The Commentariat -- Jan. 21, 2014

Internal links removed.

Li Anne Wong of CNBC: "The combined wealth of the world's richest 85 people is now equivalent to that owned by half of the world's population -- or 3.5 billion of the poorest people -- according to a new report from Oxfam. In a report titled 'Working for the Few' released Monday, the global aid and development organization detailed the extent of global economic inequality created by the rapidly increasing wealth of the richest, warning of the major risks it poses to 'human progress.'" ...

... Rebecca Riffkin of Gallup: "Two out of three Americans are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are currently distributed in the U.S. This includes three-fourths of Democrats and 54% of Republicans."

Nelson Schwartz of the New York Times: "Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, is ... pushing his branch of the central bank to get more involved in the New England economy..., spearheading an effort to turn around some of Massachusetts' most depressed cities. Last week, Mr. Rosengren and his team announced the winners of a Fed-sponsored competition that will funnel $1.8 million into innovative economic development projects in six medium-size cities.... It represents a new, untested approach for the Fed, which has been widely criticized for bailing out Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis, but leaving Main Street to fend for itself." CW: Less than $2MM for Main Street, $700 billion for Wall Street. And the money is coming from private "donors."

Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times: ObamaCare "is already having a profound effect on the lives of poor Americans. Enrollment in private insurance plans has been sluggish, but sign-ups for Medicaid, the federal insurance program for the poor, have surged in many states.... In West Virginia, where the Democratic governor agreed to expand Medicaid eligibility, the number of uninsured people in the state has been reduced by about a third.... "The men and women getting the coverage here say the mere fact of having it has drastically improved their mental health. Waitresses, fast food workers, security guards and cleaners described feeling intense relief that they are now protected from the punishing medical bills that have punched holes in their family budgets. They spoke in interviews of reclaiming the dignity they had lost over years of being turned away from doctors' offices because they did not have insurance." ...

     ... CW: Now say, "Thank you, Democrats & President Obama." Oh, never mind: "President Obama -- often blamed here in coal country for the industry's decline -- remains deeply unpopular.... Chad Webb, a shy 30-year-old who is enrolling people in Mingo County, said a woman at a recent [ACA sign-up] event used biblical terms to disparage Mr. Obama as an existential threat to the nation. Mr. Webb said he thought to himself: 'This man is not the Antichrist. He just wants you to have health insurance.'"

Alex Pareene of Salon on the newest Republican excuse for not passing immigration reform: ObamaCare! See, Obama screwed up the implementation of a major portion of the ACA, so he would screw up the administration of any immigration bill, too. The only solution for Latinos: elect a Republican president (someone like me, Marco Rubio!). As Pareene points out, Republicans had some other excuse to reject immigration reform when there actually was a Republican president -- Dubya -- who advocated for it. ...

     ... CW: As we have seen for the past five years, the basic Republican position is that they will enact no legislation in the national interest while a Democrat is president. Obstructionism is not a tactic; it's a goal. This is why the Healthcare.gov rollout was such a disaster: it didn't give Republicans just a weeks-long talking point; it bolstered their central theses that (a) government is the problem and (b) Democrats can't be "trusted" to do it well. (In the same way, the killing of Osama bin Ladin was a disaster for Republicans.)

Keystone XL Junior. Ned Resnikoff of NBC News: "A leak in one of the pump stations along Enbridge Energy's Line 67 pipeline caused about 125 barrels to spray across a rural area of Saskatchewan, Canada.... For over a year, environmental groups have been building the campaign against Line 67's expansion.... Environmental activists insist that accidents in general are the norm for Enbridge.... A report [PDF] from Canada's progressive Polaris Institute claim[s] that the company had accidentally spilled approximately 161,475 barrels of oil between 1999 and 2010."

Local News

Scott Fallon of the Bergen Record: "A planning report heavily favored the politically connected builder of a $1.1 billion proposed development that is at the center of a dispute between the governor's office and Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer.... Of the 10 industrial and commercial properties that the report recommended for redevelopment, nine were owned by a subsidiary of the Rockefeller Group, records show. The Rockefeller Group is represented by the law firm of David Samson, a close Christie adviser whom Christie appointed as chairman of the Port Authority, which paid for the planning study." ...

... James O'Neill of the Record: "Amid the debate over the amount of Sandy recovery money Hoboken received, the Christie administration on Monday defended its decision to send significant chunks of federal Sandy aid to towns and counties that were minimally affected by the October 2012 storm. Counties largely unscathed by Sandy, including Warren, Morris and Burlington, received millions of dollars in aid for local resiliency projects, and dozens of individual communities barely grazed by Sandy were able to tap into a $25 million fund designed to help make local energy systems more resilient." ...

... Patricia McGeehan of the New York Times: "On Monday, [New Jersey Lt. Gov. Kim] Guadagno disputed [Hoboken Mayor Dawn] Zimmer's account of their meeting at a Shop-Rite supermarket in May. 'Mayor Zimmer's version of our conversation in May of 2013 is not only false, but is illogical and does not withstand scrutiny when all of the facts are examined,' Ms. Guadagno said at an event to commemorate Martin Luther King's Birthday. 'Any suggestion that Sandy funds were tied to the approval of any project in New Jersey is completely false.'" ...

... Star Ledger Editors: "Chris Christie's smear campaign [is] in full swing." Smearer-in-Chief: Rudy 9/11 Giuliani. ...

... Gov. Bipartisan, Ctd. Matt Friedman of the Star-Ledger: "Three years ago, a plan to make Carl Lewis a 'youth fitness ambassador' for New Jersey was scrapped by Gov. Chris Christie's administration when the Olympic track and field star decided to run for state Senate as a Democrat, Lewis said today. Now, with the George Washington Bridge scandal raging, the nine-time Olympic gold medalist says he sees a 'strong parallel' between his own interaction with Christie and what happened in Fort Lee, and that Christie is an 'insecure person.'" ...

If you run, we're going to have to cancel the program. -- Gov. Chris Christie to Carl Lewis, according to Lewis

... Pew Research Center: A majority of people who have heard about Bridgegate do not believe Chris Christie's story that he had no idea his aides caused the lane closures. ...

... MSNBC Civil War. Catherine Thompson of TPM: "'Morning Joe' hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, self-described fans of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), attacked [Dawn Zimmer,] the mayor of Hoboken, N.J., Monday for alleging Christie's administration shook her down for Hurricane Sandy relief funds.... 'Way Too Early' host Thomas Roberts, calling Zimmer a 'whistleblower,' accused Scarborough and Brzezinski of 'eviscerating' the mayor. Scarborough shot back, accusing Roberts of 'putting a halo' over her."

Right Wing World

Chutzpah. Catherine Thompson: "Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin seized Martin Luther King Day as an opportunity to lob vague criticism at President Barack Obama. 'Mr. President, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all who commit to ending any racial divide, no more playing the race card,' Palin wrote Monday on her Facebook page...."

The Laws, the Prophets and Netanyahoo. I told [Netanyahu], and some people think this is crazy and meddling -- apparently from the reaction some of y'all actually know who I am -- but I told the prime minister, I said, 'I mentioned this to you in 2009 -- we met a couple of times since then, but anyway -- 'I mentioned this to you in 2009 and I want to reiterate it, I think, I'm not a prophet, I know the Old Testament, I know history, I think you've got a chance to be one of Israel's great leaders.' I said, 'I am talking about all time. The big ones. Going back to David, to Solomon, up through Josiah, Hezekiah until the end, on up through Ben Gurion.' -- Rep. Louie Gohmert (RTP-Texas)

... Linda Kintsler of the New Republic picks "the four craziest moments from South Carolina's Tea party convention." Gohmert's comparing Netanyahu to the Biblical kings doesn't make the cut, but his invoking Bluto does.

News Ledes

New York Times: "The mysterious mass die-offs of honeybees that have wiped out roughly a third of commercial colonies each year since 2006 may be linked to a rapidly mutating virus that jumped from tobacco plants to soy plants to bees, according to a new study."

CNN: "A gunman shot and killed another man Tuesday inside Purdue University's electrical engineering building, spurring worried students to scramble into the bitter cold outside for safety. The Indiana school's police chief said that the suspect appeared to have had just one target in mind. He left the building right after the shooting, and a city police officer arrested him."

AP: " Another batch of heavy snow and frigid temperatures is forecast from Virginia to New England as a winter storm bears down on the Mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S. The National Weather Service says the winter storm could bring 10 inches of snow to Philadelphia and New York on Tuesday and bitterly cold air with wind chills as low as 10 degrees below zero later in the day." ...

     ... Update: "A swirling snowstorm clobbered parts of the mid-Atlantic and the urban Northeast on Tuesday, grounding thousands of flights, closing government offices in the nation's capital and making a mess of the evening commute. The storm stretched 1,000 miles between Kentucky and Massachusetts but hit especially hard along the heavily populated Interstate 95 corridor between Philadelphia and Boston, creating perilous rides home for millions of motorists."

USA Today: "President Obama will meet with Pope Francis on March 27, capping a European trip that will take him to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy."

AP: "A Vatican monsignor already on trial for allegedly plotting to smuggle 20 million euros ($26 million) from Switzerland to Italy was arrested Tuesday in a separate case for allegedly using his Vatican bank accounts to launder money. Financial police in the southern Italian city of Salerno said Monsignor Nunzio Scarano had transferred millions of euros in fictitious donations from offshore companies through his accounts at the Vatican's Institute for Religious Works. Police said millions have been seized and that other arrest warrants were also issued."

CNN: "A team of internationally renowned war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts has found 'direct evidence' of 'systematic torture and killing' by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, the lawyers on the team say in a new report. Their report, based on thousands of photographs of dead bodies of alleged detainees killed in Syrian government custody, would stand up in an international criminal tribunal, the group says."

The Commentariat -- Jan. 20, 2014

** 'A Time to Break the Silence' Sermon delivered at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967. Text & audio. ...

... John Blake of CNN: " Why it's important: This was King's most controversial speech. Even some members of his own staff warned him not to give it. With this sermon, King decisively came out against the Vietnam War at a time when many Americans still supported it. People were furious. President Lyndon Johnson stopped talking to him. Civil rights leaders criticized him, and major newspapers told him to stick to civil rights.... One year later to the day he gave this speech, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee." ...

... Joan Walsh of Salon: "Some of King's closest living allies have been trying hard to right the reverend's record. 'There have been and continue to be efforts to "neuter" or "de-radicalize" the Dr. King who delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in August, 1963,' says his longtime lawyer and speechwriter Clarence B. Jones. Though the dream speech, which Jones helped write, was itself radical, he sees King's April 1967 'Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence' speech at Riverside Church as 'the ideological turning point for King.'" ...

... The New Yorker opens up Renata Adler's "Letter from Selma," published April 10, 1965. ...

... Sean McElwee interviews Ian Lopez for Salon about the GOP's use of racist dogwhistles to attack all liberal policies. Lopez says, "... the central point here is that race is being used to wreck the middle class. This has been the way conservatives have found that they can attack commitments to education, commitments to a social safety net, commitments to infrastructure, commitments to job programs, commitments to progressive taxation that taxes the most wealthy to help the rest of society." ...

There's no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don't like the idea of a black president. Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I'm a black president. There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it's hard to disentangle those issues. You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government -- that it's distant, that it's bureaucratic, that it's not accountable -- and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what's also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states' rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There's a pretty long history there. -- Barack Obama, to David Remnick ...

... David Remnick of the New Yorker has a long piece (18 pages!) on President Obama. Remnick interviewed Obama for the magazine. ...

... What most pundits (in this case, Jordan Sargent of Gawker) picked up from Remnick's interview was this: "Obama said just about everything he should be saying about weed."

"Influence in Paradise -- Destination Fundraisers." Eric Lipton of the New York Times: "... members of Congress ... hit hot spots like the Napa Valley wine country, famed golf courses and hunting preserves, as well as five-star hotels in Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, South Florida and even Bermuda. Congress, after a corruption scandal that involved golf trips to Scotland and other getaways paid for by lobbyists, passed legislation in 2007 prohibiting lobbyists from giving lawmakers gifts of just about any value. But as is the norm in Washington, the lawmakers and lobbyists have figured out a workaround: Political campaigns and so-called leadership PACs controlled by the lawmakers now pay the expenses for the catering and the lawmakers' lodging at these events -- so they are not gifts -- with money collected from the corporate executives and lobbyists, who are still indirectly footing the bill."

Paul Krugman clocks David Brooks: "... for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.... I know that these realities make some people, not all of them hired guns for the plutocracy, uncomfortable, and they'd prefer to paint a different picture. But even if the facts have a well-known populist bias, they're still the facts -- and they must be faced.".

Eyder Peralta of NPR: "Rep. Mike Rogers made some strong allegations against former NSA contractor Edward Snowden on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday. Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, implied that Snowden received helped from Russia's security service both to steal the highly classified documents and then to travel to Russia, where he received temporary asylum.... These are some of the strongest allegations levied against Snowden...."

... The New York Times story, by Eric Schmitt & David Sanger, is here.

New York Times Editors: "If the Air Force cheating scandal disclosed last week were a singular event, it would be easier to accept Pentagon assurances that America's nuclear deterrence and military readiness have not been compromised. But it is the latest in a series of breaches that have raised alarms about discipline and competency in the Air Force.... The scandals should force America to think more broadly about the purpose of its vast and increasingly obsolete nuclear arsenal, and how the nation could be safer with far fewer weapons."

Local News

Rosalind Helderman of the Washington Post: Dawn Zimmer, "the mayor of Hoboken, N.J., met with federal prosecutors Sunday to provide information about her allegations that top aides to Gov. Chris Christie threatened to withhold Hurricane Sandy recovery money from her city if she did not approve development projects the governor favored. The meeting is a sign of the broadening scope of the federal investigation.... In a statement, Zimmer said Sunday evening that she had met in the afternoon with prosecutors at the U.S. attorney's office for several hours. She said the meeting came at prosecutors' request and she provided them with documents, including a personal journal entry she said was written in May in which she described the encounters." ...

... Angela Delli Santi of the AP: "On Sunday, [Mayor Zimmer] went a step further and said on CNN's 'State of the Union with Candy Crowley' that [New Jersey Lt. Gov. Kim] Guadagno told her that the request 'was a direct message from the governor. The lieutenant governor pulled me aside and said, essentially, "You've got to move forward with the Rockefeller project. This project is really important to the governor." And she said that she had been with him on Friday night and that this was a direct message from the governor,' Zimmer recalled Guadagno saying."

... Dominic Rushe of the Guardian: "On Sunday, the New Jersey assemblyman John Wisniewski [D] said his special legislative panel -- one of a number of investigations looking into the actions of Christie's administration – would look into Zimmer's claims as well as those regarding the George Washington bridge." ...

... Jonathan Chait: "... this is the main reason why I think Christie's presidential aspirations are basically dead. He's genuinely corrupt. There are numerous allegations swirling around him, and at this point it would require an implausible series of coincidences to believe he's not implicated in some nasty and quite likely straight-out illegal behavior."

... Michael Barbaro & Bill Carter of the New York Times: Christie breaks up with MSNBC. ...

... Paul Krugman: Chris Christie's "most devoted fund-raiser and loudest cheerleader," billionaire Home Depot founder Ken Langone, is also a guy who "recently tried to bully -- the Pope.... Yep. Stop criticizing the rich or we'll take it out on the poor. Nothing at all like punishing the residents of Fort Lee -- and, apparently, in what may be a much worse story, Hoboken -- because you're annoyed at their mayor."

Steve Szkotak of the AP: " Almost overnight, Virginia has emerged as a critical state in the nationwide fight to grant gay men and women the right to wed. This purple state was once perceived as unfriendly and even bordering on hostile to gay rights. That's changed after a seismic political shift in the top three elected offices, from conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats who support gay marriage. Two federal lawsuits challenging the state's constitutional ban on gay marriage are moving forward, and a hearing on one of the cases is scheduled for Jan. 30."

News Ledes

New York Times: "Otis G. Pike, a longtime congressman from New York who spearheaded an inquiry in the 1970s into accusations that the intelligence establishment had abused its power, died on Monday in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 92...."

One of his memorable achievements was when he thwarted a bill with a single comical speech on the House floor. The bill would have awarded $14 million in flight pay to admirals and generals who spent their time not in cockpits but sitting at desks. Standing up on the House floor to criticize the legislation, Mr. Pike spoke with his arms spread and swaying like the wings of a plane, as if he were flying. He brought up the worrisome perils of an admiral spinning in his chair and soaring out a window of the Pentagon into air-traffic patterns. The speech drew laughter and applause. The bill was defeated.

More from the Washington Post's obituary:

'If the in-basket is continually loaded on the starboard, or right-hand, side of the desk, and the out-basket is continually empty on the port, or left-hand, side of the desk,' said Mr. Pike, who flew 120 missions as a Marine pilot in World War II, 'wood fatigue sets in, the landing gear tends to buckle and the whole fuselage crashes down on your feet.'

New York Times: "Under intense American pressure, the United Nations on Monday withdrew an invitation to Iran to attend the much-anticipated Syria peace conference, reversing a decision announced a day earlier."

New York Times: "The first orchestrated rollback in Western antinuclear economic sanctions against Iran took effect on Monday under Tehran's temporary agreement with world powers, as all sides reported that the steps initially promised had been fulfilled. Under the temporary agreement, Iran began suspending most advanced uranium-fuel enrichment and halted other sensitive elements of its nuclear program. In exchange, it received what the United States called 'limited, targeted and reversible sanctions relief for a six-month period.'"

AFP: "A new threat to the upcoming Winter Olympics surfaced Sunday as US lawmakers worried about attacks at the Games to be hosted by Russia. In a video posted on a well-known jihadi forum, two men believed to have been suicide bombers in last month's deadly bombings in Volgograd speak of them -- and warned of more." ...

... AP: "Members of Congress expressed serious concerns Sunday about the safety of Americans at next month's Olympics in Russia and said Moscow needs to cooperate more on security."

AP: "Iran halted its most sensitive uranium enrichment work on Monday as part of a landmark deal struck with world powers, easing concerns over the country's nuclear program and clearing the way for a partial lifting of sanctions, Tehran and the U.N. said."

AFP: "Opposition protesters were Monday locked in a tense standoff with Ukrainian security forces in Kiev after hours of unprecedented clashes deep into the night left dozens wounded and parts of the centre resembling a battlefield."

AP: "An American missionary who has been jailed in North Korea for more than a year appeared before reporters Monday and appealed to the U.S. government to do its best to secure his release. The missionary, Kenneth Bae, made the comments at what he called a press conference held at his own request. He was under guard during the appearance. It is not unusual for prisoners in North Korea to say after their release that they spoke in similar situations under duress."

The Commentariat -- Jan. 19, 2014

Internal links removed.

Ellen Nakashima & Greg Miller of the Washington Post: "President Obama's intention to end the government's controversial practice of amassing the phone records of millions of Americans faces a tangle of technical, logistical and political problems that defy ready solutions and are largely beyond the president's control. Among the challenges is stiff resistance from phone companies that do not want to be told how long to hold their customers' data if the government does not collect it, especially if that means longer than they do now." ...

... ** Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution Center, in a New York Times op-ed: "Now that Google and AT&T can track us more closely than any N.S.A. agent, it appears that the Madisonian Constitution may be inadequate to defend our privacy and dignity in the 21st century." ...

... ** David Cole, a law professor writing in the New York Review of Books, takes a balanced look at Chelsea Mannings' & Edward Snowden's leaks.

Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, focuses on growing income inequality in this documentary film, "The One Percent":

... Wherein Paul Krugman explains elementary statistics to David Brooks. Thanks to Nisky Guy for the link. See, if you say, "The top 5% ate all the cookies," but it turns out the top 1% ate 100 times as many cookies as did the next 4%, you might not be exactly lying, but you'd be mighty misleading. ...

... Wherein Krugman explains (to an unnamed person who is David Brooks) why sociological explanations don't account for income inequality. See also yesterday's Commentariat.

Elisabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times: "Specialists earn an average of two and often four times as much as primary care physicians in the United States, a differential that far surpasses that in all other developed countries.... That earnings gap has deleterious effects: Only an estimated 25 percent of new physicians end up in primary care, at the very time that health policy experts say front-line doctors are badly needed.... More specialists mean more tests and more expensive care.

Trip Gabriel, et al., of the New York Times take the West Virginia chemical leak national, fingering Senator (& former coal magnate) Joe Manchin (FakeD-W.Va.), among others, for promoting coal & other energy interests over health & safety.

In a New York Times op-ed, Greg Grandin equates today's Tea Party racists with Amasa Delano, the protagonist in Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno, and President Obama to Babo, the leader of a slave revolt aboard the foundering slave ship Delano visits.

Eric Lyman of the Washington Post: "Pope Francis on Wednesday (Jan. 15) took his biggest step yet at cleaning house at the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank, replacing most of the institution's advisers with fresh faces."

Congressional Race

CW: A few weeks ago, the Tampa Bay Times published a longish story on former Rep. Bill Young's first marriage & family. According to the family, Rep. Young, who died last year, left his wife Marian & married his second wife Beverly in the messiest of ways. Reporter Andrew Meacham picked up on the story as the result of Bill's first family coming forward after his death. ...

... All of this mightily pissed off Beverly Young, who wrote a scathing, ungrammatical entry on FaceBook, where she posts a scathing, ungrammatical letter she says she sent to the St. Pete Times. Although Beverly Young reserves most of her invective for the Times & Meacham, she claims Democrat Alex Sink, who is running for the open seat, is complicit: "The fact that Alex Sink is a widow disgusts me that she can't show an ounce of compassion for what I and my family are going through at this time, but instead, she has chosen to participate in these hateful attacks on Bill to attempt to hurt the Republican Party."

Local News

... By Ruben Bolling in Daily Kos. Please click on the site. I like to give artists their due. Thanks.

"Follow the Money." Steve Kornacki of NBC News: "Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie's administration warned a New Jersey mayor[, Dawn Zimmer of Hoboken,] earlier this year that her town would be starved of hurricane relief money unless she approved a lucrative redevelopment plan favored by the governor, according to the mayor and emails and personal notes she shared with msnbc. With video. Thanks to contributor Victoria D. for the link. ...

... CW: I figured Bridgegate was much ado about little & that it could hurt Christie only if he tried to cover it up. Now it looks as if Bridgegate could hurt him, & Christie's attempts to distance himself from it will prolong the story, giving reporters time to dig up other examples of Christie & his team's strongarming officials & maybe doing more serious stuff. The Hoboken story, like the Fort Lee story, looks especially bad because the people who really got hurt were ordinary citizens -- in this case storm victims. Governors play favorites all the time, but most have the sense to be more subtle about it & not use federal money for bribes &/or retribution. After all, Nixon's undoing began with news of a "two-bit burglary." ...

     ... Update. Ezra Klein agrees with me: " These stories are beginning to build. Each new revelation makes the past scandals more believable -- and more damaging. And each new story intensifies the media's efforts to find more. The problem for Christie isn't what his aides did. It's what they thought he wanted them to do." ...

... MEANWHILE, Michael Barbaro, et al., of the New York Times, demonstrate that Republican "leaders" remain clueless (or completely cynical): "Party leaders are urging the governor to let go of a trademark Christie trait: his fierce loyalty to old friends and high school classmates who have risen with him in state government. It is time, they counsel, for him to recruit a more nationally savvy political team that can take him beyond Trenton to Washington." CW: Yeah, the real problem is Christie's "fierce loyalty." That's what I thought all along; Christie's superhuman virtues are the cause of his troubles. Life is so unfair.

... Martin Longman in the Washington Monthly: "... even though it's nothing new for a New Jersey governor to throw his weight around to smooth a redevelopment project, holding up disaster relief funding is unconscionable, showing again that the Christie administration has taken traditional Jersey corruption to a whole new level." Read the whole post. Longman notes, among other helpful observations, "It's significant that Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno is implicated in this scheme because she would succeed Chris Christie in the governor's office if he felt it necessary to resign." ...

... digby: "This strikes me as a bigger deal than the traffic snarl. Hurricane Sandy is Christie's bipartisan boy scout badge, the big story that made him a national figure. If it turns out he was actually using it for nefarious purposes I think it permanently damages his image." ...

... Carol Leonnig, et al., of the Washington Post: "... many [New Jersey] Democratic mayors ... made clear that they thought endorsing Christie's reelection bid likely directly benefited their towns in the pursuit of Sandy recovery aid and other state support." ...

... Jeanne B. points to this helpful Wall Street Journal chart, which shows the key players in the Christie scandal. As Jeanne suggests, the chart, published Friday, is already outdated; it doesn't include Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer who has alleged -- with evidence -- that the Christie machine deprived her city of Hurricane Sandy funds because she wouldn't totally acquiesce to a development scheme Christie favored.

Frank Bruni: a cruel Texas law forces a hospital to keep a brain-dead pregnant woman on "life" support because she was 14 weeks pregnant at the time she suffered a pulmonary embolism that effectively ended her life. The chances of her bearing a healthy child are slim.

Right Wing World

This Was Inevitable. Kyle Mantyla of Right Wing Watch: "On his radio show [Tuesday, popular fundamentalist preacher] Bryan Fischer called for ending Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, as well as the elimination of the minimum wage ... all in order to help the poor and those struggling to make ends meet, of course. So logically this discussion resulted in Fischer eventually calling for a return to an electoral system in which only people who own property can vote." With video.

... Steve Benen: "Let's also not forget that Fischer is a fairly high-profile figure in conservative media -- in recent years, a wide variety of Republicans from the U.S. Senate and U.S. House have appeared on Fischer's program. In advance of the 2012 presidential race, roughly half the Republican candidates in the field cozied up to Fischer, despite his extremist views."

News Ledes

New York Times: "Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said on Sunday that he had invited Iran to an international peace conference to end the war in Syria. The announcement drew immediate objections from American officials, who suggested that Iran had not met all the conditions for attending and that the invitation might need to be withdrawn."

Los Angeles Times: "Air Force officers responsible for safeguarding and operating nuclear-armed missiles at a base in Montana cheated for years on monthly readiness tests, but rarely faced punishment even though some commanders were aware of the misconduct, according to three former officers who served at the base. Their assertions shed new light on a cheating scandal involving 34 officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base, who are under investigation for improperly sharing information about exam questions and failing to report the alleged misconduct.... The cheating scandal came to light when Air Force investigators looking into drug possession involving two Malmstrom officers came across text messages in which dozens of officers allegedly shared details about a test last September...."