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For Pete's Sake, they're perfect together...perfectly out-of-of touch
BY JOSHUA HENNE
COMMENTARY
With Chris Christie hosting a big-dollar fundraiser for Mitt Romney tonight in Parsippany, this is the perfect time for New Jersey’s governor to remind the presidential candidate all the ways he’d be a perfect fit as Vice-President or in a cabinet post.
Sure, Romney has slipped behind Newt Gingrich in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina polls ever since receiving Christie’s vaunted endorsement. But, since they’re cut from the same out-of-touch cloth, this shouldn’t stop Romney from being able to tap Christie to join his administration.
“If you’re a betting woman, I wouldn’t bet on Romney-Christie. I wouldn’t lay any money on that. But one never knows. We live in hope.” – Christie, stumping for Romney in Iowa on December 7th
Christie & Romney: Peas in a Pod:Of course, Christie endorsed Romney. It’s just one millionaire endorsing another who shares the same warped world-view that the promotion of the powerful, super-wealthy and politically-connected should be put ahead of the well being of seniors, children and middle-class families.
Christie and Romney both love looking out for the One Percent. Christie allowed New Jersey’s millionaire tax to expire - taking away $600 million in direct property tax relief for seniors and the disabled – in order to make sure multi-millionaires pay less. Christie has also handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to mall developers, casino execs and those at the tippy top of the economic strata. Christie claims not to have money for projects and policies that help the middle-class, but he magically finds the funds for pet projects and his well-heeled backers.
Both Christie & Romney believe corporations are people, too. That’s why Christie snuck out-of-state to curry favor with the Koch Brothers and speak at their confab in Colorado. It’s also why Christie wants to scale back long-standing environmental protections to allow corporate polluters to rewrite the rules governing their actions at the expense of New Jersey’s families, land, water and air.
Romney’s legacy is one off laying off thousands of people. Christie’s New Jersey lags behind the rest of the nation when it comes to unemployment. Under Christie’s watch, scores of cops, firefighters, teachers and school employees have lost their jobs. He’s canned 25,500 public sector workers since taking office. Christie also kicked television and film productions out of the state, along with all the jobs they carry with them. Notoriously, he also killed 6,000 construction jobs by cancelling the ARC Tunnel, not to mention the 45,000 future jobs the infrastructure project would have created.
Just like Romney, Christie is a serial flip-flopper who holds - at best - a malleable relationship with the truth. **See flip-flops and lies on ARC Tunnel, tax increases, Race To The Top, defunding women’s health, support for the environment, being in touch with legislators, etc
Just as Mitt Romney would have been a career politician if he hadn’t lost to Teddy Kennedy…Chris Christie would have been a career politician if he hadn’t been bounced from local Morris County politics. Just like Romney, Christie bought his way back into the political game. Christie’s way was as a Bush Pioneer who capitalized on his investment when Bush rewarded him with the plumb position of US Attorney with no requisite experience.
No legislation to date has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap), not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.... Nor will a "paycheck fairness" law work.
That's because pay-equity advocates continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed more women are staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman. If "greedy, profit-obsessed" employers could get away with paying women less than men for the same work, they would not hire a man – ever.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they're supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home.
Feminists, government, and the media ignore what this obviously implies: If millions of wives are able to accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives are able to accept low wages, refuse overtime and promotions, work part-time instead of full-time (“According to a 2009 UK study for the Centre for Policy Studies, only 12 percent of the 4,690 women surveyed wanted to work full time”: http://bit.ly/ihc0tl See also an Australian report: http://tinyurl.com/862kzes), take more unpaid days off, avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/45ecy7p) — all of which lower women's average pay. Women are able to make these choices because they are supported or anticipate being supported by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.
See “An In-depth Look at the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu