Category: Presidential Campaign

Bridgegate, the Gift that Keeps on Giving

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Pass the Popcorn

It appears that David Wildstein has cut a deal, because the announcement of his guilty plea was followed immediately by the indictment of two of what were Governor Christie’s most senior aides:

After a 16-month federal investigation into the George Washington Bridge lane closings scandal, a judge in New Jersey unsealed indictments against two people close to Gov. Chris Christie, outlining a conspiracy made with a third confidant to exact political vengeance against a mayor for not endorsing the governor’s re-election.

The United States attorney for New Jersey, Paul J. Fishman, announced the indictments at a news conference on Friday, breaking his long silence about a scandal that started as an inquiry into the cause of a traffic jam and has since led to a host of other investigations into the Christie administration, threatening the political future of one of the nation’s leading Republicans.

Mr. Fishman said that the conspirators “callously victimized” the citizens of Fort Lee, N.J., purposely scheduling the lane-closing plan to coincide with the first day of school. Then, he said, they sought to cover up the scheme with a “sham” story of a traffic study on the bridge to Manhattan. He said that there was evidence to suggest that using a traffic jam to exact revenge was discussed as far back as 2011.

Bill Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Bridget Anne Kelly, a former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, were charged with nine counts, including conspiracy to commit fraud by “knowingly converting and intentionally misapplying property of an organization receiving federal benefits.”

David Wildstein, another former Port Authority official and a high school friend of Mr. Christie, pleaded guilty at the United States District Court in Newark to conspiracy to commit fraud and conspiracy against civil rights.

Mr. Fishman said that Mr. Wildstein corroborated the allegations in the indictment.

This is getting interesting.

I don’t expect Christie to be indicted, I think that he is familiar enough with the prosecutorial process to avoid his fingerprints being on this, but I think (hope) that this will end his political career.

The Shrill One is Sick of Those Muthaf%$#ing Liars on this Muthaf%$#ing Campaign

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Among other things, he appears to be calling out the New York Times, though not by name, who publishes his opinion pieces:

So there’s a lot of buzz about alleged scandals involving the Clinton Foundation. Maybe there’s something to it. But you have to wonder: is this just the return of “Clinton rules”?

If you are old enough to remember the 1990s, you remember the endless parade of alleged scandals, Whitewater above all — all of them fomented by right-wing operatives, all eagerly hyped by mainstream news outlets, none of which actually turned out to involve wrongdoing. The usual rules didn’t seem to apply; instead it was Clinton rules, under which innuendo and guilt by association were considered perfectly OK, in which the initial suggestion of lawbreaking received front-page headlines and the subsequent discovery that there was nothing there was buried in the back pages if it was reported at all.

Some of the same phenomenon resurfaced during the 2008 primary.

So, is this time different? First indications are not encouraging; it’s already apparent that the author of the anti-Clinton book that’s driving the latest stuff is a real piece of work.

The link that he mentions it sites dates that are wrong, conflating paid and unpaid speaking gigs, and the use of hoax press releases by parody sites.

I really don’t want to defend Hillary Clinton.

The dynastic issue is of concern, and it is clear, notwithstanding her recent statements regarding finance and inequality, that she is a tool of the banksters. (And then there is that whole frothing at the mouth war monger thing)

So damn the Times and the Post for making me defend her.

The only bright note to this, as Krugman observes later in his post, is that, “There’s a much more effective progressive infrastructure now, much more scrutiny of reporting, and the kinds of malpractice that went unsanctioned 20 years ago can land you in big trouble now.”

Truth be told, I don’t think that the progressive infrastructure will make a difference, but I do think that things like Twitter and Facebook, which make it a lot easier to point out unprofessional journalism, have become a much bigger part of the media landscape, if only because they influence what organizations like Politifact, the WaPo‘s Fact Checker, and FactCheck.org, who do a little bit of separating the wheat from the chaff.

I Cannot Believe That I am Not Saying This Ironically, but Donald Trump Just Seized the Moral High Ground in the Republican Presidential Sweepstakes

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He’s a nut. He’s a Joke. His hair is absurd.

But Donald Trump had the guts to support Social Security and Medicare in front of a Republican audience in New Hampshire:

Among the usual platitudes designed to garner applause in his Saturday afternoon New Hampshire Republican leadership summit speech, Donald Trump included a line railing against cutting Social Security and Medicare. There was no applause from the fiscally conservative crowd for that one. Go figure.

“You look at what is going with the various things that our country is doing and then you hear politicians, and all you hear is all talk, no action,” the mogul said in his speech before the state GOP’s “First in the Nation” summit.

“I am actually disappointed with a lot of the Republican politicians,” he continued, “I am a conservative Republican.” He then rattled off a series of policy ideas of which he either approves or disproves:

“Whether it is we are going to cut Social Security, because that’s what they are saying,” he continued. “Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid. And we can’t do that. And it’s not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to be cut.”

No applause there. Know your audience, man.

This is not a mark of an outbreak of sanity, or morality, on the part of “The Donald”, though. 

It is a mark of what is, for lack of a better term, the depravity of the modern Republican Party.

And the Biggest Koch Sucker of This Election Season Is………

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It is Scott Walker:

Charles G. and David H. Koch, the influential and big-spending conservative donors, appear to have a favorite in the race for the Republican presidential nomination: Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

 On Monday, at a fund-raising event in Manhattan for the New York State Republican Party, David Koch told donors that he and his brother, who oversee one of the biggest private political organizations in the country, believed that Mr. Walker would be the Republican nominee.

 “When the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” Mr. Koch told the crowd, the billionaire brothers would support him, according to a spokeswoman. The remark drew laughter and applause from the audience of fellow donors and Republican activists, who had come to hear Mr. Walker speak earlier at the event, held at the Union League Club.

 Two people who attended the event said they heard Mr. Koch go even further, indicating that Mr. Walker should be the Republican nominee. A spokeswoman disputed that wording, saying that Mr. Koch had pledged to remain officially neutral during the primary campaign.

 But Mr. Koch’s remark left little doubt among attendees of where his heart is, and could effectively end one of the most closely watched contests in the “invisible primary,” a period where candidates crisscross the country seeking not the support of voters but the blessing of their party’s biggest donors and fund-raisers.

Not surprising.

The Kochs don’t want to waste money, and Scotty, goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin,* is already bought and paid for.

**Credit where credit is due. This bon mot was coined by Esquire magazine’s inimitable Charlie Pierce.

The Clown Show Abides

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The scary kind of clown, of course.


opHthalmologist


Edutation


These people are German stock images


It appears that only one Jew supports Rand Paul

Yesterday, Ron Paul announced that he was running for president.

The roll-out did not go smoothly:

It is hard to words good on the internet! You have to measure twice and cut once, which in internet-land, is better described as reading the thing three times to make sure you didn’t accidentally paste a thing telling people to “shop Aldi for 39 cent Fine Feline Entrée cat food” right in the middle of writing about how you are Mad About A Thing. Rand Paul’s peeps did not do that, oops. In the product description for the eye chart in Paul’s sexy funtimes lingerie shop and online falafel cart, it originally explained that “Rand Paul is an opthalmologist.” Yes, that is a hard word, and Paul may not know how to spell it (“opHthalmologist”) since he might not even be one, but c’mon, guys.

 ………

 We could forgive that spelling error, if it weren’t for this other one, where his website informed us that Paul “opposes a one-size-fits-all approach to eductation.” Apparently he likes a more creative solution, one that encourages Teaching The Controversy over whether correct spelling is even a thing. (In actuality, the HuffPost points out that Paul wants to get rid of the Department Of Education entirely, which would probably level the playing field for his staffers and website writers.)

 ………

 Both of the problems have been fixed, presumably because tacky mean liberals on the internet pointed them out.

 ………

 When running for president, it’s a good idea to give folks the impression that there is already a horde of people just clamoring to pick you as their Dear Leader. Rand Paul doesn’t really have that, so he picked the next best thing — nameless German stock photo characters!

 ………

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul launched his presidential campaign Tuesday complete with a page to endorse the new presidential candidate.

 The endorsements are then presented on a map of the United States.

 The people on the endorsement map, however, appear to be stock images from a Italian photographer Andrea Piacquadio who goes by the name Olly or Ollyy on stock image sites, and according to his Shutterstock page, is based in Germany.

DOY! BuzzFeed tracked down some of the models featured on the page, and all led directly back to the Germany-based stock photo guy. This might seem like a big BuzzFeed SCOOP!, except that they failed to actually ask the stock photos if they were indeed supporting Paul for USA President. They might have been, YOU DON’T KNOW.

 There’s also a section of Paul’s website where you can pick out a special social media avatar that says what kind of US American you are, and that you support Rand Paul. There are all the normal ones — Christian for Rand, Conservative for Rand, etc. — but the one that sticks out at us is the sure to be wildly popular Jew For Rand avatar! That one guy is gonna have a field day changing his Facebook and Twitter pictures, knowing that Rand Paul made it just for him:

 ………

 Those photos have disappeared, just like the spelling errors, but the Lonely Jew avatar remains. May we also suggest Furry For Rand? Something tells us he might get some traction there.

Additionally, the YouTube of his announcement was blocked for copyright infringement.

But that was yesterday, and today is today.

Specifically, he threw a hissy fit at a reporter who wanted specifics on his abortion position:

It’s Day Two of Rand Paul’s Excellent Presidential Adventure, and he is having a bad day. Again. He started his morning picking a fight with the “Today” show’s Savannah Guthrie because she didn’t ask him questions the way he thinks she should, and he followed that up with a quick explanation to the New York Times that when reporters ask him questions he doesn’t like, “That isn’t journalism.” (Side note: Waging war against reporters when you are running for president is a FANTASTIC strategy, and we encourage Paul to stick with that for sure.)

And then it just got worse. For Rand Paul, that is:

In an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday, Paul would not say where, in his view, a pregnant woman’s rights begin and those of the fetus end.

“The thing is about abortion — and about a lot of things — is that I think people get tied up in all these details of, sort of, you’re this or this or that, or you’re hard and fast (on) one thing or the other,” Paul said.


That Dr. Paul did not care for questions about abortion is no problem, because Republicans hate talking about that. Except for how it is one of their very most favoritest things to talk about, and you cannot run for office as a Republican unless you say every sperm is sacred at least 154 times in every speech, or else the ’bortion-haters will say you love killing babies, and you are not even a Republican at all, and they will not vote for you, no sir. But Paul did NOT want that mean AP reporter asking him about that: ………

And on a more substantive level, it appears that the bulk of Rand Paul’s senior campaign staff are implicated in the bribery scandal of his father’s last presidential campaign. (They bribed an Iowa pol for an endorsement.)

The late night hosts have to be licking their chops over this.

I Bet Jon Stewart is Having 2nd Thoughts About Retiring Now

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This really is TedCruz.com

Ted “Tailgunner” Cruz, has become the first candidate to formally announce that he is running for President:

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas announced on Monday morning that he would run for president in 2016, becoming the first Republican candidate to declare himself officially in the race.

 Linking the determination of his immigrant father with the resolve of the founding fathers and his own faith in “the promise of America,” Mr. Cruz spoke at length about his family and his faith as he laid out a case for his candidacy.

 “God’s blessing has been on America from the very beginning of this nation, and I believe God isn’t done with America yet,” Mr. Cruz said before thousands of cheering students here at Liberty University. “I believe in you. I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to re-ignite the promise of America.”

 “Today, I am announcing that I am running for president of the United States,” Mr. Cruz added. “It is a time for truth, it is a time for liberty, it is a time to reclaim the Constitution of the United States.”

First, there is the internet hilarity, with tedcruz.com being registered by a liberal, and his website, tedcruz.org, is using a Nigerian Prince SSL token on its donation page:

This morning, as Senator Ted Cruz launched his bid to become president of the United States, some people who visited his site thought he might also want to become a Nigerian prince. At least, that’s what his site’s certificate said.

It turns out that Cruz’ campaign had registered to use CloudFlare as the content delivery network for its WordPress-based tedcruz.org site, anticipating a flood of traffic from would be supporters. But because the Cruz campaign hadn’t yet uploaded a certificate to identify the site for secure visits, CloudFlare’s systems automatically assigned the site one of its own certificates, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince told Ars. “The Cruz campaign didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “It was an automated process on CloudFlare’s part.” The certificate that the Cruz campaign’s site got assigned to was also assigned to nigerian-prince.com.

But it gets better:


The certificate, however, is probably the least of the Cruz campaign’s Internet problems. The domain tedcruz.com is currently hosting a site that urges people to support President Obama and immigration reform. And while the tedcruz.org site is intended to take donation information, it doesn’t use SSL by default—so donors’ credit card data could potentially be exposed.

And Donald Trump jumped on the Republican presidential clown car, forming an explaroatory committee for the 2016 campaign, and then “The Donald” went full birther on the Canadian born Cruz:*

Real estate tycoon Donald Trump cast doubt Monday on whether Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) can run for president, because Cruz was born in Canada.

“It’s a hurdle; somebody could certainly look at it very seriously,” Trump said during a phone interview Monday on My Fox New York.“He was born in Canada. If you know and when we all studied our history lessons, you are supposed to be born in this country, so I just don’t know how the courts will rule on this.”

Trump, who says he is exploring a bid for president in 2016, was part of the “birther” movement that questioned President Obama’s birth place, as well as the veracity of his birth certificate. He recently took credit for getting Obama to release his birth certificate while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

After flirting with a 2012 presidential bid, Trump has announced an exploratory committee for 2016 and says he will not renew his contract for his TV show, “The Apprentice” on NBC.

Anyone who writes topical comedy has to be rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

*The consensus amongst Constitutional scholars is that natural born US citizen is one who was a citizen at birth, even if they are born in a foreign nation, so Cruz qualifies.

Your Periodic Chris Christie Corruption and Hypocrisy Dump

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First, we have the gift that keeps on giving, Bridgate, where we now learn that David Wildstein, the architect of the bridge closure, who Christie said that he barely knew, turned out to have extensive and frequent contacts with the Governor’s office:

The political operative who helped mastermind the notorious lane closures at the George Washington Bridge – and is now cooperating with a federal investigation of the Bridgegate scandal – had more extensive contact with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s inner circle than the governor has acknowledged.

 That is the conclusion of a WNYC examination of calendars maintained by David Wildstein during his four years at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, along with a review of more than 1,000 photographs provided by the Port Authority and thousands of pages of documents released by the governor’s own legal team and the New Jersey Legislature.

Christie has insisted he had little to do with Wildstein, his former $150,000-a-year appointee at the Port Authority with whom he attended Livingston High School in the 1970s.

 “I don’t even remember in the last four years even having a meeting in my office with David Wildstein,” Christie said at his marathon two-hour press conference in January 2014, after the legislature released Bridgegate records including the now infamous email to Wildstein declaring, “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Christie told reporters: “I may have, but I don’t remember it.”

 But the documents, corroborated by current and former Port Authority and Trenton staffers who requested anonymity because of the ongoing federal investigation, paint a new picture of Wildstein’s role in the Christie Administration. That view chips away at Christie’s and his lawyers’ portrayal of Wildstein as a rogue employee largely isolated from the governor who acted with one staffer in closing lanes and causing epic traffic jams on the roadways of Fort Lee for four morning commutes in September 2013.

Well that guy that Christie barely know also appears to be singing like a canary to investigators:

The political operative who helped mastermind the notorious lane closures at the George Washington Bridge – and is now cooperating with a federal investigation of the Bridgegate scandal – had more extensive contact with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s inner circle than the governor has acknowledged.

(emphasis mine)

And then we have his shenanigans on pensions, which, if anything are even more egregiously awful.

First it appears that Chris Christie routinely steered pension money to campaign contributors firms:

Two years ago, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pursued re-election, his administration found itself mulling investment options for the state’s $80 billion pension fund. In one deal in May 2013, officials settled on a subsidiary of U.K.-based foreign financial conglomerate Prudential plc. With little fanfare, state pension overseers quickly endorsed the deal.

Weeks later, a Hong Kong–based executive director and board member of Prudential plc delivered a maximum $3,800 contribution to Christie’s gubernatorial campaign, followed by a maximum $32,400 donation to the Republican National Committee, which was about to launch a get-out-the-vote effort for Christie. Two months after that, New Jersey began moving public employees’ retirement savings into two funds managed by the Prudential subsidiary as part of the state’s new $300 million investment commitment to the company.

State and federal rules are designed to prevent firms that manage public pension money from contributing to the campaigns of public officials who have the authority to influence pension investments. The sequence of transactions in New Jersey, campaign finance experts say, is troubling.

“Pay-to-play laws are intended to stop the potential conflicts of interest and appearance of corruption that arises whenever executives at a financial firm make large political contributions to a governor and his political party around the time the state is picking the firm to handle pension system investments,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission who now works for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, a research group in Washington, D.C. “These situations undermine the public’s confidence in the integrity of government contracting.”

………

Pension investment experts interviewed by IBTimes were disturbed by the chronology of New Jersey’s Prudential deal, and the fact that Stowe’s donations closely followed the Christie administration awarding pension contracts to Prudential’s subsidiaries.

“This is about as blatant as I think I’ve ever seen in terms of timing,” Andrew Silton, who served as the chief investment officer of the $90 billion North Carolina Retirement System, said. “Forgetting whether or not it violates New Jersey’s state rules or the SEC’s rules, just from the perception of public integrity, it is just such an obvious quid pro quo that the political organizations are working Prudential plc for contributions and simultaneously the New Jersey pension division is processing the paperwork on a major investment.”

It’s gotten so bad that New Jersey state house Democrats have finally stopped fellating Jabba the Governor, and passed a law against allowing campaign contributors to his Presidential campaign to manage pension money: (A well deserved knifing)

Chris Christie may have to change the way he does business. New Jersey lawmakers have sent a bill to the Republican governor’s desk that would keep state pension money from going to firms whose executives make donations to federal political organizations — including, potentially, Christie’s presidential campaign.

The Christie administration has invested millions of dollars of New Jersey pension money with firms whose executives donated to the Republican Governors Association and the Republican National Committee, both of which spent heavily in New Jersey in support of Christie’s gubernatorial campaigns. The bill, which would effectively deter such campaign contributions from those firms’ executives, passed both legislative chambers by large majorities.

More significantly from a political perspective is the recent judicial ruling that Christie broke his own law by underfunding pensions:

In a major blow to Gov. Chris Christie, a New Jersey judge ruled on Monday that he violated state law when he declined to make the full payment into the state’s pension system for public employees last year and ordered him to find a way to fund it now.

The decision further complicates Mr. Christie’s hopes of reviving his presidential ambitions, which have suffered in recent weeks as his approval ratings in New Jersey have sunk to the lowest point of his tenure, and Republican donors have moved to other contenders for the party’s nomination.

It came on the eve of his annual budget proposal to the Legislature, which already presented him with the challenge of finding $2.9 billion to make next year’s pension payment. The challenge is steep, with the state’s economy lagging well behind its neighbors’ and the nation’s, the state surplus dried up, and the governor loath to raise taxes.

Mr. Christie will now be scrambling also to find the $1.57 billion the judge ordered him to pay.

This might be the most politically damaging part, as his Presidential campaign.  Fiscal probity, and cutting taxes, along with that whole shouting at people bit, are supposed to be at the core of his appeal.

And then there is the Exxon pollution deal, where it appears that he settled for pennies on the dollar, because of a section of a law that he pushed that would allow him to use the money for the general fund rather than cleanup:

For more than a decade, the New Jersey attorney general’s office conducted a hard-fought legal battle to hold Exxon Mobil Corporation responsible for decades of environmental contamination in northern New Jersey.

But when the news came that the state had reached a deal to settle its $8.9 billion claim for about $250 million, the driving force behind the settlement was not the attorney general’s office — it was Gov. Chris Christie’s chief counsel, Christopher S. Porrino, two people familiar with the negotiations said.

One of those people, Bradley M. Campbell, was the commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection in 2004 when the lawsuits against Exxon were filed. Mr. Campbell, in an Op-Ed article appearing in The New York Times on Thursday, wrote that “even more troubling” than the decision to settle the lawsuit were “the circumstances surrounding the decision.”

He goes on to say that former colleagues of his in the state government told him that Mr. Porrino “inserted himself into the case, elbowed aside the attorney general and career employees who had developed and prosecuted the litigation, and cut the deal favorable to Exxon.”

………

Much of the criticism has focused on the lack of a public rationale for why the state would choose to settle a lawsuit that it had invested so much effort and time in trying to win; environmentalists fear that Mr. Christie, a Republican, wants to use the money for other budgetary needs. Indeed, a state appropriations law, proposed by Mr. Christie last year, says that any funds beyond the first $50 million collected in damages or other environmental recoveries shall go to the state’s general fund.

When state lawmakers tried to amend the proposal to steer more money back toward environmental restoration, Mr. Christie vetoed the effort.

And then we have what appears to be a coverup of the details of a deal with Jerry Jones following the Dallas Cowboys owner flying him out to a playoff game and hosting him in the owner’s private box:

After New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recently accepted free football tickets and travel from Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, two key questions emerged at the center of the controversy: Did the gifts have anything to do with Christie’s appointees to the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey giving Jones’ firm a contract to manage operations at the new One World Trade Center in New York City? And how did Christie arrive at his decision to endorse that contract?

Christie officials have publicly denied any connection between the gifts from Jones and Jones getting the contact, but there is no way to verify those denials. That’s because on Monday, Port Authority officials formally blocked the release of correspondence — if it exists — between themselves and Christie’s office about the transaction with Legends Hospitality, the Jones-owned firm in question.

Finally, we have the metastasizing scandal about how the Governor’s office intervened against a corruption investigation in Hunterdon County that implicated political allies, and the disasterous privitization of the management of the New Jersey lottery. (No surprise, the company managing the NJ Lottery has made donations to Christie run organizations.)

When is this guy going to be doing the perp walk into federal court?

Shoot Me! I Agree with Rand Paul………

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In a speech at HBCU Bowie State, Rand Paul has declared that the current criminal justice is structured to keep the poor and minorities down:

………

The content more than made up for that.* Paul has sharpened his pitch to black audiences over many visits and roundtables, some well-covered and some more private; he’s also re-introduced sentencing reform bills that give him more to talk about.

“Those of us who have jobs and have lived fairly privileged lives don’t know what it’s like to pay fines and penalties on top of other fines, and how someone’s life can spiral out of control,” said Paul, leaning on a podium and wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. “As I’ve learned more about criminal justice system, I’ve come to believe it’s something that’s going to keep the two Americas separate.”

Paul ran through data and examples, from Ferguson to the novels of Tom Wolfe, to demonstrate the tragedy of over-criminalization. Some of his examples had clunked when he debuted them on TV or radio appearances. “What reason do we have for telling the police that they have to take someone down for selling cigarettes that aren’t taxed?,” asked Paul. “Couldn’t we give them a ticket?”

He was referring (though not by name) to the Eric Garner killing in New York, and while that analysis had been a brief outrage last year, it made no ripple in the Bowie State auditorium. That was likely because he put everything in the context of laws discriminating against non-whites and the poor. The effect of current de jure criminal codes, said Paul, was “somewhat like segregation.”

I guess that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but I really feel profoundly uncomfortable agreeing with him.

I would also note that I am far more sanguine regarding Paul’s putative Presidential campaign.

I cannot imagine another Republican out there who could make these sorts of statements.

I still think that Senator “Aqua-Buddha” is a nut case, but the ability to depart from Republican dogma when required, and this gives him the opportunity to make adjustments to his campaign message that his rivals cannot.

Why Scott Walker Said Something Batsh%$ Insane………

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At CPAC, Scott Walker implied that union activists and the terrorist group ISIS are equivalent:

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker drew a comparison between Islamic State militants and the Wisconsin union protesters with whom he has repeatedly clashed since 2011.

In response to a question about how he would deal with global threats such as the one posed by ISIS, Walker drew from his personal experience.

“If I can take on a 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” Walker said on the CPAC stage, after giving a longer answer about how he would handle ISIS if he were the president.

Rather unsurprisingly, Democratic firebrand Senator condemned the comments.

Rather more surprising is the fact that he was condemned on the (web) pages of the reactionary mouthpiece The National Review:

But former Texas Gov. Rick Perry quickly criticized Walker’s remarks. And NRO’s Jim Geraghty was appalled:

That is a terrible response. First, taking on a bunch of protesters is not comparably difficult to taking on a Caliphate with sympathizers and terrorists around the globe, and saying so suggests Walker doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the challenge from ISIS and its allied groups.

Secondly, it is insulting to the protesters, a group I take no pleasure in defending. The protesters in Wisconsin, so furiously angry over Walker’s reforms and disruptive to the procedures of passing laws, earned plenty of legitimate criticism. But they’re not ISIS. They’re not beheading innocent people. They’re Americans, and as much as we may find their ideas, worldview, and perspective spectacularly wrongheaded, they don’t deserve to be compared to murderous terrorists.

No one should be shocked by Walker’s statement.  Statements like this are a required part of running for office as a Republican, particularly for Presidential candidates.

There is a cultural imperative among Republicans to troll liberals/Democrats.

When a Republican candidate says something that makes non-Republican heads explode, it is seen as an independent good by the base.

The issue these days is that each time a Republican tries to make liberal heads explode, the bar keeps getting moved further down the road toward “to crazy even for Republicans”, and these days the line is pretty narrow.

It’s stupid, it’s immature, and it is exceedingly juvenile, but that is today’s Republican party in a nut shell.

Jabba the Governor Has Been a Very Busy Boy

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Federal law enforcement officials have launched a criminal investigation of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and members of his administration, pursuing allegations the governor and his staff broke the law when they quashed grand jury indictments against Christie supporters, International Business Times has learned.

Two criminal investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday interviewed the man who leveled those charges, Bennett Barlyn. He was fired from the Hunterdon County prosecutor’s office in August 2010, and subsequently brought a whistleblower lawsuit against the Christie administration, claiming he had been punished for objecting to the dismissal of the indictments of the governor’s supporters for a range of corrupt activities.

Barlyn told IBTimes that he met with the federal investigators at his Pennsylvania home for more than an hour on Wednesday afternoon. He said they specifically focused on why Christie’s then-attorney general, Paula Dow, had moved to expunge the indictments. The investigators are examining what state and federal laws may have been broken in the process. Barlyn said the investigators appeared to be at an exploratory stage, with no certainty that criminal charges would ultimately be filed. The meeting followed a June letter to Barlyn from New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney, Paul Fishman, instructing Barlyn to be in touch with his office’s investigative team about the case.

This is not particularly surprising.

When Christie was the US Attorney for New Jersey, he routinely leaked grand jury proceedings to target political opponents.

Ethics is not his strong suit.

We knew this when he was booking excessively expensive hotels when he was US attorney, and these days, he is getting the luxury treatment paid for by campaign contributors and state contractors:

As Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey waited to depart on a trade mission to Israel in 2012, his entourage was delayed by a late arrival: Mr. Christie’s father, who had accidentally headed to the wrong airport.

A commercial flight might have left without him, but in this case, there was no rush. The private plane, on which Mr. Christie had his own bedroom, had been lent by Sheldon G. Adelson, the billionaire casino owner and supporter of Israel. At the time, he was opposing legislation then before the governor to legalize online gambling in New Jersey.

Mr. Christie loaded the plane with his wife, three of his four children, his mother-in-law, his father and stepmother, four staff members, his former law partner and a state trooper.

King Abdullah of Jordan picked up the tab for a Christie family weekend at the end of the trip. The governor and two staff members who accompanied him came back to New Jersey bubbling that they had celebrated with Bono, the lead singer of U2, at three parties, two at the king’s residence, the other a Champagne reception in the desert. But a small knot of aides fretted: The rooms in luxurious Kempinski hotels had cost about $30,000; what would happen if that became public?

………

As United States attorney for New Jersey, Mr. Christie developed a reputation for flouting the rules on travel. A Justice Department report after he left office found that he was the prosecutor who most often exceeded the charges allowed for hotel stays in different cities, without properly searching for a cheaper alternative, or justifying any exemption from the rules. He stayed at a Four Seasons in Washington and a new boutique hotel in Boston, for example, at more than double the cost allowed for those cities.

It’s therefore no surprise that while all of this is going, he is also aggressively ignoring New Jersey open records laws:

On his first day as governor of New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie promised “a new era of accountability and transparency.” But five years later, local reporters and watchdog groups accuse Christie’s administration of making unprecedented efforts to keep public records a secret.

Stonewalled by the Christie administration, media outlets have been forced to sue to obtain even routinely disclosed information, such as payroll data. Rather than release documents connected to the George Washington Bridge scandal, pay-to-play allegations, possible ethics violations, and the out-of-state jaunts Christie has made while weighing a run for president, Christie’s office and several state agencies have waged costly court battles. As the 2016 presidential primary race draws closer, and Christie considers jumping in, his administration is fighting 23 different open-records requests in court.

“The track record is abysmal,” says Jennifer Borg, general counsel for the North Jersey Media Group. Her organization, which publishes the Record, has sued the state for public documents a half-dozen times since Christie took office. When a judge determines that the state withheld records illegally—which happens frequently—her group wins legal fees. As of September 2014, Christie’s administration had paid $441,000 to North Jersey Media Group and other media outlets for records. And that doesn’t count the cost of government lawyers’ time.

The fight has become so expensive for the state because when newspapers go to court for these records, they usually win. But winning doesn’t automatically produce the sought-after records. “We can and do beat them in court. But as long as they’re appealing—I don’t want to call it a pyrrhic victory, but we’re not going to get the records,” says Walter Luers, an attorney who helped a transparency project run by the state Libertarian Party sue for public access for Christie’s travel expenses. “Appeals take two to three years. We’re already into the presidential elections. By the time we get these records, Christie could have a new address.”

 And then we have his not-corrupt-but-harebrained vaccine statements, which appear to have a pretty long track record, and so it appears to be an actual statement of beliefs, not a gaffe:

New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s administration does not participate in a national program embraced by several of his potential rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination that advises new parents to vaccinate their young children against measles and other diseases.

Governors and senior health officials from 28 states send signed cards to new mothers congratulating them on giving birth and providing them with a detachable checklist of immunisations that their infants should obtain before they are two years old. Christie is not among them, according to the New Jersey department of health.

“One of your most important roles as a parent is to make sure your baby is immunised,” says the message in a recent version of the card. “Keeping your little one healthy means starting immunisations by two months of age.” The advice and checklist are reviewed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The card lists recommended vaccinations, including the combined shot against measles, mumps and rubella that some campaigners continue to link to cases of autism in children, despite this claim’s having being repeatedly and comprehensively debunked by medical researchers.

………

New Jersey participated in the program under former Republican governors such as Christie Whitman and Donald DiFrancesco. Yet Donna Leusner, the communications director for Christie’s department of health, said the state had not taken part under the administrations of Christie or his predecessor Jon Corzine, a Democrat.

Jon Corzine, who should be sharing a cell with Chris Christie, though the former should be in jail for fraud in his business practices, and the latter should be in jail for official corruption.

We haven’t even begun the Republican Presidential debates, and it looks like the clown show has already begun.

Jon Stewart Weeps

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Mitt Rmoney has announced that he will not be running for President in 2016:

On a ski lift high above the powdery slopes of Deer Valley, Utah, Mitt Romney made it clear: His quest for the White House, which had dominated nearly a decade of his life, was coming to a close.
In a talk with his eldest son, Tagg, between runs down the mountain on Monday, Mr. Romney, 67, said he had all but decided against a third bid for the White House.

The conversation, according to a person familiar with it, came after days of increasingly gloomy news reached the Romney family.

Donors who supported him last time refused to commit to his campaign. Key operatives were signing up with former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. The Republican establishment that lifted Mr. Romney to the nomination in 2012 in the face of scrappy opposition had moved on.

I don’t think that there is anyone, besides the Mittster, who is more disappointed by this than the writers of topical comedy.

They already had the jokes written, because they could have used their jokes from 2012 and 2008 with a few tweaks.

For the rest of us though, it is a win.

Pass the Popcorn

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Pass the Popcorn

The DoJ has opened an inquiry on Michelle and Marcus Bachmann for campaign finance violations in her 2012 run for President:

Representative Michele Bachmann’s presidential hopes ended 20 months ago, but her brief and chaotic campaign continues to be the focus of ethics investigations.

The latest is a federal inquiry into whether an outside “super PAC” improperly coordinated strategy with Mrs. Bachmann’s campaign staff, including her husband, in violation of election laws.

The Department of Justice demanded records from the super PAC last week of its finances and its communications with Mrs. Bachmann; Marcus Bachmann, her husband; and former staff members, according to a grand jury subpoena reviewed by The New York Times.

The investigation appears to stem from a complaint a former campaign staff member made to the Federal Election Commission and to the F.B.I. The staff member told of overhearing the president of the super PAC asking a Bachmann senior adviser about buying advertising on radio and TV stations in Des Moines ahead of the Iowa caucus on Jan. 3, 2012.

Her political career is already over, but some jail time would be a nice message to those who think that they are anointed by God to rule over us.

The message is, “Pride goeth before a fall.”

The Push-Back Against the Lindsey Graham Presidential Needs to Get Less Awful

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Let’s be clear here:  Senator Lindsey Graham is a blithering idiot, whose only claim to policy expertise is his playing ventriloquist dummy to petulant child Senator John Sidney McCain III’s harebrained “Forever War” foreign policy initiatives.

This is a guy who has literally been wrong on absolutely every foreign policy initiative that he has ever been a part of.

He makes Richard Bruce Cheney look level headed and competent.

These are all legitimate reasons for him to be criticized, and ridiculed, for his recent statements about running for President.

There is also the issue of his personal affect.

Specifically, for lack of a better term, he minces almost as much as Michelle Bachmann’s husband Marcus.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that)

So, over the past few days, we have been bombarded with tasteless cartoons and Photoshop jobs mocking the (never Married, not that there’s anything wrong with that) distinguished gentleman from South Carolina.  (I’m talking to you, Howie Klein)

Lindsey Graham sucks, both as a potential candidate, and even more so as a potential President.

It simply does not matter whatever else he does, or does not suck.

You Know, the Whole Hamlet Thing Didn’t Work for Adlai Stevenson………

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Elizabeth Warren is not being not quite so categorical in her denial of a 2016 Presidential run:

Senator Elizabeth Warren gave an interview to People magazine for this week’s issue and was asked for roughly the thousandth time if she planned to run for president. But her answer to this query was different than all the others:

But is the freshman senator from Massachusetts herself on board with a run for the White House? Warren wrinkles her nose.

“I don’t think so,” she tells PEOPLE in an interview conducted at Warren’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home for this week’s issue. “If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.”

She just doesn’t see the door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue being one of them. Not yet, anyway. “Right now,” Warren says, “I’m focused on figuring out what else I can do from this spot” in the U.S. Senate.

As a veteran Warren-watcher, I can say with certainty this is more ambiguous than she’s ever been on the subject. “I don’t think so,” “amazing doors that could open,” and “right now” are the traditional vernacular of a someone flirting with a campaign—-and someone who wants you to know it.

In the past, Warren has been much more unequivocal. (Examples: “I’m not running for president, and I plan to serve out my term,” and “I am not running for president. Do you want to put an exclamation point at the end of that?”)

I understand how tempting it is to play a “will she or won’t she” game, it creates a buzz, and it can get one’s ego stroked, but you need to be either in or out.

I’d love to see someone from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, as opposed to the current  front runner, Hillary Clinton, but jerking around potential supporters is never winning

Either get serious, and start an exploratory committee, or remain adamant about staying out.

Pass the Popcorn

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Pass the Popcorn

In 2012, Michelle Bachmann accused the Ron Paul Presidential campaign of bribing Iowa state senator Kent Sorenson for his changing his endorsement from her to the Libertarian stalwart.

Well, it turns out to be true.

Sorenson has pled guilty to taking at least $25,000.00 to switch his endorsement.

While this bit of of corruption may not seem significant beyond an indication that the Iowa caucuses are too corrupt and thus should lose their first in the nation status, there is actually more to this.

Specifically, it appears that Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign manager, Jesse Benton, is hip deep in this.

How is is significant today that the campaign manager for an iconoclast’s 2012 campaign is implicated in  bribery scandal?

Here’s how:

Neither Lori Pyeatt, Ron Paul’s granddaughter and the treasurer of his 2012 presidential campaign, nor Jesse Benton, who was Paul’s campaign manager (and is now manager of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign), had responded to requests for comment at the time this post was published.

(emphasis mine)

So Mitch McConnell’s campaign manager is implicated in a bribery scandal, and what’s more, it appears that he might be rolling over to prosecutors:

It isn’t clear if the investigation is continuing, but Sorenson has been granted immunity from further prosecution on federal and state charges, as has his wife, according to the plea agreement. OpenSecrets.org has learned that two grand juries have been investigating the events in Iowa, one focused on the Paul campaign and one on Bachmann’s. Last August, OpenSecrets.org published a copy of a memo written by Aaron Dorr, the head of the Iowa Gun Owners, in which he outlined Sorenson’s demands to switch his endorsement. Included in the emails surrounding the negotiations were several top Paul campaign officials, including Benton.

(Again, emphasis mine)

So Sorenson is singing to the feds like a canary, and Mitch McConnell’s (soon to be former?) campaign manager is clearly in the prosecutor’s cross-hairs.

Hillary Lets Her Inner Neocon Show

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Hillary Clinton was interviewed by noted “liberal hawk”, Iraq war booster, and blithering idiot, Jeffrey Goldberg, and she went full Dick Cheney:

President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army … fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict—the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

 Well, his former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, isn’t buying it. In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the “failure” that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.

 “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

Let’s be clear. Before Syria turned into a full up civil war, largely at the instigation of the House of Saud, the behavior of the Assad regime was awful, but better than that of Bahrain, whose atrocious behavior was in large part instigated by the House of Saud.

If the Gulf states, particularly the Saudis, had not aggressively shipped weapons and Jihadis to Syria, Syria would pretty much look like Bahrain, a brutal ruthless dictatorship, except that it would not be religiously based.

She continues:

During a discussion about the dangers of jihadism (a topic that has her “hepped-up,” she told me moments after she greeted me at her office in New York) and of the sort of resurgent nationalism seen in Russia today, I noted that Americans are quite wary right now of international commitment-making. She responded by arguing that there is a happy medium between bellicose posturing (of the sort she associated with the George W. Bush administration) and its opposite, a focus on withdrawal.

Because doubling down on a failed strategy, is such a good idea.

Then she doubles down on the whole Clash of Civilizations crap:

“One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States,” she said. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.”

Of course, Osama bin Laden’s justifications for his actions largely was that we were making war on Arabs and Islam: (H/t Naked Capitalism for the Link)

As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

 (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

And Hillary’s solution is to bomb more Muslims and more Arabs.

It should also be noted that she was a big supporter of another Saudi supported bit of failed adventurism, the cluster F%$# that was the nation state of Libya.

Over at Salon, Joan Walsh wonders if the faction of the Democratic party that doesn’t need settle their manhood issues with bombs might be an impediment to her coronation as the Democratic Nominee in 2016.  (She actually hopes that it won’t, because ……… I dunno. She makes no coherent case at all for voting Hillary.)

As an aside, I am so glad that I live in Maryland. My vote for president does not matter, so I feel no compulsion to cast a vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter how retrograde.