January 9, 2014

Former Port Authority exec files lawsuit to quash subpoena in GWB probe

David Wildstein, the executive at the center of the decision to close lanes at the entrance to the George Washington Bridge, filed a lawsuit in superior court today trying to quash the Legislature's subpoena of his testimony, according to a spokesperson for the court.

The lawsuit said the subpoena is invalid for a number of reasons. Wildstein's lawyer, Alan Zegas, questioned the validity of Assemblyman John Wisniewski's signature on the subpoena.

The lawsuit also said Wisniewski’s original subpoena power did not include the lane closure issue and said Wisniewski, D-Middlesex, had a conflict of interest in the case. The alleged conflict of interest pertained to a client of Wisniewski’s that had a business interest with the Port Authority.

“The entire process is political,” Zegas said.

A hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Thursday. Wildstein is subpoenaed for noon later that day.


ttp://www.northjersey.com/news/Former_Port_Authority_exec_files_lawsuit_to_quash_subpoena_in_GWB_probe.html#sthash.RD2MNYRg.dpuf

January 9, 2014

“It will be a tough November for this little Serbian”

[A]s it became clearer that the lane closures were a surprise to local officials and police, the media began asking more questions. Wildstein sent a message to Former Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni on the afternoon of Sept. 17 telling him a Wall Street Journal reporter had called him on his cell phone.

“Jesus,” Baroni responded, before advising Wildstein to call Drewniak, Christie’s spokesman.

Christie’s campaign manager exchanged messages with Wildstein the next day, and he blamed the Fort Lee mayor.

“The mayor is an idiot,” Bill Stepien, Christie’s campaign manager, wrote to Wildstein on Sept. 18, in reaction to the Wall Street Journal story about local officials’ complaints.

“When (sic) some, lose some,” Stepien wrote.

Wildstein responded to Stepien: “It will be a tough November for this little Serbian,” an apparent reference to the Fort Lee mayor, who Baroni also referred to as “Serbia” in text messages.


http://www.salon.com/2014/01/08/emails_show_christie_aides_planning_gwb_gridlock/

January 9, 2014

Christie's high school buddy implicated in GWB blockade.

Bully-boy Gov. Chris Christie’s White House hopes hit a massive roadblock after emails implicated a top aide in a punitive George Washington Bridge traffic nightmare.

“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” read the damning Aug. 13 email made public Wednesday — the political payback to the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., for his refusal to endorse the GOP incumbent last year.

“Got it,” shot back Christie’s high school buddy David Wildstein to the message from Bridget Anne Kelly, the governor’s deputy chief of staff for legislative and intergovernmental affairs.


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/emails-link-chris-christie-aides-bridge-lane-closures-article-1.1569740#ixzz2psLzTWhl

January 9, 2014

Christie Aide: "They are the children of Buono voters."

When the bridge closings had gridlocked Fort Lee for days, mayor Sokolich texted Deputy Director of the Port Authority Bill Baroni, asking for help because the lane closings were keeping children from getting to school on time.

David Wildstein texted Kelly, "Is it wrong that I am smiling?"

"No," Kelly replied.

"I feel badly about the kids."

Kelly responded, making reference to Christie's Democratic gubernatorial foe: "They are the children of Buono voters."


http://www.heavy.com/news/2014/01/bridget-anne-kelly-christie-aide-fort-lee-scandal/

January 9, 2014

Lane Closures Delayed EMS Response to 4 Calls in Fort Lee and doubled response time.

North Jersey.com has obtained a letter sent by EMS coordinator Paul Favia to Mayor Mark Sokolich on September 10, 2013, noting four instances in which emergency medical services were delayed due to the lane closures. In two instances, response time doubled, including the case of a 91-year-old woman who lay unconscious for seven minutes, before paramedics were able to reach her ambulance. Heavy traffic prevented the paramedics from treating the woman on the scene, and she ultimately died of cardiac arrest after reaching the hospital.

Considering the woman's age, its seems doubtful that three and a half minutes would have meant the difference between life and death in this instance, but it may have. Regardless, the case illustrates the grave consequences Kelly's alleged conspiracy could have wrought.


http://www.heavy.com/news/2014/01/bridget-anne-kelly-christie-aide-fort-lee-scandal/

January 9, 2014

Christie Administration's Bridge Lane Closure Slowed Search for Missing 4-Year-Old, Says Official

Private messages released on Wednesday strongly suggest that a top adviser to Republican Gov. Chris Christie orchestrated a massive traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey, as political retaliation against the city's Democratic mayor.

Calling the messages "astonishing" and "unconscionable," members of the Fort Lee borough council described the mid-September traffic disaster, caused when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey unexpectedly closed two of the town's access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, as having dire consequences.

"There was a missing child that day. The police had trouble conducting that search because they were tied up directing traffic," says Jan Goldberg, a Fort Lee councilman who works with local emergency personnel. Police found the missing child, a four-year-old. "But with the streets in the condition they were, I would venture to say that the search took longer," Goldberg says.

Ila Kasofsky, a Fort Lee councilwoman, tells Mother Jones that ambulances and other emergency vehicles could not get through the gridlock. In the aftermath of the lane closures, Kasofsky says she spoke with a Fort Lee resident who couldn't get over the bridge to support her husband through major surgery. Another Fort Lee woman was unable to pick up her son after his dialysis session.

Police Chief Keith Bendul cited these problems when he spoke to New Jersey press in September. "On Monday, while all this was going on, we had to contend with a missing four-year-old, a cardiac arrest requiring an ambulance, and a car running up against a building," he said. "What would happen if there was a very serious accident?"



http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/01/chris-christie-bridge-lane-closure-slowed-search-missing-child

January 9, 2014

Woman literally killed by New Jersey Republicans.

FORT LEE – Emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations – including one in which a 91-year-old woman lay unconscious – due to traffic gridlock caused by unannounced closures of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, according to the head of the borough’s EMS department.

The woman later died, borough records show.

In at least two of those instances, response time doubled, noted EMS coordinator Paul Favia, who documented those cases in a Sept. 10 letter to Mayor Mark Sokolich, which The Record obtained.

On Sept. 9, the first day of the traffic paralysis, EMS crews took seven to nine minutes to arrive at the scene of a vehicle accident where four people were injured, when the response time should have been less than four minutes, he wrote.

It also took EMS seven minutes to reach an unconscious 91-year-old woman who later died of cardiac arrest at a hospital. Although he did not say her death was directly caused by the delays, Favia noted that “paramedics were delayed due to heavy traffic on Fort Lee Road and had to meet the ambulance en-route to the hospital instead of on the scene.”


http://www.northjersey.com/fortlee/GWB_lane_closures_delayed_EMS_response_in_Fort_Lee.html#sthash.U6AEl8ss.dpuf

January 8, 2014

Jahi McMath: Family says brain-dead teen's body may be too deteriorated to save

A day after winning the three-week battle to take their brain-dead daughter from Children's Hospital Oakland, the family of Jahi McMath conceded Monday they are losing the ghastly war against nature.

Her body, checked in at an undisclosed care facility Monday morning, has deteriorated so badly, that "Right now, we don't know if she's going to make it," said attorney Christopher Dolan.

"She's in very bad shape," he said. "What I can tell you is that those examinations show that her medical condition, separate from the brain issue, is not good."

Dolan's frank and sober assessment echoes a Friday legal declaration by Children's Hospital Oakland critical care pediatrician Dr. Heidi R. Flori, who opposed surgical insertion of a feeding tube because the girl's body was deteriorating.

Brain-dead for 25 days, Jahi has been sustained under court order with a breathing machine and other medical interventions since complications arose after surgery to remove her tonsils and other tissue.


http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_24857783/jahi-mcmath-brain-dead-teens-body-may-be

January 6, 2014

Gigaom: What 60 Minutes got right and wrong in its story on the “cleantech crash”

1). RIGHT: From a purely venture capital perspective, cleantech has been ugly and it has “crashed.” I don’t think you can argue rationally that this hasn’t happened; again, only in the venture capital, Silicon Valley ecosystem. And yes, there are a couple exceptions that emerged from the Valley that made it through, like Tesla.

As I’ve covered many times over the past six years, venture capitalists lost a lot of money on cleantech (Kleiner Perkins being the poster child of this), and many have now left the sector. At the same time, entrepreneurs widely know there’s very little money available for early stage “cleantech” startups anymore, and the limited partners that back venture funds don’t want the VCs to invest their money in anything called cleantech these days.

There was a very real bubble and bust that happened, though there are still firms around that have evolved and are sticking with it. Will it come back like the second wave of the internet? There will be some more successes in the future but I don’t think the equivalent massive amount of money from VCs will emerge again.

A lot of the 60 Minutes piece was trying to cover this Valley aspect and I think they did a good job of that. The VCs did lean on government connections and support at times, and they made a lot of mistakes.

Vinod Khosla is also the right guy to talk to, as he’s the enigma that says his firm is going to continue to fund the cleantech sector at an aggressive pace, despite the difficulties. It was probably pretty hard to find a VC that would admit on camera that she or he made a bunch of weak investments in cleantech and now, hat in hand, is exiting the scene.

2). WRONG: Unfortunately, playing up the taxpayer-funded government green-flop angle in the piece was both stale and overblown. It’s been covered ad nauseum not only in the political arena, but also in more mainstream pieces like the Wired one two years ago.

There were a few companies in manufacturing that were backed by the Department of Energy loan program that were clear mistakes — Solyndra and Fisker — but some of the other companies mentioned in the piece were either very minor losses or also still have promising tech that is being developed under a different owner. Leslie Stahl named 9 companies that didn’t do well for various reasons (not all from the loan program) and then dramatically declared she’s exhausted from naming them all.

As Michael Grunwald has pointed out in his book The New New Deal, government support — from the Department of Energy through the stimulus — has created a large amount of jobs over the years. Beyond the stimulus, solar panels and wind power have reached record levels in the U.S. in the last year and that’s also thanks to U.S. government support. Even within the loan program, there were more wins than the 60 Minutes piece let on, like the Ivanpah solar farm that created a lot of jobs outside of Las Vegas. The U.S. government needs to give more support to next-generation energy technologies, not less.

Part of the problem with the 60 Minutes piece is that it’s combining the story of U.S. support for clean power and energy efficiency, with the Silicon Valley story. They’re totally separate and different. The subhead of the piece is a prime example of the confusing aligning of those two things:

“Despite billions invested by the U.S. government in so-called “Cleantech” energy, Washington and Silicon Valley have little to show for it.”

Um, does that include the huge gains in wind farms and solar panel projects in the U.S., or does that just mean that Solyndra didn’t work out? Because, Solyndra happened in the summer of 2011; two and a half years ago. The underlying problem is that “cleantech” is a convoluted term that can mean many things, and isn’t all that helpful as an organizing group. Let’s figure out in 2014 if we should kill that term or not.


http://gigaom.com/2014/01/05/what-60-minutes-got-right-and-wrong-in-its-story-on-the-cleantech-crash/

January 6, 2014

From Dailykos: Would Steven Seagal Treat Arizona Like He Treated His Wife?

So, Steven Seagal is discussing running for Arizona governor with that bane of immigrants, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Maybe Seagal is worried about securing the borders so his ex-wife can't fly to the US and give him a piece of her mind.

Three wives ago, Seagal married Miyako Fujitani.

The young Seagal was studying martial arts in Japan. Though an outsider, he was accepted into the community and eventually married Miyako Fujitani, a fellow Aikido student whose family helped found their dojo (school).

Seagal left his wife and their children when opportunity called in the USA. Since then it's been a series of brief marriages, bad divorces and several children.

Miyako Fujitani remains faithful to her family and to her practice. She is a pioneer in women's martial arts and a respected master teacher in the Aikido community. She's the real deal.

Miyako Fujitani Sensei wrote an autobiography, 'Precious Time'--in her words...

Now I have made up my mind to live my own life, this remaining precious life, by following my inner voice and the wisdom　gained from my bitter　struggle with fate. By writing this book, I hoped to be released from　my burdens, having had to carry on by myself after Steven Seagal abruptly left for　the USA, leaving behind our family, the dojo, and me.

Aikido is a way of life based on dignity, respect and self-control. So it's no surprise that Seagal couldn't last.

On these photos from her dojo website, Fujitani Sensei looks like she is still in fighting shape, and their son, Kentaro, is also a martial artist. Steven Seagal, on the other hand, has put on a few pounds.

Maybe it's the stress of those sexual harassment lawsuits and that regrettable incident with the puppy.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/05/1267421/-Would-Steven-Seagal-Treat-Arizona-Like-He-Treated-His-Wife