[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.