LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN – MARK LEVIN – JULY 16, 2023 – ATTACK ON FIRST AMENDMENT
Monday, July 17th, 2023
INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILYWhen Is A Scandal Not A Scandal? When There’s A Democrat Involved
September 7, 2017EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:Menendez in on trial for allegedly having sold his office in exchange for luxury vacations, private flights, and piles of campaign cash. In his opening remarks, Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Koski said “this case is about a corrupt politician who sold his Senate office for a life of luxury he couldn’t afford and a greedy doctor who put that senator on his payroll. … The defendants didn’t just trade money for power, they also tried to cover it up.”
It’s the first time in 36 years that a sitting U.S. senator has been on trial for bribery, which you’d think would make it front page news.
And the stakes of the trial’s outcome are big, too. Should Menendez be found guilty and forced to give up his Senate seat, New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie would almost certainly replace him with a Republican, giving the GOP a bigger margin in the Senate. That could, among other things, improve the odds of getting things like ObamaCare repealed and tax reform enacted.
Corruption: A sitting U.S. Senator is currently on trial for bribery, and if he’s found guilty it could have major political ramifications. Haven’t heard about this case? That’s because the Senator in question is a Democrat.
A CNN story this week about the opening of the trial against New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez noted that “Democrats are eager to avoid the subject of Menendez’s bribery trial.”
That headline would have been just as accurate if it said “Reporters” instead of “Democrats.”
Think of Chris Christie as one of 14 Republicans vying for the presidential nomination and the odds appear insurmountable. But think of him as a defensive lineman with a talent for stripping the ball from an opposing quarterback and the race now becomes far more interesting.Back in the October CNBC debate, the quarterback was Jeb Bush, who fumbled when asked whether the feds should regulate fantasy football. Mr. Christie gave the answer Mr. Bush should have: “Fantasy football? We have ISIS and al Qaeda attacking us and we’re talking about fantasy football?”Cue to Paris, where world leaders are meeting this week to discuss . . . climate change. This time the hapless quarterback is President Obama, who declares the conference a show of “resolve” against Islamic State terrorists.“This is the president once again living in his fantasy world rather than the world as it actually is,” says Mr. Christie, calling in from the campaign trail in New Hampshire. “He really believes that folks are worried about climate change when what they really care about now is the Islamic State and Syria and terrorism.”
But the terrorist attack in Paris is reordering priorities. According to a recent Suffolk University/Boston Globe survey of New Hampshire Republicans, 42% now rank terrorism and national security as their top concern, replacing jobs and the economy. This plays to the strengths of a former U.S. prosecutor who knows what a FISA court is and has used the Patriot Act to go after terrorists.
C-SPAN VIDEO – GOVERNOR CHRIS CHRISTIE AT CPAC 2014
Published: August 1, 2013
WASHINGTON — A combination of early presidential maneuvering and internal policy debate is feeding yet another iteration of that media perennial: the great Republican crackup. This time it’s tea party insurgents versus get-along establishment fogies fighting principally over two things: national security and Obamacare.
National security
Gov. Chris Christie recently challenged Sen. Rand Paul over his opposition to the National Security Agency metadata program. Paul has also tangled with Sen. John McCain and other internationalists over drone warfare, democracy promotion and, more generally, intervention abroad.
So what else is new? The return of the most venerable strain of conservative foreign policy – isolationism – was utterly predictable. GOP isolationists dominated until Pearl Harbor and then acquiesced to an activist internationalism during the Cold War because of a fierce detestation of communism.
With communism gone, the conservative coalition should have fractured long ago. This was delayed by 9/11 and the rise of radical Islam. But now, 12 years into that era – after Afghanistan and Iraq, after drone wars and the NSA revelations – the natural tension between isolationist and internationalist tendencies has resurfaced.
In fact, both parties are internally split on domestic surveillance, as reflected in the very close recent House vote on curbing the NSA. This is not civil war. It’s a healthy debate that helps recalibrate the delicate line between safety and security as conditions (threat level and surveillance technology, for example) change.
The more fundamental GOP divide is over foreign aid and other manifestations of our role as the world’s leading power. The Paulites, pining for the splendid isolation of the 19th century, want to leave the world alone on the assumption that it will then leave us alone.
Which rests on the further assumption that international stability – open sea lanes, free commerce, relative tranquility – comes naturally, like the air we breathe. If only that were true. Unfortunately, stability is not a matter of grace. It comes about only by Great Power exertion.
In the 19th century, that meant the British navy, behind whose protection America thrived. Today, alas, Britannia rules no waves. World order is maintained by American power and American will. Take that away and you don’t get tranquility. You get chaos. (more…)
A RadicalIslam.org investigation has discovered that at least four Islamists sit on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s Muslim outreach committee, which was formed after Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa concluded in May that NYPD intelligence-gathering operations in New Jersey did not break any laws.
All of the information about the Islamist backgrounds of these four committee members is publicly available, yet the Christie Administration picked them to serve as liaisons to the Muslim community of the state. As a result, they are having private meetings with N.J.’s top security officials. This is just the latest example of Christie’s embrace of Islamists that should be shunned, not exalted.
The discovery that the Islamists were on the committee was made when RadicalIslam.org obtained a previously unreleased list of committee members present at a September 5, 2012 meeting at the Leroy Smith Building in Newark.
The four committee members of concern are:
In his January 2011 inaugural address, California Gov. Jerry Brown declared it a “time to honestly assess our financial condition and make the tough choices.” Plainly the choices weren’t tough enough: Mr. Brown has just announced that he faces a state budget deficit of $16 billion—nearly twice the $9.2 billion he predicted in January. In Sacramento Monday, he coupled a new round of spending cuts with a call for some hefty new tax hikes.
In his own inaugural address back in January 2010, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also spoke of making tough choices for the people of his state. For his first full budget, Mr. Christie faced a deficit of $10.7 billion—one-third of projected revenues. Not only did Mr. Christie close that deficit without raising taxes, he is now plumping for a 10% across-the-board tax cut.
It’s not just looks that make Mr. Brown Laurel to Mr. Christie’s Hardy. It’s also their political choices.
Garden State Gov. Chris Christie has a message for the top 1% of income earners: Please occupy New Jersey. “I’m going to start going after a lot of these hedge-fund guys who are in Connecticut and New York and say, ‘You’re going to get a better deal with us,'” says the country’s most important Republican not running for president.
Mr. Christie’s new tax-reform plan also offers an improved deal to the bottom 99%, which is why he may be able to move it through New Jersey’s Democratic legislature: a 10% cut in tax rates across the board.
The governor is two years into a four-year term. In 2010, he told the Journal’s editorial board that the Garden State represented America’s best example of a “failed experiment” in rising taxes and bigger government. As he returns to the Journal for another visit, it’s time to check the results of his counter-experiment.
Politically, so far so good. A recent Quinnipiac poll gives him a 53% approval rating among the state’s registered voters, and Mr. Christie says that private polls show him “in the low 60s.”
Economically, unemployment in the state has fallen to 9% from a high of 9.8%. With almost 3.9 million people working, New Jersey has added almost 60,000 private-sector jobs since he took office, while shedding more than 21,000 government jobs. Reforms of the pension and health programs for government employees will save taxpayers an estimated $120 billion over the next 30 years. A new limit on local property-tax increases appears to be working. (more…)