Burying the lede:

Politico reports: (emp add)

Christie back in spotlight as Perry sags

With the party’s frontrunner sagging, Chris Christie is reconsidering pleas from Republican elites and donors to run for president in 2012, two Republican sources told POLITICO.

The New Jersey governor has indicated he is listening to big-money backers and Republican influence-makers, and will let them know in roughly a week whether he has moved off his threat-of-suicide vow to stay on the sidelines of a presidential race that remains amorphous heading into the fall, the two sources said.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s candidacy has failed to clear a basic bar with elites and some donors, and his shoddy debate performance in Orlando has only highlighted the window for someone who Republicans searching for a Mitt Romney alternative can rally around.

Christie’s potential candidacy has been an increasingly fevered fantasy of a certain cadre of some media and business elites — mostly based in New York, with a smattering of California technology and entertainment players — since last summer. That’s when he showed up at a Sun Valley conference hosted by the investment banker Allen and Co. and wowed the crowd, including Rupert Murdoch, with what many in attendance described as a nimble mind and a speaking style that was both articulate and blunt-spoken.

... the conservative elite buzz over a potential Christie candidacy has kicked into overdrive in the past few weeks, including on the pages of the Weekly Standard and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch controls the Republican party with Fox News which, in addition to its daily propaganda to the faithful, is largely responsible for the Republican Tea Party contingent being what it is today, not to mention the fact that most of the presidential candidates were on the network's payroll.

Earlier this year Christie met with Murdoch's deputy, Rodger Ailes (and Limbaugh!) to talk about the governor's future. That is not the action of a neutral news organization.

Some time ago David Frum said that the Republicans work for Fox News. It would be more appropriate to say that Republicans work for Murdoch, owner of the lawbreaking News of the World, and of News America - the firm that got into legal hot water and paid a competitor half a billion dollars to settle the litigation (nytimes link). About that latter item:

In a statement, the News Corporation’s president and chief operating officer, Chase Carey, said: “It has become evident to our legal advisers from pretrial proceedings over the past couple of weeks that significant risks were developing in presenting this case to a jury. That, coupled with concerns over the venue, led us to believe it was in the best interests of the company and its stockholders to agree to a settlement.”

But wait! There's more:

In a separate case that was settled last year, News America was accused by another competitor, Floorgraphics, of corporate spying. Just as witnesses began testifying in a federal case in New Jersey, News Corporation settled the lawsuit and then days later bought the company outright for an undisclosed sum.

That case centered on the testimony of a former News America Marketing executive who became a whistle-blower. In a court filing, Floorgraphics said that News America had “illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary information from the computer system” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff.”

That's who is running the show with one of the two major political parties in the United States. Don't ever forget it.


posted by Quiddity at 9/24/2011 12:33:00 PM