Republican Party shifts on immigration with high stakes for 2016
BOCA RATON, Fla. — The conventional wisdom in the Republican Party is changing.
Less than two years ago, party leaders solemnly declared after an exhaustive study that the GOP “must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” It was critical for the party’s survival, they said, to address an issue that was paramount to the nation’s surging Hispanic population. But as President Obama issued a sweeping immigration order last week, some of the Republican Party’s most prominent governors — likely presidential candidates among them — described immigration reform as little more than an afterthought.
“This issue is probably not in the top 10 of most voters in America,” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is considering a 2016 White House bid, said alongside nodding colleagues at the Republican Governors Association annual conference in Florida. Walker dismissed the Democratic president’s order that shields as many as five million immigrants from deportation as a trap designed to divert attention “from the real issues in this country.”
The comments reflect a dramatic shift among some GOP leaders emboldened by this month’s midterm success just as the next presidential contest gets underway. Having claimed the Senate majority in the low-turnout November campaign, the sense of urgency that dominated Republican leadership after losing the White House in 2012 has all but disappeared.
The evolution presents risks, however, for Republicans competing in a 2016 election that will draw a much larger and more diverse electorate — especially in a handful of swing states where the Hispanic population is quickly growing.
Discovery of long-lost letter that inspired Jack Kerouac delights poet blamed for losing it
LOS ANGELES — When a letter credited with inspiring Jack Kerouac to create a new literary genre suddenly surfaced, no one was happier than an 86-year-old poet and playwright from New Jersey.
For more than 50 years, Gerd Stern had been wrongly accused of tossing what Kerouac called “the greatest piece of writing I ever saw” over the side of a houseboat.
“Yes, I’m the guy who dropped the letter off the boat, but of course I didn’t,” Stern, laughing heartily, said after The Associated Press reported Sunday that the 16,000-word screed to Kerouac from his friend and literary muse Neal Cassady was found intact last week in a house in Oakland.
“At least 12 literary publications through the years have accused me,” Stern said. “People have written to me and damned me for this. After 50 years, it’s a blessing to be vindicated.”
Cassady, who wrote the letter over three amphetamine-fueled days in 1950, sent it to Kerouac just before Christmas.
As hackers show cars can be commandeered, feds and automakers aim to block threats
LOS ANGELES — Against the team of hackers, the poor car stood no chance.
Meticulously overwhelming its computer networks, the hackers showed that — given time — they would be able to pop the trunk and start the windshield wipers, cut the brakes or lock them up, and even kill the engine.
Their motives were not malicious. These hackers worked on behalf of the U.S. military, which along with the auto industry is scrambling to fortify the cyber defenses of commercially available cars before criminals and even terrorists penetrate them.
“You’re stepping into a rolling computer now,” said Chris Valasek, who helped catapult car hacking into the public eye when he and a partner revealed last year they had been able to control a 2010 Toyota Prius and 2010 Ford Escape by plugging into a port used by mechanics.
These days, when Valasek isn’t working his day job for a computer security firm, he’s seeing how Bluetooth might offer an entry point.
By wire sources