Category: Politics As Usual

Yay Wendy

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

This is some very good news!

Wendy Davis, the Texas Democratic candidate for governor, reported eye-popping fundraising numbers on Tuesday evening, another indication that the Lone Star State governor’s race will be a high-dollar, high-profile race.

The state senator, who is facing Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott in the race to succeed Rick Perry, raked in more than $12.2 million from July 1 to Dec. 31 from more than 70,000 individual donors, an impressive figure even in vast Texas, where campaigning statewide is astronomically expensive.

The total figures put Davis “way past the credibility threshold,” said Davis spokeswoman Rebecca Acuña in an interview. “They are huge, huge numbers showing there is so much support and momentum for her race.”
Davis catapulted to fame over the summer when she waged a lengthy filibuster that temporarily derailed a restrictive abortion measure, drawing notice from Austin to Washington. But she still faces an uphill battle in the deep-red state against Abbott. Abbott spokesman Avdiel Huerta said the Republican’s campaign raised $11.5 million in the same period, and that Abbott has $27 million cash on hand. He stressed that about 97 percent of the contributions came from within the state.

Christie’s false transparency

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Republican Gov. Chris Christie - A Bridge Too Far and impassable

An editorial in yesterday’s Newark Times-Ledger:

When the Assembly’s Bridgegate investigators released thousands of scandal-related phone and e-mail records last week, the most damning were those sent from personal phones and email addresses. The Christie administration, it’s now clear, runs on Gmail.

That’s no accident.

Using private channels for sensitive – even illegal – government business is a common end-run around nosy reporters and pesky open-records laws. Legally, the records are public – but hardly anyone knows to ask for them. In this case, it took a legislative subpoena to shake them loose.

That’s why the New Jersey ACLU has called for Christie to order all public employees to use government email accounts and phones when they conduct public business. He should comply – though it’s hardly more than a baby step toward ending this administration’s pattern of obstruction that includes denying public record requests, refusing to discuss its decisions on controversial issues and hiding top officials – all the way up to Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno – from questions.

And when reporters tried to track down executives at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to answer questions about the George Washington Bridge lane closures, the questions were routed through the New Jersey Governor’s Office – where they were ignored.

Bridgegate is an example of the dangerous shenanigans that fester when powerful people grow accustomed to acting without accountability, and doing the public’s business with no risk of public scrutiny. As long as the Christie administration hides its policies and people from the public eye — using back-channels to plot revenge and conceal their secrets — his promises of accoutability and transparency are nothing more than a joke.

Christie’s second inauguration takes place in less than a week – too little time to build a transparent administration from scratch, but more than enough time to tell his minions to stop hiding behind their Gmail accounts.

The difference between DeBlasio and Warren

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Wise - 734 - Elizabeth Warren

The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber piece, “Here Comes The Anti-Government Left” does an interesting compare and contrast between Bill DeBlasio and Elizabeth Warren. He says Warren’s populism is more radical — and more popular across the country:

de Blasio accepts that today’s rich and powerful will continue to be rich and powerful; he just thinks they should do more to help the rest of us. Warren questions the very legitimacy of their wealth and power. “I’ve been in the Senate for nearly a year and believe as strongly as ever that the system is rigged,” she said in a recent speech.

This difference of emphasis isn’t shocking: New York City would fall into a deep depression if the financial sector shrunk substantially. And I don’t mean to belittle de Blasio’s agenda, which I consider important. But neither is that agenda especially ambitious in any cosmic sense. As other politicians have demonstrated before him, there’s no particular tension between a concern for the poor and a deference to the rich.*

It’s why some have begun to think of de Blasio’s worldview as “Bloombergism with a populist mask.” De Blasio helped nurture this impression himself by courting the lords of finance and real estate during his general election campaign, then making a handful of Bloomberg-esque appointments, like the Goldman Sachs executive he named as his deputy mayor for housing and development.2

But here’s the thing: In addition to being more radical substantively, Warren’s agenda is much more sale-able politically.

The reason is that it plays directly to the source of today’s anti-government skepticism. While trust in government has been steadily falling since hitting a decades-long peak after 9/11, voters’ particular beef against government changed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Around that time, a variety of indicators suggested that voters’ suspicions were tied to the relationship between the government and powerful interests, whom voters believed were lavishing benefits on themselves at taxpayer expense. Pew found a sharp bipartisan drop in the number of voters who felt “government is really run for the benefit of all the people” beginning in 2009. Gallup found a spike in the number of people dissatisfied with “size and influence of major corporations.”

It turns out that many of the voters who’d lost faith in government weren’t anti-government per se. They’d simply concluded it was working for the powerful and not for them.
Continue reading “The difference between DeBlasio and Warren” →

When did he know?

~ susie

Chris Christie Explodes

TPM has a Sept. 19 letter from NJ Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg about the GWB lane closures on which Chris Christie was copied — at least two weeks before he said he first knew about it. My, his version does keep changing, doesn’t it?

The letter was addressed to William Pat Schuber, a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the bridge, expressing her dismay about the lane closures. She also copied Christie on it.

“I am at a loss for words regarding the Authority’s sudden change in the traffic flow pattern to the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee. Reducing the number of lanes during peak traffic times has caused a significant hardship for many in the area. This decision, made with no public comment, has created significant congestion in Bergen County,” Weinberg wrote.

At a news conference last month, Christie suggested he first learned of the situation in Fort Lee from newspaper reports published Oct. 1. At his marathon news conference last week, Christie modified his earlier statement and said he may have learned of the issue from “an earlier story.” Christie’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TPM about Weinberg’s letter.

In an interview with TPM Monday, Weinberg said she contacted Schuber because he was a former executive of Bergen County, where Fort Lee is located. Due to this association, she expected him to be responsive to local needs. She said Schuber responded after receiving her letter and vowed to look into the issue, but afterwards, she said he did not respond to subsequent inquiries.

“Pat Schuber called me said, ‘You know I didn’t know anything about this,’ which on Sept. 19 he probably didn’t, ‘But I will get to the bottom of it,'” Weinberg told TPM. “I have engaged Pat Schuber personally and publicly at least two or three times saying, ‘You promised me you’d get to the bottom of this.’ And I’m faced with dead silence.”

Weinberg said her attempts to discuss the matter with Schuber included trying to speak to him at a swearing in event for one of the local councils over the “New Year’s break” where they were both in attendance.

“He cut out of there so fast because he didn’t want to bump into me,” she said.

Schuber did not immediately respond to a request for comment. View Weinberg’s original letter below.

Loretta Weinberg Letter (September 19, 2013)

A little background on Christie’s gal pal, Michele Brown

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Chris Christie and Bridgegate! The Hidden Reality of the Bridge Scandal

In 2012, Christie pushed out the previous experienced head of the Economic Development Authority, and put in his GF, Michele Brown. Despite having no background in redevelopment, she was given a significant raise — to $225,000. (The previous head made $184,000.)

But since she didn’t really know what she was doing, they had to hire someone else to do the actual work ($162,5000). Always looking out for the taxpayers, right?

And I’m sure he wouldn’t dream of using her to wield the development bank as a way to reward his friends and punish his enemies!

Feds probing Chris Christie for using Sandy relief money to fund ads during campaign

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Once in a while, there’s a perfect storm that enfolds a politician, and this is one of those times:

Feds probing Chris Christie for using Sandy relief money to fund ads during campaign (via Raw Story )

Federal inspectors are investigating whether New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who was forced to fire two top aides over the George Washington Bridge scandal last week, misused relief funds from superstorm Sandy to make commercials with his family…

Continue reading “Feds probing Chris Christie for using Sandy relief money to fund ads during campaign” →

Those kids with asthma weren’t really using those lungs

~ susie

So it won’t actually matter how much pollution this little project will dump into the air — in an area already famous for poor area quality. But since the elite on the Jersey side are complaining, perhaps it will be sidelined:

Toxic chemical particles could begin swirling around areas of Mercer and Burlington counties if a hazardous waste incinerator — estimated to burn 25,000 pounds of waste per day — comes to Bristol, Pa., opponents of the project say.

Route 13 Bridge Partners of King of Prussia, Pa., is seeking approval tonight from Bristol Township officials to build a 50,392-square-foot industrial waste burner on the now-defunct Rohm & Haas chemical manufacturing plant on Route 13, officials said.

The plan also calls for a 3,749-square-foot office on George Patterson Boulevard in the Bridge Business Center.

But environmentalists and area officials, concerned about its possible far-reaching health impacts, said they are doing all they can to prevent the project from coming to fruition.

“This is one of the most ludicrous proposals you could have along the riverfront. When you burn hazardous waste, you don’t get rid of it; it’s changing forms,” said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, a nonprofit that promotes environmental conservation. “People in New Jersey need to fight this.”