Governor Christie, about that $400 million for the New Jersey schoolkids you managed to lose

Oh sure, you said all kinds of things after coming up a couple points short. First you blamed Obama. That was really classy by the way, blaming a guy whose people practically held your representatives hands in TRYING to help you score enough points to get big money and no whammies. Then you started pointing fingers at almost any carbon unit in your sightline. It's what bullies often do when things blow up in their faces, place blame anywhere they can try.

So now it comes out you KNEW you could have secured the money by letting Education Chief Bret Schundler turn in a joint proposal from your administration and the NJEA. You were told there were more than enough points to secure the $400 million for schoolkids of the state you claim to represent. You KNEW you had enough points to get the cash but that wasn't enough for you was it? No, you had to be Big Bad Chris Christie, the tough governor who is setting some kind of example fighting the teachers unions to the death.

We quote Bret Schundler:

"We have an opportunity to win here, with union support, which is a rare thing," Schundler said he told Christie. "He said he didn’t care about the money … He said he hadn’t gone through hell with (the NJEA) so he could then cave in to them now."

Didn't care about the money. Except Governor, that money was for children, NOT so you could continue bloviating about how you stood up to the teachers union. You put YOURSELF ahead of the CHILDREN.

How noble of you. How classy of you. How conservative of you. How utterly irresponsible of you.

Governor Christie, it's one thing to bungle a deadline costing NJ schools $400 million, it's quite another to invent reasons about why it got bungled

As many of you know (or can catch up by scrolling down this page), Governor Chris Christie and Education Commissioner Bret Schundler failed to follow simple instructions to garner a $400 million dollar federal payout for New Jersey schools. The horrid mistake meant Ohio would finish 10th in the race for the money and New Jersey fell 3 points short into 11th place.

Well Chris Christie is never one to accept blame for something his administration OBVIOUSLY bungled so almost immediately when the heat got turned up on this $400 million dollar error Christie tried the old tried and true chestnut that the reason New Jersey lost out was nameless faceless bureaucrats. Yes, bureaucrats did it. Then when that failed to get traction Republican Christie pulled out the right wing dog whistle and invoked the name of President Obama. Yes, it was not only the bureaucrats fault but President Obama's fault New Jersey couldn't fill out forms as directed.

Christie may have appeased his base with such platitudes and used them for cover were it not for a troublesome VIDEO proving indeed, Christie isn't telling the truth about ANY of how New Jersey lost out on the money. The video shows the panel asking EXACTLY the questions Christie blames the bureaucrats of not asking or offering help with. NJ.com takes it from here:

About one hour into the presentation, held on Aug. 11 in Washington, D.C., a soft-spoken reviewer asked for help locating missing information in the state’s application for Race to the Top funding. After a few moments of silence, New Jersey Education Commissioner Bret Schundler turned to the assistant commissioner to his left.
"No I cannot. I don’t, um..." said the assistant commissioner, Willa Spicer.
"We can come back to that, if someone wants to take a look, that would be fine," said a reviewer, one of five who would grade the state’s application.
Though Christie has portrayed federal officials as nitpicking and begrudging about the state’s application, the video shows that toward the end of the session, federal reviewers asked the New Jersey delegation a second time if they had found the correct information.
"No. No, we all searched," Spicer said.

It's one thing to make a glaring costly mistake. It's another thing entirely to make a glaring mistake and then try to blame others. In this case Chris Christie behaved like a 4 year old.

A fish rots from the head down

Soon to be Education Commissioner (and former Jersey City mayor) Bret Schundler has told Jersey City's CREATE Charter School it's closing. Not because of funding cuts, but because of poor performance on standardized and other testing. In Schundler's letter to the school telling it of it's closing, he noted these sad statistics:

4.8 percent of the school's senior class was proficient in Language Arts last year and only 2.7 percent was proficient in math.

Schundler knows a little something about charter schools as he founded the Golden Door Charter School. In looking deeper at the facts in this case, we see one apparent big problem. The CREATE Charter School is run by former disgraced Jersey City councilman Steve Lipski, yes, he of the drinking problems and he of the urinating on people's heads at a concert in Washington D.C.

Geez, with leadership like Lipski's behind it it's no wonder the CREATE school has failed it's students.

This just in, Bret Schundler will NOT be running for Mayor of Jersey City

Claiming the nation's economic downturn has hurt his portfolio and would not allow him to campaign full time, former mayor Bret Schundler has decided not to run. Schundler told NJ.com:

"This will make it impossible for me to run," Schundler wrote in his e-mail. "I had planned to campaign full-time this Spring and to pay my family's mortgage and my children's tuition bills out of investment savings. Instead, I will need to work full-time at an income-earning job to pay those mortgages and tuition bills."

This leaves ONLY This leaves Mayor Jerramiah Healy, former Assemblyman Louis Manzo, ex-City Council President L. Harvey Smith, and Downtown activist Daniel Levin as candidates.

Maybe Johnny should run, he has a vision. He has lots of visions, mostly on Friday and Saturday nights after he takes his medicine.