Transcript from my Feb 9-10 2014 show in the Controversy regarding the CBO Report on Obamacare

To hear the segment as I delivered it, click http://www.blogtalkradio.com/lesersense/2014/02/10/cbo-controversy-on-jobs-russian-intelligence-intercepts-calls-from-us-diplomats-1  

This past week, the Congressional Budget Office released a huge 182 page report detailing their analysis of the future of the economy and the budget for the next ten years from 2014 to 2024.

What I said just there is probably mystifying to most of you because the only thing that seemed to be reported in the news is that the Congressional Budget Office said something about Obamacare that affected around two million jobs.

No, the report was meant to cover every aspect of the economy and budget and give a ten year outlook. I am going through the report and hope to have more interesting tidbits for you during my next few shows. 

There is a lot to take in.

I am going to ask you to stay with me here because the report is really wonky and full of somewhat dry details. I am going to try to address what the report said and the reaction to it by Republicans a couple of ways that I think you will enjoy it’s just going to take a little bit of time to get there.

What immediately made headlines is a suggestion regarding two million jobs and Obamacare. Now, the first thing you have to understand is that where this is all detailed is appendix C of the CBO report in question, titled Labor Market Effects of the Affordable Care Act: Updated Estimates. This section is eleven pages long and divided into an Overview where the report first explains what it thinks is going to happen, and two major subsections, one called “effects on the Supply of Labor” and another titled effects on the Demand for Labor where it painstakingly details the reasons why it thinks the things outlined in the Overview will happen.

The Supply of Labor is of course us the workers and whether we want to work and how much. Demand for labor refers to whether businesses out there want to hire.

In the overview, it talks about how quote

the CBO estimates that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net,by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.

That is a verbatim read from the report. So right off the bat, the CBO’s report says that it is talking about workers choosing to work less, not businesses offering fewer jobs and it as much as says that this accounts almost entirely for the reduction in hours and jobs.

Now, I want to talk about what that means and whether I agree with it or not and I will get to that, but first I want to address what happened when this information came out, namely, the mischaracterization of this information in Republican and Conservative circles and failure of huge segments of the press to report this properly. Let’s get started with Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Certainly we can have the expectation that the Senate Minority Leader has a staff that can get him the correct information on things right? Well, let’s hear what he said:

            <I play a clip by Sen Mitch McConnell on the CBO where he talks about 2million jobs being lost>

Almost everywhere you went where a Republican or Conservative elected official or members of the press was speaking you heard something similar to what Mitch McConnell just said. I can give a lot of examples, but one of them that stands out is The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication started in 2012 with ties to Tea Party organizations like the Center for American Freedom which has William Kristol on its board, this publication deserves special mention for putting out no less than four misleading videos on this. Here is part of the audio of just one of those four videos:

            <I play a clip from the Washington Free Beacon where they have several people talking about jobs being lost>

Even supposedly non-partisan members of the media rushed to make statements that were completely unsupported by the document the CBO put out. Talking Points Memo put out an article where they showed Tweets by several high profile journalists that fell into this category. For instance

Chuck todd, the Chief White House Correspondant for NBC news tweeted:

CBO essentially reaffirms GOP talking points on health care. Says it will cost jobs, feel as if it raises taxes and contributes to deficit

Ben White from Politico tweeted:

Devastating #CBO report: Obamacare will cost 2 million full-time jobs over next three years.

The ability of our media here in the US particularly those conservative aspects of it to put out misleading information has really become breathtaking. Jon Stewart did a hilarious piece on this where he showed clips of a number of Republican elected officials repeating the incorrect information about job losses and then played this piece of congressional Democrats asking the head of the CBO Mr. Elmendorf some questions about it:

            <Jon Stewart Questions Elmendorf who reiterates jobs are not being lost in his scenario, people are choosing to work less>

So not only is the head of the CBO, Mr. Elmendorf refuting what Republicans are saying about his report, he basically says that Obamacare is going to cut the deficit and has not caused employers to cut jobs or reduce hours. The funny thing is, there is stuff worth discussing in this CBO report regarding jobs and Obamacare. To get us started on those things, here is some audio from an appearance I did on Thursday on Your World with Neil Cavuto to discuss it.

            <I reiterate that the 2 million refers to people deciding to work less not that people are being let go and I talk about how I don’t agree with the CBO’s analysis because in my experience people are holding onto their jobs and hours out of fear after the economic downturn>

That’s my main contention with this small piece of the CBO report and that is that I don’t think it captures how unwilling people are to give up their jobs right now even folks who are deeply unhappy with their current job. People are not quitting their jobs and they are not willingly giving up hours, and I don’t know if there is a way for the CBO to factor in angst like that in their analysis. That’s why I think they are wrong. If you are out there in the workforce, I think you know what I am saying is true. People are generally not leaving jobs of their own free will.

But let’s assume the CBO is right for a moment. Obamacare allows everyone to get good and affordable insurance outside of an employment situation. CBO is correct about that. CBO then says that because of that, some folks will work less or leave their jobs because of that for a variety of reasons.

One of those reasons is that you have a two parent family with both parents working and one will now spend more time at home taking care of the kids. That is one of the situations contemplated by the CBO.

Another is that someone will leave their job to start a business. Now you might ask what Obamacare has to do with that. I’ll explain.

Let’s say that you are also one of two working parents with children. Let’s say you are a plumber or a carpenter or a computer programmer or an accountant or one of a lot of other jobs working in a medium sized firm that provides health insurance and because of this you are the reason your family has health insurance. If this was before Obamacare and you quit your job to try to start a business, your entire family would lose their health insurance. That is a huge disincentive to start your own business particularly if you or another member of your family has health issues.

But now with the Affordable Care Act, you can leave your job and start your own carpentry or plumbing or programming or accounting business. You can afford health insurance for your family without having to continue to work for someone else. That is a great thing. That encourages good risk taking to create new businesses. In short, Obamacare supports capitalism.

That’s the funny thing about social programs. Social programs plus capitalism does capitalism better than capitalism by itself.

And that a the succinct way of describing the Liberal and Progressive position on economics in a nutshell.

We’ll be right back.

Transcript of my Feb 9-10 2014 Segment on Russian Intelligence intercept of US Diplomatic Phone Call

To hear the segment as I delivered it, click http://www.blogtalkradio.com/lesersense/2014/02/10/cbo-controversy-on-jobs-russian-intelligence-intercepts-calls-from-us-diplomats-1 and forward to about the 16th minute.

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As many of you know there was a conversation between two American diplomats leaked to the press this week. The conversation was between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland (C) and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.

Nuland: OK... one more wrinkle for you Geoff. [A click can be heard] I can't remember if I told you this, or if I only told Washington this, that when I talked to Jeff Feltman [United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs] this morning, he had a new name for the UN guy Robert Serry did I write you that this morning?

Pyatt: Yeah I saw that.

 Nuland: OK. He's now gotten both Serry and [UN Secretary General] Ban Ki-moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, **** the EU.

Pyatt: No, exactly. And I think we've got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, that the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it...

Now of course there are the geopolitical considerations to be discussed resulting from this. Some leaders in the EU expressed outrage, and of course they weren’t really outraged they just have to express it to appear like they are doing something. There were a few notable exceptions.

The office of EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said that they would not comment on “allegedly intercepted communication as a position of principle.”

“Intercepted private conversations aren’t part of the toolbox that we use to assist Ukraine,” said a spokesperson for Barroso.

The German newspaper Der Spiegel online published an opinion column titled “Relax, Europe.” Stating:

“Europe should simply laugh about the American F-word. Some humor would do no harm to the transatlantic relationship at the moment.”

Those are public statements; let me assure everyone that no leader in Europe is upset at the US or Assistant Secretary of State Nuland. In private, people say all kinds of things, all of you hearing this show, I am sure that at several points in your life, you have privately expressed frustration with even your best friends on occasion. Everybody knows that.

The curious thing about this is how it happened.

American officials immediately pointed the finger at Russian intelligence for the leak, Nuland herself referred to quote “remarkable tradecraft”, which is political and diplomatic speak for spying and intelligence actions. That is what I want to talk about because that is the really interesting aspect of this.

I think she is right and I think it is pretty obvious that this intercept and leak is the work of the Russians. They are the ones who have motive.

Russian intelligence is mostly conducted out of three agencies, the FSB, GRU and SVR. One of these three would be responsible for intercepting this call and disseminating it. My guess here is that this is the work of the GRU or Glavnye Raz-vedie-vatel-noye Uprav-linye which translates to main intelligence directorate.

But why would they do this now? In some ways it doesn’t seem to make sense. First of all, this is yet another blow to the narrative that had been set by Edward Snowden when seeking Asylum in Russia. A few weeks ago I noted how the problems Russia was having with ensuring that the Sochi Olympics were secure from terrorists was one problematic area for them because Snowden’s argument is that the US is going too far in its surveillance and espionage efforts against terrorism. If Russia is having problems dealing with terrorism but harboring Snowden, that is pretty hypocritical.

Now we have another instance of hypocrisy. One of the things that Snowden leaked was the idea that the US was listening in on the phone conversations of various diplomats. That is supposed to be bad. Now we have an example of Russia doing the same thing, yet they are giving Snowden asylum for leaking that the US did it.

That is some pretty serious hypocrisy.

Why would the Russian’s out themselves as hypocrites like this? While you are thinking that over, I should point out that countries usually do not advertise efforts by their intelligence agencies to the extent that this phone call intercept and dissemination did. That’s part of the whole point of covert operations. They are supposed to stay secret. You don’t want the public knowing, you don’t want your adversaries knowing. You can bet that this very second, US intelligence agencies are conducting a thorough investigation of how the Russians did this and are building new countermeasures and procedures into how diplomats and other officials do business.

So in terms of both keeping the US looking bad with respect to Russia on surveillance, this hurts Russia and it also potentially weakens Russia’s ability to eavesdrop on certainly the United States and perhaps other countries and groups in the future.

So again, why would they do this?

To me, the answer is obvious. I think the Russians are really worried about the situation in Ukraine.

A Russian expat friend just back from a trip to Russia said to me a week and a half ago, Steve, you have no idea how serious the Russians are about keeping complete control over the government and political situation in Ukraine. They will do everything they can to keep their guy in power over there and prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union.

The intercept of this phone call is confirmation of that as far as I am concerned. To give you all some more background, Russia’s preferred Ukranian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych was elected to the Presidency in Ukraine in 2010 and as of that moment, all progress towards Ukraine joining the European Union stopped. Prior to this, two Ukranian leaders, Victor Yushenko and Yulia Tymoshenko had been pursuing not only EU membership for Ukraine, but NATO membership for Ukraine.

Upon assuming power, Yanukovych’s governing of Ukraine can be described as pretty much exactly how Putin wants him to govern Ukraine. Ukraine has become a satellite of Russia under Yanukovych. EU and NATO membership for Ukraine is something that Putin does not want to see happen because if and when that happens, Russia’s influence over Ukraine will be weakened permanently.

In November of 2013, Yanukovych formally rejected an accord with the European Union in favor of stronger ties to Russia. Ever since then, protests have erupted in Ukraine which turned violent in January. The BBC reports that this is the worst unrest in the country since Ukraine’s independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991.

The pro-European Union rallies have drawn crowds in Ukraine’s capitol of Kiev numbering in the hundreds of thousands of people. Putin fears losing control of Ukraine and he hates that the US is playing a role in trying to mediate a solution to the crisis.

That is why Putin ordered the Russian intelligence services to risk exposing themselves by intercepting and releasing this phone conversation. It is a move motivated by desperation by a man who wants to maintain control of Ukraine and fears he is about to lose it.

In case any more evidence is needed about how seriously Russia views its control of Ukraine, curious things have happened to both prior Ukranian leaders who wanted to forge closer relationships between Ukraine and Europe and the US.

I mentioned Victor Yushenko earlier. In 2004 in the middle of an election against the current President of Ukraine, Yanukovich, Mr. Yushenko was poisoned with the Dioxin Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin. Mr. Yushenko won that election and became President of Ukraine. On September 27, 2009 Yushchenko said in an interview that the testimony of three men who were at a dinner in 2004 at which he believes he was poisoned is crucial to finishing the investigation, and he claimed these men were in Russia. And, surprise, surprise, Ukrainian prosecutors said Russia has refused to extradite one of the men, the former deputy chief of Ukraine's security service, Volodymyr Satsyuk, because he holds both Russian and Ukrainian citizenship.

That is the experience of one leader who wanted to take Ukraine into a closer relationship with the EU and the United States. Another such leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister of Ukraine was thrown in jail after Yanukovich came to power and her trial and imprisonment is viewed by many in the international community, not least of which the Danish Helsinki committee as a politically motivated imprisonment. The European Court on Human Rights said in an April 30, 2013 judgment that Tymoshenko’s arrest had been politically motivated and her rights had been violated. She has sat in prison since 2011 under a seven year sentence.

Russia particularly has it in for Ms Tymoshenko because of a role she played in a gas dispute between Ukraine and Russia back in 2009 where it is said she directly angered Putin.

So if you want to understand how ruthless Putin is willing to be with regards to keeping control over Ukraine, just look at what has happened to the two highest profile Ukranian Leaders who wanted to move Ukraine from a Russian centered foreign policy, to a European Union centered foreign policy,

Once you understand the background, what happened here and why becomes much more clear. This phone intercept and its release was part of a deliberate plan to hinder the US efforts to mediate the Ukraine crisis and the Russians hoped it would put a wedge between US and the EU precisely when they should be working together on Ukraine to help remove her from Russian domination. Accomplishing that goal was worth it to Putin even though it would expose Russian intelligence efforts and make him and Russia look like a hypocrite in the Snowden case to anyone who was paying attention.

The crisis in Ukraine is ongoing with the USA Today reporting on Thursday that Ukraine protesters are telling reporters that they are concerned that Russia will intervene militarily at some point. I’ve heard this myself from several sources that the Russians are contemplating military intervention in Ukraine after the Olympics are over.

Again, this is a big issue to Russia and they are willing to pull out all the stops, all of the tricks and everything else to get their way here. What no one in the US or Europe should do is succumb to the dirty tricks that Russia and Putin are utilizing here to try and drive a wedge between the US and Europe. The US and Europe need to work together to ensure the wishes of the people of Ukraine to have closer ties to the EU are realized.

We’ll be right back.

Transcript from my Feb 2-3 Radio Show piece on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

To hear this from my Radio Show Podcast, click here to hear at BlogtalkRadio.com http://www.blogtalkradio.com/lesersense/2014/02/02/coverage-of-bombshell-new-evidence-and-allegations-against-chris-christie-more-1 or here to hear at KCAA http://kcaaradio.celestrion.net/kcaa-podcasts/leser/20140203.html

Folks, I was on the Kelly file hosted by Megyn Kelly on Friday night to discuss the latest allegations about New Jersey governor Chris Christie and they do not paint a nice picture of him.

If you haven’t heard, the attorney for David Wildstein, the erstwhile Port Authority director of interstate capital projects and the person most responsible for implementation of the closed lanes on the George Washington Bridge, says that he has evidence that Chris Christie knew about the scandal during the time the bridge lanes were closed, which is much earlier than Christie says he did and also that he was aware of the Patrick Foye email before he said he was.

There is a common character these scandals take when in the person at the center of them is guilty of doing something wrong and is desperately trying to hide that fact.

They come out and do a big press conference where they deny everything, they say they did nothing wrong and had no idea about wrongdoing, and then drip, drip, drip, the evidence that they did not tell the truth and that they are guilty of whatever it is they are being accused of slowly and painfully comes out. Not all at once and sometimes the first revelations aren’t exactly smoking guns, but it starts with evidence that there were things said in that big press conference that were just not true.

Something told me when Governor Christie held his January 9th press conference where he denied participating in or in fact all prior knowledge of any wrongdoing in his administration regarding Bridge-gate, that this was not going to be the end of his problems with that issue.

For starters, the suggestion that Christie, who claims to be this extraordinary leader and manager and is in fact a micromanager and bully and who portrays himself as this guy who is on top of everything but on this one issue issued a couple of dozen denials that he knew what was going on until way after it was over, those two versions of Christie that he wanted to feed us seemed incongruous non credible.

He claimed in his press conference that he didn’t begin to know something was wrong until press reports began to surface about Patrick Foye’s email. Patrick Foye is the Executive Director of the Port Authority and his forceful email on September 13th, the fifth day of the George Washington bridge lane closures is what ended the lane closures.

The bridge closures occurred from September 9th to September 13th. Press reports about Patrick Foye’s email didn’t start coming out until October 1st. That is when Governor Christie says he realized the lane closures were some kind of issue.

What I want to make sure everyone understands is that the dual level George Washington Bridge which connects Manhattan and New Jersey and serves 102 million vehicles per year is the most heavily trafficked bridge in the world.

This bridge is arguably the most important piece of infrastructure in a metropolitan area with a lot of important infrastructure. In order for someone to believe Christie, you would have to believe that the Governor of a state would ignore a massive ongoing five day crisis with the most important piece of infrastructure in his state and wouldn’t look into it at all.

Honestly, who would believe that? Obviously the justice department doesn’t believe that which is why a Federal investigation complete with the FBI having agents involved is currently going on with regards to bridge gate.

I want to talk about some of the important reasons I think that Governor Christie is guilty of wrongdoing in Bridge gate, but before I talk about that, I think it’s important to remind you all that there is a second federal investigation going on regarding the Christie administration concerning the Christie administration’s use of the Superstorm Sandy funds and there are several allegations involved. 

The first is that Christie improperly chose between two bids for marketing the relief efforts. There was a bid that would cost $2.5 million dollars and a bid that would cost $4.7 million dollars and again this was just for marketing, not actually rebuilding anything. The costs would come right out of the relief funds. Christie chose the $4.7 million dollar effort and here is the kicker, the $4.7 million dollar plan involved advertisements featuring Christie and his family. The lower priced campaign did not.

Also, as reported by NJ.com, Gov. Chris Christie helped channel $6 million in federal Hurricane Sandy recovery dollars to a project conceived years before the storm struck, in an Essex County town that was not particularly hard hit, records show. The funding, pushed for personally by the Republican governor, was announced less than two weeks before the town’s Democratic mayor Raymond Kimble formally endorsed him for reelection. The development is an $18 million senior center and housing complex in Belleville called Franklin Manor. One third of the cost — $6 million — is being paid for by a $1.8 billion pot of federally funded Community Development Block Grants to help the state recover from Sandy.

There are also the well-known allegations by the mayor of Hoboken Dawn Zimmer that she was told if she did not endorse Christie’s re-election, her relief funds for Superstorm Sandy would be affected.

Remember how Republicans and the conservative media jumped all over her and called her allegations non-credible? Well emails surfaced on January 28th backing up her story.

The NY Post, again, not a liberal media institution by any stretch of the imagination reported that newly released e-mails indicate Gov. Chris Christie’s administration pressured the mayor of Hoboken to approve a huge development project even during a meeting centered on Hurricane Sandy relief funds, according to a report.

One e-mail to Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer lists the first item on the agenda for a meeting about Sandy funds was “review of concepts for flood control measures at Rockefeller property,” The New York Times reported Wednesday.

The property refers to a billion-dollar complex that was being proposed for the city by a Christie-connected developer.

Zimmer requested the meeting after a severe rainstorm last May flooded Hoboken and raised concerns that the city could be devastated again.

She said she would not discuss the project at the meeting, the Times said.

The next day, Zimmer received a call saying Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno would be visiting her in Hoboken.

At that infamous meeting, Zimmer claims Guadagno and another Christie staffer demanded she push forward the redevelopment plan or risk losing all the Sandy recovery money.

On January 18th, the Washington Post reported that in September, Adam Schneider, the liberal mayor of the New Jersey shore town of Long Branch, was having trouble with the state utility board. After repeatedly getting the run-around, Schneider decided to instead try his luck with the office of Gov. Chris Christie.

Schneider’s call came four months after he crossed party lines to endorse the 2013 reelection of Christie (R), whose performance he admired after Hurricane Sandy. Schneider said that the governor never promised him anything but that he believes he has received “enhanced” access to state officials since the endorsement.

The same Washinton Post article says that Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop has said the Christie administration suddenly yanked his access to a contingent of top officials slated to offer guidance on navigating the state bureaucracy after he declined to back the governor.

So we start to see a pattern here with how the Christie administration did business. The word pattern may not even do justice to what this suggests.

Since I promised to do so, let’s talk about some of the lies or suspicious behavior by Chris Christie regarding Bridge gate:

1.      Christie claims not to have known about the Bridge lane closures until after it was over. But he met with the person who was one of the prime people responsible for it, Mr. Wildstein, on September 11th in New York, in the middle of the whole mess and while the Mayor of Fort Lee was screaming about it to everyone who would listen. Remember the lanes were closed from September 9th to September 13th. September 11 was right in the middle.

2.      On December 12th, the Wall Street Journal reports in an article by  TED MANN, ERICA ORDEN and HEATHER HADDON that Chris Christie phoned New York Governor Cuomo about Patrick Foye and the closure investigation to try to get him to back off of the investigation. A day later, and ever since, including in his January 9th press conference, Christie has tried to deny speaking with Cuomo about the investigation. The article specifically says:

a.       New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week to complain about a Cuomo appointee's handling of a growing controversy over traffic pattern changes on the George Washington Bridge, a person familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Christie, a Republican, complained in a private phone call to Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, that Patrick Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was pressing too hard to get to the bottom of why the number of toll lanes onto the bridge from Fort Lee, N.J. was cut from three to one in early September, according to this person. The lane closures occurred without notice to local authorities, officials have said, and snarled traffic for a week in the small borough on the Hudson River bluffs.

This particular issue isn’t so easy for Christie and his goons to use the typical response which is to pass it off as an attack by that quote Liberal media. We all know the Wall Street Journal leans conservative.

3.      In response to Wildstein’s lawyer saying this past week that Christie knew about the lane closures and why they were occurring during the crisis, not afterwards as Christie claims, Christie issued a statement saying this corroborates his previous assertions that Governor Christie did not know about the lane closures in advance. As Megyn Kelly pointed out when she and I discussed this on her show last night, those two statements are not mutually exclusive. If you take them together, there is a simple statement that is true in both assertions and that is that Christie knew fairly early on in the lane closures what was happening.

All three of these issues cast extreme doubt on the assertions made by Christie in his January 9th press conference.

I think we can safely say a couple of things about bridge-gate at this point. The intersection between the statements of Wildstein’s attorney and the statement released by Christie’s camp along with the things I outlined earlier regarding the experience and statements of Democratic mayors in New Jersey and their experience with the Christie administration suggests to me that Governor Christie fostered a climate in his administration where it was routine not only to offer quid pro quos, where support for the Governor by mayors and other local officials garnered one favorable funding for projects and similar concessions, on the flip side of that, the lack of such support of Christie by local officials resulted in retribution and punishment.

Governor Christie expected his staff to threaten and carry out such measures. It is demonstrated in repeated instances how this was the case. I think Governor Christie expected that the mayor of Fort Lee Mark Sokolich would support his re-election because of the killing of the Hudson train tunnel which would have diverted traffic and business from Fort Lee. Christie looked at that as a favor and expected quid pro quo in the form of an endorsement of his reelection.

When he didn’t get that, he expected his staff to retaliate. Whether he explicitly said it or not, and whether he explicitly said to close the lanes on the bridge as part of that retaliation is immaterial. Christie actively fostered quid pro quo and retaliatory policies as a part of normal doing business for his administration.

You see this with Bridgegate, you see it with the way Christie used the money for superstorm sandy when I went over that earlier this is how the Christie administration did business.

I feel sorry for my friends just over the Hudson river in New Jersey. People don’t deserve to have elected officials who engage in corrupt practices. These quid-pro-quo and retaliatory actions take money away from doing the state’s business, they waste the taxpayers money. The people of New Jersey did not deserve to have Superstorm sandy relief funds spent needlessly on a more expensive ad campaign that featured the Governor and his family. They didn’t deserve to have superstorm sandy relief funds go to a mega-complex in a city that received little to no damage in the storm. They didn’t deserve to have EMS responders in Fort Lee require four times the normal response time to respond during the lane closures and the people of New Jersey didn’t deserve a situation where parent’s in Fort Lee couldn’t get their kids to school those days. The estimated money lost to New Jersey commuters alone in gas and time from bridge-gate is estimated at over $20 million. That’s just the beginning in terms of estimating money lost from that event.

It is starting to come out, it is all going to come out folks. It is going to come out that all of the worst allegations regarding Chris Christie and his administration are true.

It’s obvious now. And you know what, I think a lot more examples of quid-pro-quo and retaliation haven’t come out yet. As I said, the sense I get is that this was the way the Christie administration went about business all the time. There may be dozens, scores or even hundreds of examples before we are over folks.

It’s really sad, this is going to be the second major corruption scandal facing New Jersey in the last couple of decades, the other one being ABSCAM now being featured in the film American Hustle.

I can’t even begin to fathom the number of indictments and convictions that we are going to see. Like the examples of quid pro quo and retaliation that will come out the numbers could be pretty high before it is all over.

Let’s hope that those responsible for all of this, including the Governor, resign, take responsibility and get this over with so that the people of New Jersey can begin the process of rebuilding their state government. Yes, I just said Chris Christie should resign. I laid out the reasons, I don’t think there should be even a question left about that at this point. This is one of the most corrupt state administrations in American history. When it is all said and done I think Chris Christie is going to make Rob Blagojevich look like a boyscout in comparison.