Never say never......Looking at the GOP line-up, it is no wonder that Americans are looking closely at NJ Governor Chris Christie.... Born to Run is not just a line for Bruce Springsteen...
Slick Mitt and Gov. Perry look like fumbling idjits next to the straight talker from New Jersey.
We need to knock out the Fool who presently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, (to quote Top Gear), " How hard can it be ??"
We need the BEST person, not the one who has raised the most $$$.
Christie: Face 'difficult truths'
MAGGIE HABERMAN / Politico.com
Here's Juana Summers' story on Chris Christie's Reagan Library speech, with a theme of "real American exceptionalism" that rapped political leaders adrift and singled out President Obama for criticism:
American exceptionalism, as Christie defined it, is a “vision followed by a set of principled actions that made us the envy of the world,” not a political punch-line.
“Not a re-election strategy, but an American revitalization strategy,” he called it.
During his remarks – interrupted numerous times by applause – Christie delivered several characteristically tough lines, including saying America must not become “a country that places comfortable lies ahead of difficult truths,” that showed the kind of swagger that’s defined his persona and won the hearts of the people who are desperate to see him come off the sidelines of the campaign.
Obama, Christie said comparing his approach now to the then-Illinois state Senator’s address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, is willing to divide the country to win re-election.
“This is not a leadership style, this is a reelection strategy,” Christie said of Obama’s actions in the Oval Office. “Telling those who are scared and struggling that the only way their lives can get better is to diminish the success of others….That may turn out to be a good re-election strategy for President Obama, but is a demoralizing message for America. What happened to state Sen. Obama? When did he decide to become one of the ‘dividers’ he spoke of so eloquently in 2004?”
Christie decried a Washington that isn’t working, saying Congress is “at war with itself because they are unwilling to leave campaign-style politics at the Capitol’s door” and said the nation’s capitol drifts from “conflict to conflict with little resolution.”
And if domestic issues suffer, the world’s opinion of America is damaged, Christie said.
“Without strong leadership at home, without our domestic house in order, we are taking ourselves out of the equation,” he said. “Over and over, we are allowing the rest of the world to set the tone without American influence because of our failings.”
To some extent, it was a version his American Enterprise Institute speech from March writ global. But it was also not ideologically specific.
He seemed to laud Bowles-Simpson, for instance, in terms of fiscal issues. But in the portion of his speech that dealt with foreign policy, he moved away from the neocon hawkish position and sounded closer to the one espoused most loudly in the GOP field by Jon Huntsman, in terms of not fighting the world's fights.
It highlights why Christie appeals to conservative elites and some major donors. But it is also a reminder that he would face some of the same challenges as any other candidate in this hard-right moment in the Republican party in a national race.
At the same time, it underscores what those who want Christie to run find appealing - a straight message, and one that's not ideologically based.
ROGER THAT !
Seems a Governor Rick Perry would like to alter history and forget that he was an ardent supporter of AL " THE SKY IS FALLING " GORE... GORE is top of the hypocrites list with his fake crusade to "save the earth" which is really his way to shill more money out of people's pockets.....
A picture says a 1000 words...We already learned not to listen to POLS who deny their past associations ( Like all the idjits that President Obama associated with before running for President)
It's hard to soar like an EAGLE when you flock with TURKEYS.....looks like PERRY is a bit of a TURKEY and less of an EAGLE than he alludes to be.... GORE is a Turkey and a gold plated liar. maybe if he kept his mouth sut for 5 minutes, it would lower all the co2 in the atmosphere.
Perry backed crusading Gore in '88
By: Bob King - Politico.com
August 15, 2011 06:32 PM EDT
Texas Gov. Rick Perry may have forgotten a thing or two about the Al Gore presidential campaign he helped lead in 1988.
In an interview with an Iowa radio station on Monday, the Republican presidential contender explained his role as the Gore campaign’s Texas chairman by saying that “this was Al Gore before he invented the Internet and got to be Mr. Global Warming.”
But in fact, global warming was already a significant theme for Gore in 1987 and 1988 — long before his activism led to several books, a Nobel Prize and a part in an Academy Award-winning film. It was also well before the right gave him the "Mr. Ozone" nickname and talk radio heaped endless mockery on the future vice president.
Gore, then a young Tennessee senator trying to break out in a crowded Democratic field, mentioned the warming planet as one of his priorities for his presidential campaign in April 1987, according to news coverage at the time.
“He laid out a broad list of national objectives, from combating AIDS and Alzheimer's disease to curbing the ‘greenhouse effect’ — the threat to the Earth's atmosphere from the burning of oil, gas and coal,” The Los Angeles Times reported in covering Gore’s announcement. In May 1987, according to The Washington Post, his stump speeches included a call for the nation to “confront the emerging problems of the greenhouse effect and the threat to our ozone.”
Later that summer, Gore joined Republican Sen. John Chafee in calling for urgent action on climate change and the threat of coastal flooding.
Such was his reputation for green wonkery that, in a January 1988 profile in the Christian Science Monitor, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund said of Gore: ''I think it would be safe to say that he goes to bed at night worrying about things like stratospheric ozone depletion and global warming.''
So was all this unknown to Perry, who at the time was a Democrat trying to put Gore in the White House?
No, Perry spokesman Mark Miner said Monday. They just disagreed.
“The governor has always been a conservative and didn't agree with Al Gore on every issue, global warming being one of them,” Miner said in an email to POLITICO.
Perry has, of course, broken with Gore before. In a December 2009 speech to builders in Dallas, Perry said a lot had changed in the years since he worked on Gore’s campaign: “I certainly got religion. I think he’s gone to hell.”
In a 2007 speech to Californian Republicans, Perry said: "I've heard Al Gore talk about man-made global warming so much that I'm starting to think that his mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide."
Rick Perry jumps into the 2012 Presidential Race and many in the collective media get all pitter-patter as they want to see as much discord on the GOP side of things, giving hope to their liberal friends and POTUS.
Let us as a nation choose carefully on the GOP side as hucksters like SLICK MITT ROMNEY only embolden the MOONBATS that they will get Obama another 4 years.... If the wrong republican is put up against POTUS, it could cause people to be complacent....and all in the military know the adage, " Complacency Kills "
Perry is a POL and he has baggage (Texas sized baggage)...while this is a given, we really need to think twice before people give him a free pass. This article points out a serious issues that will make people worry that PERRY is just another " Say one thing, do another" POL.....we have plenty of them already and we don't need another one in the White House.
For a guy who runs himself as BEDROCK Conservative, this program sounds like a redistribution of taxpayer's $$$ to those who are connected....not good.
Rick Perry's Crony Capitalism Problem
The presidential candidate's signature economic development initiative has raised questions among conservatives.
By CHARLES DAMERON - Wall Street Journal
Gov. Rick Perry's presidential pitch goes something like this: During one of the worst recessions in American history, he's kept his state "open for business." In the last two years, Texas created over a quarter of a million jobs, meaning that the state's 8% unemployment rate is substantially lower than the rest of the nation's. The governor credits this exceptional growth to things like low taxes and tort reform.
It's a strong message. But one of the governor's signature economic development initiatives—the Texas Emerging Technology Fund—has lately raised serious questions among some conservatives.
The Emerging Technology Fund was created at Mr. Perry's behest in 2005 to act as a kind of public-sector venture capital firm, largely to provide funding for tech start-ups in Texas. Since then, the fund has committed nearly $200 million of taxpayer money to fund 133 companies. Mr. Perry told a group of CEOs in May that the fund's "strategic investments are what's helping us keep groundbreaking innovations in the state." The governor, together with the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the Texas House, enjoys ultimate decision-making power over the fund's investments.
Among the companies that the Emerging Technology Fund has invested in is Convergen LifeSciences, Inc. It received a $4.5 million grant last year—the second largest grant in the history of the fund. The founder and executive chairman of Convergen is David G. Nance.
In 2009, when Mr. Nance submitted his application for a $4.5 million Emerging Technology Fund grant for Convergen, he and his partners had invested only $1,000 of their own money into their new company, according to documentation prepared by the governor's office in February 2010. But over the years, Mr. Nance managed to invest a lot more than $1,000 in Mr. Perry. Texas Ethics Commission records show that Mr. Nance donated $75,000 to Mr. Perry's campaigns between 2001 and 2006.
The regional panel that reviewed Convergen's application turned down the company's $4.5 million request when it presented its proposal on Oct. 7, 2009. But Mr. Nance appealed that decision directly to a statewide advisory committee (of which Mr. Nance was once a member) appointed by Mr. Perry. Just eight days later, on Oct. 15, a subcommittee unanimously recommended approval by the full statewide committee. On Oct. 29, the full advisory committee unanimously recommended the approval of Convergen's application. When asked why the advisory committee felt comfortable recommending Convergen's grant, Lucy Nashed, a spokesperson for Mr. Perry, said that the committee "thoroughly vetted the company."
Starting in 2008, Mr. Perry also appropriated approximately $2 million in federal taxpayer money through the auspices of the Wagner-Peyser Act—a federal works program founded during the New Deal and overseen in Texas by Mr. Perry's office—to a nonprofit launched by Mr. Nance called Innovate Texas. The nonprofit was meant to help entrepreneurs by linking them to investors. It began receiving funding on Dec. 31, 2008, soon after Mr. Nance's previous company, Introgen Therapeutics, declared bankruptcy on Dec. 3. According to state records, Mr. Nance paid himself $250,000 for the two years he ran Innovate Texas. Innovate Texas, whose listed phone number is not a working number, could not be reached for comment. (Two phone calls left for Mr. Nance at Convergen's offices went unreturned.)
ThromboVision, Inc., a medical imaging company, was also the recipient of an award from the Emerging Technology Fund: It received $1.5 million in 2007. Charles Tate, a major Perry contributor, served as the chairman of a state committee that reviewed ThromboVision's application for state funding, and Mr. Tate voted to give ThromboVision the public money. One month after ThromboVision received notification that it would receive a $1.5 million state grant in April 2007, Mr. Tate invested his own money in ThromboVision, according to the Dallas Morning News. The Texas paper later found that by 2010 Mr. Tate owned a total of 200,000 preferred shares in ThromboVision.
According to a Texas state auditor's report, ThromboVision failed to submit required annual reports to the fund from 2008 through 2010, when the company went bankrupt. The report noted the tech fund's managers were "unaware of ThromboVision, Inc.'s bankruptcy until after the bankruptcy had been reported in a newspaper." ThromboVision's bankruptcy filing revealed not only that Mr. Tate had been a preferred shareholder in ThromboVision, but so had prominent Perry supporter Charles Miller, who owned 250,000 preferred shares in the company and has donated $125,000 to the governor's campaigns. Three phone calls and an email seeking Mr. Tate's side of the story went unreturned.
All told, the Dallas Morning News has found that some $16 million from the tech fund has gone to firms in which major Perry contributors were either investors or officers, and $27 million from the fund has gone to companies founded or advised by six advisory board members. The tangle of interests surrounding the fund has raised eyebrows throughout the state, especially among conservatives who think the fund is a misplaced use of taxpayer dollars to start with.
"It is fundamentally immoral and arrogant," says state representative David Simpson, a tea party-backed freshman from Longview, two hours east of Dallas. The fund "opened the door to the appearance of impropriety, if not actual impropriety."
In April, the state auditor's office called for greater transparency in the fund's management, and some legislators began looking for ways that the fund might be reformed. With the state facing a $27 billion budget shortfall in the last legislative session, Mr. Simpson filed a motion in the Texas House in May to shutter the fund and redirect the money to other portions of the budget. That measure passed 89-37 to cheers from the chamber. But the fund was kept alive by the legislature's conference committee. The fund currently has $140 million to spend, according to the governor's office.
Michael Quinn Sullivan, the president of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, sees in the Emerging Technology Fund a classic example of the perils of government pork. "The problem with these kinds of funds is that even when they're used with the best of intentions, it looks bad," says Mr. Sullivan. "You're taking from the average taxpayer and giving to someone who has a connection with government officials."
Mr. Dameron is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal.
