I still admire him for speaking his mind, but his decision to have a special election is completely political in nature after all. I have to pull back my statements from before. Silly me, I thought better of him.
You see, he scheduled the special election to fill the empty New Jersey Senate seat for a few weeks before the regular election in November. This will cost the state millions of dollars, and has the express purpose of making sure that all of Cory Booker’s Democratic supporters who will turn out to elect him in October aren’t necessarily going to be there in November when Christie himself faces a Democratic challenger. His worry was that Booker’s supporters would turn out and, while in the booth, also vote for Christie’s opponent. Can’t have that now, can we? So a separate election it is.
Would a Democrat do the same thing? Sure, probably. Doesn’t mean it’s right, and doesn’t mean I’d support it — but then again, who am I to be surprised that there are politics in politics?
Seriously … civil libertarians have been telling us for ten years that the Patriot Act allowed NSA to monitor phone calls of Americans. Many of us have spoken out against this intrusion, but were yelled down as being “terrorist sympathizers” and so on.
Now suddenly the program is being brought up as a terrible overreaching of the government.
Well, duh. Yeah, it is. It’s been that way since the Bush administration.
Then I started realizing who the biggest complainers were — the Republicans are attacking Obama with a vengeance over this. You remember the Republicans, don’t you? They’re the ones who wrote and passed the Patriot Act, and renewed it consistently.
Admittedly, some Democrats supported it, and still do, and some Republicans are not attacking Obama and are also defending the Patriot Act’s provisions. But, as Harry Reid said, “This is nothing particularly new.”
It’s only new to John Boehner who now apparently hates it (because he thinks he can make Obama look bad) despite having voted for it many times.
David Silverman’s American Atheist organization sued Bradford County in Florida after a ten commandments monument was placed on public property in violation of the 1st amendment. As a result of the suit, the atheists are allowed to place their own monument. It will be a bench containing a few sentences about what atheists believe, and will be dedicated next month.
Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson shrugged it off, said it was there to taunt Christians, and predicted almost happily it would be vandalized. Because, you know, how dare anyone else exercise their 1st amendment rights. 
I mean, they’re just atheists. Who cares?
Can you imagine if he had said the same thing about Christians putting a monument up? It would be the “War on Christians” all over again. Apparently, a war on non-believers is perfectly fine.
I asked David Silverman (who happens to be a good friend) what he thought of this, and here’s what he said:
Just as the Governor of Georgia went out of his way to say he “couldn’t guarantee the safety” of atheist books legally placed alongside Bibles in public cottages, the commentators who laugh at the future vandalism are not only supporting such vandalism, but actually instigating it.
Religion wants nothing more than superiority – it hates equality. In Florida, as in Georgia and at the World Trade Center, atheists are demanding nothing but the equality guaranteed to us by the constitution. Religion views equality as an attack on itself, and facing the threat of equality, may resort to violence and vandalism, yet again. Yes, it’s pathetic. No, it won’t stop us. It will just reveal more of religion’s unseemly underbelly for all to see.
What we need are brave religious people to prove Silverman wrong — I want to see religious leaders decrying anyone who would dare to vandalize the monument. I want to see clerics welcoming non-believers as fellow Americans with just different views. I know there are some very nice and open-minded religious folks out there, because some are my friends.
But I’m not holding my breath waiting for the religious leaders to do the right thing.
Once more, New Jersey governor Chris Christie has proven that he is unfit to be nominated by the Republican party to run for President in 2016. Yes, it’s true — he has once again placed the good of his state over the good of his party.
It was bad enough when he actually said a nice thing about the President after Hurricane Sandy, acknowledging the help his state received from the feds. Just because it was true never stood in the way of the modern Republican party.
But now, with the death of Senator Lautenberg, Christie had the opportunity to appoint a new Senator who would serve until the next election. Clearly, he should have appointed a Republican to fill the seat left vacant by a Democrat, even though the will of the state was clearly to put a Democrat into that seat at the last election. No, Christie has decided to let the people decide who should fill the seat by holding a special election. Maybe they’ll choose a Republican, you never know.
The party is outraged that he would allow the will of the people to be more important than the good of the party. So, by doing the right thing, he has pretty much destroyed any chance he had of getting the nomination of his party in 2016.
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