New Jersey governor Chris Christie has never been one to mince words—he became a conservative heartthrob during his first gubernatorial campaign thanks to a string of anti-union screeds that made the rounds on YouTube. But on Wednesday, Christie took aim at his fellow Republicans for their failure to pass a relief bill for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. “There is only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these innocent victims: the House majority and their Speaker John Boehner,” Christie said during a press conference today. Boehner had promised to introduce the bill following the fiscal-cliff impasse but adjourned the House Tuesday night without offering a vote.
At first, it looked like 2012 would be another terrible year for immigration reform advocates. Mitt Romney won the Republican presidential primary by adopting a xenophobic, right-wing platform, advocating for policies against immigrants so terrible they led to self-deportation. Meanwhile Barack Obama continued to deport undocumented workers at an unprecedented pace—he’s sent 1.4 million people out of the country through July of this year—and failed to introduce comprehensive legislation, as he’d promised.
President Obama has insisted that a long-term solution to the nation's borrowing limit be included in a deal to avert the automatic spending cuts and tax hikes that will come January 1 if the president and Congress don't reach an agreement. But Republicans have clung to the debt limit as their sole leverage in the negotiations. "The debt limit ought to be used to bring fiscal sanity to Washington, DC," John Boehner said at a press briefing on Thursday.
In the last frantic days of the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney turned to desperation. His campaign realized that Ohio was slipping out of contention and turned to untruths to peel white, working-class voters away from Obama. They rolled out a campaign ad charging that, under Obama's auto bailout, Chrysler would be shipping Jeep manufacturing over to China. That, of course, was an outright lie. Even Chrysler jumped in to dispute the claims, but Romney was not dissuaded, assuming the public wouldn't be smart enough to parse through the dispute.
