New jersey

The votes are in – and they’ve shattered any illusion that New Jersey is a swing state. The Democratic Party will hold onto the New Jersey governorship, with governor-elect Mikie Sherrill beating Republican Jack Ciattarelli in his third attempt at the governor’s mansion. While Sherrill was always the favorite, polls continued to narrow even in the final stretch of the race. This pushed both parties into increasingly aggressive, even desperate, tactics. In mid-October, Sherrill accused Ciattarelli of “kill[ing] tens of thousands of people in New Jersey, including children” with opiates through a “misinformation” campaign pushed by a medical company he once owned.

The national spotlight is on New Jersey as the long-blue state’s gubernatorial race narrows, but it wouldn’t be Juh-zey without a little last minute drama. Lying, suing and a last minute showing from Donald Trump – this race has just about everything.  And the Republican may actually win.  Democrat Mikie Sherrill has been the conventional favorite throughout the race. She’s a relatively fresh face, despite being a four-term U.S. Congresswoman, and she checks all the boxes: Navy veteran, Georgetown Law, and a respectable patina of moderation to go with the Girl Boss pantsuit. Still, the VoteView database shows her holding the party lines 95 percent of the time in Congress.

The second coming of President Trump has brought an invigorated commander-in-chief asserting broad authority over the executive branch, reigniting debate over how much power the president has over his own subordinates, including US Attorneys. At present, the battle has focused on one US Attorney in particular. On March 24, 2025, the President named Alina Habba, his former personal attorney, the Interim US Attorney for the District of New Jersey. There’s a catch: Interim US Attorneys may serve only 120 days. On July 1, the President nominated Habba for Senate confirmation as New Jersey’s US Attorney; if confirmed, Habba could have served permanently at the pleasure of the President. Neither of her home state’s senators (both Democrats) supported Habba.

Former senator Bob Menendez was sentenced yesterday to eleven years in prison on charges of bribery, acting as a foreign agent and more. The sentence followed a nine-week jury trial, where it was shown beyond a reasonable doubt that Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, accepted bribes of cash, furniture, gold bars and a car to influence his role as a member of the federal legislature and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of Egypt and other parties between 2018 and 2022. Menendez was prosecuted and sentenced alongside Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, who were sentenced to over eight years and seven years, respectively, for bribery and conspiracy.

The nightly news is replicating Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds, which scared Americans by describing an invasion of space aliens. Listeners who tuned into the broadcast a little late didn’t hear the disclaimer that it was fiction. Now, they are tuning in on time and hearing real broadcasts about mysterious objects flying over our skies. And people are asking the same questions they asked long ago, “What are those things?” They have heard the government’s disclaimers, but they are not sure whether to believe them.  The public is frightened, and bland reassurances from Washington aren’t helping.

New Jersey senator Bob Menendez was found guilty of all sixteen charges today, including bribery, extortion, acting as a foreign agent, obstruction of justice and several counts of conspiracy. Three businessmen paid bribes to the Democratic senator and his wife in exchange for taking actions to benefit them and the governments of Qatar and Egypt, or so the prosecutors argued. Those bribes included $100,000 in gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz and more than $480,000 in cash. Two of the New Jersey businessmen tried alongside Menendez were also convicted on all counts. Menendez did not plead guilty or testify in his own defense. His team argued that he was acting on behalf of his constituents and that the prosecution couldn’t prove that the gold bars and money were bribes.

Cockburn has fallen for his fair share of fake Nigerian prince scams over the years. But even this gullible old hack is surprised at the credulousness of the city of Newark, New Jersey. Back in January, the city announced a cultural trade agreement with the Hindu nation of Kailasa. The mayor hosted a signing ceremony at City Hall, and issued a statement heralding the win-win deal as something that could improve the lives of the people of Newark and Kailasa. Everyone seemed to be very excited about a new age of comity between a great nation and a thriving metropolis. Except the city has now been forced to admit that it has been duped. There is no Hindu nation of Kailasa.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a collection of ingenuous words devised by a young man, John Koenig, who spent seven years reflecting on gaps in the English language. He was especially interested in situations that spark an emotion that feels distinct from the general flow. English has taken on words from other languages, such as the German schadenfreude, for the pleasure we feel in an opponent’s misfortune. The elections this month lit up schadenfreude circuits like Times Square among conservatives.

By removing Donald Trump from social media and New York governor Andrew Cuomo from office, progressives unwittingly gave an opening to a largely unheralded candidate in New Jersey. That’s why the newspaper headlines on the Wednesday morning after the election all declared the governor’s race in the Garden State “too close to call,” which in itself is a victory for beleaguered Republicans from the northeast. And even if Democratic governor Phil Murphy does pull it off, as now looks likely, this election portends serious headaches for Democrats.

'Protest' often feels inadequate as a characterization for the public exhibitions that have erupted nationwide over the past several weeks. The term 'protest' carries a connotation of actions carried out in opposition to existing structures of power; hence, you 'protest' against forces that are arrayed against you (even if some municipal bureaucrat might have reluctantly granted you a permit). However, at least in many jurisdictions, events which were presented as 'protests' should more rightly be labeled as something along the lines of 'state-backed demonstrations.' For instance, in my otherwise sleepy hometown of Caldwell/West Caldwell, New Jersey, high-school students organized what turned out to be an astonishingly large protest march.

The left is demanding 'defund the police' in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. President Trump’s allies are hunkering down with calls for 'law and order.' Both miss the plot. When pressed, the left really wants a new Great Society. Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza told NBC's Meet the Press that 'defunding police' is really about 'increased funding for quality of life of communities who are over-policed and over-surveiled.' But the Great Society didn’t work, and a new one would also be ill-fated. For its part, the right fails to acknowledge real problems with our criminal justice system. President Trump addressed some of them in a much-praised federal sentencing reform bill last year.

The worst brings out the best. Joe Seals, a police officer and father of five, was killed defending the law and his fellow Americans in the anti-Semitic assault on the kosher market in Jersey City. And the best brings out the worst. In footage from the aftermath of the killings, African American residents are pleased by a mass murder on their doorstep.‘If they got shot dead, that’s great,’ says one.‘Get the damn Jews the fuck out of here,’ says another.‘My children are stuck at school because of Jew shenanigans,’ a woman says. ‘I blame the Jews.’America was meant to be different for the Jews. In a sense, it is. In Europe, the majority of assaults upon Jewish people or schools or synagogues seem to be committed by Muslim immigrants.

The New Jersey State Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill Thursday to require presidential candidates to release five years’ worth of tax returns in exchange for a place on the state’s ballot. The measure passed along party lines 23-11. Sitting President Donald Trump famously bucked modern tradition when refusing to release his tax returns, so the NJ measure could effectively keep Donald Trump off the ballot. The Democrat-dominated New Jersey legislature passed the same requirement in 2017, but Republican Gov. Chris Christie refused to sign it.

Donald Trump’s reputation took a battering during the shutdown. He said he would own it, and he did. He took the blame and then he took the hit when he agreed to end the partial federal closure without winning funding for his border wall. So what was the point? A new set of polling figures reveals the point with hard numbers. It turns out that while his stand was broadly unpopular across the country, his no-nonsense stance resonated with one critical cohort of voters – people in key battleground districts, those that voted Trump in 2016 but swung Democratic in the midterms. They gave him the win on the wall and border security.