Jersey Style Appointments and Hearings

Monmouth County Prosecutor Peter E. Warshaw, Jr was nominated by Governor Chris Christie to become a Superior Court Judge on June 14.  The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold his confirmation hearing today.  He is likely to be confirmed by the full Senate before the end of the week, ending his 18 month tenure as county prosecutor.

First Assistant Prosecutor Christopher Gramiccioni is expected to be nominated to replace Warshaw as the chief prosecutor in Monmouth County.  Word in the legal community is that Gramiccioni, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney under Christie, was the governor’s first choice to become Monmouth County Prosecutor in 2010 but that he was 18 months short of the residency requirements.

Former Monmouth County Sheriff Joe Oxley, also former Monmouth GOP Chairman, was nominated to the Court on May 14. Oxley’s confirmation has yet to be scheduled by the Democratically controlled Judiciary Committee, due in part to a Star Ledger report that federal informant Soloman Dwek accused Oxley, Senator Joe Kyrillos and Assemblywoman Amy Handlin of trading favors for campaign contributions.  

Dwek’s allegations were revealed in discovery documents in the civil case of former Hudson County Assemblyman Louis Manzo who unsuccessly sued the U.S. Attorney’s office to recover $100K in legal fees that resulted Manzo’s 2009 Operation Bid Rig indictments. Manzo was accused under the Hobbs Act of accepting bribes from Dwek in exchange for future help in zoning and permit applications should Manzo be elected Jersey City Mayor.  Manzo was running for Mayor for the fifth time when the alleged bribe occurred.  Federal Judge Jose Linares threw out the charges on the basis that the Hobbs Act applied only to elected officials, not candidates.  The Appellate Court affirmed Linares’ ruling.

The discovery documents in Manzo’s civil case miraculously found their way to the Star Ledger in what Kyrillos called an “oppo (opposition research) dump” by U. S. Senator Robert Menedez’s reelection campaign.  Kyrillos is the GOP nominee to unseat Menendez and a minority member of the State Senate Judiciary Committee which reviews judicial nominations.

Expect the Judiciary Committee to schedule Oxley’s confirmation hearing in September or October as the general election campaign is heating up.  Democratic Senator Ray Lesniak has called for Dwek, who is in federal prison, to testify at Oxley’s hearing.  That would put Kyrillos, as a member of the committee and also accused by Dwek of trading favors for contributions, in a hot seat at the height of the U.S. Senate campaign.

In another potential twist in this tangled web, Gramiccioni was one of the federal prosecutors working on the Bid Rig investigations, including Manzo’s, according to Bob Ingle and Michael Symons in Chris Christie: The Inside Story Of His Rise To Power (page 90).  Should Gramiccioni be nominated Monmouth County Prosecutor, as expected, his nomination will also be subject to a Judiciary Committee hearing.

Gramiccioni’s wife, Deborah, is Governor Christie’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Cabinet Liason.

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Republicans could be in for a long summer

In Chris Christie:The Inside Story of His Rise to Power, authors Bob Ingle and Michael Symons describe U.S. Attorney Christie’s reluctance to use Solomon Dwek as informant during the Operation Bid Rig investigation in 2006.  “Do I really want to get in bed with this guy?” Christie is described as asking his deputies who were pushing for approval to make Dwek an informant. 

Ironically given how Democrats and defendants have argued that the July 2009 arrests based on Dwek’s sting were politically motivated to help Christie, the Deputy U.S. Attorneys advocating the sting argued to Christie that he would have been acting politically if he did not approve Dwek’s cooperation.

If this Star Ledger article by Matt Friedman is an indication of charades to come this summer, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee will make Joe Oxley’s confirmation hearing for his Superior Court Judgeship nomination a payback for the unceremonious end to former House Speaker, Senator and Commissioner of Community Affairs Joe Doria’s career when he his home was raided during the July 2009 federal operation. 

Doria has been cleared of any wrongdoing.  He has a letter from the U.S. Attorney, just like John Bennett does, but his career in public service is over.   Maybe Doria can become Chairman of the Hudson County Democrats some day.

U.S. Senate nominee Joe Kryillos is in the Democrats sites as well.  Dwek is the ammunition.

Democratic State Chairman John Wisniewski Tuesday issued a list of questions for Kyrillos, including how often he met with Dwek, what was discussed, who else was in attendance and whether he was ever contacted by law enforcement about it. “If you deny this and suggest Dwek is lying, does that raise the possibility with you that Dwek’s testimony that convicted others should be questioned?” Wisniewski wrote.

Kyrillos campaign spokesman Chapin Fay did not directly respond to Wisniewski, instead repeating that Kyrillos did nothing to help Dwek.

During the trial of Ridgefield Mayor Anthony Suarez it was revealed that among the diobalical schemes Dwek deployed in the 14 years leading to his 2006 arrest was a life insurance scam.  Dwek paid the life insurance premiums of people close to death who could not afford to keep their policies.  Upon the death of the insured, Dwek would give the deceased’s family 10% of the policy proceeds and pocket the rest.

Dwek’s father tried to get Soloman a pardon from President George W. Bush.  Maybe President Obama will pardon Dwek if he helps knock Chris Christie down a notch and helps keep Bob Menendez in the Senate.

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Asbury Park Press Laments Lack Of Competitive Primaries Yet Fail To Do Their Part

Yesterday the Neptune Nudniks ran an editorial lamenting the lack of competition in the primaries.

This morning The Star Ledger reported that there are five candidates seeking the two major party nominations for U.S. Senate, 44 candidates for 13  congressional seats (they should have said 12 seats or 24 nominations) and 8 candidates for three special election primaries for State Assembly.

There are two GOP primary races in The Asbury Park Press’s coverage area.  The CD-6 race between Monmouth GOP candidate Ernesto Cullari and Middlesex GOP candidate Anna Little, and the CD-4 race between incumbent Congressman Chris Smith and Terrence McGowan of Howell.

A search for “Anna Little” reveals that the former Highlands mayor’s name has not appeared on the site since February. “Ernesto Cullari” produced no results in a search of the site.   On May 14 a letter to the editor in support of McGowan in CD-4 was published.  Nothing else.  Congressman Smith has made international headlines recently for his work to secure Chen Guangcheng’s release from China.  Yet the APP is interested only in what Smith is doing for Lakewood’s schools, an issue that Smith’s office has no authority over.  APP.com also reported that a 71 year old Manchester woman drove her car into the side of Smith’s Whiting office last November.

This is not to say that the press should cover every candidate that collects signatures to get on a primary ballot.  Earned media should indeed be earned and so-called “fringe” candidates should be challenged to earn their coverage.  MMM is aware that it could have made the CD-4 race more competitive than the rout it will be with Smith getting over 80% of the vote.  However, McGowan did nothing to earn coverage on MMM.  The first we heard from anybody in the McGowan campaign was last week when we were invited by a reader to a meet and greet a couple of hours before it started.

But there is no excuse for the APP’s lack of coverage of the CD-6 race where the competing candidates each earned the endorsement of a county Republican organization.  That is a story.

One could argue, and the Nudniks do as an excuse for their lack of coverage in their editorial, that the gerrymandered congressional districts make the CD-4 and CD-6 races uncompetitive and the end result of each election is a fait accompli. 

Where were they during the redistricting process?  They ran an editorial lamenting the gerrymandering after fact, but provided little coverage that would have increased public awareness before or during the process.

How do the Nudniks think that voters will get their information about the electorial process?  They are very supportive of pay to play restrictions that make it more difficult for candidates and parties to get their messages out, yet the APP does little to pick up the slack or provide coverage to to the electoral process.

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Star Ledger Editor Tom Moran Calls Conservatives Racist

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.

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Christie’s Supreme Court Nominees Under Scrutiny

The press is vetting Govenor Chris Christie’s nominees to the State Supreme Court.

NJ.com, The Star Ledger’s website, posted an article this morning about the family business of nominee Phillip Kwon. Kwon’s mother owns a  liquor store in Mt. Vernon, NY that made a $160,000 settlement with the New York U.S. Attorney’s office over $2,000,000 in allegedly “structured” cash bank deposits.  “Structuring” is the practice of spreading out cash deposits in order to avoid the $10,000 trigger that requires the bank to report the deposit to the IRS.

There is no evidence or allegation that Kwon had anything to do with the business or the transactions.  There was no admission of liablity in the settlement.

Star Ledger columnist/blogger Paul Mulshine reports that Bruce Harris, the African-American gay Mayor of Chatham that Christie nominatied to the Court along with Kwon this week, wrote an email to state senators, including Joe Pennacchio,  asking that they support the same sex marriage bill that was before the Senate during the lame duck session of 2009.

Harris’s email said, in part (with emphasis added):

The New Jersey Supreme court has determined that our relationship is entitled to the equal protection guarantees of the State Constitution. The New jersey Civil Union Review Commission determined that civil unions do not provide the equality the State Constitution mandates.(Please take a few moments and visit www.gardenstateequality.org. which has two short videos that provide sad examples of the failures of the civil union law.)

Mulshine points out that there is no equal protection clause in the State Constitution.   Mulshine quotes conservative Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll regarding “originalists” interpretations of the State Constitution:

“No originalist can tell me there’s an equal protection clause in the constitution. No originalist can tell me there’s a right to a thorough and efficient education or a right to affordable housing.”

As much as Christie has done, and is attempting to do, to reform New Jersey’s government, there is nothing more important he can do that make sure conservatives, “orignalists,” are seated on the Supreme Court.  The State Supreme Court will be his legacy.

I hope that Christie is not using the same standard that former Governor Christine Todd Whitman used to populate the Court, i.e., appointing friends and senior staffers or making “diversity” appointments for political gain.

The activist State Supreme Court, with the consent of the Legislature and six governors/acting governors, have destroyed New Jersey’s economy over the two decades. 

Governor Christie needs to make sure his nominees have the “right stuff.”   Hopefully Kwon and Harris do. 

Harris said we would recuse himself from cases involving gay marriage.  Now that he is going to be a Justice, if confirmed, he needs to brush up on the State Constitution.

As for Kwon, the news of his mother’s business with the feds is interesting but does not qualify him. 

The question the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the press, should ask, is what does qualify Kwon and Harris.  

Is being the Governor’s long term trusted colleague enough?  Is being Black and gay enough?

Maybe it is.  But similar standards did not serve us well with Whitman’s Court.

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Hot Pants

If all press is good press, then Anna Little’s fledgling U.S. Senate campaign got a boost this morning when  The Star Ledger’s PolitFact gave her claims about Senator Robert Menendez’s spending and borrowing record a “MOSTLY FALSE” rating on the TRUTH-O-METER.

Little avoided the “PANTS ON FIRE” designation the Ledger gives for completely false claims, but earned the newly created Hot Pants designation from MMM.

What is most surprising about this morning’s PolitiFact post is that it has been up at NJ.com for two hours and it doesn’t have any comments from Rullo supporters, yet.

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Why Christie’s Poll Numbers Are Surging

Two credible, independent polls released this week indicate that New Jersey voters strongly approve of Governor Chris Christie.  The Monmouth University Poll gives Christie a 55%-37% rating. Quinnipiac respondents approve by 58% to 38%.  Both polls show women and Independent voters swinging strongly to approve of the Governor.

The narratives of both polls indicate that Christie’s growing popularity is the result of the national attention he has received due to his dalliance with the GOP presidential nomination race.  Neither poll ask respondents about Christie’s handling of Hurricane Irene.

While Irene might be a distant memory for pollsters and pundits, many many New Jerseyans are still dealing with the aftermath.

The Star Ledger’s Kathleen O’Brien says that women are warming to Christie because of how he handled Irene. She says Christies’s “Get the hell off of the beach” rebuke won women over because he was protecting the people rather than berating an opponent.

Women and Independents are approving of Christie because of the job he is doing.  The results of his work over the last 20 months are beginning to be felt.   His performance before, during and after Irene was immediate and tangible.  The impact of the reforms he’s fought and cajoled for are gradually paying dividends.

Christie has been traveling the state this week promoting the property tax relief that is resulting from the pension and benefits reform he negotiated in June.  That will help his numbers further.

Christie’s reforms are being appreciated in places where there are no press conferences as well.  

Wednesday evening at  the Henry Hudson Regional High School in Highlands there was a public hearing concerning the proposed tri-district shared services agreement for one Superintendent of Schools for the Atlantic Highlands Elementary, Highlands Elementary and Henry Hudson Regional school districts.  These three districts each have one school.  For decades there have been three superintendents.  Merging the administration of these schools is a no brainer.  Yet prior to the Christie administration, no brainer solutions couldn’t happen.

The vast majority of the speakers at the public hearing in Highlands spoke of how they have been wanting such a no brainer solution for years.  One women said she’s been advocating such since the 1970’s.

Similar reforms are taking place throughout New Jersey.  Common sense solutions that have been talked about for decades to no avail are now beginning to happen.  New Jersey is noticing.

That is why we approve of Chris Christie.  The national attention he has been getting is nice.  We enjoy it because we know him and he is one of us.  But we approve of the job he is doing in New Jersey, not because of the national media and the national GOP loves him.  We approve of him because he is doing what he said he would do.

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Change is inevitable for the post office…..and newspapers

The Neptune Nudniks got one right today. 

In their editorial, Change inevitable for post office, The Asbury Park Press editorial board accurately spells out how the Internet and digital technology has changed the economics of information delivery, making the United States Postal Service obsolete and insolvent.  

The post office is undergoing a major downsizing. Appropriately so because people are just not using it they way we used to.  Electronic exchange of documents and information is just far more efficient than physically moving paper across town or across the country.

The Press concludes that, “we cannot subsidize what should be a self-sustaining entity any more than we could subsidize the buggy whip industry at the turn of the last century.”

That unassailable reasoning should also be applied to the subsidies the newspaper industry receives in the form of state mandated legal and public notices advertising.

Classified advertisings in newspapers has gone the way of the buggy whip industry. It has been replaced by craigslist, ebay, autotrader.com, realtor.com, realtytrac.com, and countless other websites.  The once thick classified sections of newspapers are now four or five pages daily, half of which is government compelled legal and public notices.

Bi-partisan legislation, The Electronic Publication Of Legal Notices Act, passed the State Senate in July of 2010 and the Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee in February of this year.  Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver has blocked the bill from being voted on by the full Assembly.

With millions of dollars in government mandated subsidies at stake, the newspaper industry came out in force to lobby against the bill arguing that legal notices on government websites instead of in newspapers really wouldn’t save the government money, that poor people without computers would not have access to the vital information( do poor people attend foreclosure auctions and zoning board hearings?) and that elected officials could use the power to withhold legal notice advertisements to punish newspapers for unfavorable news coverage.  The newspaper publishers said that their role as unbiased watchdogs would be compromised.

The assertion that newspapers fill the role of unbiased watchdogs is laughable.   Yesterday’s Star Ledger editorial laying out a strategy for Democrats to counter Governor Christie’s effective Town Hall meetings, along with the paper’s slanted “news” coverage of Christie’s meetings eariler in the week is just one recent example of how “newspapers” are just as biased as this or any other blog.

But the publishers’ argument that allowing newspaper advertising and/or Internet advertising on governement websites of Legal Notices gives government officials the power to punish newspapers whose coverage they don’t approve of (or to reward newspapers for coverage they do approve of) has merit.

That potential for abuse could be fixed by amending the Electronic Publication Of Legal Notices Act to require that legal notices be published only on government websites.  Reasonable fees for ads that are now paid to newspapers by planning and zoning applicants, foreclosing lenders and other private interests that are compelled to advertise could be collected by the municipalities to offset the cost of maintaining their websites and as a new source of much needed revenue.

The rest of New Jersey’s traditional media should embrace The Asbury Park Press’s outstanding reasoning, as it applies to the post office, and apply it to themselves in the interests of the public good. They should let Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver off the hook and suggest she post The Electronic Publication Of Legal Notices Act for a vote before the full Assembly where their friends in the chamber should amend the bill to prohibit governments from spending taxpayers dollars on legal notice advertising and eliminate the requirement that private interests pay to advertise anywhere other than on a government website.

Of course, the 1st amendment would allow the newspapers to continue publishing the notices, as a public service, or as a private sector revenue driven profit center.

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Diversify The Media

UPDATE:

Star Ledger reporter Ginger Gibson, a member of the Statehouse press corps tell me she is Mexican:

 I saw your piece about the diversity of the press corps. I just wanted to let you know, I’m Mexican. So it’s not all white guys in the press corps, there are some minorities. Just wanted to make sure you knew that.

I never would have guessed that, given Gibson’s fair skin and last name.  Another lesson about assumptions.

Yet the point of my piece still stands.  The press corps is far from 40% minority, and the Ledger editorial board is still FOS.

On Saturday The Star Ledger published an editorial calling on Governor Chris Christie to appoint minorities to the State Supreme Court.

The Ledger is lamenting the fact that since Christie took office both minorities who were on the court, Justice John Wallace and Justice Roberto Rivera-Sota,  have left the bench.  For the first time in twenty years there are no minorities on the court. “And yet more than 40 percent of the state’s population is black, Hispanic, or Asian.”

The Ledger took the diversity theme a bit further this morning with an article that sites a Star Ledger analysis which concludes Governor Christie is favoring white middle class senior citizens in selecting communities to host his Town Hall meetings.

This got me thinking about the diversity of the New Jersey Media.  Is the New Jersey press corp comprised of 40% of African Americans, Hispanics and Asians?   Not even close.

From my experience, without doing an extensive MMM analysis like the Ledger did of Christie’s Town Halls, journalism may be the least diverse industry in New Jersey.

The State House press corp?  Overwhelmingly white. 

NJ.com, The Star Ledger’s website?  Only one African American columnist who writes almost exclusively about Newark. 

Giving credit where it is due, Gannett’s papers have a diverse group of reporters, on the local levels.  They have an African American Executive Editor, Hollis Towns, at The Asbury ParkPress.  Their Statehouse Buerau?  Five white guys.  They would be wise to make Jane Roh part of that team.

News12 has a diverse staff. 

So what is with the progressives at The Star Ledger?  Should they be telling the Governor to take the speck out of his eye while they have a log in their own?

Are the folks at The Ledger hypocrites or has Gannett scooped up all the good minority writers?

I don’t know for sure, but I tend to think they’re full of poop.  They’re attempting to set the agenda for Christie’s Supreme Court appointments by using the race card.  As part of the vast progressive conspiracy, the Ledger likes an activist court that requires billions of dollars to be flushed into urban schools that produce morally unacceptable results in educating minority children.   If they can convince the public that race should be a criteria for selecting a Supreme Court Justice, rather than scholarship, judicial temperment and a philosphical committement to interpreting law, rather than writing it from the bench, The Ledger figures they can thrwart Governor Christie from “turning Trenton upside down” anymore than he already has.

The Legislature is very likely to remain in Democratic control after the coming election, which limits severely the reforms Governor Christie can make over the rest of his term.  Given the legislative map, a second Christie term will most likely also have a Democratic legislature.    That he will have the responsiblity to appoint the majority of the court in his first term, to reshape the court as he promised, will result in the real legacy of the Christie administration.

The Star Ledger’s lip service for diversity is nothing more then getting ready for that coming political battle.

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SLedger Defends Naked Freeholder

By Art Gallagher

The Star Ledger Editorial Board says the blogger who published the nude photos that former Freeholder Louis Magazzu emailed to a mystery woman he never met is a cyber-bully.

Magazzu was a Cumberland County Freeholder, former Freeholder Director and former Chairman of the Cumberland County Democratic Party.  He resigned under pressure from other Democratic party leaders when his Weineresque photos became public.

The blogger who took Magazzu down, Carl Johnson, admits his problem with the power broker was personal.  Johnson says Magazzu used the power of his positions to attempt to silence his political criticism and make his life miserable including having him arrested for failing to pay child support.

Yet Magazzu’s demise was not a political assassination, as the SLedger states.  It was a political suicide.

Magazzu’s photos weren’t taken by someone else in a setting where he might expect privacy.  He took the photos himself, just as former Congressmen Christopher Lee and Anthony Weiner took photos of themselves.  Like the congressmen, Magazzu voluntarily transmitted the photos to a stranger.   That was stupid. 

The SLedger laments the pre-Internet days when the media elite were the gatekeepers of what the public learned about its elected officials:

Photos and racy e-mails that Magazzu sent to a mysterious woman over the internet — a woman who has yet to appear, but who both sides believe exists — were refused by several local newspapers on the grounds they weren’t news. They were evidence of Magazzu’s private relationship. And deserved to be private.

If the photos weren’t news, i.e. of interest to the public, no one would have paid attention to them and Magazzu would still be in office.  The photos were not of Magazzu gardening, fishing or playing golf. They were photos he took of himself, nude, in a bedroom and a bathroom.  They weren’t evidence of a private relationship. He sent the photos himself to a stranger, a “mystery woman.”   If the photos were evidence of a private relationship, Magazzu would have shared them with someone who would have kept them private.

With the possible exception of President Priss, the media elite are no longer the arbiters of what the public knows about it’s public figures.  Long gone are the days when the electorate doesn’t know they have a president with polio or one that philanders with movie stars. Long gone are the days that an Assemblyman collecting a police disability pension can be physically fit and the public won’t know about it.  Long gone are the days that any public figure can share nude photos of themselves with strangers and expect that the public won’t learn about.

The public rightfully doesn’t trust the media elite to decide what is relevant because the media elite is often driven by its own bias as to what is news and what isn’t news.  My bias tells me that the Sledger editorial board would have a very different take on this story if a high ranking member of the Christie administration, a Republican Freeholder from any county or a Republican member of the legislature had been involved, rather than a Democratic power broker.

The Sledger contributes to the demise of its own influence by taking a hyperbolic leap in lamenting the power of the blogosphere:

We’ve created a whole new class of political assassins, and any target is now fair game — not just the biggest-name politicians anymore. Tabloid stalking has trickled down to the next-door neighbor level. Any small town sex scandal can be international news.

Really?  Did I miss something?  I ran “next door neighbor small town sex scandal” through google news.  The only “news” there was the Sledger editorial. 

The hyperbole continues in the Sledger’s conclusion:

Political figure or not, blogging these photos amounts to cyber-bullying. Attacking your opponent on legitimate political or legal grounds is one thing. But publicizing his private life to destroy his reputation crosses the line into virtual stalking.

I don’t buy it.  Magazzu wasn’t stalked, virtually or otherwise. He took the photos himself and pushed the send button himself.   Cyber-bullying a Freeholder and former County Chairman?  Please!

We’ll have to wait until the next time a Republican does something stupid in his/her “private” life to see if the Sledger really means what it says and lives up to its own standards.

In the meantime, public figures of both parties and from all walks of life should refrain from sending nude photos of themselves to anyone and should be careful about everything they do when cameras are present, which is pretty much anytime they are anywhere in public.

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