Forget about slaying dragons.
New Jersey's Republicans are having a difficult enough time trying to knock off someone they say is a dinosaur -- 84-year-old Frank Lautenberg, the state's senior US senator, who has given every indication he plans to run for re-election, despite the public's wariness.
No sooner had the most mainstream candidate dropped out of the Republican race this month than two counterpunchers from the party's conservative flank began lacerating each other.
Now Andrew Unanue, a political novice who is a former chief operating officer at his family's business, Goya Foods, is hoping to make a late splash. And although Unanue, who owned a Manhattan nightclub, has been photographed far more often with socialites than with senators, he does have one attribute that the Republican establishment says is crucial to wage a battle against Lautenberg: a lot of money to finance a campaign.
"He's the only one who can raise the money necessary to defeat Senator Lautenberg," said Mark Campbell, a Republican political consultant who sounded ebullient at the idea of Unanue.
Whether the fortunes of a cash-strapped party that has lost every statewide election since 1997 can be revived by Unanue, a resident of Alpine, a wealthy pocket in Bergen County, who has never held public office is a large imponderable. But with an April 7 primary deadline approaching, some Republicans have been itching, almost obsessively, to attract a moderate candidate to fill the place of Anne Estabrook, a wealthy real estate developer who dropped out this month after suffering a minor stroke.
Hardly a day has passed since Estabrook's withdrawal without rumor of a possible candidate, preferably one with deep pockets, taking on the two remaining candidates from the conservative wing of the party, state Senator Joseph Pennacchio, a dentist and veteran legislator from Morris County, and Murray Sabrin, a finance professor at Ramapo College who ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2000.
After initially throwing up their hands in the face of an anticipated Democratic rout at the polls in November, there has been a clear sign that Lautenberg is vulnerable. His recent poll numbers have been underwhelming, with one finding that while a plurality of residents approved of the senator, 58 percent preferred that someone else be elected.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS