Year: 2014

Christie Burned By George Washington Bridge Flap

Buck Banks

To this point, Chris Christie has treated the George Washington Bridge closure story as a joke, and national reporters have regarded it as a minor irritation. The public release of e-mails among his staff changes all that. The e-mails prove that Christie’s loyalists closed the bridge deliberately as political retribution, not as a ‘traffic study’ as claimed. They display an almost comical venality bordering on outright sociopathy. And they will probably destroy Christie’s chances in 2016.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.

After Spending 20 Years Irreparably Dividing the Country, GOP Spin Doctor Frank Luntz Is Bummed That the Country Is Irreparably Divided

Jon Ponder

It’s amazing in the first place that an A-list Republican propagandist like Frank Luntz would allow himself to be profiled by a reporter who was not employed by a media outlet owned by one of his clients like, say, Rupert Murdoch. But he did, and the resulting article by Molly Ball in the Atlantic, “The Agony of Frank Luntz,” reveals Luntz to be, as Wonkette put it, “a clueless conservative asshole with the self-awareness of a rock”:

[…]

Ex-Florida GOP Chair Greer Now Sells La-Z-Boy Recliners

Buck Banks

$8/hour

“Jim Greer, the disgraced former chairman of the Florida GOP, is now selling La-Z-Boy recliners for $8 an hour plus commission at an Orlando-area furniture store as part of a prison work release program,” the Orlando Sentinel reports. “Greer still has seven months left on his prison sentence for stealing $125,000 from the state GOP.”

Pastafarian Christopher Schaeffer Takes Oath of Office

Jon Ponder
Christopher Schaeffer wears a strainer as he takes his oath

Patheos:

Back in October, Christopher Schaeffer announced his candidacy for election to the Pomfret Town Board in New York. He was elected the following month and was sworn in Thursday.

Why is any of that relevant to the rest of you?

Because of how Schaeffer took his oath of office: With a strainer on his head as a representative of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster…

When the OBSERVER asked afterward why he wore a colander on his head, Schaeffer said he was a minister with an even more unique organization – the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

“It’s just a statement about religious freedom,” he said. “It’s a religion without any dogma.”