TPM Reader LF has a less flattering take on the Governor across the river …
I think that Chris Christie can be related to another Republican politician whose presidential ambitions, once seen as highly realistic, faded because his personality became too apparent–Rudy Giuliani.
Like Christie, Giuliani was a bombastic executive who rose to prominence as a tough-as-nails prosecutor in bare-knuckles US Attorneys’ offices. They both tended to “wear their emotions on their sleeve” as you very generously put it. Or put another way, Christie and Giuliani are both assholes.
We all know Chris Christie is a bit of a hothead. I mean, it’s a bit like saying a hothead is a bit of a hothead. It’s not observation but truism. Republicans love him or loved him for it. And Democrats started to too because his blow ups don’t all follow ideology. There was this time back in 2011 when he flipped out at a reporter for questioning whether a Muslim-American judge he’d appointed to the bench might be a security risk or sympathetic to al Qaeda. Read More
Senate Democrats spent the latter part of the week building consensus amongst themselves on a plan to pay down the sequester that includes a mix of spending cuts and new taxes. Early reports from Democratic aides suggest they want to sub out a year’s worth of sequester cuts by reducing Medicare provider payments, defense spending, and farm subsidies; and increasing revenues from wealthy individuals and businesses in one of any number of politically advantageous ways. On their own, these measures would reduce deficits by about $120 billion over 10 years — about one tenth of the full sequester.
Once this plan is set in stone, Republicans will reject it out of hand for including revenues. Until then, they will continue to advance the peculiar claim that only they have a plan to avoid the sequester (to replace it with spending cuts, largely to social programs for the poor) and that Democrats do not.
Let’s examine that claim. Read More