Fugget about it!Follow

As adorable as it would be to listen to you lecture on construction management*, I'll just restate that we already have statements (and likely incoming testimony) from the decision-making levels of the organization.

*I'm reminded of you lecturing me about urban zoning and construction permitting. Which was made even more precious by your temper tantrum when people didn't just accept you as an authority on how ISPs and internet traffic worked.

The study that was approved had no mention of lane closures. It was for traffic cameras, which were installed prior to the email Kelley sent to Wildstein.

Edited, Feb 3rd 2014 9:00pm by Catwho

Then who put folks with orange vests and cones out to close those lanes? You don't actually think that Wildstein personally called up a few work crews and told them to close those lanes do you? So there were other people involved with the decision making process. People who had much greater understanding of traffic flow and whatnot than Wildstein. People who's jobs are to do things like organize freeway work and lane closures of all sorts. People who are not Wildstein.

Get it? This idea that it was him and some staff member working for the Governor is laughable.

Truly shocking revelations.

Actually, it's pretty much what happened. All the people who are, per the regulations of New Jersey and New York, supposed to be informed about this kind of thing, were not so informed ahead of time. That's why everyone freaked out. That's why people started digging all the way back in September immediately after it happened. It didn't grow legs until the FOAI dug out the emails indicating that people who claimed ignorance of the whole thing actually knew (e.g. people in Christie's office.)

Christie's only line of defense for himself has been, to this point, that his staff didn't tell him about it until after the lanes were re-opened. (I guess he doesn't listen to traffic reports or the news.) No emails directly implicate Christie.

But now that half his staff has resigned and been subpoenaed and he's thrown them under the bus, speculation is whether or not they're going to say he was the instigator or try to protect him til the end.

No. I don't think it's impossible. I just think that the investigation has skipped past the whole "did someone actually do something wrong?" part and right to the "find the person responsible!" part.



Sure. And if it turns out that those lanes really were closed in some kind of bizarre political revenge scheme, committed by members of the governors staff, I'll freely admit that I was wrong and I apparently have no clue how stupid and petty folks in NJ are. And if the governor himself is involved, I'll also freely admit that he's a heavy handed *** hat, and boy are people stupid and vindictive in Jersey.

But I'm the person who looked at the Plame scandal on day one and predicted that it would turn out that no laws were broken, and no one really outed anyone, but they'd find someone in the white house to nail for perjury or some other such silly charge. And that's exactly what happened.

For the record? That is what a real "phoney scandal" looks like. Now, It's possible that I'm wrong. But if this goes anything like most of the trumped up phoney scandals the left has cooked up go, the "investigation" will mostly involve a couple years of innuendo and cleverly leaked statements designed to be most damaging to the GOP victims involved. They'll keep going over records and testimony until they find someone (or multiple someone's) who lied about something somewhere, even if it's completely unrelated to the original scandal. And then, after enough time has gone by, and most people have forgotten what the original thing was about and are primed to accept a half loaf result, they'll quietly conclude with facts that don't match the original claims, but it wont matter because they'll have trashed several people's careers along the way and gotten a couple years of media cycles where they get to rehash the old "corrupt republicans" meme.

But hey. I could be wrong. Never know.




Who? Seriously. I really don't care that much, nor do I even know who most of these people are. It's just that I've been watching this thing unfold nationally for a month or so now, and every time I read or hear someone talk about it, they skip right from "lanes were closed" to "who knew the lanes were going to be closed" and I've yet to have anyone really explain how merely knowing that some lanes were going to be closed equates to being in on some kind of plot.

I guessing that hundreds of people knew that those lanes were going to be closed. Were they all in on it? Or just the people working for and politically aligned with Christie? Doesn't that seem suspiciously selective? Again, look hard enough at anyone and you'll find something that can be viewed as "suspicious". The issue with a lot of these scandals isn't about what was done by whom, but who the folks investigating decide to focus on. If the Plame scandal had focused on the meeting she had and traced who knew about her from there, they would have arrived at Armitage almost immediately. But instead, they started with the theory that the white house outted her as payback for her husbands Op Eds. Therefore, they focused only on who in the white house knew about her and might have leaked it.

Same deal here. They're starting with the conspiracy theory (they did it to get back at their political enemies) and thus focusing only on looking at people who knew or were involved, and who might be in on such a conspiracy. They should be starting with the work that was done, then looking at who signed off on it. Then looking at who met with those who signed off on it. And then looking at who gave direction to those who were in the meetings with those who signed off on it. I suspect that once you do that, you'll find that there really was a planned traffic study, and someone deep in the bowels of whatever agency in NJ handles traffic issues decided that blocking off selected lanes would give them more/better data, and a bunch of other people, most not involved with the governors office or party in any direct way, all thought it was a good idea as well, and thus it got authorized.

Starting with the top and looking only at people in the governor's circle who knew about it is a really skewed way of doing things if you actually want to find out what happened and why. It's a great way of doing things if your objective is to create a scandal that will damage governor Christie.

A FOIA request by a left leaning media outlet that looked only at emails of people connected with Christie. You don't see the problem with that?


And you're believing the whole "normal channels weren't followed" bit? Look. Someone (multiple someone's) screwed up. Big time. And that someone is unlikely to step forward and say "Yeah. We were complete idiots who didn't realize how much problem this would cause". And if the media folks scrutinize the governors staff instead of the folks who were actually involved, you think they're not just going to stay quiet and thank their lucky stars that politics is more important than the truth? Yeah. Sure.

People freaked out. Then the people who should have been on top of this sort of thing, but screwed up, looked for someone to take the fall.

I'll point out again that Wildstein can't order a crew to shut down a lane. Someone else, several someone elses, at several organizational levels between him and the crews had to both known and agreed to do it. If the correct signs off processes were not followed, then the question should be "why the hell did a road crew close those lanes without proper authorization?". And you trace the issue upwards from there. Saying "normal regulations weren't followed' is a cop out. Someone told the crews to do that. Someone told that person to tell them. Someone else told that person. Etc... Skipping all those steps and blaming Wildstein is insane.



You're operating under the assumption that the conspiracy theory is true. Consider that it's not, and this whole thing is an exercise in constructed scandal. Who gains? It's strange that you have no problem accepting the idea that people would engage in what has to be the stupidest political payback scheme in the history of the universe, yet managed to pull it off despite having no direct authority to do so, and apparently with no record of them actually giving any orders to anyone involved in the lane closures at all, but you can't muster up the imagination to think that maybe someone just decided to take advantage of a traffic ***** up to go on a fishing expedition against the governors office?

Examine any group of people close enough and long enough, and you'll find someone who did or said something that can be made to look suspicious. The first rule of a scandal is to point the investigation at the people you want to hurt. Hence my suspicion at a scandal that seems to have been created in the news media by choosing to look only at the governors people rather than tracking the people who actually did the work.

Considering you're from the Wrong Coast I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but New Jersey in general is stupid, petty and vindictive.

Besides all of the evidence you've hand waved away as your "just not seeing it," you mean. Republican. gbaji to the rescue by repeating what he heard on the news. Not nearly as much to think about as you would hope. Kind of pedestrian, really.

Hmm, ok, funny that we didn't see the proposed project documentation for the study; related study documents were, apparently, not even recovered by the right leaning media. I will mention that it would appear that few studies are done by actually blocking stuff ( and done without heads up ).

Food for thought,

What evidence? The quotes from the emails do not even show that either Wildstein or Kelly was responsible for making the lane closures happen, much less give us any reason to make any assumption about the motivation behind said lane closures. They only show that they knew they were going to happen. Great. So they and presumably several hundred other people all knew that these lane closures were going to happen. That means nothing.


You're starting with what you want to believe happened and then looking only at things that are consistent with that starting point. So what? Lots of things are consistent with that assumption. But they're also consistent with any of a dozen other more likely explanations.

When you hear hoofbeats behind you, you don't assume it's a zebra.



You know, the whole "you're just parroting what you heard" bit is really old and tired. Doubly so in this case, where the issue is that I'm not hearing anything on the news about this. I'm specifically commenting on what I see as big gaping holes in the information about this case in the media. I've been trying to find that information, but it's just not there. And that makes me think that there's something bogus about the scandal. There's just too many people saying "This was done for political payback", but aside from people saying that over and over, I can't find anything that actually supports that idea.

If I just wrote down all the facts we have about this, and presented it to someone who hadn't heard anything about this before, they would never in a million years conclude that there was a plot by the governors office/staff/whatever to block lanes to punish their political enemies. You only think that because a bunch of people in the media keep speculating that that happened. Take away their speculative editorializing and there's no reason to think that. We're talking cart before the horse, big time.

Don't yell at him. It will only scare him. What I found helpful is to slowly nudge him towards the answer.

Does it take long. Good God yes, but I did not see anything else work.