So Jimmy Carter went to North Korea on a “humanitarian” mission to win the release of a Boston man held by the regime. If the North Koreans truly wanted to demonstrate their humanitarian side, they’d have kept Carter and send the Boston man home.
Folks close to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who apparently lost her bid for another term to a conservative Republican in last week’s primary, have tossed about the idea of the liberal senator jumping ship and running in the general election as a Libertarian if the LP would agree to substitute her for the candidate currently on the ballot.
To their credit, the LP told Murkowski to take a flying leap off that bridge to nowhere.
“Sen. Murkowski voted for TARP,” the Alaska Liberatarian party explained in an official statement today. “She voted to bailout Fannie and Freddie. Although no one from her campaign had approached us about her running as a Libertarian, the speculation had reached the point where we felt we had to take a clear stand. We did the hard work to get a Libertarian candidate on the ballot. We didn’t do that hard work to then nominate someone with Sen. Murkowski’s record.”
If only Republicans were so principled.
Back in days of Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, Bret Schundler was the poster boy for GOP success. He was the Republican mayor of the overwhelmingly Democratic Jersey City, New Jersey, and was routinely feted at GOPAC event after GOPAC event explaining how Republicans could win over Democratic voters.
Then he ran for governor in 2001…and lost.
Eventually Schundler ended up serving as New Jersey’s Education Commissioner and was responsible for preparing and submitting the state’s application for federal Race to the Top funds earlier this year.
But as the Associated Press reports, Schundler cut a deal with the state’s teachers’ union on the merit pay components of the proposal. Gov. Chris Christie, not one to cozy up with the very people responsible for why our public schools stink so badly, rejected the compromises and submitted the proposal without them.
In the end, New Jersey was rejected for Race to the Top money; not because of the merit pay component, but because Schundler reportedly provided “budget figures for the wrong years in one section of the application.” So Gov. Christie fired him last Friday.
Sleep with dogs, you get fleas. Sleep with the teachers union, you get fired. And that’s the moral of this story, children.
