Posted on 02/08/2007 11:30:41 AM PST by PhiKapMom
Rudy Giuliani will prevent a conservative crack-up.
Today, after very little effort, Giuliani is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Dick Morris is predicting a Giuliani vs. Clinton race in 2008. Yet some conservatives are dubious of the man who cleaned up New York, returned it to a vigor unimaginable from the 1960s through the 1980s, and then led New York and the country heroically through 9/11. Well, one knows a politician by the company he keeps, and Giuliani has around him the financial people who created the libertarian-conservative Manhattan Institute. He relied heavily on the Institute's policies while governing New York. He will rely on libertarian-conservative policy makers in his race for the White House and once there.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Free Republic DOES NOT Represent the entire U.S. voting block as a whole. It is soo tiny compared to it and is only one sided. And most of those 1000 posts were repeat posters returning answers on the post. It doesn't mean a thing. To Free Republic it does but to the Voters in the U.S. - they don't even know who we are.
44 million Americans own guns. That is hardly a trivial number, and they can be very one-sided. Question the political power of the NRA at Rudy's electoral peril.
The revival of the Times Square area actually dates back to the mid-1980s when the city's planning commission approved a formal rezoning of the area. A number of redevelopment proposals were brought forward at the time, but the process hit a dead end when the stock market crashed in 1987 and many institutional investors had to pull out of these deals to reduce their exposure to risky real estate ventures.
The two major real estate deals that signalled the "official" start of the Times Square restoration -- in which Disney and Bertelsmann signed long-term leases on new buildings in the area -- occurred when David Dinkins was still the mayor.
Well I wish there were 44 million americans on freeRepublic. But that's not the point - the point is that those 1000 posts does not mean Rudy will not get the nomnation. That's what I was trying to say.
I thought "single-issue" pro-lifers would be the most difficult hurdle for Giuliani to overcome, but after the last couple of days I'm convinced gun owners are far more likely to stay home in 2008 or vote for third party candidates.
That thread is a good indication of the problems Rudy is going to have with conservative gun owners - both GOP and Democrat. 44 million gun owners. The NRA. He's going to have real problems in this area, especially with his lackluster performance on H&C addressing 2nd Amendment issues.
And there is nothing to be gained by running further leftward on a pro-war platform. The antiwar resistance increases rapidly the further left you go.
The GOP will only win by holding the base and attracting conservative Reagan Dems with a pro-war, pro-life, pro-gun message. Rudy's only got one of those.
I know plenty of gun owners here on Free Republic (who have said so) and who have never been on Free Republic who will be voting for Rudy. That does not matter to them. They have their guns and they know Rudy is not planning on taking them away from them. And they wouldn't be caught dead voting for a useless third party candidate.
Jeeze then my huge ping list is mute isn't it? I don't think so!
You crack me up. You first say that FR is tiny and insignificant, and then you turn around and say how your ping list on FR is such a big deal.
Hey! Welcome! If you're interested in reading Rudy threads, let areafiftyone or PhiKapMom know.
Some freepers are staying the closet and just freepmailing us, but I'm glad to see them starting to "come out". LOL
Got another one in Freepmail. Thanks Peach!
Oh, and another thing. I wouldn't want to compare the political power of your pinglist to the power of the NRA, unless you're auditioning for a sequel to Bambi Meets Godzilla.
Great! Things are looking good.
Does anyone know when/where Rudy is announcing tomorrow in California? I hope it's carried on FNC.
Well, this will just be punishing the Republican Party even more. Then (eventually) they'll all convert to the conservative chatechism. Unfortunately, they won't be able to do anything about it since they won't be in office anymore. :/
Giuliani made New York over from a Third World dungheap to a decent place to live. And by showing that it COULD be done, he raised the expectations of citizens, expectations that even liberal mayors will have to live up to in the future.
But any man who says the government should guarantee the "right" to puncture a baby's skull with scissors and suck out the brain, is a WICKED man. Remember "wicked"? As in, "Herod, the wicked king"? Yes, wicked. And no one who is wicked should get anyone's vote.
The problem with Rudy is that it's not just one issue involved here. There are several. Abortion, guns, gay rights, amnesty - and a lot of potential negatives such as his messy divorce, his poor polling against Hillary in the 2000 NY Senate campaign, and other intangibles such as Bernie Kerik.
Uh...Hillary is a Democrat and Rudy is a Republican. Even if everything else was equal, just the fact he's Republican gives Republicans more influence with him, which in turn should translate into vetoing at least a few bills Hillary would NOT veto.
Not sure - I'll look it up and see what I can find.
What say you Jim? I think I already know where you stand....same place I do. Care to comment?
FMCDH(BITS)
"Well, one knows a politician by the company he keeps, and Giuliani has around him the financial people who created the libertarian-conservative Manhattan Institute. He relied heavily on the Institute's policies while governing New York."
I've been posting data from the Manhattan Institute for the last six months on FR, and it doesn't paint a pretty picture of the final record of Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
TAXES: Giuliani did cut the marginal city income tax rates, reducing taxes by some $2.0-billion from 1996-2001, but those cuts only offset the $1.8-billion increase in city income tax rates put in place by Mayor Dinkins a few years earlier. In the end, taxes were actually cut by a modest $200-million. Freezing the 12.5% surcharge on high wage earners was good, but Giuliani didn't attempt to abolish that surcharge. Nor did Giuliani attempt to make serious permanent changes the city income tax code. The primary reason Rudy and the City Council agreed to cut taxes, was to make NYCity more appealing to new businesses thinking about locating/relocating to the Big Apple. A smart move, however, Rudy left office with NYCity the highest taxed big city in America, with some of the highest income taxes, property taxes and utility rates in the entire nation.
GOVT SPENDING: From 1997 to 2001, spending under Giuliani went up 32%. More then double the rate of inflation. Rudy left NYCity with a $2.0 billion deficit and an enlarged debt of $42-billion. Second largest debt after the federal government. Giuliani also added 15,000 new teachers to the city employment rolls. Increasing the membership of two major liberal organizations, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
From the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research:
"The scope of government was not reduced at all. The mayor abandoned his most visible initiative in this sphere—the proposed sale of the city hospital system—after a struggle with the unions and defeats in the courts. He did cut costs in social services; even before the new federal welfare reforms took effect in 1997, the city had begun to significantly reduce caseloads. But money saved on social services has only helped to subsidize big increases in other categories. Today the array of social services sponsored and partially funded by the city—from day care to virtually guaranteed housing—is as wide as ever.
"In the final analysis, Mayor Giuliani sought to make the city deliver services more efficiently—not to make the city deliver fewer services. Gains in efficiency were offset, however, by a spike in the costs of outsourced contracts (see point 2 below). Thus, in two areas where inroads might have been made, the city instead failed to reduce spending."
"1. Personnel Increases. In 1995–96, the city entered into a series of collective bargaining agreements with its public-employee unions. In addition to granting pay increases that ended up roughly equaling inflation, the city promised not to lay off any workers for the life of the contracts. These agreements were expected to add $2.2 billion to the budget by fiscal 2001. But that estimate didn’t reckon with renewed growth in the number of city employees. After dipping in Giuliani’s first two years, the full-time headcount rose from 235,069, in June 1996 to over 253,000 by November 2000. Thanks largely to this growth in the workforce, the total increase in personnel service costs since 1995 has been $4 billion.
2. "Outsourced Services. The failure to shrink the scope of city government made it all the more imperative that Mayor Giuliani vastly increase its efficiency. In the attempt to increase productivity, the mayor farmed out some city services to private contractors. But as the number of outsourced contracts doubled under Giuliani, contractual expenses also nearly doubled—from $3 billion to $5.8 billion. While it may be argued that the city saved money by outsourcing these services, the net savings turned out to be marginal at best. In practice, outsourcing proved to be more of a bargaining chip in negotiations with unions than a serious means of pruning expenses."
Hard evidence from the Manhattan Institute that Rudy Giuliani was NO fiscal conservative. Just another run-of-the-mill, NYCity liberal.
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