A top staffer to Eric Cantor is leaving the House majority leader’s office to launch a Super PAC aimed at raising Cantor’s national profile, sources told Influence Alley.
The PAC will be run by Cantor’s deputy chief of staff John Murray and would give Cantor a vehicle he could use to run for vice president, should the opportunity arise, said a source close to the majority leader’s office, who asked not to be named because the source was not authorized to speak publicly. Murray’s departure from Cantor’s office is imminent, the source said.
Murray did not respond to requests for comment.
Cantor, first elected to the House a decade ago, has risen quickly through the leadership ranks and has worked hard to raise his profile co-authoring “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders” last year.
And on Tuesday, after New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced — again — that he wasn’t running for president, talk quickly shifted to Cantor as the GOP’s next white knight. And just this week, the majority leader was the subject of a lengthy profile in New York Magazine.
George Osborne moved to deregulate the labour market by announcing big fees to deter workers bringing employment tribunal action such as unfair dismissal and race discrimination cases.
In a move condemned by the unions as an attempt to silence the vulnerable, workers will face a £150 to £250 charge to make any employment tribunal application and a further £1,000 for starting a hearing. The sums would be higher for compensation claims of more than £30,000. Continue reading “Fight back now”→
We have numerous examples of major pieces of infrastructure literally crumbling around us – our power grid, the water and sewage systems in our major cities, our highways and bridges, and even our slowest-in-the-world internet/telecommunications network – and yet all anyone can do is whine about taxes, get hard-ons for austerity, and wonder why everything isn’t repaired to their liking.
Federal funds for highway and bridge projects come from a gasoline surtax, one which hasn’t been raised (not even to meet inflation) since Bill Clinton raised it an astonishing four cents in 1996. Since raising taxes is, you know, completely off the table, states have had to repair an aging and increasingly creaky highway network with a pool of money that, in real terms, is shrinking annually.
We are very much a country clinging to faded glory, and I don’t think there is a better symbol of where we are right now than dilapidated Cold War era bridges. They’re falling apart and all we can do is fill comment sections with bitching and moaning about big government, tax-and-spend libruls, and how the problem would already be solved if the government didn’t spend so much on (insert thing that does not directly benefit the person using this rhetorical tactic). When we finally take time out from congratulating ourselves on being the #1 super-greatest country in the history of the world to recognize that, frankly, this place is turning into kind of a dump, it will already be too late.
Please, Gov. Christie, run for president! I so want to talk about how, as you put it, you never even set foot in the Trenton state house until you were elected — even though you were the lobbyist for the Securities Industry Association, the Wall Street trade association, under Bernie Madoff.
Let’s talk about what you achieved, since one of your primary lobbying projects on behalf of Wall Street was to win an exemption for securities fraud from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. Straight shooter! Woo hoo!
Easy enough for just about anyone to remember: Lobbyist Chris Christie worked to remove securities fraud from a consumer fraud act on behalf of an organization run by Bernie Madoff.
Bring it on, I say:
The Republican Party’s long search for a standard-bearer is placing extraordinary pressure on the tough-talking governor of New Jersey to suddenly leap into a presidential race that he has long denied interest in entering.
As the clamor reached a heightened pitch, Gov. Chris Christie arrived Tuesday night at the symbolic heart of political conservatism, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, to deliver a speech on American exceptionalism that some Republicans had hoped would be the opening stroke of a presidential campaign.
Christie gave an impassioned call for strong leadership, accusing Washington of drifting from crisis to crisis without resolution and President Obama of being a “bystander in the Oval Office.” In his nearly 30-minute speech, Christie offered no indication he might offer himself as that strong leader, but didn’t close the door, either.
During an audience question-and-answer session, a woman stood up and pleaded. “I really implore you — I really do. This isn’t funny. I mean this with all my heart,” she said. “Please, sir, reconsider. Go home and really think about it. Please. Do it for my daughter, do it for our grandchildren, do it for our sons. Please, sir, your country needs you to run for president.”
The audience rose to applause and Christie, in an emotional moment, responded: “I feel the passion with which you say it, and it touches me.”
The governor said he was listening to those urging him to run, adding that he was taking it in and “feeling it too.” But he continued, “by the same token, that heartfelt message you gave me is also not a reason for me to do it. That reason has to reside inside me. That’s what I’ve said all along. I know without ever having met President Reagan that he must’ve felt deeply in his heart that he was called to that moment to lead our country. And so my answer to you is just this, I thank you for what you’re saying.”
The Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has managed to hack a Diebold Accuvote touch-screen voting machine in what I describe at my exclusive today at Salon as perhaps “one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.”
As noted by the computer scientists and security experts at Argonne’s VAT, largely all that’s needed to accomplish this hack is about $26 and an 8th grade science education.
“This is a national security issue,” VAT team leader Roger Johnston told me, echoing what I’ve been reporting other computer scientists and security experts telling me for years. “It should really be handled by the Department of Homeland Security.”
Johnston should know. While the VAT folks have been dabbling in the security (or lack thereof) of e-voting systems in their spare time of late, most of the work they do is related to issues like nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation.
What makes this hack so troubling — and different from those which have come before it — is that it doesn’t require any actual changes to, or even knowledge of, the voting system software or its memory card programming. It’s not a cyberattack. It’s a “Man-in-the-middle” attack where a tiny, $10.50 piece of electronics is inserted into the system between the voter and the main circuit board of the voting system allowing for complete control over the touch-screen system and the entire voting process along with it.
Add an optional $15 radio frequency remote control device, and votes can be changed, without the knowledge of the voter, from up to half a mile away…
And these people all voted in the spending-cuts crowd. All spending is bad – except the spending they need! Despite their situation, they still can’t quite connect the dots
“We are basically homeless at this point,” said the owner of the house, Kenneth S. Eisenman, who had been planning to retire after 31 years as a driver for United Parcel Service.
Mr. Eisenman said he was not unsympathetic to the Republicans’ argument that Congress should partly offset the cost of disaster relief by cutting lower-priority programs. Some programs, he said, are as useless and wasteful as providing “treadmills for seahorses.” Continue reading “Elections have consequences”→
French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative government has lost its majority in the Senate for the first time in recent French history.
The Socialist Party and its Communist and Green allies have won enough seats to gain control of the upper house.
Their victory comes just seven months before the country’s presidential election in April.
Right-wing parties have controlled the Senate since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.
Early results from the indirect elections showed left-wing candidates took at least 23 seats from the governing conservative party, giving them an absolute majority.
“The 25th of September, 2011, will go down in history,” Jean-Pierre Bel, head of the Socialist group in the Senate, said on French television.
“The results of this Senate election represent a real comeuppance for the right.”
