Stephanie Schriock in Politico takes an uninspiring stand against New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, leaving you supporting him instead of hating him by the end.
It begins like this:
New Jersey voters know that running their state requires a lot more than making people laugh on late night TV. They know that a conservative who talks like a moderate is still a conservative. They know true moderates stand up for policies that work for families.
It’s time to look behind the Trenton curtain. It’s time to get to know the real Chris Christie. He’s been in the limelight, but I think it’s time to put the spotlight on his record.
Christie can say what he wants but his words are just words. His actions make it pretty clear: his priorities are not the priorities of the people of New Jersey.
Who does he stand for? Not for New Jersey women!
No, the article still has not started yet. This stuff is called I-need-to-fill-up-space-to-sound-authoritative.
New Jersey recently saw the closure of six family planning clinics that women across the state relied on for health care because of Christie’s funding cuts. And when given the chance to help those women, Christie instead vetoed a budget bill that would have given $7.5 million to those family-planning organizations. These are organizations like Planned Parenthood, which sees tens of thousands of New Jersey women each year.
Why does Planned Parenthood, which holds “an excess of $87.4 million in revenue and $1.2 billion in assets”, need a dime of government funding?
Anti-waste? Yes. Anti-women? No.
Moving on:
And he doesn’t just work against women’s health. He also vetoed equal pay legislation calling it “senseless bureaucracy” and was especially critical of legislation to reduce pay inequities in public contracts. The average woman in New Jersey makes just 79 cents for every dollar a man earns. Closing that gap would help women buy school supplies and groceries, and pay for rent and tuition. Closing that gap would help New Jersey communities and families make ends meet. That gap is what’s senseless — working to correct it is not.
Whatever happened to “do less work, get less money”? Men don’t get maternity leave, and are required to do more dangerous jobs than women. That cannot be controlled by law. Women are not missing out on some enormous windfall here.
Anti-bureaucracy? Yes. Anti-equality? No.
We continue:
With that kind of respect for women, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear about the time he made a lewd joke to a woman at a campaign rally, or told reporters to “take the bat out on” a 76 year-old widow.
What was so lewd?
The woman had called out something about “jobs going down” and Christie yelled back: “You know something may be going down tonight but it ain’t gonna be jobs, sweetheart.”
It’s pretty evident he meant “going down” as in a fight scenario, not a blowjob scenario like some perverted reporters thought.
And then this week he made another lewd spectacle of himself by calling a gay New Jersey legislator “numbnuts.”
Since when was “numbnuts” a gay insult?
And here’s the widow comment:
Governor Christie told reporters Wednesday to “take the bat” to 76-year-old Sen. Loretta Weinberg for collecting a taxpayer-funded pension while making $49,000 a year as a legislator.
“I mean, can you guys please take the bat out on her for once?” Christie said to a crowd of reporters at a State House news conference. “Here’s a woman who knows she did it, yet she comes to you and is pining … ‘Oh! My goodness! How awful this is! What a double standard!’ But she’s the queen of double standard.”
The senator, a widow, pointed out that in an April 4 blog post on Blue Jersey, she declared herself “one of those double dippers.” The loss of her retirement savings in the Bernie Madoff investment scam, she wrote, led her to apply for pension payments to supplement her part-time lawmaker income.
Anti-hypocrisy? Yes. Anti-widow? No.
Onward and upward:
It’s not just women he’s working against. New Jersey families in search of a champion in the capital need to keep looking.
When Christie needed to make cuts in the budget, he decided to target programs that helped the people of his state in their moments of greatest need. He put the chance for children from low-income families to go to college in jeopardy by cutting nearly $50 million from Tuition Aid Grants. And he didn’t stop there; he also cut more than half a million dollars in funding for programs for abused children.
Abused children?! Funding was cut for once place, Wynona’s House, a center where:
According to their IRS Form 990 for 2009 (the latest available), there are only 6 paid full-time employees, and 1 part-time employee. The executive director made $110,176 in 2009. The other employees were paid an accumulative $213,000 in wages and benefits. They do get yearly rental income of $216,000 for leasing part of their building at 185 Washington Court. The building is worth $4.2 million. In the past 5 years, Wynona’s house received $1.3 million in 2005, $2.9 million in 2006, $2.1 million in 2007, $1 million in 2008, and $912,000 in 2009 from public support. NJ government has cut support since 2007 and they have survived well.
Sounds like a lot of money that should be going to “THE CHILDREN” is going to the director and expensive real estate.
And what about aid grants to poor college students?
Christie proposed a modest increase in parts of the higher education budget, including a $17 million increase in Tuition Aid Grant funding to help low-income students pay for college.
So much for a cut.
Anti-greedy “caregivers”? Yes. Anti-children? No.
It gets better:
Both his budget priorities and his “colorful commentary” make it obvious he doesn’t understand the needs of working families. Maybe he’s forgotten that not all parents have access to the state helicopter to travel to their kid’s sports games and activities, and are just trying to earn a decent wage.
His economic agenda has included vetoing legislation to increase the minimum wage and restore the earned income tax credit for low-income workers and supporting a bill that could have destroyed collective bargaining. It also included giving a record $1.57 billion in tax cuts to corporations.
State helicopter abuse?
Christie, a Republican, personally paid the state treasury $2,151.50 for his use of the chopper on two occasions in the last week to attend his son’s games in a state baseball tournament.
He reimbursed the state.
Minimum wage increase and earned income tax credit veto?
Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a Democratic bill to raise the minimum wage and instead proposed hiking it by $1 an hour over the next three years.
Christie said the state economy was too weak to handle the Democrats’ proposed $1.25 increase, a 17 percent jump, all at once. He also rejected a provision in the bill that would have mandated automatic yearly increases in the minimum wage.
Instead, the governor suggested adding more funding to the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is targeted at the working poor. Christie slashed funding for that program but said he would restore what he cut if the Legislature agrees to the changes he’s making in the minimum wage bill.
“The sudden, significant minimum-wage increase in this bill, coupled with automatic raises each year tied to the Unites States consumer price index, will jeopardize the economic recovery we all seek,” Christie said in his conditional veto of the bill.
He supports an economically-sound increase and an Earned Income Tax Credit increase.
Against collective bargaining?
“I love collective bargaining,” the New Jersey Republican said at a town hall meeting in Hillsborough, N.J., on Wednesday.
If anything, Christie said, he’d like to see collective bargaining become a bigger part of how the state negotiates pay and benefits for its employees. “I’ve said let’s get rid of civil service and let everything be collectively bargained, as long as collective bargaining is fair, tough, adversarial and there’s someone in that room representing you,” he said.
So he’s for collective bargaining.
And that tax cut?
The new state budget projects around $347 million in business tax relief — continuing a three-year trend since Christie took office and reflecting his and the Democratic-controlled Legislature’s shared priorities to improve the state’s business climate.
This year’s cuts were locked in through legislation passed last year — and members in both parties said there was no political will to reverse or reduce them, even while battles over income-tax and property-tax relief came down to slim cost differences.
It was bipartisan.
Anti-wasteful spending? Yes. Anti-minimum wage/unions/unnecessary expenses? No.
It’s clear he’s been busy pushing his conservative social agenda and, no matter what he says, improving the state’s economy clearly has not been at the top of his to-do list. Perhaps that’s why under his leadership New Jersey has dropped to 48th in statewide employment rates.
New Jersey voters have noticed.
Only 45 percent of New Jersey voters approve of his handling of the economy, an issue that the plurality of voters say is the most important problem facing their state. And, given his policies, it should not be surprising that he gets only a 40 percent approval rating on taxes.
His approval rate is 74%.
Also, New Jersey had the second-largest over-the-month increase in employment of any state, adding 30,200 jobs in December.
Popular? Yes. Causing high unemployment? No.
Incredibly, Christie’s pseudo-straight-talk has somehow managed to give him cover for an extremely conservative agenda and a brazen search for the limelight. Sound bites and laugh lines only curry so much favor. He likes the perks of public office, but has not taken on the attitude of public service.
Another paragraph of the ‘ol bitch-n-moan.
They say you can tell a lot about someone by the company they keep, and with friends like Scott Walker, Linda McMahon and Mitt Romney, Christie is clearly more conservative than he likes for people to believe. He’s pushing an agenda that the people of New Jersey weren’t looking for, and one they aren’t looking to continue.
Friends like a fellow governor, a Senate candidate at a nearby state, a former fellow governor from a nearby state, which is in no way out of character.
Maybe he doesn’t realize that voters in New Jersey are women and family members, workers and taxpayers. They want the ability to make their own health care decisions, the chance to send their kids to college, get good paying jobs and build a stronger economy. He’s not working for them. It makes you wonder: just who is he working for?
Chris Christie wanted national attention, well, now he has it. Now that his record’s in the spotlight, he’s about to learn there’s a difference between being famous and being infamous.
Christie is not anti-women, anti-family, anti-worker, anti-taxpayer, or any of the other anti’s you’ve smeared him with.
Stephanie Schriock is president of EMILY’s List, an organization that seeks to elect more women to public office.
“EMILY’s List is a political action committee (PAC) in the United States that aims to help elect pro-choice Democratic female candidates to office”.
She can’t even finish her by-line without having a couple more lies/misrepresentations.
The case against Gov. Christie, going by this stunningly poor critique, is flimsy—flimsier than a plastic bag in a hurricane.
