Is there anything Newark Mayor Cory Booker can’t do with the help of well-timed Tweet and a disarmingly charming smile? While others in government were abandoning those New Jerseyites floating helplessly into the unknown on their ice floes, Booker donned a stylish-but-not-overly-trendy-like-he’s-trying-too-hard-or-anything trapper’s hat, sat down at his computer, and Tweeted his people to safety. Now, he’s vowed to use the social networking site and Facebook to help him lose weight.

A few months ago, Mayor Cory Booker jokingly sent Snooki a Tweet threatening to give her a ticket for texting while driving after she Tweeted about being stuck in Newark traffic. That was funny. This, though, is awesome. After a resident let him know via Twitter that his sister’s street was still snowed under and she couldn’t leave to get diapers, he responded that he’d deliver them personally. Within a half an hour, he’d actually done it!

For the past few weeks Glenn Beck has joined the chorus of opinion-media personalities discussing the fascinating story of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In Beck’s inimitable fashion, he cut straight to the part of the story that resonated emotionally with his audience, focusing on revolution and youth, represented by “hactivists” and “Operation Payback.” But now that someone claiming to represent the renegade vigilante set of hackers known as Anonymous has sent a message to Beck regarding his coverage, one can only wonder if he is in danger of painting a target on his own back.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie often seems larger than life, and it’s not just because of his “rubenesque” body type. Christie has a knack for connecting with his constituents because of his remarkably candid, and yes, sometimes combative, way of communicating. On The Today Show, Jamie Gangel filed a glowing report on the New Jersey Governor with a clear and optimistic theme of a presidential bid in the future.

This week’s Real Time round table was a little less political than usual. Bill Maher had John Avlon, S.E. Cupp and Newark mayor Cory Booker on the show to talk about a variety of topics, but somehow Elena Kagan‘s nomination of the Supreme Court became a much more metaphysical topics as Maher challenged Cupp, who is openly atheist, to call all people of faith “delusional,” which she refused.

It sucked to be at Newark tonight — the entire Terminal C was on lockdown thanks to some wayward dude wandering unchecked through a security gate into a secure area. Flights were grounded, planes were stuck on the tarmac, and passengers weren’t going anywhere. But — things that suck mightily can always be made better through song, and that is just what musician Josh Wilson demonstrated….when he led the entire crowd around him in the terminal in a rendition of “Hey, Jude.”

When people like Rainn Wilson, Mindy Kaling, Paul Feig, Rob Corddry, Paul F. Tomkins, Joel Stein, Rob Riggle, Diablo Cody and Jenji Kohan say your schtick is funny, then it’s pretty safe to say it’s funny. But will saying that — and tweeting it, and Facebooking it, and YouTube-ing it, and emailing them on the [...]

Newark is a city in transition and at the center of that transformation is its mayor, Cory Booker. Crippled by riots that took place in 1967, the city struggled to recover and it was only until recently, almost a half century later, that Newark has begun to rise again. Booker’s sweeping reforms in city government [...]