Somebody may want to ask Mr. Beloved.
Archive for the 'Rudy Giuliani' Category
Again, Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani’s rhetoric doesn’t line up with the reality.
Rudolph W. Giuliani has been broadcasting radio advertisements in Iowa and other states far from the city he once led stating that as mayor of New York, he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.”
The assertion, which Mr. Giuliani has repeated on the trail as he has promoted his fiscal conservatism, is somewhat misleading, independent fiscal monitors said. In fact, Mr. Giuliani left his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, with a bigger deficit than the one Mr. Giuliani had to deal with when he arrived in 1994. And that deficit would have been large even if the city had not been attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
“He inherited a gap, and he left a gap for his successor,” Ronnie Lowenstein, the director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that monitors the city budget, said of Mr. Giuliani. “The city was budgeting as though the good times were not going to end, but sooner or later they always do.”
You may remember in 2003, leading up to Iowa, that Howard Dean was clearly the Democratic frontrunner, and as Gov. Dean later noted - when you’re the frontrunner that’s who everyone is aiming at. The GOP field is beginning to turn it’s guns on Giuliani, on issues like guns and immigration. The other GOP campaigns have apparently concluded that hitting him on his moderate-liberal positions on gays, abortion, etc. won’t work (or more likely, will be used as a last resort) and hit him on conservative issues but not 100% crazy conservative issues.
I advise folks to take all political predictions with a grain of salt, and take mine with a whole silo, but I think you have to be crazy to think that the same religious far-right voters who saw a vote for George W. Bush as a vote for Jesus’s Emmisary On Earth Against The Gay Homosexual Liberal Terrorists will turn out for Rudy Giuliani both in the primary and general election. Rudy’s base is the pro-war wackos and the folks who like in Trickle-Down Fairyland. And while those people may constitute a part of the Republican’s mostly white, mostly male tent - they don’t look like America at all.
That said, I almost look forward to a candidate with as much baggage (corruption, anti-firefighter, racial insensitivity, etc.) being the GOP’s boy versus any of the top-tier Democrats.
Continue reading ‘Is Giuliani Going To Get Whacked Like Dean?’
Rudy Giuliani has signed up lispy nimrod and former gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore to help him out in Virginia. I guess Jerry wasn’t doing much else.
Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani supports the failed Bush administration plan to privatize social security.
Rudy Giuliani challenges Mitt Romney’s mantle as king of the flip-floppers.
Representatives of New York groups who advocate for abortion rights, gun control, and rights for immigrants, also said Giuliani’s actions on the presidential trail, presenting himself to a more conservative GOP electorate, bears little resemblance to the man they knew as the stand-up mayor of Gotham in the 1990s who was open to moderate and liberal arguments.
More than any candidate in the Republican presidential field, rival Mitt Romney has been tagged with the flip-flopper label. But Giuliani, with late shifts on civil unions and federal campaign finance laws, is a political makeover in progress.
Sick little man.
Speaking to reporters in Cincinnati, Giuliani said: "I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. … I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them."
Michael Palladino, head of the Detectives Endowment Association, the union of NYPD detectives, told the Associated Press that the mayor’s record can’t compare to those who spent 12 months sifting through toxic debris for evidence and human remains.
"As a result of their hard work, many are sick and injured. The mayor, although he did a fine job with 9/11, I don’t think he rises to the level of being an equal with those men and women who were involved in the rescue, recovery and cleanup," Palladino said.
Rudy Giuliani’s daughter is an Obama supporter.
Tell the truth, Mr. Ferret.
I can’t think that the only Italian in the 2008 field wants to play up his support from a mafia man, if only one on tv.
You don’t want to think that a guy like Rudy Giuliani is really this stupid, but he is.
Asked about health insurance, Giuliani talked about television sets, saying the plummeting cost of a TV shows the power of the market.
We all know that vital medical care is just the same as catching "Heroes" each week. Then again, this is the "brilliant" mind that thought the criminally connected Bernard Kerik should oversee the entire country’s security from terrorism and other threats.
Oh, poor dear.
In a video that is by turns emotional, scathing and at times factually questionable, the nation’s largest union of firefighters is appealing to its members across the country not to support the Republican presidential candidacy of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
The video, issued by the International Association of Fire Fighters and titled “Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend,” strikes directly at what Mr. Giuliani’s campaign has presented as a central strength: his leadership of New York City after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which nearly 350 firefighters died.
No, not the one indicted for cocaine, this a brand new one - the cocaine guy’s dad Arthur Ravenel, Jr..
The friends you keep…
Advocates for victims of abuse by Catholic clergy on Friday urged presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani to fire a priest who was suspended from the church and then hired by the ex-mayor’s security consulting business.
A spokeswoman for Giuliani said the firm had no plans to fire Monsignor Alan Placa.
Placa, a childhood friend of Giuliani’s, has defended himself for years over allegations in a 2003 Suffolk County grand jury report that detailed decades-old abuses by priests in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y.
Giuliani has a record of preferring the imagery of something over making good decisions. One could say it lacks leadership.
Marc Ambinder details how Rudy Giuliani has covered up and befriended a priest accused of child molestation and covering up for other child molesters.
The GOP’s values are revealed once again.
State Treasurer Thomas Ravenel was indicted Tuesday on charges of cocaine possession and intent to distribute it. Gov. Mark Sanford immediately suspended him from state office.
“Given the grave nature of these charges and what is alleged in this indictment, we’re left with no choice but to suspend Treasurer Ravenel immediately,” Gov. Sanford said Tuesday afternoon. “These are obviously very serious allegations that we’re constitutionally bound to act upon, and they’ll ultimately be decided by the courts.”
At a press conference late Tuesday, South Carolina Law Enforcement Department Chief Robert Stewart said Ravenel emerged as a participant in an ongoing cocaine sting in Charleston County. He said Ravenel was charged with possession and was sharing — not selling — powder cocaine with an undisclosed number of people.
This is the clear sort of leadership we can expect from Rudy Giulani, the Republican frontrunner:
“Iraq may get better; Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq; we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people.”
Rudy Giuliani seems focused on following in the footsteps of Lois Griffin.
Red State says that Giuliani’s campaign is over because of his mainstream position on abortion, then again the piece is written by Ben Domenech so it’s possible it’s been written somewhere else before.
Giuliani snubs farmer couple for campaign appearance because they don’t make enough money.
Rudy Giuliani faces his own swift-boat type response:
