State Senate primary candidate Leigh-Ann Bellew owes her supporters, and the voters of the 13th Legislative District, the truth about her resume. Any candidate’s educational and employment history is an important consideration for voters to take into account when choosing their nominees and elected officials. Bellew is asking Republican voters to fire an long term and distinguished incumbent in Senator Joe Kyrillos, and to hire her instead. In order for her candidacy to be taken seriously, she needs to be transparent about her education, career and character.
Bellew has gone into hiding since the questions about her resume and education have become public. When the questions about her legal education arose in early April, Bellew told MMM that she graduated from law school in Texas but never took the bar exam. She said she went to work in customer service for American Express rather than pursue a career as a lawyer, and then exited the work force to raise her children.
However, since PolitickerNJ questioned the veracity of her resume, Bellew has stopped returning MMM’s repeated phone calls. Her campaign manager, Dwayne Horner, has not been able to provide answers.
Bellew, her running mates and campaign volunteers have been distorting Kyrillos’s record. Kyrillos is a moderate, but he is not a tax and borrow liberal as the Bayshore Tea Party Group backed ticket is claiming. Kryillos does not support partial birth abortion and death panels, as the duplicitous literature the BTPG backed campaign has been distributing claims.
If a candidate or campaign is going to take liberties with the truth about their opponent’s record, they at the very least should have the decency to be transparent about something as basic about their own education and career.
Leigh-Ann Bellew can put an end to all of this nonsense over her past by simply proving she has the degrees she has claimed she has. She should do that immediately. If Bellew has embellished her past, she should come clean about that and explain herself.
In 2010 I was a manager in Anna Little’s campaign for Congress. I worked with Leigh Ann Bellew, who was the campaign’s initial manager and then became the campaign’s Chairman. I am a conservative Republican who has been active with the Tea Party.
During that campaign Leigh Ann Bellew led me, as well as and all the rest of us who were working on Anna Little’s campaign, to believe that she was “a lawyer who didn’t practice”. We also got the impression from what she told us that she had studied law and had a degree of some kind in Constitutional studies. None of this has turned out to be true.
Leigh Ann Bellew also misled us about her involvement with national conservatives like Dick Morris, telling us that she had been his “communications director”. This isn’t true either.
I wasn’t aware of her answers to a Project Vote Smart (http://votesmart.org/candidate/political-courage-test/59968/leigh-ann-bellew/#.UYeWJXzD-M8) questionnaire in 2006, none of us were, but have had the opportunity to read it since. I am concerned by a number of her answers and most concerned by her answers to the questions on the 2nd Amendment and Abortion.
On the 2nd Amendment, if Leigh Ann is a “constitutionalist” as she claims, how is her support for the federal licensing of all firearms in line with the 2ndamendment?
On Abortion she claims to be Pro-Life, but told Vote Smart that an abortion should be legal when the mother’s life is involved. How this fits with her “Pro-Life, Christian” values? You are either for the death of a baby or you are not.
But first, please understand that I thought long and hard about writing this commentary. After all, Bellew is running in a primary in another district than my own and I have my hands full rebuilding our home after Sandy. I would have loved some peace and quiet right now; instead of what I expect will be coming; harsh criticism from some Tea Party people who will attack me as a faux Conservative. I could have simply sat this out. But then, people that know me; know most of all that I am indeed a Conservative and I would feel ill at ease for not doing the right thing. I will let my resume and references speak for themselves should those attacks come.
State Senator Barbara Buono, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, told urban residents that Governor Chris Christie is too focused on rebuilding New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy, according to a Star Ledger report.
Christie, she said, had focused too much on rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy, while the cities have been suffering for years under his economic policies.
“There’s a whole other New Jersey that needs to be rebuilt,” Buono told a crowd in Irvington, vowing to reverse many of the Republican governor’s moves.
In a little more than three years in office, Christie’s economic policies are responsible for the condition of our cities? Christie is not working to improve the quality of life in our cities?
The Democratic Mayor of Camden, Dana Redd, seems to disagree:
Transcript:
Camden Mayor Dana Redd: To our Governor Chris Christie, and you’ve often heard him say this when we’ve stood side-by-side on matters of importance, of education, of Renaissance Schools, public safety and now public education. He’s often talked about, listen, I didn’t get but 28 votes out of Camden but that’s not why I’m doing this.
Newark Mayor Cory Booker brought his 2014 U.S. Senate exploration to Congressman Frank Pallone’s backyard by endorsing‘Forward Asbury Park,‘ the slate of mostly incumbents running in the May 14 municipal election in Asbury Park.
Booker and Pallone both want U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg’s job when he retires at the end of his current term. The seat is up for grabs in the November 2014 election. Booker and Pallone are unofficially competing for the Democratic nomination.
Pallone has so far stayed out of the Asbury Park municipal election. Booker’s endorsement is a boost for the ‘Forward’ team. If they win, it will be a boost for him in his contest against Pallone.
UPDATE: Asbury Park Sun is reporting that the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office executed a search warrant on the campaign office of ‘The A Team” this afternoon. The report said that the investigators appeared to be looking for ballots. Read the APS report here.
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MoreMonmouthMusings has confirmed that the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the “A-Team” ticket of Council candidates in upcoming Asbury Park municipal election. That investigation included a visit to the campaign’s Main Street office today.
No arrests have been made.
The ‘A-Team’ consists of five candidates running together for the five council seats, the entire governing body, being contested in the May 14 election. The candidates are former Councilman James Keady, former board of education member Redmond Palmer, Duanne Small, Nora Hyland and Daniel Harris. There are a total of 22 candidates running for the five seats.
The Bayshore Tea Party group is recruiting volunteers to canvass for their candidates in the LD 13 and Monmouth County primary races by offering free personal 2013 tax returns.
In an email with the BTPG logo and a Bellew for Senate paid for disclosure, potential canvassing recruits are offered a tax services if they canvass for the candidates for 10 hours between now and the primary on June 4. The offer is limited to 5 returns and expires on April 15, 2014.
I don’t know how Greg Kelly missed this, but Saturday is the 10th annual World Naked Gardening Day. (hat tip to Chris Fotache) This being The Garden State, well, it could happen.
Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon said he’ll be ready, just in case.
“The Libertarian side of me is willing to talk Conservative principles with anyone, regardless of how they are dressed, or not, on their own property,” said O’Scanlon,
“We need to take ourselves less seriously. That there is a World Naked Gardening Day is hilarious.”
Someone commissioned ‘phone ID’ calls in LD 13 that went out yesterday asking Republican primary voters if they planned to vote for Republican Senator Joe Kyrillos, Tea Party challenger Leigh-Ann Bellew or if they are unsure.
It was left as a voice mail at an MMM reader’s home. The caller ID said the call came from 602-357-5922, a Phoenix, AZ landline listed to Danny Crosby.
None of the competing campaigns or candidates will cop to paying for the call. There was no ‘paid for’ disclosure.
‘Phone ID’ calls are not polls, per se. The data collected is used for get out the vote (GOTV) planning.
Sheriff Shaun Golden, Freeholders Serena DiMaso and Tom Arnone at Christie fundraiser, facebook photo
Governor Chris Christie’s reelection campaign raised $500,000 at the Middletown home of Newport Capital Group President Domenic DePiero, according to sources familiar with the event. The fundraiser, chaired by State Senator Joe and Susan Kyrillos, was the most successful Christie fundraiser to date, including the February fundraiser at the Palo Alto, CA home of facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
I don’t know how 
