Thanks to The Smartest Kids In The World author Amanda Ripley for joining us for TPM Cafe Book Club this week. If you missed her great stuff you should check out her work (one, two, three, four and five) we published this week. Please consider buying her book if you liked what you read at TPM.
I’d also like to announce our next Book Club, which will be on The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee the week of Feb. 10-14. Buy it and read it so you have smart questions to ask when they stop by.
Amidst new allegations, Christie introduces Bon Jovi at Howard Stern’s birthday party.
Today’s events reminded me of this passage from a note from a TPM Reader who vividly remembered David Wildstein’s brief tenure as Mayor of Livingston, New Jersey …
Everyone I talk to agrees that closing lanes to get back at a mayor is right out of the Wildstein playbook. But since Wildstein is capable of anything, a lot of people also believe that he would have no problem saying Christie ordered him to close the lanes, whether it’s true or not. That explains the odd, erratic behavior from the Governor….he’s caught between a rock and a hard place.
David Wildstein, the Christie appointee at the center of the BridgeGate scandal, says Christie knew and there’s proof.
You’ve really got to see this. Each party has its blind spots created by culture, ideology and demography. But this is incredibly rich and riveting for what may seem to some of us – or rather I would assume, just about everyone – as something extremely, extremely obvious. The Republican House leadership has discovered that not everyone runs a small business and not everyone is hyper-focused on cutting regulations. And they have a new message for Republican members of Congress: Most people have (or try to have) jobs and work for others!
It turns out hotheaded Congressman Michael Grimm (R-NY) caught a pretty big break. Capitol Police were investigated his threat against that NY1 reporter as a potential crime but they appear to have dropped the investigation when reporter Michael Scotto declined to lodge a complaint.
“Imperial” President Obama has fewest executive orders in a hundred years. Chart.
Daniel Strauss highlights this amazing rant from a Georgia Senate candidate’s campaign aide about why anyone who complains about Gov. Deal’s handling of the city’s snowfall is a giant sissy.
When we first reported on the Senate GOP’s new Obamacare alternative earlier this week, one expert pointed out that it contained “the biggest tax increase on the middle class” in decades. Since then, the senators have quietly released new language that seems to significantly alter that provision of the plan. Dylan Scott reports.