The Star-Ledger hit a new low of innuendo and guilt-by-association smear tactics in editorially trying to link racists to the Republican Party. You get an A+ in McCarthyism and dirty tricks, but an F in integrity and respect for any point of view other than your own.
The editorial’s subliminal message is that Republicans who disagree with the paper’s editorial board or President Obama on policy do so for racially-motivated reasons.
Why not consider that maybe, just maybe, those who disagree do so because the policies are horrible, not in the national interest and complete failures?
“I never thought I’d see so much of your anatomy” –The Camel Toe Movie
By Art Gallagher
Respected columnists on both the left and right have come to Governor Chris Christie’s defense against the viral social and new media reaction to the ridiculously embarrassing photos of Christie in a way too tight softball uniform last week.
Star Ledger sports columnist Steve Politi writes that we should give Christie credit for not being ashamed of his body and applaud him for putting on the skin tight uniform that revealed both girth and a lack thereof and getting on the field to raise money for a very good cause–the families of slain New York City police officers. Politi noted that he was fat in high school and that he’s covered high school sports. Therefore, he argued, we should not ridicule Christie because fat kids might stop participating in sports.
A Star Ledger editorial, presumably written by Editorial Page Editor Tom Moran who launched Christie’s YouTube career when he lectured to Governor on his manners, lectures his readers for acting like fifth graders, asks if we’d tolerate such nastiness if a female politician dressed like Christie did last week, and like Politi, asked if it would have been better if Christie had not taken the field in his tight white pants, as if Christie did not have another choice. Moran, if he wrote the editorial, did not mention if he has ever been fat.
Ken Kurson, publisher of The Observer and a friend to many MMM regular readers, writes that he used to be fat and probably will be again while dubbing the social and new media’s reaction to the Governor’s appearance as “Disgraceful and Stupid Fat Shaming.”
New Jersey voters are either greedy jerks or stupid and impressionable buffoons if you buy The Star Ledger Editorial Board’s (Tom Moran’s) reading of the QuinnipiacPoll released on Thursday. The poll reported that New Jerseyans favor wage freezes for state workers, by a 53-42 margin, and oppose an increase in the gasoline tax by a 65-33 percent margin.
Hundreds of middle-aged people looking for work at Brookdale Community College job fair. April 4, 2014
New Jersey voters are jerks. The new state motto: “Screw you, not me.”
That is how Moran starts off his rant. He finishes by cutting the poll respondents a break. Maybe we aren’t greedy jerks, maybe we’ve been led to think the way we do.
We’ll cut the folks responding to the Quinnipiac poll a break – they’ve been goaded in this direction. Despite widespread reforms to state workers’ pay and benefits during the past four years, not to mention budget cuts that led to historic layoffs of police, teachers and firefighters, Gov. Chris Christie used his annual budget address to continue to blame state worker compensation for our fiscal aches and pains.
Hmmm. Moran’s frustration is showing. As the editorial page editor of the state’s largest media outlet, Moran should be the most powerful opinion maker in New Jersey. How could his readers be so stupid?!
Insulting your customers (readers) is a interesting strategy to stop the bleeding of a company (media outlet) that is contracting rapidly and recently announced 167 layoffs which followed millions in concessions from the outlet’s unionized workers and a smaller round of layoffs.
It was Christmas season, a light snow covered the ground, and all across New Jersey children were mailing letters to Santa Claus swearing they had been good. But in the state Senate, a political brawl was breaking out, one that guarantees the New Year…
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s ascent to the status of would-be savior of the national Republican Party started with one viral video – a clip of him telling my colleague, Star-Ledger Editorial Page Editor and columnist Tom Moran, “you must be the…
She hasn’t officially secured the Democratic nomination yet and the wheels are falling off State Senator Barbara Buono’s gubernatorial campaign.
Buono will be the nominee. Her only competition on the ballot is Troy Webster, an aide to East Orange Mayor Robert Bowser. Webster isn’t really running for governor. He agreed to through his hat in the ring on the same slate as Bowser for ballot positioning purposes in the primary.
But the wheels are falling off the Buono wagon. She can’t raise money. She defiantly divided the party and broke with the legislative leadership with her choice of State Democratic Chairman. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews dubbed her Dawn Quixote.
Buono is on track to be the first major party candidate not to qualify for state matching funds for her campaign. She named Assemblyman Jason O’Donnell her choice as State Chairman, against the advice of Senate President Steve Sweeney and over the objections of Assembly Speaker Shelia Oliver. A prominent Monmouth County Democrat told MMM “Buono should never go on TV again,” after her appearance on Matthew’s Hardball.
Just when things couldn’t get any worse for Buono they did. Over the weekend former Democratic Governor Brendan Byrne, on a teleconference with former Republican Governor Tom Kean, told The Star Ledger that Buono should consider dropping out of the gubernatorial race.
In a column posted on NJ.com yesterday, Where is the sin in Cryan’s tawdry sex e-mails?, Star Ledger Editorial Board Editor Tom Moran argues that “the sin” is the “outrageous breach of privacy” that Cryan suffered as a result of the leaked emails.
Yes, Cryan, a Democrat from Union County, had sex with a lobbyist and tried to hide that fact for years. But we are talking about two consenting adults, neither of them married at the time. Where is the crime against humanity?
Anything goes if you’re an unmarried consenting adult and everything apparently did between Cryan and Karen Golding. But what does it say about New Jersey that texting while driving is a crime, but fellatio while driving is not a sin?
We’ve evolved as a culture to the point that sexual acts are no longer sins or crimes, unless they involve children, money exchanging hands or the violation of a marriage vow or vow of celibacy.
Golding says that Cryan emailed her pornographic pictures from his government owned computers, but that is apparently OK, because, unlike his former office mate, former Assemblyman Neil Cohen, the pictures did not depict children.
Moran should have read beyond the tawdry emails. Golding provides evidence of possible perjury, abuse of power, judicial misconduct, and official misconduct by several in the Union County/Trenton government machine. There is no apparent effort to investigate or prosecute these alleged crimes, but there is an announced investigation into who leaked the emails.
Evidently Cyran’s pride and privacy are more of a government priority than his actually working while on the government payroll as a Union County Under Sheriff or a State Legislator.
Cryan’s personal emailing activity from his government issue computers raises the question of how much political activity is done from those computers. How much of his “work” as Democratric State Chairman was done while on the Union County Sheriff Office’s dime? New Jersey residents deserve more investigating of Cryan and his protectors than Bob Ingle asking, “Where does he find the time?”
Don’t say, “Everybody does it” as a defense for using government equipment and offices to do personal and/or political business. Everybody doesn’t do it. I talk to many elected officials who won’t take my calls in their offices just in case the subject becomes political. They call back from their personal cell or home phones. Or they won’t meet me at their office, but at a restaurant accross the street.
Monmouth University Polling Institute Director Patrick Murray is a “go to guy” for journalists looking for expert opinions and analysis on New Jersey politics.
Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Matt Katz called Murray to ask him why Christie’s approval numbers are so high when many voters used the pejoratives “bully” and “arrogant” when asked to use one word to describe the Governor and when Jersey mainstream media pundits so frequently criticise Christie’s manners. Katz mentioned The Star Ledger’s Tom Moran, Inquirer opinion writers, and the Courier-Post editorial board. He could have included most of the Statehouse press corp, save Gannett’s Bob Ingle and the Capitol Quckies crew.
Murray’s answer was Christieesque in its refreshing honesty: “Part of the issue is, voters of New Jersey are probably a little more savvy than reporters.”
Who talks to more reporters and voters in New Jersey than Murray? His is an expert opinion.
“Ouch,” wrote Katz, who often writes critically of Christie.
Credit Katz for including Murray’s quote in his article. If you start seeing Ben Dworkin’s name in The Star Ledger more than Murray’s, you’ll know Chrisite was right when he called famously called Moran, the editorial page editor, “the thinnest skinned guy and America.”
Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon called for fiscal accountability in Newark this week. You wouldn’t have known that unless you read The Star Ledger. The Asbury Park Press, the newspaper/pay site that covers O’Scanlon’s Monmouth County district missed it.
At issue is the $24 million in state aid that Newark is “due” this year, after the state taxpayers kicked in $32 million to Newark’s budget last year, in the face of blatant waste on the part of Mayor Cory Booker and the city council.
Booker squandered $3.7 million in legal and consulting fees in a fight with the New Jersey Devils hockey team over revenue sharing. Booker lost the fight, which even The Star Ledger says was a waste and should have been settled, and vowed to spend more—O’Scanlon says $1 million more, The Ledger says $100 thousand more—in appealing the ruling that favored The Devils. As the ruling stands, Newark owes the Devils $600 thousand.
Newark’s city council is disgrace. A “gaggle of blowhards,” Ledger editor Tom Moran calls them, who “awards itself the highest salaries in the state, along with a free car.” Newark’s city council is paid six times more than Jersey City’s city council, according to Moran. $3.45 million in salaries paid to the Newark city council in 2011.
Also at issue is that the overpaid council has yet to pass their budget that was due in February. Yet, they want the $24 million from Jersey taxpayers.
According to The Ledger, O’Scanlon said,
“Cory Booker is fighting an expensive personal vendetta with one hand while he has the other hand out expecting state aid”
and
“As the ranking Republican member of the Assembly Budget Committee, I cannot, in good conscience, imagine handing Newark another $24 million when the mayor is continuing to rack up legal fees and costs for litigation that could have been settled months ago,” O’Scanlon said. “The state should not be in the habit of bailing out towns and cities that are unwilling to help themselves.”
“I’ve never seen a less optimistic time, in my lifetime, in this courtry. And people wonder why. I think it’s really simple. It’s because government’s telling them stop dreaming, stop striving, we’ll take care of you. We are turning into a paternalistic entitlement society…”
“….more importantly, there will be more money, more hope, more aspirations, in the hearts of our children and grandchildren than there are today. And that’s what will make the 21st century the second American century. That more than anything else, will allow the United States to export hope, and liberty and freedom around the world. Not by just saying but by living it everyday in the way we conduct ourselves and in the way we govern ourselves.”
~Governor Chris Christie
Chris Christie believes that unrestrained by oppressive and “paternalistic” government, that ordinary people can and will live lives of accomplishment.
Tom Moran, that sanctimonious polyhistor responsible for The Star Ledger’s editorial page, thinks that makes Christie conceded.
The Asbury Park Press editorial board, the Nudniks of Neptune who have fewer orginal thoughts that Joe Biden, agrees with Moran.
Christie made his remarks at a George W. Bush Presidential Center gathering in New York on Tuesday, April 10. Moran posted his rant calling the governor’s message “condescending” early yesterday morning, the 12th. The Nudniks followed yesterday evening calling Christie’s message “hectoring,” “insulting” and “condescending.”
The editorialists of New Jersey’s two largest news outlets must be appalled by Christie’s soaring popularity.
It was the content of Christie’s remarks in between the two phrases I quoted above that got to the liberal regressive pundits. Without naming the president, Christie had the audacity to point out that the Obama agenda has not resulted in hope, but in pessimism. That if it continues we will be financially and morally bankrupt, waiting for the check to show up rather than striving for bigger checks.
Here’s what Christie said, unfiltered by the bias of Moran, the Nudniks or MMM:
The Star-Ledger hit a new low of innuendo and guilt-by-association smear tactics in editorially trying to link racists to the Republican Party. You get an A+ in McCarthyism and dirty tricks, but an F in integrity and respect for any point of view other than your own.
