Category Archives: Opinion

By James J. Devine On Jan. 2, 2021, President Donald Trump placed a phone call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and delivered a simple, direct request: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” After losing to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, he tried to cheat andContinue reading “Lying, cheating Donald Trump has no credibility on elections or anything else”

By James J. Devine The defining failure of the Democratic establishment was not what it accomplished after the 2008 financial crisis, but what it declined to do when it possessed the political power to remake the American economy. Frustration among the party’s base became clear when many Democrats chose not to vote in the 2016Continue reading “Disappointing Democratic establishment declined to do what voters wanted — and then wondered why they lost”

By James J. Devine Quitters never win, and winners never quit. Yet whenever Republicans attack a Democratic candidate, too many Democrats instinctively reach for the white flag instead of the battle standard. The latest target is Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for a must-win US Senate seat in Maine, and the calls for him toContinue reading “Wounded Democrat Graham Platner must win the US Senate seat in Maine”

By Johanna Silver Delegates from across the original 13 colonies signed the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago on July 4, 1776 detailing the abuses of the King of England that led to their fight for sovereignty. Their condemnation feels all too familiar today. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed the country’s original 13 colonies separateContinue reading “The Declaration of Independence lists injuries similar to those Trump has inflicted”

By James J. Devine Let’s be brutally honest about what just happened: Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “voice of the working class,” just executed one of the most audacious wealth transfers in American political history—and his most loyal followers paid the price. The numbers are staggering, almost beyond comprehension. While hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans—manyContinue reading “Trump’s crypto swindle: How the President pickpocketed his supporters”

By Catherine Simpson Bueker, Emmanuel College Twenty-five years ago, I attended a Fourth of July parade in Boston that has stuck with me. The head drummer of the colonial fife and drum band was a Black man in a Revolutionary War costume, his dreadlocks peeking from under a powdered wig. As the parade stopped toContinue reading “How public celebrations quietly remake what it means to be American”

By James J. Devine Woody Allen’s famous quote, “80% of success is showing up,” has been lost on a New Jersey congressman who has virtually had everything in life handed to him—without being physically present or earning deserved credit for achieving goals—but rumor has it that he will attend a campaign fundraising event tonight. InContinue reading “Absentee Tom Kean Jr. makes a mockery of the republic by not showing up”

By James J. Devine Cory Booker wants you to believe that love is what has carried him through his political journey. Love for the vulnerable. Love for the forgotten. Love that motivated a hunger strike, a mayoral campaign, and a Senate run. It is a beautiful story, but it is bullshit. It is a fictionContinue reading “All the Love that money can buy”

By James J. Devine Republicans have abandoned any pretense of representation, embraced cheating, and taken the United States far from the “republican form of government” guaranteed in Article IV of the Constitution. Gerrymandering—the manipulation of electoral district boundaries to gain political advantage—remains one of the most enduring challenges to representative government in the United States,Continue reading “Electoral district boundary lines that erase the people annihilate legitimacy”

By James J. Devine In the wake of a genuine tragedy—the murder of Daniel Anderl, son of federal judge Esther Salas—the state legislature constructed a legal edifice that protects the safest and most sheltered people in society, and dismisses with bureaucratic indifference the actual victims of America’s crime epidemic. The dangerous and bipartisan bill creatingContinue reading “Sanctuary for the powerful enhances New Jersey’s two-tiered system of justice”

As our nation celebrates 250 years of independence, we are proud to mark our own place in the American story. For more than two centuries, our newspaper has informed, challenged, and connected generations of readers. Founded on July 13, 1822, as The Bridgetown Museum and New Jersey Advocate, NJTODAY.NEWS has survived wars, economic crises, technologicalContinue reading “Serving New Jersey since 1822: Publisher’s reflect as USA marks 250 years”

By Leon Reed Along with the long-since abandoned beliefs in “judicial restraint” (Republicans now applaud the most radically activist Supreme Court in the nation’s history) and “fiscal restraint” (Eisenhower was the last Republican president who EVER experienced an annual deficit smaller than the one he inherited), let’s add “federal overreach” to the discarded set ofContinue reading “The SAVE Act: Didn’t Republicans once oppose federal overreach?”

By James J. Devine The president of the United States threw a party in Kentucky, and on the tarmac, beneath the roar of Air Force One’s engines, he pronounced victory over a man who committed the unpardonable sin of disagreeing with him. Representative Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican who dared to demand the release ofContinue reading “The Price of Presidential Purity”

You have been played. Not once, not accidentally, but systematically and with the full resources of one of the most profitable industries on planet Earth. The package of snack cakes in your pantry, the frozen dinner in your freezer, the breakfast cereal your children ate this morning before school — these are not foods. TheyContinue reading “Ultra-processed food giants copied tobacco’s deadly lung cancer playbook”

By James J. Devine The Democratic Party has a purity problem. It can forgive a president who is an adjudicated rapist, a convicted felon, and a serial fraudster. It can accommodate Wall Street billionaires, AIPAC cash, and the complete collapse of labor protections. It can look away while the executive branch deploys troops to AmericanContinue reading “Cory Booker’s “concerns” are that Graham Platner is on our side in a class war”

By James J Devine The problem in Washington isn’t broken process. It’s legalized predation. Special interests don’t buy votes with sackfuls of cash under tables—they buy them with Super PACs, “social welfare” dark-money shells, and stock tips that turn a $15,000 congressional salary into a multimillion-dollar insider portfolio. The fix isn’t a dozen lukewarm billsContinue reading “Stop Polishing the Trough. Nail It Shut.”

By James J. Devine The bar for releasing the Epstein files — those elusive records detailing how a convicted sex trafficker moved freely among the powerful for years — is apparently so high that the trump administration has not managed to clear it. The bar for launching military strikes, destabilizing entire regions, and spending hundredsContinue reading “It’s easier to start a war than to comply with a law enacted by Congress”

By James J. Devine Let us, for a moment, set aside the dusty niceties of the Sixth Amendment, the tedious presumption of innocence, and the general inconvenience of a months-long courtroom slog. The people have made up their minds. The scrolling headlines have declared it. Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of putting a bulletContinue reading “Instead of a boring televised trial, feed Tyler Robinson to a hungry lion”

Josh Gottheimer has spent years perfecting a single political trick: wrapping the slaughter of Palestinians in the blood-soaked flag of “fighting antisemitism,” then demanding applause. Last week, the New Jersey congressman—Donald Trump’s favorite Democrat, and a man so obsessively dedicated to defending Israel’s every atrocity that he makes AIPAC lobbyists look like peaceniks—rushed to TwitterContinue reading “Trump’s favorite Dem, Josh Gottheimer, has no problem with genocide but he’s against jokes”

By James J. Devine The guardrails are gone. Every single one. In the winter of 2020, a handful of federal officials still had the spine to tell the president no. They huddled in a windowless room deep inside the Justice Department. William Barr, then the attorney general, had summoned cybersecurity experts to answer one question:Continue reading “The unmaking of American democracy is happening right now”