Last Call For The End Of The Bridge

And the other shoe drops:  if you want to know why Chris Christie is facing a grand jury over Bridgegate and why US attorneys are moving forward, it's because the aide behind the Port Authority scandal is now talking to the Feds.

The former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey executive who orchestrated the George Washington Bridge lane closures is cooperating with federal prosecutors investigating the scandal, Esquire reported on Monday.

According to Esquire's Scott Raab, sources close to the investigation say that David Wildstein has been cooperating with Paul Fishman, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey. Raab also reported that Fishman has increased the number of investigators working the case, and has been presenting evidence and witnesses to a grand jury. (On Friday, ABC News reported that Michael Drewniak, press secretary to Gov. Chris Christie (R), testified before the grand jury.)

Esquire isn't the only outlet to get word of Wildstein's interactions with prosecutors. On Sunday night, the website Main Justice reported that Wildstein “was camped at the U.S. Attorney’s office” in Newark last week meeting with prosecutors. In January, Wildstein's attorney, Alan Zegas, said that his client would talk if given "immunity from the relevant entities."

Main Justice also reported that Charlie McKenna, former chief counsel to Christie, met with federal investigators in mid-January. Christie announced on Dec. 19 that McKenna was leaving the chief counsel position to become CEO of the New Jersey Schools Development Authority (SDA), a position he was officially elected to by the SDA board of directors on Jan. 2. McKenna could not immediately be reached for comment by TPM on Monday.

So at this point multiple people are cooperating with the Feds to build a case to bring Christie down.  This has gone beyond the theoretical exercise of "what if" for 2016 and its associated punditry and into criminal proceedings against a sitting governor.

Chris Christie is in serious trouble, and he knows it.

The Sum Of All Derp

The Telegraph columnist Charles Moore declares "the game is up for climate change believers" as he reviews a new book trashing climate science as the sum of all eeeeeevil liberalism.

Most of us pay some attention to the weather forecast. If it says it will rain in your area tomorrow, it probably will. But if it says the same for a month, let alone a year, later, it is much less likely to be right. There are too many imponderables.

The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days.

We can't even get the weather forecast for next week right, so climate science is really a cult.  A LIBERAL CULT OF WARMISM.

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

If anything, both the book and the column explain the seething hatred wingers have for the notion that climate change even exists.  To them, it's the sum of everything they believe liberalism is, a vast conspiracy of "low-information" dunces who worship scientists as rock stars, grubby parasites who dare to bite the hand of the wealthy who own the businesses and pay the taxes to sustain the programs that feed and clothe them.  The argument is that by throwing off the shackles and becoming "educated" about this, you'll at least be rooting for the team that's going to win in the end.

Thus the gigantic effort to prove climate change as a myth, and reinforcing the notion that it's a myth by saying things like "Well if it really was as bad as you say, why aren't governments acting?" while ignoring that the multinationals own the world governments.

Amazing stuff really, but if you ever wondered why the wingers despise climate change so much, apparently if they disprove it, they disprove liberalism forever and we can all live in harmony as serfs with SUVs we can't afford because 'Murica.

Jeb Bush Will Never Be President

Mainly because Jeb Bush will never survive a GOP primary.  Not after consecutive losses by McCain and Romney, and certainly not with his record on immigration.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said Sunday that many who illegally come to the United States do so out of an "act of love" for their families and should be treated differently than people who illegally cross U.S. borders or overstay visas.

This right here has ended his 2016 prospects before they ever began.

Asked about immigration, Bush started by saying that a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate last year made "a good effort" at proposing ways to ensure that people overstaying visas leave the country.

"A great country ought to know where those folks are and politely ask them to leave," he said, adding later that properly targeting people who overstay visas "would restore people's confidence" in the nation's immigration system.

"There are means by which we can control our border better than we have. And there should be penalties for breaking the law," he added. "But the way I look at this -- and I'm going to say this, and it'll be on tape and so be it. The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn’t come legally, they come to our country because their families -- the dad who loved their children -- was worried that their children didn’t have food on the table. And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of commitment to your family. I honestly think that that is a different kind of crime that there should be a price paid, but it shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families."

Let me explain this another way:  Chris Christie has a better shot now at 2016 than Jeb Bush does.  The Wingers will never accept his position on immigration.  They will savage him and they will nominate Rand Paul or Marco Rubio and lose in a landslide anyway.

It'll be glorious.

Well, it would be if we still have a country after 2014.  Better vote then first.

StupidiNews!

• US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel says that the US Navy will send two additional missile defense destroyers to the Sea of Japan in 2017 to protect against North Korean threats.
• Nigeria has passed South Africa to become the continent's largest economy at $453 billion, making it the 26th largest economy in the world.
• Pro-Russian protestors have stormed and captured state buildings in at least three eastern Ukrainian cities over the weekend, with the government in Kiev blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• Humans are taking over for robots in Toyota's Japanese plants as the company looks to efficiency over growth.
• Microsoft has gotten permission from New Mexico state officials to dig up the infamous burial site of millions of unsold 80's-era Atari 2600 console games as part of a documentary.