Here’s something you don’t see every day:
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey took an unscheduled break from partisan attacks on the President Obama on Tuesday to praise him, repeatedly and effusively, for leading the federal government’s response to the storm.
“Wonderful,” “excellent” and “outstanding” were among the adjectives Mr. Christie chose, a change-up from his remarks last week that Mr. Obama was “blindly walking around the White House looking for a clue.”
Some of Mr. Christie’s Republican brethren have already begun grumbling about his gusher of praise at such a crucial time in the election.
But the governor seemed unconcerned. When Fox News asked him about the possibility that Mitt Romney might take a disaster tour of New Jersey, Mr. Christie replied:
I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested. I have a job to do in New Jersey that is much bigger than presidential politics. If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.
A governor who cares more about serving his (or her) state more than national partisan politics? Imagine that. If you live in South Carolina, you might find that difficult, but try…
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Kudos to Gov. Christie. I’ve certainly had issues with Christie in the past but in this situation at least he’s doing the right thing.
He’s running for Pres in 2016
@J – I certainly hope he runs, but in 2020 after 8 years of Romney.
J, if Christie’s motivation is that he’s running for POTUS in 4 years then he’s going about it the wrong way. Remember he has to get through the primary season and if anything goes wrong with the FEMA operations over the next few days then Christie will be blasted by his GOP rivals during the primaries. In this case I’m inclined not to be cynical.
If Romney does somehow manage to win it will be because of his ongoing campaign of mendacity. To all my GOP friends out there why do you support this guy? He’s just about the most dishonorable politician that has ever run for POTUS. He’s now betting on a completely false ad campaign that attempts to brand Chrysler with a massive shift of production to China. Seriously this is so beyond the pale. So dishonest. So bogus. Chrysler is doing well because of the car bailout that Romney OPPOSSED. In fact they are doing so well they are now expanding Jeep production in the USA by adding 1500 jobs. Yes Mitt, 1500 good, high paying American jobs. AND they are catching on in China which means added production over there is now an option. All this is GOOD news, WELCOME news for the formerly troubled auto maker and their workers. But is all this good news enough to stop the smears and misinterpretation of history? Not if you’re Mitt Romney.
@bud – “mendacity” who are you, Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
Fiat is looking to expand Jeep production to China, not shift it all there as MANY news outlets and automotive blogs reported.
Romney supported a managed bankruptcy and then government support for the GM and Chrysler – a plan that would have left the US taxpayer with much less substantial losses. They still owe the public treasury billions, and have still not fixed many of their structural issues including overcapacity, pensions, labor rules and legacy costs. The auto bailout was really a bankruptcy for GM & Chrysler stock/bondholders and a bailout for Obama’s UAW cronies. Just admit it. We’ll lose $14 billion on the auto bailout.
Silence, the Romney claim got a pants on fire from Politifact and four Pinochios from Factchecker. If you can’t see how utterly false, desparate and misleading this atrocious ad campaign is then you’re nothing but a partisan idiot. Romney railed against George W. Bush for his initial efforts to help Chrysler. The whole tie-in with Fiat was something that came of necessaty as a way to keep the company going. Obama had zero to do with the Fiat purchase. By all accounts the Romney approach to Detroit would have led to liquidation of Chrysler. The Obama approach (and yes W. did have a roll in this) has led to EXPANDING USA Jeep production while at the same allowing for a RETURN of Jeep production in China. This is all good news thanks to the president. And Romney is a dishonarble lying bastard.
Just admit it. We’ll lose $14 billion on the auto bailout.
-Silence
You make some ridiculous claims but this one is so far off the scale it deserves a billion Pinochios. Seriously had the auto bailout not occurred $14 billion would be considered pocket change compared to the desparate situation to our manufacturing sector.
The guy is about as polished as Councilman Danny Frasier.
But he is whip smart. While I don’t particularly think he would make a good presidential candidate; the guy lives leadership. I would take him at his word when he says he is focused on the current needs of his state; take a look at his look this am – there is a guy who was up all night working hard to do what needs to be done. That’s a rare quality in politicians; few of whom have any interest in rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done.
I liked how he also basically said this morning that the Mayor of Atlantic City was a liar and an imbecile – without crossing the line of decorum. Keeping cool when things get tough will serve him well, today and into the future.
I probably shouldn’t have called Silence an idiot. By all accounts he’s a plenty smart guy. But he is a partisan.
No, you shouldn’t have.
And Silence, I’m sorry I read Bud’s comment too quickly in approving it, and missed that…
Actually, now that I look again, I DID read the word, but was taking it as a sort of rhetorical, nonspecific “you.”
In any event, I’m glad Bud has apologized…
” Seriously had the auto bailout not occurred $14 billion would be considered pocket change compared to the desparate situation to our manufacturing sector.”
You mean Detroit would look worse than it does now?
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089_1850973,00.html
He’s just waiting for the check to clear.
No offense taken on the idiot charge, that’s likely provable with the right test. But I’m not a partisan. This cycle I’ve made 2 donations, both to Democrats – Tory Rush and Beth Bernstein. Last cycle I worked actively on a Democratic campaign, and I’ve supported Republican candidates in the past as well. I support the better candidate, either the better person, or the one I feel will do the best job.
Now on to the auto bailouts: Here’s an article from USA Today which puts the auto bailout losses at $23.6 billion.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2011/11/auto-bailout-losses-expected-to-rise-by-9-billion/1
Bankruptcy laws in the United States provide for a clear preference in favor of secured over unsecured creditors. GM & Chrysler’s secured bondholders anticipated that their prior status would protect them from the most severe losses in the bankruptcy. Obama and his cronies gave priority to the UAW, placing them ahead of the secured creditors in the bankruptcy.
A standard bankruptcy with government financing would have served them better, and been legal. It would also NOT have resulted in the carnage that bud alleges.
Romney practised a scorched earth policy of stripping companies and employees of what few assets they had in order to give himself and his tiny cadre of investors a huge windfall. The lessons he learned at Bain, had they been applied to the car companies, would have resulted in disaster for the nation. He was adamently oppossed to the use of federal funds to help the car companies even when Bush was helping them along in 2008. No doubt the Romney approach, that categorically rejected federal money, and absolutely essential feature of the bailout, would have resulted in lost pensions and the secured debt holders would have lost it all in any event. So that is a red herring. There is no doubt the financial markets would have tanked under the Romney approach.
The Obama approach, on the other hand, saved the industry and the workers pensions. As part of the deal the UAW made compensation concessions. This saved the car companies and a huge chunk of the manufacturing sector. It also calmed the markets which are doing very well right now. If some small portion of the bailout money is never returned to the treasury that is a tiny price to pay for the results that have been achieved.
Romney can trot out mendatious ads til the cows come home (or perhaps in this case til the cars come home) but the fact remains he favored an untenable liquidation approach while Obama favored a much more pragmatic interventionist approach. And the nation is better off for it.
@bud
Romney’s “scorched earth” policy also revived or created plenty of businesses as well. To suggest that Bain only pillaged companies is as untrue as any lie you claim Romney has made. Every business they took over had a willing seller… many of the businesses that were dismantled would have gone bankrupt anyway.
So bud, by your logic we should spend our tax dollars supporting industry, no matter how inflexible or outdated in order to protect the workers’ jobs and pensions? Never let a failiing company go through bankruptcy? Keep TWA flying so the pilots and stewardesses can keep working? Keep those poor energy traders at Enron employed? Should we keep the lines going, cranking out Polaroid cameras? Subsidize K-Mart so that they can compete against more efficient retailers? Let’s keep those Penn Central trains rolling too, after all, those conductors and engineers are hard working folks! What about all of the linemen and operators at WorldCom? What about all of the scientists, engineers and breast implant manufacturers at Dow Corning? Won’t somebody think of them?
Let’s ensure that creative destruction never takes place, and continue to support companies that should be allowed to restructure, liquidate or dissolve through bankruptcy. That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.
But bud, the workers don’t matter. Just the “job creators.”
The fact that the job creators drove us off an economic cliff doesn’t mean we should take their drivers licenses away, amirite?
Isn’t Obama declaring himself a “job creator”?
@Kathryn
There are plenty of guilty parties that led to the economic cliff. Republicans, Democrats, Wall Street, Government Backed Mortgages, House Flippers, People Who Took Second Mortgages to Pay for TV’s and Cars,
Presidents (Bush and Obama) who continue to fund wars with deficits.
It was a result of a culture of greed and “me-too” that did it.
Ultimately, the economic cliff was the result of individual greed on many levels, and a general lack of thrift, something I’ve often harped upon. Greed’s been around since the dawn of time, and always will be with us. Thrift however, can be learned, taught and re-instituted as a shared cultural value. It’s a shame that nobody’s promoting thrift. Instead we have government sponsored lotteries.
I don’t mean to disparage Gov. Christie, but I have to confess that when I saw this picture, the following Randy Newman lyrics ran through my head:
“President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, ‘Little fat man isn’t it a shame what the river has
done
To this poor cracker’s land.'”
I guess it was the fact that they were touring a disaster area that made me think of it.
Of course, there’s nothing “little” about Christie. And this is New Jersey, so I don’t think you’d call the residents crackers. But I thought of it just the same.
I’d really like to see Christie lose some weight, for his own sake. It’s not just that it hurts him as a presidential candidate; it’s likely to kill him.
I hope no one is offended thinking that was a gratuitous reference to Gov. Christie’s weight. It wasn’t. What it was was a gratuitous reference to “Louisiana 1927.” What an awesome song. It always comes to mind when there’s flooding in the news…
There is no evidence that losing weight increases longevity. This is an increasingly widely known fact in the scientific community. Stop concern trolling!
I am offended by your gratuitous reference to Gov. Christie’s weight.
Yet there is scientific proof that gaining weight reduces longevity.
There is no proof that gaining weight causes anything other than sore joints. Correlation is not causation.
So why is NYC banning trans-fats and big sody-pops?
And there you have it from Dr. Kathryn. Let’s all go out and eat a dozen Krispy Kremes for lunch.
So what Dr. Kathryn is stating is that obesity has no side effects outside of sore joints.
As someone who has battled her weight her whole life, and who is quite literate, I have read widely and wisely on the subject, and yes, the only thing obesity has been definitively shown to cause is bad joints.
Dr. Steven Blair at USC, for one, has studied this extensively. There is no causal link between obesity and ill health.
So all this heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, etc… talk associated with obesity is just “malarkey” (I’m trying to say that properly but I don’t own a set of over-sized, ill-fitting dentures) according to Dr. Blair at USC? In his scientific studies all it causes is sore knees and ankles. Tendonitis in the elbows I can believe…
Is the AMA aware of these recent findings?
Next I’ll be hearing Dr. Blair’s other discovery that taking in less calories than a person burns in a day is the root cause of obesity. The guy sounds like a freakin’ genius.
Actually there is a lot of support for the theory that bacteria cause obesity, just as antibiotics are used to fatten cattle by modifying their biome ( the bacterial profile of an organism).
If obesity causes high blood pressure, diabetes, etc., how come I never had any of these diseases, yet thin people I know do?
Ah yes… the obesity bacteria. Extensively tested by Dr. Ronald McDonald working for the Lazy-Boy Foundation.
Why do I bother?
Ignore Steven’s snark.
At the same time, I’m not surprised he is incredulous, since what you’re saying about Dr. Blair’s findings seems to fly in the face of so much of what we’ve been told for so many years.
I think what I hear you saying is that in a purely scientific definition, obesity is not shown to be the direct, proximate cause of diabetes, heart disease, or any of the major killers with which we associate it.
But don’t you think it’s true that most physicians will tell their patients that if they are as big as Gov. Christie, they are more likely to be in danger of those things? Regardless of the strict, scientific definition of direct CAUSE, wouldn’t most physicians see a relationship of SOME kind between those phenomena?
I’m not talking about someone who struggles to maintain the weight that he or she would like. Christie is really, really big, alarmingly so. I really doubt that his doctor thinks that’s a good thing.
There may be a relationship, but is there co- morbidity, for example? The same genes or biome that result in obesity also may result in the other diseases? No causal link has been found, and there’s a huge recent study showing that losing weight doesn’t improve these markers.
I sent you the link. I cannot figure out how to append things with the iPad and I’m too lazy to fire up the real computer.
Doctors are taught very little about obesity, nutrition or exercise, and science actually knows a lot less about at least the first two than the popular media would lead you to believe. In general, daily exercise and eating more fruits and vegetables are considered to be a good idea, but so much else they thought they knew, or the press said was known, turns out to be false. A lot of it was plausible hunches later disproven, or apparent correlations that proved to have no causal link or to in fact not be correlations.
For example, eating fat does not cause heart disease. There is a lot stronger evidence that white stuff like sugar and white flour are to blame. The glycemic response seems to be important. A recent article in The New Yorker talks about all the diseases that seem to have a bacterial involvement, including insulin resistance, which is Implicated in heart disease and obesity, I’ll see if I can email you the link. Asthma and allergies are also possibly resulting from a particular biome.
It is in the October 22 issue. I’m having trouble accessing it from Safari.
So these people I see shoveling their face with junk food and constantly sipping on soft drinks aren’t fat because of what they put in their mouth, but it’s because they have a chronic case of the fat bacteria in their body. Gotcha.
Next I bet you’ll tell me that a dentist has discovered that sugar doesn’t damage teeth and that brushing and flossing is a waste of time. What they really need to do is take a pill to try to rid themselves of the rotting tooth bacteria.
STD’s are probably caused by some airborne bacteria as well.
I eat better than my skinny friends who live on cigarettes and red wine, and am healthier by any measure except dress size.
Sugar doesn’t damage teeth. It creates an environment that favors the bacteria that may do so. My dad eats candy all the time and seldom flosses and has great teeth. My mom does everything perfectly and spends a lot of time and money in the dentist’s chair. My dentist says it’s most likely because of the difference in bacteria and mouth chemistry.