Is it time for Obama to reject and denounce Richard Sherman?
Archives for January 2014
I think your name tag said Jenny
The Bezos Times really should replace Rubin with a slightly less absurd conservative hack (via):
After Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin attached herself early to Mitt Romney andconfidently predicted his triumph for months, the shock of his unforeseeable loss left Rubin confused and leaderless for about a year. But she has settled back comfortably at the feet of Chris Christie, defending him with escalating devotion in a series of blog posts (here,here, here, here, here, here, and here) as a compulsively honest man persecuted by hypocritical partisans and likely to emerge from the pseudo-scandal not merely unscathed, but actually better off for it. (“The focus on an agenda more relevant to the rest of the country and more explicitly conservative may help him in the long run.”)
[….]Rubin likewise asserts, “MSNBC says the mayor has a personal diary that corroborates her claim — a diary that has yet to be released, reviewed or verified.” In fact, Zimmer’s diary entries are posted on MSNBC’s site — or, if you don’t trust MSNBC, other news sites as well — and the physical diary is being reviewed by the U.S. attorneyinvestigating Christie.
Sing, Mika, sing
“I don’t know if she’s telling the truth. I’m not convinced” @morningmika on NJ mayor’s Christie accusations. http://t.co/LKVg01GTQs
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) January 20, 2014
Say what you will about the tenets of Mark Halperin, at least he’s moved on to fluffing Jeb Bush.
MLK Jr. Day — Open Thread
(Seriously) Long Read: “Going the Distance: On and off the road with Barack Obama”
In the New Yorker, David Remnick, author of The Bridge: The Life & Rise of Barack Obama, has a 17,000 word report on a pre-Thanksgiving fundraising tour with President Obama:
… When Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a memoir. “Now, that’s a slam dunk,” the former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book—the most ever for a work of nonfiction—and around twelve million for Michelle Obama’s memoirs. (The First Lady has already started work on hers.) Obama’s best friend, Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago businessman, told me that, important as the memoir might be to Obama’s legacy and to his finances, “I don’t see him locked up in a room writing all the time. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was writing his second book, he would say, ‘I’m gonna get up at seven and write this chapter—and at nine we’ll play golf.’ I would think no, it’s going to be a lot later, but he would knock on my door at nine and say, ‘Let’s go.’ ” Nesbitt thinks that Obama will work on issues such as human rights, education, and “health and wellness.” “He was a local community organizer when he was young,” he said. “At the back end of his career, I see him as an international and national community organizer.”
Yet no post-Presidential project—even one as worthy as Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs or Jimmy Carter’s efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm in Africa—can overshadow what can be accomplished in the White House with the stroke of a pen or a phone call. And, after a miserable year, Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the Republicans took the House, in 2010, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming…
The question is whether Obama will satisfy the standard he set for himself. His biggest early disappointment as President was being forced to recognize that his romantic vision of a post-partisan era, in which there are no red states or blue states, only the United States, was, in practical terms, a fantasy. It was a difficult fantasy to relinquish. The spirit of national conciliation was more than the rhetorical pixie dust of Obama’s 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, in Boston, which had brought him to delirious national attention. It was also an elemental component of his self-conception, his sense that he was uniquely suited to transcend ideology and the grubby battles of the day. Obama is defensive about this now. “My speech in Boston was an aspirational speech,” he said. “It was not a description of our politics. It was a description of what I saw in the American people.”…
Obama walked toward the stage and, as he was announced, he mouthed the words: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
Then it happened again: another heckler broke into Obama’s speech. A man in the balcony repeatedly shouted out, “Executive order!,” demanding that the President bypass Congress with more unilateral actions. Obama listened with odd indulgence. Finally, he said, “I’m going to actually pause on this issue, because a lot of people have been saying this lately on every problem, which is just, ‘Sign an executive order and we can pretty much do anything and basically nullify Congress.’ ”
Many in the crowd applauded their approval. Yes! Nullify it! Although Obama has infuriated the right with relatively modest executive orders on gun control and some stronger ones on climate change, he has issued the fewest of any modern President, except George H. W. Bush.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Obama said. “Before everybody starts clapping, that’s not how it works. We’ve got this Constitution, we’ve got this whole thing about separation of powers. So there is no shortcut to politics, and there’s no shortcut to democracy.” The applause was hardly ecstatic. Everyone knew what he meant. The promises in the second inaugural could be a long time coming….
Obama has every right to claim a long list of victories since he took office: ending two wars; an economic rescue, no matter how imperfect; strong Supreme Court nominations; a lack of major scandal; essential support for an epochal advance in the civil rights of gays and lesbians; more progressive executive orders on climate change, gun control, and the end of torture; and, yes, health-care reform. But, no matter what one’s politics, and however one weighs the arguments of his critics, both partisan and principled, one has to wonder about any President’s capacity to make these decisions amid a thousand uncertainties, so many of which are matters of life and death, survival and extinction.
“I have strengths and I have weaknesses, like every President, like every person,” Obama said. “I do think one of my strengths is temperament. I am comfortable with complexity, and I think I’m pretty good at keeping my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin. And every morning and every night I’m taking measure of my actions against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding that there are going to be mistakes that I make and my team makes and that America makes; understanding that there are going to be limits to the good we can do and the bad that we can prevent, and that there’s going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part of that tragedy occasionally, but that if I am doing my very best and basing my decisions on the core values and ideals that I was brought up with and that I think are pretty consistent with those of most Americans, that at the end of the day things will be better rather than worse.”…
Sunday Late Night Open Thread
Dropped off the grid for a bit this weekend. There was a scheduled power outage here for 12 hours last night, so I invited my buddy Tammy up and we stayed at Harry and Chatman’s farm. Here’s a pic of the living room with Walt, Harry, Chatman, Tammy, and about eight of the dogs and a couple of the cats (there were 12 dogs total there last night, and a half dozen indoor cats, as well as the 12 barn cats, three pigs, a dozen hens, three donkeys, Otis the bull, a goat and a couple sheep, and countless others I am forgetting):
They have a fully furnished efficiency+ apartment above the barn (with a picture window looking out onto the farm on one side and another picture window looking down inside the barn so you can see all the animals from your bedroom), and let me tell you, the rooster and the donkeys make quite the ruckus in the morning (not to mention the pigs), and man, I have to tell you, when Chatman came and fed the hens late this morning, they were mightily pissed and let him know it, clucking all over the place defiantly and one hen challenged him and gave off some aggressive “I’m not sure about this guy” calls.
And before anyone asks, none of the animals are ever used for food (‘cept the eggs). They are all rescues, and they don’t even sell the wool from the sheep, they just throw it in the yard for birds nests. And it is so funny watching a half dozen dogs lounging around in the barn with cats sleeping on them while hens walked around talking and eating. It’s like Doctor Doolittle’s wet dream. Oh, and Tammy watched a hen lay an egg and just couldn’t get over watching a hen squeeze one out and then we picked it and the others up and went in and had bacon and eggs. City people.
Oh, and I have been doing the “JUST HOLD DOWN ON THE BUTTON AND ONE OF 100 PICS WILL TURN OUT OK” thing with the iPhone 5s. Here are two new attempts:
It was nice being off the grid without internet and phone even though it was only for under 24 hours. Oh, and you should totally see Rosie on a farm- I think some more clues into her background were divulged today. She has always loved Chatman, but today, she followed Chatman all over the place while he did the morning feedings. Chatman said most dogs won’t go into the pens with him, but Rosie just stuck by him the whole time and totally acted like she had been around livestock her entire life, so there may be a chance she was from a farm before being dumped. She just followed him everywhere and had a good old time, and I actually stopped keeping an eye on her because she was just following the pack and Chatman.
I shouldn’t be surprised- she is a working dog. Russell, my parents former Jack Russell terrorist, was at his best when dad was out in the yard. He would spend all day “helping” him, never leaving his side and always willing to “help.”
Christie’s “Friends” Stand Behind Him
(John Deering via GoComics.com)
Thing about succeeding as a Public Bully, even the people who stand to profit from the bully’s success don’t have much reason to defend him when his luck changes. And, of course, those on the other side won’t have much reason to hold back their glee. Steve Kornacki takes a modest victory lap at MSNBC:
The New Jersey mayor who publicly claimed this weekend that Gov. Chris Christie’s administration tried to withhold hurricane relief funds met Sunday in private with the U.S. attorney for the state of New Jersey.
“This afternoon I met with the U.S. Attorney’s office for several hours at their request and provided them with my journal and other documents,” Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer said in a statement Sunday. “As they pursue this investigation, I will provide any requested information and testify under oath about the facts of what happened when the Lieutenant Governor came to Hoboken and told me that Sandy aid would be contingent on moving forward with a private development project.”…
“The bottom line is, it’s not fair for the governor to hold Sandy funds hostage for the City of Hoboken because he wants me to give back to one private developer,” Zimmer said in an interview on UP w/ Steve Kornacki. ….
At Slate, Dave Weigel has some more unpleasant tales “Updating the Christie Petty-Scandal Registry“.
Rachel Maddow uses her monthly Washington Post column to highlight the abiding pettiness of Christie’s inner circle:
If you type “Shawn Boburg” into your Web browser address bar, a strange thing happens. Boburg is a reporter for The Record newspaper, in Bergen County, N.J. But ShawnBoburg.com sends visitors to The Record’s rival, Newark’s Star-Ledger.
The man who bought the rights to Boburg’s online name — and who presumably engineered the nasty little redirect — is David Wildstein, who last week became the country’s most high-profile political appointee. After his high school classmate Chris Christie was elected governor of New Jersey in 2009, Wildstein was appointed to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for a highly paid position that, conveniently, had no job description…
According to reporting in The Record, Wildstein has made a habit of buying the Web addresses of people who cross his path in New Jersey politics — including the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in 2012 and a mid-level official at the Federal Aviation Administration who helped forge a firefighting agreement with the Port Authority that Wildstein disliked. While he was at the Port Authority, Wildstein bought the online names of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top appointees to the agency, including Executive Director Pat Foye, who sounded the alarm about the Fort Lee scheme. Wildstein’s redirect on PatFoye.com sends visitors to the Web site of the New York Yankees.
It’s one thing for public officials to subject one another to that kind of low-level, neener-neener harassment, but in New Jersey, reporters have been targeted too. Wildstein snatched up and redirected ShawnBoburg.com after Boburg wrote a (not terribly unflattering) profile of the intensely private Wildstein last year and an article on Christie’s patronage hiring…
To put the cherry on Christie’s terrible-horrible-very-bad-no-good-week, the timing could hardly be worse. Steve Karnicki, again:
… The allegations against the Christie administration caught the Republican governor just as he was on a fundraising trip to Florida over the weekend. The trip, alongside Republican Gov. Rick Scott, could have been an opportunity to showcase Christie’s star power and cement relationships with potential donors; Christie has left the door open to a presidential bid in 2016, and now wields new influence as the freshly-minted head of the Republican Governor’s Association. Instead, the governor kept his activities and appearances in the Sunshine State under wraps…
As Mr. Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, said on Friday, concerning a Romney fundraiser’s intemperate remarks about Mr. Christie:
… Part of me wants to point out that, apparently, the utterly self-centered cluelessness of the candidate spread pretty widely throughout all levels of the Romney campaign. (Christie was supposed to let his constituents fight each other for bottled water rather than accept help from the federal government? People on the Jersey Shore were supposed to live in lean-to’s until Willard closed on that new place in D.C.?) Part of me wants to point out that this is yet another indication that the prion disease afflicting the collective brain of the Republican party rages unabated. But a much bigger part of me wants to laugh and laugh until I fall down.