Governor Christie spent the week trying to smooth over his mean-spirited image after making retaliatory budget cuts and leaving town, according to an analysis in today's APP. His generous budget givebacks and targeted visits were geared to calm the political frenzy he left behind and restore his more tolerable bully status, according to Patrick Murray, a political scientist at Monmouth University. "You can be a bully and still do good things, but mean-spirited means you're simply out to get somebody, regardless of what the impact would be on anybody else," Murray told the paper.
Stick to the blog, you are much better at it. I can go to MSNBC for political crap!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if our esteemed Gov. was having second thoughts about pulling our state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative while he was gasping for air in the emergency room.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous 9:16 am, you just can't handle the fact that the Governor overstepped with his budget slashing extravaganza and you wish he didn't have to ratchet back his signature nastiness to soothe the citizenry. I mostly quoted the Asbury Park Press. Like they said, he's mean spirited and boorish. Anything nice he did this week is only because he was told to be nice.
ReplyDeleteNo, I'm just pissed off you took a really good blog and made it political. Start a political blog if you want to do that, otherwise I will have to re-think my bookmark.
ReplyDeleteAn916AM
I've been writing this blog for over two years and have always had a political perspective that surfaces now and then. I've not made a sudden turn. I have fashioned a blog that tries to serve a community. I write about music, the arts, food, history, roads, and stores but also about schools, government, churches, unions, police, fire and rescue, the environment, and on and on. Singling out political commentary as inappropriate, segmented off from other issues of community life, is a non-starter. I wish you'd stay.
ReplyDeleteOK let's be political. Q1 growth 0.4%. Q2 growth 1.3%. Q3 growth revised down. Cost for this growth, $1 TRILLION dollars in stimulus. First downgrade of US credit EVER. Jobs created last 2 mo. 58K-118K. 9.1% unemployment. 45.8 million on foodstamps. Highest ever. Afgan now at it's worst Gitmo still open. Still in Iraq. Now in Libya and spending 3 mil a day. I could go on and on and on. How's that hopey changy thing working for you? It ain't workin' for me.!!!!
ReplyDeleteAccording to Politifact, Obama inherited a current fiscal year deficit of $1.3 trillion and a projected 10 year $8 trillion deficit from the Bush Administration. Republican tax cuts, war mongering, and lax regulation put us in a fine mess. You can point at Obama's response to the mess he faced, and it hasn't been perfect, but what you and I are dealing with has Republican roots, plain and simple.
ReplyDeleteDo you know that Politifact is a wholly own sub of the St. Petersburg Press, a way left-leaning newspaper. You have to do better than "it's all Bushed fault" after almost 3 yrs. Even your DNC head says you own the economy. He was elected because he said he was going to fix everything and in truth he has made it much worse! We have much less credibility as a country, he was going to make our enemies our friends, and instead he has made our friends our enemies.Barney, Dodd, Nancy and Waters are the ones who put us in a mess. "FNMA & FREDDY are doing fine and don't need oversight" Did you see FNMA wants an additional 5.1 bil? Please!!
ReplyDeleteMaybe you'll believe Fox News, which reported that the 2009 federal deficit of $1.4 trillion was more than three times the previous high deficit of $454.8 billion in 2008? Obama owns the bad situation he was left with. The Republican Congress has been a legislative sluggard, focusing ineffectively on ending abortion rights and union rights, preventing gay marriage, and preserving the Bush tax cuts. They should have been promoting jobs and education, rebuilding infrastructure, helping urban centers, protecting the food supply and the environment, and other such things. The Republican agenda is bankrupt. BTW, two-thirds of the Tea Party voted in favor of raising of the debt ceiling at the last minute, so they were obviously disingenuous when they swore they would vote against it no matter what. I have no respect for this new brinksmanship. Wait til the retirees and union members get a hold of the Tea Party members next election season. They're going to wring their little necks.
ReplyDeleteI love how the right wing can delude itself into believing that the real estate collapse and the greatest economic contraction since the Great Depression has had no ripple effect on our present economic situation...We were hit with an economic tsunami in the last month of Bush's administration but.....Nooooo, its all Obama's fault! They're whining into the wind though. Anybody who was not in a coma in 2008 knows exactly why we are where we are today.
ReplyDeleteJust to reassure you.. I was not in a coma during the housing collapse, I was actually originating mortgage loans with qualifying criteria I could not believe. I spent 25 years in the industry. I watched as Angelo (Countrywide) got preferential treatment from FNMA for a few years to write the "can you take one more breath for me loans" that no one else could.I watched as FNMA underwrote no income no asset no appraisal no job loans. I watched when Bush asked for oversight. I watched when Barney, Maxine, Dodd and Pelosi said it wasn't needed and that the "agencies" were doing a "remarkable job". Yes, I watched as all these loans defaulted and the economy went down hill. I watched and knew what was going on a damn sight better than you did, so don't try to rewrite history with talking points.. So now you know the truth and the rest of the story. You can blame the collapse and resulting demise on our Democratic friends
ReplyDeleteTime Magazine has an article titled "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis" Here's what they said about George W Bush:
ReplyDeleteFrom the start, Bush embraced a governing philosophy of deregulation. That trickled down to federal oversight agencies, which in turn eased off on banks and mortgage brokers. Bush did push early on for tighter controls over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but he failed to move Congress. After the Enron scandal, Bush backed and signed the aggressively regulatory Sarbanes-Oxley Act. But SEC head William Donaldson tried to boost regulation of mutual and hedge funds, he was blocked by Bush's advisers at the White House as well as other powerful Republicans and quit. Plus, let's face it, the meltdown happened on Bush's watch.
I would expect nothing less from Time. What it says does not make sense. How can they say "eased off on banks and mortgage brokers" in one sentence, and "Bush did push early on for tighter controls over Fannie Mae and Freddie" in the next."but he failed to move Congress" should read "but the Democratic Congress wanted nothing to do with anything that regulated FNMA & Freddie". "Since it happened on Bushes watch", I guess that means anything that happened after 2009 is Obama's watch so I guess all the bad news we've had since then is on Obama's watch.
ReplyDeleteFannie Mae and Freddie Mac are both government-sponsored enterprises, so it was reasonable for President Bush to tighten the reins on them. I was in favor of that action myself. But after the savings and loan debacle, Enron, and a bunch of other things, it seemed unreasonable for W to loosen regulations on private banks and private mortgage brokers, something all together different from managing Federal GSEs. You should know that. I've quoted Fox News, Time, and Politifact and you're still not willing to admit that Bush left us in a bad way. We're still under his ill influence due the lingering Bush tax cuts. We'll just have to disagree on this. The history books will be hard on the man, but they're written by a bunch of liberal hacks anyway. With any luck, the Texas Board of Ed will reject those histories and W's legacy will remain as you remember it.
ReplyDeleteAlthough you won't watch it, or REALLY listen to it, I leave you with this testimony in Congress
ReplyDeletewhere the Democrats forced us into the largest equity loss in the history of the world!!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
A much better choice for your argument would have been the text of FRB Chairman Ben Bernanke's speech to the Independent Community Bankers Association in 2007. No doubt the Dems in 2004 were hearing none of it because of the Republican agenda to quash affordable housing. If you listen to the video, you'll notice that both Waters and Frank justify their position based on their defense of affordable housing. It's a shame they didn't come to terms then. And it's a shame that the Republicans and their Tea Party fringe refuse to come to terms now. Obama can no more overcome a belligerent Congress than Bush could. If you don't want to blame Bush, then stop blaming Obama. Let's agree to blame the legislature and kick the bums out. Truly Congress is dysfunctional and has been for some time.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't use anything from Bernanke after he telegraphed the Fed position on rates for the next 2 years. I prefer to think it's a shame that Democrats and Obama didn't come to terms with Cut,Cap & Balance. Mr. Obama had 2 years of Dem Congress and Senate, and couldn't even produce a budget. The recent one he produced went down to unanimous defeat as you know.
ReplyDeleteYou may have the last word. Play nice!! LOL!!