Tea Party Republican Congressional hack from New Jersey spills his lying bile in my living room. Now I’m mad as hell.

Rep. Scott Barrett. Good thing this

is only a head shot, because his pants

are on fire.

What is it with New Jersey Republicans? Are they all head cases, psychopaths, and habitual liars? 

First we had Chris Christie, whose shenanigans in creating a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge to punish a mayor who didn’t support him made life miserable for hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders. They  included kids on their way to school, and could have cost lives if an ambulance had to get through. And it has unmasked Christie for the malign liar he is.

Now, spewing into my Manhattan living room from Northern New Jersey comes a barrage of wildly misleading TV spots. They’re from Scott Garrett, an incumbent Tea Party Republican member of Congress who evidently can’t stoop low enough to make sure he keeps his butt on his Republican seat.

The advertising depicts a condo apartment building and discusses a woman who, according to Garrrett, was “assaulted” in the building by Garrett's Democratic rival, Joseh Gottheimer.

Garrett’s ad keeps gushing out of my television set. It declares: 

“Gottheimer aggressively intimidated and assaulted her and left her fearful in her own home.” 

And furthermore:

 “Scared and violated, the victim had to move to escape Gottheimer’s harassing environment. That’s the real Josh Gottheimer, and his values aren’t New Jersey’s values.”

"Fearful?" “Violated?” What was this, a Donald Trump-style sexual attack? A brutal mugging? A sex attack and mugging?

Nope. Gottheimer was with his wife at the time. (The apartment by the way, isn't in New Jersey. It's in Washington, D.C.) And the neighbor turns out to be one of those, umm, “difficult” individuals of whom some apartment dwellers say, “There’s one in every building.”

NJSpotlight, an online journal, reports:

According to documents filed in 2007 in Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Gottheimer said he and his wife had entered the building and saw someone they did not recognize in a place where owners’ keys were kept. 

The woman’s complaint said she was retrieving her keys from an unattended key closet in the lobby when “Gottheimer aggressively approached” and “derisively asked if she was the new security guard.” 

“When plaintiff informed him that she was a resident, Gottheimer threateningly waived [sic] his finger in her face and aggressively questioned plaintiff in a loud voice and an intimidating manner about who she was and what she was doing,” the complaint said.

Gottheimer countered that when he and his wife “saw an unidentified/unknown woman searching in a restricted closet/drawer, he asked questions in order to assure the appropriateness of the conduct he was witnessing.”

So the so-called "assault" that desperate T-Party Republican Garrett refers to in his ads consists — even if we assume it’s true — of nothing more than wagging a finger and speaking in a voice that the cranky neighbor perceived as loud.

But wait, there’s more! The neighbor not only attempted to sue Gottheimer, but also another neighbor because of another “incident.” She also tried to sue one of the building’s concierges for, among other transgressions, going to the bathroom in one of the building's toilets, and in addition she tried to sue the building’s management company. Here’s NJ Spotlight again:

She said, for example, that she had been discriminated against because she was Asian, and cited numerous complaints about one of the concierges and the management company that employed her. The concierge, for example, had failed to provide the homeowner with a garage key; twice turned away a cable television technician while other technicians were waiting; twice called police to ticket vehicles making deliveries, and once failed to notify the homeowner when a package was delivered. 

Also named as a defendant was another condo board member who questioned the plaintiff as she was leaving the building gym about whether she had made a complaint to the management company about building employees using the bathroom in a common area. The woman denied making the complaint, and said she felt intimidated by that board member as well.

For a complainant, the so-called harassed woman wasn’t very cooperative. Court papers show at one point the management company’s attorneys asked the judge for an order to compel the plaintiff to answer interrogatories.

Finally, when it looked as if her case was falling apart and was going to cost her a pretty penny in costs and legal fees, the woman dropped the matter. The judge in the case dismissed her case “with prejudice.” According to the legal dictionary Nolo:

“When a lawsuit is dismissed with prejudice, the court is saying that it has made a final determination on the merits of the case, and that the plaintiff is therefore forbidden from filing another lawsuit based on the same grounds.”

In other words, a court has already ruled that the charges are nonsense. Which so far hasn’t stopped incumbent Congressman Garrett from spewing lies into my home via my TV set on an almost daily basis. I find it almost impossible to watch the evening news in New York without being “assaulted” by this lying Republican from New Jersey. Maybe he took lessons from Chris Christie.

Recently, various commentators  been appropriating the old saw about the similarity between making laws and making sausages, and applying it to electoral politics. But that’s a bad analogy.

Watching many Republicans run for office is nothing like watching sausages getting made. It’s more like watching human feces gushing into a vat in a sewage plant.

Chris Christie promises to kill your Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and disability benefits. And Trevor Noah lets him get away with it.

Kiss it goodbye: If Chris Christie (or

any Republican) becomes the next 

President, this is what you can do to

your Social Security and Medicare

Oh Jon Stewart, I miss you already. 

On Wednesday night of this week Christie, he of George Washington Bridge traffic jam fame, appeared on Trevor Noah’s version of the Daily Show for what turned out to be a softball interview. No, make that a powder puff interview.

It was the kind of interview that would have caused Stewart to wade into Christie’s traffic- jammed George Washington Bridge and jump off, had he turned in Noah's performance.

Early on, Noah applauded Christie on camera. Which may have been why Christie felt at home enough to declare….

“My plan is to increase the retirement age for a couple of years….and then also for people who make a lot of money in retiremet. People who make $2000,000 or more a year in retirement, they don’t need Social Security check. They’re fine.”

Except for one small thing that Trevor Noah failed to point out. Social Security isn’t a gift. It’s an insurance policy that every working American bought and paid for, whether they get zero dollars a week or a million dollars a week from other sources in retirement.

If you bought an insurance annuity from, say Met Life, and when you came to collect they said, “Nope, you’re fine, so we’re not paying what we owe you,” you’d have a right to be plenty irate. You’d have an equal right to rage if the company that insures your car refused to pay up after a crash because you can afford a new car on your own. You'd call the insurance company a bunch of crooks, for doing the same crooked think Chris Christie says he'll do.

And since Medicare and disability insurance were also on Christie’s list, it’s a pretty sure bet that if your surgery and hospital stay cost $250,000, Christie would tell you, “You’re fine. Just sell your house.” 

Americans would find themselves in the situation that happens now when elderly people need to go to nursing homes. They have to spend down the assets they and their spouses are living on first, and then go on Medicaid. That’s a process that sometimes leaves a surviving spouse penniless as well. 

Christie wants to “reform” Medicaid too, God help the poor.

Anticipating what might be the next question from an alert interviewer, Christie added, 

“The other alternative if course is to bring more money into the government. But here’s the thing. Why would we trust the government? They’ve already lied to us and stolen the trust fund for Social Security. That’s why we’ve got a problem….”

Noah finally seemed to regain partial consciousness. “Who is the government? Are you?” he asked.

“No no no,” Christie shot back. As if, as governor of New Jersey, he had nothing to do with government. And as if, as President of the United States, he’d also have nothing to do with government. (Speak of lying to us!)  He’d just, uh, cut taxes for the rich so they wouldn’t have to pay more into Social Security.

And who knows? Christie might “adjust” his numbers. Maybe, if you make only $25,000 in retirement, Christie might eventually decide you’re “fine,” especially if that would further help him cut taxes for the rich. Maybe if you have fifty grand in the bank Christie would tell you you’re fine, and come back when you’re broke and we’ll give you Social Security.

The whole disgusting performance — by both Christie and Noah — is viewable here. (Note: to make it even more disgusting, you’ll have to sit through a TV commercial first.)

As for me, it took only three of Trevor Noah’s appearances for me to decide I’m going back to the evening news during The Daily Show time slot. 

Mr. Noah, I watched Jon Stewart regularly. And you’re no Jon Stewart.

United Airlines honchos bail out after corruption charges. What about charges of torturing passengers?

Will his golden parachute open? Stay tuned.

As I write this, the New York Times is reporting that United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek and two of his lieutenants are resigning because of a Federal corruption investigation.

All this evidently has to do with having “improperly sought to influence” officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. You know. The Port Authority. As in "Chris Christie" and the “George Washington Bridge Scandal.”

Just like Chris Christie, who has been known to bully the little people even if they have real grievances, I also believe in hitting a man when he’s down. At least I believe in hitting him if he's a bad man. But I’m not gonna bother with Chris’s corruption-connected political operation just now, because I’m more interested in United Airlines. Last time I flew them, out of Dayton, Ohio, in June 2014, it was a nightmare. I think about it often. And gnash my teeth.

Grounded below the "friendly" skies

Y’see, it rained that day.  Other airlines flying out of Dayton (none, alas, with available space to New York) seemed to have their acts together. Their planes were taking off. There were no lines at their ticket counters. 

But at United, and United alone, there was a line long enough to dance a conga from here to the moon. A single clerk was on duty to make new arrangements for all United’s passengers whose flights had been cancelled due to “weather.” The sun was shining brightly as we waited but hey, you know, weather. Somewhere.

What about calling in extra clerks to deal with the hapless passengers standing in line? The airline had a different idea. Go call 'em yourselves, you feckless passengers.

“You can do this on the phone by calling 1-800-UNITED-1” the clerk screamed at us. Fortunately, I stayed on line while I  tried to call.  I was put on hold, and forced to listen to repetitive blather, because my call was so very important to United. So important, in fact, that by the time I reached the clerk’s desk, perhaps an hour or more later, my ear was sore, my cell phone battery was dead, and a live person still hadn’t picked up the phone on the other end.

“I’d like you to change my ticket to the next available flight to New York,” I told the airport clerk. “My cancelled ticket is to LaGuardia but I’ll take any airport in the New York area. I’ll even go to Philadelphia.”

Flights for stranded passengers?
We don't got no stinking flights.

I can put you on a flight to New York at 5:10  p.m. tomorrow,” the clerk said, unsympathetically. “Everything’s booked until then.”

“That’s more than 24 hours from now!” I said.

“That’s what’s available,” said the clerk, in her best take-it-or-leave-it voice. 

“What am I supposed to do, sleep on the airport floor?” I asked her.

“You can go over to that desk,” (she pointed) “and find a local hotel.”

“Will United pay for it?” I asked.

“No.”

Screwing passengers is never
having to say you're sorry

So I spent the night at a nearby Clarion, paid for my bed, my meal, and my back-and-forth transportation between the airport and the hotel. The next day, when I got to the airport, nobody even said sorry. But they did charge me extra for my baggage.

I don’t have to tell you about in-flight sardine can conditions.

So when I hear that United’s top officers may be as corrupt as the rotting corpse of Boss Tweed, I am not moved to pity. Nor am I moved toward giving them the benefit of the doubt. 

You bastards are bailing out? My only hope is that your golden parachutes fail to open.

Counterfeit police badges. A persecuted prosecutor. Employee loyalty oaths. A sleazy foreign government? Nah, just another Christie scandal.

A few years from now, people may think
this is a photograph of Chris Christie
saying farewell to his troops.

There's an old rule of thumb in the pest control business: If you find a cockroach in the kitchen, guaranteed you have more than one cockroach in the kitchen.

And it's starting to turn out that if you have a scandal involving Chris Christie, guaranteed you have....well, maybe the governor's official residence, one of those mansions so pretentious it has a pretentious name – Drumthwacket – needs to be sprayed. 

First there was the George Washington Bridge scandal to screw the mayor of Fort Lee. Then a shutoff of Hurricane Sandy aid to screw the mayor of Hoboken. And now we're beginning to learn about a county prosecutor getting screwed for trying to do his job – which in this case involved prosecuting a Christie cronie.

I found the latest brewing scandal – actually it may be the oldest scandal, suppressed until now – at Crooks and Liars, which in turn lifted its info from the Newark Star-Ledger. Please do drop in  at Crooks and Liars and treat yourself to all the juicy details.

However, for you very busy folks who are pressed at the moment, here's an executive summary lifted from Crooks and Liars (boldfacing my own to enhance your delectation):

And now, we are reminded of the accusations of Ben Barlyn, a former Hunterdon County prosecutor who says he was fired because he refused to drop a case against a Christie ally. For the past year, he’s been striving to prove his story, paying through the nose for a civil lawsuit against the state while telling it to anyone who will listen. 

Barlyn says that after he secured an indictment in 2010 against Hunterdon County Sheriff Deborah Trout, a Republican with political ties to Christie, he was fired and the case hastily killed by Christie’s appointed attorney general at the time, Paula Dow. The real story isn’t the mundane crimes that were alleged: hiring without proper background checks, making employees sign loyalty oaths, threatening critics and producing fake police badges for a prominent Christie donor. It’s the possible abuse of power by the administration’s head prosecutor.

I'm beginning to wonder if the real question about Christie should be not whether he's done as a presidential candidate, but whether he's going to prison. 

Governor Christie clearly focuses on one thing and one thing only. And that thing is…..

From a MSN News story on January 17:

Christie himself, meanwhile, gave a speech at an event outside those at the State House for the first time in more than a week, telling people in a community devastated by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 that storm recovery remains his top priority. 

"I am focused as completely this morning as I was when I woke up on the morning of Oct. 30, 2012, and nothing will distract me from getting the job done," he said. "Nothing."

And from a New York Times article by Kate Zernike that appeared the previous day:

As the New Jersey Assembly voted unanimously on Thursday to authorize an investigation into abuses of power by Gov. Chris Christie’s administration, Mr. Christie seemed to be maneuvering against the inquiry, hiring a high-powered defense lawyer and resisting questions about whether he would cooperate with the Legislature’s efforts.

When a man lawyers up, you can be pretty sure he isn't focusing on the ants in his picnic basket. Or, to futz with an old saying, nothing focuses a man’s mind so much as the prospect of his own indictment.  Trust this cranky commentator, that prospect of indictment is stronger than the storm.

Squish, squish, squash! Chris Christie throws his own people under the bus, drives it over them, then backs up and keeps squashing them until they’re flat.

Sounding like an angelic and contrite choir boy who’d been caught by his priest pilfering from the collection plate, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie revealed today that there are really two Governor Christies.

One, the old familiar one, is mean, sharp tongued, and nasty:

The other Governor Christie is sweet and innocent-sounding, “heartbroken” “incredibly disappointed” and about to burst out into “the anguish stage” of grief – over at least two of his aides. He has a developed a late-blooming curiosity over matters that were in the headlines for weeks. What his press conference on the topic boiled down to was, "Who, me? I'm an innocent dupe."

Christie's aides royally screwed thousands of innocent commuters and were probably responsible for the death of at least one occupant of an ambulance that couldn’t get a heart patient to the hospital on time because the aides deliberately jammed up traffic on and around the George Washington Bridge.

At the same time, Christie demonstrated that if you work for him and he feels he needs to save his own hide, he can and will squash your career and your reputation with all the tender regard of an exterminator stomping on a cockroach. He’ll throw you under the bus and drive back and forth over you several times, until you’re as flat as five-day-old road kill.

Not that his aides deserve much sympathy for what they’ve done. But it appears they were almost certainly “taking a bullet” for him. And he may have been speaking sweetly, but he was squeezing the trigger himself, with the the compassion of a pit viper.

Christie not only had “accepted” the resignation of David Wildstein as a Port Authority of New York administrator, but suddenly denied that he had ever been Wildstein’s friend, contradicting months and months of reporting that they had been high school buddies, reports the governor never denied before.

As for his own Deputy Chief of Staff, Bridget Kelly, Christie piously told the world, “I’ve terminated her employment because she lied to me.”

The lie, said Christie, was that she knew nothing about any traffic jams when, in fact, she had called up Wildstein and ordered it.

He is also, as you can see in the second video above, vowing to find out what happened. But according to news reports, he is going to appoint Bridget Kelley's boss, his own Chief of Staff Kevin O'Dowd as the next state Attorney General. That means, in effect, that the Christie administration will be investigating itself – a nifty way to control the evidence and deep-six the damning stuff.

Does the governor think

you’re an idiot, too?

The Governor is clearly asking the world to believe that despite weeks of headlines in the news about the traffic jam, he lacked the intellectual curiosity until his televised act of contrition to find out what was going on, or why suddenly everything was gridlocked on the bridge and adjacent Fort Lee, New Jersey.

He is also asking the world to believe that a member of his staff called for a traffic jam on her own say-so, working not as a public servant but as a self-appointed political operator for Christie.

The only reasons she possibly could have done that would have either been to curry Christie’s favor or more likely, to follow an order from Christie or her boss, the self-investigating Kevin O'Dowd. Yet Christie wants us to believe she denied any knowledge of the situation to him.

In order to believe her, Christie would have to be the sort of “stupid” “idiot” he accuses other people of being– from teachers to reporters.

Umm, sorry, that pointer-out of idiots would be Governor Christie’s double super secret evil twin brother masquerading as the angelic governor.

Is New Jersey’s Governor Christie a corrupt crook? A New York Times expose might lead you to think so.

The New York Times this morning reports an alarming story of systemic corruption in the Hunterdon County, New Jersey sheriff’s office, with a trail leading straight to the New Jersey Attorney General and other appointees of Governor Chris Christie.

I’m not going to recapitulate the whole tangled spider’s web of sleazy and corrupt interlocking acts by Christie appointees. Just go here and read the lengthy and very well-reported New York Times horror story by Michael Powell.

But I can’t resist a few highlights:

• A Hunterdon County Grand Jury indicts a  Christie-appointed sheriff on 43 counts of what comes down to downright abuse of power worthy of a police state. So what happens?

• The state takes over the county prosecutor’s office and fires three veteran prosecutors

• A deputy state attorney general walks into a state court and asks that the case be dismissed, insisting that the case was full of “legal and factual deficiencies,” but enumerating not one of them. Does the judge ask the deputy attorney general what the heck he's talking about, or for evidence of those "deficiencies?" Nah! The judge simply dismisses the case.

• When one of the dismissed prosecutors sues, “claiming that the attorney general killed the indictment to protect prominent supporters of the governor,” the records of the indictment get spirited away to the state capital, where the state has now has them hidden while it resists and appeals court orders to release them.

There’s more. Powell learned of so called “law enforcement” officials doing the backgrounds checks on…themselves! There were threats from law enforcement against someone whose website reported on the matter. Police IDs get issued to friendly campaign contributors. Explanations from the attorney general’s spokesman about what’s going on and why change with the wind.

I urge you to read this, and keep in mind that Governor Christie is a potential Republican candidate for president. Given his police state tactics in New Jersey, that’s not just worrisome. It’s terrifying.

Who’s the new Republican presidential candidate waiting in the wings?

The see-saw is doing its thing. Newt is up. Newt is down. Newt is down and Romney is up. Romney is up and Newt is down. Is the see-saw making you sea-sick yet?

The odds are good that it’s nauseating some Republicans, too. My condolences to them. Or maybe not, since what they seem to want to do most is dismantle the economy and the safety net that keeps most older Americans (and many of the younger ones) from freezing to death on the streets. And to lower taxes on the rich even if the rest of us have to pay for it with smaller soup rations on the bread line.

Still, one senses that the Republicans finally sense that they’re not going to beat Obama. Not with Gingrich. Not with Romney. And not with the passel of other candidates who either threw themselves in front of the bus, got thrown there by Republican primary voters, or who simply got sucked under the bus by the vacuum in rational thinking that surrounded them. (Think Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann, for example.)

This morning the New York Times ran an article saying that former Florida governor Jeb Bush is withholding his endorsement from Romney. Cranky old cynics like me immediately start wondering if Jeb is planning for a draft Jeb rally after Newt and Willard (aka Mitt) badmouth each other into a stall at the Republican convention.

Chris Christie, who also says he’s not a candidate, is also possibly a candidate.

Mitch Daniels, the Indiana senator who gave the world’s most boring speech to “rebut” President Obama? Possible candidate.

But I’m going to go with a long shot bet here, and nominate New York’s impresario of self-dealing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Never mind that the billionaire “Mayor Mike” who can spend triple digit millions on a local political campaign the way you and I might drop $3.50 for a latte at Starbucks sabotaged the two-term mayoral limit and is now serving his third term.

Never mind that he keeps standing by his police commissioner, Michael Kelly, a character who looks like Popeye in a business suit. There have been outrageous excuses to shoo away Occupy Wall Street protestors in Zucotti Park. There’s the commissioner’s son, who now stands accused of rape and whose case has to be investigated by people outside the NYPD. There have been numerous instances police misbehavior such as this one, which resulted in … err, ah, umm … an “investigation” which has been creeping along at what some might consider a snail’s pace, despite the fact that police miscreants were caught on video pepper spraying their victims. What's to investigate for three months?

Never mind the outrageous Kathy Black scandal, in which the mayor appointed a crony with zero – that’s zero – educational experience to run one of the world’s largest public school systems. Fortunately, she self-destructed by mocking angry parents at a public meeting.

None of this matters. The mayor can only be mayor so long – even if he had to pay what most of us would consider a fortune to blow up the law that limited his term. What Bloomberg wants, Bloomberg buys. And I wouldn’t be amazed to see him try to buy the Republican presidential nomination.