New Jersey

Michael Lesher Growing up as I did in the Cold War, I still experience a special kind of shudder whenever I come across an anecdote like that of Katya Soldak, whose Soviet nursery school teacher once showed her class a photograph clipped from a Western newspaper, “depicting skinny [Russian] children in striped robes walking in …

Will, Brigid and AmyThere's a red hot race for the Democratic nomination for New Jersey's 2nd congressional district, the one the South Jersey (Norcross) Machine and the DCCC screwed up when their repulsive Blue Dog pet-- Jeff Van Drew-- switched parties and (openly) became a Trump butt wipe. The same machine-- along with the DCCC-- has another candidate though...

In 2018, after trying and failing for years, the DCCC had what it wanted and celebrated as a great triumph. They successfully recruited the single worst Democrat-- as in most conservative and most GOP/NRA-friendly-- in the New Jersey legislature, Jeff Van Drew, to run for Congress.

New Jersey's 8th congressional district-- most of Hudson County, parts of Essex and Union counties and includes Hoboken, Elizabeth, Weehauken, West New York, half of Newark and parts of Jersey City, Kearny, Harrison, Belleville and Bayonne. The district is 55% Hispanic, 44% foreign-born and strongly Democratic. The PVI is D+27. Republicans don't even try. Hillary beat Trump 75-21% and in 2018, the Democratic incumbent, Albio Sires took 78% of the vote.

The Democratic Party establishment is conservative in the sense of defending and bolstering the status quo-- not as perniciously as the GOP, but perniciously enough. It is also incredibly corrupt-- no less so than the Republican Party.

Michael Lesher Reading op-eds these days about the grim progress of COVID-19 through the United States, I sometimes have the eerie feeling that I’ve traveled backward in time and landed in some sort of Cold War-like, hyper-conformist dystopia — but with one disquieting difference. As in those dark days, we’re bombarded with warnings of a …

A new piece on the LiveScience website covers recent developments in the biggest single current newsmaker around the world, the COVID-19 “coronavirus” outbreak. In listening and reading news from many sources, it appears that there is definitely great concern over this virus, but it is not always clear exactly why this is so.

The bill was torpedoed after a vigorous campaign by angry parents, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group and anti-vaccine celebrities rallied to outmatch those pushing the bill. Social media allowed opponents to reach directly into lawmakers' private lives and some politicians' family members were contacted by phone.

Van Drew was always a Republican-- and now it's officialIn the 2018 cycle, conservative then-"Democrat" Jeff Van Drew wasn’t one of the party’s star fundraisers, although he did bring in $1,881,731, despite a very right-wing voting record in the Jersey state legislature. The 3 other successful challengers in New Jersey that year all did significantly better than Van Drew did:

The DCCC had been trying to recruit Jeff Van Drew for years. He was the perfect candidate for them-- a South Jersey machine-backed hack in the state legislature who tended to vote with the GOP more frequently than any of his colleagues.