NJ Senate Majority Leader says criminal charges possible in bridge scandal.
Whenever there’s a scandal, everybody reaches for ‘Nixonian’ and the 20 shelves of psychobabble written on what that term means. It’s almost as hackneyed as attaching a “-gate” to every scandal name. So let me start by saying I’m not saying Christie is “Nixonian” or Nixonian in the big sense. But there is a narrow sense in which this is highly, highly redolent of a big part of the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down.
Investigators of every stripe dream about getting smoking gun documents like the ones multiple media outlets, including TPM, obtained today. They not only show aides and appointees of Chris Christie conspiring to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., a Democrat who did not endorse Christie’s reelection bid in 2013, but they capture a tone and mentality that, well, you might find in the works of David Chase or David Simon. Jonathan Chait calls it an “almost comical venality bordering on outright sociopathy.”
As I’ve written several times, this Christie Bridge Scandal is far more potentially damaging for Christie that it might seem on its face because its fits so perfectly with the negative view (as opposed to the positive view) of Chris Christie. That is, that he and his crew are thugs and bullies. We have basically demonstrable evidence that one of Christie’s top aides instructed Christie’s crony at the Port Authority, David Wildstein, to create the series of massive traffic jams in the city whose Mayor wouldn’t endorse the Governor.
Put into a mix that a good part of the country has the Sopranos as their primary prism for viewing New Jersey. (And, hey, I’m a former New Jersey resident!) And these emails sound very Sopranos-esque. “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Christie Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly told David Wildstein, according to emails obtained by TPM. “Got it,” Wildstein replied.
Newly obtained documents from New Jersey suggest Chris Christie’s office directly involved in Fort Lee bridge closure scandal.
Mississippi tea partier State Sen. Chris McDaniel: It’s probably the hip-hop that’s responsible for gun violence.
This is why there was no gun violence before hip-hop was invented. Oh, wait.
Gingrich notes that “life was fine” during the “age of the dinosaurs” when the Earth was in fact dramatically warmer than today.
We might also note in Gingrich’s defense that if we went back to dinosaur era temperatures, sports would likely be dramatically more awesome since the atmosphere had like 50% more oxygen. 2 minute mile. No prob.
In case you missed it yesterday evening (it pubbed late), you need to check out this piece we published on the toll taken by GOP efforts to sabotage Obamacare at the state level. We’ve known this has been happening – rejecting Medicaid expansion, refusing to set up an exchange and most insidiously preventing nonprofits and state officials from helping people enroll for care. The toll is striking when you look at this chart. The price of sabotage has been very high.
Mitch McConnell offers to extend unemployment benefits for a year in return for delaying Obamacare’s individual mandate.
Ed Kilgore: “[W]hen you consult the professionals on how gubernatorial races look, there doesn’t appear to be any Democratic counter-landslide in the offing for 2014.”