Okay, I’m sorry. Chris Christie holds his first townhall post-BridgeGate – supposedly open to public, no vetting of questions – and not a single person asks anything about Bridge story? I don’t buy it. The public is often not as interested in scandal as the press. But zero questions is not credible.
Late Update: We’re putting in a call to Christie’s office asking for more details on whether questions or questioners were vetted.
Later Update: Christie’s office tells us that the questions were absolutely not vetted. It just happened that no one asked a Bridge question in an hour and a half of questions.
Clerics rule that Muslims are not allowed to live on Mars.
There’s been a lot of talk about how funeral selfies are a sign of the coming apocalypse, but funeral director and blogger Caleb Wilde takes a second look at how this phenomenon can be actually respectful.
Sahil Kapur systematically looks at all the reasons why the deck is stacked against Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections.
TPM Reader MM was at Christie’s townhall today and gives us his own take on how he’s not surprised no scandal questions were asked. As noted earlier, Team Christie flatly denies questions or people were vetted. And despite my earlier skepticism, this was a pro-Christie town during mid-morning when most people had to be at work. Here’s MM’s report …
I live in Middletown NJ and was at Chris Christie’s town hall meeting today, it was first Christie town hall event I have ever been to and can honestly say that I’m not surprised that a Bridgegate or other scandal question did not come up considering who was in attendance. There were easily a couple of hundred local Sandy victims in the room, all wanting to know why they still can’t get into their homes 16 months after the hurricane. I’m more surprised that only 1 person attempted to ask a question about the misuse of Sandy relief funds on private contractors whose job it was supposed to be to help victims but were recently fired by the governor due to irregularities. Christie deflected the question but no one else followed up on it.
A surreal, blood curdling report from an AP reporter witnessing Ukrainian security services unleashing snipers on unarmed protestors.
Twice Tea Party absolutism cost Republicans the Senate; now it cost them a huge win on cutting Social Security too.
TPM Reader KR sends in this note about Chris Christie’s town hall meeting yesterday:
I grew up in Middletown, and return a few times a year to see family and friends. It’s true that it’s a reasonably (though not overwhelmingly) Christie-friendly town. Middletown has a lot of people who work in finance; it lost more residents than any other town in the state on 9/11, and built a memorial garden next to the train station. It also continues to have a large (if shrinking) working class population. The two communities send their kids to different high schools and are actually, literally separated by the train tracks that run through town.
The first thing you need to know about the battle in the Arkansas legislature to fund Medicaid expansion is that getting it done requires a whopping 75-percent supermajority. The second thing you need to know is that Democrats were willing to give Republicans just about anything to get those votes — and Republicans obliged.
Can liberals admit that John Roberts was right about the Voting Rights Act and actually move forward with fixing it? University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Amel Ahmed explains how.