National Review Reviewing Governor Chris Christie

Daniel Foster writes the following at National Review Online about Chris Christies entry a Governor of New Jersey, a Conservative in a very blue, high spending, anti business culture:

“It was supposed to have been the biggest fight of Chris Christie’s young administration: a May showdown over what Democrats in Trenton were calling the “millionaires’ tax,” designed, like each of the 115 statewide tax increases of the last decade, to paper over a small part of a yawning structural deficit by soaking the rich, one last time. Never mind that half the filings and a third of the revenue from the tax were to come from New Jersey’s business community, already battered by a perfect storm of overtaxation, capital flight, and recession. The Democrats were loaded for bear, and had the legislative majorities in place to pass the measure, having spent all winter threatening a government shutdown should Christie use his veto pen.

Democratic senate president Stephen Sweeney had even admonished, in a turn of phrase eminently Trentonian in its sheer backwardness, that “to give up $1 billion to the wealthy during this crisis is just wrong.” He promised that the millionaires’ tax was where the Democrats would “make our stand.”

The tax passed on party-line votes in the assembly and senate on May 20. Sweeney then certified the bill and walked it across the statehouse to Christie’s office, where the governor — who had vowed to balance the budget without raising taxes, and who’d developed a bewildering habit of keeping his promises — vetoed it. The whole thing took about two minutes.

“We’ll be back, governor,” Sweeney told Christie on being dispatched with the dead letter.

“All right, we’ll see,” came the reply.

And just like that, the biggest obstacle standing between Christie and the realization of his sea-changing, fiscally conservative first-year agenda was gone.

“We have not found our footing,” Democratic state senator Loretta Weinberg later said, still reeling from the decisive defeat. “I think a lot of people underestimated Chris Christie.”

Christopher James Christie is fond of saying that he’s been underestimated his whole professional life. The Newark-born son of an Irish father and a Sicilian mother, Christie is the product of respectable but middling schools — the University of Delaware and Seton Hall Law — and enjoyed a successful, if not spectacular, career as a partner in a small New Jersey firm. He served a single term as a Morris County freeholder, but was primaried, and soundly defeated, in his bid for reelection. When, despite a lack of criminal prosecutorial experience, he was appointed U.S. attorney in 2002, some detractors thought it a bit of cronyism — the Bush administration rewarding Christie for the fundraising work he’d done during the 2000 election.

They were wrong. By the time Christie left the job six years later, he had put over a hundred crooked pols — “from the school board to the state house and of both political parties” — behind bars, without losing a single case. And he had tried and convicted terrorists, Mafiosi, and child pornographers; arms dealers, gang members, and corporate hacks.

So when he announced for governor in 2009 — as a low-tax, small-government alternative to Democrat Jon Corzine, who had the misfortune of being both an incumbent and a former CEO of Goldman Sachs — he did so with a brand name. Yet the initial response from the right was skeptical. New Jersey had become deeply blue over the past 40 years, and its Republican executives tended to be milquetoast centrists. Even as Christie beat conservative favorite Steve Lonegan in the primary and surged past Corzine on a wave of anti-incumbent fervor, the state’s small conservative establishment feared they were in for more of the same. Those fears seemed justified, since Christie, despite employing the proper rhetoric about Trenton’s unsustainable “addiction to spending,” was frustratingly vague about his plans to fix the state’s finances, more or less claiming that he had to see for himself how bad the situation was before he’d know what needed to be done. To many, this was the tack of a governor who intended to go along to get along, and who’d be swallowed whole by the Democratic Trenton machine.

About this, too, Christie’s critics were wrong.”

Comment:  What do you expect me to say other than Governor Christie is very impressive….the unObama certainly…..and maybe the antiObama.   Both are promissing.

Will America ever become America again?

Missouri voters Bomb Obamacare- Support Repeal

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air wrote the following article at HotAir, “Missouri Pops the Obama-Media Bubble.”

“One meme had materialized over the last couple of weeks that ObamaCare had begun to get more popular with voters.  Using a couple of carefully-selected media polls, the White House had started this claim and the press seemed willing to ignore the avalanche of other polling showing that solid majorities favor repeal of the overhaul and the candidates who argue for repeal.  That meme died in Missouri, where almost three-quarters of the voters who came to the polls cast votes for a largely symbolic measure repudiating one of ObamaCare’s key provisions:

Missouri voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a federal mandate to purchase health insurance, rebuking President Barack Obama’s administration and giving Republicans their first political victory in a national campaign to overturn the controversial health care law passed by Congress in March.

“The citizens of the Show-Me State don’t want Washington involved in their health care decisions,” said Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, one of the sponsors of the legislation that put Proposition C on the August ballot. She credited a grass-roots campaign involving Tea Party and patriot groups with building support for the anti-Washington proposition.

With most of the vote counted, Proposition C was winning by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1. The measure, which seeks to exempt Missouri from the insurance mandate in the new health care law, includes a provision that would change how insurance companies that go out of business in Missouri liquidate their assets. …

Missouri was the first of four states to seek to opt out of the insurance purchase mandate portion of the health care law that had been pushed by Obama. And while many legal scholars question whether the vote will be binding, the overwhelming approval gives the national GOP momentum as Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma hold similar votes during midterm elections in November.

How big was this victory?  Three weeks ago, Rasmussen polled likely voters in Missouri and asked whether they supported repeal of ObamaCare.  At that time, 58% said they supported its repeal, with 50% strongly supporting it.  Thirty-eight percent said they opposed repeal.  That 58/38 split turned into a 71/29 disaster for Democrats and Obama.

If anything, this shows that opposition to ObamaCare is growing, not receding, but that’s probably not what actually happened.  While general-population and registered-voter samples may have seen a bit of softening to ObamaCare opposition, those aren’t the people turning out to vote this year.  Even Rasmussen may be underestimating the power of ObamaCare repeal in its likely-voter turnout, as their last poll on this question in Missouri clearly underestimated (in an indirect survey, of course) the results for this election.

Bear in mind that over 315,000 Democrats turned out to cast ballots in the primary that nominated Robin Carnahan, while over 577,000 Republicans hit the polls.  That is about a 65/35 split — which means that a significant amount of Democrats either supported the ballot measure repudiating ObamaCare, or didn’t bother to cast a vote to defend the program.  Actually, Prop C got more votes than the combined voting in both Senate primaries — which tells us something even more about the passion in the electorate.

Democrats may have to hit the panic button after seeing the results from this swing state.  ObamaCare set fire to the electorate last year, and that may be an inferno for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in November.

Addendum: Carnahan should also be very, very worried.  Republicans beat Democrats in turnout almost 2-1 in the primaries for the US Senate despite the fact that Blunt won just as big as she did.  That’s a very bad sign for November for her, too.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz Examines Leftwing Piety and A Second Atrocity at Ground Zero

Another Wall Street Journal gem of an article from Ms. Rabinowitz subtitled, “The entlightened class can’t understand why the public is uneasy about the Ground Zero mosque.”

“Americans may have lacked for much in the course of their history, but never instruction in social values. The question today is whether Americans of any era have ever confronted the bombardment of hectoring and sermonizing now directed at those whose views are deemed insufficiently enlightened—an offense regularly followed by accusations that the offenders have violated the most sacred principles of our democracy.

It doesn’t take a lot to become the target of such a charge. There is no mistaking the beliefs on display in these accusations, most recently in regard to the mosque about to be erected 600 feet from Ground Zero. Which is that without the civilizing dictates of their superiors in government, ordinary Americans are lost to reason and decency. They are the kind of people who—as a recent presidential candidate put it—cling to their guns and their religion.

There is no better exemplar of that faith than New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, though in this he is hardly alone. Compared with the Obama White House, Mr. Bloomberg is a piker in the preachments and zealotry department. Still, no voice brings home more unforgettably the attitudes that speak for today’s enlightened and progressive class.

Immediately after the suspect in the attempted car bombing near Times Square was revealed to be Faisal Shahzad, of Pakistani origin, Mayor Bloomberg addressed the public. In admonishing tones—a Bloomberg trademark invariably suggestive of a school principal who knows exactly what to expect of the incorrigibles it is his unhappy fate to oversee—the mayor delivered a warning. There would be no toleration of “any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers.”

That there has been a conspicuous lack of any such behavior on the part of New Yorkers or Americans elsewhere from the 9/11 attacks to the present seems not to have impressed Mr. Bloomberg. Nor has it caused any moderation in the unvarying note of indignation the mayor brings to these warnings. It’s reasonable to raise a proper caution. It’s quite something else to do it as though addressing a suspect rabble.

It’s hard to know the sort of rabble the mayor had in mind when he told a television interviewer, prior to Shahzad’s identification, that it “could be anything,” someone mentally disturbed, or “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health-care bill.” Nowhere in the range of colorful possibilities the mayor raised was there any mention of the most likely explanation—another terrorist attempt by a soldier of radical Islam, the one that occurred to virtually every American who had heard the reports.

The citizens were, of course, right. Those leaders bent on dissuading them from their grasp of the probable cause of this near disaster were left with their red herrings hanging—but remembered. Mr. Bloomberg’s “someone who doesn’t like the health-care bill” would be inscribed in the golden book of howlers these events have yielded, along with Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s brisk assurance there was no evidence this was anything but “a one-off.”

The notion that it is for the greater good that the people be led to suspect virtually any cause but the one they had the most reason to fear reflects a contempt for the citizenry that’s of longstanding, but never so blatant as today. It is in the interest of higher values, Americans understand—higher, that is, than theirs—that they are now expected to accept official efforts to becloud reality.

Such values were the rationale for the official will to ignore the highly suspicious behavior of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who went on to murder 13 Americans at Fort Hood. A silence maintained despite all his commanders and colleagues knew about his raging hostility to the U.S. military and his strident advocacy on behalf of political Islam.

Those who knew—and they were many—chose silence out of fear of seeming insensitive to a Muslim. As one who had said nothing in the interest of this higher good later explained, Maj. Hasan was, after all, one of the few top-ranking Muslim officers the army had.

In the plan for an Islamic center and mosque some 15 stories high to be built near Ground Zero, the full force of politically correct piety is on display along with the usual unyielding assault on all dissenters. The project has aroused intense opposition from New Yorkers and Americans across the country. It has also elicited remarkable streams of oratory from New York’s political leaders, including Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

“What are we all about if not religious freedom?” a fiery Mr. Cuomo asked early in this drama. Mr. Cuomo, running for governor, has since had less to say.

The same cannot be said for Mr. Bloomberg, who has gone on to deliver regular meditations on the need to support the mosque, and on the iniquity of its opponents. In the course of a speech at Dartmouth on July 16 he raised the matter unasked, and held forth on his contempt for those who opposed the project and even wanted to investigate the funding: “I just think it’s the most outrageous thing anybody could suggest.” Ground Zero is a “very appropriate place” for a mosque, the mayor announced, because it “tells the world” that in America, we have freedom of religion for everybody.

Here was an idea we have been hearing more and more of lately—the need to show the world America’s devotion to democracy and justice, also cited by the administration as a reason to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City. Who is it, we can only wonder, that requires these proofs? What occasions these regular brayings on the need to show the world the United States is a free nation?

It’s unlikely that the preachments now directed at opponents of the project by Mayor Bloomberg and others will persuade that opposition. Those fighting the building recognize full well the deliberate obtuseness of Mr. Bloomberg’s exhortations, and those of Mr. Cuomo and others: the resort to pious battle cries, the claim that antagonists of the plan stand against religious freedom. They note, especially, the refusal to confront the obvious question posed by this proposed center towering over the ruins of 9/11.

It is a question most ordinary Americans, as usual, have no trouble defining. Namely, how is it that the planners, who have presented this effort as a grand design for the advancement of healing and interfaith understanding, have refused all consideration of the impact such a center will have near Ground Zero? Why have they insisted, despite intense resistance, on making the center an assertive presence in this place of haunted memory? It is an insistence that calls to mind the Flying Imams, whose ostentatious prayers—apparently designed to call attention to themselves on a U.S. Airways flight to Phoenix in November 2006—ended in a lawsuit. The imams sued. The airlines paid.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser—devout Muslim, physician, former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy—says there is every reason to investigate the center’s funding under the circumstances. Of the mosque so near the site of the 9/11 attacks, he notes “It will certainly be seen as a victory for political Islam.”

The center may be built where planned. But it will not go easy or without consequence to the politicians intent on jamming the project down the public throat, in the name of principle. Liberal piety may have met its match in the raw memory of 9/11, and in citizens who have come to know pure demagoguery when they hear it. They have had, of late, plenty of practice.”

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

Comment:

I am not uneasy about this second attack on Ground Zero, I am outraged.  I am also outraged that we have this Marxist alien  in the White House whose approach to this second attack on Ground Zero is “It is not our (administration’s) affair.  It’s  the concern of New York City.”   As if to this headless horseman  in the White House and his buddy Marxist, Eric Holder, it was no more than a shooting on tenth avenue.  

Since when is a foreign bombing of an American city killing 3,000 of its citizens NOT AN ATTACK ON AMERICA ITSELF?

This Obama has absolutely no feel for the country.

This Democrat administration is asking for trouble, big trouble.   It is commiting an atrocity that will not be tolerated this time.  If this Barack Hussein Obama allows this jihadist victory memorial to the highjackers who murdered these 3,000 Americans on American soil on September 11, 2001 to be built, there will be violence until that structure is destroyed……Marxist piety or no Marxist piety.  

This alien president is doing his very best to divide, diminish  and impoverish this country.  On this attempt he is playing with fire.