Shocking news: NY Times endorses Corzine

(Tongue placed firmly in cheek) In a breaking news development today, the New York Times has endorsed Jon Corzine. The endorsement is unique for its sophmoric cheap shots on Chris Christie and Christopher Daggett while attributing "pragmatic" ideas to Corzine. And for his small ideas, Corzine apparently deserves another four years.

Here is my issue with this endorsement and Corzine in general. Our state is sufferring from rot deep within the core. The political system is a patronage mill monolith that will not be changed by a get-along-to-go-along politician like Corzine. We already have seen the lengths he will go to coddle unions and spread money around to keep people quiet about the ethical lapses he perpetuated to get it done. In all, he is a small man, with small ideas and absolutely zero leadership.

As for issues, the state had financial problems during good times. And when the economy went south, the state has taken a hit FAR greater than it should have. New Jersey has been bleeding jobs for 10 years due to its practice of driving business out of the state to friendlier business climates. And what are the top issues being talked about by Jon Corzine? Abortion, Christie's weight, mamograms and George Bush. And the voters of the state let him get away with it.

I guess the bright spot is that at least in this election, the Democrats actually let their candidate campaign unlike the last senatorial campaign when Frank Lautenberg was not allowed to be seen or engaged in public.

The joke is on the average New Jersey voter because they keep letting Corzine and the Democrats get away with providing no plan, no leadership and mudslinging. I was thinking the other day that deep down given the current trajectory of the state, I know that my family has to leave New Jersey. It really isn't a question of whether but when. No responsible person would sit idly by while the Democrats continue their quest to turn New Jersey into Michigan.

This state needs something different. I don't know that Christie is perfect but he has shown leadership as Federal attorney taking on the rot. I KNOW that Corzine will not even try. He isn't a leader and never will be. The New York times is right:

Mr. Corzine is hardly the perfect politician. Most New Jersey voters find him astonishingly inarticulate, and his credentials as a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs do not seem as impressive as they did before the financial meltdown in 2008. He has poured lots of his personal wealth into this race, far too much of it for biting — and sometimes juvenile — attacks on Mr. Christie.

Only in New Jersey would this represent a incumbent candidate's shining achievements worthy of an endorsement by the "paper of record".

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A Lesson From the Madoff Fiasco

The default response to news of fiscal wrongdoings is to lay on greater government oversight and regulation.

But perhaps we should take a lesson from this New York Times article:

Based on the vagueness of the complaints against Mr. Madoff, his confession, as detailed in court filings, seems to have taken the F.B.I. and S.E.C. by surprise. Investigators have not explained when they believe the fraud began, how much money was ultimately lost and whether Mr. Madoff lost investors’ money in the markets, spent it, or both....

[T]he S.E.C. had already investigated Mr. Madoff and two accountants who raised money for him in 1992, believing they might have found a Ponzi scheme. “We went into this thing just thinking it might be a huge catastrophe,” an S.E.C. official told The Wall Street Journal in December 1992.

Instead, Mr. Madoff turned out to have delivered the returns that the investment advisers had promised their clients. It is not clear whether the results of the 1992 inquiry discouraged the S.E.C. from examining Mr. Madoff again, even when new red flags surfaced.

According to an S.E.C. statement released on Friday night, the agency looked at Mr. Madoff’s operations twice in recent years — in 2005 and 2007. The 2005 review found only three technical violations of trading rules. The 2007 inquiry found nothing that prompted the regional enforcement staff to take further action by referring the matter to Washington, the statement said.

Ponzi schemes are already illegal, so for additional regulation to have helped it would have needed to be in the form of additional auditing, disclosures, etc. But having one of the most powerful organizations in Washington look into the firm -- three times -- didn't stop Mr. Madoff from making off with other people's money.

So if you want more government oversight to prevent these kinds of problems, ask yourself: What specific kinds of additional oversight would have prevented this? And are you willing to pay for the drag that it would have on the economy as a whole to have that level of oversight required of every institution of reasonable size in America?

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NY Times Endorses Lautenberg - and NJ was cheated out of an election

From the NY Times endorsement of Senator Frank Lautenberg:

New Jersey voters deserved a better race this year than the nearly invisible contest between Senator Frank Lautenberg and Richard Zimmer, his Republican challenger. Mr. Lautenberg, 84, has accomplished much over 24 years in the Senate but seemed reluctant to campaign actively. He agreed to only one televised debate.

A lot of bloggers are criticising the Times on this one. I am not so sure. While the media should have forced Lautenberg to come out of his hole, so should the citizens of New Jersey. This man was allowed to hide during the primary and again in the general election.

New Jersey should take a page out of the Pennsylvania book. Every Presidential election, they are a battleground state. New Jersey doesn't really even mobilize either side. No issues are discussed or debated here. Everything is debated in PA. We are rapidly becomming a corrupt welfare state. And Pennsylvania has become a player that matters on the national stage.

And Frank Lautenberg sitting in his easy chair refusing to campaign, debate or discuss the issues is responsible. And so are we.

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Powerline breaks major election fraud story!

Because there is no such thing as investigative journalism by media giants like the New York Time in regard to Barack Obama, Powerline once again broke a story about contribution fraud at Obama's web site:

More recently, incidents have been reported in which people have seen credit card charges surface suggesting they donated to Barack Obama when they did not. Matthew Mosk and Sarah Cohen noted one such incident earlier this week:

Now comes the story of Mary T. Biskup, of Manchester, Missouri. Biskup got a call recently from the Obama campaign, which was trying to figure out why she donated $174,800 to the campaign -- well over the contribution limit of $2,300.

The answer she gave them was simple. "That's an error."

Is the Obama campaign knowingly receiving illegal contributions?

It it indeed? Apparently, Powerline readers have been testing the site and have found a criminal lack of basic fraud checking at the Obama donation web site. Interestingly, the McCain has verification clearly in place.

Read the article here. The fact that the fraud is occurring is bad enough. The fact that no media organization will report on it is chilling. If this were John McCain, it would be front page news.

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Now they are after McCain's wife

So let me get these rules straight. Michelle Obama tells the audience at a POLITICAL RALLY that this was the first time she was proud to be American. Barack Obama and the media blasted anyone who criticized her and called this out of bounds. I will not even begin to get into the logic of crying foul when a political spouse decides to make political speeches and says something stupid. What was more interesting was the reaction of Mr. Obama and his severe indignation. Obama was very adamant that spouses were out of bounds.

Now, the New York Times has published a hit piece in Cindy McCain. Let's ignore for a moment how sick the mindset is that would create that kind of article. Remember, this is the same NY Times that created an affair scandal about McCain from whole cloth. Below was the NY Times in June helping remake Michelle Obama after she said she spent her life "not proud to be American".

Then came some rhetorical stumbles. In Madison, Wis., in February, she told voters that hope was sweeping America, adding, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” Cable news programs replayed those 15 words in an endless loop of outrage.

Barack Obama often blurs identity lines; much of his candidacy has seemed almost post-racial. Mrs. Obama’s identity is less mutable. She is a descendant of slaves and a product of Chicago’s historically black South Side. She burns hot where he banks cool, and that too can make her an inviting proxy for attack.

The tone here is that these attacks are unfair and she is just misunderstood. Shortly after this article, they tipped their hand when the wrote a puff piece on Michelle Obama. Just read this passage below. Michelle Obama is "too authentic" while Cindy McCain is "too fake".

The amount of scrutiny the two spouses face is not commensurate — Mrs. Obama has endured far more virulent attacks by her critics — but it is somehow symmetrical. Mrs. Obama went on a popular television talk show to combat the notion that she is a little too authentic to be a first lady, while Mrs. McCain did it to undercut the image that she is too fake.

So now they create a hit piece about Cindy McCain. They can write about Cindy McCain's drug use but they can't seem to lift a finger to investigate Obama's. We have said this before at this site that the media has been absolutely incompetent this election cycle. They will go through Joe the Plumbers trash but they won't investigate the public record of Obama. And McCain is fighting back:

The campaign's outrage comes on the heels of a letter Cindy McCain's attorney, John Dowd, wrote earlier this month to New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller accusing him of biased coverage for not pursuing more information about Obama's personal life.

"It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama," Dowd wrote in the letter, which the campaign has made public now in response to the latest report by the Times.

"You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, 'Dreams of My Father,'" he continued. "Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them. Thus there is a terrific lack of balance here."

The McCain camp provided the letter to FOX News on Saturday, the same day the piece was published. In addition to the missive, the McCain released a scathing critique of the story, calling it "gutter journalism at its worst -- an unprecedented attack on a presidential candidate's spouse."

Here is hoping that John McCain keeps fighting back. This election cycle has been unfathomably unfair. First to Hillary Clinton and now to McCain. American's as a whole believe in fairness. I hope Obama pays a terrible price for his quiet approval of this continued trash.

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