against red light cameras, was an invited speaker for the group’s meeting.  Peters and the LD 13 Tea Party backed candidates also spoke at the event which was held in Hightstown.

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Meet the Tea Party Candidates

Evidently, the Bayshore Tea Party Group leadership and their candidates don’t like the coverage MoreMonmouthMusings is giving their primary campaign.  Don’t take my word for it.  Listen to Barbara Gonzalez introducing sheriff candidate Dan Peters in the first video below.

Leigh-Ann Bellew stopped taking my phone calls a couple of weeks ago.  She told someone to pass along the message that I should deal with Dwayne Horner.  Now Horner is not returning my calls.  Freeholder candidate Ed Pekarsky asked that I post Tom Fitzsimmons’ email and if he could respond here.  I told him he could.  He hasn’t sent me his response.  It’s OK with me that he isn’t responding, but hey, Gonzalez wrote that I censored Tea Party posts, which I didn’t, and then her candidate doesn’t send it a post he that requested.

When I met Dan Peters in early April, he said he would sit for an interview.  I’m writing a story about him for publication later today or tomorrow.  Peters hasn’t returned three calls since yesterday.

It’s a lot easier to write “Bellew (or Horner, Peters, Pekarsky, etc) didn’t return a phone call,” than it is to write up their comments, but I’d really rather give them an opportunity to tell their side of the story.

In that spirit, here they are, telling their own stories on video:

Dan Peters, Sheriff Candidate

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Bellew Campaign Seeks Help From Monmouth County Democrats

Monmouth Democratic Chairman Vin Gopal

We couldn’t make this up

Monmouth County Democrat Chairman Vin Gopal told MMM that a representative of the Bellew for Senate campaign reached out to him for financial support and help in generating publicity for the Bayshore Tea Party backed slate of candidates in the 13th Legislative District Republican Primary.  “We need help getting the truth out,” Gopal said the operative pleaded.

The campaign operative, who Gopal said is close to Bellew but not so involved with BTPG, said the campaign was having difficulty raising money, recruiting volunteers and getting positive press.

“I turned him down,” said Gopal, “this is a primary between two Conservative Republican tickets.  It’s not our fight.

“Kyrillos may have run as a moderate in the U.S. Senate campaign last year,” Gopal added,” but based upon his voting record in the legislature, he is a Conservative as far as I am concerned. He’s voted against abortion rights, marriage equality rights and the millionaires tax.

“I’m glad to see the Republicans spending money fighting with each other instead of coming after us.”

MMM called Bellew, her campaign manager Dwayne Horner, and BTPG co-founder Barbara Gonzalez for comment.  None have returned the call.

UPDATE

Gonzalez did not return our call, but she banned MMM publisher Art Gallagher from the BTPG’s facebook page.  Eariler today, Gonzalez accused Gallagher of censoring BTPG members’ comments on this site.  That hasn’t happened.

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Bellew Needs To Come Clean On Her Credentials

State Senate primary candidate Leigh-Ann Bellew owes her supporters, and the voters of the 13th Legislative District, the truth about her resume.  Any candidate’s educational and employment history is an important consideration for voters to take into account when choosing their nominees and elected officials.  Bellew is asking Republican voters to fire an long term and distinguished incumbent in Senator Joe Kyrillos, and to hire her instead.   In order for her candidacy to be taken seriously, she needs to be transparent about her education, career and character.

Bellew has gone into hiding since the questions about her resume and education have become public.  When the questions about her legal education arose in early April, Bellew told MMM that she graduated from law school in Texas but never took the bar exam.  She said she went to work in customer service for American Express rather than pursue a career as a lawyer, and then exited the work force to raise her children.

However, since PolitickerNJ questioned the veracity of her resume, Bellew has stopped returning MMM’s repeated phone calls.  Her campaign manager, Dwayne Horner, has not been able to provide answers.

Bellew, her running mates and campaign volunteers have been distorting Kyrillos’s record. Kyrillos is a moderate, but he is not a tax and borrow liberal as the Bayshore Tea Party Group backed ticket is claiming.  Kryillos does not support partial birth abortion and death panels, as the duplicitous literature the BTPG backed campaign has been distributing claims.

If a candidate or campaign is going to take liberties with the truth about their opponent’s record, they at the very least should have the decency to be transparent about something as basic about their own education and career.

Leigh-Ann Bellew can put an end to all of this nonsense over her past by simply proving she has the degrees she has claimed she has.  She should do that immediately.  If Bellew has embellished her past, she should come clean about that and explain herself.

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Bellew’s Credentials, Conservatism Questioned

By Kelly Ann Hart

In 2010 I was a manager in Anna Little’s campaign for Congress.  I worked with Leigh Ann Bellew, who was the campaign’s initial manager and then became the campaign’s Chairman.  I am a conservative Republican who has been active with the Tea Party.

During that campaign Leigh Ann Bellew led me, as well as and all the rest of us who were working on Anna Little’s campaign, to believe that she was “a lawyer who didn’t practice”.  We also got the impression from what she told us that she had studied law and had a degree of some kind in Constitutional studies.  None of this has turned out to be true.

Leigh Ann Bellew also misled us about her involvement with national conservatives like Dick Morris, telling us that she had been his “communications director”. This isn’t true either.

I wasn’t aware of her answers to a Project Vote Smart (http://votesmart.org/candidate/political-courage-test/59968/leigh-ann-bellew/#.UYeWJXzD-M8) questionnaire in 2006, none of us were, but have had the opportunity to read it since.  I am concerned by a number of her answers and most concerned by her answers to the questions on the 2^nd Amendment and Abortion.

On the 2^nd Amendment, if Leigh Ann is a “constitutionalist” as she claims, how is her support for the federal licensing of all firearms in line with the 2^ndamendment?

On Abortion she claims to be Pro-Life, but told Vote Smart that an abortion should be legal when the mother’s life is involved.  How this fits with her “Pro-Life, Christian” values?  You are either for the death of a baby or you are not.

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I Know Leigh-Ann Bellew

By James C. Granelli

But first, please understand that I thought long and hard about writing this commentary. After all, Bellew is running in a primary in another district than my own and I have my hands full rebuilding our home after Sandy. I would have loved some peace and quiet right now; instead of what I expect will be coming; harsh criticism from some Tea Party people who will attack me as a faux Conservative. I could have simply sat this out. But then, people that know me; know most of all that I am indeed a Conservative and I would feel ill at ease for not doing the right thing. I will let my resume and references speak for themselves should those attacks come.

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