Christie Clear

It should be obvious by now that the most dangerous place in America is anywhere between Chris Christie and a camera. Christie was recently in California campaigning for Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman (forcing me to use the names "Christie" and "Whitman" for the first time in nearly a decade) and he shouted down a participant at a town hall-style campaign appearance for daring to ask a question at an event where no questions were entertained. The question was why Whitman wasn't taking any questions. Christie dismissed the man - a wealthy businessman named Ed Buck - as someone who was trying to divide the country by yelling and screaming at people. The idea of Christie reprimanding someone for shouting angrily is like a demolition derby participant accusing reprimanding someone for driving recklessly.

Christie also went to Chicago to accept a $100 million gift from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to fix Newark's schools - on Oprah Winfrey's show. He's hoping that Zuckerberg's gift - which will likely replace the few remaining arts education programs in Newark schools with classes on social networking - will compensate for the failure to qualify for four times as much public money to improve all of Newark's schools. How Christie plans to keep Newark schools going after Zuckerberg's gift runs out has not been addressed.

Zuckerberg is seen as a boy wonder who can make anything work. Too bad Facebook had a major outage yesterday. :-O