He’s running around the country gearing up for a 2016 presidential run, but back in the state of New Jersey, the state he actually governs, Chris Christie’s approval ratings just hit a new low.
In a Rutgers University-Eagleton poll released on Friday, 53 percent of New Jersey voters view Christie unfavorably and just 37 percent hold a favorable view of the governor — down 7 percentage points in two months.
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The possible 2016 GOP candidate’s job approval ratings are facing similar blows. Fifty-two percent of New Jersey voters disapprove of the job Christie is doing while 42 percent approve. In December, 48 percent of voters approved of Christie’s job performance.
Those questioned for the poll were able to elaborate on why exactly they hold unfavorable opinions of their governor. When asked, 20 percent cited his “attitude, personality and behavior,” while 15 percent specifically mentioned Bridgegate and 10 percent mentioned his national ambitions to possibly run for president in 2016 as affecting his ability to govern the state.
“As one respondent said, ‘Christie visiting different states for the presidential race made New Jerseyans not like him,’” David Redlawsk, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, said in a news release.
“Others used words like ‘arrogance,’ ‘rudeness’ and ‘abrasive’ to explain the turnaround from his high flying post-Sandy days. And of course, all manner of mentions of Bridgegate and other scandals were offered.”
The former senior political adviser to the president told CNN that the freedom from having to run another campaign has empowered the President, allowing him to better fight for his policies.
“He’s having the time of his life right now. I think he feels very much unrestrained in terms of speaking to all these issues,” Axelrod said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday.
Obama has indeed drawn notice for his newly relaxed and frank posture and comments, now that he’s nearing the end of his presidency. During his State of the Union address, Obama tossed a couple of zingers at Republicans, the likes of which had been absent in previous years.
As far as Republicans are concerned, the safety and security of the United States means nothing if they cannot get president Obama to roll back his immigration order. And Republicans they will defund The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if they cannot get their way.
Well, maybe that is not a totally fair statement. I was able to find one Republican who thinks that the safety and security of the United States is important and should not be used as a bargaining chip.
Republican Sen. Mark Kirk said Wednesday that his party made a mistake by picking a fight over President Barack Obama’s immigration actions, and said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) should bring up a “clean” bill to keep the Department of Homeland Security funded.
“I generally agree with the Democratic position here. I think we should have never fought this battle on DHS funding,” the Illinois senator said in the Capitol. “I think it’s the wrong battle for us at the wrong time.”
Does the GOP share blame for the impasse over DHS?
“It does,” Kirk said. “Had I been consulted, which I wasn’t, I don’t think we should have ever attached these issues to DHS funding. I always thought the burden of being in the majority is the burden of governing.”
Jon Stewart, who turned his biting and free-wheeling humor into an unlikely source of news and analysis for viewers of “The Daily Show,” will leave as host this year, Comedy Central said Tuesday.
His departure was announced by Comedy Central President Michele Ganeless after Stewart, host of the show since 1999, broke the news to the audience at Tuesday’s taping in New York.
“Through his unique voice and vision, ‘The Daily Show’ has become a cultural touchstone for millions of fans and an unparalleled platform for political comedy that will endure for years to come,” Ganeless said in a statement.
She called Stewart, 52, a “comic genius.” He will remain as host until later this year, she said, but did not specify his exit date or what lead to his decision.
Reaction was swift from his admirers and, in some cases, likely past targets.
“Just had the honor of being the great Jon Stewart’s guest (on ‘The Daily Show’), where he announced he’s leaving. Emotional night,” David Axelrod, former adviser to President Barack Obama, posted on Twitter.
Since day one of this gross mistake engineered by John Boehner and the Republican party, Vice President Joe Biden had already said that he would not be attending. The vice president said a scheduling conflict was the culprit for him missing the Republican event. Then, various mention of the Congressional Black Caucus said they were not going. And now the list is growing.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said Monday he would skip the event, and that it was “wrong” that Obama was not consulted ahead of time. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) dismissed the speech as a “stunt” to the Chicago Sun-Times.
A few notable lawmakers said Monday they did plan to attend the address, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who said she was “deeply troubled that politics has been injected” into the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Obama did not directly address a question Monday on whether he thought lawmakers should skip the event, but acknowledged he and Netanyahu “have a very real difference around Iran sanctions.”
He also looked to shore up popular support for his diplomacy, saying he had no intention of allowing a third delay in the nuclear talks, and warning that if they failed, “options are narrow and they’re not attractive.”
Netanyahu was joined by Boehner’s office in offering public signals that the speech would go on.
Yea, this really happened. Last week, President Obama spoke at a prayer breakfast and used the occasion to, among other things, talk about how there are extremists in all religions, and how these extremists use their religion as a basis for hate and terrorism.
Again, this was a general speech where multiple forms of religion were mentioned. But the president’s decision to include Christianity and some of the documented horrendous acts done under that religious banner, touched off the usual wave of backlash from the Republicans and those in the conservative media.
This manufactured outrage by some of these people were covered in a previous post, but when a conservative mouthpiece equates the president’s speech to “verbal rape,” well, that outrageous statement is worth a mention.
Conservative activist Star Parker told radio host Mark Levin this weekend that President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast last week amounted to “verbal rape” because he “stole all the energy in the room” with his “secular humanism.”
“It was verbal rape. Frankly, what the president did was verbal rape,” Parker said. “He stole all the energy in the room. He stole from all of us. He stole the momentum in the room, he stole from our country, he stole from the world.”
Explaining that those in the room had already been dealing in what she called weak interfaith “sippy soup,” Parker said Obama “reduced that whole meeting to meaninglessness.”
“This is what we were doing in this room, all this prayer, all these people, and then the president gets up and totally politicizes it,” she said. “It was verbal rape. You could feel the energy leave the room because he is so adamant about his secular humanism. These are certainly big questions, but he reduced that whole meeting to meaninglessness. It was just bad.”
I mean come on! Is there any vetting going on in the Jeb for president camp? I can almost understand if the hire was done before the obscene tweets were known, but hiring him knowing about his sluttery on twitter is totally unacceptable… but then again, Jeb is a Bush!
Ethan Czahor’s tweets began disappearing today after news broke that he had been hired by Jeb Bush. A spokesman for Bush told BuzzFeed News: “Governor Bush believes the comments were inappropriate. They have been deleted at our request. Ethan is a great talent in the tech world and we are very excited to have him on board the Right to Rise PAC.” Czahor also apologized in a tweet on Monday.
I must say, this is exactly what I expected from a Bush. Reminds me of George-boy.
Let me be the first one to issue an apology. I was wrong and I am big enough to admit that. Apparently, there is one smart Republican in Mississippi, I had no idea. And because he is so wise, he has dropped the party of hate and ignorance and has joined the party of Progressives.
Former Republican state Sen. Tim Johnson on Wednesday announced he’s switching parties and challenging incumbent Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves this year.
According to the local report, Johnson held a press conference at the state Capitol and reportedly told supporters, “Why join the Democratic Party and run for lieutenant governor? I’ll tell you: We are all Mississippians first. Elected officials should be in the business of helping all Mississippians, not picking out who to hurt.
“The Republican Party leaders’ actions against supporting Medicaid expansion and threatening our local hospitals was the final, deciding factor for me.”
I get very tired very quickly when I hear that we need the best and brightest to become classroom teachers in the United States. For one, it’s incredibly insulting because it assumes that the teachers we have now in public schools are somehow subpar, which is not true. Further, it also assumes that the elite students at elite colleges need to swoop down and save education because the best students make the best teachers, right?
Wrong. Oh, so wrong.
Don’t misunderstand me: I support all effective teachers across the country who want to make a difference in any type of school, public or private, and who want to educate students. This includes those from Teach for America, the program that began in 1990 at Princeton University and places the best and brightest into urban schools for specified periods of time, usually three years. The program has been criticized for providing a short-term conscience break for smarties who then leave the classroom and make billions as hedge fund managers and tech company start-up junkies. It has also been lauded for enabling the most difficult school districts to staff their classes with committed teachers who knew what they were getting into they signed up for TFA.
For 15 years, the program grew. For the past two, growth has stopped. That’s bad news for the districts that rely on TFA graduates, but it might be the beginning of good news for the rest of public education. Why? Although TFA was founded on a laudable goal, the program was also responsible for pushing some of the worst reforms education has seen in decades. From the article:
Teach for America has sent hundreds of graduates to Capitol Hill, school superintendents’ offices and education reform groups, seeding a movement that has supported testing and standards, teacher evaluations tethered to student test scores, and a weakening of teacher tenure.
It seems that the best and brightest are neither when it comes to new ideas on how to improve education. They, along with the conservative know-nothings who inhabit statehouse governments and education commissionerships, relied on untested data purporting to show a connection between student test scores and teacher effectiveness, and supported ever more Charter schools that take public money away from public schools that have legal mandates to deliver a quality education to all students. Weakening teacher tenure and injecting market competition in the schools round out the final failures on their list as both destroy the culture and ethos that have protected the public schools from unwanted political interference, commercialization and data-mongers of all political stripes.
Ten years from now, those still left in education will look back on this era as not only misguided, but destructive; an era from which it will take a few years to recover and reclaim the ideas that actually work in the classroom. By then, the best and brightest will be back on Wall Street or law school or boardrooms touting their latest ventures and perhaps reflecting on the years they spent in the program. I applaud their efforts as teachers. For many, it will inform the rest of their lives. For others, it allowed them to realize a community service dream in a neglected corner of the country.
But for their support of ideas that have wreaked havoc in the classroom and resulted in a culture of testing that undermines effective teaching, I will forever rue the day that they joined the reform conversation. I have met far better and far brighter minds who didn’t attend elite schools and who have enriched teaching and learning across the United States.
I’m still waiting for all Congressional Democrats to stand up and join Vice President Joe Biden and members of the Black Caucus in denouncing this Netanyahu mockery of American politics.
Vice President Joe Biden is expected to miss Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial address to a joint meeting of Congress because of foreign travel, Biden’s office said Friday.
The announcement comes amid deep White House irritation over Netanyahu’s decision to accept an invitation from House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, without either party consulting the administration. The White House blasted the move as a breach of diplomatic protocol and said President Barack Obama would not meet with Netanyahu during next month’s visit.
But Biden, as president of the Senate, would typically have attended a joint meeting of Congress, taking his familiar seat just behind the speaker’s podium. Whether Biden would still carry out his ceremonial duties became the focus of increased speculation this week as some Democratic lawmakers said they planned to skip the March 3 speech.
On Friday, Biden’s office confirmed that the vice president was expected to be abroad during Netanyahu’s visit. Biden’s office did not announce any details of where the vice president would be traveling, but insisted the unspecified trip had been in the works before the prime minister’s speech was announced.
On February 6, 1990, it announced (in a headline that’s now pretty dated), “First Black Elected to Head Harvard’s Law Review,” and explained that the 28-year-old’s new role was considered the “highest student position” at the school.
As if things aren’t already messed up in Washington, Republicans and Benjamin Netanyahu plan to mess it up even more with his so-called Congressional Session speech to the United States congress.
So naturally, Jon Stewart is the perfect person to take on this ridiculous mess, which he did during Thursday night’s episode of The Daily Show.
“One of our closest foreign allies is taking sides with Republicans against a Democratic president, which creates a major conundrum for Democrats,” Stewart said. “I’m reminded of a similar situation, faced by an Israeli king renowned for his wisdom.”
Stewart also laid into the Obama administration’s excuse for not meeting with Netanyahu when he visits — that the president didn’t want to be seen as “meddling” in Israeli politics (Israel’s elections are two weeks after the March 3 speech).
“Yes, yes!” Stewart said. “America doesn’t wanna meddle in a Middle Eastern nation’s domestic politics. I mean, we don’t do that!”
He then ran through a list of nearby countries America has, in fact, meddled with: Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey.
“Unless, obviously, a country wanted to nationalize its own oil industry, or looked likely to ally with a rival superpower, or was fighting a proxy war against some other country we didn’t like, or would let us put military bases in their country, or send prisoners to their country, or was next to a country we wanted to spy on, or fight with.”
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