Shamelessness Is Their Superpower

In which the old Emperor shows more of a sense of shame than you'll ever see from Chris Christie, or Marquito Rubio, or the entire Roberts court.

Didn't everybody see this coming if RvW was overturned? I mean, I know a lot of people thought it would never happen -- Wrong! -- but the consensus was that it would be an electoral disaster.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) September 12, 2022

Kilgore in July https://t.co/Yf3bUBqvEs to Bump last week https://t.co/yyBSsS9CuJ chanting "don't get your hopes up"

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2022

Curate's Egg

 

Right Reverend Host: "I'm afraid you've got a bad Egg, Mr Jones!"; The Curate: "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!" "True Humility" by George du Maurier, originally published in Punch, 9 November 1895, via Wikipedia.

Jordan in comments yesterday insisting that, even though Bret Stephens must have been wrong about what happened in the 2016 primary campaign, something did after all happen, and it was important:

that the 2016 Republican primaries were a fundamentally transformative moment in American Conservatism, like the Counter-Reformation, with Trump as Martin Luther -- suddenly, the conflict between scripture and practice wasn't tenable any more, and the voters rebelled (for real, unlike the fake, astroturf "rebellion" of the Tea Party period, but borrowing the same frameworks), followed by the politicians, who were dragged hopelessly along until they awakened to the possibilities that the Trump movement had opened and became true-believers (like Goebbels and other Third Reich figures).

I'm not so crazy about the Reformation analogy, with its implication that Trump had an idea (let alone 95 of them). I've used the Hitler analogy, of course, with a different emphasis, thinking about the surprise the German conservatives got when the idiot to whom they'd offered the chancellorship turned out not to be controllable. 

Keep your eye on the timeline, redux

Via boundary2.

Christopher Christie, in contrast, is not being wholly candid in his own superbly subtitled memoir, Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics, as reported by Maggie Haberman:

On Feb. 14, 2017, Mr. Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, had lunch scheduled with the president. It happened to be the day after Mr. Flynn — whom Mr. Christie did not back for the national security adviser role — was dismissed for lying to the vice president about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition. Mr. Kushner decided to attend.

As Mr. Kushner tucked into his “typical salad,” Mr. Christie wrote, the president said to him, “This Russia thing is all over now, because I fired Flynn.” Mr. Christie said that he started laughing, and the president asked why.

“‘Sir,’ I said, ‘this Russia thing is far from over,’” Mr. Christie wrote. Mr. Trump responded: “What do you mean? Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over.” Mr. Kushner added, “That’s right, firing Flynn ends the whole Russia thing.”

Which looks at first sight like evidence of Trump's attempts to obstruct the investigation, but that's not at all what the ex-governor meant to suggest, heavens no:

Christie's secret keeper

Too many krises (Kriskris? Krisses?), from brisi.org.

Chris Christie tells @NicolleDWallace Trump's comments to Comey were "normal New York City conversation" he didn't realize was inappropriate

— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) June 7, 2017

That part of New York moved to Jersey after Sammy Gravano testified. https://t.co/kREkmHV8kJ

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 8, 2017

There's a story about Trump's apparent pick for FBI director, Christopher Wray, that isn't getting told as widely as it needs to be; I happen to know about it because great news staffers at WNYC, my local radio station, Andrea Bernstein and Matt Katz, did a lot of the original reporting, but it's also very nicely written up by Brendan Morrow at Heavy, and it involves New Jersey governor Christopher Christie, who used to work with Wray "a lot" back in the oughts when he was US Attorney for the New Jersey district and Wray was running the criminal division of the federal Department of Justice.

He was also Christie's lawyer during the investigation of the "Bridgegate" scandal that arose when two of three lanes onto the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee were closed at the morning rush hour in the first week of school in September 2013 for an imaginary traffic study, causing devastating delays and public fury, apparently as punishment from the governor's office for Fort Lee's Democratic mayor Mark Sokolich for not supporting Christie's reelection campaign, and we were supposed to believe Christie was entirely unaware of this criminal activity by the avengers on his staff.

Christie thinks Wray is a terrific choice for FBI director!

Overwhelming Minority

Guadalupe García de Rayos. Photo by Rob Schumacher/Arizona Republic, via Will Bunch at Philly.

That's what Governor Chris Christie calls the non-felons being snatched up in raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement around the country, like dolphins caught in a tuna net, in the Los Angeles area some 25% of the total according to ICE, or 40 of the 160 people they acknowledge busting, alongside who knows what percentage of the hundreds more in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and cities in Florida, Texas, Kansas, Virginia, and North and South Carolina, an "overwhelming minority":

I can tell you, Jake, from having run a government for seven years and been involved for many years as a U.S. attorney, things always don't go perfectly. And so you are going to have some people who also, by the way, have violated the law, but don't fit that one category. But that will be the overwhelming minority in all this. And what -- what people should focus on is what the president is trying to do, which is to keep a campaign promise on making sure that violent criminals who are here illegally are taken out of the country in order to make America's streets safer. 

So one of the overwhelming minority is Guadalupe García de Rayos, as we learn from Will Bunch:

Charitable interpretation, continued

Update 9/25: Welcome Crooks, Liars, and Fans—thanks, Blogenfreude!

Image via Jacques Exclusive Caterers, which handled the Foundation's 2012 Summer Solstice Gala.

In the course of reading up on the activities of the Trump Foundation I came across a story that seems to have been told a lot but not enough, or we'd all know it: that of the Drumthwacket Foundation of New Jersey, a nonprofit devoted to maintaining Drumthwacket, the Greek-revival governor's residence in Princeton, ten or eleven miles from the State House in Trenton. The governor doesn't in fact live there (only one Jersey governor, the ill-fated Jim McGreevey, ever has done it full-time), but uses it as a venue for official events, on the order of 70 a year.

When Chris Christie took office in January 2010, Christina Wilkie wrote for the HuffPost in 2014, the character of the Drumthwacket Foundation began to change quite rapidly. The CEO of the Prudential insurance company and his wife, John and Mary Kay Strangfeld, volunteered to serve as chair and vice chair, and Mary Pat Christie, the governor's wife, assumed the presidency, a new position, and they announced a new vision to encourage the citizenry to take pride in the mansion and fundraising through a New Jersey Pride Corporate Campaign which octupled the foundation's annual income, from around $125 thousand to $1 million.

It doesn't have a Charity Navigator rating, and I can't find any specific information on what's been done for it with that million dollars a year other than making it accessible to persons with disabilities, which is certainly a good thing (but the first floor was already accessible when Jon Corzine moved in to recuperate there after his 2007 car accident left him temporarily wheelchair-bound, and he had a wheelchair lift installed so he could occupy the second floor).

But it has, as you might suspect, given lots of opportunities for wealthy people with business with the state of New Jersey to show what nice people they are, starting with Prudential itself, which has given more than $150,000 to the foundation and in November 2011 received a $250-million tax break ($527,000 per job created). Down to Jared Kushner's Uncle Murray, whose KRE Group made a $10,000 donation and got $33 million in tax incentives for their Journal Square project. And guess what, Jared Kushner's father-in-law, Donald J. Trump shows up as well!

He gave them $10,000 a year from 2010 through 2013, and got approval in 2013 to build a personal cemetery on the fairway of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, ten graves, just for his immediate family, which turned out two years later to be another Trumpian lie; he plans to spend eternity in Florida and turn this site into a 548-grave site for club members. At a substantial profit, obviously.

I should say that, like the Clintons, Christie doesn't get any actual money out of this arrangement, and unlike the Clintons, he can't even get much prestige, since nobody could possibly care very much about whatever he's done for this admittedly very handsome Princeton building. And yet there's clearly something wrong with it that isn't wrong with the Clinton Foundation. Christie himself memorably lied about it as if it were embarrassing, falsely claiming that Trump had contributed to Hurricane Sandy relief on the first morning of the Republican National Convention, and then being forced in the afternoon to admit that it was Drumthwacket that had received the Trumpian largesse. And you can make a case with specific evidence of a pay-to-play phenomenon here (lots more examples in that HuffPost article) in a way that you can't for the Clinton Foundation at all.

What's it about with these things? People talk about donations to a presidential library, say, as contributing to a "legacy", and say that could be worth it to Bill Clinton or George W. Bush as a payment for political favors, and I can sort of understand how that could add up if it did (which in the Clinton case, as I've argued lots before, I think it doesn't). But the Drumthwacket Foundation? Really? What kind of pathetic quo for your quid is that?

Is it about being "high society" at all those gala events, the same thing that makes Christie long for a hug from Jerry Jones in the Cowboys skybox? Yearn so hard that he's willing to sell tax favors or a valuable lease from the Port Authority to get it? Or is it building general relationships with the great, without any particular plan, that might just pay off some day when Donald Trump has a job he could give you?

Photo by Jonathan Ernst, for Reuters, via Kos.

Out of the Swamp

Image by Jacqueline Mellow for Alec McGillis's February 2014 piece in The New Republic.

How to talk to a New Jersey jury:

A vicious guy. He’s a bully, he’s an asshole, he’s a horrible person, he’s the most complicated person I’ve ever met. He’s a vindictive person who would destroy your life, he’s known for lying, he has a twisted mind, he’s maniacal, he’s a miserable prick.

That's Michael Baldassare, Bill Baroni's lawyer in the Bridgegate case, describing David Wildstein, who was Governor Christopher Christie's agent of evil in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey at the time and is now the felon in the case who has been "cooperating" with the feds since he took a plea in May 2015 to help them build a case against Baroni, his former deputy at the Port Authority, and Bridget Kelly, Christie's former chief of staff. (In return for a lighter sentence, it still hasn't been decided how much lighter, than the 15 years he was likely to end up with.) The coverage on WNYC radio (by Andrea Bernstein and Matt Katz) has been enthralling, but it's even better reading it on the website, linked above, where you get some color you can't get on the radio.

The main thing that's been emerging so far is the way that same description seems to apply to the governor. The prosecution and defense are in pretty much complete agreement on that, and more specifically that Christie definitely did play the leading role, in concert with Wildstein, in locking up traffic in Fort Lee, NJ, and on the George Washington Bridge, for three days in September 2013—the first week of the school year, to make it as nasty as possible for Fort Lee mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, as vengeance for his failure to endorse Christie, a Republican, in that year's gubernatorial race, to which Christie had taken offense, having wooed Sokolich a lot more energetically than we realized: in testimony yesterday Sokolich explained that he

Prosecution for the Witness

Donald Trump's lawyer, by Runt-of-the-Web.

Famed prosecutor Christopher "Wormtail" Christie has never actually argued a case or cross-examined a witness in his distinguished career, that's one of my favorite facts about him, but decided to make his debut at the Republican convention on Tuesday, roaring out his list of charges against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and asking the audience to agree: "Guilty or not guilty?" Massive audience response, with chants of "Lock her up!" Leading inevitably to more calls to execute her for her crimes, though even Christie didn't manage to allege any of those. It was one of the most fascist moments of this increasingly fascist campaign.

I got into a very lengthy debate with a Trumpet Strumpet on the Twitter machine when I should have been writing a blog post, and here most of it is. At least it has a couple of jokes, and a few references if you want to argue about Libya with anybody (including me), below the fold:

Friday cheap shots: Baseless Rhetoric

Image via the Toms River Patch.

Now we know what the price of Christie's Trump endorsement was: cash (via WNYC).

At a rally of about a thousand people at the armory in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Thursday, Governor Chris Christie introduced the guest of honor, saying: "Let me bring you the next President of the United States, Donald Trump!"

But this was no ordinary political Trump rally. Tickets cost $200 a person, and the money was used to pay off Christie’s debt left over from his presidential campaign.

WNYC's Matt Katz says that with about 1,000 people attending the rally, that went a long way toward wiping out Christie's $250,000 debt. And that wasn't all. 

"Before the event, Trump did a roundtable fundraiser that cost between $20,000 and $25,000 a person, There were about 18 people there," Katz said. "That money was actually used to pay off Bridgegate lawyers that the state Republican party had hired after they got hit with subpoenas more than two years ago. There’s a half-million dollars owed to those Bridgegate attorneys. And now, thanks to Trump — who six months ago campaigned against Christie by saying he knew about Bridgegate — that debt is mostly paid off."

And what Trump gets out of it is a representative of the "conservative establishment" he can victimize in public, to his (pained) face:

How much would it cost to make Chris Christie a better person?

It takes a lot to frighten Snooki. Via.

About $25 million:

The ideology of stupid

Image from a real article, in Car & Driver, 2011.

So I too made myself watch the Republican candidates' "debate", or quite a lot of it, doing the family laundry—every time I resurfaced from the basement the 18-year-old said "You missed everything!" He was talking about the WWE trash-talking aspect, which dominated the production, as it was clearly intended to do, with all the questions directed by Jake Tapper to provoke quarrels: "Well, Cheryl says she saw you whispering to Bobby in algebra class, is that correct?"

On the plus side, Tapper tended to shut people up after some fixed number of seconds if they refused to answer the question at all, as they all did, in favor of a carefully composed aria displaying their "knowledge" of the general subject or asserting that they had dealt with something relevant in the course of their careers. This has of course always been a central element of the political "debate" since its advent in 1960; Tapper wielding the hook lent the proceedings an enjoyable note of Live-at-the-Apollo hilarity.

Local news

Guido Fawkes and the Gunpowder plotters, by Crispijn van de Passe, 17th century. Wikipedia.

In local news, as you've probably heard, New York State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R) and his son Adam have been arrested for corruption—specifically, with doing favors in Albany for an environmental contracting firm and a real estate developer in return for their paying Adam a hefty, work-free salary (eventually, $10,000 a month).

In a statement, Senator Skelos said: “I am innocent of the charges leveled against me. I am not saying I am just not guilty, I am saying that I am innocent. I fully expect to be exonerated by a public jury trial.”

Uh-huh:

¡Cuomo lo deseas!

Image from last September via WNYC Radio. Don't they look as if they're taking an exam and Andrew's thinking about cheating?

Governor Andrew Cuomo, fresh from his turn as Pontius Pilate in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation review of natural gas fracking in the state—they came to the right decision, which is a really good thing, but it's evident that Cuomo's chief concern was to not be seen as making a decision at all, and instead of welcoming the ban and its protection for the health of New Yorkers and the integrity of the environment he gloomily predicted a "ton of lawsuits" that are not in fact going to take place at all—

Fearless City: Postscript

Andy 'n' Chris: "Look how serious we are! Awesome!" But a little smile on Cuomo's lips as he contemplates the captive press, paying him attention but unable to ask him a single question about his role in Albany's corruption and secrecy. Photo by Katie Orlinsky/New York Times.

Not that fearless. I guess I spoke too soon.

Friday started off pretty well, with New York as a whole resolutely refusing to panic and Mayor de Blasio and city health commissioner Mary Bassett keeping things that way, as our own Ebola victim, Dr. Craig Spencer, remained in stable condition:

The right to aspire

"Make that respect for me, not for you." Via somebody's tumblr.

Just about everybody you might want to hear from is on this astonishingly offensive remark by the governor of New Jersey, but I'd like to help pile on:

"I gotta tell you the truth, I'm tired of hearing about the minimum wage, I really am," Christie said during an event at the Chamber of Commerce in Washington, according to a recording of his remarks by the liberal opposition research group American Bridge.

Chris Cross

Why are these men laughing? Via Capital New York.

New Jersey governor Christopher Christie, although his job as chairman of the Republican Governors Association tasks him above all things with working for GOP victories in this year's 36 gubernatorial races, is strangely reluctant to offer any support to the Republican candidate across the Hudson in New York, somebody called Rob Astorino (which would be the Italian for "little goshawk" and not, as I hoped, "little star"—twinkle, twinkle!), against the Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo.

That may be, according to a brilliant analytic piece by Andrea Bernstein of WNYC radio New York. because Christie and Cuomo are practically the same person:

Cheap shot: Just a little bit

What does Governor Christie want? According to Radio Iowa:

“Every time I come here to Iowa I get a great sense of affection and respect from the folks here, but that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be universally loved and if you want to be universally loved in this business, then you’re the absolute poster boy for being ineffective,” Christie said during this afternoon’s news conference. “I don’t care about being loved. I care about being respected.”

For example:

But is our children learning?

Philip Kovacs at Education Week. 2011.

You've heard about the situation in the Newark Public Schools, which have been under state control since 1995 and now, under the imperial control of Governor Christie's proconsul/superintendent Cami Anderson, faces the layoffs of about 1000 teachers or a third of the teaching force as well as of other workers, while Teach For America missionaries (no doubt wearing pith helmets and carrying machetes; see shrill Owen Davis) replace them and in spite of the $40-million budget gap Anderson's local minions reap remarkable rewards. I just wanted to post all these extraordinary links, and note in passing that Newark is getting to be like the Stalingrad of education rephorm.

But in the interests of fairness, I'd like to present the following comment in favor of the layoffs, from a story at www.nj.com:

CC0715

last month

As a teacher I think it's a great idea to "trim the fat", so to speak. I work hard for my position and I see other teacher's doing the same things year after year. Other professions are merit based, I think Teaching should be too. We are talking about the future of our Country. What types of people would you like to see fix our nation, slackers or go getters?

LikeReplyShare

Hey, I'd like to see our classrooms staffed by people who know how to use apostrophes and capital letters, but nobody's asking me.

Christie on partisanship

Governor Christie, quoted at ForwardProgressives:

“I don’t believe this is a conservative, or moderate, or liberal issue,” Christie concluded.  “I don’t believe this is a Republican or Democrat issue. Because, let me tell you, I know as many drug-addicted Republicans as I know drug-addicted Democrats.” 

OK, I'll let you tell me. But I want numbers.

From artsy tumblr ChrisChristieEats.

Let's go slumming

Ill-met in Oakton, proud Titania. Wikipedia.

The mainstream media don’t get New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. They think he is a bully.

Writes Jennifer Rubin. I love how somebody with a full-time gig at the Washington Post gets to speak of the "mainstream media" as a kind of exotic species of which she has a specialized knowledge she can share with her audience: