Did Christie Go Easy on a Human Trafficker Just to Bust a Small-Time Pol?

The U.S. Attorney's office cut a deal with Medrano. She got a light sentence, and in return gave up information -- some of which was about a local politician that Christie would use to burnish his image as an enemy of corruption. The upshot was that a human trafficker got off easy, in part, so that Christie could jail a small-town mayor.

The deal, critics charge, was at best a bad one and at worst, a callous political move. Christie's defenders respond that it was a necessary move to help catch other criminals -- just another one of the unpleasant compromises that prosecutors are routinely forced to make in the name of justice. At the time of Medrano’s sentencing, Christie’s spokesman, Michael Drewniak, said Medrano assisted with the convictions of eight other people who part of the smuggling ring.

However, Medrano’s attorney, Gerald Shargel, told me that she “never testified about human smuggling” and court documents clearly state that “Luisa Medrano did not testify before the grand jury” regarding the human trafficking ring. The U.S. Attorney’s office would not provide information about what convictions Medrano allegedly assisted on, or how many. Reached for comment for this story, a spokesman for Governor Christie referred me to Drewniak’s 2009 statements.

Absent any concrete evidence to the contrary -- and there certainly could be some evidence that has yet to publicly emerge -- it appears that Christie’s office all-but-excused one human trafficker that he considered to be “vile” in order to convict someone for comparatively petty crimes.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/17/did-christie-go-easy-on-a-human-trafficker-just-to-bust-a-small-time-pol.html

CNN’s Don Lemon wonders whether God took the plane to Heaven.

CNN anchor Don Lemon and Decoded host Brad Meltzer bandied about the idea Sunday afternoon that something “beyond our understanding” happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370, that “something” being perhaps supernatural maybe?

“Especially today, on a day when we deal with the supernatural,” Lemon said. “We go to church, the supernatural power of God…people are saying to me, why aren’t you talking about the possibility — and I’m just putting it out there — that something odd happened to this plane, something beyond our understanding?”

“People roll their eyes at conspiracy theories, but what conspiracy theories do is they ask the hardest, most outrageous questions sometimes, but every once in a while they’re right,” Meltzer said.

“You can say, ‘Oh, it crashed into the ocean,’” Meltzer continued. “But where are the parts? Where are the pieces? Why did it keep going for seven hours? Why do you have a guy on board who gives his watch and his ring to his wife and says ‘Keep these for my boys in case something happens to me’? And that’s not some stranger, he was a mechanical engineer. Something smells wrong.”

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/don-lemon-cnn-guest-wonder-whether-something-supernatural-happened-to-malaysian-plane/

More good news: Polygamist Sect Leader Warren Jeffs Hospitalized

Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs has been hospitalized, according to prison officials in Texas.

Jeffs, 58, is serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2011 of sexually assaulting two minors whom he described as his spiritual wives. At trial, prosecutors presented DNA evidence to show he fathered a child with one of those girls, aged 15.

According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Jeffs is being treated at a hospital in Galveston. It was not clear why or when Jeffs was transported from prison.

His Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism whose members believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven.

Jeffs will be eligible for parole in 2038.


http://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/polygamist-sect-leader-warren-jeffs-hospitalized-n54351

Conservative writer upset ’12 Years A Slave’ doesn’t show happy slaves

A Conservative writer is upset that the Oscar-winning movie 12 Years a Slave displays a negative light on slavery, instead of the happy times. Apparently the author of the article believes that being enslaved is a happy time for those who are taken from their country in chains, their families ripped apart, beaten into submission and forced to work grueling hours in the sun for nothing.

Politix reports, “But that negativity is merely anti-slavery “propaganda,” according to James Bowman in conservative magazine The American Spectator.”

Via American Spectator:

If ever in slavery’s 250-year history in North America there were a kind master or a contented slave, as in the nature of things there must have been, here and there, we may be sure that Mr McQueen does not want us to hear about it. This, in turn, surely means that his view of the history of the American South is as partial and one-sided as that of the hated Gone With the Wind.

…Yes, there was much cruelty and hardship in the slave-owning South, as there has been in most of the rest of the world most of the time, and Mr. McQueen’s camera is all over that. But it strains ordinary credulity to suppose that there was nothing else.

Salon: How did Irish-Americans get so disgusting?

As the title of Noel Ignatiev’s important if overly harsh academic study “How the Irish Became White” makes clear, Irish immigrants first arrived in America as despised outsiders, who were white in terms of complexion but not culture. In my colleague Joan Walsh’s “What’s the Matter with White People?”, she discusses Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, a little-noticed event in which black and Irish indentured servants rose up against British colonial rule. (This led to the creation of the slave codes, which made African-Americans slaves for life, and the conferring of limited white privilege on the Irish.) As late as the 19th century, Anglo elites in New York perceived the drunken and disorderly Irish newcomers as an unhealthful influence on the city’s industrious and long-settled black population.

But Irish-Americans rapidly absorbed the lesson that the way to succeed in their new country was to reject the politics of class and shared economic interests and embrace the politics of race. One disgraceful result was the New York draft riots of 1863, the low point of Irish-black relations in American history, when Irish immigrants by the thousands turned on their black neighbors in a thinly disguised race riot. Irish-Americans were under no delusions that the ruling class of Anglo Protestants liked or trusted them, and anti-Irish and/or anti-Catholic bigotry endured in diluted form well into the 20th century. But by allying themselves with a system of white supremacy, the Irish in America were granted a share of power and privilege — most notably in urban machine politics, and the police and fire departments of every major city.

As Joan’s book and many other sources have discussed, over the course of the last century the bulk of the Irish-American population drifted rightward through the Democratic Party and then out the other side into Archie Bunker-land. A key constituency of the New Deal coalition became, 40 years later, a key constituency of the Reagan revolution. But throughout that period there was always a countervailing social-justice tendency in Irish-American life, the tendency of the antiwar activist brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan (quite likely the only Jesuit priests ever to make the FBI’s most-wanted list), or of 1952 left-wing presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan and his firebrand San Francisco family. This was the tradition of the radical Vatican II priests, nuns and theologians, who kept many of us from abandoning the Church altogether, and of the 1968 reawakening of Robert F. Kennedy and the subsequent career of his brother Teddy.

Without exception, those people started from an understanding of their own cultural and national history. They began with Irish nationalist or republican politics, and moved from there to consider how Ireland’s story fit into a worldwide pattern that transcended the specific racial paranoia of the United States. Of course Irish history did not end in 1998, and the current situation in that country – a land of immigrants for the first time in its modern history – is exceptionally interesting. But Ireland is no longer a divisive and charismatic “issue,” capable of galvanizing people who live thousands of miles away. With Irish-American identity now split between an optional lifestyle accessory and a bunch of unappealing right-wing guys yelling at us, its social-justice component has evaporated as well.


http://www.salon.com/2014/03/15/how_did_irish_americans_get_so_disgusting/

The Jeep Plant Mitt Romney Said Was Moving To China Is Booming In Ohio

The auto plant at center of a misleading TV ad run by Mitt Romney's campaign during the 2012 presidential election is booming, Bloomberg reported Friday.

In a last-ditch effort to swing Ohio into the Republican column in the waning days of the campaign, Romney's team aired an ad that gave the impression that Chrysler would ship jobs to China because of President Obama's auto rescue.

"Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China," the ad's narrator claimed.

Not only is the factory in question still in Ohio, demand for Jeeps is so great that Chrysler is planning on hiring up to 1,000 part-time workers as a way to alleviate pressure on regular employees who work 60 hours per week.


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/obama-romney-jeep-ad

Massive fire near UC, San Francisco

It's a three-alarm fire likely to become a five-alarm. Nasty!!

Rick Scott’s ‘awful’ poll numbers make Florida Republicans queasy

The state of Gov. Rick Scott’s poll numbers is . . . sorry.

On Tuesday, as Scott kicked off the Legislature’s 60-day lawmaking session, he gave the annual state of the state speech, a campaign-like preview filled with job-creation statistics.

But many of Scott’s fellow Republicans were paying attention to a different set of numbers: a raft of poll data-points that make the GOP queasy because it shows Democrat Charlie Crist has broad support across Florida right now. The highlights:

• 34 percentage points — the margin Crist beats Scott by in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, according to one business interest’s statewide survey. This margin is 12 points greater than Democrat Alex Sink’s in the 2010 governor’s race. If she had earned Crist’s poll numbers in just these two counties, Sink would have won.

• 10 percentage points — the margin Crist beats Scott by in another business interest’s statewide poll.

• 8 percentage points — the margin Crist beats Scott by in two other business interests’ statewide polls.

• 7 percentage points — the margin Crist beats Scott by in a fourth business interest’s statewide poll.

• 6 percentage points — the margin Crist beats Scott by in a poll of Republican-controlled state House districts across Florida.

• 4 percentage points — the margin Crist beats Scott by in North Florida, a Republican stronghold. The number is well within the poll’s error margin. But it’s a cumulative 17-point shift in favor of Democrats compared to 2010, and Sink would have won the governor’s race with this North Florida margin.

• 2 percentage points — the margin Scott beats Crist by in a poll of Republican-controlled state Senate districts in North Florida. Again, it’s within the error margin. But again: If Sink had had this margin, she probably would have won the governor’s race.

• 1 percentage point — the margin Crist beats Scott by overall in that poll of Republican-controlled state Senate districts. The poll was paid for by the Republican Party of Florida.

That last number — compared to the others — might initially look like a spot of good news for Scott.



http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/09/3984566/marc-caputo-rick-scotts-awful.html#storylink=cpy

Yep, Mitt's running again.

Is Mitt Romney getting the band back together?

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee has invited his debate prep advisers and senior campaign aides to his mountaintop chalet in Park City, Utah, for a weekend of skiing later this month, according to two people close to Romney.

The reunion of Romney's political brain trust comes amid a burst of positive buzz about the former Massachusetts governor -- from favorable reviews of "MITT," the Netflix documentary about his campaigns, to chatter among some powerful GOP donors about another Romney presidential campaign in 2016.

But Romney has been adamant in saying he will not run for president a third time. And his aides insisted this month's reunion in Park City is not a 2016 strategy session.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/09/mitt-romney-gathers-top-advisers-for-campaign-reunion-in-utah/

Democrats Eye Governor Races for 2014 Gains

For Democrats, gaining seats in Congress this year is a tall order. But their outlook is rosier at the state level, where party members in gubernatorial races are on the offensive in states where the president has twice been victorious.

Democrats are hoping to take out some of the governors in the class of 2010 -- a midterm year in which the GOP swept up statehouses and legislatures that gave them the upper hand in redistricting -- including some potential 2016 presidential candidates. For their part, Republicans hope to hold serve in 2014 while laying the groundwork for the presidential contest to follow and helping GOP governors eyeing the White House.

One anomaly for both parties is that Republicans hope to gain Senate seats in states the president lost, while Democrats hope to gain governors' seats in states Mitt Romney lost.

For Democrats, their road to governors' mansions runs through Rust Belt states President Obama won in 2008 and 2012, while their path for retaining the Senate majority travels through the South and Northwest in states he lost. Republicans have to protect 22 of the 36 governors' seats up in 2014, while Democrats have to protect just 14.



http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/26/democrats_eye_governor_races_for_2014_gains.html#ixzz2vUsQ78a4