Virginia Governor
McDonnell (Rep) 59, Deeds (Dem) 41

New Jersey Governor
Christie (Rep) 49, Corzine (Dem) 45

New York (23d District)
Owens (Dem) 48, Hoffman (Con) 46

We won the two big governor’s races and, despite the uphill difficulty in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, came close to pulling off a conservative win out of what started as a three-way race.

John Dickerson, at Slate, explains that the independent voters have come back to the Republican Party. Independents are, naturally enough, frightened by the economy and appalled at the deficit.

The Republican candidates killed among independents. In both New Jersey and Virginia, they won by two to one. Independent voters make up their largest share of the electorate since pollsters have been counting them. In 2006 and 2008, these voters backed Congressional Democrats, and in the 2008 presidential race, they went for Obama 51 percent to 47 percent over John McCain. They’ve been souring on his presidency, though, and now more disapprove of his performance than approve. In Virginia, Obama won 48 percent of independents. The Republican Bob McDonnell won 68 percent of those voters this time around. In New Jersey, Christie carried independents 58 percent to 31 percent, which helped him overcome the fact that there are 700,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in that state.

This video recorded around June 19, 2009 at the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey shows young students being taught to sing a pair of songs praising President Obama.

This interesting performance was arranged in connection with Father’s Day.

2:24 video

Song 1:

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that all must lend a hand
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Yes

Song 2:

Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
For all your great accomplishments, we all doth say “hooray!”

Hip, hip hooray!
Hip, hip hooray!
Hip, hip hooray!

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Obama obviously did not write the songs or arrange for them to be composed, but it can hardly be denied that the teacher(s?) responsible in New Jersey were responding to a personality cult and a political style which has been recognizable since the appearance of Barach Hussein Obama (Mmm, mmm, mm!) on the national political stage. It is a style a lot more compatible with backward Third World Communist dictatorships than with the American Republic.

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Fox News story

I think Gateway Pundit was the original source of the story.

“Civil Rights,” n. fabricated and supposititious rights claims, purportedly entitling liberals to use state power to compel individuals and businesses to comply with liberal moral opinions within their own private spheres.

The moral status of homosexuality, homosexuality’s social and political status, to what degree participation in certain kinds of sexual activities constitutes a natural and legitimate identity and whether homosexual inclinations are a product of psychological pathology are all matters of opinion.

There is every reason to expect that large numbers of Americans, on natural and legitimate grounds, would hold 180 degree opposite opinions in this area.

Social and religious conservatives have long since abandoned claims that the state should enforce traditional Judeo-Christian sexual morality on consenting adults with regard to private acts. Today, “the enforcement of morals” (the title of a famous essay on the question of tolerance of homosexuality by Lord Devlin) is, on the contrary, actively, and frequently successfully, pursued by the left.

If right now, at the present time, in which Gay Marriage is only the law of the land in a couple of ultra-liberal states, this kind of claim can be successfully enforced on a business, just imagine what kind of Civil Rights claims will be enforceable in an environment where Gay Marriage is the rule, not the rare aberration. You’ll have lawsuits demanding that Catholic Churches, Mormon Temples, and Jewish Orthodox synagogues solemnize sexually perverted unions, and, I daresay, some of them will prove successful.

LA Times:

The Pasadena-based dating website, heavily promoted by Christian evangelical leaders when it was founded, has agreed in a civil rights settlement to give up its heterosexuals-only policy and offer same-sex matches.

EHarmony was started by psychologist Neil Clark Warren, who is known for his mild-mannered television and radio advertisements. It must not only implement the new policy by March 31 but also give the first 10,000 same-sex registrants a free six-month subscription.

“That was one of the things I asked for,” said Eric McKinley, 46, who complained to New Jersey’s Division on Civil Rights after being turned down for a subscription in 2005.

The company said that Warren was not giving interviews on the settlement. But attorney Theodore Olson, who issued a statement on the company’s behalf, made clear that it did not agree to offer gay matches willingly.

“Even though we believed that the complaint resulted from an unfair characterization of our business,” Olson said, “we ultimately decided it was best to settle this case with the attorney general since litigation outcomes can be unpredictable.”

The settlement, which did not find that EHarmony broke any laws, calls for the company to either offer the gay matches …

... on its current venue or create a new site for them. EHarmony has opted to create a site called Compatiblepartners.net.

Warren had said in past interviews that he didn’t want to feature same-sex services on EHarmony—which matches people based on long questionnaires concerning personality traits, relationship history and interests—because he felt he didn’t know enough about gay relationships.

McKinley, who works at a nonprofit in New Jersey he declined to identify, said that he had originally heard of EHarmony through its radio ads. “You hear these wonderful people saying, ‘I met my soul mate on EHarmony.’ I thought, I could do that too,” he said.

But he couldn’t. When he tried to enter the site, the pull-down menus had categories only for a man seeking a woman or a woman seeking a man. “I felt the whole range of emotions,” McKinley said. “Anger, that I was a second-class citizen.”

But instead of just surfing over to a dating site that admits gay lonely hearts, he contacted the New Jersey civil rights division to file a complaint.

The settlement also calls for EHarmony to pay $50,000 to the state for administrative costs and $5,000 to McKinley.

A little overenthusiasm on the part of New Jersey’s State Legislature in drafting one more anti-gang measure may send a harmless 20-year-old sales clerk to jail for three years for BB-gun possession.

MyCentralJersey.com:

Caught speeding in Highland Park in April in his father’s Acura RSX, Ryan Narciso found out the hard way about a recent change in a New Jersey gun law that could send him to prison for three years.

The 20-year-old sales clerk at a shop at Menlo Park Mall and former Middlesex County College student had a pellet handgun in the car, according to an indictment filed last week in Superior Court, New Brunswick. ...

Narciso’s father, an architect, bought the pellet gun at a garage sale a few years ago to fend off squirrels that made their way into the attic of the families home on Mount Pleasant Avenue in Edison, the father and Narciso’s lawyer, Amilcar Perez of Perth Amboy, said.

Under a new state law, Narciso’s possession of the weapon qualifies as a Graves Act offense. Narciso could face what prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys call a “hard three,” meaning three years with no prospect of parole.

But a state official Wednesday acknowledged that the draconian measure made its way into law by mistake.

The Graves Act, adopted in 1981 and named after Frank X. Graves Jr., the late state senator and law-and-order mayor of Paterson known for patroling the city, outlined mandatory-minimum prison sentences for anyone guilty of using a gun in the commission of a crime in New Jersey. A burglar caught with a handgun, for instance, faced a solid three years behind bars for the gun crime alone.

With little or no fanfare, lawmakers stiffened the Graves Act in the last session. They folded the amendment into anti-gang legislation that Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed into law in January.

Now, the simple unlawful possession of any firearm can bring mandatory penalties for anyone who pleads guilty to or is convicted of that crime alone.

Barnegat, NJ public schools were recently locked down after someone sighted a ninja in the woods.

You can’t be too careful.
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Hat tip to Tom Helm.

The Dennis Township ُPrimary School in Cape May, New Jersey suspended a 7-year-old second grader for drawing a stick figure holding a gun. He gave the drawing to a schoolmate whose parents saw it and complained.

The 7-year-old’s mother thought the official reaction was excessive, particularly since the drawing was depicting a person using a water pistol.

Press of Atlantic City

AP

Train Station security cameras at Ramsay, New Jersey captured images of an unusual group of travellers.

AP:

Some wild turkeys, it appears, were trying to get out of New Jersey before Thanksgiving Day.

A spokesman for the NJ Transit said train officials reported a dozen or so wild turkeys waiting on a station platform in Ramsey, about 20 miles northwest of New York City, on Wednesday afternoon. The line travels to Suffern, N.Y.

“For a moment, it looked like the turkeys were waiting for the next outbound train,” said Dan Stessel, a spokesman for NJ Transit. “Clearly, they’re trying to catch a train and escape their fate.”

Transit workers followed the bird’s movements on surveillance cameras. “I have no idea how they got there,” Stessel said.

A Ramsey police dispatcher said the department had received three calls about the traveling turkeys who also were blamed for causing morning rush hour traffic problems on a roadway.

“From time to time, I’ve heard calls that there are turkeys on the loose,” said Erik Endress, president of the Ramsey Rescue Squad, a volunteer group. “Maybe they’re trying to make a break.”

Paul Mulshine, in the Star-Ledger, notes, as we did ourselves, that if you try to find the reference to “equal protection” in the Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey State Constitution (mentioned as the basis of its ruling requiring Gay Marriage by the New Jersey Supreme Court), you will seek in vain. And he adds:

You will note that the words “equal protection” do not appear in it. They couldn’t have. That article first appeared in the New Jersey Constitution of 1844. But it wasn’t until 1868 that the concept of equal protection came into being, and that was in the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 14th amendment doesn’t apply here, but if it did, the state Supreme Court would almost certainly be re versed in the federal courts. That was the case with the court’s last ruling on the question of gay rights. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed a New Jersey ruling in which our high court ordered the Boy Scouts to accept a gay scoutmaster. That decision was also based on the nonexistent “equal protection” clause in Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the state constitution.

The seven justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court have a habit of putting words into the Constitution—and of taking them out.

If a court made up of liberals was working on the basis of a Constitution whose only text was the Second Amendment’s provision That the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed, I have no doubt they could find Equal Protection, a Right to Abortion, Gay Marriage, Affirmation Action, Forced Busing to Achieve Racial Integration, and Confiscation of Private Firearms all mandated by the same text.

The Atlantic City Press reports unsubstantiated sightings of a mountain lion in Upper Township, New Jersey.

UPPER TOWNSHIP — The Township Committee is trying to determine whether mountain-lion sightings in the area are fact or phantom.

Mayor Richard Palombo this week publicly urged residents who have seen a large cat — maybe a mountain lion or a big bobcat — to notify the township’s animal-control officer.

“At this point, we’re making everyone alert about it. The animal-control officer is looking at it if anyone sees an animal,” the mayor said.

Liam Hughes, who handles animal control in parts of Atlantic and Cape May counties, said there are no confirmed lion sightings. Nor could anyone find scat or tracks, called pug marks.

But the lion stories persist.

“There are reports of it. Nothing positive,” Hughes said. “Did you see this? Did you hear this? There are credible people who believe they saw something.”
State Police in Woodbine and the Cape May County Park & Zoo are aware of the rumored sightings. The zoo is home to the county’s one and only known mountain lion.

Hughes said a cougar could make a tidy living in Upper Township, home to the Great Cedar Swamp and its countless muskrats, rabbits, turkey and deer — all cougar favorites.

But could a large cat remain undetected in a suburban township such as Upper?

Out here in Silicon Valley, highly substantiated sightings, like the case of the mountain lion shot out of a front yard tree in Palo Alto, are far from rare.