OK – remember when Chris Christie was the Freeper-approved heir apparent for the Presidency?
Neither do I.
Christie has tested and trusted team ready if he runs for White HouseThe Bergen Record ^ |December 2, 2013| Melissa Hayes and John Reitmeyer
Posted on 12/3/2013 12:43:21 AM by 2ndDivisionVet
One is a trusted friend, with decades of national campaign experience. Another is a media consultant who worked on six of the last seven presidential races. Then there’s a trio of strategy and communications experts who have been together since George W. Bush’s 2004 run for the White House. What they have in common are deep-seated relationships with Governor Christie and connections that reach across the country. They form the nucleus of a political team so tight and loyal to the governor, that it’s difficult to get them to talk about anything – even their success in helping him win twice in a blue state.
When Christie decided to leave the U.S. Attorney’s Office and run for governor four years ago, he was able to quickly establish this team through existing relationships and connections they had to New Jersey. They were with him again this year when he broke records in securing a second term, and they’re viewed as people he will turn to if he runs for president.
With the governor winning more than 60 percent of the vote in a state dominated by Democrats – including a majority of Hispanics and women – speculation that Christie plans to run in 2016 has swelled. Every time he meets with a deep-pocketed donor or someone who worked on a presidential campaign, or appears on Sunday news shows, he makes headlines.
Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said Christie has an “A-list campaign team” if he seeks the White House. It consists of Bill Palatucci, a longtime friend and one of Christie’s closest advisers; campaign strategist Mike DuHaime; campaign manager Bill Stepien; communications director Maria Comella; and ad man Russ Schriefer.
Christie also has the benefit of being chairman of the Republican Governors Association…
1 posted on 12/3/2013 12:43:21 AM by 2ndDivisionVet
To: 2ndDivisionVet
32 posted on 12/3/2013 3:39:54 AM by
Yehuda (Pres Obortion, Sen.McAnus, Hillary Abedin Clinton all kiss the *ss of the muslim brotherhood. A)
Hey Randians, There’s More To Life Than Economics: Mike Lee is right, life is not an Ayn Rand novelThe Federalist ^ | December 12, 2013 | Nicholas Rizzuto
Posted on 12/26/2013 12:01:42 AM by 2ndDivisionVet
In an address to the Heritage Foundation entitled “What’s Next for Conservatives”, Senator Mike Lee said, “The conservative vision for America is not an Ayn Rand novel. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Frank Capra movie: a nation ‘of plain, ordinary kindness, and a little looking out for the other fellow, too.'” The comment, which received little attention when it was made back in October, harkens back to a traditional conservatism that stressed the importance of local institutions and relationships as a source of strength. As innocuous as that might seem to most conservatives, the mildly unfavorable comparison of Ayn Rand to anyone seems to be enough to send some of her devotees into a tizzy.
Enter Yaron Brook and Steve Simpson of the Ayn Rand Institute.
Taking to the pages of The Daily Caller to defend Rand from the Utah Senator’s statement, the two conclude that Mike Lee’s vision of America is no different than Barack Obama’s. As evidence, they point to a speech Lee gave in November at a Heritage Foundation anti-poverty forum. The Senator said:
“First, let’s be clear about one thing. The United States did not formally launch our War on Poverty in 1964, but in 1776: when we declared our independence, and the self-evident and equal rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Brook and Simpson responded to Lee’s assertion by sarcastically asking, “American colonists fought the most powerful nation on earth as a precursor to a mid-20th century welfare program?”
It would be obvious to all but the most obtuse readers that it was not Lee’s intention to compare the American Revolution to LBJ’s War on Poverty. To anyone who cared to read beyond the cherry picked excerpt Brook and Simpson provided, Lee explicitly says what he means a few sentences later:
“From our very Founding, we not only fought a war on poverty – we were winning. The tools Americans relied on to overcome poverty were what became the twin pillars of American exceptionalism: our free enterprise economy and voluntary civil society.”
Are the luminaries at the Ayn Rand Institute denying that free enterprise and voluntary association have been the most effective tools in reducing poverty? I suppose that makes them no better than Obama.
It’s sad to see such knee jerk hostility to the idea that communal ties, beyond those that are the result of cold economic calculation, played an integral part of the success America enjoys. It’s also not very conservative.
While the Randians rightfully hold individual achievement as the primary building block of prosperity, they seem to think that it occurs in a vacuum defined by the size and scope of government. They’d have you believe that all the remarkable individuals of the world need in order to reach their potential is the absence of government.
But the truth is more complex than they’d lead you to believe. There are more conditions that contribute to the level of individual achievement in America than we can even begin to catalogue here. The social stability that provides the safe space in which the individual flourishes is not the result of abstract principles divined from a Rand novel. It is the result of millions of relationships, shared beliefs, and communal bonds or, as Edmund Burke famously put it, being “attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society”.
Norman Rockwell’s ability to capture the spirit of Burke’s little platoons is what makes his work a more appropriate metaphor for what makes America great than anything Rand wrote. The idealized image of a family sitting around a Thanksgiving table says more about America in one image than Atlas Shrugged was able to say in 1,168 pages of dense text.
Yaron Brook and Steve Simpson would have you believe that attributing America’s success to strong communal bonds is a deviation from conservatism or the vision of the founders. To the contrary, denying them is the true deviation.
You know, I’ve never had to do so little work on a thread. This one is literally writing itself. All I have to do is summon a clean-up crew to mop up the debris and sterilize the floor.
The Inequality SmokescreenFrontpage ^ | 1/6/2013 | Bruce Thornton
Posted on 1/6/2014 4:48:40 AM by markomalley
Desperate for a diversion from the disasters of Obamacare, the president has conjured up the old leftist “income inequality” cliché. His court-pundits complain that “the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic,” according to The New Republic, while Berkeley Professor Robert Reich has thundered against “casino capitalism,” blaming it for “the greatest concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together.” Democrats, no doubt cheered by left-over-leftist Bill de Blasio’s election as mayor of New York, and excited by his Occupy Wall Street rants, apparently believe that such class-warfare rhetoric is a political winner. So be prepared for more of the same, and for demands to raise the minimum wage and gouge even more money from the “millionaires and billionaires.”
Fretting over income inequality, however, has little to do with economic reality. It’s a statistical sleight-of-hand that counts only “money income” and ignores non-cash transfers in order to decry how much more income the top 1% are earning compared to everybody else. In fact, when the value of government transfers such as Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit are included in calculating income, income inequality actually declined 1.8% between 1993 and 2009. Equally revealing is the fact that in 2005 those in the bottom 20% of earners consumed almost twice their income, again because of the value of non-cash transfers. And that doesn’t count the underground economy, everything from working for cash to more unsavory occupations. That’s why the statistical poor enjoy living standards higher than the average European. And that’s the real point––not how much the rich have, but how much everybody else does.
(snip bloated spew of trash)
Obviously, modern “income inequality” rhetoric is a political smokescreen, which explains its inconsistencies. We do not hear Obama and the Democrats decrying the bloated incomes of progressive actors, television talk-show hosts, rap moguls, or sports stars. Their demonization of Wall Street doesn’t stop them from accepting campaign contributions from investment bankers or working for Goldman Sachs after leaving government. Worse yet, they are completely indifferent to the assault on the Constitutional order this rhetoric represents, or the divisiveness sown among the citizens by stirring up destructive passions like envy and resentment. All they care about is keeping their own power and privilege no matter what the social and economic costs.
1 posted on 1/6/2014 4:48:40 AM by markomalley
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To: markomalley
We’re all born equal.
Of course, some are born more equal than others, like the Waltons.
What you choose to do with that equality your trust fund is up to you.
FIFY.
AMEN.
The bottom of my classes in grade school, high school * college had the same atmosphere I had.
They had the same rooms, chairs, desks, teachers, books, and assignments.
They had the same heat, light, weather, and sports available that I did.
I did my hoework (sic). I turned in papers on time. I took the tests given to the whole classroom. I gave up a social life to take college classes at night for over 4 years. That extra education gave me the ability to be self-employed since about 1979. I still have clients, and I am well past Soc Sec age.
Especially “whatever”.
They don’t EARN those points, and often, they also do NOT deserve them.
Telling a person who puts in over 60 hours a week keeping clients happy that they don’t deserve that hourly pay they are getting is a total insult. I actually was given the incentive to get more college courses well into my 30’s when I saw the worst worker in my section get all the raises I got & all the benefits. They missed work for a variety of reasons and certainly didn’t work very hard. I got disgusted & went to work for myself. I absolutely DID drop clients who I didn’t like or were nervous about their business habits. I wasn’t going to sign reports to the state or Federal government for them.
I own everything I have. All my property, vehicles, animals, furniture, ——everything. No mortgage—no car payment.
I’m sure you do.
As I said before, they keep dismissing these people from their team and soon there will only be a few left. Maybe then they will figure out that their utopian world can never be achieved. Nah, probably not.