Not all of us would survive first adult contact with a full revelation of our college age selves. But there’s some pretty funny and quite characterologically consistent stuff in this piece about how Chris Christie cut his political teeth in student government at University of Delaware. Christie set up his own political machine, a corrupt one in the eyes of campus critics. He was elected president of the student government. And then when he left he arranged to have his future wife, Mary Pat, installed as his successor, even though he was no longer in school. And Todd Christie, Chris’s bro apparently managed stuff as “chairman of the election committee.”
Fascinating email from TPM Reader DW about the sheer level of attempted sabotage down at the ground level in GOP-run Obamacare rejectionist states.
I am a healthcare attorney for an insurance company and I wanted to share our experience with the implementation of the ACA. I know the idea is that state legislators have been working to subvert the ACA, but it actually goes deeper.
All things considered, best to keep the ‘lynching’ metaphor to people who are black, come from historically terrorized minorities and/or most of all end up dying by being hanged from a tree. On the other hand, maybe not: Rothenberg: Christie Scandal Has Become A ‘Political Lynching’
Marion Johnson on North Carolina’s rollback of voting rights to post-Reconstruction-era restrictions: “Much like the voter suppression of a century ago, many elements in North Carolina’s new law will disproportionately hurt black and low-income voters. According to Democracy NC, 29 percent of early voters and 34 percent of same-day registrants in 2012 were black.”
One of the questions that hangs over the Chris Christie bridge scandal involves his hot-headed spokesman, Michael Drewniak. Emails show Drewniak met with one of the Port Authority officials at the center of the scandal just a short time before the official announced his resignation. So what was said at that dinner, and what role does it play in the scandal? Plenty of questions here.
If you’re a TPMPrime subscriber, don’t miss our latest Prime Longform on the global battle for ‘rare earths’, the critical metals that run your iPhone, your Android, your hybrid car and most things we associate with the high tech and post-fossil fuel world. They’re pricey, incredibly messy to get out of the ground, and almost all the global supply is mined in China. It’s a fascinating story that brings together tech, environmental threat and a new 21st ‘Great Game’ among the global powers to secure reliable supplies of the metals. It’s a great read. I hope you enjoy it.
Not much coverage of it today. But today’s bipartisan Senate report debunked virtually all of the right-wing conspiracy theories about the attack on the Benghazi compound back in September of 2012.
I posted a reader email yesterday from a 30something Brooklynite, TC, who is supportive of Obamacare but still can’t afford the premiums for health insurance on the exchange.
It prompted several emails from other readers with a range of reactions that basically fell into three categories: readers who could relate; older readers who, in almost a parental way, urged TC to reassess the financial risk of going without insurance; and readers who, if I can freely summarize, had little patience for underemployed hipster financial predicaments.
Here’s a sampling:
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act almost four years ago, there’ve been two continuing battles over the law. One was narrowly political: win the 2010 and 2012 elections and repeal the law. The other was less visible but no less important: sabotage the law at the state level to engineer failure and force repeal or a combo of policy and political catastrophe for the Democrats. The first failed in November 2012. Now we know they whiffed on the second one too.
It’s simply too late to undo what happened in March 2010.
This is a what a Republican running for Congress in Virginia said in 2002: It’s just too hard to prosecute marital rape “when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, there’s no injury and so forth or anything.”