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WATCH: Christie Opens Campaign In New Hampshire With Epic Trump Takedown
@kerryeleveld
June 08 | 2023
Chris Christie
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had news about Donald Trump for attendees of his presidential campaign kickoff event Tuesday night in New Hampshire.
"If you think for one minute, when he says, 'I am your retribution'—if you think he wants to be your retribution, forget it," Christie told them, referring to Trump's signature 2024 campaign pledge. "He's going to be retribution for one person and one person only: himself."
Trump, he said, was a "bitter, angry man" who wanted to get back in the seat of power so he could look out for No. 1.
"If you want somebody who's actually going to fight for you," Christie continued, "I would suggest to you he's not the right choice."
\u201cMore Christie on Trump: \u201cit is the last throes of a bitter angry man who wants power back for himself, not for you.\u201d\u201d— Alex Thompson (@Alex Thompson) 1686098391
Before launching, Christie advertised himself and fundraised for his bid as a brawler who would take on Trump like no other Republican in the GOP field. Frankly, that was a very low bar, given the lightweight barbs of Trump's other rivals thus far. But Christie didn't just clear that bar during his town hall-style event at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics: He smashed it to smithereens.
If New Hampshire marked a bitter end to Christie's disappointing run in 2016, he delivered a raucous rebirth Tuesday, with nothing and no one off limits.
“The grift from this family is breathtaking,” Christie said, going straight at the Trump family's shameless swindling. “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis?”
What for? It's a payoff, Christie suggested.
"You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius?" Christie posited. "Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the president of the United States for 4 years doing favors for the Saudis?"
Voters should be pissed off, he added.
"That’s your money," Christie said. "That’s your money he stole, and gave it to his family."
\u201cChristie hits Jared and Ivanka: \u201cthe grift from this family is breathtaking\u201d\u201d— Alex Thompson (@Alex Thompson) 1686101079
Speaking of wasting taxpayer money, Trump dug America into the biggest financial ditch it's ever seen.
"He left with the biggest deficit of any president in American history," Christie said, before pummeling one of Trump's patently ridiculous 2016 campaign pledges. "He said he was going to eliminate the national debt in 8 years. He added $3 trillion to the national debt in 4 years."
\u201cChris Christie criticizes Donald Trump's record: "He left with the biggest deficit of any president in American history. He said he was going to eliminate the national debt in 8 years. He added $3 trillion to the national debt in 4 years."\u201d— Republican Accountability (@Republican Accountability) 1686097133
On foreign policy, Christie wondered if attendees had heard the one from Trump about promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours if he were elected president.
"Did you hear that one?" Christie asked, calling it "a beauty" worthy of Trump's "top five" list in “a career of complete falsehoods."
But hey, why not give Trump the benefit of the doubt, Christie continued.
"Let me tell you how he would. He'd give Ukraine to Russia," Christie explained. "He'd call Zelenskyy and say, 'Hey, guess what? Time to raise the Russian flag up on the poll. We're out of here.'"
\u201cChris Christie slams Trump for claiming he would settle the war in Ukraine in 24 hours:\n \n"Let me tell you how he would. He'd give Ukraine to Russia...He'd call Zelenskyy and say, 'Hey, guess what? Time to raise the Russian flag up on the poll. We're out of here.'"\u201d— Republican Accountability (@Republican Accountability) 1686097712
Christie managed a few hits on other 2024 candidates, but he deftly kept Trump in the mix.
Only Trump, Christie said, could manage to lose to Joe Biden.
"He wouldn't be in office if it wasn't for Trump," Christie offered. "Joe Biden never beat anybody outside the state of Delaware in 45 years except for one guy: Donald J. Trump," he said, knocking Biden's two previous runs for president in 1988 and 2008.
\u201cChris Christie: "He wouldn't be in office if it wasn't for Trump. Joe Biden never beat anybody outside the state of Delaware in 45 years except for one guy Donald J. Trump...not once, until he ran up against the guy who the American people knew in their heart was full of it."\u201d— Republican Accountability (@Republican Accountability) 1686094834
Christie also added a touch of humor at his own expense, but not without a jab at Trump first.
"Beware of the leader in this country, who you have handed leadership to, who has never made a mistake, who has never done anything wrong, who when something goes wrong it's always someone else's fault, and who has never lost," Christie said, then paused as the crowd giggled at his oblique reference to Trump's persistent election fraud lies.
"I've lost," Christie continued earnestly, before pointing around the room and dropping a pitch-perfect delivery: "You people did that to me in 2016."
\u201cChris Christie: "Beware of the leader in this country, who you have handed leadership to, who has never made a mistake, who has never done anything wrong, who when something goes wrong it's always someone else's fault, and who has never lost."\u201d— Republican Accountability (@Republican Accountability) 1686092845
Indeed, Christie suffered a sixth-place finish in the Granite State after hanging his hopes on a strong finish there to boost his 2016 bid.
But now Christie's back, warning voters about the "pretenders" who say, "Pick me, ‘cause I'm kinda like what you picked before—but not quite as crazy, but I don't want to say his name."
Christie completed his barb at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by saying the name.
"Let me be clear," he said, "the person I am talking about who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault, who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong, but finds every reason to take credit for anything that goes right—is Donald Trump."
\u201cChristie\u2019s pointed case against Trump:\n\u201clet me be clear\u2026the person I am talking about who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistakes, who never admits a fault\u2026is Donald Trump.\u201c\u201d— Alex Thompson (@Alex Thompson) 1686095923
Trump's response to Christie's truly epic takedown of him was a predictable exercise in fat shaming the man who initially led his presidential transition team and nearly died after helping COVID-positive Trump prep for a 2020 debate.
"How many times did Chris Christie use the word SMALL?" Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Does he have a psychological problem with SIZE?" Trump also disseminated doctored video of the town hall depicting Christie at a buffet.
Trump is known for his mastery of finding his opponents' weak spots and savagely exploiting them, but if anything seemed small by comparison, it was Trump's response to Christie's biting commentary.
Trump has never seen broadsides like this from a Republican rival with no fucks to give beyond his promise of going nuclear on the perennial loser and GOP front-runner.
Perhaps because Christie's critique of Trump was so brutally incisive and Trump's response so childishly predictable, it seemed weak. But one has to wonder if Trump’s one-time superpower still packs the same punch.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
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Lice so severe that even kerosene couldn’t kill them. Shoeless feet padding aimlessly. Gross malnourishment.
That’s how people described the Yellow Hammers, a semi-isolated colony of the ostracized and downtrodden in Illinois that developed during the Reconstruction Era.
The history of the Yellow Hammers is murky. As the legend goes, a Colonel Brodie of the Civil War — it doesn’t include a first name — came home to Alabama, the Yellowhammer State, and relocated to Wilmington, Illinois where he purchased several acres of wooded land and invited anyone from his home state to come live on it, creating essentially an encampment people called “Brodie’s Woods.” Those people who relocated to Wilmington from Alabama were impoverished, almost permanently, and made pariahs in the community as they huddled on Brodie’s land.
The pariahs’ poverty prevented those among them who were employed from purchasing their own equipment so they used company tools — when they were able to work — whose handles were painted yellow.
These stories, reported by a high school student, can’t be confirmed. First, the only nineteenth century colonel named Brodie was about 12 years old when the Civil War started. One William Brodie from Alabama fought in the Civil War but there’s no record of his being a colonel. A now defunct local Chicago newspaper, the Surburbanite Economist, reported in 1970 that an area of Wilmington, Illinois was known as Brodie’s Woods, but that’s one of very few verifiable mentions of the area.
The more likely story of the root of Yellowhammer is that a cavalry of soldiers from Huntsville went to Kentucky during the Civil War to aid Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s — history will call him both a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and an innovative warrior — Company A of the Confederate Army. They wore new sharp gray uniforms adorned with brilliant yellow trim. A Confederate soldier in tatters said they looked like the bird the yellowhammer, a type of woodpecker, which was made Alabama’s state bird in 1927. The Yellowhammers ended up becoming valuable team members; they supported several of Gen. Forrest’s victories, one of which frustrated Gen. Ulysses Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign.
That the history of the Yellow Hammers is so hard to pin down says quite a bit about the state today; tracing what really happens proves difficult. Even though Alabama media tries to cover events inside the prisons, the state of news in 2023 dictates that coverage isn’t as complete as anyone would like.
Just as the history of the Yellowhammers is unclear, the view into Alabama’s prisons is muddied by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) and its commitment to opacity. The officials who run that system do not like looksies. Early this year, ADOC stopped releasing the number of in-custody deaths on a monthly basis, ostensibly because there were so many that they either couldn’t keep up or didn’t want to be embarrassed by their inability to protect the state's wards.
Nevertheless, the reports of carnage that keep dripping out — two men were murdered on May 15, 2023, an additional pair added to a list of over 60 since January 1, 2023 — have contributed to a narrative that men and women in Alabama prison are incorrigible, even feral, when all they’re doing is adapting to the environment that the state has established for them.
The truth is that a good number of them are quite high-minded. When they staged a strike last fall, they didn’t even protest the squalid conditions they live in, which happen to be deplorable. Instead they sought policy reform on sentencing and parole which will ultimately benefit people beyond them.
Their strike demands were imminently reasonable, despite Gov. Kay Ivey’s disagreement. But the demands were really only part of the story of the strike. My sources tell me that — under the guidance of some dedicated leaders who I won’t name now — rival gangs and sworn enemies convened in good faith to hammer out what they needed to ask for. In that respect, they’re behaving better than many of us on the outside if they can display that type of comity. They came together despite the fact that they worry every day — along with family and friends — that they’ll be killed or starved. They’re fighting back non-violently. Bravely.
And even effectively. Because of the strike demands, lawmakers introduced two bills poised to pass the Alabama legislature. First is a bill that would mandate the right to attend one’s own parole hearings by video (they can’t attend these crucial proceedings now) and second is a bill that would allow people serving life sentences to petition to have their punishment reduced. Most prison work stoppages achieve nothing. This group of men and women convinced people to listen and act. Do not count these people out.
That doesn’t mean the wind is under their yellowhammer wings. Gov. Ivey just signed a bill into law that reforms the so-called “good time” statute by making it harder to earn time off one’s sentence because ADOC failed to take the good time of someone who attempted escape. Their resilience doesn’t mean they’re safe now or being treated justly. It’s just the opposite.
Alabama’s prison population reflects a lot of their yellowhammer history. Like woodpeckers, they’re tenacious fighters. Much like the Yellowhammer Cavalry in 1862, they're nimble, capable of putting up a few wins, but then ultimately forgotten.
And they aren't living much differently than Brodie’s Yellow Hammers. Some aren’t supplied shoes and therefore aren’t allowed in the chow hall. As I have reported before, the ADOC intentionally starves them when they assert their rights. They wander, often squatting in dorms where they’re not assigned because they want to avoid being raped. The violence doesn’t cease; I hear reports of outright beatings that all too often result in lost “good time” but no medical treatment. And they huddle, displaced and ostracized, in one of Alabama’s 15 state-sanctioned colonies of fear and panic.
But unlike the legend of Brodie’s Woods, these tales are true and verifiable. There’s no fiction here. It’s traceable. It tracks, all too well.
That’s why today The National Memo announces an unflinching series that goes inside Alabama’s criminal legal crisis: the Yellowhammer Files. We’re going to trace and track data and stories until something changes. Check these files as they are published and you will be stunned by what you read.
Chandra Bozelko served more than six years in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent. Her work has earned several professional awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Los Angeles Press Club, The National Federation of Press Women and more.Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.
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