Chris Christie joins ABC News as a contributor

Former Gov. Chris Christie has landed a TV gig, NJ Advance Media has learned. Christie has been hired as an occasional contributor to ABC News, according to sources familiar with the discussions. The hiring is scheduled to be announced Tuesday on “Good Morning America” during the 7 a.m. hour, according to the sources, who requested anonymity… Read the rest of this entry »

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Menendez on ABC’s ‘This Week’

U.S. Senator Bob Menendez was interviewed by ABC’s Martha Raddatz yesterday on the stations weekly Sunday morning talk show, ‘This Week.’

Raddatz, who you might remember as the moderator of the vice presidential debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Congressman Paul Ryan, asked Menendez about immigration reform Benghazi, former Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense and whether or not Senator Frank Lautenberg should give Newark Mayor Cory Booker a spanking.

No questions about the allegations that Menendez engaged underage prostitutes or accepted illegal gifts from a campaign contributor.

Click here to watch the Menendez segment on ‘This Week”

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Menendez Sex and Ethics Scandal Widens

Daily Caller says FBI is investigating NJ Senator for exploiting underage Dominican prostitutes, ABC News covering up scandal

Senator Bob Menendez should be kicking back and celebrating his accomplishments this weekend.  He took over the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just in time to preside over Hillary Clinton’s high profile testimony regarding the September 11 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya and he scored a 51% approval rating among New Jersey voters in a Quinnipiac poll this week.

But the stories about Menendez’s inappropriate foreign relations in the Dominican Republic just won’t go away.

Early this morning Daily Caller, the conservative website that last October broke the story about Menendez stiffing Dominican prostitutes, posted a story reporting that the FBI opened an investigation into the Senator for victimising underage Domincan girls, in exchange for money, last August.

DC links to documents indicating that ABC News Senior Investigative Producer Rhoda Schwartz was on to Menendez’s exploits last May and that Citizens for Responsibilty and Ethics in Washington (CREW) was alerted to Menendez’s foreign pay to play last April.

New Jersey’s mainstream media has ignored the story because it is considered “thin,” according to one reporter and becauses “nobody cares and we’re too busy” according to another.

USNews reported in November that the story “wouldn’t stick”, in part, because it involved a Democrat.

“You would see a little more digging if he were a Republican. It is the slightest of the factors, but it is still a factor,”

State Senator Sam Thompson, in his capacity as chairman of the Middlesex GOP, wrote to the Senate Ethics Committee in November asking that they investigate Menendez.  So far, there has been no investigation reported.

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“The Price of Politics”

Bob Woodward’s new book, “The Price of Politics”  may do more to threaten President Obama’s reelection than the anemic jobs reports.

Obama may be a great orator with a clever campaign, but Woodward’s book depicts his White House as dysfunctional and disorganized.  The president himself is depicted as aloof and unable to develop the relationships necessary to lead the nation.  Congressional leaders of his own party, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, have little regard for Obama’s leadership abilities.

The book focuses on the debt ceiling crisis that the nation face during the summer of 2011.  A crisis that was so serious that “they wouldn’t tell the world how bad in was at the time,” according to Woodward in a interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer that will be aired Monday night.

As I was reading several reviews of the book I was reminded of Governor Chris Christie’s frequent criticism of Obama’s lack of leadership and inability to work across the aisle.  It’s worse than Chrisite imagined.  Harry Reid asked Obama to leave the room, at a meeting Obama called of congressional leaders at the White House, so that the congressional leaders could hammer out a deal to avert our nation defaulting on its debt that Obama would have no choice but to sign.  Earlier in the Obama administration, Nancy Pelosi muted  a conference call from Obama while she and Reid were together working on details of the stimulus package so that the president wouldn’t know that he did not have their undivided attention for his pontification.  Clint Eastwood was right.  The chair is empty and even the national Democratic congressional leaders know it.

The mainstream media’s coverage of the book may be more damaging to Obama’s reelection chances than the content of the book itself.

Reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post read like the reviewers compared notes before publication.  They are trying to suppress sales by depicting the book as boring and a rehash of previous reporting.  Yet they have enough integrity to report Woodward’s conclusion:

“It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition.

“But presidents work their will — or should work their will — on the important matters of national business. There is occasional discussion in this book about Presidents Reagan and Clinton, what they did or would have done. Open as both are to serious criticism, they nonetheless largely worked their will.

“Obama has not. The mission of stabilizing and improving the economy is incomplete.”

But ABC is giving Woodward  prime coverage of the book on Monday night in a intervew with Sawyer during “World News Tonight” and “Nightline.”  Woodward will sit down with George Stephanopolous live on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday, September 11, the day the book is release.

The early coverage does not look good for Obama.

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