Lonegan: Not so fast on Christie’s budget proposals

The Record ^ | Thursday, June 24, 2010 | BY STEVEN LONEGAN

[Al B.]

Thanks for checking in mick. Your take on this was what I was looking for. Appreciate it.

Christie seems to be making the right enemies up there but I'm a little concerned about the hoopla surrounding his possible national ambitions. His interview with Hannity where he refused to back away from gun control really rang the alarm bells for me.

Take care and have a great weekend FRiend.

[Lancey Howard]

This is disappointing.

I like Lonegan (or at least, used to), but he sounds silly here. Certainly he is aware that Christie doesn’t have the dictatorial powers he would need to have in order to do what Lonegan would have him do. In fact, Christie has to deal with significant rat majorities in the state legislature and all the embedded corruption that situation brings with it.

It is a minor miracle that this year’s budget is less in real dollars than it was last year.

This guy Christie is a brand new governor and Lonegan is beating him up already?
That’s lame. ...Sounds a lot like sour grapes.

[Lancey Howard]

but his appointments are left wing libs...

I have to give Christie credit for balls for dumping Justice John Wallace from the state Supreme Court.

[mick]

I’ll give you Wallace....but as far as Lonegan beating him up too early read this:
http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2010/06/if_christe_follows_through_on.html

But like I said...right now he is the best we could hope for...but a conservative he ain’t...we are in a strange situation in NJ. CC is trying to preserve as much of the welfare state as he can, but IMO he will fail and the state will go belly up and default on it’s debt and massive pension obligations. And then after the collapse the next governor will be the true terminator. The system must be purged. It ain’t gonna be pretty in NJ but the debt must be liquidated one way or the other.

[Lancey Howard]

Thanks for that link. I have read Mulshine from time to time and I don't trust him. As I recall he's squishy on some things. It looks like he shot pretty straight with this column, though. I thought the last item was interesting:

THIS JUST IN: I now hear that Senate President Steve Sweeney is going to exercise his prerogative to prevent the Kean-Doherty switch on the committee. Is this an effort by the Democrats to embarrass Christie by calling attention to the tax hike? Are they trying to embarrass Doherty by forcing him to vote for a tax hike? We shall see.

Junior Kean is a real scumbag, as you no doubt know, so that makes this all the funnier. Ideally, Christie will shove it back in the rats' faces by dropping the tax hikes and announcing cuts in some welfare program or another - - something the rats use for vote buying - - in order to "offset" the jettisoned tax hikes. I'm not counting on that, but Christie has shown that he's full of surprises.