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Ya, but who can trust a Jew?

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****

So Wildstein decided to put Christie out of the 2016 election cycle.

Then again, two years is a lot of time in politics. We already moving faster and faster on every news cycle. I don't think people even remember recent gvmt shutdown thing. So this is prolly even smaller potatoes.

Anyway, how badly did they scare the guy that he ratted out on a guy that is known to be somewhat vindictive, and, well, something of a ****.

That's true for saying something stupid or supporting an unpopular policy. There's no way people will forgive him intentionally ******** over people for personal gain. Republicans will not risk supporting him. They doubted him before, there's no way they will support him now.

I realize you're a troll, but it's the weekend... so heh.

The severity of the scandal makes a difference. Republicans did not trust him or support him without the scandal, they are surely not going to support him with the scandal. You have to remember that the Republicans are low in the polls, have lost the past two elections and have no clear front runner. Republicans will only support a candidate that they believe can win the general election and without the scandal, Christie was questionable.

Wrote a long response, pressed post, the browser freaked out, and I lost it. Oh well, I will give you cliff notes.

Republican party is falling apart. Dems are slowly falling apart In two years people won't remember **** even if you show them pictures.

Well, he was the front-runner in GOP primary polling. Not by any huge margin (+4-6) but he had the plurality anyway. But, yeah, you already had conservative groups bemoaning the idea of another "blue state moderate governor" after Romney just got trounced with the same calling card.

Key work about democratic party is 'slowly'. If you look at Vermont, you will understand what I mean.

Also, it was chrome.

I use IE at home. I was having some serious issues with this site about a month ago. It kept giving me an error message that the certificate thingy was bad. Some times I could refresh the page and it would go away, other times not.

I figure IE and Zam kissed and made up though, as it all just stopped one day.

I have to use IE for work stuff for some reason. As a matter of fact, I specifically have to use IE version 9. I'm not sure why.

Also this:

Highly unlikely that he would have even come close to being the nominee. I've never been a huge fan of Christie, but I get why people like him. He's got a strong "tell it like it is" persona, that people tend to like in a politician (in theory anyway). In reality, that sort of politics ends out getting you bounced out of national level runs because it's something that sounds great in principle, but makes it terrifically easy for the opposition to turn against you. There are far too many different groups that can be pissed off by that sort of political approach.

Um... And at the risk of injecting something which maybe shouldn't matter. He's fat. Not "a little on the heavy side", but actually medically obese. We can all stand here and say it shouldn't affect his chances, but if we're honest we all know that alone costs him like 10 points in any national election (at least). People like their leaders healthy and strong. Fair or not, an obese person is assumed to have a lack of self control. And if he can't be trusted to keep his sweaty mitts off the dessert tray, how can we trust him with the nuclear ******* of the worlds largest military?

Having said all of that, I have to admit that I'm honestly still confused about what the hell this whole scandal is actually about. I get that there were lanes closed that caused a big massive traffic jam. And I get that there were people who "knew about it" (which seems kinda "duh", since someone had to actually authorize it and send crews to do it). What I don't get, and haven't yet really heard a satisfactory explanation to is how we go from those facts to "The governors staff deliberately closed the lanes to create a traffic jam to <insert fuzzy logic here> harm some Mayor from the other party".

It just seems like a strange leap to make, yet, all the coverage and "investigation" seems to be focusing on whether various people in the governors staff knew about the closures, and not into the motivation and reasoning behind the closures themselves. I mean, I'm assuming the governor's staff weren't actually standing on the freeway with cones and orange vests themselves, right? So there had to be coordination with a whole set of different organizations which actually have direct control over things like freeway lane closures. So shouldn't we be looking at that process instead of going on a witch hunt through the governors office?


It would seem like minutes of meetings with whatever groups actually did the closures might yield more information as to why they happened and whether those reasons were legitimate, right? I mean, do we actually have anything other than wild speculation to suggest that this was actually some kind of political payback thing?

Yeah. I've heard this. But this tells me that they knew that the lane closures would cause traffic problems (again, duh!). It doesn't lead me to "this was done as political payback". The whole thing just comes off like speculating about what terrible plot could have been behind it all, but not really establishing that this was behind it. Then going 3 steps past the evidence and launching an investigation.

That's not a smoking gun to me. Not unless you really leap to conclusions without facts. Where's the email saying "those traffic jams will teach <someone> to mess with us!"? That's what's missing. Where's the connection to this idea of it being political payback? I'm just not seeing it.



Great. So let's start with the guys wearing the vests and putting out cones and trace the issue back from there. I guess my issue with this is that somehow we've bypassed like 8 levels of government right to the governors staff, apparently based on the wild speculation I mentioned earlier. I'm not seeing the dots in between though.



Sure. Which is exactly what you'd expect if they knew that there was a traffic study going on, right? I'm not seeing how the fact that some members of his staff knew about the lane closures equates to a really wild assumption about why those closures happened.

Again, his staff weren't out there with orange vests and cones, right? So a whole group of people, all of whom presumably had much more direct responsibility with actually managing traffic on the highway system, were involved in this. Perhaps we should be looking at them first instead of leaping to the target(s) we want to investigate. This whole thing smacks of phony scandal.



Um... which at the absolute worse tells us only that some set of people knew about the lane closures. So what? This just sounds like a "gotcha" scandal. Something happens that garners public attention. The media jumps on it and speculates that anyone in the governors office who knew about it must have done something wrong. Magically, people in the governors office start denying knowing anything about it, not because they did a single thing wrong, but because there's an angry mob looking to blame anyone in the governor's office who knew about it. Meanwhile, we've forgotten that a whole ton of people also knew about and were directly involved in the planning and execution of the event itself. But because they aren't the political targets we want to attack, they get ignored.


If we're going to assume something nefarious of anyone who knew about this, then why aren't we looking at the folks who actually did the shutdown? Or their bosses? How did we skip all those levels and go right to the governor's staff? That's the part that I don't get. Admittedly, here on the west coast this didn't become a story until the very tail end, so maybe I'm asking questions that have already been answered, but I swear I've listened to lots of pundits rambling on and on about this, and I still don't see where the link is between what clearly had to have been an approved traffic closure to "this was all done to punish Democrats". I really honestly don't see it.

All of the discussions about this seem to start with the assumption that the closures must have been political payback so anyone who knew about them was "in on it", but I've yet to actually hear or read any explanation of why the starting assumption exists. It just is.



That's great and all, but doesn't indicate anything concrete about this specific case. It's just more circular innuendo. All those other actions are being interpreted as payback because it's assumed that this went on in this case. One leads to the other. Take one away, and there's nothing real there at all.

Edited, Feb 3rd 2014 3:44pm by gbaji

Why on earth would you start with the road crew? Unless your contention is that rogue road crews are roaming around, shutting down lanes in some maverick fashion, you're just wasting time there. You already have a record who who told them where to go via the Port Authority and you already have senior people from the Port Authority implicating the governor's office.

Dunno. Do we have the full context of the string of emails, or just selected tidbits that look bad? For all I know they had a whole conversation where he told her what the plan was for the lane closures, both of them knew it would result in traffic jams, and when she heard that the study was green-lit, she said "time for some traffic problems in Port Lee", cause that was what was going to happen. Doesn't mean that she ordered it or anything.



Again. Is she telling him to cause traffic problems in Fort Lee, or responding to previous conversations about the upcoming traffic study? We all know how easy it is to misconstrue email, doubly so when we're only reading selected parts of the conversation.



Um... Because according to some of the other documents I've been looking at, a town called Springfield requested the study, and the $60k cost was being paid for or approved by the Governor's office. So presumably, that's how some of the governor's staff would have been aware of it.



Cause they were having a conversation about something that was coming up? Who cares? Find me the email where they say "Let's create a traffic jam to punish the people of Port Lee", and you've got something. All I've seen is a lot of stuff that could be interpreted to imply some kind of deliberate punitive action, but could also just be casual conversation being misconstrued.



No one else in any meeting over the months of planning and prep for this had any knowledge about traffic flow and effects of lane closures? He greenlit the thing, but let's go out on a limb and assume he's not actually a traffic flow expert. Let's also assume that someone requested the study (cause they did), and that they had some reason for doing so. Let's also assume that a whole set of people involved in the lane closures presumably had a much better understanding of traffic flow and handling then the "got it" guy.

He's a political guy. Not a traffic guy. Presumably someone (multiple someones) who actually are traffic guys were involved in this, and signed off on it, actually choose which lanes to shut down, etc.

Again, the political folks were not wearing orange vests and placing cones on the road. There's a ridiculous number of layers between them and those people. If you think that someone at his level could just say "hey. You guys with orange vests on. Go shut down this list of lanes tomorrow", you're incredibly naive. I'm not automatically discounting the possibility that a whole set of guys were involved in this, but my point is that if even a fraction of what's being tossed around as the assumed motivations and actions were true, you'd have hundreds of people "in on it". And not just political folks. You'd have to have the direct agreement of a bunch of hard hat guys working in/with whatever the freeway management agency is in NJ.


It's far far more likely that there was an actual legitimate traffic study that was proposed and approved, and the political folks (and presumably a whole bunch of other people) knew that it would cause traffic problems and they foolishly made jokes about it because the town that would be most impacted by said traffic problem happened to be run by a mayor of the other political party. Bad taste, sure. Conspiracy to cause a traffic jam? I just don't see it. If for no other reason than it seems like a particularly ineffective way of hurting someone else politically. No one's going to blame the mayor of Fort Lee for the traffic jams, right? So how exactly does this end out being political payback?

The biggest victims of this from a political perspective has been the governor's staff, right? So if we're going to create some kind of theory about political payback, isn't it more likely that someone took advantage of a traffic study that caused a big traffic jam to float the scandalous theory that it was done deliberately by the governor's office? Look hard enough at the emails of those involved and you can pretty much always find some statements that can be made to look "bad". And again, if you don't start with the assumption that this was done maliciously, there's nothing to indicate that. The cart is leading the horse here IMO.


Reminds me a lot of the whole Plame scandal, where it ultimately ended out to be complete BS, but if you raise a big enough stink and threaten people with the fear of "being involved", and investigate enough, you'll find someone who'll lie, not because he did anything wrong, but because he's afraid of the investigation. So far Bridget Kelly looks to be a lot like poor Scooter Libby. Let's not forget that she wasn't fired because she plotted to close the freeway to punish the people of Fort Lee, but because when the theories started floating around that this might have been political payback, she told the governor that she didn't know anything about it. She lied about knowing about the lane closures. Which is "bad", but still doesn't mean that the lane closures were anything other than a legitimate (if poorly executed) traffic study.