Free Republic

President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, has presided over the hiring of at least four senior staffers and advisers who have no law enforcement experience but align politically with the president. Jordan Grossman is a special adviser and deputy to the deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, for instance, yet his resume shows no law enforcement experience. Before Grossman got his post in January 2009, he was a “special assistant” at the Obama-Biden presidential transition team after working for Obama’s 2008 election campaign. Before that, Grossman worked as a research assistant at the Annenberg...

Principal encouraged cheating, staffers sayBy Kristen A. Graham and Dylan Purcell Inquirer Staff Writers Posted: Sun, Feb. 12, 2012, 6:35 AM Teachers got the message in meetings and during visits to their classrooms in the days before they were scheduled to administer state exams. Multiple staffers at Cayuga Elementary said they were instructed by principal Evelyn Cortez to do what they had to do in their rooms to get good scores. Cortez, reached Friday night, was emphatic: "I disagree with these allegations." The school, in a tough Hunting Park neighborhood, produced strong test results for several years running, and Philadelphia...

With only one congressman and two senators, Vermont’s congressional delegation may be small. But that isn’t stopping Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) from doling out big dollars–$236,830, to be exact–to members of their staffs...

The rocky, rickety boat that is the New York times has long been in peril of sinking. Now the Times staffers have sent a letter to publisher Arthur Sulzberger expressing "profound dismay" at the direction the company is headed. Huffington Post: The letter calls attention to several grievances. Last week, Times brass notified foreign citizens employed in the paper's overseas bureaus that their pensions would be frozen. In the letter, Times staffers dismayed by this decision point out to Sulzberger that some of these foreign employees, working alongside Times reporters in war zones, have "risked their lives so that we...

Staffers of Rep. Rick Larsen boasted over Twitter that they were drinking and otherwise goofing off on the job, according to a story in the NW Daily Marker. The website said the tweets gave off the impression of "a staffers-gone-wild bash" in the Washington Democrat's office, including insults lobbed at the congressman himself.

Additional budget cuts could force House committees to lay off staffersBy Debbie Siegelbaum - 11/30/11 04:38 PM ET Lawmakers expressed significant concerns about the ability of House committees to maintain staffing levels and perform congressional duties as they stare down additional budget cuts. In July, the House approved the fiscal year 2012 Legislative Branch Appropriations bill, instituting a 6.4 percent cut to leadership, committee and personal office budgets for the coming year. This is on top of a 5 percent cut committees already took in January 2011. On Wednesday, the Committee on House Administration heard testimony from the chairmen and...

Senate Democrats are charging taxpayers for a trip to Hawaii, The Daily Caller has learned. The entire press staff of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is in Maui, even though a field hearing there won’t happen until next Wednesday. The committee’s oversight field hearing, scheduled for next Wednesday at 9 a.m. at the Maui Beach Hotel, will focus on “Strengthening Self-Sufficiency: Overcoming Barriers to Economic Development in Native Communities.” Rick Manning from Americans for Limited Government, which first discovered the hearing, told TheDC it’s unbelievable that Hill staffers talking about fiscal responsibility would waste money on a trip to Maui....

In his numerous fund-raising and policy speeches around the country these days, President Obama often bemoans the difficult economic times and uncertainties afflicting millions of Americans, including the nearly 14 million still seeking work unsuccessfully.

President Obama pays 21 White House staffers the maximum allowable salary, $172,200 a year, the White House disclosed today in its annual report of salaries. These top wage earners include all of those given the assignation “assistant to the president”: chief of staff Bill Daley, national security adviser Tom Donilon, top speechwriter Jon Favreau, counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, senior advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Plouffe, press secretary Jay Carney, and communications director Dan Pfeiffer -- whose first name is Howard (!), the disclosure reveals. The annual disclosure of salaries (the full list can be read HERE) is one of the...

Oregon Rep. David Wu apologized Tuesday for sending photos of himself dressed in a tiger costume to aides, calling that and other behavior last fall “unprofessional” and “inappropriate” as his mental health suffered. “You shouldn’t ever send photographs of yourself in a Halloween costume, something you intend to wear to a private party a couple of nights later,” the Democrat said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” It’s just not professional, even when you’re joshing around with your kids a couple of nights before Halloween. I did send those photographs. It was unprofessional, inappropriate.” Half a dozen Wu staffers have quit...

Reporting from Washington — President Obama has recast his White House team for the second half of his term, giving top jobs to a pair of Clinton-era veterans in a signal to business leaders and independent voters that he is resolved to steer a more centrist course after two years of intense partisan clashes. Obama announced Thursday that he was installing William Daley as chief of staff, entrusting the White House operation and perhaps the future of his presidency to a former Commerce secretary who has warned that pressing a liberal agenda risks scaring away an all-important bloc of moderate...

It has begun. Republican Senate aides who desperately want the majority back so they can add an extra zero to their eventual K-Street salary package once they stop prostituting themselves to lobbyists and instead become lobbyists prostituting themselves to squishy Republicans are attacking Jim DeMint. In addition to their own self-interest, you can be sure they are expressing their bosses’ frustrations.Now, you and I both know that Jim DeMint swooping in at the last minute to endorse Christine O’Donnell had as much to do with her victory as a butterfly flapping its wings in China 340 years ago last Monday....

WASHINGTON – Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says. The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained late Thursday by The Associated Press. The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed. It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley,...

Select congressional leadership staffers -- some of whom wrote the health insurance act -- are not governed by new rules governing millions of Americans and the rest of their colleagues on how they buy insurance -- and the special exemption has the Hill hopping mad... ..and neither will White House staffers and Cabinet members -- nor the president himself. They will be allowed to keep their current plans, which are offered to all other federal employees. And now many congressional aides who like their current health insurance policies and will be forced to switch are asking: Why? They want to...

For those who may be unaware, the Drudge Report is an aggregate news portal. That simply means that in a single web page Drudge, his human editors and/or web crawling robot compile a long list of news headlines, many dealing with politics but many more not. Drudge also features a comprehensive list of additional full service news organizations from around the world, and...(cont'd at http://www.marktalk.com/blog/?cat=2

Politico is apparently hatching up some story about "wounded" McCain staffers who were Palin "loyalists" and are upset by her innocent joke about praying with her seven-year-old daughter before the vice presidential debate. I don't buy it myself. No one with half a brain would be offended by that cute little anecdote from Palin's Lincoln Day speech -- certainly not a self-proclaimed Palin "loyalist." In fact, I predict that next week Jim Geraghty will call up Randy Scheunemann and Steve Biegun and get them on the record saying that they don't feel slighted in the least. (And those are the...

Obama's Inability to Hire Good Help Rears Its Head … Again We started covering Sen. Barack Obama's inability to hire good staffers in June 2007, when he blamed staffers for some opposition research trying to link Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, to outsourcing in India; for injecting some venom in the David Geffen/Hillary Clinton fight; and for missing an event with firefighters in New Hampshire. In December, we noted again that Obama was blaming the answers on a 1996 questionnaire on a staffer; and was blaming his touring with "cured" ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin (which antagonized gays and lesbians) on...

WASHINGTON, April 24, 2008 – As the children of Defense Department employees arrived in throngs for National Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, they transformed the normally serene Pentagon courtyard into a veritable circus, replete with clowns, animals, and arts and crafts. Army Staff Sgt. Matthew Edmonds and his sons, Gatlin, 5, center, and Adam, 4, prepare to enjoy the arts and crafts in the Pentagon's center courtyard April 24, 2008. The activities were part of America Supports You's celebration of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. Defense Dept. photo by Samantha L. Quigley  (Click photo...

The Politico's Martin looks at large discrepancy between the number of staffers the leading Dems have in Iowa and New Hampshire versus the leading Republican candidates. In fact, Martin finds the second-tier Democratic candidates have more staffers on the ground in the early states than all of the LEADING GOP candidates. (By the way, considering how little of an organizational advantage Romney may actually have in the first two states, does that mean Thompson can get up to speed in Iowa faster than some believe?) --snip-- NBC/NJ's Memoli notes that Ann Romney seemed to take personally Thompson’s "actor" barb in...

No kidding. The pro:con ratio of calls [related to the Immigration bill] is probably 1:19 here. That's because the people who are "for" it are busy working and not calling Senate offices. 6/19/2007 - 3:06 pm