The Relentless Hillary Clinton

By Alan Caruba

Who said:

“We’re going to take things from you on behalf of the common good”

“It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, and for the few…and to replace it with shared responsibility, for shared prosperity”

“(We) …can just let business as usual go on and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”

“We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own…in order to create this common ground.”

“I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in the entire economy that they are being watched.”

“I certainly think the free market has failed.”

Was it Joseph Stalin? Lenin? Hugo Chavez? Kim Jong II? All reveal a communist philosophy.

It was Hillary Clinton. Over the years, Hillary has made it clear that the redistribution of wealth—communism—is central to her beliefs and that her regard for capitalism and the free market economy of America is nil.

The election of Hillary Clinton would be an extension of the two terms of Barack Obama and, if possible, worse.

There are moments when a politician’s opportunity to win elections passes—often unnoticed at the time.  I think that time was 2008 when Hillary lost the Democratic nomination to an unknown Senator from Illinois who offered “hope and change.”

Eight years later, having served as his Secretary of State, she will share his growing disapproval as Obamacare unfolds as the perfect namesake of the worst President the U.S. has ever known. And then, of course, there is their shared Benghazi scandal.

For these reasons, I believe Hillary will decide her time has passed and elect to avoid the ordeal of a presidential campaign even if the Democrats gave her the opportunity.

Her long career in the public eye has been filled with scandals and failures, not the least of which was her early advocacy of “HillaryCare.” When her husband was President, she was put in charge of developing a plan to take over the healthcare sector despite the fact that she was not an elected official, but merely his wife. It was overwhelmingly rejected.

The most astonishing thing about the 2016 elections is that the Party still regards her as the sole candidate to run for the presidency even as 2014 Democrats seeking reelection are fleeing the disastrous failure of Obamacare and the huge debt that Obama imposed on the nation. In addition, elements of the Party’s base, Millennials—younger voters—and Hispanics are among those deserting it while some are beginning to call for Obama’s resignation.

There is something so disconnected from the facts, from reality, about the Democratic Party that it suggests that those who remain within its numbers are deranged.

Some political pundits will be inclined to dismiss Hillary as too old to run, that her agenda would not stand up to examination, that she would be in effect Obama’s third term, or that her record as Secretary of State is littered with lies and failures.

Democrats do not vote based on such things. They vote out of a nostalgic attachment to its past, to its message of fairness and equality, out of concern for its false “war on women”, “income inequality”, and the accusations leveled against the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement. Democrats will be driven by the belief that it is time for a woman to be President, no matter how awful her qualifications or political beliefs.

This is also a belief of the nation’s leftist media and the momentum of news coverage about Hillary will be orchestrated by her. In the meantime, she will earn tidy sums giving speeches and receiving every leftist award that’s out there. No doubt there is a book in the works as well.

Hillary has left a long record of scandals in the course of her “public service.” The most recent was the lies about the killing of an American ambassador and three security personnel in Benghazi on the 2012 anniversary of 9/11. Most famously, under questioning she said, “What difference does it make?” Nowhere during the course of her service as Secretary of State is there a single major international treaty or significant accomplishment. Indeed, her tenure is marked by the severe loss of respect for America and its influence over foreign affairs.

The Clintons have always been about the acquisition of money to fund their lifestyle. In 1979 Hillary earned $100,000 profit on a $1,000 investment in cattle futures within the course of just nine months. She was guided to the windfall by a highly placed Tyson Foods connection. An investigation into her role as an attorney with the Rose law firm was stymied until its billing records magically appeared in her White House office, years after they had been subpoenaed.

Like Obama, Hillary never recalls anything involved with her past. She knew nothing. She was the victim of others around her. It’s all a right-wing conspiracy.

The real conspiracy has been the takeover of the Democrat Party by the far Left and its elected office holders who appear to have no regard for the decline of the nation thanks to their relentless spending and borrowing.

Hillary Clinton has been among the most relentless of all Democrats, concerned only with her determination to become the next President and for the acquisition of wealth that puts her and Bill firmly in the one percent of the extremely wealthy that Democrats and liberals defame.

A significant defeat of Democrats in 2014’s midterm elections will influence her decision. A lot can happen between now and 2016. Even the mainstream media’s fixation on getting her elected may decline. Stay tuned.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Obama's War on U.S. Energy

By Alan Caruba

There is no reason for the U.S. to be in such a slow recovery from the financial crisis of 2008. If President Obama would get out of the way, our national debt could be dramatically reduced and hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created in the nation’s energy sector, leading to the expansion of its manufacturing sector and still more jobs.

As Daniel Simmons, the Director of Regulatory and State Affairs for the Institute of Energy Research told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Energy Policy, Healthcare and Entitlements in February 2013:

“The federal estate contains vast energy resources, but the federal government allows energy production on a very small percentage of taxpayer-owned federal lands. The Interior Department has leased just two percent (2%) of federal offshore areas and less than six percent (6%) of federal onshore lands for oil and gas development.”

“These technically recoverable resources total 1,194 billion barrels of oil and 2,150 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that is owned by the federal taxpayer…the value of the estimated oil resources is $119.4 trillion and the value of the estimated natural gas resources is $8.6 trillion for a grand total of $128 trillion.”

As 2014 began, Mark D. Green, editor and lead contributor to Energy Tomorrow, a project of the American Petroleum Institute, noted that “Oil and natural gas are the energies of our lives.” They heat and cool our homes and apartment dwellings. They fuel our vehicles and aircraft. They are components of products we use every day. “Every day 143 U.S. refineries convert an average of 15 million barrels of crude oil for these uses and more.”

Green also noted the important role the energy industries play in our economy, citing the “5.6 percent (5.6%) of total U.S. employment. “With the right policies in place—pro-development policies that increase access to domestic reserves—the industry could add another 1.4 million jobs by 2030.”

Jobs for younger workers would increase because 50 percent (50%) of the oil and natural gas industry’s skilled workers could be retiring within a decade. Pro-development policies would fuel a renaissance in manufacturing as lower energy prices would reduce out-sourcing and attract manufacturers to build and expand facilities in the U.S.

One factor stands in the way of this brighter economic future and that is President Obama and those who direct the work of the Environmental Protection Agency—an enemy of the coal industry—and the Department of the Interior which has slowed the provision of leases to energy companies to expand the discovery and extraction of energy resources.

Instead, Obama has delayed the construction of Canada’s Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would generate jobs to build it and jobs resulting from it. Green says that “As unimaginable as it might have been just five years ago, the right policy decisions could see the U.S. meet 100 percent (100%) of its liquid fuel needs domestically or from Canada by 2014.”

Energy industries already send $85 million a day to the U.S. Treasury in income taxes, royalty payments, and other fees. Obama, though, wants to raise the nation’s borrowing limits after having added six trillion dollars in debt in his first term.

It was Obama who wasted a trillion dollars on a failed “stimulus”, discovering belatedly that there were few “shovel-ready” jobs while at the same time wasting billions in loans to wind and solar companies that went into bankruptcy shortly after receiving them.

As Simmons points out, “In 2011, wind power produced 1.2 percent (1.2%) of the energy used in the United States, solar power produce 0.1 percent (0.1%) and hydroelectric power contributed 3.3 percent (3.3%) of the total energy used. Solar and wind energy is unpredictable and require back-up from traditional electrical energy plants. “Today, there are 104 nuclear reactors in the United States and construction began for all of these reactors prior to 1974.”

Thanks to the EPA 153 coal-fired plants have been shut down!

What the public is not told is that the coal-fueled electric sector has invested $110 billion in a variety of clean coal technologies that reduced emissions by 90% and intends, over the next decade, to spend $100 billion more. Even so, the EPA continues to issue rules—New Source Performance Standard—that make operating coal-fired plants too costly to operate.

The Obama administration’s justification for its policies is the bogus claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) is responsible for “global warming” or “climate change” when it plays NO role whatever regarding the Earth’s climate.

The same lies the Obama and Democrats in Congress, as well as the Health and Human Services department told Americans about the Affordable Health Act are reflected in their lies about the nation’s energy sector.

Obama has been waging a war on America’s energy needs and the benefits that would result from its expansion.

Until Obama leaves office and voters remove the opponents of the nation’s energy sector, the enormous benefits to Americans in jobs and debt reduction will not occur.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Cartoon Round Up

Women Voters This Year and Beyond

By Alan Caruba

Men when in the company of other men have no hesitancy to admit they have no idea why women are so different in so many ways. 

Well, viva the difference, but one does have to wonder why so many women of the present era feel no need for a man as a husband or father.

In May, the Census Bureau released a report noting that more than six out of ten women who gave birth in their early 20s were unmarried. “Overall,” a Washington Post article reported, “36 percent of all births in the United States were to unmarried mothers in 2011, the year that the census analyzed from answered in the American Community Survey.” Among whites, it was 29 percent. Among blacks, it was 68 percent.

For the second year in a row, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 40.7% of the babies born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers. That is very bad news.

It is an enormous commitment when a man asks “Will you marry me?”, but are we in an era when the answer is “No, thanks” or “Why?” This is happening when women in general still earn less than men, encounter more problems borrowing for a car or a mortgage, and, if the Internet match-up services ads are true, are still are looking for Mr. Right. Their problem often is that he has done a Google search and learned she would involve a big investment. Many men choose to remain single these days or as the divorce rate indicates, to opt out of marriage.

None of this has anything to do with the 2014 midterm elections or the ones in 2016…or does it?

Well, yes it does. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, columnist Gerald F. Seib said “The gender gap is alive and well in American politics. Indeed, it may be the defining characteristic of our political system as next year’s midterm elections beckon.” 

“We are not talking here just about the well-established pattern in which women are more likely to vote Democratic and men Republican in presidential elections. That’s true, but it appears to be only the tip of a gender-gap iceberg.”  And here’s where it gets scary for conservatives of both sexes, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that 52% of men want Congress under Republican control “while just 38% of women feel that way.”

The poll reported that 49% of women say they approve of the job (Obama) is doing; just 37% of men approve. In either case, the numbers are too high because he has done the worst job of any President of the modern era or earlier.

Seib reported that “women are more likely to give the President high grades on leadership qualities, overall competence, and improving America’s image abroad.” This is so absurd it defies any explanation. “College-educated women, in short, emerge as a core Obama constituency.”

That might not be the case in 2014 because The Hill reports that, based on a Dec 23 CNN/ORC poll, support for Obamacare is dropping rapidly and “The drop in support indicated could be particularly troubling for the Obama administration because almost all of it came from women, whose opposition rose from 54% to 60% in a month.”  The poll cited by Sieb indicates that Republican woman—more than 80%--dislike Obamacare.

The gender gap is well documented and in 2012 it was the largest in the history of Gallup’s polls—20 points—since the polls measuring it began in 1952.

One thing needs mentioning and that is the extraordinary Republican women. There’s Rep. Michelle Bachman, Sen. Susan Collins, and Gov. Jan Brewer, to name just a few in positions of political leadership and others like columnists Peggy Noonan. Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter. The list is much longer, but it tells me that the GOP is fortunate to have them.

Clearly, the Republican Party has to undertake a major effort to draw more women into the party and, right now, it is a divided party as the GOP establishment wage battle with the Tea Party Movement that challenges their control.

It must also strongly refute the Democratic Party's lie that the GOP has "a war on women." There is no such war.  

The GOP, however, need not look to the League of Women Voters for any support. Despite its claim to be non-partisan, it has for decades tilted in favor of the Democratic Party and liberal policies. The League is pro-abortion, favors environmentalism, and a greater role for government in all aspects of the lives of women and men.

Who knows? The 2014 and 2016 elections may signal a shift in the liberal views of women voters.  If so, that is bad news for the Democratic Party, but the Republican Party has to do a much better job of enlisting the support of American women.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Harry Reid is Killing the Senate

By Alan Caruba

In his 2005 book, “The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate”, Lewis L. Gould began by noting that the Senate was intended “to provide a legislative check against the potential tyranny of unrestrained majority rule.”

“The Framers of the Constitution envisioned a Senate that would function as a wide and judicious check on both executive power and the House of Representatives. They did not imagine a body that would act as a rubber stamp for an incumbent president. Nor would they have been pleased to see the Senate so focused on allocating federal appropriations to contributors and constituents.”

By 2005, Gould had concluded that “the Senate had become more often an impediment to democratic government rather than a place to express sober second thought on national priorities.”

Nearly a decade ago, he concluded that “A profound sense of crisis now surrounds the Senate and its members. Critics allege that it is an undemocratic place where the national interest received only fitful attention.”

On January 8^th I happened to watch CSPAN as the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, addressed the problems that were worse than even when Gould was writing about the Senate. The subject of his address to fellow Senators was “Restoring the Senate” and it received little or no media coverage.

Rule changes instituted by Majority Leader, Harry Reid, had turned the Democrat-controlled Senate into the rubber stamp the Framers had feared. It was Reid and then-Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who had pushed the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—through both houses in 2009; a 2,000-plus-page bill that was famously voted upon by Senators who had not even had time to read it, let along take the time to debate it. By 2010, voters returned control of the House to the Republican Party.

Obamacare had given rise to the Tea Party movement and the growing numbers of independent voters in the 2014 midterms will likely return power in the Senate along with voters unhappy with Obamacare and the President’s preference to rule by executive orders to bypass Congress. These days, in addition to Obamacare, the Tea Party movement is devoted to ensuring that the Constitution is not ignored.
 

McConnell, addressing the members of the Senate, said, “even if you’re completely at peace about what happened in November, even if you think it was perfectly fine to violate the all-important rule that says changing the rules requires the assent of two-thirds of Senators duly-elected and sworn, none of us should be happy about the trajectory the Senate was on even before that day or the condition we find it in 225 years after it was created.”
 

Kimberley A. Strassel, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, was much freer to address the problem. In a Jan 14 column, she wrote “The popular judgment that Washington’s dysfunction is the result of ‘partisanship’ misses the crucial point. Washington is currently gridlocked because of the particular partisanship of one man: Senate Majority leader Harry Read. And Republicans are warming to the power of making that case to voters.”

Noting that the 113^th Congress is often called the least productive in history, Strassel pointed out that “The Republican House in fact passed more than 200 bills in 2013. Some were minor, and others drew only GOP votes” but “the laws all went to die in Mr. Reid’s Senate graveyard.”

“Mr. Reid took over the Senate in early 2007 and it functioned just fine in the last two years of the Bush administration. It didn’t suddenly break overnight. What did happen is the Senate Democrat’s filibuster-proof majority in the first years of the Obama administration—when Mr. Reid got a taste for unfettered power—and then the GOP takeover of the House in 2011.”

"That is when the Senate broke, as it was the point at which Mr. Reid chose to subvert its entire glorious history to two of his own partisan aims. Protecting his majority and acting as gatekeeper for the White House. Determined to protect his vulnerable members from tough votes, the major leader has unilaterally killed the right to offer amendments…Determined to shield the administration from legislation the president opposes, Mr. Reid has unilaterally killed committee work, since it might produce bipartisan bills.”

“Here’s how the Senate ‘works’ these days,” wrote Strassel, “Mr. Reid writes the legislation himself, thereby shutting Republicans out of the committee drafting. Then he outlaws amendments.”

“It isn’t that the Senate can’t work, it’s that Sen. Reid won’t let it.”

In addition to a President who is seen by more and more Americans as a liar and an incompetent, they are often unaware of the critical role that Harry Reid has played in thwarting the normal process of the Senate to debate—and amend—legislation. While Obamacare is the President’s legacy legislation, it was created in the Senate, a body which does not have the Constitutional right to initiate legislation that imposes taxes, an authority granted only to the House. And the Supreme Court ruled that it was a “tax” and permitted its implementation!

In his address to the Senate, McConnell said of Obamacare, “The chaos this law has visited on our country isn’t just deeply tragic, it was entirely predictable…the Senate exists to prevent that.”

Harry Reid is killing the Senate and only American voters can save it by replacing the Democratic Party majority there.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Blueprint for Tyranny

By Alan Caruba

There are lots of Americans who, after the first five years of living under the governance of Barack Hussein Obama, have concluded that, among his most notable characteristics, he is an incompetent, a pathological liar, a Marxist, and, fearful as the prospect is, a potential dictator who will not leave office when a new President is due to be sworn in.

The fears are largely based on the astonishingly lax Congress that, with the exception of Rep. Darrell Issa and the House Oversight and Reform Committee, has done little to investigate the many scandals that litter the Obama administration.

It doesn’t help that the Department of Justice and possibly the FBI have been politically corrupted.

It doesn’t help when the Commander-in-Chief has forced a significant number of the armed forces top generals and admirals into early retirement or removed them from duty. The question is why.

It doesn’t help when we learn of the purchase of millions of dollars of ammunition by the Department of Homeland Security and other measures that appear to be turning it into an internal army.

Politics in America is a metaphoric war in which the worst is thought of any President in office by those in the opposing party. It isn’t always this way. Reagan enjoyed a relatively non-partisan relationship with Congress, but Andrew Jackson was regarded as a tyrant by many. Now his face is on the twenty dollar bill.

I got to thinking about the way tyranny and despotism has been and in many nations still is the rule throughout history and existing today. The U.S. Constitution was written to ensure that its three branches would act as a brake on each other. If there was one thing the Framers did not want it was a monarch or despot.

The opposite of U.S. history is found in the history of Russia which has been replete with czars, followed by communist dictators, Lenin, Stalin, and others. These days it is Vladimir Putin and his grasp on power has been the subject of protest by a new generation of Russians.

A new book, “Kicking the Kremlin” by Marc Bennetts, a British journalist working out of Moscow, tells the story of Putin’s rise to the office of president of the then-new Russian republic following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He was appointed prime minister in 2000 by Boris Yeltsin who had replaced Gorbachev. At the time, Putin was a former KGB Lieutenant Colonel who had served five years in East Germany recruiting spies when Gorbachev was in charge. In 1998, after serving in administrative posts, he returned to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB.

As Bennetts notes, “In less than a decade, the little-known prime minister that Yeltsin had told to ‘take care of Russia’ had transformed himself into a modern day czar in the Kremlin, eliminating all but the most stubborn opposition to his rule. Early on he established control of the media.

“The Russian constitution stated clearly that no president could serve more than “two consecutive terms.” But Putin had no plans to surrender power. In 2007, he picked Dmitry Medvedev to be his puppet to serve as president and, in turn, Medvedev named him to be prime minister and he became head of the governing party, United Russia. It was clear that Putin was still calling the shots. Two years into his term, Medvedev proposed extending the presidential term from four years to six. “It would grant Putin, upon his return to the Kremlin, the opportunity to remain in power until 2024” if elected president again. He was.

The hope that corruption and nepotism would be curbed and that an independent judiciary and police force would be established was dashed.

“Traumatized by a world war, revolutions and almost total economic collapse at the tail end of the twentieth century,” wrote Bennetts, “many Russians have first-hand experience of the dangers of rapid political and social change. That is why Putin’s message of stability had remained so attractive to so many, for so long.”

While Obama is now engaged in a campaign aimed at “income inequality”, corruption in Russia soared to a point where, in 2013, Credit Suisse noted that “Worldwide, billionaires collectively account for 1%-2% of total household wealth; in Russia today 110 billionaires own 35% of all wealth.” However, “large swatches of the country are still wallowing in Third World poverty…And all this in a country that possesses the world’s largest natural gas reserves, the second-largest coal reserves, and the ninth-largest crude-oil reserves.”

A major characteristic of Putin's regime has been the suppression of any opposition. It is marked by the assassinations of journalists and of politicians. Leaders of the opposition who organized mass protests in Moscow were jailed and even Pussy Riot, a girl’s band, that spent forty seconds in a Moscow cathedral were sentenced to seven years in jail. Laws were passed to make protest leaders and participants subject to jail for their opposition.

“Putin’s inauguration in May 2012 for a third presidential term was not so much a national celebration of sovereignty as a highly disciplined military operation,” wrote Bennetts. “And the number one threat to the head of state? The Russian people.”

Here in America the last major protest in Washington, D.C. was organized by the then-new Tea Party movement and was focused to stopping the enactment of Obamacare. It attracted nearly a million or more Americans. There have been few such protests since, but on May 16, “American Spring” is slated for a major protest march against Obama.

The protests in 2011 and 2012 against Putin were ruthlessly put down by government forces. By 2013, half the Russians no longer believed what they were being told by television. Similarly, Obama’s approval ratings are falling fast due to massive unemployment and disappointment.

America is not Russia, but Americans are growing increasingly concerned about the way Obama is governing the nation. They should be.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Christie's Crisis

 

 By Alan Caruba

I watched the 107 minute press conference by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on Thursday, but I must admit that I almost fell asleep towards the end. What struck me at the time was that I had not seen anything comparable from President Obama regarding the many scandals such as Fast and Furious, the IRS targeting of Tea Party and comparable groups, Benghazi, and the Obamacare debacle.

Gov. Christie didn’t just offer a prepared statement, take a few questions, and leave. He stayed on. He took full responsibility for the closing of lanes to the George Washington Bridge by over-zealous staff, announced the firing of two top aides, and promised a further investigation of what occurred and why. Then he answered a barrage of questions.

The focus on the event is the result of countless predictions that he would face Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.  The Governor has become a celebrity politician as the result of his personality and dramatic reelection in a state that is heavily Democratic. He gained a lot of attention for facing down the powerful teacher’s union and addressing the state’s fiscal problems.

He also gained attention for his “style” of governance. A former U.S. District Attorney for New Jersey, he had put a lot of politicians in jail and, as Governor, often challenged those who questioned those who challenged him and showed his toughness on the issues. “I am not a bully,” he said in the press conference, but his assertive nature was, for many New Jerseyans, part of their support.

Did his staff and appointees absorb some of that “attitude”? Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science and law at Montclair State University (NJ), said, “It is not too much of a logical leap to connect the rhetoric that the governor has used with the tone of public servants in his administration, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the disdain that is evident in these documents comes from the top down.”

Those thousands of documents, however, reveal no connection to the Governor.

Born in New Jersey, grown to maturity, and a resident here, my interest in the Governor stems in part from watching him over the many years he has been a public servant. This is the first time he has faced such a crisis and he took full responsibility. That is quite a contrast with Obama who has never taken responsibility for anything and often stated he was unaware of them until he read about it in the newspaper, something that occurred to Christie when a New Jersey daily revealed the content of emails regarding the lane closures subpoenaed by the state legislature.

I voted for Christie twice, am a registered Republican, and am politically conservative. I never voted for Obama. That doesn’t mean I have been happy with his politics that includes an antipathy toward gun ownership, an inclination to believe the environmental nonsense about global warming or some energy-related issues.

What is occurring, however, is a huge effort by the liberal mainstream press to discredit and eliminate him from being a potential Republican presidential candidate to oppose Hillary Clinton. It is the same press that has done its best to ignore the many Obama scandals and those that compose the history of Hillary, the most recent of which was her failure to respond to the Benghazi scandal when she was Obama’s Secretary of State.  She signed onto the huge lie that the attack was the result of a video nobody ever saw.

The same press thought his close relationship with Obama following the devastation of superstorm Sandy on the New Jersey shore was wonderful. He was trying to get the federal government to respond swiftly to the needs of citizens who had lost their homes or had their businesses ruined. That’s what a Governor is supposed to do. Christie also campaigned for Mitt Romney when he was running for President.

Christie’s politics make a lot of conservatives wary. He appointed a Muslim to the judiciary in New Jersey and he did a John Kerry on same-sex marriage, having been against it until he was for it. During his second campaign his campaign coffers were enriched by more donations from Democrats than Republicans! He failed to assist Ken Cuccinelli when he ran for Governor of Virginia. Et cetera.

Until the lane closing scandal, the mainstream press was touting him heavily. Now they see an opportunity to remove him from those who might challenge Hillary in 2016, assuming she will run. Hillary has so many scandals that political pundits might pause in their predictions. What she represents is four more years of the Obama agenda.

At this writing, there is no way of knowing if Gov. Christie will come out of the bridge lanes closing relatively unscathed or whether it will end his position as a Republican front-runner. The fact is that the GOP has a number of politicians who can replace him in 2016 if that occurs. The Democrats never mention anyone other than Hillary, nor is the impact of Obamacare on the November midterms and the outcome in 2016 ever mentioned. Right now the President is desperately trying to focus attention on the utterly bogus “income inequality” nonsense.

For now, Gov. Christie, a gifted politician, has three more years of overseeing 65,000 state employees and his legislative agenda in New Jersey. For now, the mainstream press will have a field day covering him.

© Alan Caruba, 2014