Despite all of the rancor and “honesty” that Damaged Goods Christie spewed at the Donald when Christie was “running” for the Republican nomination, he has found the conscience bypass he received has proven surpassingly more successful than his apparently failed gastric one, in order to endorse Trump.  Which endorsement laughably pissed off NJ county GOP heads.

To answer the question of what overly ambitious angle Chris and Mary Pat Christie have been machinating towards over copious servings of veal parmigiana since leaving the trail, we present this small vignette from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey”:

Chris: Mary Pat, I could be Attorney General. I know how.

Mary Pat: Of course you could.  Mangia, mangia my Prince Charming.

Chris:  Shut up, prostitution whore! (flips table)

To answer the question, should Damaged Goods travel out of state to support Trump?

OH YES, PLEASE GOD, DO THAT THING.

What Chris Christie Said About Trump BEFORE the Endorsement

“I tell everybody who goes to a Donald Trump event, if you get to ask a question, just ask him ‘how?'” Christie said. “I don’t care which of the things he talks about just ask him, ‘How? How?'”

I suppose Trump told Christie how and satisfied his curiosity.

There is no level of dishonesty and disingenuousness that Republicans will not stoop to. Christie has no options left in NJ, will never be elected to anything ever again. So I guess he’s figured his only hope for advancement lies in some Washington appointment from an imaginary Trump administration. After all, Damaged Goods was an unknown and undistinguished lawyer and ex-Freeholder and failed General Assembly candidate scraping the bottom of the anonymity barrel until his unlikely appointment to the U.S. Attorney’s Office by George W. “C+” Bush, after raising shitloads of money for said electoral loser handed the presidency by Scalia and Company. This against all odds story is why I previously referred to Chris Christie as “the Luckiest Man in America” before he earned the moniker “Damaged Goods”.

It will be delicious when, like Mitt before him, Trump denies Christie a place on his ticket because Damaged Goods is all about himself, and you can’t have two angry, mean, nasty, rude, NY area people on the ticket – who are all about themselves.

But you know, you can be an angry, mean, nasty, rude, NY area person and get a cabinet spot.  I’ll bet Damaged Goods is angling for Attorney General so he can be a right wing hero for prosecuting Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for being Democrats, which would be a crime under a Trump admin. with a GOP Senate and Congress.

May they never get over their delusions and science develop a vaccine to resist said delusions.  Oh yeah, they did:  stupid killing education!!

The 23 Cities with the best quality of life in the world 

Every year Mercer, one of the world’s largest HR consultancy firms, releases its Quality of Living Index, which looks at which cities provide the best quality of life.

Not one of the 23 is in the United States, the richest country in the world. Although 4 of the best places are right across the border in Canada.

That is a rebuke to the great lie of American exceptionalism, of American greatness, kindness, generosity, of American superiority, such that we do not have to learn from other countries. We can’t have universal health care, can’t give up our guns, can’t provide free tuition, can’t guarantee safe child care. We can’t create a safe, civilized, human friendly place to live because our “values” are incompatible with such a place where people can live happily, peacefully, with amenities that make life more harmonious and secure.  That’s for Austria, Denmark, New Zealand, Canada, etc. not us. Because we’re better than that.

For the record the top 5 are:

1. Vienna, Austria
2. Zurich, Switzerland
3. Auckland, New Zealand
4. Munich, Germany
5. Vancouver, Canada

It’s notable to me that 5 of the cities are in Germany, including Berlin. Germany is an industrial giant like we are, but has committed to the environment, a strong social safety net, renewable power, government support of the arts, affordable housing, unions and protection of their middle class. Britain and the U.S., which pioneered such ideals, have been shedding them in favor of austerity. To what end?

CAPE MAY, NEW JERSEY – JANUARY 23: Ice forms as the winter storm mixed with high tide causes flooding on Beach Avenue on January 23, 2016 in Cape May New Jersey. A major snowstorm is upon the East Coast this weekend with some areas expected to receive over a foot of snow. (Photo by Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images)

But you don’t want a knee-jerk reaction because these things are cyclical.  What if in the next 28 centuries the sea recedes.  Then where are we if all those beach properties are devalued?  Won’t somebody think of the property barons?

Seas are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries

The increasingly routine tidal flooding is making life miserable in places like Miami Beach; Charleston, S.C.; and Norfolk, Va., even on sunny days.

I’ve written about Miami’s days being numbered and the costly flooding damage happening to coastal towns up and down the East Coast that has nothing to do with storms.  Especially the rising salt water winding through the Swiss cheese that is Floridian land. I imagine it’s just a matter of time before the water tables are contaminated by salt water, then you have real problems.

But when you do have storms, you have serious flooding that didn’t used to happen.

In a report issued to accompany that scientific paper, a climate research and communications organization in Princeton, N.J., Climate Central, used the new findings to calculate that roughly three-quarters of the tidal flood days now occurring in towns along the East Coast would not be happening in the absence of the rise in the sea level caused by human emissions.

How did they figure this out?  It’s a geological detective story.  Done by Rutgers scientists, examining core samples from the salt marshes in South Jersey and other places.

The scientists drilled for sediment cores along the Atlantic coast of North America, including at the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, north of Atlantic City. They analyzed other sediment data from such diverse sources as corals in the South Pacific and mangroves in Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean.

The man is in the ground now and I can admit that my first thought when I’d heard he was dead was “Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead.” Mean, huh? Not as mean as Scalia.

Just to be clear, Scalia was the judicial equivalent of Reagan in putting into place judicial policies that turned back the clock to pre-New Deal America and in many cases the 19th century.  We didn’t just stop progressing, we regressed as a country under the ideas of these people. And it wasn’t just the numerous 5-4 decisions regressing abortion rights, voting rights, undermining elections, gun control, etc. It was the cases heard that shouldn’t have been heard at all except for four ideological votes to bring a case to the Supreme Court that experts never imagined would be heard at that level. Bush v. Gore? Citizen’s United? The Obamacare cases on the law and the contraception mandate?  If not for Scalia’s vote, those cases aren’t even heard, no less ruled on.

More and more Scalia resembled, in his dissents and public speeches, a consumer of right wing talk radio rather than a distinguished Justice of the Supreme Court.

Jeffrey Toobin lays out the case against Scalia in the New Yorker.

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.

Renato Bialetti is dead and was cremated and interred in an urn modeled after his famous coffee maker. I have one of those. I may never use it again.

In this photo made available Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2016, father Pietro Segato, the parish priest of Casale Corte Cerro, stands in front of a Moka pot containing the ashes of Renato Bialetti, during his burial service in the cemetery of Omegna, Northern Italy, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016. Renato Bialetti had expressed his wish to be cremated and then buried in the Moka his father Alfonso invented in 1933. Although he was not the inventor, Renato was responsible for the extensive marketing campaign that made the Moka an icon of Italian design, exposed in museums such as the Museum Of Modern Art and many others all over the world. (AP Photo/Elisa Sola)

It will. Not his fault that he’s black, but he did have the nerve to think he could be president. Not in this America. Even after being elected, twice, he just can’t be president.

I think I’ve written this before. But my theory is that when the unblackening happens and the black family leaves the WH, certain situations will become somewhat less tense as some Amurikans will suddenly lose interest in the laser pointer and go play with the ball of yarn instead.

The evidence that crystallized this for me was a Pew graph that showed attitudes on gun control vs. gun rights.

Question: What do you think is more important – to protect the right of Americans to own guns, OR to control gun ownership?  Great interactive graph http://www.people-press.org/2015/08/13/gun-rights-vs-gun-control/#total

The lighter line is gun control, the darker is gun rights. Notice how more people consistently believe that gun control is more important to them than gun rights, by significant margins, until 2008.  What special event happened in 2009? And since then it’s been about equal 50/50.

Broken down by race?  Blacks and Hispanics are 75% to 25% for gun control over gun rights, and have remained so.  The entire difference from pre-2009 to today is White people who switched positions.

The test will be when the unblackening happens in January 2017.  If it suddenly goes back to the historical norm, then we know why that was. Not calling anybody racist. They’re just simple folk, people of the land, the common clay of the new west, you know, morons.

The way the obstructionists have set it up there’s really no way for Obama to lose on replacing Scalia. The entire premise of their gambit is that maybe, just maybe if they can run out the clock on the Obama presidency, then President Trump/Cruz/Rubio will get to nominate the successor, no doubt in his conservative image. But bless their hearts they are simple, stupid creatures playing checkers on a chess board.

Fact 1: for the first time in a long time, there’s virtually no way that Scalia’s successor could be more conservative then Mr. “The Constitution is Dead, Dead, Dead”.  The next Supreme Court Justice named will be a moderate at worst. Possibly a liberal. Even if hell froze over and President The Donald named the next person, they would be an improvement over Scalia. But that’s not gonna happen.

Obama will name somebody soon who is eminently qualified and probably a non-ideological choice who would be a return to a less politicized court.  The GOP will block and it will look bad for them, making the naming of a Supreme Court Justice a very concrete point next November.

The real downside of being rather delusional about, well, almost everything, the Republicans are not only overplaying their hand in regards to the presidential election, they are pretending that their handle on the Senate isn’t in mortal danger.

Fact 2: The GOP has 5 senators from blue states (Ayotte, Kirk, Toomey, Johnson, Portman) that were elected in the GOP wave of 2010 and have poor chances of surviving a presidential year challenge. The likelihood of decent to good Democratic turnout is probably enough to give the Senate to the Dems, and with that the Judiciary Committee.

So if they want to play this out and deny a moderate a seat on the bench, it might just allow the next president to put an actual lefty on.

Not on the Supreme Court, but as baseball managers, they’re perfect. There’s got to be someone crotchety, of whatever age, to say “there’s no crying in baseball.”  Or this:

“It’s become a young man’s game, especially with all of the technology stuff you’ve got to be involved in,” he said. “I’m not very good at it. I don’t enjoy it like other people do. I’m not going to sit there today and look at all of these (expletive) numbers and try to predict this guy is going to be a great player. OPS this. OPS that. GPS. LCSs. DSDs. You know who has good numbers? Good (expletive) players.”

Mets manager Terry Collins on his feelings about Sabermetrics, the math wizardry that is all the rage in evaluating players.

“You know who has good numbers? Good (expletive) players.”

Indeed. Get off my lawn nerds!

The debate on Thursday night between Clinton and Sanders didn’t address the progressive/establishment argument that was a point of contention in at least one earlier debate. But there was one part of the debate where that progressive/establishment schism was illustrated better than maybe any other issue could bring it into focus.

Only establishment Democrats, like the “Morning Joe” contributors, the DLC, the Clintons, do not consider Henry Kissinger a war criminal. The Nation and other progressives have thought, and said he was one since 1973. Pretty clearly, if you won’t say Kissinger was a war criminal and his brand of realpolitik a nightmare for the country then you are part of the chummy establishment. Period.

Henry Kissinger’s War Crimes are Central to the Divide Between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders

But Kissinger is reviled by many left-leaning observers of foreign policy. They consider him an amoral egotist who enabled dictators, extended the Vietnam War, laid the path to the Khmer Rouge killing fields, stage-managed a genocide in East Timor, overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government in Chile, and encouraged Nixon to wiretap his political adversaries.

This is a must read, especially if you aren’t familiar with Kissinger and Nixon’s horrendous continuation and expansion of the disastrous foreign policy proscriptions of intervention, both covert and overt (in conflicts and countries they didn’t really understand), and a philosophy that concluded “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” (even if they’re a monster).

These establishment foreign policy “experts” operated for decades never understanding (or wanting to understand)  the concept of blowback and unintended consequences. This is what progressives have been arguing since the 50’s. It was typified by the arrogance of the Iraq war, entered into by people who didn’t know, and evidently didn’t care about, the difference between Sunni and Shia.

A poster at Daily Kos as an important point – You Can’t Admire Both Henry Kissinger and Martin Luther King Jr.

Part of that is a link to a David Corn article that asserts that the Clintons and Kissinger are pretty chummy. Like vacationing together annually in the Dominican Republic.

Keep hearing that, but it’s not like when you cross the border into SC the devil meets you at the airport. Politics in SC aren’t any more amoral or immoral than NH or IA, it’s that the candidates get more desperate by the time an election gets there. Survival is on the menu along with the shrimp and grits. So yeah, that’s when you pull out the push poll saying your opponent has a black child.

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.