NY Times, Feb. 20, 2014

By MICHAEL BARBARO

PORT MONMOUTH, N.J. — When Chris Christie started to talk over a complaining questioner, a signature tactic of the bellicose, pre-scandal governor, the audience here briefly turned on him.

“Answer the question,” some shouted.

When he took a microphone from a long-winded speaker, the man startled Mr. Christie by snatching it right back.

And when he singled out a young woman as his inspiration for repairing the Hurricane Sandy-battered coastline, he failed to grasp that the girl’s mother — sitting just a few feet from Mr. Christie — was angry with him for not doing enough.

“He’s full of it,” she said.

For the embattled Mr. Christie, bogged down by scandal and dogged by investigations, Thursday was supposed to represent a defiant, maybe even triumphant, return to the town-hall-style meeting, an intimate and comfortable setting in which he could bathe in the adulation of his fans and unleash harsh denunciations of anyone foolhardy enough to challenge him.

Over the course of four years, and 110 of the cozy sessions — all recorded by aides and quickly uploaded for consumption by his fast-expanding audience — Mr. Christie transformed himself from a little-known former prosecutor into the public face of New Jersey, a national emblem of straight-talking government, and the most forceful presence in the national Republican Party.

But the two-hour forum here near the Jersey Shore on Thursday, his first since controversy enveloped his administration, demonstrated just how difficult it will be for Mr. Christie to quickly recreate the political magic that once seemed certain to put him in contention for the White House.

The man who once commanded these rooms just by walking into them seemed unmistakably mortal.

The event, which was delayed several times by snowstorms, took place in Monmouth County, a location carefully selected to highlight Mr. Christie’s leadership in recovering from Hurricane Sandy. The county was hard-hit by the hurricane, but the governor carried it overwhelmingly in his re-election last fall.

Yet Mr. Christie arrived amid a flurry of protesters, who waved placards mocking his administration’s role in lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, demanding his resignation over the imbroglio and reminding him that even his musical idol was angry about the issue.

“Hey Gov,” read one, “Bruce Springsteen hates you.”

Once inside, amid the brown folding chairs and white linoleum floors of a local V.F.W. hall, Mr. Christie encountered fury on an entirely different, but no less intense front: from homeowners inflamed by the pace of recovery from the hurricane.

With homemade T-shirts and handwritten signs, they complained that his administration had let them down: Subsidies that allowed them to rent a temporary home had run out; reimbursements for emergency repairs never arrived; and, above all, the distribution of federal aid was painfully slow.

It was a jarring tableau for a governor who, just six months ago, was heralded as a hero for consoling devastated families up and down the state’s shattered shores, and for berating Congress until it increased recovery funding for the state.

One man asked Mr. Christie why he had put so much recovery money into the hands of outside contractors, sarcastically noting, as Mr. Christie did at the start of the bridge scandal, that the governor oversees a staff of 60,000 employees. Why not use state workers, as New York had?

Mr. Christie leapt in — defending his decision, casting doubt on New York’s performance, and challenging the man’s grasp of the facts.

In past moments like this, when Mr. Christie seized on the slightest provocation, he invariably earned applause and turned the rest of his audience against whoever had confronted him.

But this time, the crowd directed its frustrations at the governor. Several people began to loudly clear their throats; a few of them demanded that he answer the question.

“I am answering it,” Mr. Christie replied coldly.

Mr. Christie forcefully defended his administration, saying that it had delivered funds to hundreds of thousands of homeowners and assigning blame to the federal government for most of the problems.

“FEMA,” he said mischievously, “is the new ‘F Word.’ ”

There were moments when Mr. Christie struck an empathetic tone, telling homeowners that their woes consumed him and acknowledging his own frustration at the slow pace of the recovery.

“I wish I could wave a magic wand and make this better for everyone,” he said.

Despite rules he outlined at the start of the event, he allowed several speakers to vent at length, uninterrupted.

But at times, it seemed as if the crowd had lost its patience with Mr. Christie’s instinctive playbook — doling out inconvenient truths and administering tough love.

Mr. Christie — who explained that for now, funding went to those with the greatest need — chafed when a woman asked why she had not received help, despite severe damage to her home.

“I’m there,” she said, explaining her poor finances.

Mr. Christie replied, “You must not be quite as there as you think you are.”

At that, a few men and women in the audience gasped. “Nice,” one of them shouted to Mr. Christie.

Mr. Christie seemed relieved to be grappling with questions from constituents about urgent housing needs, not about a traffic tie-up from five months ago. The bridge scandal was not broached by the crowd; when an out-of-town reporter shouted a question about it, Mr. Christie glared at him and said, “People care about real problems.”

And many in attendance still seemed to revere him. A woman who recounted the pain of watching her mother die in a rented apartment, because her house was still damaged from the storm, paused to tell Mr. Christie that “she really liked you.”

Another woman called Mr. Christie “the real governator — not Schwarzenegger.”

“Because of your shoot-from-the-hip style,” she explained. “It’s no nonsense.”

A military veteran, displeased by those who have ganged up on Mr. Christie, said that he could not understand why the governor did not destroy all of his Springsteen CDs.

Mr. Christie made clear that, after 132 Springsteen concerts, the idea was anathema to him, even after Mr. Springsteen had performed a parody of Mr. Christie to the tune of “Born to Run.”

“We get attached to certain people as youngsters,” Mr. Christie said.

But for once, it was the anger of Mr. Christie’s detractors, not his own, that most colored the event.

Gail Doherty, 44, said she had seethed as Mr. Christie highlighted her young daughter Ginger’s role in making it clear how much pain Hurricane Sandy had inflicted, especially on children, a story he has told across the state.

Ms. Doherty said she resented Mr. Christie for invoking their experience, since she and Ginger remained homeless.

“I don’t think he’s kept his word,” she said. “It’s beyond frustrating.”

Ginger, she added, “just wants to go home.”

Christie Watch, Feb. 20, 2014

Surprisingly — no, actually, shockingly is the right word — Chris Christie got through an entire town hall meeting with several hundred New Jersey residents on Thursday morning without once being asked to say a single word about Bridgegate, the allegations about withholding Superstorm Sandy aid from Hoboken, and other scandals swirling around the governor. Held in at a VFW hall in the Port Monmouth section of Middletown, in the middle of areas devastated by Sandy in 2012 and still not rebuilt, Christie put on a masterful display, taking question after question from residents who came to beseech the governor and his cabinet, many of whom came in tow, about a wide range of problems, from Sandy aid to family law to treatment of disabilities. But no one — not a single questioner — even mentioned the ongoing investigations.

Meanwhile, the governor used part of his performance in Port Monmouth to blame New Jersey’s troubles after Sandy on President Obama, Congress, the Federal Emergency Management Agency — Christie referred to the agency as “the new F-word, FEMA” — and, most surprisingly, the National Flood Insurance Program. He blamed, in short, everyone but himself.

How is it even possible that the lane closing scandal at the George Washington Bridge and the allegations that Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno threatened to cut off Sandy aid to Hoboken unless the mayor of that city backed a development project that Christie wanted weren’t even mentioned? And all this in front of perhaps two dozen cameras from national and local television stations and reporters from throughout New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia, plus not a few national outlets?

First, as usual in Christie’s town hall events — and this one, he said, was his 110th — reporters don’t get to ask questions.

Second, Christie held the event, his first town hall meeting since last spring and his first public appearance in weeks, on friendly territory, in precincts known to support Christie and the Republican party. And as evidenced by interviews conducted by two Christie Watch reporters with participants, there was indeed a strong reservoir of support for Christie in the room.

Third, according to several participants in the event — which was, to be sure, open to any and all comers — Christie aides and staff both outside and inside the hall told attendees that no signs, posters or placards would be allowed. Gert Sofman of Highlands, New Jersey, whose home and business were both flooded by up to six feet of ocean water and who still hasn’t recovered damages, said that the event’s organizers strictly disallowed any sign of activism inside the building. “They’re shutting down any kind of demonstration,” said Sofman. “I’m so absolutely angry at this point.” And Isabel Newson of Keansburg, a lone activist who pulled out a small sign reading “Christie Resign” toward the end of the event, said that two other, similar signs had been confiscated by the staff.

Fourth, Christie himself, in laying out the ground rules for the event at its start, warned that he wouldn’t be passive if anyone challenged him. If anyone, he said, had it mind, with all the cameras present, to “take the governor out for a walk,” well, he said, “We’re all from New Jersey.… If you give it, you’re going to get it back.” Anyone familiar with Christie’s bullying, hectoring YouTube videos in which he lays into critics with abandon knew exactly what they were in for.

And finally — and this is most puzzling — there was no sign at the event of any presence by teachers and trade unions who’ve clashed with Christie, of activist groups such as Citizen Action who’ve opposed him, or from groups such as the Fair Share Housing Center, which has emerged as a key critic of how Christie’s administration has handled the distribution of Sandy-related aid.

In a bit, we’ll get to how Christie unleashed a barrage of anti-government, anti-Washington and pro-privatization rhetoric in response to questions about Sandy assistance. But for most of the attendees at the town hall, it was a chance to listen and ask questions of a very personal nature, hoping against hope that the governor and his aides would promise to help. Before the event got underway, your Christie Watch reporters talked to quite a few audience members, and all had tales of woe, of heartbreak and discouragement, even desperation. Joe Wernock, an out-of-work construction and demolition man from Keansburg, lost nearly everything and recovered only $20,000 from insurance. “I want to find out what’s going on,” he said. “The insurance company said that they can’t insure me now unless I lift the house, and I can’t afford to lift the house. They’re fighting with everybody, the people across the street, the guy down the street.” Ron and Jessica Sickler, of Fort Monmouth, said that their house is gutted. “We pay the mortgage in Fort Monmouth and we pay rent in Tinton Falls,” said Jessica. “I think the funds could have been handled better.”

Richard Isaksen, representing the Belford Seafood Cooperative, said the several hundred fishermen in his coop were “barely working” because the creek they have to get through to reach the ocean hasn’t been dredged since the hurricane and is barely passable. And although there was supposed to be several million dollars set aside for the fishing industry, he said, “we haven’t seen a nickel” of the money his group needs to repair the ice machines and other machinery they use for the fish. “We just need some help.”

But none of these people, nor most of the other folks lined up outside to enter the event knew exactly whom to blame, they said. “We’re here to get information,” said Ron Sickler.

And, at the event, Christie did his best to shift the blame for post-Sandy problems away from his office, and his administration, and onto the federal government. Perhaps most outrageously, Christie went ballistic about the National Flood Insurance Program. “The entire flood insurance business in this country has been taken over by the federal government,” said Christie, just getting warmed up. “There’s not much I can do. We’re stuck in dealing with the federal government.… Why they think they’re the best people to deal with flood insurance is beyond me. They don’t have the first idea of what they’re doing.”

There’s so much wrong with Christie’s attack on FEMA and the NFIP that’s it’s hard to know where to start. For decades it’s been obvious that private insurers don’t have the wherewithal to be able to cover flood damage at prices that would be affordable, and so the federal government has come to the rescue. The truth is that the federal government is the only place people can buy flood insurance, because private insurers don’t want to touch it. “Because of the catastrophic nature of flooding, the difficulty of adequately predicting flood risks and uncertainty surrounding the possibility of charging actuarially sound premium rates, private insurance companies have historically been largely unwilling to underwrite flood insurance,” concluded a recent study by the Government Accountability Office.

Responding to Christie, Representative John Pascrell (D-NJ) said:

“When Hurricane Sandy bore down on the Northeast, I fought alongside my colleagues to ensure the federal government delivered the resources New Jersey families desperately needed to rebuild their lives. Instead of playing partisan politics and passing the buck, the Governor should focus on correcting the botched rollout of the state-run RREM [Rehabilitation, Reconstruction, Elevation and Mitigation] program that has left scores of New Jersey families out in the cold.

“The federal government cannot be blamed for the state’s lack of transparency, lost applications and the mysterious firings of Sandy contractors. More than a year after the storm, there are still folks not back in their homes that deserve answers. It’s time for Governor Christie to take responsibility for his administration’s mismanagement and do what’s right by the people of New Jersey.”

And the Fair Share Housing Center, which has studied the issue in depth, has issued a series of reports and statements indicating that it was Governor Christie’s private contractor, HGI, which was assigned to manage the distribution of Sandy aid, that bears most of the responsibility for recent problems.

One member of the audience did indeed try to raise the issue of the problems with HGI with the governor. “All I hear from you is privatize, privatize, privatize,” he said. “Why was HGI fired?” And, indeed, so far the Christie administration has refused to disclose the problem with HGI, hired in 2013 and then dismissed in December without explanation. At today’s town hall event, Christie once again refused to say why HGI was fired, but he had to speak over loud protests from some in the audience, including one man who shouted, “Answer the question!” Still, Christie provided no answers.

Steve Sweeney, the Democrat who is president of the state Senate — a sometimes collaborator, sometimes rival of the governor — issued a statement following the town hall meeting, saying in part:

“The administration has twice fired a contractor handling aid in secret and given no reason. They’ve denied people aid, nearly 80% according to Fair Share Housing, who should have received it. They’ve failed to properly inform people what documentation they need to receive aid. They provided the wrong information on deadlines and appeals on the Spanish language website, and shut out the people who were misinformed from applying. They rejected African-Americans at rates 2.5 times higher than Caucasians. Millions of dollars that should have been going to homeowners and businesses have been withheld.

“These problems were not caused by the federal government. They were caused by his administration’s failed policies.”

Christie, who’s well known to be a fanatical Bruce Springsteen fan, brought the Boss into the town hall event, at least indirectly. At the start of the event, as people were filtering in — and again at the close, as the governor made his exit through a curtain at the back of the room — the hall echoed to the strains of “We Take Care of Our Own,” from Bruce’s 2012 album, Wrecking Ball. It’s hard to imagine a less appropriate song to be played at a Chris Christie event. Its lyrics are a strong denunciation of Republican go-it-alone policies and a bitter denunciation of the fact that in today’s America many people can’t make it on their own. Bruce sings:

I’ve been knockin’ on the door that holds the throne.
I’ve been lookin’ for the map that leads me home.
I’ve been stumblin’ on good hearts turned to stone.
The road of good intentions has gone dry as bone.

Recently, Springsteen and Jimmy Fallon rocked a hilarious parody of “Born to Run” criticizing the governor’s lane-closing fiasco that [youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=VKHV0LLvhXM]. And at the Port Monmouth event, one audience member, who identified himself as with the VFW, said he and some friends had discussed what to ask the governor. Here’s what they came up with: “When you go home, will you please destroy all your Bruce Springsteen CDs?” The governor said, in response, that he hopes that the Boss will come around as he gets older.

NY Times, Feb. 19, 2014

By CHARLES M. BLOW

The Michael Dunn case has caused us to look once again at the American culture and criminal justice system, and many don’t like what they see.

But we shouldn’t look at this case narrowly and see its particular circumstances as the epitome of the problem. They are not. The scope of the problem is far more expansive, ingrained and elusive.

This is simply one more example of the bias against — and in fact violence, both psychological and physical, against — the black body, particularly black men, that extends across society and across their lifetimes. And this violence is both interracial and intra-racial.

A 2011 study found that black parents were the most likely to spank their children. After the study was released, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who advocates against corporal punishment, and who also happens to be black, told CNN: “We have such damage in the black community. When you add to that parents beating their kids, it’s sending the message that violence is an O.K. way to solve problems.” Poussaint added later, “violence begets violence, anger begets anger, and the loss of control makes it all worse.”

Charles M. Blow

DAMON WINTER / THE NEW YORK TIMES

And for many black children, when they go to school things don’t get much better. According to the Center for Effective Discipline, corporal punishment and paddling in school is allowed in 19 states; these include all the states except Virginia in the Black Belt, which stretches across the South. The center found that African-American students make up “17 percent of all public school students in the U.S., but are 36 percent of those who have corporal punishment inflicted on them, more than twice the rate of white students.”

This inequitable treatment in schools is also exerted in other ways. As USAToday reported in May:

“The average American secondary student has an 11 percent chance of being suspended in a single school year, according to the study from the University of California-Los Angeles Civil Rights project. However, if that student is black, the odds of suspension jump to 24 percent.”

It continued:

“Previous studies have shown that even a single suspension can double a student’s odds of dropping out, said Daniel Losen, a former Boston-area teacher and one of the authors of ‘Out of School and Off Track: The Overuse of Suspensions in American Middle and High Schools,’ released in April.”

Even on the streets, they can’t escape it.

In New York City, from 2002 to 2011, the Police Department stopped and frisked millions of citizens, but nearly 90 percent of those were black and Hispanic, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Eighty-eight percent of those stopped were innocent.

And, according to a 2011 report from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, although black, white and Hispanic drivers were stopped by the police at roughly similar rates, “black drivers were about three times as likely as white drivers and about twice as likely as Hispanic drivers to be searched during a traffic stop.” It doesn’t take a leap of logic to understand that if you search for contraband, you’re more likely to find it.

The inequity continues into the justice system, even for juveniles. As “Frontline” pointed out:

“A number of recent surveys have shown that there are profound racial disparities in the juvenile justice system, that African-American and Hispanic youth are more likely to be tried as adults. They are more likely to receive longer sentences, they’re more likely to be in locked facilities, and on and on and on, even when charged with the same offense as whites.”

In fact, a January study in the journal Crime & Delinquency found that by age 23 nearly half of all black men will have been arrested at least once. This compares to 44 percent of Hispanics and 38 percent of whites.

This disparity continues into the adult prison population. While blacks are only 13 percent of the population, they make up 38 percent of the state prison population nationwide.

Part of this last problem abides in the jury box.

A 2010 report from the Equal Justice Initiative found that “people of color continue to be excluded from jury service because of their race, especially in serious criminal trials and death penalty cases.” And among the people who do make it onto juries, a 2001 study published in Psychology, Public Policy and Law found, white jurors demonstrate bias more often when race isn’t a prominent feature of a case than when it is. So, much of this bias would likely slip by, away from the glare of media attention.

It is no surprise then that many of these young black men, having endured a life of violence and suspicion and inequitable treatment, would have a vastly altered relationship to authority and even the basic concepts of fairness and hopefulness. A small number of these young people, having been baptized in brutality, can internalize it and then act it out, being destructive to themselves and their communities. And pop culture — whether music, television or movies — can amplify the problem by either normalizing violence or glorifying it.

In that context, the repercussion of poor decisions is amplified, and the tiny minority of people who exist within any demographic group who are intent on committing themselves to wrongdoing and disruption could prosper.

That is the conundrum of the current African-American experience: How to unwind all the hurt and damage? How to rescue folks from a system and culture that threatens to drown them?

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. There is no one place to start.

I often advocate that blacks fight this bias on two flanks. First, work every day to eliminate the structural and systematic biases. This is actually easier said than done, particularly since many of the people who, wittingly or not, become instruments of the bias, and in some cases are beneficiaries of that bias, deny that bias.

The second flank is to recognize that the bias is present and not make choices that would make it worse, and in fact try to countervail it. The latter is always the more delicate argument, because it calls on people to redouble efforts to behave nobly in an ignoble — and unjust — context. There is an issue of basic fairness that goes unaddressed in the discussion.

But, sadly, those seem to be the options that exist at the moment. Moving in two directions at once, fighting the system and fighting despair.