Imagine What Chris Christie Can Do For (To) The Country......
I'm writing this because as much as most people would dismiss Mr. Christie as a viable candidate I don't agree with that assessment. Kept alive by Ken Langone's money, he lurks like a latent tuberculosis spore hiding in your lungs waiting for an opportune moment to break out and infect us with a virulent disease. Christie is just waiting for the rest of the field to self-destruct leaving him as the "sane" alternative candidate. There's plenty of evidence that this may in fact occur. As long as there's any chance of a bad case of Christie breaking out, appropriate precautions need to be taken to avoid serious infection. So a bit of preventative medicine....
Back in 2012, the Center for Public Integrity did an assessment of all 50 state governments to measure "good government" practices and measures. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, New Jersey was at the top of the class. Government transparency, anti-corruption measures, ethics rules and practices and many other indicators of good government made New Jersey a model of how a state government should operate. (sad, but NJ's B+ was the highest grade in the country) Now, after 5 years of Chris Christie's mismanagement, the state has dropped to a solid D, near the bottom of the national list, mostly due to practices implemented by the Christie administration.
A long fall from the top
Bridgegate is perhaps the most brazen of a series of controversies, including lavish all-expense-paid trips and an ongoing battle with the press over public records, that have engulfed the Christie administration in recent years.
All of this has contributed to the state earning an overall score of 65, or a grade of D, in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven analysis of state government accountability and transparency conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. The report also found in New Jersey a significant “enforcement gap,” which measures the difference between the laws on the books and how they're actually implemented.
....the assessment contained several grades of "F" in important categories....Contributing to that F, the investigation found:
Patronage and cronyism are rampant in hiring;
Politics and governing are intertwined;
Executive branch financial-disclosure statements go unaudited and are not made available in a format that is easy to analyze;
Christie is poor at giving reasons for his policy decisions;
The governor is able to freely accept "gifts" from "friends," and does.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/11/09/18457/new-jersey-gets-d-grade-2015-state-integrity-investigation
It takes a great deal of effort and hard work to screw things up this much. Many of his transgressions are documented here:
vimeo.com/142194514
but somehow, he continues to float along under the radar. This man should be under indictment, not running for President. This goes beyond just making sure this guy never gets close to the White House-he needs to be held accountable for what he's done and for his methods of governing. As long as there is no accountability, Christie and others like him will continue to screw us over.
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