In the first poll conducted by their new Executive Director, Dr. Krista Jenkins, FDU’s Public Mind Poll found that 55% of New Jersey’s registered voters approve of Governor Chris Christie. The electorate is divided over whether they like the governor for his personality or his policies.
36% say they like Christie and his policies, 29% don’t like him personally or his policies. 14% like his personally but don’t like his policies while another 14% like his policies but not his personality.
Christie suffers a gender gap. 61% of men approve of his performances compared to only 49% of women. 54% of men say the state is on the right track, compared to 44% of women.
FDU did not distinguish between registered voters and likely voters.
Monmouth University Polling Institute Director Patrick Murray is a “go to guy” for journalists looking for expert opinions and analysis on New Jersey politics.
Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Matt Katz called Murray to ask him why Christie’s approval numbers are so high when many voters used the pejoratives “bully” and “arrogant” when asked to use one word to describe the Governor and when Jersey mainstream media pundits so frequently criticise Christie’s manners. Katz mentioned The Star Ledger’s Tom Moran, Inquirer opinion writers, and the Courier-Post editorial board. He could have included most of the Statehouse press corp, save Gannett’s Bob Ingle and the Capitol Quckies crew.
Murray’s answer was Christieesque in its refreshing honesty: “Part of the issue is, voters of New Jersey are probably a little more savvy than reporters.”
Who talks to more reporters and voters in New Jersey than Murray? His is an expert opinion.
“Ouch,” wrote Katz, who often writes critically of Christie.
Credit Katz for including Murray’s quote in his article. If you start seeing Ben Dworkin’s name in The Star Ledger more than Murray’s, you’ll know Chrisite was right when he called famously called Moran, the editorial page editor, “the thinnest skinned guy and America.”
June was by far the most active month in MMM’s history. There have been 32,000 visits and 57,000 page views so far month. 71% of those visitors were repeats. Google analytics says that all of that traffic came from 8700 computers. Unbelievably to me, the average visit is for 11 minutes, which is longer than it takes to read an entire issue of the Asbury Park Press.
According to alexa.com, only 15,850 websites in the New York area and 125,439 in the United States get more traffic than MMM.
Special thanks go out to Anna Little, Ernesto Cullari, John Bennett, Christine Hanlon, Vin Gopal, Frank LaRocca, Barbara Gonzalez, Bob Gordon, Linda Baum Rachel Alintoff, Judge Paul Escandon, Louise Murray and everyone who wears bathing suits on the Asbury Park Boardwalk. I can’t forget Bob Menendez’s opposition research team.
I doing my monthly review, I couldn’t help but notice the success of my friends in Asbury Park.
Congratulations to Dan Jacobson and Molly Mulshine at the AsburyParkSun. In only three months they have made a significant impact in the local media market. Alexa.com says that APS is in the top 200,000 of all websites nationally and in the top 35,000 in the New York area. Mulshine was the first to report the Asbury Park Boardwalk beach attire controversy, a story that went national.
UPDATE: July 1
Wow! I haven’t had such a busy last day of the month since I was in the car business. The final numbers for June are 32,959 visitors fromm 9,194 unique IPs and 58,768 page views. Ranked 120,646 in the U.S. on Alexa.
As Lois mentioned in the comments, thank you so much to all the commenters, especially the “congregation” as Lois called the regulars. I won’t name them all because I’m sure to leave an important one out.
Traffic rankings for APP.com, the Asbury Park Press’s website are down 25% in the month since the Gannett owned media outlet started charging for reading content on its website, according to the web information company, Alexa.
Unlike the major local news outlet, Patch seems to be taking its duty to inform the public about its most important civic duty….voting….seriously.
Middletown Patch and Red Bank Patch both published Election Guides last week, listing the Municipal, County, Congressional, U.S. Senate and Presidential candidates who will be on the general election ballot in November.
The Patch editors only made one error and one categorical omission. They listed the 12th congressional district as including part of Monmouth County which it no longer does. New Jersey’s congressional district lines were redrawn in January as a result of the 2010 U.S. Census. Monmouth County is now divided between the 4th congressional district, represented by Congressman Chris Smith-R and the 6th congressional district, represented by Congressman Frank Pallone.
The 2012-2021 New Jersey Congressional Map can be found here, courtesy of our friends at Save Jersey.
Patch neglected to report that most New Jersey communities will elect their Board of Education members in November, for the first time this year.
MMM salutes Patch for bringing elections to their readers attention and encourages them to continue to do so. The error and omission were easy mistakes to make, as both changes are recent and information about them not easy to find if you’re not a regular reader of a publication that focuses on politics and government.
Michael Riley, a Baptist minister and member of The Asbury Park Press editorial board says “Jesus was a card-carrying socialist” in his Only Human column in today’s print edition. The column is not yet on the app’s web site.
Someone better inform Barack Obama who insists that he is a Christian, that he is not a socialist, and that he was born in Hawaii.
But Riley is not writing for Obama. He’s writing to Republicans:
“I hate to break it to the far-right wing in this country (or as it is more commonly called these days, the Republican Party), but Jesus was a car-carrying socialist. Or, he would have been, if cards had been invented, and if pockets to carry the card had been around and if the word socialism had made it into the language in the first century.
I have no doubt about it.”
I have doubts about what Riley understands about Jesus, government and freedom. That there will be a slew of cancelled subscriptions to The Press as a result of Riley’s column, I have no doubt.
The first thing that struck me about Riley’s column is that he is talking about Jesus in the past tense. Even a Jesuit trained lapsed Catholic like me believes in a Living God. Why is this Baptist minister telling The Press’s remaining readers that Jesus is dead? Didn’t we just celebrate His resurrection two weeks ago?
Riley paraphrases the Gospel of Luke and Karl Marx to make his case.
“One thing you lack,” Riley quotes Luke quoting Jesus talking to the rich, “go and sell all you possess and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”
“But Jesus was a conservative compared to those who followed him,” Riley continues in the past tense again, “In the book of Acts, we read, ‘All the believers were together and had everything in common, They sold property and possession to give to anyone who had need.’
No one claimed that any of their possession were their own; they shared everything they had.
That is right out of the Marxist playbook: ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his need.’ And woe to anyone who tried to wiggle out of the deal.”
Without getting all theological and politically scientific on Michael, the Nudnik of Neptune, let me just point out two key words from his paraphrase of Luke paraphrasing Jesus that hopefully will set him straight:
Sell and Give. Both involve a concept that is fundamental to Christianity and foreign to Marxism: Choice.
Never mind that Christians believe that God created Man (and Woman) and that Marxists believe than Man created God. Let’s look at selling and giving.
In order for Jesus’s followers to sell all of their possessions, they first had to have them. Hmmm, how would that happen in a Marxist socialist society?
In order for the rich to give to the poor, someone would have to buy those possessions. More than likely someone else who was rich.
While Riley starts his column with no doubt that the dead Jesus was a socialist, he seems to have some doubt as he concludes:
Obviously, human sin makes this kind of socialistic/communist economic system unworkable over the long haul and in large groups. But capitalism is a sinner’s banquet as well, full of abuse and greed and loopholes that turn into nooses for the poor.
The point here is that socialism is not necessarily a dirty word. It seems to be sort of what God was hoping for as a model for his people. So let’s not get all high and mighty about using it as an epithet.
How about we do get high and mighty about Liberty, Choice, Charity and Responsibility.
How about the preachers and ministers do their jobs and spread The Word and convert the sinners so that capitalism, the only system that has ever worked and creates genuine sharing and empowerment as opposed to the compelled sharing and mediocrity of Marxism, can work better for the rich and the poor.
Riley’s heart might be in the right place, but his head is a dark place.
The Star Ledger’s Tom Moran is back to his old tricks of using the race card while attempting to advance his political agenda.
In early 2010, shortly after Governor Chris Christie took office, Moran tried to derail the Christie administration by teaming up with Assembly Speaker Shelia Oliver to call Christie and his team “…white men, most of them political neophytes…” who never rode a bus and couldn’t understand how their deeply their economic policies were impacting “working poor families.”
Moran did that before he realized that Christie is a “force of nature who could probably make a dog sing if he put his mind to it.”
In a column posted on Tuesday that defends the President’s constitutional pronouncements about the Supreme Court’s right to overturn ObamaCare Moran employed Jeanane Garofalo’s tactic of accusing Obama’s critics of being racist.
Because Moran is smarter and prettier, his accusation is sublter than Garofalo’s crude remarks, yet it is no less offensive:
Obama went on to make an important point: That if the court overrules the health care law, it will be practicing judicial activism. Conservatives have been complaining about judicial activism since the Supreme Court struck down Jim Crow segregation laws in the South, and the heat rose considerably after Roe v. Wade.
Maybe fellow Star Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine can explain the difference between judicial activistism and constructionism to Moran.
Activistism is when a Court finds, invents or redefines a constitutional provision in order to make new law that is consistent with its political or ideological preference. That is what the U.S. Supreme Court did in Roe v Wade and what the NJ Supreme Court did in the Abbott decisions.
Constructionism is what a court does when it decides that the legislative or executive branches exceeded the power granted to them in the Constitution, like mandating people buy something they don’t want.
Moran, like Obama, probably knows the difference. Also like Obama, he probably just doesn’t think the Constitution is that important. That’s OK for Moran who hasn’t sworn to protect and defend the Constitution. It’s not OK for the President who has sworn that oath.
The race card worked well for liberals in 2008. The invoked it successfully to mute Obama’s poltical opponents in the Democratic primary and during the general election. They appealed to ‘white guilt” to get Obama elected. It was a disgusting and effective strategy.
But the race card is played out. It didn’t work in the politicization of the Trayvon Martin tragedy. It didn’t work when Garofalo played it. It didn’t work in 2010.
Moran should stop playing the race card. Conservative opposition to ObamaCare has nothing to do with the Jim Crow laws, just as Governor Christie’s economic policies have nothing to do with how many of his cabinet members and staffers have ever ridden a bus.
Moran’s job is the inform, educate and persuade. He should leave the obfuscation to politicians, activists and B-rate entertainers looking for their next gig.
triCityNews publishers Dan Jacobson has launched a hyper-local news site, The Asbury Park Sun, which will cover local events in Asbury Park, Allenhurst, Interlaken, Loch Arbour, Ocean Grove and Wanamassa.
Molly Mulshine, the very talented Stimulus Girl, has signed on as the site’s editor.
MMM welcomes our friends to Al Gore’s greatest invention and is pleased to be the first to get them listed on google.
The Asbury Park Press editorial board is doing such a good job covering Monmouth and Ocean Counties that they’ve decided to expand their coverage north to Essex County.
Newark Mayor Cory Booker had a sit down with the APP editorial board yesterday. It was a nice interview judging from the write-up; Booker agrees with Governor Christie’s proposed public education reforms. He disagrees with Christie’s restructuring of higher education. He differs with Christie on gay marriage and diet. He thinks the Governor is a good guy. As is usually the case, no news was broken by The Asbury Park Press.
Gannett’s Middlesex/Somerset publication ran the same article and included a video on MyCentralJersey.com
This from Central Jersey’s supposed major news source that didn’t know that a new Monmouth County freeholder was elected in January until they read about it here and on Patch.com.
Monmouth County had 53 mayors. Ocean County has 33. Has the editorial board ever sat down with one of them?
Gannett is apparently surrendering the local news market to the Patches. Maybe as they change their business model they plan to merge all of the New Jersey publications and and put out a statewide edition of USA Today. To bad for them that NJTV already took the name NJ Today.
