Category: It’s OK If You’re A Republican

The goombah

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

chris christie

Everyone who lives around here already knows what a vindictive asshole Christie is:

So the unfolding story of the lane closings has become something of a cause célèbre, resulting in a hearing before the New Jersey Legislature on Monday, as well as a window into the proudly aggressive and often secretive dealings of Mr. Christie’s team.

The mayor of Fort Lee, a Democrat, complained in a letter in September that the lane closings were “punitive” — Mr. Christie, a Republican, was leaning heavily on Democratic mayors to endorse him for re-election so he could present himself as a presidential candidate with bipartisan appeal, but the mayor was not going along.

Mr. Christie laughed off the idea that he had been involved in a matter as small as closing bridge lanes, and his chief appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the bridge, insisted that the lane closings were simply part of a traffic study.

But on Friday, the man who ordered the closings — a high school friend of the governor’s who was a small-town mayor and the founder of an anonymous political blog before Mr. Christie’s appointee created a job for him at the Port Authority — resigned, saying the issue had become “a distraction.”

And testifying under subpoena in Trenton on Monday, bridge workers described Mr. Christie’s associates’ ordering the closings, and called the different maneuvers “unprecedented,” “odd” and “wrong.” There was, they said, no study.

Mr. Christie’s associates at the Port Authority, they said, ordered bridge workers to shut down the lanes with three days’ notice despite warnings that it would cause havoc, and that changes of this magnitude typically took years of planning. They were instructed not to tell anyone — not the news media, not Fort Lee, not even the Port Authority’s executive director, who is an appointee of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, they said. They protested, but went along, they said, because they feared retribution.

At perhaps the strangest turn in the legislative hearing, the chairman of the Transportation Committee, Assemblyman John Wisniewski, a Democrat, pressed the Port Authority’s executive director, Patrick J. Foye, to say whether it was possible that the police officer who had overseen the moving of the cones that closed the lanes — a man named Captain Licorice, though no one who testified could verify the spelling of his name — had been given a promotion as a reward for staying silent about the whole operation.

“You have to forgive our suspicion here,” Mr. Wisniewski told Mr. Foye, who was forced, as other Port Authority officials were, to attend the hearing by subpoena. “There’s a lot here that’s happened that is not normal, that is unprecedented.”

“It is troubling to me, too,” Mr. Foye replied. (He did say, however, that the promotion was not an exchange for silence.)

Via DUI Lawyer Kush Arora.

The real Chris Christie

~ susie

Chris Christie

Yes, he really is that vindictive and small. I can’t wait until the rest of the country understands that!

At first, it seemed crazy to believe that Gov. Chris Christie’s allies at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey would be stupid enough to mess with the traffic flow at the George Washington Bridge as an act of revenge against a mayor who refused to endorse the governor’s re-election.

But the administration, including the governor, has been so evasive and secretive that it’s obvious they have something to hide.

Most of the relevant players have simply refused to testify. And the one who did, Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni, was implausible. He said the closures, and the resulting traffic horrors in Fort Lee, were part of a traffic study. But he could not produce the study, or any e-mails discussing the need for a study, or an explanation as to why the agency broke its routine by failing to give advance notice to police, ambulance crews or even relevant employees within the agency.

Now the governor has jumped in. Asked Monday about the lane closures, he mocked the question with this: “I worked the cones,” he said. “Unbeknownst to anyone, I was working the cones.”

Here’s what we know for sure: The lanes were ordered closed by David Wildstein, a political appointee of the governor, not a traffic expert. The agency’s executive director, Patrick Foye, exploded when he learned of the move. He ordered it reversed at once, and called it “dangerous” and “probably illegal.

Chip Rogers has the biggest cojones in Georgia…

~ Boohunney ~ 1 Comment

Former Georgia State Senator Chip Rogers a PLAYER. It’s a real fascinating story of a well connected Georgia politician.

This is the person that in 2007 that took out a 2.3 million dollar loan to refurbish an interstate motel in Northwest Georgia. The plan did not go well…

Five years later it appears U.S. Rep. Tom Graves and state Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers will have to pay back only about half that debt, according to public records examined by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Experts say the FDIC, the federal agency that insures bank deposits, will be on the hook for most of the loss.

For Graves and Rogers, tea party favorites and champions of fiscal responsibility, the resolution of their failed business venture opens them up to charges of hypocrisy.

“They may oppose bailouts, but it looks like they are getting one themselves,” said Tony Plath, a national banking expert and finance professor at UNC-Charlotte…

Court documents show that Graves and Rogers were struggling to make payments almost immediately after they signed the loan documents with Bartow County Bank in 2007.

Soon, Bartow County Bank had joined the ranks of Georgia banks shuttered by federal regulators

Rogers was the state Senate Majority Leader that had the most informative meeting in 2012 regarding Agenda 21, a nonbinding UN agreement that commits member nations to promote sustainable development …

In the eyes of conservative activists, Agenda 21 is a nefarious plot that includes forcibly relocating non-urban-dwellers and prescribing mandatory contraception as a means of curbing population growth. The invitation to the Georgia state Senate event noted the presentation would explain: “How pleasant sounding names are fostering a Socialist plan to change the way we live, eat, learn, and communicate to ‘save the earth.'”

Comments made in this meeting included how this plan will implemented by President Obama using the Delphi Technique…

They do that by a process known as the Delphi technique. The Delphi technique was developed by the Rand Corporation during the Cold War as a mind-control technique. It’s also known as “consensive process.” But basically the goal of the Delphi technique is to lead a targeted group of people to a pre-determined outcome while keeping the illusion of being open to public input.

That’s right, MIND CONTROL. After this little afternoon of insanity, in a possible unrelated circumstance, Chip Rogers withdrew his re-election bid for the leadership position.

Well, Chip Rogers leads a charmed life, I tell you. Our state just can’t let good talent go. So, Governor Nathan Deal found Chip Rogers a perfect position: an Executive Producer at Georgia Public Broadcasting. He had a really strong resume for the position…

Rogers appeared on cable television broadcasts as Will “The Winner” Rogers and other monikers to predict the outcomes of upcoming football games to help sports bettors before he became state Senate majority leader.

On one cable TV show, Rogers allegedly urged bettors to dial a pay-per-call number for his predictions, which he claimed had an 80 percent success rate.

Did you know that the new position created for Rogers pays more than what our Governor pulls down a year?

A veteran employee of Georgia Public Broadcasting in Atlanta has quit in protest over the hiring of former State Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers at GPB, at double and triple the salary of others in similar positions there…

Employees have been furloughed and laid off, as many of their jobs are being out-sourced and eliminated.

And yet Rogers began work this week at GPB headquarters, on 14th Street NW (Atlanta), as an executive producer, for $150,000 a year.

And he used to own an interest in a little radio in Cartersville, GA in Bartow County. Except now, he has regained his interest in the radio station without filing proper notification to the FCC…

The station, tiny WYXC-AM, is at the center of an ongoing drama that’s spilled over into Bartow County courts. Current operators John and Brandi Underwood filed suit last month, alleging their partner Greg Detscher had surreptitiously bought the station and kicked them out of the premises.

FCC records show WYXC-AM in Cartersville is licensed to Clarion Communications Inc., which bought the station in 2006 from Rogers, who financed $190,000 of the deal. Ownership records from 2011, the most recent on file with the FCC, name Cartersville businessman Chuck Shiflett and former Adairsville City Councilman Tommy Young as equal partners in Clarion.

It’s unclear when Young, a former Adairsville city councilman, returned his half-interest to Rogers. In December 2012, Rogers signed the new management agreement with Detscher and the Underwoods on behalf of Beechwood Services Inc., identified as the parent company of Clarion Communications. Rogers has listed Beechwood as his wife’s business in financial disclosures filed as a legislator, most recently for 2011.

An FCC spokeswoman confirmed last week that it had received no notice of any change in WYXC’s controlling interest. The station’s public file, which licensees must make available to anyone wanting to see it, contains no such notice.

Georgia Public Broadcasting, which requires that employees get written permission for outside employment, also has no written disclosure of Rogers’ ownership or affiliation with outside media outlets.

Well, I doubt much will come from GPB. It will be interesting if he can weasel his way out of this with the FCC. I mean, after all, he is the well connected Chip Rogers with BIG COJONES…

Southern hospitality

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Bless his heart:

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R)’s family and business partner have been receiving payments from a secret Political Action Committee called Real PAC. Half a million dollars of the money donated to the PAC has come from corporate health care interests which — like the governor and Georgia state Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens — oppose the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as “Obamacare.”

According to investigative reporter Jim Walls of Atlanta Unfiltered, the PAC hasn’t filed taxes or the required financial disclosures in two years, and the information it did file for 2011 was incorrect.

Contributors to Real PAC include Aetna, Humana, Blue Cross, United Health care and other interests that want to keep health insurance premiums and other costs as high as possible. Bryan Long of activist group Better Georgia told Raw Story that the list of donors shows who Gov. Deal really works for.

“He goes out and he does their bidding,” Long said, “He’s working for them instead of working for the 650,000 Georgians who don’t have insurance at all or access to the Medicaid expansion.”

“What’s remarkable about this isn’t that there’s money in politics,” he continued. “We all know there’s money in politics. He knew that this was so wrong that he didn’t want to tell anyone. He tried to keep it a secret for two years.”

Deal’s office made financial records publicly available on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, hoping, Long said, that no one would pay attention. The AP reported Friday that among its outgoing costs, the PAC “paid $30,000 to Southern Magnolia Capital, a fundraising firm founded by Deal’s daughter-in-law, Denise Deal. It also paid Ken Cronan, who co-owned a Gainesville salvage yard with Deal, more than $10,000 in December for pilot and plane expenses.”

All of the companies that pay into the PAC are doing business with the state of Georgia on some level. The PAC’s treasurer, former state ethics chairman Rick Thompson, protested that the PAC money is not just for Deal’s re-election, but for “Republican causes.”