Lonegan Takes The Offensive

“I have a handicap, you know.   I’m a white guy, running in the State of New Jersey.  That’s my handicap. “

“I took down an inappropriate, silly tweet after 20 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes.  5 months later, Anti-Semitic, hate filled videos are still posted on Cory Booker’s website. Where’s the race card now? Where’s the media now? “Where’s the liberal left now in defending us against this kind of hate filled Anti-Semitism?”

~Steve Lonegan

Former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, the front runner in the August 13 Republican primary for the nomination to replace the late U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg,  held a press conference in Kinnelon yesterday afternoon to address the reaction to the tweet(pictured to the right) posted by his campaign on Thursday night during the Democratic Senate Debate.

Lonegan billed the event as a “press conference on political correctness” but the tweet and his opponents “pulling the race card” was the topic.  In classic Lonegan fashion, the candidate confronted the problem and flipped the criticism back on his opponents.  In this case, his opponents being Booker, who is expected to win the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, the “liberal media” and Dr. Alieta Eck, his opponent for the Republican nomination.

Lonegan said the tweet, which was removed quickly, was posted by a young staffer who remains employed by the campaign. “He made a mistake. I’m not going to ruin his career by firing him.  I don’t do that. I will help him learn from it,” Lonegan said.

“Racism, racism, racism. They can’t wait to play the racist card,” Lonegan said of the Booker campaign and the media, “They couldn’t wait for the opportunity, any opportunity at all, a silly map, which is meaningless, sent out by some kid in a campaign, that had no intent other than to ah, whatever the intent was, I don’t even know what the intent was. But they can’t wait to pull the race card. Cause that’s how they play politics.

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At Montclair State, you can call someone racist, but you can’t call someone fat

By Art Gallagher

Last September Steve Lonegan addressed a group at Montclair State University.  During his presentation, a fat guy asked Lonegan about his famous 2006 billboard controversy.  In case you forgot, Lonegan gained widespread press coverage in 06 for asking McDonalds to remove a billboard written in Spanish from a Bogota roadside.  Lonegan was mayor of Bogota at the time.

The fat Montclair State student proceeded to heckle Lonegan, calling him a racist and a shameful American fascist.  Fatboy was escorted from the meeting after he refused to shut up.  The incident was captured on video and posted to youtube where as of this writing it has only 510 views. (UPDATE: The fatboy youtube has been set to private)

Evidently fatboy has a fat girl friend. It’s not clear from the video who the girlfriend is, but Joseph Aziz, a graduate student at Montclair got himself into hot water for posting a comment on Youtube that the woman’s legs look like “a pair of bleached hams.”   Someone complained to the university administration, according to a surviving reporter at the Star Ledger,  They forbade Aziz from having any contact with the fatgirl or from posting her name anywhere on the Internet.  MoreMonmouthMusings was going to ask Lonegan if the girl was really fat, but we figured he wouldn’t know.

Aziz later joked about the incident and the fat girl in a facebook group.  He said he thought the facebook group was private.  Someone sent Aziz’s comments to the Montclair University Internet Police and Aziz was suspended from the university for a year.   Karen Pennington, Montclair’s vice president of student development, campus life and manners, cited New Jersery’s Anti-Bullying Law as justification for Aziz’s suspension and for denying his appeal of the suspension.  Aziz says the suspension puts his future career as a microbiologists at risk.

MMM has been told that the fatboy who called Lonegan a racist and a shameful American facist while disrupting the event received no disciplinary consequences from the Montclair State administration.

Neither fatboy nor Aziz should have been disciplined by the University.  Their friends and families should tell them they were being assholes. The only fascists in this sordid story are the administrators at Montclair who are abusing their power to forward a polictical agenda.

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Menendez puts personal and political interests before national interests

While most of the media is justifiably covering the events in Libya and Egypt today, I thought I’d bring some attention to a foreign policy issue in the Middle East that has been going on for two years involving our junior New Jersey U.S. Senator Bob Menendez that has escaped the attention of the New Jersey media.

MMM readers may remember how Menendez blocked U.S. Magistrate Patty Shwartz’s nomination to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals because her boyfriend was the lead prosecutor who investigated the senator in 2006.

It came to our attention today, via the president of Azerbaijan, that Menendez has been similarly abusing his senatorial courtesy power in the domain of foreign affairs.

Yesterday, President Ilhan Aliyev said that Menendez is racist and that he is cooperating with a political adversary of Aliyev’s on behalf of the Armenian lobby in his country.

His compatriot Breivik killed about 80 people and he was sentenced to 21 year imprisonment. And it means that he got 3 month of imprisonment for each people.Is that possible? Why does he keep silence about this? Or there is one pro-Armenian Senator Menendez and he is against Azerbaijan and Islam. His last work was that he was not allowed to extend the term of the former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan and to prevent his nomination for two reasons. The first reason is that the US ambassador does not recognize the so-called “Armenian genocide”. And he should not recognize as the U.S. government does not recognize this “genocide”.

The second reason is that the ambassador’s wife is of Turkish origin. It is racism. However, I want to stress that no one can affect my will, opinion, action, and have never affected.’

The ambassador that Aliyev is talking about is Matthew Bryza.

President Obama nominated the career diplomat Bryza to be the ambassador to Azerbaijan, an oil rich former Soviet state which is a rare constitutional secular republic with a predominantly Muslim population, in 2010.  Menendez and California Senator Barbara Boxer put a hold on the nomination because, The Washington Post Editorial Page Editor says, of the senators ties to (and donations from) the Armenian community. 

Azerbaijan and Armenia are long term geopolitical and cultural rivals.

Despite Bryza’s strong endorsement from the elite of the diplomatic community, Menendez held out his judgement as superior to that distinguished bipartisan group and that of Obama, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post.

Obama made Bryza a recess appointment.  Menendez continued to oppose his nomination and Bryza’s diplomatic career came to an end this past January.  Because Bob Menendez and Barbara Boxer get political donations and support from Armenians, a talented ambassador to an important Middle Eastern country was sent home.

MMM knows little about the Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict.   We highly doubt it will be an issue in the campaign between Menendez and GOP nominee State Senator Joe Kyrillos, as Kyrillos has exceptionally close ties to the Armenian community. Joe’s wife Susan is of Armenian descent.  The conflicts between the two countries and cultures is not the point.

The point is that Menendez has a pattern of abusing his power for his own personal and political interests, to the detriment of our national interests.

New Jersey’s mainstream media has not covered the Menendez/Bryza disgrace.  Yesterday the President of Azerbaijan gave them a reason to cover it.  When the head of state of a foreign country calls a U.S. Senator a racist, that should be news.  MMM is happy to point the story out to our mainstream media friends, just in case they missed it with all the other pressing foreign affairs news.

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Don’t let up on demanding fiscal accountability in cities

Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon called for fiscal accountability in Newark this week.  You wouldn’t have known that unless you read The Star Ledger.   The Asbury Park Press, the newspaper/pay site that covers O’Scanlon’s Monmouth County district missed it.

At issue is the $24 million in state aid that Newark is “due” this year, after the state taxpayers kicked in $32 million to Newark’s budget last year, in the face of blatant waste on the part of Mayor Cory Booker and the city council.

Booker squandered $3.7 million in legal and consulting fees in a fight with the New Jersey Devils hockey team over revenue sharing.  Booker lost the fight, which even The Star Ledger says was a waste and should have been settled, and vowed to spend more—O’Scanlon says $1 million more, The Ledger says $100 thousand more—in appealing the ruling that favored The Devils.  As the ruling stands, Newark owes the Devils $600 thousand.

Newark’s city council is disgrace.  A “gaggle of blowhards,” Ledger editor Tom Moran calls them, who “awards itself the highest salaries in the state, along with a free car.”   Newark’s city council is paid six times more than Jersey City’s city council, according to Moran.  $3.45 million in salaries paid to the Newark city council in 2011.

Also at issue is that the overpaid council has yet to pass their budget that was due in February.  Yet, they want the $24 million from Jersey taxpayers.

According to The Ledger, O’Scanlon said, 

“Cory Booker is fighting an expensive personal vendetta with one hand while he has the other hand out expecting state aid”

and

“As the ranking Republican member of the Assembly Budget Committee, I cannot, in good conscience, imagine handing Newark another $24 million when the mayor is continuing to rack up legal fees and costs for litigation that could have been settled months ago,” O’Scanlon said. “The state should not be in the habit of bailing out towns and cities that are unwilling to help themselves.”

Moran, The Ledger’s editorial page editor, responded to O’Scanlon’s rebuke of Booker, with a racially charged column under his own byline, From a perch in the suburbs, a cheap shot at cities.

As if $24 million, or $32 million, or $3.7 million or $3.45 million is cheap.

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