Mine is that he was stranded and unable to return to the water after his echo location malfunctioned.
This is a sincerely curious question; does the least popular governor in the state’s history stay in that state after leaving office? I could see him changing his name, buying a piece of land somewhere up north, and hiding out in obscurity for the rest of his days.
He’s going to be fine. He’ll join a big law firm as a partner and leverage all his Republican connections. He’ll get on the board of a bunch of other companies and end up pulling in millions a year. Don’t weep for Christie.
Back when Chris Christie was a US Attorney General, he put the father of Jared Kushner (who is Ivanka Trump’s husband) into jail for Criminal Tax Evasion and Witness Tampering. Once Kushner became ascendant in the Trump campaign he worked to push Christie out.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/16/politics/trump-transition-jared-kushner-chris-christie/index.html
They shut down beaches on the 4th weekend in Jersey?
Just a quick question: How do you shut down the beaches? Are they all really locked up & behind fences? Sounds like a pretty big effort to go to…
eg on that pic, couldn’t anyone just walk over the dunes to get to the sand & water?
Public beaches are like public parks.
Technically, no, if you went out there while they were closed, you could be arrested.
Easy! You elect Chris Christie as governor and go from there.
Maybe they learned their lesson from the first shark?
That was NJ…right?
First, you close all the bridges that lead there …
Heh
I’m currently sitting on the beach in NJ and one of those planes pulling banners just flew by and it said “Tell gov Christie to get the hell off Island Beach State Park”
The memes…
This is frightening.
There is so much to highlight here, but I’ll quote this passage at length as it illustrates how conservatives think, and, more importantly, act. Remember, this is the self-proclaimed “Pro Life” party. As someone on Twitter observed:
“Key takeaway from Texas: the GOP didn’t need Trump’s help to become an authoritarian white nationalist party.”
In May, 2011, Governor Perry, who was gearing up for his first Presidential race, signed a bill requiring all women seeking an abortion to have a sonogram at least twenty-four hours before the procedure. Carol Alvarado, a Democratic state representative from Houston, pointed out on the House floor that, for a woman who is eight to ten weeks pregnant, such a law would necessitate a “transvaginal sonogram.” She then displayed the required instrument to the discomfited lawmakers: a white plastic wand resembling an elongated pistol, which would be inserted into the woman’s vagina. “Government intrusion at its best,” she observed.
Nonetheless, the bill passed in the House, 107–42. When the Senate approved the bill, Dan Patrick, then a state senator, declared, “This is a great day for Texas. This is a great day for women’s health.”
Between 2010 and 2014, the proportion of women who died in childbirth in Texas doubled, from 18.6 per hundred thousand live births to 35.8—the worst in the nation and higher than the rate in many developing countries. These figures represent six hundred dead women.
Researchers say that it’s not entirely understood what accounts for the rise in maternal mortality in Texas, because the rate was already rising before the 2011 laws went into effect. Obesity, heart disease, drug overdoses, and a lack of health insurance—all serious problems in the state—play a role. Nevertheless, a report in the September, 2016, issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology noted, “In the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a two year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely.”
The mystery might be cleared up if Governor Abbott released records about how these women died. In 2011, when he was attorney general, he issued an opinion stating that information about the deceased would be withheld, supposedly to prevent fraud.
Dan Patrick, Rick Perry, and other Texas lawmakers who have called their bills a victory for women’s health have shown no compassion for the women who have suffered, and perhaps died, because of them. Their legislation has been equally heartless toward children. A fifth of the uninsured children in the U.S. are in Texas. In 2004, the Texas Education Agency lowered the percentage of children who can be enrolled in special-education classes from thirteen per cent (about the national average) to eight and a half per cent (the lowest in the country). According to the Houston Chronicle, tens of thousands of children have been denied the education they need because of this arbitrary limit.
In 2015, a federal judge, Janis Graham Jack, ruled that, in Texas, foster children “almost uniformly leave State custody more damaged than when they entered.” The state, she said, was violating the children’s constitutional rights by exposing them to an unreasonable risk of harm. Judge Jack declared that state oversight agencies had adopted an attitude of “deliberate indifference” toward the plight of the children in their care, even in the face of repeated abuse and, sometimes, homicide. “Rape, abuse, psychotropic medication, and instability are the norm,” she added.
Governor Abbott promised to overhaul the child-welfare system, but things have only worsened. In the 2016 fiscal year, at least two hundred children in Texas died of maltreatment, compared with a hundred and seventy-three the previous year, and those figures don’t include more than a hundred other deaths that are still being investigated. Child Protective Services, the state unit charged with investigating cases of abuse, is in chaos. Nevertheless, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, appealed Judge Jack’s decision to appoint a special master to oversee the state’s foster-care system, claiming that it would amount to a “federal takeover.”
Nearly a year after the judge’s ruling, Child Protective Services acknowledged that caseworkers had not even visited more than forty-seven hundred children at high risk of abuse or severe neglect. Hundreds of children have been sleeping in hotels or emergency shelters, or on air mattresses in government offices, because the state has nowhere else to put them. Hundreds of caseworkers have quit, complaining that they were overworked, demoralized, poorly paid, and often placed in dangerous situations. Union leaders have said that higher pay would help attract more applicants to the job, which offers a starting salary of thirty-seven thousand dollars, but state officials countered with a plan to lower the educational requirements for caseworkers. During the 2017 legislative session, while bills addressing the child-welfare crisis were being considered, a teen-age girl who was being housed in a state office building fled in the middle of the night. She was hit by a van and killed.
In a weird way, I admire Christie a little. When you have no fucks to give, and are done politically except for a hail-Mary thing from Trump, I’d sit on the damn beach too.
It looks like the beaches will reopen today, so yay for the people of New Jersey (who really need some yays because they live in New Jersey). ;-)
Florida. At least it’s not New Jersey.
Say what you will, but I got to take 6 six paternity leave when my eldest was born, and it was paid by the state. Not too shabby.