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The New York Times has a front-page story today on a political giver named James Robert Williams, who has no visible means of support, but is very generous to both parties and to politicians of different stripes. From the article: ...one government watchdog group called the pattern of donations extremely troubling. Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, said, "In more than 15 years of investigating political corruption, I've never seen a more suspicious set of facts." According to the story by reporters Raymond Hernandez, Alison Leigh Cowan and Jo Craven McGinty, Williams lives in a...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Thursday urged his party, and the nation, to guard against intolerance on issues ranging from gay marriage to the role of Muslims in the government, arguing the country’s diversity of opinion and acceptance are part of America’s basic fabric. “There can’t be some kind of monolithic opinion handed down from the government or a political party. I don’t think we’re monolithic beings,” Cantor, a Virginia Republican, said in an interview with BuzzFeed.

In an interview with BuzzFeed, a top Republican leader says the GOP needs to be “the party of inclusion.” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Thursday urged his party, and the nation, to guard against intolerance on issues ranging from gay marriage to the role of Muslims in the government, arguing the country’s diversity of opinion and acceptance are part of America’s basic fabric. “There can’t be some kind of monolithic opinion handed down from the government or a political party. I don’t think we’re monolithic beings,” Cantor, a Virginia Republican, said in an interview with BuzzFeed. ... But many Republican...

First week after August recess... Obama and his congressional minions swore back in 2008/09 'you will not see your taxes increase one single dime'- and they never would have got this leviathan passed on the Hill had they been even slightly more honest about it. So consider this- some (like former AG Alberto Gonzales) even think Roberts/SCOTUS just handed the election to Romney- as the Court cannot be labelled as biased to the Right now -no way- and the truth has at long-last come out: ObamaCare is the largest tax increase in the history of the US -nay, the...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her Republican counterpart, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, are the wealthiest members of the U.S. House leadership, according to financial disclosure forms. Pelosi, 72, of California tops the list of House leaders, with $40 million to $187 million in financial assets she reports with her husband, San Francisco commercial real estate investor Paul Pelosi. Most of their assets are listed as rental properties in California and partnership income in companies including investment management and restaurants. ... Pelosi, who yielded the speakership to Boehner after Republicans won control of the House, and her husband [also] own...

Heard on the Hill — Roll Call's Gossip Blog North Carolina: Eric Cantor-Affiliated Group Backs Richard Hudson on Radio By Joshua Miller Posted at 5:39 p.m. on May 2 The YG Action Fund, a super PAC affiliated with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), is on the radio in North Carolina’s 8th district with an ad backing former Hill staffer Richard Hudson. The spot, backed by a $53,000 buy, is the second independent expenditure the super PAC has made on behalf of Hudson. On April 24, the group spent $22,750 on mailers supporting the candidate, according to Federal Election Commission...

I reported the other day that the Young Guns Network, a group led by two former top aides to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, is spending $100,000 in the primary between Sen. Richard Lugar and state treasurer Richard Mourdock in a bid to protect the Indiana incumbent - and here's what some of that mail looks like. A lit piece that the YG Network dropped focuses, as they'd said it would, on energy policy - but it is targeted to non-Republicans, as it reminds voters that Indiana's GOP primary is an open one in which Democrats and independents can vote....

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., has defeated fellow Republican Rep. Don Manzullo in the state's 16th District GOP congressional primary. The AP called the race for Kinzinger just after 11 p.m. Eastern time. With 85 percent of precincts reporting, Kinzinger led Manzullo 56 percent to 44 percent. The race between Kinzinger and Manzullo, forced because Illinois lost a congressional seat and state Democrats controlled the redistricting process, followed a common tea party-against-establishment trend in recent GOP primaries. But the script flipped here, with 10-term veteran Manzullo garnering the bulk of the tea party and movement conservative support while Kinzinger, a freshman,...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) endorsed Mitt Romney's presidential bid on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday morning.

Of particular interest is the “Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982,” the largest of Reagan’s tax increases, and generally considered the largest tax increase — as a percentage of the economy — in modern American history. In fact, between 1982 and 1984, Reagan raised taxes four times, and as Bruce Bartlett has explained more than once, Reagan raised taxes 12 times during his eight years in office.

In a strange and unexpected twist, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives is now blocking progress on a bill that would definitively outlaw insider trading [cnbc explains] by federal lawmakers. The Republican sponsor of the bill in the House, Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus of Alabama, had scheduled a markup of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act for next week. But on Wednesday, Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia cancelled the markup session. Cantor reportedly said he blocked the bill to give Congress more time to examine the issue. Critics of the move, however, fear that...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- The FBI says a Tennessee man has been charged with threatening the family of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia. Agents arrested 62-year-old Glendon Swift of Lenoir City on Wednesday. He is accused of leaving two voicemail messages...

Way to go Cantor! That didn't take long! You big Weenie! ...A top Republican in Washington dramatically altered his stance on protesters involved in Occupy Wall Street just one week after comparing the movement to “angry mobs”. Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, told Fox News on Sunday that Republicans agreed there was “too much” income disparity in the country. “More important than my use of the word [‘mobs’] is that there is a growing frustration out there across the country and it is warranted. Too many people are out of work,” he said.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said that President Barack Obama’s $447-billion American Jobs Act was dead, adding that Obama’s “all or nothing” approach would not work. At a Capitol Hill briefing on Monday, a reporter asked Cantor whether the "jobs package as a package [was] dead?" Cantor said, "yes," and shortly thereafter said, “It seems as if the president is in full campaign mode. The president continues to say ‘pass my bill in its entirety.’ As I’ve said from the outset, this all-or-nothing approach is just not acceptable.” Cantor also questioned whether Obama had the votes for his jobs...

Dear Chairman Bernanke, It is our understanding that the Board Members of the Federal Reserve will meet later this week to consider additional monetary stimulus proposals. We write to express our reservations about any such measures. Respectfully, we submit that the board should resist further extraordinary intervention in the U.S. economy, particularly without a clear articulation of the goals of such a policy, direction for success, ample data proving a case for economic action and quantifiable benefits to the American people. It is not clear that the recent round of quantitative easing undertaken by the Federal Reserve has facilitated economic...

Yesterday, it was announced that an astounding 1 in 6 Americans are living in poverty. President Obama's response? To demand a tax on donations to soup kitchens and other charities that help people desperately in need. The President's proposal will impact approximately 40% of all the tax deductible contributions, and essentially penalize soup kitchens, hospitals, and churches that provide essential services to those who need them most. It’s no wonder this tax hike has been rejected on both sides of the aisle.

Eric Cantor (EricCantor) on Twitter

President Obama’s widely anticipated speech before a joint session of Congress on Thursday stunned and amazed his erstwhile political opponents. “Until I heard it from his own lips I never realized how mistaken the GOP plans to tear up all the roads and burn down all the schools were,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va). “And now that I know the President’s jobs plan is endorsed by the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa and the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka, well, let’s just say that my eyes have really been opened.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) admitted that he was skeptical at...

The White House suggested Wednesday that President Obama will not meet with Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor before he delivers his jobs speech to Congress on Thursday night. White House press secretary Jay Carney said he did not have any meetings to announce when asked if Obama would honor the request for consultation made by the Republican leaders. "I do not believe that anyone out there in the country thinks that the answer to getting Washington out of gridlock is having another round, before this speech, of meetings in the Cabinet Room," Carney said.

Rahm Emanuel may have decamped to Chicago, but Democrats in Washington still won't let a good crisis go to waste. Their current gambit is to use Hurricane Irene as a pretext to prevent spending cuts to one of Washington's most notorious boondoggles. This week the left-wing press has been attacking House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for holding disaster relief funding "hostage." A more accurate way to put this is that Senate Democrats won't approve new funding for disasters unless they get the funding they want for corporations that make electric cars.