1. KitchenAid's Twitter incident

KitchenAid insulted Obama's dead grandmother during the presidential debates in October, tweeting "Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president’ #nbcpolitics." To its credit, the company stemmed the bleeding by deleting the tweet and immediately issuing an apology on Twitter and later to news outlets.

2. Lance Armstrong's interview with Oprah

After several missed opportunities to admit that he took performance enhancing drugs, a USDA investigation charged seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong with doping. Only then did Armstrong try to come clean in a tell-all interview with Oprah -- but by then it was too little, too late.

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Reuters reports:

The sweeping plan includes 250 recommendations, ranging from installing floodwalls and storm barriers to upgrades of power and telecommunications infrastructures.

With the Big Apple facing significant impacts from climate change in the decades to come -- including becoming as hot as Birmingham, Alabama, by 2050 -- the plan aims to make sure that New York City's extensive subway, transit, sewer and water, energy and food distribution systems will still be able to serve the more than 8 million people who live there.

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Cruz played to type when he proudly defended his vote against the “pork-laden” bill, but for much of the night he tried on humility, shining a spotlight on his Tea Party colleagues as “the children of Ronald Reagan” and exhibiting no interest in a 2016 presidential run.

On the day the GOP lost Rep. Michele Bachmann, the woman who’d emerged as Joe McCarthy in lipstick in 2008, Cruz didn’t do his familiar “Tailgunner Ted” routine. Wearing a wireless mic, he stepped out from the podium and wandered the room like a coach, or a speaker at a get-rich-quick seminar. He tried to cast himself as a man of the people, friend to the downtrodden, who thought Mitt Romney’s big mistake in 2012 was his callousness to the so-called 47 percent.

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“I don’t think we should be acknowledging people who are voting against us in our hour of need,” King told BuzzFeed, referring to Cruz's vote against federal relief funding in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

“Once I found it was him,” King continued, “I decided not to go. I don’t know if I would have gone or not because of scheduling things, but that made it easy once I found out it was Ted Cruz.”

King has been calling for New York Republicans to freeze out those in the party who voted against the funding bill, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

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And unless extreme protection measures are implemented, people could again die.

Hyperbole? Hardly. Even though Sandy’s storm surge was exceptionally high, if sea level rises as much as scientists agree is likely, even routine storms could cause similar destruction. Old, conservative estimates put the increase at two feet (0.6 meter) higher than the 2000 level by 2100. That number did not include any increase in ice melting from Greenland or Antarctica—yet in December new data showed that temperatures in Antarctica are rising three times faster than the rate used in the conservative models. Accelerated melting has also been reported in Greenland. Under what scientists call the rapid ice-melt scenario, global sea level would rise four feet (1.2 meters by the 2080s, according toKlaus Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. In New York City by 2100 “it will be five feet, plus or minus one foot,” Jacob says.

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According to the White House pool report:

The party then moved to an arcade called "TouchDown Fever" to try and win a stuffed bear by tossing a football through a tire. Obama tried and missed a few times. Christie then threw the ball through the tire, on his first and only try. Obama gave him a high five ending in a clasp. And said,  "That's because he's running for office."  The guy behind the counter gave Obama a "Chicago" bear.

Christie also tweeted more pictures:

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From the Washington Post:

During remarks at the Asbury Park Convention Hall after his tour, Obama is expected to praise the resilience of the local communities, while also emphasizing the federal government’s response to the storm, which has been widely praised, including by Christie. By shining a spotlight on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the president is able to endorse the role of government at a time when public attitudes toward the IRS have soured.

Obama “will underscore his administration’s ongoing commitment to stand with the impacted communities as the important work of recovery continues,” the White House said in a statement.

The President just finished a visit to Moore, Okla., which was devastated in last week's tornado. "Obviously the damage here is pretty hard to comprehend," Obama said.

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Coburn, who has argued that there is no need to pass a bill without offsetting the costs with other cuts, pointed to the funding passed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings, which was offset. "It's the lamest excuse in the world when we have at least $200 billion of waste, fraud and duplication to say 'oh my gosh we can't do that we have to borrow the money' against the very kids you're saying you want to help."

He added that "it's morally wrong, it's repugnant to me and it's the lamest excuse career politicians can use, and that's why our country is in trouble. That kind of thinking."

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“I think there’s a lot of hypocrisy involved here, [Sen. James] Inhofe saying Sandy aid was corrupt but Oklahoma won’t be,” King told Politico. “But I don’t want to hold the people of Oklahoma responsible for what elected officials are saying, for the husband and wife without a home, for the people who lost all their worldly possessions.”

Inhofe, a Republican, said Tuesday that tornado aid is "totally different" from Hurricane Sandy aid. His colleague, Tom Coburn, also a Republican, called for aid to the state to be offset with cuts elsewhere.

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Your life has been upended, and your face tells the story: Shock. Pure, unmasked shock. The tornado that ripped through Moore left you feeling as if today you awoke on a planet other than your own. This is not your life. It’s not the way you left it. But it is what you now have to face, and that is the most shocking thought of all.

I know this is true because six months after Hurricane Sandy wrecked my house, leaving three and a half feet of water and months of chaos, I am still processing how your life can go from utterly routine to completely unrecognizable in less than a day.

You look around, and that which you once found so comforting -- home, community -- are suddenly foreign, scary, dangerous. You seek out something familiar and when you find it, you embrace it — the neighbor down the street, a cracked dinner plate, a mangled stuffed animal.

You’re looking for normal, but you’re not going to find it. Normal got swept up by that tornado, just as our normal got washed away by Sandy’s storm surge.

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Inhofe, of course, believes his state deserves those resources, even though he voted down aid to Hurricane Sandy victims. On MSNBC, Chris Jansing confronted Inhofe about his calling the Sandy aid bill a “slush fund,” and the brazen right-winger insisted the two issues shouldn’t be linked.

“Let’s look at that, that was totally different,” Inhofe told Jansing. “They were getting things — for instance that was supposed to be in New Jersey, they had things in the Virgin Islands, they were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.; everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy taking place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

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Inhofe contended on Tuesday that the Hurricane Sandy relief bill was different because it was filled with pork. “They were getting things, for instance, that was supposed to be in New Jersey," he said on MSNBC. "They had things in the Virgin Islands. They were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C. Everybody was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

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“Believe me, nobody’s going to get naked if I’m spending the entire day with Prince Harry,” Christie joked during a radio interview. The governor also presented Prince Harry with a "royal fleece," a nod to Christie's much-parodied fleece that's "basically fused" to his skin:

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"He went out of his way to attack New York on the bill,” King, R-N.Y., added, the New York Daily News reports. "It's a little early to forgive and forget."

“It’s life and death,” King continued. “There were really false and phony charges made against the Sandy aid, and if Ted Cruz had prevailed, my constituents would be homeless."

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He continued: "You’ve got people suffering and you say to yourself, I’ve got to do my job. I say the same thing to all of them – put yourself in my shoes, and if you’re a responsible elected official, you would do nothing different.”

At the time, Christie sharply criticized House Speaker John Boehner and other House Republicans for holding up a vote on relief funds after the hurricane, meanwhile praising President Obama for his efforts in the state.

“Listen, I supported Mitt Romney and I was very vocal about it,” Christie added. “But the fact is, presidential politics was not the first thing on my mind that day. It was getting my state recovered and restored.”

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I’ll never forget the moment when, after fishing blindly in this box of a thousand dead memories, I pulled out a work of art.  It had not been intended as one; it was just a snapshot.  But it was aesthetically bewitched.  The time it took for a shutter to open and close in, oh, I don’t know—a sheared-off sliver of one second in Depression-struck 1932?—was the exact amount of time it took the eye to remake it. A picture of a picture, this time taken by the beholder.

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"After Barack let him ride on Air Force One, he gave him an ice cream cone," Morris said.

The famously inaccurate pundit was presumably alluding to a ride Obama and Christie took together to tour devastation in New Jersey stemming from Hurricane Sandy. Christie has gotten on the bad side of some conservatives for praising the president's handling of the disaster and its aftermath.

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If Staten Island’s Great Kills Marina Café is able to reopen this spring after Sandy ripped apart its interior – blowing out windows and punching through walls – it will be thanks to assistance from the federal government.

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"Being from New York we’re not supposed to be suckers,” King told the New York Observer's Politicker blog. “It’s bad enough that these guys voted against it, that’s inexcusable enough. But to have the balls to come in and say, ‘We screwed you, now make us president'?"

King said that New York donors should cut off Rubio and any other Republicans who “threw a knife in the back in New York” by opposing the bill. “[Republicans] are more and more taking on this anti-Northeast attitude,” he said. “We say fine, if you want to be anti-Northeast, then the Northeast is going to be anti-them."

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