Posted on 03/18/2007 11:17:46 PM PDT by FairOpinion
Can America's mayor win support from enough social conservatives to win the Republican nomination?
Maybe not, but social conservatives should think long and hard before they decide to pass on Giuliani. This may be difficult advice to credit. Giuliani is thoroughly alienated from the dominant concerns of the social right.
Mayor Giuliani delivered what they needed most. He reclaimed New York City from the toxic leftism of his predecessors but in the process identified himself with the moral elements of their leftism.
social conservatives are concerned about social rot and Giuliani is one of the very few executives in the history of the world with a record of reversing rot. This is appealing.
On September 11, 2001 and the days that followed he auditioned for commander in chief and the audition went well. This too is appealing. If we don't bestir ourselves to win our war with Islamic fascism, the moral state of our civilization won't matter. We won't be around to wallow in sin.
Social conservatives could benefit from the presidency of someone who agrees with them less but fights for them more. This is the crux of Giuliani's appeal to the social right and every other Republican constituency. He is a fighter, and Republicans of all sorts are sick and tired of turning the other cheek and seeking common cause with the enemy both at home and abroad.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
- Rudy tossed Arafat out of a city sponsored celebrations saying, "I would rather not have someone who has been implicated in the murders of Americans there, if I have the discretion not to have him there”.
- Rudy did the same to Fidel Castro.
- When a Saudi prince donated millions to 9/11 relief efforts and later suggested that United States policy in the Middle East may have been partially responsible for the attacks, Rudy returned the money.
- Rudy refused to meet with racial arsonist Al Sharpton.
- Rudy as mayor was strong on law and order. Rudy said that "government exists above all to keep people safe in their homes and in the streets, not to redistribute income, run a welfare state, or perform social engineering". And Rudy backed this all up by going after both quality-of-life crimes and serious crimes. Total crime went down by some 64 percent during the Giuliani years, and murder went down 67 percent. Auto thefts went down on average about 80,000 per year.
- Rudy supported the police when the police had to enter and deal with Muslims at a mosque.
- Rudy closed down many porn shops across the city and specifically shutdown porn shops in residential neighborhoods.
- Rudy went after both low level and high level drug dealers for the first time in the cities history.
- Rudy had zero tolerance for quality of life crimes such as squeegee extortionists, graffiti vandals, panhandling and public urination.
- Rudy launched a welfare revolution, removing illegal recipients, cutting the rolls by 20% the first year alone and dropping the welfare rolls by 600,000 over the course of his plan.
- Rudy launched a work requirement program for the remaining welfare recipients. The NY Times called it slavery.
- Rudy constantly spoke out against illegitimacy and fatherless families. One of many things that Rudy said on the subject was the following: " If you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, . I guess the social program would be called fatherhood.
" - Rudy objected to affirmative action. Rudy ended the cities set-aside program for minority contractors.
- Rudy rejected the idea of lowering the job requirement standards for minorities and woman. - Rudy said. "it was unfair to expect middle-class kids to work their way through college by holding down jobs and going to classes while exempting students on welfare from working
. " - Rudy reformed the public school system and forced out liberal chancellors who wouldn't install his reforms.
- Rudy tried to privatize 5 of the cities worst public schools.
- Rudy was for school vouchers Rudy said, "The whole notion of choice is really about more freedom for people, rather than being subjugated by a government system that says you have no choice about the education of your child,".
- Rudy fought against public money for an art display that defiled Christ and he fought against other obscene so-called works of art.
- Rudy played hardball with city unions winning concessions from city workers that other mayors had failed to do.
- Rudy strong armed state leaders to merge the cities Housing Police and Transit Police into the NYPD saving the city hundreds of millions. Rudy did this by threatening to fire every housing and transit officer and rehire each as a city cop if legislative leaders did not go along.
- Rudy did the same with the city’s garbageman, many of whom worked only half days because the department was so overstaffed with union jobs. Rudy won $300 million in savings from them by threatening to contract out trash collection to private companies.
- Rudy cut or killed 23 levies and taxes, saving taxpayers $9.8 billion during his terms.
- Rudy cut NYC's top income-tax rate by 20.6%.
- Local NYC taxes on a family of four dropped 23.7% during Rudy's term.
- Rudy cut the commercial-rent tax.
- Rudy cut sales taxes, including taxes on clothing.
- Rudy cut the marriage penalty on taxpaying couples.
- Rudy cut taxes on commercial rents everywhere outside of Manhattan’s major business districts, and various taxes on small businesses and self-employed New Yorkers.
- Rudy's expenditure growth averaged 2.9% annually, while local inflation between January 1994 and December 2001 averaged 3.6%.
- Rudy privatized municipal assets.
- Rudy sold WNYC radio for $20 million, WNYC-TV for $207 million, and NYC's share of the U.N. Plaza Hotel for $85 million.
- Rudy divested the City from the New York Coliseum adding $345 million to city coffers.
- Rudy let the private Central Park Conservancy manage Central Park.
- Rudy cut NYC's hotel tax from 6% to 5%. Consequently, hotel tax revenues increased from $135 million in Fiscal Year 1995 to $239 million in FY 2001.
- When asked if Rudy would raise taxes after 9/11 Rudy said that would be "a dumb, stupid, idiotic, and moronic thing to do.
" - A quote from Rudy on his economic philosophy: “City government should not and cannot create jobs through government planning. The best it can do, and what it has a responsibility to do, is to deal with its own finances first, to create a solid budgetary foundation that allows businesses to move the economy forward on the strength of their energy and ideas. After all, businesses are and have always been the backbone of New York City.
” - Construction permits increased by more than 50% in the city per year during Rudy's terms.
- Tourism increased 50% in the city per year during Rudy's terms.
- City jobs increased by 430,000 to an all time high of 3.72 million during Rudy's terms.
- City personal income increased 50% during Rudy's terms.
- The percentage income that city residence paid in taxes declined from 8.8 to 7.3 percent during Rudy's terms.
- Unemployment in the city went form 10.3% to 5.1% during Rudy's terms.
- Rudy was an outstanding leader during the 9/11 crisis.
- Rudy has been a strong supporting in our WOT including supporting the mission in Iraq.
- Rudy was chosen by Ronald Reagan in 1981 as an Associate Attorney General placing him in the third highest position in the Reagan's DOJ.
- In 1983, Rudy was appointed by Reagan to be U.S. Attorney for the SD of NY. In that position, Rudy amassed 4,152 convictions including the heads of NY's so-called "Five Families". Rudy also prosecuted terrorists and illegal immigrants.
LOL! That's funny!
DRINK RUDY! The more you drink, the better he looks!
Giuliani represents the 30% who loudly support Bush. Not much to work with.
What makes people think Rudy is a hawk?
See? That's also something posted on every Rudy thread, aka "spam". But it's factual information that has value.
I just think we can do better, at least until the primaries end.
This thread is about Rudy's claim that he would appoint conservative judges, and THE FACTS are that he has appointed Democrats overwhelmingly to the judiciary in the past.
I love the people who come up with these red herring lists of minutia designed to impress with length, rather than content. I can probably come up qith a just as lengthy list showing Hillary Clinton or John Kerry is a conservative.
Giuliani's appointments to the Supreme Court can't be any worse than Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter.
Now, I know that Hunter is about as relevant to the '08 race as a gnat, but why don't you post the same thing re: his position on it?
Thanks to your post I have 're-loaded' my tagline. Think about it - ooops! Forgot. You have to suspend that part of your brain if your preacher tells you to do so....
Wanna bet?
Giuliani:
"That's...exactly the kind of person you'd think that you'd want to appoint, somebody who shares kind of your general outlook...Presidents, going back to the beginning of the republic, generally appoint people on the Supreme Court that they believe agree with them."
"Most of Clinton's policies are very similar to most of mine." - Rudy Giuliani
Sure, Rudy's gonna fight for us.
Too bad he'll fight for the wrong side of the issues.
Birds of a feather flock together. Your anti-Christian tagline explains a lot about why you would gravitate towards an ultra-liberal like Giuliani.
Thank you for flying into my web, little fly....
I think you meant to say:
"Your anti-heretical-nutso-make-it-up-as-they-go-along American Protestant evangelical don't-bother-me-with-facts-bible-literalist-'pseudo-Christians'
...I am very much a Christian - but I use my BRAIN. And I am thoroughly unimpressed - after a decade of being immersed in it thanks to a psychotic ex-spouse - with the 'Evangelical Movement'.
Most of the followers are well-meaning lemmings - but the same cannot be said of MANY (not all) of their 'unaccountable to no one but themselves' scandal-ridden, $$$$$$$$$$$$$ obsessed 'preachers'....
Not according to Rudy.
When asked whether he supports a ban on partial-birth abortions, Rudy said, “No, I have not supported that, and I don’t see my position on that changing."
Source: CNN.com, “Inside Politics” Dec 2, 1999
LOL! Now that's a good one!
Whittaker Chambers:
"The dying world of 1925 was without faith, hope, character, understanding of its malady or will to overcome it. It was dying but it laughed. And this laughter was not the defiance of a vigor that refuses to know when it is whipped. It was the loss, by the mind of a whole civilization, of the power to distinguish between reality and unreality, because, ultimately, though I did not know it, it had lost the power to distinguish between good and evil.… The dying world had no answer at all to the crisis of the 20th century, and, when it was mentioned, and every moral voice in the Western world was shrilling crisis, it cocked an ear of complacent deafness and smiled a smile of blank senility—throughout history, the smile of those for whom the executioner waits."
"For while Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization."
"It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved, and, hence, their conflict is irrepressible."
"Abortion, which now fills me with physical horror, I then regarded, like all Communists, as a mere physical manipulation."
"To me many of my colleagues at Time, basically kind and intensely well-meaning people, seemed to me as charming and as removed from reality as fish in a fish bowl. To me they seemed to know little about the forces that were shaping the history of our time. To me they seemed like little children, knowing and clever little children, but knowing and clever chiefly about trifling things while they were extremely resistant to finding out about anything else."
-----------------------------------------
"The pessimist stared at his visitor. He had never talked with the Devil before. But he had read descriptions of him by people who had and who remembered Satan as a goat, a bull, a dog, a cat, a big black man with horns, claws and a tail. The presence beside him looked distinguished, relaxed, urbane. Except for a face too characterful to be contemporary, the Devil might have been a movie magnate, an airline executive, a college president, a great surgeon or a grain speculator. “And yet,” thought the pessimist, “those are certainly not the eyes of a Yale man.”
"[The Devil said:] Hell is a conspiracy. Like all good conspiracies, its first requirement is that nobody shall believe in it. Well, we have succeeded so well that for centuries there has been no Hell, and there is scarcely a rational man in the world today who, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, believes that the Devil exists.
"[The Devil said:] It seems but yesterday that I launched Hell’s Five Hundred Year Plan.… I saw that Hell had to move with the tide and leave the rest to rationalism, liberalism and universal compulsory education.… At first there was some opposition in Hell. Baal, Beelzebub and a handful of almost aboriginal demons who are still living in the 10th Century B.C. and have not had an idea since the Fall, naturally opposed the New Deal."
--------------------------------------
"That [haunting fear of being wrong] is the fate of those who break without knowing clearly that Communism is wrong because something else is right, because to the challenge: God or Man?, they continue to give the answer: Man.… They are witnesses against something; they have ceased to be witnesses for anything.
"External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom.… Hence every sincere break with Communism is a religious experience.
"There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died."
I think you have "issues."
"That's...exactly the kind of person you'd think that you'd want to appoint, somebody who shares kind of your general outlook...Presidents, going back to the beginning of the republic, generally appoint people on the Supreme Court that they believe agree with them."
I don't see anything wrong with that quote. Presidents generally appoint justices who are members of their political party and who are recommended by other members of their party. There is no guarantee that Supreme Court justices are going to vote the way the president likes on every controversial issue. The people advising Giuliani on judicial appointments will not be Democrats. No prominent Democrats will make inroads into a Giuliani administration unless they're smart enough to endorse him in the election (like many did when he ran for mayor). Since no Democrat on Capitol Hill will endorse Giuliani over Hillary (or whoever their party's nominee) for president, they will be shut out of his administration and thus, will have no influence over his policies.
You can repeat that lie all you want - but Rudy supported Clinton's veto of a PBA ban that included provisions for the life of the mother. Both Hunter and Thompson voted for that ban.
Actions speak louder than words. Rudy is just blowing smoke and you're more than glad to bogart what he's blowing.
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