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NJ Becomes 14th State to Recognize Gay Marriage (+video)

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Photo Credit: MYFOXNY.COMSome couples in New Jersey had waited decades. At the stroke of midnight the moment arrived as New Jersey became the the 14th state to legalize gay marriage.

The celebrations came three days after the state Supreme Court rejected Gov. Chris Christie’s request to delay the start of the nuptials while he appealed a lower court’s ruling on same-sex marriage.

Weddings were held in several cities and towns across the state in the first minutes of Monday morning, as soon as a court order requiring the state to recognize gay marriage went into effect.

Peter Connell and David Calle have been together 13 years and were among those toasting their commitment at midnight. Now official they say the historic day was made even better when Christie announced Monday morning that he is dropping his appeal in the legal case.

My9 New Jersey

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Heavy Campaigning For Booker, Lonegan Day Before N.J. Senate Vote (+video)

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Photo Credit: Nick.FisherThe New Jersey U.S. Senate race was in a fight to the finish Tuesday, a day before voters were set to head to the polls in a special election.

As CBS 2’s Christine Sloan reported, Democrat Cory Booker is hitting the Democrat-favoring communities of Belleville, New Brunswick, Hoboken and Newark, where he is mayor.

Republican Steve Lonegan is campaigning Tuesday in Basking Ridge, Flemington, Belvidere, Morristown and Middletown — all places where Republicans usually get the most votes. He’s also stopping in Jersey City.

Lonegan also received the endorsement of former Jersey City Acting Mayor Joe Rokawski. And Lonegan attacked Booker for his performance as Newark mayor.

“Two people were shot to death on the streets of Newark last night. Unemployment in Newark has gone from 8 to 14 percent,” Lonegan said. “Mr. Booker has failed Newark. That’s extreme. See, he’s an extreme failure.”

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Genuine Animosity Rules As Booker, Lonegan Hit Homestretch For U.S. Senate (+video)

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Photo Credit: Lincoln Park – Newark NJMudslinging has reached a fever pitch in the race for U.S. Senate in New Jersey.

During Wednesday night’s contentious debate, Democrat Cory Booker accused his opponent of being tea party extremist, while Republican Steve Lonegan said Booker is nothing but a Hollywood stand-in for President Barack Obama.

The Senate showdown will continue until voters go to the polls next week, CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday.

Newark Mayor Booker took time out from his campaign to announce that upscale supermarket Whole Foods will open a branch in his city, a branch, officials said, that will charge “affordable” prices for local residents.

“If you have an impossible dream; if you have an impossible dream, don’t give up,” Booker said.

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Firefighters Make Stand Against NJ Boardwalk Blaze (+video)

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Photo Credit: ABC News

Photo Credit: ABC News

Firefighters dug a trench and tore out a section of Jersey Shore boardwalk in an effort to prevent a furious, wind-whipped blaze from jumping to an area just rebuilt after Superstorm Sandy.

By late evening, officials were voicing hopes that the plan was working and the fire that raged on the boardwalk in Seaside Park, N.J., was dying down.

“The threat of it moving at this point is minimal and emergency workers did an amazing job,” said John Camera, borough administrator in the neighboring boardwalk town of Seaside Heights, according to ABC News Radio..

“The fire appears to be under control,” Camera said. “They’ll be people stationed there probably for another day or more and they expect that there may be controlled burning.”

At one point, the blaze went beyond 10 alarms to an “all county call,” according to ABC News New York station WABC. It destroyed a length of boardwalk containing perhaps 30 businesses, officials said, near the same stretch of sand where a rollercoaster landed upright in the ocean after Sandy hit the coastline in October 2012.

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Circuit Court: ‘Unsettled’ if 2nd Amendment Applies Outside of Home

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Photo Credit: APIn a case over New Jersey’s requirement that a citizen demonstrate “justifiable need” for a carrying a firearm before receiving a concealed carry license, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that such a requirement “does not burden conduct within the scope of the Second Amendment’s guarantee.” The court also said “it remains unsettled” whether the Second Amendment is even applicable outside one’s home.

Filed on July 31, 2013, the ruling in Drake v. Filko upheld New Jersey’s practice of placing the burden of proof upon the citizen. In other words, the citizen who wants to carry a gun for self-defense must demonstrate why doing so is necessary for him or her. In simple terms, the citizen must justify being free.

That runs contrary to previous rulings in other circuits, such as on March 6, 2012 when U.S. District Judge Benson Everett Legg ruled against Maryland’s requirement that citizens who wanted a concealed carry permit had to demonstrate a “good and substantial reason” for getting one. Overturning this New Jersey-like requirement, Legg ruled: “A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights. The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”

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New Jersey Town Bans Saggy Pants on Boardwalk

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Photo Credit: AP

Hindsight will soon be punishable by a $25 fine in this Jersey Shore resort.

Wildwood on Wednesday passed a law banning overly saggy pants on the boardwalk, prompted by numerous complaints from longtime visitors about having to see people’s rear ends hanging out in public.

Subsequent violations of the law, which takes effect July 2, could result in fines as high as $200 and 40 hours of community service.

Civil libertarians say the law is unconstitutional and predict it will be overturned if challenged in court.

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Chris Christie’s Lautenberg Dilemma Is 2013-as-2016 All Over Again

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Photo Credit: AP

By Elspeth Reeve. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie can name a successor for Frank Lautenberg, who died at the age of 89 on Monday, becoming the 299th Senator to pass away in office. But it’s yet another moment when what’s good for Christie in 2013 might not be good for him in 2016. Christie, after all, is a Republican running a state that voted for President Obama by almost 18 points. “Replacing a Democrat with a Democrat and then saying the voters should decide what happens next in November would no doubt be very well-received by Democrats and moderates,” The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan writes. But that would mean Republicans who are already annoyed with Christie and his Obama-hugging antics would disown him.

To understand the difficult position Christie’s in, look at these two tweets: “What lucky Democrat will Democrat Chris Christie appoint to Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s seat?” conservative thriller author Brad Thor asks. Salon’s Joan Walsh adds: “Hey Dem donors giving to Chris Christie: will you rethink if he picks a Republican to replace Lautenberg?” Read more from this story HERE.

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Major Democratic donors flock to Christie

By Salvador Rizzo. Gov. Chris Christie is cashing in donations from top Democratic fundraisers and other traditionally liberal donors across the country, even nabbing the support of a handful of rainmakers aligned with President Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Star-Ledger review of state and federal records shows.

The checks are flying into the Republican governor’s war chest from all sorts of unlikely places — the hedge fund run by liberal billionaire George Soros, for example, and the politically progressive halls of the University of California, Berkeley.

The nascent support from Democratic donors is an early sign of Christie’s fundraising prowess in a potential run for the White House in 2016, experts and Democratic donors said, and dovetails with recent polls showing him gaining popularity nationally among Democrats and independents. Read more from this story HERE.

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Christie faces tricky task in filling N.J. seat

By Dave Boyer. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s options for appointing a replacement for the late Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg include Tom Kean Jr., minority leader of the state senate and son of the former governor.

The Republican bench in New Jersey, a blue state, isn’t particularly deep and Mr. Kean would have the advantage of name recognition if he wanted to run for a full term. He won the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2006 but was defeated in the general election by Democrat Bob Menendez.

But there’s also a potential problem — there’s friction between Mr. Christie and Mr. Kean.

The governor “does not like Kean Jr.,” said a New Jersey political operative familiar with the governor’s thinking.

Among the governor’s other options are Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, and Joe Kyrillos, a Christie ally whom the GOP nominated for the Senate in 2012. Read more from this story HERE.

Marco Rubio Touts Chris Christie in Fundraising Pitch

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Photo Credit: AP

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s PAC has sent an email to his supporters praising New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as a “conservative leader” in the blue state where he’s running for reelection.

The pairing of Rubio and Christie is interesting for a few reasons, including that both are often mentioned as potential 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls. Christie has been hit by conservatives for appearing with Obama during the final week of the election after Hurricane Sandy, a move critics said unnecessarily undermined Mitt Romney.

And Rubio — one of the party’s brighter young stars after he defeated then-Gov. Charlie Crist in the tea party wave of 2010 — has been dinged by some conservatives over his work on the immigration reform bill that recently cleared a Senate committee.

“Conservative leadership is hard to find these days, but the voters in New Jersey have seen it firsthand,” Rubio writes in the email from his Reclaim America PAC.

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Christie Continues Tight Political Embrace of Obama

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Photo Credit: Getty Images A post-Hurricane Sandy tour of the New Jersey coast line on Tuesday, gives the president a chance for a three-point play that can move him ahead of the recent controversies that have dogged the White House. With New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie at Obama’s side, effective government, bipartisanship and economic opportunity will be the unmistakable message in the face of the coastal recovery.

For Obama, the tour helps him continue redirecting the political conversation after two weeks of dealing with the fallout over the administration’s response to terror attacks last September in Benghazi, Libya, the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department’s review of journalist phone records as part of a leak investigation.

The visit occurs as Congress is away for a Memorial Day holiday break, a week-long recess that likely will silence the daily attention lawmakers, particularly Republicans, had been paying to the three political upheavals. It also comes just days after Obama started seeking to change the subject in Washington with a speech defending his controversial program of strikes by unmanned drones and renewing his push to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility.

On Sunday Obama traveled to Oklahoma to view damage from the recent tornado and console victims of the deadly storm.

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Syrian With Direct Ties To 9/11 Hijackers Still In US, Apparently Immune From Deportation

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Free to do as he pleases, living out his days in the suburbs of northern New Jersey, a Syrian national who is a known associate of the 9/11 hijackers never has to worry about deportation by the U.S. government, according to an investigation by Fox Files.

With nearly 400,000 people waiting for U.S. citizenship, Daoud Chehazeh last November received political asylum for a third time after a series of bureaucratic screw ups at the federal level, according to a review of court documents and interviews with former federal and state investigators.

“It’s a slap in the face to Americans, especially the victims of 9/11 and the families,” said Jim Bush, who as a New Jersey state criminal investigator was part of the 9/11 investigation code-named PENTTBOMB. His partner in the investigation was Bob Bukowski, a now-retired FBI special agent.

“Three thousand people were murdered,” Bukowski said. “(Chehazeh) was definitely part of that conspiracy. … He facilitated the moves and protection up to the whole flight, basically, of Flight 77. Could we prove that in a court of law? No. But there are other remedies. Deport him. That’s what should have been done in this case.”

“This is an example of our national security policy gone mad,” Debra Burlingame, the co-founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America, said. Fox Files’ findings and the connection between Chehazeh and the Flight 77 hijackers were especially disheartening because Burlingame’s brother, Charles, was the pilot of Flight 77, which was hijacked and slammed into the Pentagon.

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