Cross-posted from Blue Jersey

New Hampshire beware! Jill Hazelbaker is coming to a blog near you!

Jill Hazelbaker, battle tested in New Jersey this year as Tom Kean Jr.'s Communications Director, is headed to John McCain's presidential campaign. She will serve as Communications Director for McCain's campaign in New Hampshire.

Last September, Hazelbaker spent valuable work time posing as a Democrat on Blue Jersey -- from Junior's office!

This movie is meant to provide some perspective on the upcoming election. As a Desert Storm veteran, whose father served in Vietnam and whose grandfather suffered in the prisons of Imperial Japan during WW2, there is NOTHING more important than standing up for ou military. Please click the picture-link and spare three minutes for the people whose blood is being spilled needlessly.

Despite all the fun that Jilly-girl has been for Blue Jersey, the fact is that this election is serious business.  Bob Menendez is fighting against one of the slimiest campaigns of the season.  His opponent has absolutely no substance, and no facts to back his claims of wrongdoing.  Lives hang in the balance.  Let's not forget that.

(Distilled from a post at Blue Jersey. This just has to go on the front page--Chris)

After Blue Jersey exposed another Tom Kean Jr campaign lie yesterday (which state media is now picking up as well), the campaign went into panic mode. Their spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, registered multiple accounts on Blue Jersey and posted what were obvious "concern troll" comments. The accounts were registered within 10 minutes of each other, the comments from the different users were posted 15 minutes apart, and both comments were posted from the same exact IP address (70.90.20.85), which is for a Comcast business account that can be traced to a node within 5 miles of the campaign. But there's more. Below is the header information from an email sent out by the campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker. Some information has been removed to protect the innocent, but the important thing here is that Jill Hazelbaker's IP address is 70.90.20.85:

Return-Path: <jill@tomkean.com>
Received: from tomkean.com (mail.xquizit.com [66.194.14 8.20])
by XXXXX with ESMTP id XXXXX;
Received-SPF: neutral (XXXXX is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of jill@tomkean.com)
Received: from KFS05 [70.90.20.85] by tomkean.com with ESMTP
(SMTPD32-8.15) id XXXXX;
From: "Jill Hazelbaker" <jill@tomkean.com>
To: "XXXXX"

This is the same IP address that several troll comments last night were posted from. It's pretty obvious that those comments were posted by Hazelbaker herself. The content of the comments is a dead giveaway. In one comment, "cleanupnj" says:

"What happened to Mr. Mark Davis, the counsel who apparently gave Boss Bob "verbal approval" to line his pockets with tax-payer funded federal money."

This sounds like nearly the exact same thing Jill Hazelbaker said to reporter Herb Jackson in his story today:

"Menendez said it was another person that originally gave him approval, now his corroborating witness doesn't remember the act of approval."

And then there's this highly defensive comment from "usedtobeblue" protesting attacks on Hazelbaker:

Also, you guys are upset about the attacks on Menendez, but isn't it a little bit hypocritical to then attack his press secretary.

Wow. I'm sure that's what random, rank-and-file supporters are thinking: "Why is that blog attacking the press secretary?" Uh huh.

And perhaps the most damning evidence, again from "cleanupnj" (emphasis mine):

She is also married to Russ Feingold's legislative director.  Unbiased source?  A conflict of interest certaintly. And the woman isn't even sure if she gave Boss Bob approval anyway.

That was not public information until Herb Jackson's article appeared this morning. That's something only Herb and the people he spoke with for the article, like the campaign spokespeople, could have known at 7:15 PM yesterday.

In an embarassingly funny twist, even after being exposed as trolls, the campaign created yet another account and posted another "concern troll" comment, pretending to be an ardent democrat who used to enjoy reading this blog. Again, with the same exact IP address.

All hilariousness aside, this raises serious questions about the Kean Jr campaign. If they're willing to lie about simple things like this, what else would they lie about to win? Does Tom Kean Jr condone this type of unethical behavior in his campaign? And will he fire all those involved?

I have a question for you.  What were you doing in February of 1996?

It was a month that saw yet another major snow storm hit New Jersey.  Bill Clinton signed a telecom bill to widen competition and market access in cable television.  Republicans were watching rightwing freakjob Pat Buchanan bury Bob Dole and Steve Forbes in the New Hampshire primary. 

Kirsten Danis was writing an article  [Page one, Page two] for the Jersey Journal revealing that then-Congressman Bob Menendez had approval from a House Ethics lawyer to rent his former business office to the North Hudson Community Action Corporation.

(Cross-posted at Daily Kos)

This weekend, I relayed the story of GOP Senate wannabe Tom Kean, jr. running away from reporters after rightfully being criticized by Senator Bob Menendez (whose campaign many of you know I'm working for). Kean, jr couldn't take the heat and, in the face of reporters' questions, did nothing but repeat canned talking points. At one point, he even tried to cut the questioning off by ducking into an elevator. To prove that this was simply an attempted reporter dodge and not an actual trip to another floor, the elevator never left the sixth floor.

Many of you have been clamoring to see the sight for yourself.  Many have lamented, "if only there was a video of this escapade." Well... lament no longer. Tom Kean, jr not only runs from the issues -- he runs from the reporters. Watch for yourself! (And please by all means, feel free to pass this along to your friends.)

(Cross-posted at Blue Jersey and Daily Kos)

All of us here at the Menendez campaign have been pretty fed up with the petty attacks against the Senator, from NJ GOP chairman Tom Wilson's Ann Coulter-isms to Kean, Jr.'s own vague and unfounded personal attacks. Now, there are a few options for responding to this kind of Rove-style campaign. You can ignore it. You can send out surrogates to protest. Or you can confront the tactics, head on. Senator Menendez insisted on the latter.

Friday morning in Atlantic City, at a meeting of the New Jersey Association of Counties, Senator Menendez had some choice words for Tom Kean, Jr.

My record is clear, and I will not stand by another minute and let my opponent malign me or my service to the people I have represented throughout my career.  Tom, you may be playing with George Bush's campaign playbook, but you're on the field with a different kind of Democrat....

One week ago, his state party chairman stooped to the lowest form of politics, and said that if I had my way, the terrorist Zarqawi would still be alive to murder innocents in Iraq and plot attacks against our country.  And Tom Kean, Jr.?  No, rebuke, no apology, not a word.

That's not a campaign of courage, that's a campaign of cowardice.

You have to earn the right to talk about honesty and integrity and frankly Tom, when it comes to ethics and character, you have no standing to lecture anyone.

What was Kean's response to the speech? Well, even though he was supposed to be sitting on the stage with Senator Menendez, he chickened out and waited outside until the Senator was done speaking. He then went up to the podium and delivered the same canned speech he'd been planning all along, with absolutely no response to the Senator's comments. After Kean, Jr. spoke, reporters tried to get him on the record. No such luck. As Josh Gohlke of the Bergen Record put it, Kean and his crew "stampeded down a carpeted hallway and into an elevator."

Several reporters managed to keep up, blurting out questions the candidate was determined not to answer.

Did he care to respond to Democratic candidate Robert Menendez's scathing speech just a few minutes earlier in the same ballroom? Was he, as Menendez charged, a lightweight armed only with empty attacks?
The Kean contingent stampeded down a carpeted hallway and into an elevator. The reporters and questions squeezed into it with them. Kean kept repeating a few slogans.

"I'm proud of both my record and my vision for the future of the country," Kean reiterated, this time with finality, as everyone spilled back out of the elevator and he hurried off. "Thank you very much!"

After talking for a few minutes, the reporters realized they had entered and exited the elevator on the same floor. So ended a strange episode in a campaign that is reaching impressive levels of absurdity, given that it's only June.

When the only impressive aspect of his campaign is the new level of absurdity he's been able to reach, Tom Kean, Jr.'s got to be wondering what he's doing in this race at all. The Beltway Republicans think they're going to win this race the same way they've won races all across the country -- shoveling fear and smear. Welcome to Jersey, Rove. It's not going to work this time.

(Cross-posted at Daily Kos and Blue Jersey. Bumped--Chris)

This is an incredibly exciting week for all of us here at the Menendez campaign. While we've been hard at work for some time now, we're just starting to work at the new headquarters in New Brunswick and are "officially" launching the campaign today with two events in North and South Jersey. Even though New Jersey's considered a "blue" state and Senator Menendez has something of an incumbency advantage, this race is far from over. The rightists have been crowing, for example, over poll numbers that indicate a tight race, or even a lead for Kean Jr.

However, the polls they've been citing have largely been from partisan Republican firms like Strategic Vision and Rasmussen. In fact, the GOP's clamoring for bona fide good news in this race has even caught the attention of Media Matters, which has repeatedly criticized the partisan Republican Beltway media for pushing absurdly pro-Kean Jr talking points. Meanwhile, truly independent polling forms like Quinnipiac have shown Senator Menendez in the lead.

(Cross-posted at Blue Jersey and Daily Kos.)

In my first official post as a Menendez for Senate staffer, I'm really excited to announce the launch of StandUpToBigOil.com. As many of you have probably heard by now, Senator Menendez is fighting back against Big Oil and their allies in the Republican Congress. The Menendez plan will force Big Oil to foot the bill for a 60-day suspension of the federal gas tax to ease the burden of outrageous prices at the pump. Senator Reid and the DSCC have been touting the Menendez plan for a few weeks now, and it really seems to be gaining traction.

Here's the proposal, in a nutshell. As both retail gas prices trend upward with no relief in site, the federal gas tax -- currently $0.184 per gallon -- would be suspended for 60 days, ideally during the traditionally high-priced summer driving months. This tax holiday would be revenue neutral, however, as it's paid for by a repeal of the tax breaks and corporate welfare Republicans have made sure to protect for their cronies in Big Oil. Even though word of the Menendez proposal has made its way around the netroots, this is an important point that's been too often overlooked. Senator Menendez is going to stand up to Big Oil and make them pay for real relief at the pump.