Christie urges Cuomo to employ EZ Pass and keep the infidels off the high way to Hell while he goes to church and prays that someday he will be King of the US
Andrew Cuomo hates Greeks and others that do not share his religious persuasion like Christie hates the Mayor of Fort Lee.
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the help. The item’s below. I’d be happy to mail you a copy,
if you give me a mailing address.
Claude
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Confidential > Stop
scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Officials
loyal to Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey went to elaborate means to
make it appear that the September closing of lanes leading to the George
Washington Bridge was part of a traffic study, even though their
private communications suggest the move was purely political, according
to documents released on Friday.
The
documents also show a concerted effort to keep their true motivation
hidden, including the insistence by one official of the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey in an email that communications about the
matter should not be conducted by email or discussed publicly.
Among
the documents was a PowerPoint presentation prepared after three days
of snarled traffic, titled “EARLY assessment of the benefits of the
trial.” The conclusion: “T.B.D.” (To be determined.)
Ultimately,
the traffic diversion, in Fort Lee, N.J., led to four mornings of
gridlock, months of investigations into whether the move was a blunt
display of political payback and what has become the gravest challenge
to Mr. Christie’s political career, after it was revealed that a top
aide was intimately involved in the matter.
Document: Newly Released Files in the New Jersey Bridge Scandal
The
release on Friday of roughly 2,000 pages of documents by New Jersey
state legislators, which included emails and texts among top officials
in the Christie administration and officials at the Port Authority, the
bridge’s operator, came one day after Mr. Christie apologized for, he
said, unwittingly misleading the public. The governor, a Republican,
called the entire episode “embarrassing and humiliating.”
Mr.
Christie spent the day on Thursday trying to repair the damage the
unfolding scandal has done to his image and his possible aspirations to
run for president in 2016. But even as questions continued to swirl on
Friday, he was still planning to travel to Florida next week to raise
money for Republican candidates.
He did not comment on the newly released documents.
The
documents suggest that the decision to close the lanes had been met
with confusion by both local officials and workers ordered to close
them.
Inspector
Darcy Licorish of the Port Authority Police Department, who was
assigned to place the orange cones directing local traffic away from
three toll lanes, wrote that superiors could not answer how long the new
traffic pattern was intended to last or whether Fort Lee officials had
been informed of the change.
For
months, Mr. Christie steadfastly denied that his administration had any
role in the decision to close the traffic lanes. At the same time,
lawmakers held hearings and subpoenaed witnesses and documents to
determine exactly what happened.
No
testimony or documents have shown that the governor called for shutting
down the lanes or was involved in any discussions to conceal the
political motive behind the closings, but the documents made clear that
the discussions about the cover-up included some top aides in his office
and campaign.
On
Wednesday, some of those communications were made public, revealing
that one of Mr. Christie’s top aides had apparently played an integral
role in ordering the lanes closed and that the motivation was to punish
the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, who refused to endorse Mr. Christie’s
re-election effort.
Video|1:48:00
Richard Perry/The New York Times
Christie’s News Conference
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said he
took no part in the lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, but
acknowledged the involvement of some of his close aides.
On
Aug. 13, that aide, Bridget Anne Kelly, one of the governor’s deputy
chiefs of staff, sent an email to David Wildstein, a Christie appointee
at the Port Authority, saying, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort
Lee.”
“Got it,” Mr. Wildstein replied.
One
month later, on Sept. 9, several local lanes onto the bridge, the
world’s busiest, were suddenly closed, snarling traffic in Fort Lee and
causing headaches for thousands of commuters. The lanes remained closed
for days.
As
the matter came under increasing scrutiny, Mr. Wildstein and another
Christie appointee at the authority, Bill Baroni, resigned under a cloud
of suspicion. Ms. Kelly was fired this week.
Advertising
The
new documents offer a look at the internal strife the lane closings set
off within the Port Authority, ultimately pitting the executive
director, Patrick J. Foye, who was appointed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of
New York, against officials from New Jersey appointed by Mr. Christie.
At one point, as Mr. Foye continued to inquire about the matter, Mr.
Wildstein called him a “piece of crap” in an email to Michael Drewniak,
Mr. Christie’s chief spokesman.
Mr.
Foye had pressed the matter internally, vowing in an email dated Sept.
13 to investigate. He wrote that he was “appalled” by the “hasty and
ill-advised” decision that had been carried out without informing local
officials, saying it had caused economic harm, endangered residents of
Fort Lee and “violates federal law and the laws” of New York and New
Jersey.
He seemed dismissive of the idea that the lanes were closed for a traffic study.
In
November, as a number of media outlets continued to raise questions,
Mr. Drewniak exchanged a series of profanity-laced emails with Mr.
Wildstein, cursing reporters and disparaging Mr. Foye, as well.
Document: Emails Between Top Christie Aides and Port Authority Officials
The
documents also indicate that Mr. Christie’s appointees at the Port
Authority had discussed the matter with Mr. Christie’s communications
director, Maria Comella, as early as Oct. 2, after the second of two articles
appeared in The Wall Street Journal. “Comella didn’t think much of the
story. Said nobody paying attention,” Mr. Baroni texted Mr. Wildstein.
The
emails also suggest the intimate involvement of David Samson, Mr.
Christie’s handpicked chairman of the Port Authority, showing that he
was aware of the lane closings before they ended on Sept. 13.
One
week after Mr. Foye sent him an angry email about the lane closings,
Mr. Samson struck back in an email to New York appointees at the
authority. He accused Mr. Foye of leaking a memo critical of the lane
closings to The Journal. When the New Yorkers said they did not believe
Mr. Foye had done so, Mr. Samson insisted, finally warning, “he’s
playing in traffic, made a big mistake.”
The
tension between officials from New York and New Jersey is an underlying
theme of many of the documents, with Christie loyalists repeatedly
trying to keep the matter from breaking into public view.
When
Mr. Foye first emailed Mr. Baroni about the closings, Mr. Baroni told
him that they had to talk about it in person rather than by email, and
that there could be “no public discourse.”
On
Sept. 13, the day the lanes were finally reopened, a staff member
responsible for fielding reporters’ calls wrote to Mr. Baroni and Mr.
Foye, saying he had had several inquiries from local newspapers.
Mr.
Baroni said he would seek guidance, and several hours later wrote back
with a statement saying that the Port Authority had been conducting a
traffic study.
On
Oct. 9, a Port Authority staff member emailed Mr. Wildstein with a
synopsis of recent news coverage that questioned whether the lane
closings had been a form of political retribution. “Has any thought been
given to writing an op-ed or providing a statement about the G.W.B.
study?” the staff member asked Mr. Wildstein. “Or is the plan just to
hunker down and grit our way through it?”
Mr. Wildstein’s reply was concise: “Yes and yes.”
Correction: January 10, 2014
An earlier version of this article misidentified the reporter. Marc Santora wrote that version of the article, not Kate Zernike. Both wrote later versions.
An earlier version of this article misidentified the reporter. Marc Santora wrote that version of the article, not Kate Zernike. Both wrote later versions.
Correction: January 10, 2014
An earlier version of this article misidentified the state where Andrew M. Cuomo is governor. It is New York, not New Jersey.
An earlier version of this article misidentified the state where Andrew M. Cuomo is governor. It is New York, not New Jersey.
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