Top Republicans Stand By Christie

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Sunday February 02, 2014 · 8:00 PM PST

2014/02/02 · 20:00

This is so unbelievably beautiful. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Paul Ryan are insisting that Chris Christie should not resign but remain as chairman of the Republican Governors Association! They feel he is just the right man to be the face of the party!

http://abcnews.go.com/...

This means that Democrats can spend the next however many months pointing out that the man who closed the GWB entry lanes for political motives, uses Sandy money as a political slush fund (while storm victims are still homeless), and whose office and campaign are being investigated by the Feds is just fine with Republicans. In fact, they admire him as a leader and a role model for governors. Whenever the Democrats point this out, they should bring in a reference to Bob MacDonald and his problems, and how much the Republicans admired him and saw him as presidential timber.

Never in my wildest dreams did I hope that the big names in the Republican Party would rally around Christie and say, we want him to be one of our leaders.

I am guessing that what is behind this is big Republican donor panic. There is a very interesting chapter in Double Down, the book on the 2012 campaign, which describes the infatuation of Langone and other big Republican donors for Christie and how they courted him and pleaded for him to run in 2012. Langone spearheaded the whole thing, and was both wild about Christie and terrified of a Tea Party nominee. The chapter on Christie is in part II of Double Down and is titled "Big Boy."

If the Republican establishment wants Christie to remain head of the RGA, it must surely mean that the big donors are panicking at the thought of a far right nominee. Wall Street and big business quail at the thought of the tremendous economic buffeting that would result from a President Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. I know it scares me.

My own guess is that Paul Ryan will build bridges with the money side of the Republican Party and end up the nominee, but who knows.

If the Republican Party is rallying around Christie, and I can't imagine why Jindal and Ryan would be urging him to stay on as head of the RGA if they weren't, this is going to be a bonanza for the Democrats as the investigations unfold over a long drawn out period of months.

Chris Christie, Wildstein's letter, and Port Authority land deals

ruellia

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Saturday February 01, 2014 · 7:20 AM PST

2014/02/01 · 07:20

I believe that the most interesting part of the letter from Wildstein's attorney to the Port Authority has so far been ignored by the media: the paragraph accusing "certain commissioners" at the PA of allocating PA funds to land deals. In addition, I think the media is not fully appreciating the indirect evidence that Chris Christie knew about the closures both before and during the days that they were effective.

There has been a lot of insistence in the media recently that there is as yet no evidence that Chris Christie knew of the bridge lane closures BEFORE they happened. Wildstein's lawyer is claiming in his letter to the Port Authority that evidence exists that Christie knew of the closures DURING the closures--which is bad enough if it is true, because this would raise the question of why the governor did not immediately take action to correct the problem. One would normally expect a Governor of New Jersey to be horrified and outraged on learning that the GWB was suffering massive unnecessary traffic congestion--over September 11, no less--even if it were due to some cause quite unrelated to the actions of his own staff. So it would be damning even if Christie only knew about the closures while they occured, as Wildstein claims, because Christie's doing nothing to end them would indicate that the closures were at a minimum okay with him--or at worst he wanted them to happen.

As yet Wildstein has offered no proof that Christie knew about the closures as they occurred. But since there was a lot of media coverage during the bridge problems, I do not see any way that Christie could not have known about them. He must have learned about them from the press coverage. Plus there were the 20 to 30 urgent emails to Christie from Mayor Sokolich complaining that Fort Lee ambulances and emergency services were being hindered and begging him to unblock the lanes. So Christie had to know. And yet Christie did nothing to end them. Hence his bizarre insistence that nobody told him about the closures (!!!), to explain why he was not hitting the roof and knocking heads left and right as one would expect.

I think there is too little emphasis in recent coverage on how unlikely it is that anyone other than Christie could have been responsible for ordering the lane closures. Anyone who has worked with a politician knows how terrifying it would be to give orders to cause traffic congestion, just on your own hook without the knowledge of, say, the mayor, which is my area of experience. It would have scared me to death to order such lane closures, and I would have known that I would almost certainly lose my job, and that the firing would likely have been done in a public, humiliating way to appease the angry citizens. People complain bitterly about lane closures even for much needed repairs of streets with car-damaging potholes (a big problem in my city, due to the type of soil we have.) Lane closures of a major artery are politically sensitive even when completely justified, and they get hostile press coverage. All of that applies exponentially more for unnecessary lane closures on "the busiest bridge in the world" and economic lifeline of the area.

After the orange squiggle, I look at the alternatives to Christie's having ordered the closures and the accusations in Wildstein's letters about Port Authority commissioners being involved in land deals.

ruellia

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Saturday December 07, 2013 · 9:35 AM PST

2013/12/07 · 09:35

HealthCare.gov had 3.7 million visitors last week in 4 and a half days!

http://www.hhs.gov/...

"This week, the site remained stable and experienced no unscheduled downtimes. The average error rate was 0.77% and response time averaged well under 1 second"

The queuing system was deployed only twice, once Monday when response times slowed and error messages rose, and once proactively on Tuesday ahead of the President’s remarks on health care. During these two periods more than 16,000 consumers--out of 3.7 million visitors over the 4 and a half day period-- were put into the new queuing system to request an email notification on when to come back. Over 93% of those who got the email to come back did so and had high levels of engagement across the site, browsing 30% more pages and spending 15% longer on the site.

I am no expert but I think that 7 million enrollments is coming, maybe not by March 31, but maybe even by then. 3.7 million visitors shows that there is a tremendous thirst for health insurance--and that the healthcare.gov site could handle that number.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post said in his Plum Line blog that the insurance companies have budgeted one billion dollars to push people toward the ACA website, and that they have not started the ads yet. I imagine they do not want to trigger a flood of faulty 834s. But my guess is that they will start their advertising onslaught within a week or two. Needless to say, the insurance companies will be targeting young and healthies very aggressively.

Also see this Huffington Post article on the administration and allied organizations' push to get people enrolled:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

I believe that the 834 problems are in the process of being fixed. This can hardly be rocket science as so many companies have figured out how to send 834s. It will be a painstaking process of going through code and going through forms to seek out errors, but it will be fixed.

I have not seen any specified argument as to why the 834s can not be fixed, and the administration says that errors are now below 10 percent. Bugs can be debugged. It is a race between debugging the 834s and the rise in enrollments that this high traffic tells me is coming.

I think that large enrollment through the ACA has the capacity to create a major shift in the political landscape -- one highly unfavorable to Republicans. It may be Democrats who are running on the ACA in 2014.

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Top Republicans Stand By Christie

Chris Christie, Wildstein's letter, and Port Authority land deals

HealthCare.gov had 3.7 M visitors in 4.5 days!