In the first go around, Bill O’Reilly had his way with the first term President. Bill showed a level of disrespect to the president not seen in a long, long time. O’Reilly lived up to his Fox News expectation and interrupted, cut off, spoke over the young Barack Obama. So when I heard that the President was offering O’Reilly another interview, I couldn’t understand the reason.
I do now. Like he did in the second debate against Mitt Romney, President Obama kept Bill O’ Reilly and his Fox News talking points at bay.
In the second go around, President Obama stood his ground and directly pointed out that Bill O’Reilly and the people at Fox are the ones pushing the misinformation to the country. He refused to allow Bill O’ to run the show like he did in the first interview and over the 10 minutes of the interview, President Obama got his message across, leaving Bill O’ to try to cut the interview short, but the President continued, letting the country know that he is doing his part, unlike those who wish to continue push a misleading narrative to their listeners… like Fox News.
A Florida woman is jailed after making a Super Bowl week trip from her home to New York City, where she allegedly sought to pimp out her 15-year-old daughter, according to police.
When questioned by cops after her arrest Wednesday, Yolanda Ostolaza, 39, admitted that, “We came up here to work and make money with a pimp. I knew it was for escorting and prostitution,” according to a misdemeanor criminal complaint.
As for her child’s role in the illegal activity, Ostolaza remarked, “I thought my daughter was just going to do the fetish stuff.”
Undercover vice detectives, who initially contacted the teen via an online ad, arranged to pay $200 for a sexual encounter at a Manhattan hotel. When officers later took the girl into custody, she told them her age and said that her mother was waiting for her at a nearby hotel.
Ostolaza, pictured above, was subsequently charged with endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor. She remains locked up in lieu of $2000 bail. Her daughter has been placed in the custody of child welfare officials.
Forget about rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain or any other objects that might be falling down over the next few days in New Jersey. The real forecast is that the sky is falling on Governor Chris Christie and he has little time, and no room for error, if he wants to regain his reputation as a bully leader anytime soon.
The problem isn’t that he’s an able politician, because he is whether you disagree with him or not, or that he can get the Democrats to sign on to what will be his signature accomplishment, which was to raid public employees’ pockets and blame them for the recession enact a pension and benefits bill that made public employees pay more for their pensions and benefits (discovered the strike through key, didn’t I? OK, I’ll stop).
No, the problem with Chris Christie is that his style finally caught up to him. He is a big guy with a big personality who doesn’t suffer people whom he considers fools very patiently. Now his main personal strategy has him gasping for clean political air, which is usually in short supply in this state, and it’s choking him.
The latest example is a memo the Governor’s Office released in response to former Port Authority official and main player in the GW Bridge traffic scandal, David Wildstein, who said that he had evidence, still unreleased, that shows Christie knowing about the lane closings as they happened. That contrasts with what the governor told the public at his two hour news conference after the scandal broke.
Now, I understand that both parties play the blame game and the strategy has always been that if you’re accused of something to deny it, either truthfully or to stonewall and hope the investigation shows nothing, and to attack your opponents. This memo, though, is officially in the Hall of Fame for its vacuous and lame attempt at slurring Wildstein. From the article:
The memo listed five incidents as evidence, saying that “as a 16-year-old kid,” Mr. Wildstein had sued over a school board election; that he had been “publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior”; that he had a controversial tenure as mayor of Livingston, N.J.; that he had been an anonymous blogger; and that he “had a strange habit of registering web addresses for other people’s names without telling them.”
I’m assuming that you’ve stopped laughing.
Suing over a school board election? Doesn’t that qualify you to be in the He-Man Government Hater’s Club? What about being accused of deceptive behavior in social studies class? As a social studies teacher, I now have ultimate political power over most of the approximately 2,500 students who have sat in my classes over the years. Can’t wait for some of them to run for office. Controversial politician? Like you, Governor? Anonymous blogger? Not anymore.
In sum, the governor has bupkis on this guy. If he did, he would have released it weeks ago and would have gone on the offensive as he did in most other cases. If he wanted to play hardball, he would have offered to pay Wildstein’s legal fees so he could defend himself without having to out Christie with what they both know is true. Firing Wildstein, and former Christie aide Bridget Anne Kelly, has now opened the governor to all kinds of problems, because those people are now trying to save their lives. Some of what they say will be wrong, but much of it will be true. And Christie knows that.
The Bridge is not the only problem the governor has because there are reports that he didn’t implement the reconstruction aid program from Sandy until a full 10 months after the money was delivered to NJ. My sense is that this is going to be a bigger problem than lane closures. That was done for political payback; stalling aid to people whose houses were now in the Atlantic is far worse.
And pundits said the President had a rough fifth year. Christie’s win in 2013 will be his final election victory.
The entire nation was saddened when it was revealed that school officials in Utah took away the lunches of about 70 poor school children and tossed those lunches in the garbage. Their reason? Because the parents of those children were too poor. School’s accounting showed that the parents had not pay the monthly stipend for their kids to continue eating school lunches.
Yes, everyone was outraged. Everyone that is, except some Republicans.
Below is a conversation between a twitter user @GammaRae206 and the Republican official for Utah, State Senator Todd Weiler. It was GammaRae206’s position that today’s Republican party and their attitudes towards the poor contributed to the school officials taking such horrific steps against innocent school children. GammaRae206 wanted to engage in a discussion with the Senator to see what could be done to avoid such incidents from happening again in the future. Instead, GammaRae206 was met with a hardened, insensitive attitude, unexpected of the State Senator… even a Republican State Senator.
Again, no words… except… When are they going to start calling this guy a “thug?” Or maybe that label is only reserved for those the same color as Richard Sherman?
This pic was taken on Saturday, as Bieber enjoyed a Super Bowl party.
The good thing about a he saud, she said situation, is that the truth will eventually come out.
After a New York Times report stating that David Wildstein had information showing Chris Christie knew about the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge last September, Christie is firing back on all cylinders.
His office released the following letter.
Things You Should Know About The Bombshell That’s Not A Bombshell
1. New York Times Bombshell Not A Bombshell. A media firestorm was set off by sloppy reporting from the New York Times and their suggestion that there was actually “evidence” when it was a letter alleging that “evidence exists.” Forced to change the lead almost immediately, the Times was roundly criticized, and its editor was forced to issue this extraordinary statement to the Huffington Post:
• “We’ve made probably dozens of changes to the story to make it more precise. That was one of them. I bet there will be dozens more.”
2. As he has said repeatedly, Governor Christie had no involvement, knowledge or understanding of the real motives behind David Wildstein’s scheme to close lanes on the George Washington Bridge.
• GOVERNOR CHRISTIE: “So what I can tell you is if people find that hard to believe, I don’t know what else to say except to tell them that I had no knowledge of this — of the planning, the execution or anything about it — and that I first found out about it after it was over. And even then, what I was told was that it was a traffic study. And there was no evidence to the contrary until yesterday that was brought to my attention or anybody else’s attention.” (Press Conference, 1/9/14)
3. The Governor first learned lanes at the George Washington Bridge were even closed from press accounts after the fact. Even then he was under the belief it was a traffic study. He first learned David Wildstein and Bridget Kelly closed lanes for political purposes when it was reported on January 8th.
• GOVERNOR CHRISTIE: “And I knew nothing about this. And until it started to be reported in the papers about the closure, but even then I was told this was a traffic study.” (Press Conference, 1/9/14)
4. In David Wildstein’s past, people and newspaper accounts have described him as “tumultuous” and someone who “made moves that were not productive.”
• As a 16-year-old kid, he sued over a local school board election.
• He was publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior.
• He had a controversial tenure as Mayor of Livingston
• He was an anonymous blogger known as Wally Edge
• He had a strange habit of registering web addresses for other people’s names without telling them
• Thomas L. Adams, Wildstein’s Council Running Mate: “It Was A Tumultuous Time.” (Shawn Boburg, “Ex-Blogger Is Governor Christie’s Eyes, Ears Inside The Port Authority,” Bergen Record, 3/3/12)
• Robert Leopold, Livingston’s former Democratic Mayor: Wildstein Was “A Political Animal” Who “Frightened People.” (Shawn Boburg, “Ex-Blogger Is Governor Christie’s Eyes, Ears Inside The Port Authority,” Bergen Record, 3/3/12)
• “He Was A Very Contentious Person.” (Shawn Boburg, “Ex-Blogger Is Governor Christie’s Eyes, Ears Inside The Port Authority,” Bergen Record, 3/3/12)
Wildstein Created “Culture Of Fear” Within Port Authority. “He and others referred to a ‘culture of fear’ within the authority, reflected in testimony from other authority officials about their reluctance to report to Mr. Foye or others what they considered an ‘odd’ request from Mr. Wildstein—to abruptly realign lanes that had been in place for decades and to tell no one about it.” (Ted Mann, “Port Authority Chief Testifies in George Washington Bridge Flap,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/13)
5. David Wildstein has been publicly asking for immunity since the beginning, been held in contempt by the New Jersey legislature for refusing to testify, failed to provide this so-called “evidence” when he was first subpoenaed by the NJ Legislature and is looking for the Port Authority to pay his legal bills.
• Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich: “Look, from my perspective and Fort Lee’s perspective, we have credibility issues with Mr. Wildstein…He is certainly bucking for immunity.” (Susan K. Livio, “GWB letter raises credibility questions for Chris Christie, Port Authority official, politicians say,” Star-Ledger, 2/1/14)
• Assemblyman John Wisniewski: “‘I am curious (Wildstein) has documents … he did not provide them to the committee when he was subpoenaed,’ Wisniewski added.” (Susan K. Livio, “GWB letter raises credibility questions for Chris Christie, Port Authority official, politicians say,” Star-Ledger, 2/1/14)
Bottom line – David Wildstein will do and say anything to save David Wildstein.
New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio took his family to 42nd Street today – renamed Super Bowl Ave – and unleashed a series of taunts on his high afro son Dante after the two took a slide down the 6 stories Toboggan Run.
“Score one for the older generation,” the mayor said in excitement after the two raced down the slide and what appeared to be a win. “Victory for the parents! You got nothing! You got height and you got hair, but you got nothing else!”
The family, along with members of de Blasio’s administration took multiple rides on the slide with the mayor taunting all the way.
A former TSA officer has confirmed many of the worst suspicions about airport security screeners: they stop passengers for having an attitude, they confiscate snow globes from children and nail clippers from pilots, they profile passengers based on their nationality.
And yes, they do see travelers naked in the X-ray photos.
In a confessional piece for Politico, former TSA agent-turned-writer Jason Harrington spills the secrets on the ways that the security workers pass the time during their long shifts.
‘I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying,’ he wrote.
One of the most coveted rotations while he worked at Chicago’s O’Hare airport while Harrington worked there from 2007 through 2013 was the secretive Image Operator room where guards took turns sitting in the windowless room- that also lacked security cameras- viewing the pictures of passengers that the x-ray machines took.
‘Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display. Piercings of every kind were visible. Women who’d had mastectomies were easy to discern—their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area,’ he wrote in the Politico article.
‘All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels.’
The I.O. room turned into its own experiment in explicit behavior as agents would use it as a secret meeting point for mid0-work rendez-vous since the lack of security cameras kept them from being busted.
The TSA issued a statement in response to MailOnline, saying: ‘Many of the TSA procedures and policies referenced in this article are no longer in place or are characterized inaccurately.’
‘Every passenger deserves to be treated with dignity and respect and Transportation Security Administration policy upholds this standard. TSA does not tolerate any form of unethical or unlawful behavior by its employees and takes swift disciplinary action if discovered.
‘Since November 2011, TSA has aggressively implemented risk-based security procedures to move away from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.
‘TSA has installed Automated Target Recognition software on every Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) unit in use, eliminating the analyzed images referenced in the article.
It concluded by reporting that the agency ‘has instituted one-step removal procedures in many cases for employees behaving unethically or unlawfully’.
Harrington, who went on to take a graduate course in creative writing after leaving the TSA, even translated the underhanded code-words used by the agents to alert their friends to an attractive passenger approaching the line.
Fanny Pack Lane 2 and Alfalfa are both used to give a heads-up about an attractive woman headed towards the agents. Code Red and Code Yellow are also used in the same way- depending on the color of her shirt.
While the overly-detailed pictures provided entertainment for the screeners, Harrington writes that the expensive machines did little else.
Even when a representative from the machine manufacturer came to give the TSA agents a tutorial on the $150,000 machines, he admitted that they barely worked.
‘He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket,’ Harrington wrote.
A number of agents became concerned about the amount of secondary radiation they were being put through by working next to the machines day-in and day-out, even though they regularly towed the party line that it was safe when passengers asked them the same question.
While he expressed empathy for alarmed pregnant women who were told to go through the machine anyway, there were also lighter moments that came as a result.
One of his code words listed on the blog that he started to vent about life behind the TSA shield, called Taking Sense Away, was the ‘baby-shower-opt-out’: when a woman opts out and explains that she is pregnant to the surprise of the friends she is traveling with, who shriek and yell and have an impromptu celebration.
The more serious allegations that came through in his piece came to his description of the not-so-random security checks of ‘suspicious’ passengers.
A number of boarding passes have a code- SSSS- printed on them based on the passenger’s name, indicating that they are on a watch list or have been flagged up for whatever reason.
Beyond that, a passenger’s nationality could also automatically prove reason for an extra-thorough check and each TSA agent is given a list of a dozen countries that they should memorize (or pin to the back of their shield badge for safe keeping): Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan.
Conspicuously absent from that list? Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two countries with a history of harboring terrorists. Harrington explained that the slip was not accidental but political.
Political posturing and possible security threats were not the only reasons that you could be selected for an extra search, however, as he also explained that ‘retaliatory wait time’ was a common practice, as agents regularly made the process more difficult when they simply didn’t like your attitude.
‘Pretending that something in your bag or on your full body image needs to be resolved- the punitive possibilities are endless, and there are many tricks in the screener’s bag,’ he wrote.
Harrington began voicing his concerns about TSA practices well into his time there, first writing a letter that was published in The New York Times in 2010.
His supervisor had ‘a chat’ with him about it, but didn’t fire him, and so he continued to write about his complaints but this time on an anonymous blog.
That blog, Taking Sense Away, eventually went viral and his fear of being caught and desire to leave a job that he never intended to be long-term led to his decision to leave and go to graduate school in 2013.
He is now working on a book about his time in uniform.
Of course things like this surprises no one. Congressional Republicans and other elected officials have just about said these same things, only not in so much words. So hearing a Congressman encouraging a woman calling for the president’s execution, is sadly not surprising.
U.S. Congressman Jim Bridenstone (R-OK) attended a luncheon hosted by the Tea Party sub-group Tulsa 9:12 Project last week to discuss the issues of the day with his constituency. One of the people in the crowd said “Obama is not President as far as I am concerned. He should be executed as an enemy combatant really” the congressman’s response was not to immediately shoot down the stupidity and treason expressed.
Instead, Bridenstone fed into the woman’s moronic fears, based on lies and a lack of understanding if what an Executive Order is. Bridenstone laughed and said “Don’t hold back, Emma.” The woman then went on to ask the congressman about “the Muslims that he is shipping into our country through pilots and commercial jets.” Bridenstone’s lack of denial about such nonsense is telling regarding just how far he will go to gain the support of people wishing for the death of the standing President of The United States.
According to the report filed by NBC, $4.8 million in federal relief funds were used by the Christie administration in the renovation of an apartment building not affected by the storm.
New Jersey’s Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency approved the disbursement as part of the state’s Fund for Rebuilding Multifamily Housing. The program is intended to speed the construction of new affordable housing in communities ravaged by the storm.
But New Brunswick lost relatively little of its housing stock when Sandy stormed through the state, and a Rutgers University study ranked New Brunswick 188th on a list of communities that suffered the most hardship due to Sandy.
“They’re not spending the money on the people that they’re supposed to be spending,” said Doris Narkum, a storm victim whose family lost their house on the Jersey Shore.
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