“Willful Ignorance?”: Did Chris Christie Turn A Blind Eye?
Well, that was a virtuoso performance by Chris Christie yesterday. For about 20 minutes. Unfortunately for him, he spoke, and spoke, and spoke, for about 110 minutes.
For the first 20, he had something to say—firing deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly, announcing that his former campaign manager Bill Stepien would have no role going forward either in Trenton or with the Republican Governors’ Association. He summoned the requisite fake contrition and outrage. It all could have been a big recovery.
Then he just kept talking. Let’s put it this way. When you say toward the beginning of a press conference with some degree of dramatic flair that you’re going to go up to Ft. Lee to meet with the mayor, and then you end up talking long enough so that a chyron eventually appears at the bottom of the TV screen that says (I forget the precise wording) Ft. Lee Mayor Doesn’t Want to Meet With Christie, you’ve gone way past lights out. (They did meet in the end.) He was like Norma Desmond up there, still craving the spotlight after the spotlight had long since been dimmed.
In much of pundit land, “time” equals “candor,” as Christie is undoubtedly aware, so he surely knew that the longer he went on, the more some pundits would gush. But I think he started to repeat himself and become tiresome, and he left thousands of words on video tape that can someday be used against him.
Maybe there was a reason Christie was filibustering. Sometime shortly after noon, his disgraced ex-Port Authority appointee David Wildstein started testifying before the legislative committee leading the investigation into “Bridgegate”, having failed in his bid to quash the subpoena that required him to do so. Good chance, it seems to me, that if Christie had finished up before noon, the cable networks would have gone straight to Wildstein invoking the Fifth Amendment (as indeed they eventually did). So maybe Christie was running out the clock. The more him, the less Wildstein.
Turns out, though, that Christie was running out the clock in more ways than one. In New Jersey, a legislature’s subpoena power into a particular investigation ends when the legislative session ends. In this case, that’s next week: January 14. That might not mean much, because the assembly (where the investigation is taking place) is in Democratic hands in the current (ending) session, and will remain in Democratic hands in the next one, so one might assume the new legislature would renew the probe.
But here’s the wrinkle: The speakership of the assembly is changing hands, from Sheila Oliver, who has a rocky history with Christie, to Vincent Prieto, who has no such history. So maybe there was a chance that Prieto wasn’t going to continue the investigation. Indeed, he’d refused to say one way or the other for a long time as the scandal percolated. But once these damning emails came out, Prieto had little choice, and sure enough, he finally said Wednesday that the investigation will continue into the next session.
So think of this from Christie’s perspective: He had to be sitting there thinking, all I have to do here is make it to January 15 when the new session starts, and maybe this whole thing will die.
And so, the most plausible current theory of the case to me. Christie knew, in his head, what happened here. He’s not a stupid man. And even if he were a stupid man, this controversy has been in the media for several weeks now. So there can be virtually no question that he knew that the notion that the lanes were closed for political reasons existed as an allegation. But he pointedly didn’t ask any questions, or at least any probing questions in search of honest answers.
Stop and think about that. If it’s true, as he’s been saying, that he had no idea all this was political until Wednesday, then he’s telling us that while allegations were swirling around in the state’s newspapers and political web sites, he a) perhaps didn’t even read them or b) read them but didn’t ask any hard questions of either his staff, his campaign manager, or his Port Authority appointees. Remember, he said he didn’t even speak to Bridget Kelly about this until Wednesday.
So that was Christie’s probable posture here. Ignorance is bliss. He did everything he could not to know, waiting for January 15, when, he was hoping, the whole thing would just go away.
But now it’s not going away in the assembly, and of course he now has the bigger problem of the U.S. Attorney sniffing around. He hung the people involved in this out to dry. When the U.S. Attorney starts asking questions, how strong an urge are they going to feel to protect the governor?
This story is a long way from over. What was redacted (or can we just say censored?) from those emails and texts? Was this really “the exception, not the rule” in how the Christie administration tries to enforce political loyalty? We’ll presumably find out answers to these questions.
And if even Christie is telling the truth, that Wednesday was the first time he’d heard that the lane closures were a political act, all that means is that he went out of his way to make sure he didn’t hear it, which in turn means there was a grotesque abuse of political power that happened right under his nose and that he not only didn’t try to get to the bottom of, but tried to sweat it out until January 15. That’s some definition of leadership.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 10, 2014
“There Won’t Be Any Highs Ahead”: Congress Deserves Public’s Contempt For Its Obsession With Destroying Obamacare
Congress is back—and the House has an ambitious plan for the year ahead. OK, an ambitious plan to cement its place in history as the Do-Nothingest Congress of all time.
The House has scheduled all of 97 days in session before the November elections, with many of them being half days or pro forma ones. And Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s memo to his troops outlining the plan for the year ahead made it clear that there is at most a bare-bones agenda, focused like a laser, yet again, on repealing or further sullying and delegitimizing Obamacare. The only possible good news coming out of that is that the obsessive focus on killing Obamacare may provide the excuse for House leaders to extend the debt ceiling without blackmail this time, by convincing their rank-and-file that it is the best way to avoid distractions and keep the focus on the health insurance law.
The obsession with Obamacare, and the near-universal belief among Republican lawmakers and conservative spinmeisters that the law will collapse spectacularly of its own weight, is fascinating.
Remember that when Sen. Ted Cruz incited the shutdown last year over the demand to defund Obamacare, his argument was that this was the last chance before the law was implemented in January—after which it would be impossible to stop it, because so many Americans would be delighted with its benefits. Cruz told Sean Hannity last July, “If we don’t do it [defund Obamacare] now, in all likelihood, Obamacare will never, ever be repealed. Why is that? Because on January 1, the exchanges kick in, the subsidies kick in; … their plan is to get the American people addicted to the sugar, addicted to the subsidies, and once that happens, in all likelihood, it never gets …”
At which point Hannity agreed, saying, “It’s over—it never gets repealed.”
The awful and bumpy rollout of the plan changed all that; now, for Cruz, Hannity, and everyone else in the right-wing echo chamber, there won’t be any highs ahead, or at least the highs and sugar addictions will be overwhelmed by bad drugs and overdoses.
Which view is right? We don’t know for sure, but there is some interesting evidence in the rollout of the Medicare Part D plan in 2005, via an excellent analysis by Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reform. The report makes clear that there are many parallels between Part D and Obamacare.
First, both plans passed with substantial partisan tension, which tarnished the initial public views of them. Second, both plans created much confusion in the public, with small proportions of Americans having even a basic understanding of what was in the plans and how they would work. Third, both plans had a lot of time after passage and before they actually took effect to prepare for a massive rollout. Fourth, neither had its website ready to roll when the deadline hit, and both had crashes and long delays to gain access. Fifth, even after the websites became more reliable, other problems persisted, including inadequate call centers and inexperienced navigators at the local level who were unprepared with full or sophisticated answers to questions posed by those trying to sign up. Sixth, supporters of the laws issued cautions when they were first unveiled, warning of glitches ahead and asking the public for understanding and help at ameliorating the problems.
Now for the differences. While Medicare Part D was the subject of serious partisan chicanery—the infamous three-hour vote in the House; the conference committee that barred key Senate Democrats from participating, including Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle; the “bait and switch” that in the end took out all the parts of the bill that had made Ted Kennedy an initial partner of the Bush administration—once it was law, most Democrats worked hard to make the plan accessible and workable for seniors, as did Democratic governors and state legislatures.
Of course, the opposite is true of Obamacare. Despite yeoman efforts to make the bill bipartisan—months and months of negotiation by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus with Chuck Grassley and other Senate Republicans, starting from a framework devised and endorsed by Grassley—it got not a single GOP vote. But after passage, it has received nothing but yeoman efforts to sabotage it, including from a slew of Republican governors denying insurance to the most needy of their constituents simply to stymie the law’s implementation. And whenever a Republican talks about how to make the law work better, instead of blowing it up (Jack Kingston of Georgia comes to mind), he or she is vilified by partisans and their media acolytes.
Second, the mainstream media reported on the glitches in the Medicare Part D plan but did not jump all over them with front-page or highlighted stories, or repeated and lengthy inquests on Sunday talk shows. The opposite has been true of Obamacare, with an added twist that reflects the new economic and political realities for media, as reported in a piece by Maggie Mahar at healthinsurance.org. Mahar investigated a ballyhooed article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram titled “Obamacare Stirs Anxiety for Thousands.” The cases of those who were purportedly shafted by Obamacare proved to be false or exaggerated, and three of the four cases cited were tea-party adherents who strongly opposed the law, two of whom had never even checked for prices on the exchanges. After a lengthy stonewall by the paper’s editors, it became clear that no one had fact-checked the piece, which was written by a reporter with no expertise in health policy, under a tight time frame, assigned by an editor who only wanted bad news, not any stories of those who had been helped by the new law. This is more a case of underresourced news outlets eager to report bad news than bias, but it reflects the tougher climate for a law that affects far more people in far more ways than Part D did.
Eight years after its rocky rollout and deep public skepticism, the Medicare Part D plan is widely popular. I have no idea if that will be the case with Obamacare—and if achieving popularity takes any length of time, the political damage, in this November election and maybe even in 2016, will already have been done. What I do know is that there are going to be a whole lot of winners under the Affordable Care Act, and a smaller number, but still a significant one, of losers or those caught up in the inevitable upheaval to the health care system.
And I know if your only legislative or policy plan for 2014, in the face of a sluggish economy, a crisis of long-term unemployment, and a host of other short and long-term problems facing the country, is to bet on the spectacular failure of the health care plan, you deserve the public contempt your Congress is receiving.
By: Norm Ornstein, The National Journal, January 8, 2014
“Something’s Still Fishy In Jersey”: There Are Reasons To Question Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal Story
I doubt the veracity of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christies’ bumper-to-bumper mea culpa. A trove of circumstantial evidence indicates that he had at least some knowledge that his deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, and former Port Authority officer David Wildstein colluded to wreak traffic havoc on Fort Lee, N.J.
It wasn’t like the week of Sept. 9, 2013 saw a typical commute on the George Washington Bridge. Drivers spent more than two hours stuck in traffic, and news of it was all over the New Jersey press. Thousands of people, including Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich and New York State Port Authority officials, were screaming bloody murder up and down the Palisades Parkway. It’s amazing that the entire New Jersey phone grid didn’t collapse from the tidal wave of calls flooding Christie’s office.
Even if the governor didn’t take one of these calls, he was in the midst of campaign season. His campaign team would’ve told him about the problem and how to respond to reporters should the traffic jam come up on the campaign trail. They wouldn’t have wanted to put him in a position where he might cede his advantage to his democratic challenger Barbara Buono.
Most telling was that on Sept. 13th, Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye, an appointee of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ordered the lanes open, a decision made by a senior New York state official affecting the New Jersey side of the bridge. Cuomo’s office would have had to have spoken with Christie’s office before the order went out. Resolving that traffic jam depended on a lot of moving parts that needed to be coordinated on a state and Port Authority level.
In a perfect world, Christie would resign, showing deference to the people of New Jersey, not spend 107 minutes spouting flimflam meant to keep his presidential aspirations afloat. But this isn’t a perfect world – it’s a world where politicians can cough up a well-crafted, poll-tested apology to avoid punishment for their bad behavior.
In keeping with the standard trajectory of most political scandals, many commentators are now blaming Democrats for the scrutiny Christie is under. My colleague Peter Roff posted a bait-and-switch piece arguing that governor’s apology was a proper way to school President Obama on how to handle Benghazi, Fast and Furious and his dog Bo’s pooping on the White House rug.
Although it’s easy to blame every problem on Obamacare, none of what Roff argues has anything to do with anything. The Christie administration engineered a major traffic jam to get back at a politician whose endorsement or lack thereof would have made no difference to the inevitable outcome of the election. Christie’s apology doesn’t make him the George Washington Bridge Memorial Professor of Presidential Leadership.
The most disappointing part about this whole affair is that another talented politician with the potential to become president has collapsed under the weight of his own self-destructive behavior. Perhaps Christie will run for president next year, but the GOP would be better off if he didn’t. There are plenty of prominent Republicans out there who’ve demonstrated enough integrity to qualify for 2016. Perhaps they’ll throw their hats into the race soon, of course, provided that they’re not stuck in traffic on announcement day.
By: Jamie Chandler, U. S. News and World Report, January 10, 2014
“Limbaugh Solves Weather Mystery”: Polar Vortex Is A Liberal, Mainstream Media Hoax Designed To Sell Global Climate Change
Who knew that Rush Limbaugh—in addition to his many “talents”—possesses a deep knowledge and understanding of climatology and meteorology?
While Limbaugh’s biography reveals no apparent training in such matters, that small detail did not prevent Rush from declaring the severe cold snap—produced by the distortion of the polar vortex and currently affecting much of the United States—to be nothing more than a hoax, proclaiming —
“We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country. And right on schedule the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it’s completely unprecedented. Because they’ve got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have. It’s called the ‘polar vortex.’ The dreaded polar vortex.”
Limbaugh continued his rant by noting that liberals are “in the middle of a hoax, they’re perpetrating a hoax, but they’re relying on their total dominance of the media to lie to you each and every day about climate change and global warming. So they created the polar vortex, and the polar vortex, something’s happened, and that cold air which normally stays is in the North Pole, something’s happening, something deeply mysterious and perhaps tragic is happening.”
Apparently, Rush has been so busy studying his weather charts that he failed to notice that Fox News, Newsmax and other conservative media outlets have decided to join the liberal media hoax by discussing the polar vortex as part of their own weather reports—and yes, they are using that precise phrase—over the past few days.
And with good reason.
You see, there is nothing deeply mysterious nor tragic involved with the existence of a polar vortex (except for the few human tragedies that always seem to accompany severe weather situations) and what happens when the weather pattern becomes distorted. What’s more, I have yet to hear any suggestion from liberals, conservatives—or any branch of the media—indicating that there is some mystery or tragedy at work.
I’ve only heard Rush Limbaugh suggest that others are suggesting the same.
Still, Limbaugh insists that the whole affair has been “created” by the liberals and the mainstream media to feather the arguments in support of global warming and climate change.
A polar vortex is a circulation of strong winds that surround the northern pole (although there is also a polar vortex surrounding the southern pole) that swirl in a counterclockwise direction, creating a low pressure weather pattern. The strong winds typically keep the seriously cold air “locked into” the Arctic region. But, on occasion, the vortex (winds) become distorted as a result of the strength of the winds lessening, causing the vortex to ‘dip’ down to the south, allowing the frigid, arctic air to escape and spill down to the south where they bring very cold temperatures to the Northern Hemisphere—including those we are currently experiencing throughout much of the United States.
Thus, it is not the polar vortex that the liberals and media allegedly “created” that is causing our really cold weather-it is the distortion of the polar vortex that bears the blame. And while Santa Claus may not truly live at the North Pole (I hope I haven’t ruined the Santa Claus thing for Limbaugh), the polar vortex is real and very much does.
The entire process is nothing new.
Cold periods frequently result from distortions of the polar vortex, but as they occur at different times, in different parts of the world and with different levels of severity, we here in the United States tend not to focus on them unless the frigid air comes our way. Indeed, just last year, many parts of Europe experienced frigid air during the Easter season as a result of a distorted polar vortex which sent the arctic air in their direction instead of our own and produced an Easter far colder than what they were experiencing during the Christmas season.
So, Rush…I’m afraid the vast liberal conspiracy did not “create” the evil sounding bit of science-fiction entitled the polar vortex as a means of selling global climate change. You’re going to have to give credit for the existence of a polar vortex to a much higher authority.
Of course, without any desire on Rush’s part to actually explore this weather phenomenon on a scientific level—a complete misuse of Limbaugh’s time as, God forbid, his audience might learn something of scientific value—and whether or not the distortion of a polar vortex might actually be the result of climate change, Limbaugh’s latest bit of buffoonery does raise for us the question of whether or not climate change does bear some blame for extreme changes in weather patterns.
The answer is that your guess is as good as mine.
In fact, your guess is as good as the climate scientists who, for many years now, have been attempting to discover whether there is a connection between the distortion of the polar vortex and any man-made climate change. As this research has been going on for quite some time, it would appear that Rush Limbaugh was a more than a little late to pick up on this bit of conspiracy as I don’t recall him discussing this back in 2001 when the first studies on the subject began to emerge.
“Studies published since 2001 suggest a link between extreme weather and the polar vortex, in recent years more research identified interactions with Arctic sea ice decline, reduced snow cover, evapotranspiration patterns, NAO anomalies or weather anomalies which are linked to the polar vortex and jet stream configuration. However, because these are considered short-term observations (since ~13 years) there is considerable uncertainty in the conclusions. Climatology observations require several decades to distinguish natural variability from climate trends (emphasis added.)
Apparently, an effort on the part of meteorologists and television weather reporters—including those over at Fox—to teach us a little something about what is causing an unusual and difficult weather pattern can only equate to conspiracy in the mind of Rush Limbaugh who has single-handedly managed to create a conspiracy where none could possibly have previously existed.
I guess that is ‘business as usual’ for Rush when forced to get the anger flowing on a slow, “first day back to work” for the new year.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, January 7, 2014
“No Clemency For Snowden”: His Behavior Is More About Promoting Himself Than Promoting Privacy
The word “whistle-blower” conjures up a certain kind of individual and circumstance. One imagines a workaday, dedicated employee who comes to realize that there is corruption or grave misconduct, dangerous to the public good, happening at his or her workplace. The employee may or may not go to superiors at the company or agency (depending on fears of losing one’s job). If that is not an option, the next move is a prosecutor (in case of illegal activity), oversight agencies and sympathetic members of Congress. If none of that works – and it’s nearly unfathomable that no one at any of those institutions would take an interest – the whistle-blower can go to the press.
This is not what happened with Edward Snowden. Snowden took an oath, when he joined the national security community, to keep national secrets secret. There is a legitimate argument to be had over whether too much is classified. But that is an argument someone with national security clearance can have internally. If you take the pledge, you take the pledge. Snowden broke it when he collected massive amounts of classified information and released it to the media.
Breaking the law would be more forgivable if it was both targeted and a last resort. Neither of those things is true in Snowden’s case. He told the South China Morning Post that he got a job with government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton for the purpose of collecting information on federal surveillance. This is like saying you took a job as a construction contractor so you could rob people’s homes.
Nor did Snowden make an effort to go to Congress with his concerns – an outlet where there are certainly members who would bring Snowden’s concerns to light in a responsible way. But that avenue would have made the issue about, well, the issue, and not about Snowden – which seems to be Snowden’s main concern.
Had Snowden gone into the national security business, become alarmed and disillusioned at what he saw as unwarranted invasion of Americans’ privacy, and then made efforts to expose that troubling practice in a targeted and responsible way, he would be a more sympathetic character. But what Snowden did – amass huge amounts of information, then leave the country as he watched U.S. officials squirm over how much Snowden knew and what he would tell – is proof that his behavior was more about promoting himself than promoting privacy. And piously warning New Year’s babies about the loss of privacy is pretty rich, considering that Snowden made his name by stealing secrets and making them public.
Blowing town doesn’t add to Snowden’s credibility. A real whistle-blower or practitioner of civil disobedience waits around and takes the fallout. They don’t hightail it out of the country and shop around for exile – most laughably, in places where civil liberties are not respected.
The New York Times editorial board has called on President Obama to engage in clemency talks with Snowden. That would be a reasonable suggestion if Snowden had made a very targeted release of information after first trying other avenues. It would be reasonable if Snowden had had the courage to stay in the country he purports to be protecting from tyranny and take the heat from his illegal behavior. But he didn’t. Clemency would just make national security oaths and laws a joke.
It’s a good thing that Americans know about the vast information-collecting the U.S. government has been doing on its own citizens (though there’s been something of an over-reaction by people who think the government is reading through everyone’s emails and listening to everyone’s calls). Congress – which, notably, gave intelligence-gathering authorities the right to do such data-mining in the hysteria after 9/11 – ought to re-examine what we allow our own government to do in the name of public security. But that’s not what Snowden’s behavior was about. It was all about Edward Snowden.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 2, 2014
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