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“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
“Got it,” Wildstein replies.
A month later, on the first day of school in Fort Lee, Wildstein arrives at the bridge at dawn to supervise the implementation of his plan, which he calls a “traffic study.” All the Port Authority employees involved know something strange and colossally stupid is afoot, but no one says anything, because they are all terrified of Wildstein. The cones are reconfigured so that Fort Lee’s access is cut to a single lane. Inside the bridge’s command center, via a live video feed, Wildstein watches as the rush-hour traffic begins to build. Soon, Fort Lee is totally gridlocked: Buses can’t get children to school. “Is it wrong that I’m smiling?” Kelly, a divorced mother of four, later texts Wildstein. “I feel badly about the kids … I guess.” He responds that they are the children of Democrats.
A Port Authority policeman named Chip Michaels texts Wildstein a report from the streets: “Its fkd up here.” Michaels is another guy from Livingston. He and his brother, a Republican lobbyist, have known both Wildstein and Christie for years. Michaels picks up Wildstein and takes him on a drive to observe the traffic. Then they go to a diner, where they have breakfast and discuss Christie’s presidential hopes.
The first day of the traffic pileup.
All right, so now it’s September 11, the most solemn day of the whole political calendar, and Chris Christie — the candidate who never neglects to mention he was appointed U.S. Attorney the day before the terrorist attacks — is yukking it up with Wildstein at the World Trade Center site. They’re there for the annual memorial service, but it’s also the third day of the closures, and Wildstein has been monitoring the traffic, along with Mayor Sokolich’s increasingly desperate messages to Baroni. (“Radio silence,” Wildstein orders.) Photos of the event show Wildstein standing next to the governor, checking his phone, and sharing a hearty laugh with Christie, Baroni, and others. No one knows what’s so funny, but Wildstein will later allege that they discussed the bridge. It is the last time he and the governor will see each other in person, at least publicly.
By the next day, Sokolich and others in Fort Lee are screaming about public safety and political payback. The “Road Warrior” columnist for the Bergen Record contacts the Port Authority about the mysterious gridlock, and Wildstein forwards the message to Kelly, who is heading down the shore with the governor, responding to a major fire on the Seaside boardwalk. No one knows what she tells Christie, but the lane closures continue. The Record column draws the attention of the Port Authority’s executive director, Pat Foye, a New York appointee. This is the first he’s heard of a “traffic study,” and he freaks out. He orders the lanes reopened, saying the “hasty and ill-advised” closure is both dangerous and illegal. A couple of weeks later, the email from Foye makes its way to reporter Ted Mann at The Wall Street Journal. Wildstein presumes Foye is waging factional warfare, rather than worrying about ambulances and school buses stuck in traffic.
“Holy shit, who does he think he is, Capt. America?” Stepien texts Wildstein.
“Bad guy,” Wildstein says. “Welcome to our world.”
The Christie administration brushes aside accusations of its involvement in causing the gridlock as an absurd conspiracy theory, but the Journal continues to pursue the story, and other outlets follow. Legislative hearings are called, subpoenas are issued, and the governor and his aides hold crisis-management meetings. As late as December 2, Christie is still trying to laugh off suggestions of retaliation. “I worked the cones, actually,” he says sarcastically at a press conference. “Unbeknownst to everybody, I was actually the guy out there in overalls and a hat.”
One day, Wildstein disappears from his office at the Port Authority headquarters, never to return. He can hear the cellos.
In early December, the dormant Wikipedia account Montclair0055 — whose sparse prior contributions include creating a page for the state senator who gave Wildstein his first paying job at age 12 and laudatory additions to the entries for Baroni and DuHaime — stirs to life. As the clamor of the investigation intensifies, Montclair0055 writes late into the night on subjects that mirror Wildstein’s obsessions, adding a critical entry for an obscure Democratic Party hack who was one of Wally Edge’s favorite targets and another about “the Curse of the 38th,” a phrase (used exclusively on PoliticsNJ) to describe the voting history of a Bergen County legislative district. The editor revises the page of Steve Kornacki to note that he got his start at PoliticsNJ. Montclair0055 seems determined to ensure that the picaresque characters and episodes that so enthralled Wildstein are preserved for posterity. Many of the contributions are later deleted by other Wikipedia editors on the grounds of insignificance.
The night of December 4, Wildstein has dinner in New Brunswick with his friend Mike Drewniak, the governor’s spokesman, and tells him that Christie was aware of the lane closings as they were happening. The message is implicit: He won’t go down alone. The governor’s chief counsel calls Wildstein and tells him his resignation is required immediately.
Wildstein’s subpoena from the state legislative committee arrives on December 12, and he hires a criminal-defense attorney. They could fight to quash it, but instead he hands over 900 pages of emails, texts, and documents. One of those emails is the fateful one from Kelly: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Those eight words are all it takes to ruin several lives.
You can imagine Christie, the former prosecutor, wondering: Why didn’t she just use the goddamn phone? His reputation as an incorruptible truth-teller is rendered ridiculous. Even his hero Bruce Springsteen, in a hilarious knife-twisting gesture, duets with Jimmy Fallon on Late Night in a song about the traffic jam set to the tune of “Born to Run.”*
Christie holds a two-hour press conference, in which he says he was “blindsided” and “humiliated” by the actions of his staff. “Let me just clear something up, okay, about my childhood friend David Wildstein,” he says scornfully. “We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school. You know, I was the class president and athlete. I don’t know what David was doing during that period of time.” Christie’s office later circulates a memo to supporters that describes Wildstein as untrustworthy, citing, among other things, the high-school dispute with his social-studies teacher and his odd habit of registering web addresses for the names of his enemies. In January 2015, Wildstein reaches a deal to plead guilty and testify. Baroni and Kelly are indicted four months later.
Christie decides to run for president anyway. He announces his candidacy at Livingston High School. Inside a sweltering gym bedecked with championship banners, the governor is received by a boisterous contingent of his old friends from the class of 1980. “Lots of people have asked me over the course of last week, why here?” he says. “Why here? Because everything started here for me. The confidence. The education. The friends. The family. And the love that I’ve always felt for and from this community.” Outside the gym, protesters picket the speech, waving signs that read BULLY.
On the campaign trail, he keeps getting incredulous questions about the juvenile traffic-jam prank. He drops out after a poor finish in New Hampshire and endorses Donald Trump. This puts him in the awkward company of the nominee’s son-in-law and strategic adviser, Jared Kushner. Kushner finally bests his father’s accuser, crushing Christie’s hopes of the vice-presidential nomination, but Christie still retains an important place in Trump’s small circle of loyalists. If Trump wins, you can assume there will be a place for him in the administration, perhaps as attorney general.
That prospect must make Wildstein extremely nervous. After the scandal, he moves to Florida, sells the house in Montville, and loses a precipitous amount of weight. When he arrives at court to enter his guilty plea, the reporters covering the case hardly recognize him. By the terms of his deal with prosecutors, he is expected to be the star witness against Kelly and Baroni, who, if convicted, would likely face two to three years in prison. It is rumored that their trial will bring significant further disclosures. Wildstein, the collector of secrets, is said to have walked out of the Port Authority with an enormous amount of documentary evidence, including the hard drive to his former friend Baroni’s computer.
Looming over the trial is the question of Christie’s level of involvement in his old classmate’s crazy bridge idea. Prosecutors have filed a sealed memorandum, listing people who were aware of the scheme; it is widely presumed that Christie’s name is on it. If he is called to testify, the governor will have to tell his story under oath. At a minimum, the spectacle will be embarrassing for Christie and threatening to any future chance of a cabinet post. At worst, the trial could destroy what is left of a career he’d once thought could plausibly culminate in the presidency.
Among veteran observers of New Jersey politics, there is an ongoing debate about who is most to blame for Chris Christie’s downfall. There are essentially two theories. One holds that Christie, a seemingly intelligent adult, would never be so idiotic as to authorize a retaliatory traffic jam. The other holds that Wildstein, a seemingly intelligent adult, would never be so idiotic as to go forward with his scheme without Christie’s approval. The trial is scheduled to begin on September 19. Soon we may hear the rest of the tale and, at long last, get the joke.
*This article appears in the September 19, 2016, issue of New York Magazine.
*This article has been corrected to reflect that Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Fallon performed a song about the traffic closure on Late Night, not SNL or The Tonight Show.
Martin Sheen says he’s “disgusted” by President Trump in a new Democratic fundraising pitch.
The “West Wing” actor, who played fictional President Josiah Bartlet on the long-running NBC political drama, slams the GOP in a Wednesday email from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).
“My time playing the president on ‘The West Wing’ taught me what Washington should be like,” Sheen says in the fundraising email paid for by the DCCC.
“And right now, with the Republicans in control, it’s far from what we, as Americans, deserve,” writes the 76-year-old actor, who appeared in an anti-Trump, get-out-the-vote ad in 2016.
ADVERTISEMENT
Sheen says he’s “disgusted” not only by Trump, but also by “the Republicans kowtowing to their rich special interests instead of representing the American people.”
And, he’s “most disgusted by the Republican effort to gut health care and social programs for Americans in need.”
The email comes the day after Senate Republicans postponed a procedural vote on their bill to repeal and replace ObamaCare. The bill had seen shrinking support after a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report found it could leave tens of millions without healthcare.
It’s not the first time Sheen has slammed Trump. During last year’s White House race, Sheen dubbed the real estate mogul an “empty-headed moron,” telling The Hollywood Reporter, “he has absolutely nothing to offer us.”
Sheen has also lent his name to DCCC fundraising efforts before. In a March pitch, he said people always ask him how President Bartlet would handle Trump.
“He would tell America to stand up for what’s right, and fight back with everything it’s got,” Sheen wrote.
As President Barack Obama begins his second term, democratically returned to office by a majority of Americans who seem to buy what he is selling, it would profit us to pause a moment and examine the discrepancies between the vision he expounded in his inaugural address and the economic reality that surrounds us. This leads to a pivotal question: What, exactly, is the underlying purpose of Obamanomics, and how would we know?
Logic offers two choices. We can take the president at his word, and then ask why the promised economic recovery, growth, prosperity, and equality, haven’t arrived yet. Or we can ascribe darker motives to the policies that have brought our country to the brink of ruin. That raises the horrifying possibility—unlikely as it might sound—that precipitating an existential crisis in order to bring about radical change has been Obama’s underlying agenda all along.
If we take the high road and accept Obama at his word, as most Americans have, we are led to three alternatives. The first is that the Keynesian nostrums applied to goose the economy—bailouts, stimulus spending, money printing, artificial suppression of interest rates, government “investments” in all manner of money-losing schemes, and a rapid expansion of the welfare state, all with the goal of increasing “aggregate demand”—are working fine. All we need is to give Washington a bit more time, a little more spending leeway, and a few more tax dollars extracted from those who can most afford it, and all will be well.
The second possibility is that the president’s macroeconomic policies are not working because they are too modest. Therefore, we must let Washington double down and play an even larger role in the economy, or all will be lost. Notables such as The New York Times’ Paul Krugman imply that this is the only way to restore prosperity, and that the one thing holding us back is stingy Republican recalcitrance.
The third possibility is that, noble intentions aside, the Keynesian plan is not working, cannot work, never has worked, and never will work. This implies we need to change course if we want to revive our struggling economy and restore our government to solvency.
The political battle being fought in Washington ranges largely across these three possibilities. But suppose none of them represent reality. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the series of deeper and deeper crises the nation is experiencing are not unintended consequences of failed policies but were the primary goal all along.
Yes, this requires taking a trip into the right-wing fever swamps occupied by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. But these days, it seems that only in such decidedly unfashionable neighborhoods are government policies measured not by their stated intentions but by results. Examining the dismal results of the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression through such jaundiced eyes, we come to two alternatives.
The first is that our government is controlled by a group of self-serving, hopeless incompetents locked in mortal gridlock with a rival political party also comprised of self-serving, hopeless incompetents. This is the easiest hypothesis to defend, and the most likely, which makes it safe ground for critics and pundits.
But suppose, just for a moment, that Obama is as brilliant as his supporters say he is. Suppose he knows exactly what he is doing and is not the least bit surprised by the outcome. Suppose he is methodically executing the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy—which, if it is not succeeding in its objective of totally remaking America, you sure couldn’t tell by looking at the results.
Yes, I know, much ink has been spilled over this theory, the best being an American Thinker article from 2008, Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. It’s worth revisiting, now that we have had a whole term to watch Obama in action.
The idea that a new age of social justice and redistributive equality can be brought about by overloading government systems until they collapse, precipitating a populist demand for a wholesale rejection of free market capitalism, was first espoused by two Columbia University professors in the 1960s. The idea gained currency in radical circles that included a diverse cast of characters, many of whom make cameo appearance in the life and education of our president and read like a who’s who of the American radical left, including Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Frank Marshall Davis, George Wiley, Saul Alinsky, Wade Rathke, ACORN, and George Soros, among others.
Yes, it is possible that Barack Obama has rejected all the radical ideas he marinated in as a young man, just as he claims to have rejected the vitriolic anti-Americanism of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in whose pews he sat for years and whose sermons inspired Obama’s memoir, The Audacity of Hope.
Yes, of course, it is possible that all of the formative influences that made our president who he is are irrelevant to the policies he is enacting now, just as it possible that we are living through a bad dream and that in the morning we will awaken refreshed in a country that is not in the process of destroying itself.
Bill Frezza is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a Boston-based venture capitalist. You can find all of his columns, TV, and radio interviews here. If you would like to have his columns delivered to you by email, click here or follow him on Twitter @BillFrezza. The cartoon is courtesy of TobyToons.
NES has signed a new contract with Remontowa Shipbuilding, Gdansk for the delivery of two hybrid electric systems for two new ferries. The contract has a value of 25-30 mill NOK. The owner of the new ferries is Transport for London (TfL) and the LMG Marin 60-DEH design includes a propulsion system, which is the newest within green energy.
The ferries shall be operating the link between Woolwich and North Woolwich across the River Thames. The Woolwich Ferry has been operating since 1889 and carries around 20 000 vehicles and 2.6 million passengers a year across the River Thames.
Norwegian Electric Systems package consists of ultralight converters forming a DC-grid system with totally four battery packages, two on each side of the DC-bus breaker for redundancy. In addition, for the main propulsion there are used water-cooled, high efficiency permanent magnet motors and four direct driven propellers.
"We have had a good and close contact with Remontowa and LMG Design during this sales process", says Fridtjof Erichsen, regional sales manager in NES.
NES will, as usual, deliver a complete integrated DC-Grid system consisting of:
Generators
4 complete battery packs
permanent magnet motors for main propulsion
DC switchboards
Low loss Quadro Drive® DC/AC and AC/DC
EMS and IAS
Project Management
Calculations/Engineering
Commissioning and sea trial
"We are proud to have won this contract," says Fridtjof. "It proves once again that NES is in the forefront when it comes to technology".
NES has already installed one of Europe`s largest test facilities for electric propulsion systems including energy storage. The new Energy Management System will also be a great advantage for future projects.
Source and top image: Norwegian Electric Systems
One family says the ratings-grabbing reality show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" turned their personal tragedy into a practical nightmare, leaving them with virtually nothing but a lawsuit.
The Higgins family, five kids between the ages of 14 to 21-years-old, lived in a two-bedroom apartment in California, orphaned by the deaths of their parents. Their story grabbed headlines.
Producers at the reality show took notice. The family's church first raised money to help them out. Then, “Extreme Makeover" contacted the church to arrange an interview with the young adults. Maybe they could be the next “deserving family.”
Fellow church members, the Leomiti family, offered to take the Higgins family into their home. The lawsuit claims the family's motivation wasn't to save the kids from a life of despair. It was to get a newly built nine-bedroom house, mortgage paid, a weeklong vacation and other gifts like computers, stereos and cars.
According to the suit against the Leomitis, ABC and the producers of “Extreme Makeover,” around the time the episode aired, the Higgins' moved out one-by-one as a result of a “orchestrated campaign” by the Leomiti family to get rid of them.
Mrs. Leomiti called the lawsuit “bogus” in an interview with the Abrams Report over the phone.
Charles Higgins, the oldest of the five Higgins children, and the Higgins' family attorney, Patrick Mesisca, explain their case to "The Abrams Report"
DAN ABRAMS, 'ABRAMS REPORT’ HOST: Charles, first let me start with you. Tell me first of all what happened here.
CHARLES HIGGINS, SUING 'EXTREME MAKEOVER': What happened was we were supposed to be promised a house that was to be built for everybody. My brothers and sisters were supposed to have a place to stay and now we‘re practically homeless. We‘re not together —we‘re not living together in one home. We‘re living in separate homes with each of our friends and it really hurts because I‘m 22.
I‘m trying to pull an extra load. I‘ve got a lot on my shoulders here. I‘m trying to be a good role model but it's hard when you don't really have a place to stay or a place for your younger brothers and siblings to call home, so they can wake up in the morning and they don‘t have to worry about where they are going to live or what they're going to do. It really hurts, it hurts me to see the look on their face every day because I know they worry.
ABRAMS: Patrick, were you literally thrown out of the house or is it basically that you felt that you weren‘t wanted there anymore?
HIGGINS: I'm not really going to comment on that right now because all of that is in the lawsuit. But practically what I‘m going to say is my brothers were done wrong by the show, by ABC.
ABC promised that we were going to have a home and that we were going to be together. And basically what happened was, we're not in a home. The thing is they keep airing our show almost like every other weekend and so that show, every time it gets aired, it makes money. They‘re practically making money off of us, and it's telling a story that's not really true. It's telling a story that we‘re all in a house together, we‘re happy, we're a loving family, we’re happier than we ever could be in our lives, but it's really not true.
ABRAMS: Mr. Higgins look, I'm sorry. Charles' family‘' story is obviously a heartbreaking one. It's one the led them, ABC, to act and to try and build this home to accommodate them. But I don‘t get how the program is responsible for what sounds like a family versus family squabble.
PATRICK MESISCA, HIGGINS‘ FAMILY ATTORNEY: The program, or, if you will, corporate entities that make up the program made a promise to the Higgins' family and told them that they were going to provide a home for them. The only home that was provided was an expansion of the residence in which the Leomitis live, and when all was said and done and the broadcast aired, the only benefit that the Higgins‘ children received was the right to be visitors in that home.
ABRAMS: But everyone knew that. I mean that clearly happened. By the end of the show, there was this big house built and they were all in the house. I mean you would think that if you were going to sue, that would be the time to sue as opposed to now, when it appears for some reason that you won‘t discuss, there was some sort of family versus family problem.
MESISCA: Well you have to realize that all this of has taken place since March 27 of this year. On March 27, that's when the program aired and here we are in August, a period of about four or five months and in that period of time, the Higgins children, all of them have left the Leomiti's home.
ABRAMS: But why is that ABC‘s fault? That's what I do not understand. If they want to sue the family and say, look, this was the deal. You knew what the deal was. You effectively suckered ABC into coming in here because our family was the one that made a great story. I get that. What I don‘t get is how ABC or the production company is responsible for these problems.
MESISCA: I can approach this on a number of levels. First, the Higgins have experienced a nightmare. This has been a very difficult time for them, loosing both of their parents last year. The home would have never been provided for the Leomitis in the absence of circumstances that the Higgins were involved...
ABRAMS: So you sue the Leomitis.
MESISCA: It was the Higgins who were told that a home would be provided for them, that a place would be constructed for them to live in. I think what happened was ABC and the production companies involved steered this into a joint enterprise, if you will, between the Leomitis and the Higgins', instead of just going forward and providing the Higgins with a place for them to live. There was never a disclosure made to the Higgins concerning the fact.
ABRAMS: Why is ABC obligated to build houses? I mean, they get to choose who they want to build a home for and the Higgins have this very compelling story and they're very deserving of it. But again, it seems to me that you're focusing on the wrong defendant.
MESISCA: We could argue this all day long. In California, and I think most jurisdictions, if a person responds to a need, a person is drowning in the middle of a river and you send a lifeboat out to get them, you can't turn the lifeboat around and not pick them up once you've reached the destination or worse, you can‘t just travel right past them and let them drown. ABC undertook here to provide a residence for the Higgins family.
I believe that the way this was done, the failure to give proper advice to the Higgins, as to what options were available to them, how their interest might most properly be protected.
ABRAMS: Very quickly, I got to read ABC‘s statement, “We‘re extremely proud of ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’ and the positive impact the show has had on people‘s lives. While we don‘t comment on litigation, it's important to note the episode is about the rebuilding of the Leomiti family's existing home to accommodate the inclusion of the five Higgins siblings, whom the Leomitis had invited into their lives following the death of their parents.”
It sounds to me like you‘re going to have a real lawsuit against the Leomitis here. I predict that the lawsuit against ABC and the production company will be thrown out, but I am wrong in the past and more importantly, Mr. Higgins, look it sounds like you‘re a guy with a good head on his shoulders and I wish you the best of luck. You don‘t deserve any of this regardless of how the lawsuit comes out, so good luck to you.
Watch the 'Abrams Report' for more analysis and interviews on the top legal stories each weeknight at 6 p.m. ET on MSNBC TV.
“It is something I have got used to since 9/11. From being called Osama Bin Laden to Paki-terrorist I have heard it all,” Zab Mustefa, a British Muslim journalist, who specialises in women's rights and culture, tells me.
Since the terrorist attacks on New York City that brought down the twin towers, it seems life has not been the same for Muslims that live in the western world. Suddenly there was a spotlight shone on Islam when most non-Muslims had barely given it a second thought before.
“Either you’re with us. Or you’re with the terrorists,” announced the then president of the USA George W Bush in a sombre tone at a press conference following the attacks.
And many people decided that all Muslims were against 'us'. Everything was under scrutiny. Their style of dress, their beliefs, their way of life. People that had never even read the Qu’ran believed they had more knowledge than Islamic scholars.
“Look at the way they treat their women!” is a statement that I often hear. “Forcing them to cover up. Not allowing them to go out alone and controlling everything that they do.”
“What about Saudi Arabia? They don’t even let women drive!”
But it's a false perception.
I am not denying that there are countries where the predominant religion is Islam where women are treated badly. But patriarchy is the problem, not Islam. In Islam, the rights of women were recognised much earlier than they were in the West.

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