Ocean County GOP Chairman Geroge Gilmore is among a handful of connected lobbyists hired by AshBrit, the Florida company that won the sole state contract for Superstorm Sandy clean up, who was making sales calls to municipal officials looking for lucrative non-bid clean up work after then storm, according to an article in The Star Ledger this morning.
MMM was the first to report that former Corzine staffer Maggie Moran and her firm, M Public Affairs, was selling AshBrit’s premium priced services to Sandy ravaged municipalities. The Ledger report expands the list of lobbyists working for AshBrit in New Jersey to Gilmore, former Corzine cabinet member Kris Kullari, and former Assembly Republican director Jon Bombardieri.
AshBrit has been widely praised for the quality of the clean up work it hired subcontractors to perform. Their no-bid pricing is the issue. AshBrit charged $100 per ton for debris removal. Towns that didn’t hire AshBrit got the work done for $26 per ton.
“If this isn’t a classic example of how everything is connected in New Jersey politics, I don’t know what is,” said state Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen), who was Corzine’s running mate in 2009 when Moran managed his re-election campaign.
MMM is generally not a fan of Weinberg, but we are with her on this issue. Excess profits paid to AshBrit for making phone calls and signing contracts could have been used to rebuild infrastructure, house the displaced, etc, or not borrowed from China in the first place.
Embattled U.S. Senator Bob Menendez reimbursed his friend and campaign contributor, West Palm Beach eye doctor Salomon Melgen $58,500 for two flights to the Dominican Republic on Melgen’s private jet almost three years after the flights took place, according to reports in The Star Ledger and The Daily Caller.
Menendez’s spokesman Paul Brubaker told the Ledger that the senator, prompted by the ethics complaint filed by NJ State Senator Sam Thompson last November, reviewed his travel and discovered that he should have paid Melgen for an August 2010 flight between Florida and the Dominican Republic and a September 2010 flight from Teterboro to the DR. Menendez paid Melgen $58,500 for the flights on January 4, 2013.
Menendez’s chief of staff, Dan O’Brien told NBC News that the over two year gap in paying for the flights was an office mistake, according to Daily Caller.
“This was sloppy,” O’Brien conceded about two 2010 flights. “I’m chalking it up to an oversight.”
No one has reported what, if anything, Menendez reimbursed Melgen for his food, lodging and party favors on the trips. Senate rules prohibited members from accepting gifts valued at more the $250 without prior permission from the ethics committee. We’d call Brubaker, but he stopped returning our calls last summer during the senator’s campaign.
Menendez finally denied he had sex with prostitutes while in the Dominican Republic, saying the charges were manufactured by a right-wing blog. Presumably he’s referring to Daily Caller.
FoxNews reported last night that Menendez cleared his Washington schedule yesterday. He cancelled a meeting with Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew and skipped John Kerry’s fare well speech on the Senate floor.
On the home front however, it was politics as usual for Menendez. Yesterday afternoon he sent out a fundraising email asking his supporters to thank Hillary Clinton for her years of service.
This morning, The Star Ledger announced that they are laying off 34 people, including 10% of the newsroom.
In a poll published on January 8, Monmouth University’s Patrick Murray said that since 2005 newspapers as the primary source of news has decline from 48% to 27% among New Jerseyans. The shift has favored the interent where 28% now get their news, up from 6% in 2005. Television as a news source has also declined since 05, according to Murray. 48% got most of their news from TV in 05. Now 34%, still the highest percentage, are informed by television.
There is not much good news for the industry looking forward, according to Murray’s report. 45% of 18-34 year olds now look to the net as their primary news source, up from 33% in 2009.
United States Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson announced her resignation yesterday. Jackson was Governor Jon Corzine’s Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner and briefly his chief of staff before joining the Obama Administration.
The Asbury Park Press’s coverage of Jackson’s resignation is more glowing than an obituary. Both the APP and the Star Ledger used the news to fuel speculation that Jackson could be a candidate for governor of New Jersey or the next president of Princeton University.
Neither of New Jersey’s two largest media outlets bothered to mention the recent scandal surrounding Jackson.
Jackson is being investigated by at least two congressional committees and her own agency’s inspector general. The Justice Department just agreed, as the result of a law suit filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to release 12,000 emails from an alias account that Jackson used to conduct the government’s business under the name “Richard Winslow.”
Even anti-corruption crusader and champion of transparency, Bob Ingle, co-author of The Soprano State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption, failed to mention Jackson’s use of an email alias while conducting the government’s business as a cabinet level official of the Obama Administration.
However, the far left wing website, Gawker, followed Daily Caller’s story with a report from “someone who was unfortunate enough to live in the unit below Menendez’s Washington, DC apartment,” who said “he would bring home a different young, attractive lady almost every night, put on a little jazz, and f**k loudly until 3 a.m.”
It could be a week or more until New Jersey’s votes are tallied due to the huge increase in provisional ballots cast both at the polls and via the email/fax voting system that Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno announced this week to accommodate voters displaced by Hurricane Sandy.
is reporting that the vote by fax or email allowance has resulting in mass confusion and fear that thousands of votes will not be counted. Guadagno extended the deadline to apply for a ballot until 5PM today and the deadline for the ballot to be received until 8PM on Friday.
Thousands of voters are complaining that their emails applying for ballots are bouncing back from full email boxes and that phone numbers are busy or going unanswered.
In addition to the email/fax voting problems, polling places are accepting provisional ballots from displaced voters and from out of state law enforcement/recuse workers who have traveled to New Jersey to assist in the recovery efforts. Each of those provisional ballots will have to be manually verified before being counted.
Ballots cast by early voters at county election offices throughout the state will have to be checked to be sure that those who took advantage of the early voting privilege did not also go to the polls to vote.
In Middletown, approximately half the the voting districts voted exclusively by paper ballots due to a voting machine programing errors, primarily in the 6th congressional district portion of the Township, according to Mayor Tony Fiore. “Epic Fail on the part of whoever was in charge of those voting machines,” Fiore said, “the county only provided us with about 50 paper ballots. We reproduced ballots on our own at a secure location.”
There is record turnout at the polls in Asbury Park and Long Branch, according to a Democratic source.
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.”
Over at NJ.comStar Ledger columnist John Farmer tells a tale of a dinner party he attended where he asked his fellow Caucasian guests (and hosts presumably) if they believe President Obama was born outside of the United States and if they believe he is a Muslim. Most of the guest at the party that took place in a “pretty typical” “slightly upper-middle class neighborhood” admitted to believing that Obama is a foreign born Muslim, so said Farmer in the piece, After nearly four years of Barack Obama, is white America still uneasy with a black man in the White House? Most of the commenters at NJ.com think the column is fiction.
How could Obama even have become president if white America was uneasy with a black man in the White House?
After four years, more Americans of all races are uneasy with that particular black man in the White House! Herman Cain or Allen West would not make me uneasy. Condoleeza Rice wouldn’t make me uneasy. Colin Powell’s uneasiness makes me uneasy, not his skin color.
Farmer’s column is likely the an early indication of how the race card will be played by the left stream media in conjunction with the Obama campaign over the next four + plus months.
What will happen is “white guilt” isn’t working according to polling data come October? What will the lefties do if Mitt Romney chooses a black running mate?
Ocean County GOP Chairman Geroge Gilmore is among a handful of connected lobbyists hired by AshBrit, the Florida company that won the sole state contract for Superstorm Sandy clean up, who was making sales calls to municipal officials looking for lucrative non-bid clean up work after then storm, according to an article in The Star Ledger this morning.
, failed to mention Jackson’s use of an email alias while conducting the government’s business as a cabinet level official of the Obama Administration.