Noticias

Superior Court Judge Mark P. Ciarrocca on Tuesday set the schedule for a challenge to a special Democratic convention that picked the nominee for a Roselle Council seat. 

Incumbent Denise Wilkerson, who lost the nomination to Cynthia Johnson, said the emergency meeting where Democrats picked Johnson included voters who were not eligible members. The allegations come in a lawsuit that Wilkerson has filed against the Roselle Democratic Committee, Johnson, and Assemblyman and Roselle Democratic Chair Reginald Atkins.

The court-ordered Democratic committee vote earlier this month wasn’t particularly close — Johnson won 20-7. Still, Wilkerson asked a judge to void the results of that vote because two voting members were allegedly ineligible. The lawsuit claims one person wrongfully substituted another member of the Roselle Democratic Committee, while another was invited to vote despite no longer being a Democrat.

Briefs in the case are due Wednesday at 4 p.m., and a hearing will be held Thursday at 2 p.m. Ciarrocca said he plans to issue a ruling on Friday.

In the primary, Wilkerson was initially ruled to have defeated Johnson by three votes. Superior Court Judge John Deitch denied Johnson’s request for a recount earlier this summer, but an appellate court overruled him. The recount brought Wilkerson’s margin down to two votes, but kept her in the lead.

Johnson continued the legal challenges. Earlier this month, her attorneys presented three voters whom Deitch ruled were illegally disenfranchised. With those findings, Deitch nullified the election and ordered a redo of the primary. Late last week, Deitch determined he lacked the authority to order a new election so late in the process and changed his mind. Instead, he told Roselle Democrats they had until last week to select a candidate, which ended up being Johnson.

Wilkerson accused Atkins of repeatedly violating bylaws and regulations, pointing to a 2023 do-over vote in which he won re-election to the Roselle Democratic chairmanship.

Atkins said he’s confident in the process.

“Twice the Roselle Democratic Committee voted fairly and transparently, and twice Cynthia Johnson was the clear choice by a double-digit margin,” he said.

The post Judge sets schedule in challenge to Roselle nomination appeared first on New Jersey Globe.

OPINION

While we in the Sussex Republican committee raise the voter turnout, message our platform, canvass and call bank, and support our elected officials, we are annoyed by borderline malefactors who have let down all that ever trusted them in life, personally and politically. Claiming free speech, they use the freedom to harm others out of spite.

When Peter Zenger was tried for Libel in 1733, a jury acquitted him because his words spoke “truth” and that was considered the staple of a “free press.” This case became a landmark case for freedom of the press not just in America, but the entire western world. What Zenger published were disagreements with the personnel decisions made by the colonial governor of New York, and accusing him, through a pseudonym (fake name), of manipulating appointed positions to maintain political control. Zenger was arrested, jailed for 8 months, and then acquitted by a New York Jury.

Currently, we are experiencing a dynamic where very cowardly and dishonest people use fake names to spread slander, veiled under the mask of blogging, and using gossip as if it was fact, under a political agenda, against the interests of the Republican party, and the people, as they spread misinformation and get away with it.

What Zenger did not do is slander personal accusations, attack the family of the Royal Governor, and attempt to mislead or mischaracterize information to achieve his own personal political agenda. Zenger wrote with integrity, as an actual journalist, with no political stake.

Here in New Jersey, there is a little gang called “Rubashov” who operates the “Sussex watchdog” and the “Jersey conservative” (Nothing “conservative” about it) and our very own disgraced county commissioner, Bill Hayden, all who plague the public with a tabloid like collection of social media, a website and a distribution list manned by disreputable wannabe politicians who have done the following:

-one claimed to be a Navy Seal when never having served in the military

-one having been indicted for tax fraud pretending to be military to receive a military exemption

-one posed as a Republican when in fact was a democrat, to infiltrate the Republican party and run a disastrous and comically incompetent campaign for county commissioner

-one volunteered to be a party leader, then used the GOP to get law clients for himself, and approached the line between extortion, intimidation and solicitation

-one pretended to be a political “consultant” but in turns out, was never a member of any professional organizations or had qualifications but instead

-the “consultant” conned two generations of Sussex County leadership using threats of slander under a fake name and is on revenge tour for being fired by the previous Senator

-all parties colluded to invent a fake scandal about the Sussex food pantry and personally threatened myself and others with “FBI” arrest if they didn’t go along with it. It was all made up

-one uses his own wife as spy at GOP events, under the guise of being a photographer (beware any Strauss media at your events)

-one told me personally that my military service “didn’t mean shit” because I “chose to be sucker”

-the utter failure and disgrace of a county commissioner, Hayden, is on the infamous tape-recording telling democrats that his is aligned with them and is against the GOP, and was undermining them on purpose, then made up actual crimes he told the democrat handler that GOP leaders and elected officials did

-one pretends to condemn past marital issues, when his own wife is a serial adulteress

-The fake “consultant” (Rubashov) invents scandals and lies, and spends all his time attacking his previous Republican clients who fired him for good cause

-one is a financial disaster who was borderline homeless, who attacked the party from within, slandering donors and then fell on her face with a fake coup that humiliated her

-the other is a democrat blogger, who was visited by the secret service, who is vulgar and dishonest and attacks our office holders’ personal lives and spews the worst kind of left-wing vitriol, and who seems to be in league with these other “Republicans.”

What do they have in common? Three things, an unholy trinity of cowardice (underhanded betrayals of confidence and fake names), dishonesty and selfish service. The other thing they have in common: No credible person will have anything to do with them. Barbara Holstein asked for many self-serving things when she was Vice Chairwoman, and she acted out against the interests of the party. When she couldn’t get her way, she tried to take the party over and failed, she was seen through.

This is the last public message to respond to their shenanigans. I hope that good people are not deterred by this, and do not take this as a reason to avoid politics. The Republican Party has a chance to take back New Jersey, and these people are doing all they can to undermine it, first from within, and I’m proud to say that I’ve made them adversaries from the outside. Their attempt to harm my family is demonstrative of our success, and it will continue.

Joe Labarbera was a U.S. Marine officer in Kosovo and a U.,S. Army officer in Afghanistan.  He is the Sussex County GOP Chairman. 

The post The “Rubashov” dynamic: How free speech ends: When bad actors weaponize lies to slander, and the law tolerates it appeared first on New Jersey Globe.

OPINION

While watching the first gubernatorial debate Sunday night, I became more convinced that Jack Ciattarelli’s positions on education, housing and health are regressive, and so backward-looking they would further divide the state along racial and economic lines.

Ciattarelli classifies cities and suburbs as distinct entities rather than collaborative for equitable education, intelligent growth, and fair distribution of healthcare resources.

Here is a snapshot of his views. There is no value in integrating our schools. Affordable housing is an urban problem. Rising healthcare costs should be shouldered by state funding for public employees, rather than rein in the exorbitant costs charged by doctors and hospitals that prevent all working families, the poor, and elderly from seeking care.

Let me first say Ciattarelli’s use of the Newark schools as an example of a substandard system because of a lack of choice is wrong on both counts.

Our best performing high schools, Science Park, Arts High and University High, have the same graduation rates as Millburn, Summit and Mountain Lakes, and other top-ranked schools.

When Ciatterelli spoke of the hallmarks of failing school systems, he overlooked the following facts about Newark.

The New Jersey Department of Education estimates Newark’s graduation rate for all its high schools is 89.6 percent for the school year 2024-2025, up three percentage points from the year before. These numbers reflect a precipitous drop in our chronic truancy, which is under 10 percent. These numbers are the best in decades, including the years the schools were under state supervision.

While lauding his plan to give students “choice,” he failed to mention one-third of Newark students are in charter schools because it didn’t fit his narrative of the city’s school system.

I found Ciattarelli’s comment that if Black schools outperformed white schools “we wouldn’t be having this conversation” dismissive of the whole integration issue.

Perhaps most troubling was his comment that “if we integrated the Newark school system tomorrow and it’s not going to improve student performance. we need to change the curriculum.”

It sounded like something from the Civil Rights Era when Bull Connor stood in the way of desegregation in Alabama, and little Ruby Bridges had to walk through a jeering crowd in New Orleans to go to a white school.

It also shows true ignorance of the social determinants, like poverty and substandard nutrition that impact learning, and also ignores the collective achievements of our students.

Jordan Thomas, a University High graduate, went on to Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Oxford and was the first Rhodes Scholar from Newark.

Jeremias Castillo was the National Honor Society’s Student of the Year while at Technology High and is now at Harvard.

Our students have been accepted at every Ivy League school and hundreds have gone to the nation’s best HBCUs, while pulling down $632 million in academic scholarships.

Technology High was named a Blue Ribbon School in 2023, Newark’s eighth since 1999.

Ciattarelli’s comment also ignores research that all students at integrated schools have better SAT scores and lower dropout rates, and benefit socially, too, as they get to know people from diverse backgrounds.

His reach back to the 1960s and decades-old stereotypes to portray Black students as hopeless, was meant to stoke fear in mostly white districts that integration would ruin their schools.

He used that dog whistle again in the affordable housing discussion, claiming infrastructure can’t support 50-unit developments in suburban cities.

First, if zoned and planned correctly, development improves infrastructure. Development has helped Newark continually upgrade our water delivery and storm water and sewage disposal systems. It’s simple math. The more customers we have, the more money we can spend to improve our systems. Also, by making developers plant trees, create rain gardens and other green spaces, we can create more permeable landscapes and lessen the impact of torrential rainstorms.

Second, every suburb on a train or bus route has an opportunity and I would say, an obligation, to create affordable housing. While it’s true that a trackside apartment tower would change the character of small- and medium-sized suburbs, it is also true that there are less imposing ways to build affordable units and spread them out within walking distance of the transit lines.

I can’t think of a suburb on a train or bus line that can’t easily absorb their fair share of affordable housing. There are creative ways to do this. Change restrictive zoning laws on multi-family housing. Allow single family homeowners to add accessory dwelling units to their property for elderly long-time residents or town workers who can’t afford to live in the place they work. Create more low-income set asides in all projects. We’ve done this in Newark, and our residents get first dibs. If suburbs took this approach, affordable housing units wouldn’t change the character of their towns, they would help preserve it.

When Jack Ciatterelli talks about the state spending more to fund healthcare costs for state employees, it shows he has no understanding of the system or the will to fight healthcare providers to lower their costs. Since Chris Christie’s Chapter 78, which required public workers to contribute a larger percentage of their health insurance premiums annually, costs have skyrocketed.

This year, the City of Newark fought to curb those costs, and introduced a healthcare plan for our employees with reference pricing and offered it as an opt-in. This means the city will pay a hospital or insurance company 150 percent of what Medicare will pay for a visit, procedure or hospital stay. We saved tens of millions of dollars, and our employees got more money in their paychecks, and the City had to contribute less for their insurance costs.

Without a fight to reduce medical costs, working people who aren’t state employees will continue to see costs rise unabated, and find it harder to pay for preventive and wellness care.

For too long, New Jersey’s home rule has divided the state by racial and socioeconomic lines. These regressive policies have led to stunted housing growth, economic stagnation and have failed to give all our residents a fair stake in the state’s future. I fear Ciatterelli will lead us backward at a time when we should be moving forward.

The post Opinion: Baraka on Ciattarelli’s debate performance appeared first on New Jersey Globe.

New Jersey PBS is expected to cease operations in July 2026 following WNET’s decision not to renew its agreement, the New Jersey Globe has learned.

The decision comes after the federal government decided to cancel funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded WNET, the parent company of THIRTEEN, the PBS New York affiliate.

Unless they can find a new non-profit funding source, New Jersey could be left without a public television station next year.

New Jersey PBS employees have been called into a staff meeting today to be informed of the decision.

It’s not clear how this will effect New Jersey Spotlight.

NJ PBS, formerly New Jersey Network (NJN), has struggled financially over the past few years.  They have already made two rounds of layoffs.

Fifteen years ago, Gov. Chris Christie ended four decades of state funding for public television, forcing them to find a new funder.  The state cut $750,000 in NJ PBS funding this year, but that was hardly the fatal blow; that came from the end of federal funds.

New Jersey PBS did not return a call, text message, or email seeking comment.

The post New Jersey PBS shutting down in July appeared first on New Jersey Globe.