podesta_email_01726.txt

podesta-emails 41,302 words email

D6 P17 V11 P22 P21

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Press Clips* *May 12, 2015* SUMMARY OF TODAY’S NEWS Huffington Post did an extensive deep-dive report on Hillary Clinton's legacy as former First Lady of Arkansas. Politico previews Mayor De Blasio's expected announcement today of a progressive "Contract with America," characterizing it as an effort to exert leftward pressure on Clinton. With a procedural vote set in the Senate later today on fast-track authority on trade, both the New York Times and Washington Post report on Clinton's reticence on the issue of free trade since departing the State Department. John Oliver’s Mother’s Day segment this Sunday mirrored Clinton’s support and highlighted that the United States is the only developed nation not to provide any paid maternity leave. News outlets declared that paid leave would become a big issue during the 2016 election. And a group of Ohio voters have filed suit over that state’s early voting laws. News outlets have claimed that because Marc Elias is involved in these proceedings that Hillary for America is a party to the suit being filed. The campaign issued a statement indicating it is not involved in the suit, though it shares the concerns of the plaintiffs. On the Republican side, Jeb Bush's interview with Fox News prompted searing coverage from right-wing commentators such as Byron York and Laura Ingraham over his statements that even knowing what he knows now, Bush would still vote to authorize the Iraq war. LAST NIGHTS EVENING NEWS Last night there was no 2016 coverage on any of the networks. The three major news outlets instead covered Patriot’s Tom Brady’s 4 game suspension and fine due to the Deflate-gate scandal, severe weather in Texas and Arkansas, and the major hurdle cleared for Shell Oil Company to start drilling in the Artic. SUMMARY OF TODAY’S NEWS................................................................. 1 LAST NIGHTS EVENING NEWS................................................................. 1 TODAY’S KEY STORIES............................................................................ 3 *On trade deal, Hillary Clinton keeps her distance from Obama and her past* // WaPo // David Nakamura – May 12, 2015 4 *In Arkansas, Hillary Clinton’s Legacy Remains Potent* // Huffington Post // Scott Conroy - May 11, 2015 7 *Paid Leave Is Going to Matter in 2016, Thanks to John Oliver and Hillary Clinton* // New Republic // Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig - May 11, 2015 11 SOCIAL MEDIA........................................................................................ 13 *Alex Hanson (5/11/15, 10:40 PM) @theAlexHanson:* First Republican presidential debate on track for Aug. 6 at The Q in Cleveland, sources say s.cleveland.com/USEtCGi via @clevelanddotcom................................................................. 13 *Emily Schultheis (5/11/15, 12:15 PM) @emilyrs:* New GW Battleground poll has @HillaryClinton at 48 fav/49 unfav. 47% say they would consider voting for her: tarrance.com/docs/BG57quest….................................................................... 13 *Joe Sudbay (5/11/15 4:54PM) @JoeSudbay:* Huh. While Bush struggles with immigration issue, his PAC's anti-gay senior advisor, Jordan Sekulow, today signed amicus to end DACA & DAPA............................................................................ 13 *Zac Moffatt (5/11/15 12:54PM) @ZacMoffatt:* @Hillary Clinton Rubbed Elbows w 250 Top Donors For Each “Everyday American” She Met Last Week www.americarisingpac.org/populist-hero-.......................................................................... 13 HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE................................................................... 13 *Hillary Clinton Walks Tightrope as Pressure Grows to Take Stance on Trade Deal* // NYT // Amy Chozick – May 12, 2015 13 *Clinton Foundation Donors Fill Hillary’s Campaign Coffers* // AP // Lachlan Markay - May 12, 2015 16 *Ohio lawsuit shows Clinton is already looking at battleground states* // On Politics- USA Today // Gregory Korte - May 11, 2015 18 *Wall Street warns Hillary Clinton: Don’t be like Ed Miliband* // Politico // Ben White - May 11, 2015 19 *Arkansas: The Clintons Don't Live Here Anymore* // Real Clear Politics // Rebecca Berg - May 11, 2015 21 *California woman receives Mother's Day greeting from Hillary Clinton* // LA Times // Seema Mehta - May 11, 2015 24 *Hillary Clinton Adds Latina From Labor Department To Oversee Hispanic, Black, Women’s Media* // Buzzfeed News // Adrian Carrasquillo - May 11, 2015........................................................................................................................................ 25 *Are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ‘Affirmative-Action Presidents’?* // NY Mag // Jonathan Chait - May 11, 2015 27 *The Hillary Clinton paradox: Progressives can’t trust her — and that’s a good thing* // Salon // Elias Isquith - May 11, 2015 28 *Clinton campaign’s dilemma: What to do with Bill?* // WaPo // Phillips Rucker – May 11, 2015 30 *Former Clinton Advisor: Bill Looks ‘Washed-Out And Washed-Up’* // Daily Caller // Scott Greer - May 11, 2015 35 OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE....................................... 35 *O'Malley plans 4 stops in NH Wednesday* // WMUR // May 11, 2015..................................... 35 *De Blasio 'Can't Think of Anything More Important' Than going to D.C.* // Observer // Will Bredderman - May 11, 2015 36 *Bill De Blasio, Elizabeth Warren escalate pressure on Hillary Clinton* // Politico // Gabriel Debenedetti - May 11, 2015 37 *Elizabeth Warren fires back at Obama … again* // Politico // Karey Van Hall – May 11, 2015 39 *Why Hillary Clinton needs Elizabeth Warren* // Vox // Ezra Klein - May 11, 2015.............. 39 GOP.......................................................................................................... 41 *First GOP debate: Aug. 6 in Cleveland* // Politico // Dylan Byers - May 11, 2015................... 41 *Jeb Bush Says He Wouldn't Repeal Obama's Immigration Actions Right Away* // Bloomberg Politics // Michael C. Bender - May 11, 2015 41 *The Assets and Liabilities of Jeb Bush* // WSJ // Gerald F. Seib - May 11, 2015..................... 42 *Jeb Bush leans on nonprofit group as he prepares likely presidential run* // Washington Post // Ed O'Keefe and Matea Gold - May 11, 2015 44 *Bush favorability rating suffers in new poll* // The Hill // Jonathan Easley - May 11, 2015 46 *John Boehner press aide Michael Steel takes job with Jeb Bush* // Politico // Jake Sherman - May 11, 2015 47 *Jeb Bush's disastrous defense of the Iraq War* // Washington Examiner // Byron York - May 11, 2015 48 *Jeb Bush’s Revisionist History of the Iraq War* // New York Times // Andrew Rosenthal - May 11, 2015 50 *All in the Family* // Slate // Jamelle Bouie - May 11, 2015.................................................... 51 *PolitFact NH: Jeb Bush says he met NH man who founded only U.S. bank since Dodd-Frank* // Concord Monitor // Clay Wirestone - May 10, 2015 53 *First on CNN: Ted Cruz to host fundraiser along U.S.-Mexico border* // CNN Politics // Theodore Schleifer - May 11, 2015 56 *Rand Paul Plans To Filibuster Patriot Act* // Huffington Post // Igor Bobic – May 11, 2015 57 *Rand Paul Battles the PATRIOT Act (and Fellow Senators Who Miss Votes)* // Bloomberg // David Weigel - May 11, 2015 58 *Rand Paul supports bird flu role of agency he tried to cut* // USA Today // Christopher Doering - May 11, 2015 59 *Rand Paul’s ‘Fast Track’ Dilemma* // WSJ // Bob Davis – May 11, 2015................................. 61 *Rand Paul Campaign Takes a Licking in New Hampshire* // TIME // Philip Elliott - May 11, 2015 63 *Chris Christie Racked Up $300k of Food and Alcohol on Expense Account* // TIME // Sam Frizell - May 11, 2015 65 *Marco Rubio Pushes Extension of NSA Phone Metadata Program* // Bloomberg // Ali Elkin - May 11, 2015 65 *We Can’t Turn To The Leaders Of Yesterday* // Medium // Marco Rubio - May 11, 2015........ 66 *Scott Walker Helps Journalists in Wisconsin Cover His Trip to Israel* // NYT- First Draft // Nick Corasanti – May 11, 2015 67 *What Ben Carson's Flat Tax Would Do to the Poor* // Bloomberg // Peter Coy – May 11, 2015 67 *Carly Fiorina Changes Mind On Amending Constitution To Bar Same-Sex Marriage* // Huffington Post // Amanda Terkel – May 11, 2015 68 TOP NEWS............................................................................................... 69 DOMESTIC............................................................................................ 69 *Administration Gives Conditional Approval for Shell to Drill in Arctic* // New York Times // Coral Davenport - May 11, 2015 69 *Wellmark spurns Obamacare exchange, but two competitors don't* // Des Moines Register // Tony Leys - May 11, 2015 71 *HHS: Insurers must cover all birth control* // The Hill // Peter Sullivan – May 11, 2015.... 74 *Tex. bill would bar local officials from issuing same-sex-marriage licenses* // Washington Post // Sandhya Somashekhar - May 11, 2015 75 INTERNATIONAL................................................................................. 78 *Pakistanis Knew Where Osama Bin Laden Was, U.S. Sources Say* // NBC News // Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Robert Windrem and Andrea Mitchell – May 11, 2015.......................................................................................................... 78 *Nepal Rattled by Powerful New Earthquake East of Capital* // NYT // Austin Ramzy – May 12, 2015 79 *John Kerry and Vladimir Putin to Hold Talks in Russia* // TIME // Matthew Lee - May 11, 2015 81 OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS............................................................. 81 *Clinton clobbers Rubio on immigration* // The Hill // Brent Budowsky – May 11, 2015....... 81 *Clinton’s claim that illegal immigrants pay more in taxes than some corporations* // Washington Post // Glen Kessler - May 11, 2015 82 *Hillary Clinton hasn’t answered a question from the media in 20 days* // Washington Post // Chriz Cillizza - May 11, 2015 85 *I Am A Dreamer Who Met Hillary Clinton* // Lets Talk Nevada // Blanca Gamez - May 11, 2015 86 *Barack Obama’s Hillary Clinton Problem* // Roll Call // Steven Dennis - May 12, 2015....... 88 *Smart Social Programs* // New York Times // Jason Furman - May 11, 2015....................... 90 *HBO’s Veep Just Got Very Real About the Hillary Clinton Campaign* // Vanity Fair // Joanna Robinson - May 11, 2015 92 TODAY’S KEY STORIES On trade deal, Hillary Clinton keeps her distance from Obama and her past <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/on-trade-deal-hillary-clinton-keeps-her-distance-from-obama-and-her-past/2015/05/11/bc2cc604-f7e1-11e4-9ef4-1bb7ce3b3fb7_story.html> // WaPo // David Nakamura – May 12, 2015 The United States’ reputation in Asia was suffering under the weight of its own economic and political turmoil when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Hong Kong to reassure American business executives in the summer of 2011. Back in Washington, President Obama was locked in a budget dispute with Congress that would ultimately damage the nation’s credit rating. But in remarks to the American Chamber of Commerce, Clinton painted a robust vision of U.S. economic leadership, anchored by an emerging free-trade deal that “will bring together economies from across the Pacific.” The goal of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, she explained, was to “create a new high standard for multilateral free trade,” a pact that would cement the United States’ standing in the world’s fastest-growing region. Four years later, with Obama making a desperate final push to complete that 12-nation pact, his former partner and most effective global advocate for the deal has gone quiet. As the president has scoured Capitol Hill for elusive Democratic support in recent weeks, Clinton has said virtually nothing about the TPP, other than to point out areas of the deal with which she has concerns. [How Obama could face a Democratic filibuster on trade] Clinton’s silence on trade, coming at the worst possible time for Obama, dovetails with her transformation into a presidential candidate eager to align herself more squarely with the liberal wing of her party. In other areas in which Clinton has moved to the left — such as immigration reform and gay marriage — White House aides have been delighted that she has forcefully embraced the president’s governing record. But on trade, Clinton’s hedge has left Obama without political cover in his increasingly bitter feud with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other progressives, who have fiercely opposed the pact as a boondoggle for big business. On Tuesday, a bill to grant Obama “fast track” authority to complete the trade pact faces its first test in the Senate, without a clear path to the necessary 60 votes to avoid a filibuster. “One of the biggest proponents of the TPP in the administration now, as a candidate, picking on a couple of technical issues just looks like pure politicking,” said Ernest Bower, a Southeast Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. For Clinton, the trade pact is “part of her legacy,” Bower said. “She really believes in it.” He predicted that as president she would “not only work to support it, but expand it as fast as she can.” White House aides have refused to criticize Clinton for remaining on the sidelines, noting that the trade pact has undergone changes since she departed more than two years ago. But she has been mocked by her political rivals on both sides of the aisle — including other Democratic presidential hopefuls who oppose the deal and GOP leaders who support it — for her refusal to take a clear position. “She can’t sit on the sidelines and let the president swing in the wind here,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said on “Meet the Press” last week. Clinton’s campaign pointed to a statement from three weeks ago, in which her spokesman said any trade pact must “raise wages and create more good jobs at home” and strengthen national security. Clinton reiterated those criteria a few days later during an appearance in New Hampshire, her only public comments on the trade deal since launching her campaign. In many ways, the politics for Clinton are playing out in a fashion similar to 2008, when both she and Obama, competing for support in Rust Belt states during the Democratic primary, distanced themselves from the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by President Bill Clinton. Longtime allies described Hillary Clinton as generally less inclined to support large, multilateral trade deals than her husband was. As a senator, she voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2005, as did Obama, then also a senator. “Some people are generally pro-trade or anti-trade. She’s case-by-case on trade,” said Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. “There is no question she has historically had a more skeptical view on trade than President Clinton.” With manufacturing-heavy Iowa holding the first-in-the-nation caucuses — which she lost to Obama seven years ago — Clinton would be foolish to actively stump in favor of the president’s trade initiative, allies said. But this time, the political calculus is complicated by her legacy as the nation’s top diplomat. Foreign policy analysts have pointed to the Obama administration’s bid to shift U.S. attention and resources toward Asia to counter China as potentially one of Clinton’s most significant achievements as secretary of state (especially when compared with the deteriorating security environments in the Middle East and Eastern Europe). From the start of her tenure, Clinton made Asia a priority; her first trip in office was a swing through Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China. Early on, Clinton and her top aides endorsed the TPP as a way to balance the Pentagon’s military buildup in the Asia Pacific region with an economic platform. Clinton’s team, in conjunction with the White House, helped elevate the trade pact as a pillar of what Clinton later described, in a Foreign Policy magazine cover story in October 2011, as the administration’s “pivot” to Asia. “Clearly, we all saw this as strategic,” said James Keith, the U.S. ambassador to Malaysia from 2007 to 2010. Before the administration publicly unveiled its Asia strategy, “there was lots of talk of having to add meat to the bones, not just on security but on economics, too. There were deep discussions about making it more than just showing up, but also about adding real resources and economic integration in Asia.” Yet a primary concern Clinton has raised about the TPP after leaving office did not register alarms inside the State Department during her tenure. In 2009, the agency oversaw a review of a component of U.S. trade policy, appointing a panel of business officials, labor leaders and academics to review the language in the United States’ “model bilateral investment treaty.” That treaty is used by U.S. negotiators to open talks with other countries and is included in most trade deals. During the review, which lasted six months, one of the primary disagreements centered on the standard inclusion of a dispute settlement mechanism that allows corporations to sue nation-states over policies that damage their profits. Under the provision, the cases are heard by an international tribunal that rules outside of domestic legal systems. To the chagrin of the labor representatives, the dispute mechanism provision remained intact during the State Department review after the business representatives on the panel fiercely defended it. “I had the feeling that we were a box that was just going to be checked off,” said Kevin P. Gallagher, an associate professor at Boston University who participated on the review panel. “It was a multi-stakeholder dialogue in which we did not agree with each other, so they just go with the old model.” Warren has made this arrangement — formally known as “investor-state dispute settlement” — a chief part of her objections to the TPP. She has argued that the mechanism potentially exposes U.S. taxpayers to massive monetary damages outside of U.S. courts if corporations sue the government over new laws to protect the environment or workers. Obama has called her arguments “dishonest,” and he has pointed out that the United States has been sued just 13 times over the provision in previous trade pacts and never lost a case. In her book “Hard Choices,” published last year, Clinton raised concerns that echo Warren’s. She cited a case in which the Asia division of tobacco giant Philip Morris sued Australia over a “plain packaging” law, employing the dispute settlement provisions in an Australia-Hong Kong trade pact. “We should avoid some of the provisions sought by business interests,” Clinton wrote. Some progressives said they do not fault Clinton for raising concerns only after leaving office. They noted that the issue gained greater notoriety and urgency after public protests last year in Europe after a Swedish company sued Germany under a similar trade-deal provision. Robert Hormats, a high-ranking State Department official from 2009 to 2013, oversaw the trade policy review and emphasized that Clinton was not involved in those types of granular policy discussions. By the time she left office, the general framework for the TPP was already in place. During a speech in Australia in November 2012, Clinton referred to the pact as “the gold standard in trade agreements.” The risk now for Clinton is that if the trade deal fails, the Obama administration’s “Asia pivot” strategy risks being viewed as more rhetorical than tangible, foreign policy analysts said, which could lead to a reevaluation of her legacy at the State Department. “We saw it as a chance to make a difference,” Hormats said, reflecting on the Clinton team’s early embrace of the TPP. “You have to remember, the American economy was in the dumps. The weakness of the American economy in the financial crisis led many to assume the U.S. was backing off and incapacitated.” After he and other Clinton aides made trips to China in 2009, Hormats said, “we came back more resolute than ever that we had to do this.” In Arkansas, Hillary Clinton’s Legacy Remains Potent <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/11/hillary-clinton-arkansas_n_7258956.html?1431375085> // Huffington Post // Scott Conroy - May 11, 2015 Back in the sizzling summer of 1991, Arkansans could often find Bill and Hillary Clinton sitting in the bleachers at softball fields around Little Rock, as they watched their 11-year-old daughter Chelsea play third base for the Molar Rollers -- a team sponsored by a local dentist. After the last out was made, Chelsea’s teammates would often get a thrill when the governor loaded them into his official vehicle and took them out to get frozen yogurt. But every now and then, Bill’s jam-packed schedule was such that Hillary was the only member of Arkansas’ first couple who could attend a particular game. It was on one such occasion that longtime Clinton family friend Skip Rutherford -- whose daughter Martha was the Molar Rollers’ catcher -- struck up a conversation about national politics while sitting in the stands next to Hillary. Still just a few months after the Persian Gulf War’s triumphant completion, President George H.W. Bush’s approval rating remained above 70 percent, and Rutherford shared the popular opinion at the time that his re-election was all but assured. “Whoever ends up running, it doesn’t look like they’ll have much of a chance,” Rutherford recalls lamenting to Hillary. “I just don’t think President Bush can be beat. The numbers just look like he’s got the thing in the bag.” Clinton -- the acclaimed attorney, who typically chose her words carefully -- pondered this for a moment before issuing her reply. “Well, I’m not so sure,” she said. “Really?” Rutherford shot back, not yet aware that her husband had begun contemplating a White House run. “What the Democrats need is a message and a messenger,” Hillary said. Clinton was, no doubt, referring to her husband. But in truth, “Billery,” as Bill and Hillary Clinton were known in Arkansas, was indeed a singular force, and it was impossible to talk about the achievements of the former without mentioning those of the latter. Even today, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s legacy in Arkansas -- particularly in the realms of education, health care and childhood welfare -- remains nearly as robust as her husband’s. This is, after all, a city where a 15-minute drive eastward can take you from the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library along President Clinton Avenue and then on to Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport. As the Democratic frontrunner revs up her second campaign for the presidency, one of most common critiques that Republicans levy against Hillary Clinton goes something like this: “Yeah, she has a long resume. But what has she actually accomplished?” On the federal stage, she has had some significant swings and misses that have fed into that perception. Among the most politically toxic: her failed 1993 health care reform push as U.S. first lady, and the Russia “reset” policy and botched response to the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks when she was secretary of state. Perhaps the simplest rebuttal that Clinton could deliver would be this: “Just look at what I left behind in Arkansas.” And while her achievements in the state are now a quarter-century or more in the rearview mirror, the Clinton campaign says it isn’t shying away from running, in part, on the now-distant past. “Every aspect of Hillary’s professional life is an important part of the story for voters in this election because her collective body of work demonstrates a proven track record of being a tenacious fighter for everyday Americans, their families and especially their children,” said Clinton spokesperson Adrienne Elrod. “People know that’s what she’ll do if she gets elected because it’s what she’s always done." Clinton developed her curiosity -- and ultimately her expertise -- in the issues that would define her tenure as first lady of Arkansas before she moved to the state with the future president. Following her graduation from Yale Law School in 1973, Hillary Rodham spent a year conducting postgraduate work at the Yale Child Study Center, during which time she published a widely cited article in the Harvard Educational Review examining how children were viewed under the law, and offering significant proposals for reform. She also landed a job working for the Children’s Defense Fund, where she worked to expose discrepancies between census data and school enrollment -- a time she recalled at the first public event of her 2016 campaign in Monticello, Iowa, this April. “I was knocking on doors saying, ‘Is there anybody school-aged who’s not in school?’ and finding blind kids and deaf kids and kids in wheelchairs who were just left out,” she recalled. “And I was able in Arkansas to work and try to improve education there and give more kids chances who really deserved them.” Hillary Rodham’s path to improving education in Arkansas began in 1974 when she moved to Fayetteville and became just the second female faculty member at the University of Arkansas Law School. Bill Clinton lost his bid for a U.S. House seat the same year. After she married the following year, retaining her maiden name, Bill was elected attorney general of Arkansas, and the couple moved to Little Rock. Meanwhile, Hillary’s own career took off upon joining the high-powered Rose Law Firm, where she took on pro bono children’s rights cases. In 1977, Hillary co-founded and drew up the articles of incorporation for the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families -- a group that for nearly four decades since has fought for expanded opportunities in early education, juvenile justice reform, increases in state funding for child health care and other major initiatives. “She was a very forceful advocate to say the least,” recalled Jim Miles, who worked with her to create the group and develop its mission. “I think Arkansas Advocates is one of the nation’s premier child advocacy organization. They have tremendous peer respect.” After Bill Clinton was sworn in as governor for the first time in 1979, he appointed his wife to be the chairwoman of Arkansas’ Rural Health Advisory Committee -- a group that worked to expand health care access within the state’s large rural population. Around the same time, Hillary became a board member of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, where she helped establish the state’s first neonatal nursery while she was pregnant with Chelsea. The facility has since expanded several times over. Meanwhile, after reading about it during a trip to Florida, Hillary brought to Arkansas a program called Home Instruction for Parents for Preschool Youngsters, or HIPPY, which trains parents of at-risk children in early education methods. It wasn’t until after Clinton lost re-election in 1980 and then won his 1982 comeback bid that the newly minted political wife (who now made it known that she would henceforth be known as “Hillary Rodham Clinton”) made what is widely regarded as her most significant and lasting contribution to public policy in Arkansas. Shortly after he reassumed office in 1982, Bill Clinton named his wife as chair of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, an entity with the daunting task of reforming the state’s public education system, which was ranked at or near the very bottom of all 50 states in just about every measure. To get a sense of how dire the situation had become, consider that a majority of Arkansas’ 365 school districts at the time offered no art or chemistry classes, and almost half had no foreign language program to speak of. And teacher training in some districts was fourth-rate. Don Ernst -- who was a social studies teacher at Southside High School in Fort Smith, Arkansas, before joining Clinton’s education policy staff -- recalls walking into his school’s biology lab and seeing two dozen unopened microscopes in storage. When he asked the biology teacher why the instruments weren’t available to her class, she responded that she was afraid her students might break them. Still, as Ernst recalls, school reform in Arkansas was not an easy sell. “It was doing the right thing,” he said. “But we also had to figure out how to deal with the politics of an anti-tax state and a state that has never been particularly fond of intellectuals and education.” Hillary spent months traveling the state to sell her proposals for reform -- which included boosting course offerings, reducing class sizes and implementing testing requirements for both students and teachers -- while soliciting ideas from parents and teachers. In the end, the administration tied the package to an unpopular initiative to boost the state sales tax by 1 percentage point. Though she faced heated pushback from the teachers’ union and a related group, Hillary largely won over lawmakers in the end. Political operatives in the state still laugh about the thunderstruck reaction that Rep. Lloyd George, a colorful state representative with a syrupy drawl, had to her presentation: “I think we’ve elected the wrong Clinton!” Though Bill Clinton received most of the credit nationally for the reform package that he signed into law, Skip Rutherford, who has served for the last decade as the dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, said it was Hillary who “took Arkansas to a completely different level educationally.” “She was really saying, ‘Look, when our students graduate now, they’re going to be competing in a world economy,’” he said. “She was very visionary. She did it not for immediate gratification but for long-term success.” In recent years, Arkansas' public school system has been ranked by education groups as high as fifth in the nation and as low as 45th, as relatively low achievement levels have struggled to keep up with the high standards that Clinton implemented. But in spite of the continued challenges, education in Arkansas is no longer the national laughingstock that it was when a common lament among self-conscious policymakers around the capitol was, “Thank God for Mississippi.” And for Clinton -- particularly in a general election scenario, in which she may face off against a Republican governor who will boast of his own executive leadership -- that is something to crow about. Still, even if she does emphasize her Arkansas achievements more than she did during the 2008 campaigns, there appears to be little chance that she’ll be doing so within Arkansas’ borders. The years of Democratic domination here have long since passed, as Arkansas has assumed an overwhelmingly Republican profile that is more in keeping with neighboring states like Oklahoma and Missouri than it is with the new South battlegrounds of North Carolina and Virginia. It was Bill Clinton himself who offered a frank reality check for any Democrats who may have dreams of an Arkansas victory in 2016 dancing through their heads. "I was governor a long time," he said last month during a question-and-answer session at his alma mater, Georgetown University. "The people of my native state were good enough to elect me five times. Based on recent events, I don't know if I could win again down there." Paid Leave Is Going to Matter in 2016, Thanks to John Oliver and Hillary Clinton <http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121765/john-oliver-hillary-clinton-push-paid-maternity-leave> // New Republic // Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig - May 11, 2015 John Oliver’s Mother’s Day segment this Sunday opened with a glimpse into what businesses are willing to take in the name of motherhood (namely: your money, on this shamelessly Hallmarkian holiday) versus what they’re willing to give: paid maternity leave. Oliver pointed out that the United States is singular among developed nations in its complete failure to provide any paid leave to mothers whatsoever. Globally, we are joined only by Papua New Guinea in our lack of paid maternity leave policy, according to data collected by the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. Unlike mothers in countries with mandates providing paid maternity leave—The Netherlands, for example, where women are guaranteed 16 weeks of paid leave, or Norway, where women can take 36 weeks—women in the U.S. often patch together a mishmash of vacation time, sick days, and whatever maternity leave is available from their workplace to eke out time to care for their newborns. Oliver observed, quite rightly, that the meager twelve weeks of unpaid leave currently mandated by the federal government spooked employers when proposed in 1993. Businesses’ allergy to any kind of regulation, Oliver proposed, helps explain why America has fallen so far behind when it comes to paid family leave. California’s paid maternity leave mandate hasn’t introduced chaos or even inconvenienced businesses in the state; nonetheless, only three states have enacted similar legislation. It is a scandal that, in a nation where family values feature so prominently in political discourse, there is barely a shred of protection for working women who give birth. Worse, even the weak provision of twelve weeks unpaid leave doesn’t extend to some women, as Demos senior fellow Caroline Fredrickson points out in her new book Under the Bus: How Working Women are Being Run Over. Women who work part-time, for small businesses, and immigrant women often in domestic work are left out of our leave mandates. Unfortunately, the women who happen to be excluded from these protections also happen to be the poorest workers, a reality that leads to dire conclusions: “[I]n almost 9 percent of cases where [families] go under the poverty line, the precipitating factor was the birth of a child,” Fredrickson notes, “and nearly 25 percent of these families succumb to poverty in thirty days when they are dependent on the earnings of a single mother.” Fredrickson also reports that a study of 1,700 bankruptcy cases conducted by Human Rights Watch found that 7 percent of debtors identified the birth of a child as their reason for going bankrupt. With numbers like these, it’s a wonder nobody has made paid family leave a campaign issue yet. But Hillary Clinton is aiming to fill that gap. On Mother’s Day, Clinton’s campaign posted a two-minute video detailing Clinton’s respect for her mother, her role in her daughter and granddaughter’s lives, and her support for paid leave. “It is outrageous that America is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t guarantee paid leave,” Clinton says, her voice set to a montage of family photographs and her own meetings with constituents’ kids and babies. “We know,” Clinton adds, “that when women are strong, families are strong.” Fredrickson’s data on childbirth and poverty seem to bear out Clinton’s claim: When women are well supported in terms of paid leave, families have a better shot at staying above the poverty line, which is good news for parents and babies. The Right may have a traditional claim to the politics of strong families, but unless they can stake out a position that will offer the kind of protections to mothers that Clinton has in mind, the pro-family rhetoric of the Right will remain nothing but talk. SOCIAL MEDIA Alex Hanson (5/11/15, 10:40 PM) @theAlexHanson: <https://twitter.com/theAlexHanson/status/597969574873702400> First Republican presidential debate on track for Aug. 6 at The Q in Cleveland, sources say s.cleveland.com/USEtCGi via @clevelanddotcom Emily Schultheis (5/11/15, 12:15 PM) @emilyrs: <https://twitter.com/emilyrs/status/597797133819969537?refsrc=email&s=11> New GW Battleground poll has @HillaryClinton at 48 fav/49 unfav. 47% say they would consider voting for her: tarrance.com/docs/BG57quest… Joe Sudbay (5/11/15 4:54PM) @JoeSudbay: <https://twitter.com/JoeSudbay/status/597867282275106817> Huh. While Bush struggles with immigration issue, his PAC's anti-gay senior advisor, Jordan Sekulow, today signed amicus to end DACA & DAPA Zac Moffatt (5/11/15 12:54PM) @ZacMoffatt: <https://twitter.com/ZacMoffatt/status/597806912453869569> @Hillary Clinton Rubbed Elbows w 250 Top Donors For Each “Everyday American” She Met Last Week www.americarisingpac.org/populist-hero- <https://t.co/4wTzTBjKRe> HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE Hillary Clinton Walks Tightrope as Pressure Grows to Take Stance on Trade Deal <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/us/politics/hillary-clinton-walks-tightrope-as-pressure-grows-to-take-stance-on-trade-deal.html> // NYT // Amy Chozick – May 12, 2015 Liberal Democrats are intensifying their pressure on Hillary Rodham Clinton to oppose President Obama’s Pacific trade deal as detrimental to American jobs. But Mr. Obama’s allies want her to endorse the accord, which the president has called a boon to the United States economy. And Mrs. Clinton, stuck between the progressives she must woo in a Democratic nomination fight and the president under whom she served, has remained, for the most part, mum. The issue has become the first major policy test in her fledgling campaign, with Mrs. Clinton under mounting pressure to pick a side in the delicate and heated debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, a 12-nation trade agreement that Mr. Obama has aggressively pursued and that is facing a critical vote in Congress on Tuesday. Just 48 hours after Mrs. Clinton delighted liberal Democrats with a proposal to expand citizenship eligibility to immigrants who are in the country illegally, protesters on Thursday urged her to speak out against the trade deal. Photo Protesters outside a fund-raiser attended by Mrs. Clinton last week in Beverly Hills, Calif. Credit Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press “Stop the TPP!” read one of the signs held by demonstrators who circled the mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif., where Mrs. Clinton attended a high-dollar fund-raiser. The left wing has not been this agitated over a trade deal since the last time Mrs. Clinton ran for president, when her squishy position on the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed into law by her husband in 1993, ignited debate during the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries. “The fact is, she was saying great things about Nafta until she started running for president,” Mr. Obama said of Mrs. Clinton during their 2008 fight for the Democratic nomination. This time, in an odd twist, it is Mr. Obama’s trade deal that haunts Mrs. Clinton’s early candidacy. If her stance on immigration, which would go further than Mr. Obama’s executive actions, offended the White House last week, any remarks she might make against the administration’s trade accord could fracture her already delicate relationship with the president. On Saturday, Mr. Obama vigorously pushed back against Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has said the trade accord will help Wall Street and hurt American workers. “The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else,” Mr. Obama told Yahoo News. “She’s absolutely wrong,” he added. But even a tacit endorsement of the accord would put Mrs. Clinton on the opposite side of a very vocal liberal base of her party, which she has increasingly been courting in her campaign. The chances of pleasing both sides are slim. Mr. Obama’s allies — including congressional Republicans and business leaders who support the trade accord — as well as liberal Democrats, labor leaders, environmentalists and human rights advocates, have forcefully called for Mrs. Clinton to take a stance. If there is one thing both sides agree on, it is that Mrs. Clinton needs to say more than the vague comment she made in New Hampshire last month: “Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security.” “She can’t sit on the sidelines and let the president swing in the wind here,” John A. Boehner, the Republican House speaker, said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” last week. From the other side came this: “This is one you can’t waffle. You’re either for the T.P.P. or against it,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic nomination and opposes the deal, told MSNBC. The Huffington Post reported that John D. Podesta, chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, had jokingly bemoaned in private, “Can you make it go away?” The Clinton campaign may not be able to make the issue go away, but it can be avoided until after a vote on Tuesday on legislation that would grant Mr. Obama the ability to “fast-track” talks on a final trade deal, which liberals vehemently oppose. Mrs. Clinton has no public events scheduled this week, only private fund-raisers and a summit meeting in Brooklyn with donors on Thursday. A spokesman for her campaign declined to comment. “She hasn’t taken any steps in the wrong direction, but she hasn’t gone as far as many Democrats who have spoken out against ‘fast track,’ ” Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said. “She’s punted a little so far.” When she does finally weigh in, Mrs. Clinton’s position could give the liberal wing of her party pause. Left-leaning Democrats have been encouraged by her recent campaign speeches about inequality and immigration, but many still harbor concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s policies will not do enough to advance their causes. The campaign had hoped to delay outlining her policy proposals until later this summer, but the pressure over the trade deal could prompt Mrs. Clinton to detail her domestic policies sooner. The debate has remnants of her 2008 campaign, when Nafta became a litmus test for whether Mrs. Clinton had the liberal credentials of her opponents, Barack Obama and John Edwards. Mrs. Clinton was accused of political posturing when she opposed Nafta, the signature trade deal of her husband’s administration, which created the world’s largest trading bloc, among Canada, the United States and Mexico. Coming out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she supported as secretary of state under Mr. Obama, could generate similar criticism. “She was working for President Obama, and you do what your boss does,” Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, said of Mrs. Clinton’s past support for the partnership. For Mrs. Clinton, coming out against the deal would be tantamount to a repudiation of not just a major legislative goal of Mr. Obama’s, but also of Mr. Clinton’s economic legacy. There are few policies Mr. Clinton is more defensive about than Nafta, which many on the left have come to see as the ultimate symbol of the perils of globalization. More than two decades later, Nafta still haunts Mrs. Clinton (who opposed parts of the deal as first lady), and it ignites a visceral reaction on the campaign trail. “If she really does stand with working and middle-class Americans, she needs to come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” said Arturo Carmona, executive director of Presente.org and one of the protesters outside Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raiser on Thursday. He pointed to damage done by Nafta. After a speech at the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., on Friday, Mr. Obama said liberal Democrats who opposed the trade deal — which would include Asia-Pacific nations and affect 40 percent of America’s exports and imports — were stuck in the 1990s. “Their arguments are based on fears, or they’re fighting Nafta, the trade deal that was passed 25 years ago, or 20 years ago,” he said. Clinton Foundation Donors Fill Hillary’s Campaign Coffers <http://freebeacon.com/politics/clinton-foundation-donors-fill-hillarys-campaign-coffers/> // AP // Lachlan Markay - May 12, 2015 High-dollar donors to Hillary Clinton’s family foundation have hosted the majority of the Democratic presidential candidate’s early fundraisers, data compiled by political spending watchdogs reveal. Twelve of the 21 Hillary for America fundraising events reported by the Sunlight Foundation have been or will be hosted by donors to the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, according to Sunlight’s Political Party Time website, which tracks fundraising events. The foundation donors hosting fundraisers include some of the largest supporters of Clinton’s past political efforts. Together, they have given as much as $90 million to the foundation, according to donor disclosures on its website. The largest foundation donor to host one of the events is Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner. Clinton will attend a fundraiser at his home on May 20. Eychaner has donated more than $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. Clinton fundraisers’ donations to the foundation have come by way of personal contributions as well as through foundations and private companies that they own or operate. Last week, Clinton attended fundraisers at the San Francisco homes of billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and Susie Tompkins Buell, founder of the Esprit clothing brand. Steyer has personally donated to the foundation. Buell has done so in a personal capacity and through her own eponymous foundation and a donor-advised fund of a separate philanthropic group. The latter has contributed as much as $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. Hedge fund manager Marc Lasry has personally donated as much as $250,000. His firm, Avenue Capital Management II, LP, has chipped in another $25,000 to $50,000. The foundation lists donations in ranges, making it difficult to know exactly how much each donor has contributed. It also declines to say when specific contributions were made. More than 1,000 donors to the group remain anonymous. The foundation has become a source of controversy in recent weeks following revelations that Clinton, as secretary of state, may have taken actions that benefitted foreign governments and corporations that donated to the foundation. Details of those transactions were revealed in a new book, titled Clinton Cash, by Hoover Institute fellow Peter Schweizer. Clinton’s presidential campaign is going to extreme lengths to discredit Schweizer following the book’s release. In the book, Schweizer suggests the foundation has served to advance the Clintons’ political aspirations since the end of Bill’s presidency. “Perhaps the most important function of the foundation is to bolster Bill and Hillary’s reputations as global humanitarians by bringing relief and care to people all over the world,” Schweizer wrote. “This reputation not only flatters the ex-president’s ego and benefits Hillary’s political career, but it also has real value both in terms of global influence and financial reward.” Many of the foundation donors hosting Hillary for America fundraisers are long-time Clinton supporters. Haim and Cheryl Saban, whose foundation has given as much as $25 million to Clinton’s, backed her 2008 presidential bid, as did Buell, Lasry, and Eychaner. Some Clinton Foundation donors have also contributed recently to other groups expected to back her candidacy, formally or informally. The TomKat Charitable Trust, the foundation run by Steyer and his wife, is a major donor to the Center for American Progress, which was founded by Clinton campaign operative John Podesta and is expected to play a major role in crafting Clinton’s policy positions. Steven Rattner and his wife Maureen White are also CAP donors. They have given as much as $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation personally and through their own foundation. They will host Clinton at their New York City home for a fundraiser on Wednesday. CAP donor Elizabeth Bagley hosted Clinton last month for another fundraising event in Washington, D.C. Bagley and her husband have given as much as $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. In addition to supporting the Clintons’ political prospects, Schweizer says that donations to the foundation can be a means to ingratiate oneself with the powerful family in the hope of securing access to their inner circle. “People look for ways to influence those in power by throwing money in their direction,” Schweizer wrote. “Politicians are all too happy to vacuum up contributions from supporters and people who want access or something in return.” The Clintons and their foundation vehemently deny any quid-pro-quos. “The big question is whether taking such money constitutes a transaction,” Schweizer wrote. “The Clintons would undoubtedly argue that it does not. The evidence presented in this book suggests otherwise.” Ohio lawsuit shows Clinton is already looking at battleground states <http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2015/05/11/hillary-clinton-ohio-early-voting-lawsuit/> // On Politics- USA Today // Gregory Korte - May 11, 2015 Lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Ohio Democratic Party have filed suit over Ohio’s early voting laws, suggesting that Clinton is already looking downfield to what will be a key battleground state in the 2016 general election. The lawsuit, filed late Friday in Columbus, alleges that Republican lawmakers in Ohio have specifically targeted key Democratic constituencies — young people, Latinos and African-Americans — by eliminating the so-called “Golden Week” during which voters could register and vote on the same day. The lawsuit does not mention Clinton, and she is not a plaintiff. The plaintiffs include the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and three Ohio voters — an Ohio State University student with a California driver’s license, a Democratic poll worker from suburban Cincinnati and an African-American minister from Akron. The lawyers are more interesting. They include Don McTigue, a lawyer for the Ohio Democratic Party, and Marc Elias, who’s the general counsel for Hillary for America. Elias is not licensed to practice law in Ohio and is seeking permission from the court to represent the plaintiffs in the case. The Clinton campaign said it was aware of the lawsuit, but it wasn’t filed on behalf of the campaign. “However, the campaign shares the concern about undue burdens being placed on the right to vote in states across the country, including Ohio,” said Hillary for America Press Secretary Brian Fallon. But Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a defendant in the suit, called the plaintiff’s lawyers “politically motivated, legal lap dogs” who were “simply intending to interject chaos into Ohio’s nationally recognized voting system.” Husted notes that Ohio recently settled a federal lawsuit over many of the same issues, and that Ohio still has more liberal early voting laws than New York, where Clinton lives. Elias said the lawsuit was brought on behalf of the named plaintiffs, and is just one of many lawsuits his Washington law firm, Perkins Coie, has brought to defend the right to vote. “It is unfortunate that Secretary Husted chose to respond with a political attack rather than working to remedy the problems identified in our suit,” he said in an e-mail. Wall Street warns Hillary Clinton: Don’t be like Ed Miliband <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/wall-street-warns-hillary-clinton-117819.html> // Politico // Ben White - May 11, 2015 NEW YORK — Wall Street has a message for bank-bashing U.S. populist politicians: Put down the pitchforks or you could wind up like Ed Miliband. Senior financial executives say the Labour leader’s anti-bank, soak the rich rhetoric helped sink his party in the U.K. elections and assured a surprisingly big reelection win for Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative party last week. Miliband resigned as Labour leader following the loss. These bankers and their ideological supporters say if likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton keeps tacking to the left on Wall Street issues — as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, other progressive Democrats and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are demanding — she could wind up facing the same fate. “Cameron embraced the role of the financial sector in growing the U.K. economy and creating jobs, never once criticizing hedge funds, banks or the wealthy,” said a top executive at one of Wall Street’s largest firms. “Milliband ran against hedge funds and bankers, promising bonus and mansion taxes and lost big. Is that a lesson for Hillary as well?” This executive, like several others who cited the U.K. election result as a warning to populists, declined to be identified by name or by firm for fear of eliciting a heavy backlash. Another executive said Milliband’s adoption of Warren’s approach to the financial sector and banking regulation failed even though U.K. voters trust banks even less than U.S. voters, according to opinion surveys. “Seems like there might be some political lessons for the U.S. out of the U.K. election — with Milliband’s Warren style, anti-business, anti-bank rhetoric clearly falling flat with the general public even as the press ate it up,” this executive from another of Wall Street’s largest firms said. “And the Edelman trust barometer actually shows that British voters are more distrustful and wary of the banks than here in the U.S.” The financial executives cited Miliband’s attacks on Cameron and the Conservatives as the “party of hedge funds” and his calls for higher taxes on the industry as failing to captivate U.K. voters. And they noted that despite polls showing a very tight race, Cameron and his party won 51 percent of the vote and 331 seats in Parliament to just 36 percent and 232 seats for Miliband and his Labour party. Conservative analysts also said U.S. politicians including Clinton should take note of the U.K. result. “There are two lessons here,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum. “One is the Miliband lesson. The U.S. has now seen that people in the U.K. don’t really like this focus on inequality and redistribution. It’s not where people are. And the second is that conservatives were very effective in saying they were for working people but keeping the focus on work not excessive government intervention and benefits.” Financial reform advocates in the U.S. say these executives and analysts are delusional and reading things into the U.K. results that are not really there. “Backwards logic like this almost makes you understand why Wall Street executives are deluded enough to believe they shouldn’t be held responsible for blowing up the economy in 2008 and fighting common sense legislation designed to prevent them from doing it again,” said Neil Sroka, communications director for progressive group Democracy for America. “If these guys actually believe that Cameron won because he bear-hugged billionaire bankers or think that Democrats will do better in 2016 if they continue treating a thief on Wall Street differently than a thief on Main Street, I’ve got an tranche of decade-old, toxic mortgages I know they’ll want to get in on.” Dennis Kelleher, head of financial reform group Better Markets, said many other factors were at play in the U.K. “Claiming the five-week sprint known as the U.K. election — and the Scottish freedom campaign — means anything for the US is nothing more than wishful thinking by Wall Street’s spinners,” he said. “Secretary Clinton will be spelling out pro-growth agendas that also protect the American people from Wall Street’s dangerous too big to fail banks. It’s not either/or. It’s both.” The comments from Wall Street executives and conservative analysts come as some in the industry fear that Clinton will continue to move left on financial reform issues as her campaign progresses. Clinton used her first trip to Iowa as an announced candidate last month to issue a fresh assault. “There’s something wrong,” she told Iowans, when “hedge fund managers pay lower taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80 when I was driving here over the last two days.” In a fundraising note last month, Clinton wrote that “families have fought their way back from tough economic times. But it’s not enough — not when the average CEO makes 300 times what the average worker makes.” Wall Street mostly shrugged off those comments, confident that Clinton, who has enjoyed heavy financial support from the industry, would ultimately govern as a pro-business pragmatist not inclined to bust up big banks or support higher taxes on financial transactions or new controls on executive pay. But as the “Draft Warren” for president movement continues to gain steam and coalitions of left wing and right wing populists in Congress flirt with the idea of breaking up the biggest banks, Wall Street is getting a bit more nervous. And they are pointing to the U.K. results and Republican gains in 2014 in the U.S. as evidence that Clinton should focus on other issues or face a possible loss in 2016. “I would say that this is the second major election in a row where bank bashing no longer seems to move voters,” said a lobbyist for the banking industry. “Even where voters may continue to have anger about banks, other issues seem to be driving their votes. We saw that last year in the U.S., and now we seem to be seeing an echo in the U.K.” Arkansas: The Clintons Don't Live Here Anymore <http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/11/arkansas_the_clintons_dont_live_here_anymore_126533.html> // Real Clear Politics // Rebecca Berg - May 11, 2015 HOPE, Ark. — Nearly a quarter-century after Bill Clinton introduced his small Arkansas hometown to America, Hope is a living shrine to its most famous native son. Clinton’s first home, on South Hervey Street, has been preserved and converted into a museum. A few blocks away, a former train depot houses the town’s visitor center, filled with even more mementos of the 42nd president’s upbringing and his political rise. At the site where the Julia Chester Hospital once stood, a plaque commemorates Clinton’s birth there. But there is no marker noting the birth there, nine years later, of another hometown hero: former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican, who returned to Hope this week to announce his second bid for the Oval Office. In his speech to an overflow crowd of roughly 2,500 people at a community college, Huckabee said he hoped to bring America, as he had brought himself, “from Hope to higher ground.” “Here in this small town called Hope, I was raised to believe that where a person started didn’t mean that’s where he had to stop,” Huckabee said. He did not mention by name either Bill Clinton, who famously invoked “a place called Hope” during his 1992 speech to accept the Democratic nomination for president, or Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee in 2016. He didn’t have to; the connection was obvious. But the event served not only as a stark reminder of the Clintons, whom Huckabee will use as a foil in his White House race, but also of the Natural State’s sharp political transformation in their absence. The state that was once the last bastion for the Democratic Party in the South has become one of the most firmly Republican states in the country — so much so that even a beloved former Arkansas first lady might not be able to win the state in a general election. “I do believe Hillary would have carried Arkansas in 2008,” said one Democratic strategist with deep ties to the state. “I think it’s unlikely she carries it in 2016.” Such a dynamic would until recently have been unthinkable. During Bill Clinton’s nearly 12 years as governor, Hillary Clinton was an equal partner in policy and politics, and her popularity grew along with her husband’s. When Bill Clinton entrusted his wife as chairman of a committee to enact education reforms, a priority of his administration, she traveled the state on an extended listening tour. In a meeting with lawmakers to discuss the committee’s work, a few of the good ol’ boys were stunned. “Gentlemen, we’ve elected the wrong Clinton!” state Rep. Lloyd George famously remarked. Although Arkansas has on the national level supported Republican presidential candidates for most of the past three decades, with Bill Clinton twice as the exception, the state’s congressional delegation and statehouse were for most of those years dominated by Democrats. Helping to keep Democrats in power were three legendary politicians at the top of the party: Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, and Bill Clinton. But, even as Clinton took office as governor for the second time, in 1983, Arkansas Democrats were paddling against a shifting tide. The state’s Republican areas were swelling with in-migration from white retirees, while Democratic populations stagnated. Still, when Huckabee took office as governor in 1996, he did so as an outsider — the sole Republican statewide elected official, facing the most Democratic statehouse in the country. A video that played before Huckabee took the stage Tuesday recalled when he arrived at the statehouse to find the governor’s office door nailed shut. Huckabee understood that he could not govern without Democrats, and so he worked extensively with them, enacting a host of policies that could well be used against him in this Republican primary: expanding Medicaid coverage for children, awarding in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants; and even pushing for a one-eighth cent tax to fund conservation efforts. Huckabee even enlisted Dick Morris, a former Clinton aide, as a top political adviser. The political landscape in Arkansas did not truly turn in the GOP’s favor until 2010, when Republican John Boozman unseated Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln. During the next election cycle, in 2012, the state legislature flipped to GOP control. Last year marked the watershed moment for Arkansas Republicans, as the state appeared to pass a point of no return. As Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat and the son of David Pryor, faced a tough re-election battle against Republican Tom Cotton, the Democratic Party unloaded its political ammo to the last, even enlisting Bill Clinton to campaign on the incumbent’s behalf. At a rally in Hope, Clinton stood with Pryor outside of the visitor center and asked Arkansans for their support. But even the former president’s star power was not enough to lift Pryor, who lost with 39 percent to Cotton’s 57 percent. The transition away from Clinton’s Arkansas was complete — and the outlook for future Democrats remains dim. Because Arkansas lacks the growing minority populations of many Southern states, its political makeup now more closely resembles those of deep-red Kansas and Oklahoma. “It wasn’t that Arkansas was the last state to fall. Arkansas left the South,” said Skip Rutherford, a longtime Clinton ally and dean of the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service. “While the South is trending to be more competitive for the Democrats, Arkansas is going in the other direction.” Following the 2014 election, the state’s congressional delegation is now fully Republican, with two GOP senators for the first time since Reconstruction. Both statehouse chambers are also controlled by Republicans. The Clinton name is still everywhere in Arkansas, adorning the Little Rock airport, the presidential library, the school of public service, just about every main drag. But the state’s party loyalties appear to have finally, conclusively flipped. When 2014 exit polls asked Arkansas voters whether Hillary Clinton would make a good president, just 39 percent said she would, CNN reported, while 56 percent said she would not. On the eve of Huckabee’s announcement, his top campaign staff and reporters met in the back room of Doe’s Eat Place in Little Rock for a hearty meal of steak, shrimp and tamales. The walls are still adorned with Democratic artwork and memorabilia, including a poster depicting Ronald Reagan and his vice president, George H.W. Bush, as “the first couple,” with Bush wearing a dress — a reminder of the Democrats who once frequented the space. During Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, the back room at Doe’s was a favorite hangout for James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, Rahm Emanuel, and other top aides. Now, Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman, his pollster Bob Wickers, and his communications aides Alice Stewart and Hogan Gidley were gathered around the table. And, at least for this week, Mike Huckabee was Hope’s hometown hero. The night before the kickoff, with his aides in Little Rock, Huckabee made the rounds at Dos Loco Gringos, a Mexican restaurant in Hope. The next day, after the campaign launch, Hope visitor center director Guy Royston pulled up a photo on his phone of Huckabee at the restaurant. Royston, who interned in the past with former Sen. Blanche Lincoln and former Rep. Mike Ross, both Democrats, said he turned out for Huckabee’s announcement speech, too — the second presidential campaign launch he’s watched in person, after Clinton’s in 1991. “We root for the hometown guys,” Royston said. But when a couple from Los Angeles, in town for Huckabee’s speech, stopped by the visitor center, there wasn’t much to show he’d grown up in Hope, too. A photograph of Miss Marie Perkins noted that she was Clinton’s kindergarten teacher, but not that she also taught Huckabee. Earlier, on the way to Huckabee’s announcement, a bus transporting reporters stopped outside of his childhood home. Unlike Clinton’s, it is today a private home, not a museum, and there is no sign or other indicator of the politician who once lived there. Huckabee might never get the chance to win Arkansas in a general election. Another Clinton likely will — but Arkansas has moved on. California woman receives Mother's Day greeting from Hillary Clinton <http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-83513395/> // LA Times // Seema Mehta - May 11, 2015 A California woman was among a handful of women whom Hillary Clinton phoned to wish a happy Mother’s Day. Sheila Frank, 73, said she felt honored to speak with the Democratic presidential candidate for a little over 10 minutes on Sunday. “We congratulated each other on being mothers and grandmothers,” said Frank, a retired psychologist who was straightening her bedroom in the gated community of Bear Valley Springs near Tehachapi when Clinton called. Frank was one of five women Clinton called on Sunday, the winners of a Mother’s Day contest on Clinton’s campaign website. A friend entered Frank’s name and she was randomly selected. No donation was required to enter. Since announcing her presidential bid, Clinton has focused on her gender in ways she never did during her unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. Frank, who has an adult son and two grandsons, noted that Clinton recently became a grandmother when her daughter Chelsea gave birth to a daughter named Charlotte. “She of course adores her new granddaughter. I could tell she was very excited about that,” Frank said. But the bulk of their conversation focused on policy, Frank said, notably Frank's work with prisoners, the poor and the homeless. Mental illness, Frank told Clinton, was a scourge that was not being dealt with, and the situation was being made worse because of state budget cuts to rehabilitation programs. Frank grew up in New Jersey and attended graduate school at UC Berkeley during the “Free Speech Movement,” a milestone in her political development. “That’s where I was coming from. We thought we had the answers. We always saw a bright future,” Frank said. “We were so naïve but we were committed. At 73, one is no longer so naïve.” Frank said she initially supported Clinton’s 2008 presidential effort, until she grew enamored by then Sen. Barack Obama’s speeches and the prospect of a black man being elected president of the United States. She believes Obama has been treated unfairly since being elected to the White House, and wholeheartedly supports Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. “I do think a lack of experience has been an issue [for Obama] and Hillary doesn’t have that – she comes with an incredible amount of experience, and I’m definitely supporting her,” Frank said. Frank said that while she admires Democrats such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, she believes Clinton is the party’s best choice. “I think that she can represent the middle class in a decent way. I love her husband, Bill. I told her that. She told me she does also, so that was fun,” Frank said. “I think she will speak to support more of the middle class, whatever there is left of us.” Hillary Clinton Adds Latina From Labor Department To Oversee Hispanic, Black, Women’s Media <http://www.buzzfeed.com/adriancarrasquillo/hillary-clinton-adds-latina-from-labor-department-to-oversee?utm_term=.lxB2ZYreZ#.mr5QZ4DYx> // Buzzfeed News // Adrian Carrasquillo - May 11, 2015 Hillary Clinton has filled a major communications position in the campaign, tapping Xochitl Hinojosa as director of coalitions press, five sources told BuzzFeed News. Hinojosa, who served at the Department of Labor under Secretary Tom Perez for almost two years and is the daughter of Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa, will oversee Hispanic, black, and women’s media, among others. Her last day in her current role is next week. The Clinton campaign declined to comment on the hire. Democratic strategist Maria Cardona said Hinojosa has been in the mix as an early hire for a while. Cardona worked with Hinojosa on two projects with the Department of Labor and said she is someone who understands the nuances of the press landscape both in general media and Hispanic media. “It’s a rare mix to be able to get someone like her with experience, someone who can do it well and do it with grace,” she said. “I was thrilled when they told me her name.” In her role, Hinojosa will not only work closely with the communications team but would also serve as a connection between field staffers organizing these coalitions on the ground — something that didn’t always exist in the 2012 Obama campaign. A former Obama staffer said that looking forward, you could envision a scenario where an organizer in Charleston, South Carolina, is working with a local hip-hop station to get information out to that neighborhood. A stronger link between coalitions on the ground and the national press team would “free up the opportunity for the field to communicate and leverage communications channels to send the most authentic message to voters they’re working with,” the Obama campaign veteran said. Hinojosa also wouldn’t be the person charged with, for example, doing the day-to-day work with black media. Hinojosa would have a team under her and there are plans to fill those roles as the campaign progresses. Sources with campaign media experience said she will need a robust staff to ensure those coalitions aren’t relegated to or feel like specialty media. For example, Univision, which is a top four network in the United States, regardless of language, doesn’t want to be relegated to a secondary position in the campaign, said Jose Parra, a former senior adviser for Harry Reid. Hinojosa’s hire makes her the fourth high-profile Latino hire, and third Latina, along with Amanda Renteria, the political director and Emmy Ruiz, who returned to run the Clinton operation in Nevada. Jose Villarreal previously joined as campaign treasurer, as well. The hiring continues the approach stressed by Clinton officials like Renteria of not just hiring, say, Latinos for Latino roles. The early focus on strong Latino hiring and outreach operations has been repeatedly called for by Democrats who note that Clinton was popular among Latino voters in the 2008 primary against Obama, but must show she is serious about addressing their concerns during this campaign. Democrats have also worried that Republicans like Jeb Bush, who is fluent in Spanish and has a Hispanic family, and Marco Rubio, could compete for support from Latino voters. Hinojosa followed very much in the footsteps of her father, Gilberto, who represented farm workers in class-action lawsuits “and made sure that the U.S. Department of Labor Employment Services Division provided farm workers with needed interstate employment services,” according to the Texas Democratic Party. She previously spent time at the Department of Justice’s civil right division, as well as campaigns and senate offices before joining Labor, where she has been focused on issues like pay leave and the minimum wage. Are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ‘Affirmative-Action Presidents’? <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/clinton-obama-affirmative-action-presidents.html> // NY Mag // Jonathan Chait - May 11, 2015 “If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2016 she will not only be the nation’s first woman president but our second affirmative-action president,” writes Joseph Epstein. This may sound like Epstein is making the outlandish claim that Clinton and Obama are uniquely lacking in merit as compared to previous presidential candidates in American history. That is exactly what Epstein is claiming. In a bizarre, rambling essay that the Weekly Standard has deemed worthy not only of publication but of its cover, the esteemed conservative scholar asserts that presidential elections used to be based on intrinsic merit, until 2008. “How have we come to the point,” Epstein asks, “where we elect presidents of the United States not on their intrinsic qualities but because of the accidents of their birth: because they are black, or women, or, one day doubtless, gay, or disabled — not, in other words, for themselves but for the causes they seem to embody or represent, for their status as members of a victim group?” Yes, that’s right. America used to elect presidents on “intrinsic qualities” rather than “accidents of their birth.” And this process resulted in the election of forty-three consecutive white men, an outcome Epstein must regard as an extreme coincidence. The last president to be elected on the basis of intrinsic qualities rather than accidents of birth was George W. Bush, whose birth circumstances, Epstein apparently believes, had no bearing upon his career trajectory. The whole essay is a remarkable testament to the level of delusion of right-wing identity politics. Epstein does not merely claim that pockets of left-wing thought in academia and elsewhere have allowed social-justice ideology to go too far, an argument with which I sympathize. He argues that white men as a whole have become a subaltern class. Epstein is attempting to intellectualize a sentiment coursing through the right and given daily expression in such places as Fox News and talk radio, but in so attempting serves only to demonstrate its sub-intellectual character. On its face, the idea that white men have become a victim class is hard to square with the ethnographic composition of the economic and political elite, which remain far more white and male than the population as a whole. Epstein clearly believes this to be the case. Apparently unaware of a vast trove of evidence proving the continuing existence of traditional race and gender discrimination, he refers to it in the past tense. (“Everyone knows of the travails of slavery and beyond, the battles of women for equality in the workplace and elsewhere, the mocking and shunning of homosexuals, and the degrading of other victim groups; it was genuine, and painful.” Emphasis added.) Epstein likewise asserts, “Today it is the victim who is doing the bullying.” After a painful meandering tour through Epstein’s view of contemporary America, he returns at the conclusion to his premise about Clinton as an affirmative-action hire, which he has not bothered to substantiate. Here is Epstein’s evidence that Clinton plans to run a campaign based on victimhood: Given the large constituency of victims in America, Hillary Clinton, as a woman, has already climbed aboard the victim train in the hope of riding it to the presidency. “When women are held back, our country is held back,” she said in a recent speech. “When women get ahead, everyone gets ahead. Our mothers and sisters and daughters are on the front lines of all of these battles. ... But these are not just women’s fights. These have to be America’s fights and the world’s fights. We have to take them on, we have to win them together.” What a rich ragout of victimhood and virtue in those words! Not only do these Hillary Clinton quotes contain no hint of personal victimhood, they contain an explicit appeal to common interest. The argument Clinton makes in this passage is that policies that prevent women from fulfilling their potential harm men and women alike, by depriving society of the ability to develop the potential talent of half its population. This is the most representative quote Epstein is able to find to support his thesis, and it instead makes the exact opposite of the point he claims. In a larger sense, of course, the very existence of Epstein’s piece serves to disprove its thesis. If it is still possible for a white man to write an incoherent farrago of self-pity whose only shred of evidence directly undercuts its thesis, and have such drivel thrown onto the cover of a national magazine, then white men are probably still doing okay. The Hillary Clinton paradox: Progressives can’t trust her — and that’s a good thing <http://www.salon.com/2015/05/11/the_hillary_clinton_paradox_progressives_cant_trust_her_and_thats_a_good_thing/> // Salon // Elias Isquith - May 11, 2015 The Hillary Clinton paradox: Progressives can't trust her -- and that's a good thing Because I care about my readers and don’t want them to pollute their minds with meaningless political ephemera any more than being a good citizen absolutely requires, I hope this comes as news to you — but, last week, the New York Times and CBS published a new poll on how the public views former secretary of state and current presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC). There were two big takeaways for the 2016 frontrunner, both of which could be reasonably seen by left-wing activists as good omens for the months and maybe years to come. The poll’s most striking discovery pertained to how voters felt about Clinton’s handling of her email while at Foggy Bottom, which was either unnecessarily secretive or downright sketchy. I got into some arguments with other folks in the media about how much voters actually cared about this story; so forgive me my vanity, but I can’t help but note that during the weeks following the press’s wall-to-wall coverage of “emailgate,” Clinton’s favorability actually went up. And it wasn’t just a little statistical blip; it was an increase of nine full points. (On this score, then, picture me as Nelson Muntz.) The poll’s second notable finding, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly so much of a boon to Clinton supporters. According to CBS and the Times, fewer than half of respondents described her as “honest and trustworthy”; and that number was only near the 50 percent mark because around 80 percent of Democrats answered in the affirmative. This issue of HRC’s trustworthiness has been the thin reed on which many of the loudest promoters of the emailgate pseudo-scandal have hung their arguments. But as Ronald Brownstein writes in National Journal, a Clinton has already won the White House before while being seen as less than entirely untrustworthy. However, just because American doubts about her honesty are unlikely to keep HRC out of the White House, that doesn’t mean that her image on this score is irrelevant. What it means instead is that Clinton’s low margin for error on trust will manifest in harder to perceive ways during her campaign and hypothetical presidency. For example, look at President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s argument over fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It’s the kind of debate Obama is having with those on his left — a debate over progressive bona fides — that a President Clinton probably will not. If you’re unfamiliar with the battle over TPP and the fast-track option, I’d recommend this Wall Street Journal post as an OK, mostly objective primer. The short version, though, is that Obama wants Congress to grant him expanded powers to negotiate the biggest free-trade agreement since NAFTA and to do so without having to worry about folks in the House or Senate larding-up the agreement with amendments. Instead of letting Congress get into the weeds of the deal, Obama would prefer they leave it to him and then ultimately give what he comes up with a simple yea-or-nay vote. Along with most liberal and labor organizations, Warren is opposed. Yet what matters for our purposes isn’t the TPP so much as the way Warren and Obama, arguably liberal America’s two favorite politicians, have been fighting about it through the media. From the very beginning, Obama has relied on a rhetorical strategy that can be boiled down to one essential question: Don’t you trust me to do the right thing? “When people say that this trade deal is bad for working families,” he said in late-April, “I take that personally. My entire presidency has been about helping working families.” Just this weekend, he used similar phrasing, saying he’d “have to be pretty stupid” to support a deal that imperiled the middle class the way Warren claims the TPP does. The biggest reason why Obama has been able to adopt this strategy can probably be found in a Gallup poll released earlier this month. On that question of trustworthiness, the president fares well, especially by the standards of our polarized era: 53 percent of respondents say “honest and trustworthy” applies to Obama, while just 45 percent disagree. That’s not a Grand Canyon’s worth of distance apart from HRC’s 48 percent, of course. But it is enough to make the White House feel relatively confident that liberals are willing to trust the president — and to make Warren skip over Obama and raise concerns about what the next (possibly Republican) president might do with fast-track’s powers. On the trail (as well as in the White House, if she wins) Clinton will be much more constricted. Yes, she’s very popular with self-identified liberals; and, yes, like Obama’s, much of her negative numbers on trustworthiness are the product of overwhelmingly disdain from conservatives. But while Democrats may on the whole approve of HRC, they don’t necessarily trust her, at least not yet. That means that Clinton will be much more poorly equipped to argue in the face of a challenge from her left that liberals should relax and trust her to do the right thing. For anyone who wants to see Sen. Bernie Sanders succeed in pulling her to the left during the primary — or see Sen. Elizabeth Warren pulling her to the left if she’s in the White House — this is a plus. All of that being said, there’s still a good chance that, by the time 2016 really kicks-in and voters are paying attention, the reality of polarization in American politics will bump HRC’s numbers on trustworthiness and honesty closer to where the president’s are today. And even without that development, pushing Clinton from her left will be harder on issues where left-wing anger over her husband’s record isn’t quite so close to the surface (Obama is desperate to separate TPP from NAFTA for a reason). But if Brownstein is right, and HRC wins despite a majority of voters not exactly trusting her completely, it could be something of a win-win for liberal activists. Not only would they get a non-Republican president, but they’d get one with a stronger desire than the current incumbent to prove she’s one of them. Clinton campaign’s dilemma: What to do with Bill? <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-the-clintons-a-big-question-what-to-do-with-bill/2015/05/10/1f5b6212-f4db-11e4-bcc4-e8141e5eb0c9_story.html> // WaPo // Phillips Rucker – May 11, 2015 MARRAKESH, Morocco — The scene that unfolded here last week as Bill Clinton convened world leaders for a philanthropic conference was hardly what his wife’s champion-for-everyday-Americans campaign would have ordered up. Gathered in Marrakesh for a Clinton Global Initiative confab, foreign oligarchs and corporate titans mingled amid palm trees, decorative pools and dazzling tiled courtyards with the former president and his traveling delegation of foundation donors — many of whom are also donors to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign. When daughter Chelsea moderated a discussion on women’s empowerment, the only male panelist was Morocco’s richest person, Othman Benjelloun, whose BMCE Bank is a CGI sponsor. For the week’s biggest party, guests were chauffeured across the city to an opulent 56-room palace that boasts a private collection of Arabian horses, overlooks the snow-capped Atlas Mountains and serves a fine-dining menu of “biolight” cuisine. Ahead of that event, Bill Clinton greeted Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal. “See you tonight, Turki,” he told his royal highness. It was a long way from Hillary Clinton’s campaign-trail visits to Chipotle. The luxe week in Morocco highlighted the over­arching question facing the Clintons and their co­existing circles of political advisers: What to do with Bill? The question applies not only to the campaign but also to his role as first gentleman if she gets elected. In a presidential race that could include two dozen candidates, none has a spouse like Bill Clinton — a former president whose sprawling charitable ventures are rife with potential conflicts of interest; an admired public figure whose common touch propelled his rise but who now charges up to $500,000 to give a speech; a curious ideas man whose penchant for speaking his mind drives news cycles; and a globe-trotting icon whose recognizable tuft of white hair draws onlookers everywhere, from his old Arkansas haunts to the bustling souks around Marrakesh’s central square. Bill Clinton is a political animal who logged 168,000 miles on the campaign trail in 2014. Yet senior aides say he does not plan to do any campaign activities for his wife in 2015, including fundraisers for her campaign or allied super PACs. He has said privately that she should lead the campaign on her own, aides said. “He’s completely focused right now on the foundation,” said Tina Flournoy, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. “That does not mean that he does not realize his wife is running for president. But he is not directly engaged in the campaign. As he has said before, if his advice is asked for, he’s happy to give it.” But even if he’s off the campaign trail, Bill Clinton is never out of the limelight. He will remain prominent in the public eye with a busy schedule of appearances, including visits this week to a Harlem food festival and next month to Little Rock for a charity ball. In mid-June, he will be in Denver to host CGI America, a domestic-themed spinoff of his foundation conference. On Tuesday, he’ll be on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” He will also speak for pay at Univision’s presentation to advertisers in New York on Tuesday. The prominent Spanish-language television network is owned in part by Haim Saban, a foundation and campaign donor who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton last week at his Beverly Hills mansion. One strategist said Hillary Clinton, shown here with Bill Clinton and former senator Tom Harkin, should not campaign with her husband: “It’s hard to shine when you’re standing next to the sun.” (Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press) “Bill Clinton is like nuclear energy,” said David Axelrod, a strategist on President Obama’s campaigns. “If you use it properly, it can be enormously helpful and proactive. If you misuse it, it can be catastrophic.” ‘A supporting spouse’ Keeping the former president at a distance is one way the 2016 Clinton campaign is trying to prove it has learned from the mistakes of 2008. Although as her aides know well, it is impossible to truly isolate him from her campaign. “He is a very smart political strategist and practitioner,” said Ann Lewis, a longtime Hillary Clinton adviser. “He has never thought that politics is beneath him. He believes that politics is the way that we govern ourselves.” Bill Clinton has many assets. He is universally known and unusually popular; 73 percent of voters approved of his job performance as president in a Washington Post-ABC News poll in March, while his personal favorability rating stood at 65 percent in a CNN-ORC poll in March. He also is considered one of the Democratic Party’s most talented communicators; his 2012 convention speech was a standout moment in support of Obama’s reelection. “Any conversation about Bill Clinton and his impact on the campaign has to start with the fact that Americans like him and they’ve liked him for a long time,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign who now works for Priorities USA, a pro-Clinton super PAC. But as Bill Clinton showed in 2008, he can be an undisciplined and rogue surrogate. Some of the ugliest episodes in his wife’s campaign were his making, including his stray remarks about Obama that angered black voters in South Carolina and his behind-the-scenes meddling in the campaign’s strategy. Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who feuded with Bill Clinton in 2008 over what he saw as race-baiting, said in a recent interview that the former president should be “a supporting spouse” this time around. “He should refrain from doing anything or saying anything that would take the attention off of her candidacy,” said Clyburn, who has not endorsed anyone in the 2016 race. “It’s got to be about Hillary. It’s got to be about her vision, and he’s got to be supportive of that.” Axelrod, recalling the Clintons’ joint appearance in the fall at retiring Sen. Tom Harkin’s steak fry in Iowa, said it would be foolish for them to campaign together regularly. “It’s hard to shine when you’re standing next to the sun,” he said recently. “He’s a luminescent character, and it is diminishing to have him out there at her side.” Aides insisted that Bill Clinton is not calling up campaign aides, devouring polls or mapping out strategies. The campaign has no “Bill whisperer” tasked with managing him, although Flournoy is in regular contact with top aides at Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters. The former president also has long-standing relationships with campaign chairman John D. Podesta and other advisers. The Clintons speak to each other often, sometimes multiple times a day, but usually about personal matters and rarely about the nity-gritty of her race, aides said. Some days, he doesn’t know where she’s campaigning. And on the Africa trip, he was more attuned to the British elections — glued to the BBC — than to her campaign. One afternoon in April, Bill Clinton looked up at a television in his midtown Manhattan office and saw the grainy security-camera photo of his wife and her aide, Huma Abedin, at a Chipotle in Ohio, appearing incognito in dark sunglasses. He turned to aides and wondered, “What are she and Huma doing? Are they robbing that place?” Far away, but still making news As Hillary Clinton raised money in California last week, Bill Clinton was about as far away as he could get, visiting the family foundation’s projects in Africa and convening the CGI meeting in Morocco. Yet he was still making big headlines. In an interview with NBC News in Kenya, he appeared testy while defending the foundation’s foreign fundraising. He also said he would continue giving six-figure paid speeches: “I’ve got to pay our bills,” he said, sounding out of touch, considering he has reported earning $105 million in speaking fees over 12 years. There were other awkward moments as well. As Bill Clinton wrapped up the CGI meeting in Morocco, a top Coca-Cola executive joined him onstage to announce a $4.5 million program to help African youths obtain job skills and career counseling. Then Curtis A. Ferguson, the company’s regional president, shifted to the sales pitch. “I hope they’re thirsty,” he said, referring to the young Africans. Then he said he wanted to “share a Coke with Bill,” pulling out a Coke bottle inscribed with the former president’s first name in Arabic. They posed for photos holding the bottle, smiling. But much of the Africa trip — which stretched for 10 days and included stops in Tanzania, Kenya, Liberia and Morocco — was aimed at showcasing the good works of the foundation and its partners. At a hearing-aid fitting in Kenya, Bill Clinton witnessed a young man hearing the voice of his sister for the first time. In Tanzania, he met farmer Wazia Chawala, a single mother with seven children, who with foundation help has improved crop yields with modern soil, seed and crop-rotation techniques. Clinton also visited a drab Nairobi laboratory, where he listened to a presentation on tracking carbon emissions and rainfall patterns so farmers could improve their yields. When he asked the donors with him if they had any questions, Drew Houston, the chief executive of Dropbox, asked, “What were your biggest technical challenges?” For Clinton and his staff, it was a proud moment of synergy — the founder of one of the world’s largest cloud-computing companies asking a Kenyan lab technician a question about uploading data to the cloud. Clinton, who declined a request to be interviewed for this report, is grappling with what the future might hold. He is continuing to raise money for the foundation, where his daughter has assumed a greater leadership role. Last year, the foundation raised a $250 million endowment to provide long-term stability in his absence. His advisers understand that the foundation’s activities could complicate a Hillary Clinton presidency. “In his heart and mind, I think he wants there to always be a scenario where his foundation is doing the work that he’s deeply invested in,” Flournoy said. “How does that look, and what does experience and time and history mean you might have to change? We don’t know. But this is his life’s work.” ‘What does she want me to do?’ Bill Clinton says his role would be determined by his wife. “What does she want me to do?” he said in an interview last week with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “I have no idea.” One option is that Hillary Clinton could draft him as a special envoy somewhere or give him a portfolio in her administration. He is continually fascinated by science, aides said, and lately has been thinking about creating a fairer economy. He also has talked about bringing together corporate partners to rebuild Baltimore after last month’s riots. A return of the Clintons to the White House would also usher in a blurring of traditional gender roles, not to mention titles: Bill Clinton’s aides still refer to him as “the president.” “Even if he were assigned the responsibility of picking out china, I think others would probably overrule him on taste,” said Skip Rutherford, a longtime adviser and friend. “People used to kid him about picking out his crazy ties. I can’t imagine.” The closest historical parallel is Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. During Franklin’s presidency, Eleanor earned personal income from paid speeches, newspaper columns and a weekly radio show, which was sponsored by Simmons mattresses, said Carl Anthony, a historian at the National First Ladies’ Library. He said she gave most of her income to the March of Dimes Foundation, which her husband founded to combat polio. “She made a lot of money on her own, but not without a congressional investigation and media attacks on her commercializing the presidency,” Anthony said. Fred Wertheimer, president of the reform group Democracy 21, said the couple should completely withdraw from the charity if Hillary Clinton wins: “Change the name of the foundation, and make a clean break.” Foundation supporters believe otherwise. “It would probably be one of the greatest wastes of human talent in the history of the world” for Bill Clinton to withdraw, said Jay Jacobs, a major donor who traveled with him to Africa. “How do you say to these poor farmers, to mothers whose children can’t hear, ‘Sorry, no more because politics can’t abide by it?’ That would be morally wrong.” Kevin Sieff in Nairobi contributed to this report. Former Clinton Advisor: Bill Looks ‘Washed-Out And Washed-Up’ <http://dailycaller.com/2015/05/11/former-clinton-advisor-bill-looks-washed-out-and-washed-up/> // Daily Caller // Scott Greer - May 11, 2015 Former Bill Clinton advisor and television personality Dick Morris thinks his old boss isn’t looking too good these days. “I didn’t recognize the character that was on TV,” Morris said of Bill Clinton’s recent interview with NBC News in a video released Monday. “He was washed-out, he was listless, he was apathetic, he was very slow-talking and even slower thinking!” (RELATED: MSNBC Panelists: Bill Clinton’s Remarks ‘Will Come Back To Haunt’ Him, Are ‘Out Of Touch’ [VIDEO]) The man who helped manage Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign took particular issue with how the former president ineffectively responded to the issue surrounding his $500,000 salary from the Clinton Foundation — a question he should’ve anticipated. “He tried a couple of others [answers] but then he settled on the pathetic answer: ‘I have to pay my bills!'” Morris said. “C’mon? Who’s going to be taken in by that?” The political consultant continued his criticism of the lackluster performance of Clinton and believes his “muddled thinking” is a result of someone who “is not all there.” “His mind was not agile, it wasn’t energetic, he wasn’t forceful and I really just wondered what happened to the guy,” Morris commented. “I’m concerned about him, worried about him, I’m also disappointed. I think you’re dealing with somebody who really is not all there.” The ex-Clinton confidant thinks this spells bad news for Hillary Clinton and her bid for the White House. “She’s losing her best advisor, she’s losing her top consultant. They made quite the team and I don’t think Bill Clinton is up to this game.” OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE O'Malley plans 4 stops in NH Wednesday <http://www.wmur.com/politics/omalley-plans-4-stops-in-nh-wednesday/32952016> // WMUR // May 11, 2015 MANCHESTER, N.H. —Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has four New Hampshire stops planned for Wednesday. The Democrat will begin the day with a diner stop in Manchester at a location to be announced, followed by a visit to the Alpha Loft, a business incubator, also in Manchester. O’Malley will attend a private fundraiser for the New Hampshire House Democratic Caucus at midday and then attend a party at the Durham home of former executive councilor Dudley Dudley. Later, O’Malley will campaign in Rockingham County with Maureen Mann, a candidate for the New Hampshire House of Representatives in an upcoming special election. De Blasio 'Can't Think of Anything More Important' Than going to D.C. <http://observer.com/2015/05/de-blasio-cant-think-of-anything-more-important-than-going-to-d-c/> // Observer // Will Bredderman - May 11, 2015 Mayor Bill de Blasio maintained that his trip tomorrow to the nation’s capital to unveil “The Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality” with other leading liberals is important and appropriate to his duties as mayor, despite complaints that he is neglecting the bread-and-butter issues of every day New Yorkers. Talking to the press today after an unrelated event in Queens, Mr. de Blasio defended making a two-day jaunt to promote his left-leaning ideals in Washington D.C.—viewed as a move to elevate his personal profile nationally—while making only infrequent visits to conservative enclaves of his own city, such as Staten Island. He asserted repeatedly that part of the trip was to call for the renewal of federal transportation funding, which is due to expire at the end of the month, as well as lobby for other policies such as progressive taxation reduce the gap between rich and poor. “I can’t think of anything more important. I’ll be doing that over the next couple of days because now is the right time to do it,” he said, noting that many criticized his ambitious agenda as a mayoral candidate in 2013 as beyond the reach of a mayor. “We need a federal partner. And we are going to create, I think, some real critical mass tomorrow pushing for these bigger solutions in Washington.” Mr. de Blasio argued that mayors since his hero Fiorello LaGuardia—whom he said he sought to emulate in his own “humble” way—have rallied with their counterparts from other cities to request federal money for urban concerns. The transportation bill push, he said, was simply part of that tradition. “We have a real bipartisan effort with mayors from across the country on Wednesday, working with the business community, working with chambers of commerce from around the country, working with folks, businesses depend on better transportation, to push the Congress for more funding,” he said. “Let’s face it, where so much of the energy is, where so much of the resources are, they’re in Washington. The situation now in Washington is unacceptable. It’s not helping New York City, it’s not helping cities across the country. We’ve got to break through in some way.” “We’ve got to change the dynamic so we can get the federal support we need, and we’ve got to do the work here every day, and my job is to do both,” he continued. Mr. de Blasio’s approval rating has long hovered around 50 percent and is racially polarized. He is still popular with black voters but increasingly unpopular with whites. Nonetheless, Mr. de Blasio will seek to take a national leadership role when he joins top liberals like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in unveiling a left-leaning agenda for the nation on Wednesday. He has maintained, however, that rumors he will launch a long-shot bid for the presidency next year are false—rumors he denied again today. “No,” he said resolutely. “I said I have one job: mayor of New York City. I look forward to running for re-election in 2017.” Bill De Blasio, Elizabeth Warren escalate pressure on Hillary Clinton <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/bill-de-blasio-elizabeth-warren-hillary-clinton-2016-117837.html> // Politico // Gabriel Debenedetti - May 11, 2015 Like Elizabeth Warren, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio isn’t running for president — he’s running to influence the presidential race. So when he and Warren appear together at the National Press Club in Washington before unveiling his Contract with America for the left, it will be the latest step in the Democrats’ primary within the primary: liberals’ effort to figure out how to push Hillary Clinton to the left. The primary within the primary may prove more challenging for Clinton than the real thing, in which she’s leading competitors by up to 50 points in some polls. James Carville, the longtime Clinton adviser, compared de Blasio’s efforts to the Club for Growth pressuring Republicans to move to the right on taxes: “It’s a natural thing that happens in presidential politics,” he said. Nonetheless, the progressive mayor’s swing through the capital is designed to kick the Democratic debate up a notch just as Warren escalates her own fight with President Barack Obama in a trade dispute that’s also entangled Clinton. But it will also represent a balancing act, as de Blasio — Clinton’s former Senate campaign manager — looks to influence the discussion without directly opposing the dominating front-runner. After his joint appearance with Warren, de Blasio will stand alongside liberal lawmakers and labor leaders on Capitol Hill to roll out a policy wish-list. Progressives close to de Blasio say the hard part will be laying down an achievable marker for candidates — including Clinton — while still applying enough pressure to get their attention. “The challenge is that a lot of this will just get a head nod” from Clinton, said one progressive Democratic leader. As they maneuver for influence, Warren and de Blasio have taken up much of the oxygen from the party’s actual candidates, grabbing headlines and jumping in the policy trenches — in de Blasio’s case going as far as to effectively hit the campaign trail before revealing his “Progressive Agenda” on Tuesday. But with the former secretary of state claiming commanding leads in national and state-level polling, in many cases performing better among liberals than among all registered Democrats, the question of how best to drag her to the left without alienating her is still outstanding. Clinton’s team is quick to predict that another candidate will reach at least 30 percent of the vote in Iowa, the first state with a 2016 contest, much of it coming from Democrats who would like to see Warren run. That concern partially explains Clinton’s recent leftward shifts on issues including immigration reform and criminal justice. Meanwhile, her campaign has remained in contact with liberal groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is encouraging Clinton to embrace expanding Social Security and a debt-free college plan. But so far, Clinton stands far ahead of her likely competitors — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee — in polling, reducing pressure on her to appease liberals. In that vacuum, Warren and de Blasio have sought to position themselves as king-makers among activists in early-voting and swing states, a role de Blasio has pursued by stopping in Iowa and Wisconsin. His “Progressive Agenda” is designed to be broad enough for Clinton and other Democrats to embrace whole-heartedly: he is expected to call for universal pre-kindergarten, a higher minimum wage, and a paid family leave policy — all of which Clinton has mentioned favorably in recent months. And de Blasio’s Wednesday roll-out follows a similar speech in late April by AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka — an address that read like a warning memo to Clinton about how to gain crucial union support. “Standing with working people once in a while won’t work. Candidates can’t hedge bets any longer,” said Trumka on April 27. The Clinton campaign named a Labor Outreach Director on April 28. The mayor’s stop in Washington comes at a time when Clinton has been caught between Obama and Warren over supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement she helped negotiate as secretary of state. Warren and Obama traded barbs over the weekend, as the president told Yahoo News Warren is “a politician like everybody else” when trying to explain her opposition to the trade deal. Clinton has avoided weighing in on the topic, only vaguely describing restrictions she would put on a deal rather than firmly opposing it. Trade is just one policy where liberals are seeking to get more clarity from Clinton, particularly as Sanders intensifies his campaign schedule and O’Malley — who has recently focused on Wall Street reform and debt-free college — nears his expected late-May campaign launch. The bar is low for Clinton to satisfy liberals in many cases, but she still faces some risk of alienating more centrist voters she might need in November 2016. “Two areas where words alone do make a difference are expanding social security and debt-free college,” explained the PCCC’s Adam Green, pointing to a recent interview where her campaign manager mentioned the latter. “If she were to give a speech or even send a tweet mentioning them, that would shift the entire national discussion.” Thus, Warren and de Blasio have shown few signs of letting up. The former mayor has pointedly refused to endorse her, and Warren has declined to ask the various organizations aiming to draft her into the race to stand down. And de Blasio’s national travels aren’t ending on Tuesday. His next stop, on Wednesday, will be in Silicon Valley — 3,000 miles from Manhattan. Elizabeth Warren fires back at Obama … again <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/elizabeth-warren-obama-trade-fight-117809.html> // Politico // Karey Van Hall – May 11, 2015 The war of wrong continues. Sen. Elizabeth Warren hit back at President Barack Obama in an interview published on Monday, saying she is justified in her criticism of trade negotiations that she believes could undermine the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The tit-for-tat comes after Obama over the weekend again asserted that Warren is “absolutely wrong” in arguing that fast-track authority for trade deals could be a boon for Wall Street. Warren, in an interview with the Washington Post, said fast-track authority gives a future Republican president a better path for undermining financial reforms because it would only require 51 votes in the Senate instead of 60. She also said Dodd-Frank can be undercut through other measures besides straight legislation, such as international agreements on capital standards and leverage ratios. “It’s possible to punch holes in Dodd-Frank without directly repealing it,” she said. Warren and Obama have been long-time allies in public on consumer issues, but the trade deal has seemingly eroded their relationship. In the interview published on Monday, Warren again accused Obama of not being forthcoming about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact that his administration is negotiating with 11 other countries. “If the president is so confident it’s a good deal, he should declassify the text and let people see it before asking Congress to tie its hands on fixing it,” she said. Why Hillary Clinton needs Elizabeth Warren <http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8583313/hillary-clinton-elizabeth-warren> // Vox // Ezra Klein - May 11, 2015 Elizabeth Warren has pulled off something remarkable in the Democratic primary: she's managed to set the terms of the challenge to Hillary Clinton without actually entering the race and challenging Clinton herself. In part, this is because Warren's agenda has been defined down from very specific ideas about financial regulation to a pretty generic form of economic populism. When Hillary Clinton mentioned that "the average CEO makes about 300 times what the average worker makes" and said "the deck is stacked in favor of the powerful," the New York Times wrote that she was "embracing the ideas trumpeted by Ms. Warren." This is really just standard-issue Democratic populism. As it happens, Clinton used that CEO pay statistic in her 2008 campaign, too. But Warren has become so synonymous with the populist wing of the Democratic Party that Democrats sounding like Democrats gets reported as Democrats sounding like Elizabeth Warren. And that's great news for Hillary Clinton, because it sets up a test she can easily pass. On economic policy, Clinton is pretty liberal. Her last presidential campaign was full of rhetoric that you could imagine in any Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren speech today: Over the 12-month period that just ended in July, the slow growth in wages actually accounted for more than two-thirds of the increase in corporate profits. What does that mean? Well, the profits go up, but unlike every other time in our history, the CEOs and the boards of these companies are not sharing the wealth. So companies are actually profiting off of keeping workers' wages stagnant ... In 2005, the last year I could find the numbers for, all income gains went to the top 10 percent of households, while the bottom 90 percent saw their incomes decline. That is not the America that I grew up in. "Hillary was talking about inequality and wage stagnation before it was in vogue," says Neera Tanden, who served as policy director on Clinton's 2008 campaign and now leads the Center for American Progress. "She was ahead of this debate, not behind it." If the question of the 2016 Democratic primary is whether Hillary Clinton can sound like a populist, and adopt more populist policies, she's going to answer it with ease. Compared with the status quo, Clinton pretty much agrees with Sanders, with Warren, and with every other liberal: she wants higher taxes on the rich, more social spending, a tighter social safety net, a public option for health insurance, stronger financial regulations than what Congress actually passed, and so on. There might be individual policies on which Warren or Sanders go further than Clinton — Sanders, for instance, supports single-payer health care — but on most economic issues, Clinton is well to the left of current policy and to the left of the average voter. And on specific issues like financial regulation, she's willing to go further than many expect: she has already named Gary Gensler, a tough financial regulator, to be her campaign's chief financial officer. There's just not going to be that much room to her left on economic policy. But there is a lot of room to her left on other issues — and these are disagreements that the Warrenization of the Democratic primary is helping to obscure. GOP First GOP debate: Aug. 6 in Cleveland <http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/first-gop-debate-aug-in-cleveland-206951.html> // Politico // Dylan Byers - May 11, 2015 The first Republican primary debate will take place on Aug. 6 in Cleveland, the Northeast Ohio Media Group reports. The debate, sponsored by Fox News, will take place at the Quicken Loans Arena (or, "The Q"), home to the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers. The Q is also the site of next year's Republican National Convention, which is scheduled for July 2016. Fox News is expected to formally announce the date and venue within the next few days. Spokespeople for both Fox News and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Monday night. The RNC has sanctioned nine primary debates for the 2016 campaign, with the possibility of adding three more. It had previously announced that the first debate would take place in August in Ohio, though the exact day and location were unknown. Last week, an NBC News spokesperson told the On Media blog that the last sanctioned Republican primary debate would take place in Houston on Feb. 26, 2016, just four days before Super Tuesday. That debate is being sponsored by NBC News and Telemundo in partnership with National Journal. Fox News and CNN have each been granted two debates this cycle with the possibility of a third. The three broadcast networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — have each been given one debate, as have Fox Business and CNBC. The Democratic National Party has sanctioned six primary debates, though it has yet to name the sponsors. Jeb Bush Says He Wouldn't Repeal Obama's Immigration Actions Right Away <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-11/jeb-bush-says-he-wouldn-t-repeal-obama-s-immigration-actions-right-away> // Bloomberg Politics // Michael C. Bender - May 11, 2015 He may be a staunch critic of President Obama's executive orders on immigration, but Jeb Bush wouldn't rush to repeal them if he's the next White House resident. In an interview scheduled to air Monday night on Fox News, Bush suggested that he would wait until a new law was in place before overturning Obama's actions. Noting the political difficulty of repealing the orders, host Megyn Kelly asked Bush how he would go about undoing them. "Passing meaningful reform of immigration and make it part of it," Bush answered, according to a transcript of the interview. The interview will air in full on The Kelly File at 9 p.m. Bush, who hasn't yet formally entered the presidential race, also defended his support for giving undocumented immigrants driver's licenses and their children in-state tuition, saying, "If you’ve been here for an extended period of time, you have no nexus to the country of your parents." "What what are we supposed to do? Marginalize these people forever?" Bush said. Bush insisted that his support for providing undocumented immigrants a path to legalization wouldn't be a deal-breaker for voters in the GOP primary, saying Republican voters "can be persuaded." Bush suggested he's showing stronger leadership than the rest of the field by defending his position, which includes strengthening border security, limiting those who can immigrate because of family ties, and expanding the number of immigrants who come for economic reasons. "Do you want people to just bend with the wind, to mirror people’s sentiment whoever is in front of you? Oh, yes, I used to be for that but now, I’m for this. Is that the way we want to elect presidents?" Bush said. Bush has regularly criticized Obama's executive actions on immigration, saying the Democrat exceeded the constitutional authority of the nation's highest elected office, and has promised to repeal those changes, including one that protects those brought to the country as children, if he's elected president. But Bush, who is married to a Mexican American woman and supports legalizing many of the 11 million undocumented workers in the country, hasn't said whether he'd make those changes without Congress first passing a comprehensive immigration bill. Such a move, which House Republicans supported last year, would put millions of otherwise law-abiding immigrants at risk of deportation. The Assets and Liabilities of Jeb Bush <http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-assets-and-liabilities-of-jeb-bush-1431359095> // WSJ // Gerald F. Seib - May 11, 2015 Five months ago this week, Jeb Bush got a beat on the world by announcing he was forming a committee to explore running for president. That means enough time has passed to frame the Bush paradox: He is the establishment favorite in a party that almost always picks that candidate, but has walked into an election cycle in which that isn’t necessarily the case. The powerful assets Mr. Bush brings to the table have been on full display since his December move. He can raise prodigious amounts of money from the party’s business and finance wings, and enjoys the backing of many GOP power brokers and most of his family’s network of supporters. He is an articulate candidate with a conservative record as Florida’s governor, yet crossover appeal to moderates. He is better than other governors and former governors at discussing the national-security issues that are rising on GOP voters’ priority list. But as the weeks have gone by, it’s also been easy to see Mr. Bush’s problems within his party. Conservative skepticism is higher than some anticipated, based largely on his support for Common Core education standards and broad immigration reforms. Rival candidates— Mike Huckabee and Sen. Rand Paul in particular—have tapped into an antiestablishment strain within the party that works against Mr. Bush. The loss of two elections to Barack Obama has left some yearning for a generational change that is being exploited by—ironically enough—Sen. Marco Rubio, something of a Jeb Bush protégé. Any rational analysis has to rate Mr. Bush as the slight favorite within an exceptionally crowded field of Republican contenders, though it’s way too early to draw definitive conclusions. What is possible, based on an analysis of polling data and the shape of the race ahead, is to define two significant problems Mr. Bush faces, as well as two big advantages: First, the problems: The Republican party has changed. Since his brother and father were elected, the party has become more populist and has been altered by the rise of the tea-party movement and the absorption of its messages and foot soldiers. In a broad examination of party-identification trends, Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm that helps conduct the Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, found that the party’s three largest subgroups now are tea-party supporters, self-identified conservatives and white Southerners. Moreover, in the last few years, the Republican party has become more male in composition. These trends don’t necessarily work to Mr. Bush’s favor. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, he is the top choice among Republicans overall, by a small margin, but scores somewhat better among women than among men, better among moderates than among conservatives, and is the top choice of just 6% of self-described tea-party supporters. The Romney experience left a bitter aftertaste. The nomination, followed by the defeat, of Mitt Romney in 2012 has left some Republicans questioning the party’s tendency to nominate the big name whose time has come. Democrats didn’t do that when they picked Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008, the argument goes, and they won the White House twice as a result. Mr. Bush isn’t quite the same next-in-line choice that Mr. Romney was. Still, the Romney experience has opened the way for rivals such as Sen. Ted Cruz to argue that Republicans lose general elections because they don’t excite and turn out their conservative base. While that analysis is open to question, the Journal/NBC News poll found Mr. Bush behind both Sen. Paul and Sen. Cruz among Republican primary voters who didn’t vote for Mr. Romney. Here are two big Bush advantages: The conservative anti-Bush vote is being splintered. There is no single populist/antiestablishment/tea-party/evangelical alternative to Mr. Bush, but rather a whole series of them. That reduces the chances that any one rival can, at least for a while, reach the critical mass necessary to be seen as the singular alternative. Which leads to the second big advantage: A long nomination contest benefits Jeb Bush. The longer a fight goes on, the more important it is to have a lot of money to wage it. Mr. Bush is tops in that category. More than that, Mr. Bush has a plausible answer to conservative criticism of his support for Common Core education standards—that he’s for high standards at the state level, not federal coercion in imposing them—that will benefit from more time and opportunity to deliver it. And to the extent the nominating contest moves into big swing states on the March and April calendar—Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania—it will reach relatively more natural Bush voters than may be found in some of the early states. A marathon may suit Jeb Bush just fine. Jeb Bush leans on nonprofit group as he prepares likely presidential run <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/jeb-bush-leans-on-nonprofit-group-as-he-prepares-likely-presidential-run/2015/05/11/db20d700-f81b-11e4-9ef4-1bb7ce3b3fb7_story.html?postshare=7201431382177068> // Washington Post // Ed O'Keefe and Matea Gold - May 11, 2015 A nonprofit group allied with former Florida governor Jeb Bush is playing a more expansive role in his current political operation than previously known, housing several top policy advisers who are expected to join his eventual campaign, according to people familiar with the structure. At least four people with expertise on energy issues, foreign affairs and communications are working with Right to Rise Policy Solutions, a nonprofit advocacy group that can accept secret, unlimited donations from individuals and corporations. Bush’s reliance on the non­profit as he prepares for a likely presidential bid puts him on untested legal ground, cloaking who is paying the salaries of his expected advisers. But a polarized Federal Election Commission is unlikely to scrutinize the maneuver, campaign finance experts said. The latest hire was announced Monday: Michael Steel, a top spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), said that he was moving to Florida to take a role with the nonprofit group. If Bush officially launches a presidential campaign, Steel would join it, according to people familiar with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly. At least three others working for the group are expected to make similar moves. Marcus Peacock, a former staffer with the Senate Budget Committee, is working with the group on environmental and energy issues. Former congressional staffers Robert S. Karem and John ­Noonan are advising the former governor on foreign policy issues as paid consultants to Right to Rise Policy Solutions. In a statement, William Simon, the group’s founder, said that if Bush launches a campaign, his entity “will continue its education efforts independent of such campaign.” He confirmed in a separate e-mail that “some of our policy team are on short-term contracts to help get up to speed building policy and creating an informational Web site. As the year progresses I expect that some will move on to other opportunities.” Simon is a former Wal-Mart executive and was head of Florida’s Department of Management Services during Bush’s second term as governor. In February, Simon established Right to Rise Policy Solutions as a nonprofit corporation in his home state of Arkansas. Having Simon’s nonprofit group temporarily house a team of Bush aides means that the public may never know who is paying the salaries of those helping craft Bush’s policies right now. Tax-exempt “social welfare” groups such as Right to Rise Policy Solutions can accept unlimited funds from individuals and corporations and are allowed to keep the names of the contributors secret. Simon has said he may end up disclosing the donors to the group, but it is unclear when that might happen. “The beauty of nonprofits from the standpoint of some donors is that the source of the money will never see the light of day,” said Kenneth Gross, who heads the political law practice at Skadden Arps. “The entire process is going to be even less transparent than it has been in the past.” Campaign finance experts said the nonprofit’s relationship with Bush is legally risky. A landmark 2002 law bans a candidate from directly or indirectly establishing an organization that is not subject to federal contribution limits. It is unclear, however, how that would apply to Bush, since he has not yet declared his candidacy for the White House. And the FEC is mired in intense partisan gridlock, making it unlikely that the six-member panel would agree to pursue the issue. “It seems to me that it is pushing the envelope, but I don’t know whether the FEC is going to take any action,” said Gross, a former associate general counsel at the commission. Advocates for tougher enforcement of campaign finance rules said that Bush’s aggressive use of a nonprofit in his political operation undermines the federal contribution limits, which permit individuals to give up to $2,700 to a candidate per election. The former governor has also been raising money at an intense clip for his allied super PAC, also called Right to Rise. “This is another example of how he is running roughshod over campaign finance law,” said Larry Noble, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “He is outsourcing what will normally be campaign activity, and he’s not even admitting he’s testing the waters, which is absurd.” Kristy Campbell, a spokeswoman for Bush, said in an e-mail Monday that his team is “fully complying with the law in all activities Governor Bush is engaging in on the political front and will continue to do so.” Bush is not the first presidential contender to have an allied tax-exempt organization. A super PAC set up to back President Obama in 2012 had a smaller nonprofit arm, Priorities USA, which ended up giving most of its money away to groups such as Planned Parenthood and Hurricane Sandy relief efforts before being dissolved, according to tax documents. Other 2016 Republican contenders — including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former Texas governor Rick Perry, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania — have aligned nonprofits groups that have conducted polling, developed policy and covered travel expenses. But Bush’s advisers appear to have gone further by parceling out a specific function to a tax-exempt group that is expected to flank his eventual campaign. Steel has served as Boehner’s press secretary since 2008, chiefly responsible for handling daily interactions with the congressional press corps and implementing a broader communications strategy, especially during high-stakes negotiations over formation of the “super committee” in 2011, the 2012 “fiscal cliff” and the 2013 government shutdown. Boehner has voiced support for Bush generally in the past but is not expected to endorse any candidate before a nominee is chosen. He praised his outgoing spokesman in a statement on Monday, calling him “a pro’s pro.” Bush favorability rating suffers in new poll <http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/241626-bush-favorability-rating-suffers-in-new-poll> // The Hill // Jonathan Easley - May 11, 2015 Former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) has the worst favorability rating of any of the prospective Republican presidential candidates and a majority of voters nationwide say they won’t even consider voting for him, according to a new poll. The George Washington University poll released on Monday found that only 35 percent of voters say they have a favorable of view of Bush, against 48 percent who view him negatively. Only 36 percent of voters said they would consider voting for Bush, while 60 percent said they would not consider voting for him. The rest of the GOP field has better favorability ratings, but remains largely unknown. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is viewed favorably by 22 percent of voters, against 19 percent who say they view him negatively. However, 47 percent said they don’t know enough about Walker, compared to only 6 percent who said the same about Bush. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is the only other GOP candidate with a positive favorability rating, with 31 percent saying they view him positively, against 30 percent who have a negative view of him. Twenty-six percent of voters said they don’t know enough about Rubio to have an opinion. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) breaks even on favorability with a 34-34 split, while Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is 4 points underwater at 33 percent positive and 37 percent negative. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) comes in at 25 percent positive and 33 percent negative. But it’s not just Bush that faces deep skepticism from the electorate at large – 55 percent of voters said they wouldn’t consider voting for Paul, Huckabee or Cruz, while 50 percent said the same about Rubio and Walker. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) is viewed positively by 48 percent of voters, while 49 percent say they have a negative view of her. Forty-seven percent of voters said they would consider voting for Clinton, against 51 percent who said they would not. “These GW Battleground Poll results show that the American electorate's deep, broad and chronic pessimism about jobs and economic security translates into across-the-board hostility toward the 2016 presidential candidates,” Michael Cornfield, the research director for the GW Global Center for Political Engagement said in a statement. “In each and every case, more respondents said they would not consider voting for them than would,” he added. “Campaigners face stiff suspicions and a preference for political effectiveness over ideological affinity.” The poll of 1,000 registered voters, conducted between May 3 and 6, has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points. John Boehner press aide Michael Steel takes job with Jeb Bush <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/michael-steele-jeb-bush-pac-117814.html> // Politico // Jake Sherman - May 11, 2015 Michael Steel, one of Speaker John Boehner’s top aides, is moving to Miami to work in a “leadership role” for Jeb Bush’s political action committee. Steel has worked as the press secretary for Boehner since 2008, when the Ohio Republican was the minority leader of a battered Republican party in the House. He has guided Boehner’s communications operation for seven years, helping craft the strategy that made the Ohio Republican speaker, and subsequently playing a key role advising him in day-to-day governing, including high-stakes negotiations with President Barack Obama. Steel will be an adviser to Bush’s Right to Rise Policy Solutions PAC, “with a leadership role in policy and communications,” according to a source familiar with the role. Right to Rise is the precursor to Bush’s all-but-certain presidential campaign. “Ask anyone in the Capitol – Republican, Democrat, or otherwise – about Michael Steel, and they will tell you the same thing: he is a pro’s pro,” Boehner said in a statement to POLITICO. “For more than seven years, I have relied on his ability to dissect an issue, win a debate, and deal openly and honestly with the press. He brings nothing but class, decency – and even cheer – to his work no matter how tough the situation. We would not be where we are today without him. All of Boehnerland is sorry to see him go, but we wish Michael the best of luck and we thank him for his service.” Boehner has been clear that he himself is a fan of Bush, and wants the former Florida governor to run for president. Steel, a graduate of the University of North Carolina and Columbia University’s graduate program in journalism, has worked on Capitol Hill for a dozen years. He started in 2003 as the press secretary for former Arizona Rep. John Shadegg. Steel has frequently taken leaves of absence from the Hill to hit the campaign trail. He was Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) press secretary during the 2012 presidential campaign. In 2014, he was a senior adviser to the Republican Party of North Carolina and helped Sen. Thom Tillis defeat Kay Hagan. This time, he is leaving Capitol Hill behind. Jeb Bush's disastrous defense of the Iraq War <http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jeb-bushs-disastrous-defense-of-the-iraq-war/article/2564325?custom_click=rss> // Washington Examiner // Byron York - May 11, 2015 Is it possible that in 2016, more than a decade after the invasion of Iraq, the Republican party's presidential nominee could become bogged down in debating whether the war was the right thing to do? The answer, a depressing one for many in the GOP, is yes — if the nominee is Jeb Bush. Fox News' Megyn Kelly asked Bush a straightforward, concise question: "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?" Bush's answer was an unhesitating yes. "I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody," Bush said, "and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got." "You don't think it was a mistake?" asked Kelly. "In retrospect, the intelligence that everybody saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty," Bush answered. Bush's view of the war is considerably less clear-eyed than that of his brother, former President George W. Bush, the man who ordered the invasion. In his memoir, Decision Points, W. wrestled with the dilemma of his decision to start a war on the basis of bad intelligence. Only W. did not call the intelligence "faulty," as Jeb had. W. called the intelligence "false." "The reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false," George W. Bush wrote. Even though W. still argued that the world is "undoubtedly safer" without Saddam Hussein, he knew the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that he used to justify the invasion was "a massive blow to our credibility — my credibility — that would shake the confidence of the American people." "I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it," George W. Bush wrote. "I still do." As for whether Hillary Clinton would have authorized the invasion "knowing what we know now" — it's hard to believe that Jeb Bush is serious when he says she would. Of course she wouldn't. Nor would others involved in the decision. For example, look at the account of another key player in the 2002-03 Iraq debate, top presidential advisor Karl Rove. "Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD?" Rove asked in his book, Courage and Consequence. "I doubt it: Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the threat of WMD. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change and deal with Iraq's horrendous human rights violations." So no, Congress would not have authorized war if lawmakers knew there were no WMDs. If Jeb Bush sticks to his position — that he would still authorize war knowing what we know today — it will represent a step backward for the Republican Party. Other candidates before Jeb have grappled with the issue and changed their position. Look at the evolution of the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. In January 2008, Romney said, "It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported it at the time; I support it now." In 2011, Romney said: "Well, if we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction — if somehow we had been given that information, why, obviously we would not have gone in." So now Jeb Bush takes a step back to support an invasion even in the absence of WMD. Jeb's statement is likely to resonate until he either changes his position or loses the race for the Republican nomination. Should he become the nominee, the issue will dog him into the general election campaign. To his credit, George W. Bush wrestled with the consequences of his decision to invade Iraq. Other war supporters were forced to re-think their positions, too. In coming days, Jeb Bush will likely have to do the same. Jeb Bush’s Revisionist History of the Iraq War <http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/jeb-bushs-revisionist-history-of-the-iraq-war/> // New York Times // Andrew Rosenthal - May 11, 2015 Last week, a spokesman for Jeb Bush, who used to be governor of Florida and is now vacuuming up as much dark money as he can without actually announcing a run for president, tried to unspin a comment Mr. Bush made in a private gathering that suggested he was taking advice about the Middle East from his brother, former President George W. Bush. Since it’s hard to think of a foreign-policy success by George Bush in that region, it was alarming that the would-be president would take his brother as his role model. Turns out it’s much worse. Jeb Bush doesn’t seem to have learned anything from his brother’s failures and he is blithely parroting the worst propaganda about the war in Iraq. Asked on Fox News (in an interview to be aired tonight) if he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq, knowing what the world now knows, Jeb Bush replied: “I would have and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.” Let’s leave aside for a moment that Mr. Bush has no clue what Mrs. Clinton would have done given her knowledge now about the lack of a security threat to the United States from weapons of mass destruction or anything else in Iraq. What he appears to be referring to is the fact that Mrs. Clinton, like most of the Senate, voted in favor of a war resolution after George W. Bush presented Congress with a National Intelligence Estimate that said Saddam Hussein had active programs in nuclear, chemical and biological warfare. The former president likes to say Congress had the “same intelligence” he had when they voted to authorize the war, which sounds good, but is not exactly true. George Bush decided to invade Iraq long before the National Intelligence Estimate was ever even drafted. Its purpose was not to inform policymaking, but to fool Congress, the United Nations, the American people and the rest of the world into supporting the war. The world now knows that the document was reverse-engineered to suit a policy that had already been created. The assessments of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs were wrong, and hotly disputed within the intelligence community at the time; the Bush administration just conveniently forgot to mention that to Congress. Mr. Bush said in his interview: “Once we invaded and took out Saddam Hussein we didn’t focus on security first,” a stunning understatement of the incompetent way Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld planned the invasion. Jeb Bush added that his brother “thinks those mistakes took place as well.” That may set a new standard for passive shifting of responsibility — even worse than the classic dodge, “mistakes were made.” All in the Family <http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/05/jeb_bush_is_embracing_his_brother_s_invasion_of_iraq_while_hillary_clinton.html> // Slate // Jamelle Bouie - May 11, 2015 Hillary Clinton is sprinting away from Bill. In the short month since she’s been an official candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, she’s renounced his criminal justice policies—pledging an end to the “era of mass incarceration” her husband helped usher—and adopted a careful skepticism on free trade, versus the enthusiasm of the Clinton administration. She hasn’t abandoned the former president—Bill will almost certainly campaign for Hillary—but she’s begun to put space between her career and his legacy. The other dynastic candidate in the presidential race, Jeb Bush, is moving in the opposite direction. “If you want to know who I listen to for advice, it’s him,” said Bush of his brother, President George W. Bush. In this instance, speaking to a group of Manhattan financiers, he was referencing his proposed policy toward Israel. But it’s clear Jeb has taken sibling wisdom on a variety of topics. Not only does he sound like his brother on immigration—he wants a path to “earned legal status” for 11 million unauthorized immigrants—but he’s on board with his foreign policy as well. When asked if, “knowing what we know now,” he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq, Jeb Bush said yes. “I would have,” he told Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, “and so would have Hillary Clinton,” he added. Because the question was whether Bush would go to war with today’s information—as opposed to 2002’s intelligence—this wasn’t really an answer. Clinton’s vote to authorize the war with the information she had doesn’t mean she would do the same with the information she now has (though, someone should ask). But that’s secondary to the astonishing fact that Bush has embraced the most disastrous choice of his brother’s administration. To that point, Kelly also asked if Bush thought the war was a mistake. And here, his reply was even more interesting. “In retrospect,” Bush said, “the intelligence that everybody saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty. And in retrospect, once we invaded and took out Saddam Hussein, we didn’t focus on security first, and the Iraqis, in this incredibly insecure environment turned on the United States military because there was no security for themselves and their families. By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place, as well? George W. Bush. So, news flash to the world, if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.” Either Bush is dodging the question—and looking for ground to defend his brother—or he doesn’t understand that the mistake of the war was the decision to launch it, not the shoddy aftermath. Even with a more competent administration in charge, it’s likely the Iraq war would have remained a disaster: a needless diversion against an overblown threat that claimed tens of thousands of lives, committed the United States to a long destructive occupation, and destabilized the Middle East in ways that still reverberate. And if Bush doesn’t grasp the error of the invasion, then he’s liable to make a similar mistake if elected president. Bush has to know this is toxic to the general public. Even with the gruesome violence of ISIS, pluralities—and sometimes majorities—of Americans oppose further major involvement in Iraq. Last June, in a poll from Quinnipiac University, 61 percent of Americans said the Iraq war was the wrong thing to do, and that October, in a poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 66 percent of Americans said the war was “not worth it.” But at this moment in the election, Bush isn’t speaking to the public. He’s speaking to Republicans. And even now, most Republicans think the war was a good idea. Last year, in a poll from USA Today and the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Republicans said it was “right to use” military force in Iraq. And in the aforementioned Quinnipiac survey, 56 percent of Republicans agreed that the war “was the right thing for the United States.” In that instance, Republicans were the only group to show majority support. If Bush were running unopposed—or with marginal opposition—there might not be an imperative to embrace the Iraq war. But he’s running in a crowded field of legitimate competitors, where most are hawkish (Sen. Rand Paul is the notable exception) and one, Sen. Marco Rubio, has the belligerent posturing of George W. Bush in his first term. In his 2010 campaign for Senate, Rubio praised the Iraq war for making the world “better off,” and in a 2013 speech in London, he called the war a “vitally important achievement” of America’s relationship with the United Kingdom. He’s pushed interventions in Syria (he would have armed the rebels), opposed withdrawal in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wants a more aggressive stance toward Iran. As Eliana Johnson wrote for National Review last year, Rubio is the neoconservative candidate for 2016: “To this group, beating back the rising tide of non-interventionism in the Republican party is a top priority, and they consider Rubio a candidate, if not the candidate, capable of doing so.” You can chalk up Jeb Bush’s Iraq position to familial loyalty, if you want. But you shouldn’t ignore the politics of it. Bush needs to distinguish himself from a younger, more popular competitor in a congested presidential field. Embracing the Iraq war—and his brother’s legacy on foreign policy—is one way to challenge Rubio on his own turf, at least among donors and elites. Likewise, over on the left, Clinton is rejecting the triangulation of her husband and adopting progressive positions on criminal justice and immigration reform, to bolster her position and preclude a repeat of the 2008 primary. Most observers assumed Clinton and Bush would be forced to make some moves because of the political legacy of family members. What’s ironic is that they’ve moved opposite of expectations. Bill Clinton is among the most popular presidents of recent memory, and George W. Bush is among the most disliked. But Hillary, eager to define herself and reconstitute the Obama coalition, has distanced herself from her husband while Jeb, fighting to build stature in a melee of a Republican primary, has pulled closer to his unsuccessful brother. PolitFact NH: Jeb Bush says he met NH man who founded only U.S. bank since Dodd-Frank <http://www.concordmonitor.com/news/politics/16828828-95/politfact-nh-jeb-bush-says-he-met-nh-man-who-founded-only-us-bank> // Concord Monitor // Clay Wirestone - May 10, 2015 At an appearance in Concord in mid-April, former Florida governor Jeb Bush talked banking -- and the legislation meant to reform it. “On my last trip to New Hampshire I think I met the guy who founded the first and only bank since Dodd-Frank passed, since the financial crisis,” Bush said at his speech at Saint Anselm College’s Politics and Eggs event April 17. “One bank in the country.” The banking reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank became law on July 21, 2010, nearly five years ago. We decided to look into Bush’s statement that only one bank had been founded since that time. We checked with Bush’s camp and according to spokesman Matt Gorman, Bush met with businessman Bill Grenier when he was in the state March 14. Greiner, of Bedford, filed last year with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to charter an entirely new bank named Primary Bank. “We’re going against the grain, and we’re okay with that because we see a need,” he told the Wall Street Journal in December. So would Primary Bank be the nation’s “first and only” since Dodd-Frank? Not exactly. Depending on the data set you choose, it’s either the second, fourth, ninth or 20th. The Journal and other media sources have said the first bank founded after the law’s passage is in fact the Bank of Bird-in-Hand, Pa. It mainly serves the area’s Amish community. And yes, it includes a drive-through window for horse-and-buggy. This was included in the information forwarded to us by Bush’s spokesman. But we decided to ask the FDIC itself. Greg Hernandez, an agency spokesman, offered further details. First, off, when Bush and others talk about new banks, they’re referring to de novo banks, or banks issued a new charter by the agency. Not counting Grenier’s startup, the FDIC actually lists three banks issued charters since 2010. The oldest, Lakeside Bank of Lake Charles, La., had its charter approved in October 2009, before Dodd-Frank’s passage. But the charter wasn’t consummated until late July 2010, after the bill was signed into law. The next bank on the FDIC’s list is Start Community Bank of New Haven, Conn. While its charter was approved in December 2010, the bank itself says its origins date to 2004, with the founding of its parent company. The Bird-in-Hand bank’s charter was both approved and consummated in November 2013. It seems fair to call Primary Bank the second of all-new bank approved by the FDIC since Dodd Frank’s passage. But if you include the two others that the agency itself lists, Primary Bank would come in fourth. The FDIC lists five other banks as having been established since mid-2010, including one in Kansas City, Mo.; Brockton, Mass,; and Easley, S.C., according to Hernandez. These banks, however, didn’t apply for new charters. “Other banks can be established through a shelf charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,” Hernandez wrote in an e-mail. “That would be when a private equity group purchases a failed bank. Also, (newly) established banks can be the result of a merger or acquisition.” If you use that criteria, and include the five other banks mentioned, Primary Bank would be the ninth bank started after Dodd-Frank. And finally, while they’re not called banks and are regulated by a different agency, consumers generally see credit unions as the equivalent of banks (and credit unions are affected by the law, too). According to John Fairbanks of the National Credit Union Administration, there have been at least 11 credit union charters approved since the start of 2011. That would make Primary Bank at least the 14th and at most the 20th such institution started since Dodd Frank overhauled the banking industry. None of these different contexts would make Grenier’s bank the first one established since the passage of Dodd-Frank. And there’s the implication that new banks aren’t being created because of Dodd-Frank, which raises the question: What does the law actually do, and why is it important? The full name of the law is the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and it passed on July 15, 2010. President Obama signed it into law on July 21. While the financial crisis mentioned by Bush predated the law by a couple of years, Dodd-Frank itself has been fiercely criticized by Republicans, who say it stifles growth in the financial sector. The law itself was meant to prevent another financial meltdown like that of 2008-9. According to an overview from CNBC, the law was meant to avoid banks becoming “too big to fail,” regulate risky trading and created new oversight bodies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The banking industry blames the law, in part, for the lack of new banks. Frank Keating, president and CEO of the American Bankers Association, criticized government regulations on the financial sector in a recent column for The Hill. After mentioning the New Hampshire bank, he gets down to business. “Investors are reluctant to shoulder the cumulative regulatory burdens -- both from new laws and from a more stringent approach by regulators themselves -- and the rising legal risks associated with running a bank these days.” Keating doesn’t mention Dodd-Frank by name, but the implication is clear. He also highlights the dropoff of bank creation post-2010, pointing out that “the average from 2002 to 2008 was closer to 100” per year. According to a Motley Fool explainer piece, “between 1990 and 2006, the FDIC approved an average of 152 bank and thrift charters a year.” That being said, there isn’t universal agreement that regulation is behind the drop in new bank creation. Keating acknowledges that in his column, noting toward the end that “the low interest rate environment is challenging for bank startups. And the number of banks has been steadily falling for decades due to a wave of mergers and acquisitions.” According to a report from the Richmond Federal Reserve bank, there could be several factors at work. One is the Federal Reserve’s policy of keeping interest rates low. That lowers interest rates overall, making it harder for banks to earn money. (The Motley Fool suggests that’s the main reason for the drop.) The research raises the possibility that the cost of complying with regulations has gone up, but says “it is unclear” whether that is driving down the creation of new banks. Finally, though, it mentions that the FDIC itself has changed its policies for new banks, in a move that predates the passage of Dodd-Frank. “In 2009 the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation increased the length of time -- from three to seven years -- during which newly insured depository institutions are subject to higher capital requirements and more frequent examinations,” the paper’s authors write. Our ruling Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said “I met the guy who founded the first and only bank since Dodd-Frank passed, since the financial crisis. One bank in the country.” He’s certainly got a point that there has been a sharp dropoff of newly chartered banks since Dodd-Frank became law in the summer of 2010, but it’s incorrect to say Primary Bank would be the first in the country. There is at least one other in the nation, and possibly several more. It is certainly the first bank chartered in New Hampshire during that time. The suggestion that Dodd-Frank has caused the drop-off in new bank formation is also debatable. While regulation has perhaps played a role, FDIC policies set before the law’s passage may have had a more direct effect. And the overall economic picture, with incredibly low interest rates, has simply made it difficult for banks to make money. We rate Bush’s statement Mostly False. First on CNN: Ted Cruz to host fundraiser along U.S.-Mexico border <http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/11/politics/ted-cruz-election-2016-rio-grande-valley-fundraiser/index.html> // CNN Politics // Theodore Schleifer - May 11, 2015 Washington (CNN) Ted Cruz will raise money for his presidential campaign along the U.S.-Mexico border next month. The Texas senator -- who has made beefing up border security a calling card of his presidential campaign -- will visit McAllen, Texas, for a $1,000-a-head fundraiser on June 9, according to an invitation obtained by CNN. Cruz deplores the White House's executive actions on immigration and has proposed tripling the size of the U.S. Border Patrol. On the stump, he frequently jokes about staffing the border with reassigned Internal Revenue Service agents. "Imagine you had traveled thousands of miles in the blazing sun. You're swimming across the Rio Grande and the first thing you see is 90,000 IRS agents. You'd turn around and go home too," Cruz said to applause at the South Carolina Freedom Summit this weekend. Cruz has been criticized by local officials and business leaders for speaking extensively about the border but visiting relatively infrequently. Steve Ahlenius, the head of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, told the Texas Tribune earlier this year that too many politicians like Cruz prioritize "parachuting" in over spending meaningful time on the ground. "They don't come in with viable solutions that really kind of take into account the feedback, comments and ideas coming from the local area, as opposed to what they think someone in Iowa is going to want to hear," he said. The Rio Grande Valley, a Democratic stronghold in a solidly Republican state, is about 90% Hispanic and is currently represented by only Democrats in Austin and Washington. Hidalgo County, where Cruz will raise money next month, gave 70% of its vote in 2012 to Barack Obama. Much of the early money Cruz has raised has come from Texas, even though the state's business community was originally hostile to him when he first entered the political scene. The Republican firebrand has worked hard to win over much of the state's traditional donor base, but he now finds serious competition from a crowded field of presidential candidates with ties to the Lone Star State, led by Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. The Cruz campaign declined to confirm the event to CNN. Rand Paul Plans To Filibuster Patriot Act <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/11/rand-paul-filibuster-patriot-act_n_7258460.html> // Huffington Post // Igor Bobic – May 11, 2015 Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said this week that he intends to mount a fight against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the post-Sept. 11 law that gives the National Security Agency much of its authority to conduct surveillance programs. "I'm going to lead the charge in the next couple of weeks as the Patriot Act comes forward. We will be filibustering. We will be trying to stop it. We are not going to let them run over us," Paul told the New Hampshire Union Leader on Monday. The Patriot Act expires June 1, but Congress must effectively renew the law by May 22nd because of a scheduled weeklong break. Paul, a civil libertarian who hopes to capture the 2016 Republican nomination for president, has consistently spoken against reauthorizing the law, going so far as to oppose a 2014 bill that would have ended controversial NSA phone record collection because it left the government's broad authority to conduct surveillance intact. It's unclear whether Paul plans to vote to block reauthorizing the surveillance law, or whether he intends to mount a traditional "talking" filibuster that would eat up valuable time on the Senate floor. A request with the senator's spokesperson for more details was not immediately returned. The Kentucky Republican isn't the only member of the Senate with objections to the Patriot Act. On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who is one of the most persistent critics of U.S. surveillance programs, has said that he, too, plans to wage war over some of the law's most controversial provisions. In an interview with MSNBC on Sunday, Wyden threatened to mount a filibuster if Congress reauthorizes Section 215 of the act, upon which the government has built its rationale for the bulk data collection revealed in 2013 by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Wyden and Paul have teamed up on national security issues in the past. In 2013, the senator from Oregon lent his voice to Paul's filibuster of the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director. A request for comment with a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is a strong supporter of the Patriot Act, was not immediately returned on Monday. Rand Paul Battles the PATRIOT Act (and Fellow Senators Who Miss Votes) <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-11/rand-paul-battles-the-patriot-act-and-fellow-senators-who-miss-votes-> // Bloomberg // David Weigel - May 11, 2015 Last night, before arriving for a short and busy visit to New Hampshire, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul published an op-ed in Manchester's conservative Union Leader newspaper. "As President of the United States, I will immediately end the NSA’s illegal bulk data collection and domestic spying programs," said Paul. "I will take my responsibilities seriously and protect the Fourth Amendment rights of all Americans. I believe the overreaching NSA spying program represents the worst of the 'Washington Machine.'" He'd touched on some of the same themes Saturday, on a visit to San Francisco. Paul, having been accused of a light touch when drone strikes and police brutality were forced into the news cycle, was taking the opposite approach to the NSA. He would talk about it whenever he could, and focus on the June battle over whether to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act. Before his big public event of the day in Londonderry, Paul joined a small group of New Hampshire state legislators who planned to endorse him. They wanted to hear his critique of the NSA. As soon as he arrived at the Londonderry Lions Club, Paul walked into a scrum of waiting cameramen and started talking about how a New York court's ruling against the NSA's bulk metadata collection would define his race. "I'm the only Republican and the only Democrat who said I'd end this program on day one," said Paul. "It's illegal. We can catch terrorists by using the Constitution. We can use warrants, with a judge writing the warrant, with someone's name on the warrant." Inside the Lions Club, Paul gave a truncated stump speech to around 100 voters, several of whom had been in the crowd for his April campaign announcement speech, just down the road. "We're getting ready to have a big fight over the PATRIOT Act," said Paul. "I was walking down the hallway with another senator, three years ago, when I led the fight to get rid of the PATRIOT Act. He said, 'What will happen? It will expire tonight? If you filibuster, it will expire.'" One voter started applauding, even before Paul's punchline. "I said: 'Maybe for a few hours, we can just use the Constitution!'" Paul's town hall queries veered from common core to VA hospital funding to Social Security, but it ended with a question about spying. James Bellamy, a 28-year old law student at Western New England University, asked Paul if he'd vote for the USA FREEDOM Act. Some libertarian-minded Republicans, like Representative Justin Amash, were already promising to oppose that bill, a supposed fix to the data collection program that allowed the government to make bulk requests through alternate means. "I sued the NSA," said Paul. "I'm a leader in trying to stop this. My bill would end it, and not replace it. The USA FREEDOM Act ends it, but then replaces it with another program. My concern is whether or not they'll have individualized suspicion to get your records. USA FREEDOM says the government is not going to collect your records in Utah, but the government can get them from the phone company. I'm okay with the government getting them from the phone company if they have your name on the warrant. I'm not okay with them saying, we need everybody in Londonderry's stuff, so even though it's not being held in Utah, they can get in from the phone company." The answer to Bellamy's question wasn't easy. "I'm not perfectly at home with the USA FREEDOM Act," Paul said. "I voted against it once. The reason I voted against it was that it reauthorized the PATRIOT Act." In other words, Paul's vote would depend on the Senate's debate. That was where he'd be heading next—to the Senate, to debate. Before Paul even took questions, State Senator Andy Sanborn, an early endorser, made joking reference to Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. "We don't want to mention anyone else who might be living in Texas or in Florida," said Sanborn, explaining why Paul might have to run out early. "He's actually going to go back and do his job as a senator and vote." On the way to the pick-up truck that would spirit Paul to the airport, NH1 reporter Paul Steinhauser asked Paul if he agreed with Sanborn's snark. "I get paid by the taxpayer, and I figure I need to vote, so I'm working very hard to do this and also vote at the same time," Paul said. "I'll not only be back there for a vote this afternoon, I'll be back and voting and leading the effort against the PATRIOT Act, and leading the vote to try to end bulk collection of your phone records." Rand Paul supports bird flu role of agency he tried to cut <http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/11/rand-paul-usda-bird-flu/27110857/> // USA Today // Christopher Doering - May 11, 2015 WASHINGTON — Presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul as recently as 2013 proposed cutting an Agriculture Department agency responsible for studying the spread of poultry diseases such as bird flu, a virus that has killed millions of birds in Iowa the past two weeks. Paul, a Kentucky Republican, had proposed budget plans as recently as two years ago that backed scrapping the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Agricultural Research Service, which includes a division responsible for studying ways to predict, treat and control poultry diseases. Steve Grubbs, Paul's chief Iowa strategist, declined to address specific spending reductions at the USDA or whether the senator continues to support cutting those agencies as he has in past budget proposals. But Grubbs said Paul favors the government playing an active role in working with farmers to combat bird flu because the virus has spread throughout several states. As a result, the outbreak triggers what's known as the commerce clause in the Constitution, effectively giving the government the power to get involved, he said. "Sen. Paul recognizes that there are important programs in the USDA related to food safety and disease control that need to be protected and potentially enhanced," said Grubbs. Bird flu and other diseases are "a perfect place for the USDA and other federal agencies to play a role." Former Lt. Gov. Patty Judge brought the budget items to the attention of the Des Moines Register. On May 1, Gov. Terry Branstad declared a state of emergency in Iowa — an action that could help state agencies assist in the disposal of birds stricken by the virus. The virus, which can kill a poultry flock within 48 hours, has struck in 14 states. In Iowa, more than two dozen cases of avian influenza have been identified, affecting an estimated 20 million birds that have been infected or must be destroyed to contain the disease. Government officials are still trying to determine how the disease is spreading and find ways to bring it under control. Paul has pushed for smaller government, sparring with some GOP leaders during his first term in the Senate, blaming them for being part of the problem. Political analysts believe that if elected president, Paul would move to cut the federal government. He has proposed eliminating several Cabinet-level departments including Commerce, Education and Energy. A spokesman with the USDA declined to comment on Paul's previously proposed cuts. Ed Schafer, a former agriculture secretary in the George W. Bush administration and a one-time governor of North Dakota, said agencies such as the Agricultural Research Service are especially vulnerable when lawmakers are looking to rein in spending because their results are difficult to measure right away. Research programs, he said, are vital to helping agriculture thrive by discovering new advancements in yields, improving water management and finding ways for crops to handle weeds and pests. "I'm all for Rand Paul's efforts to say we need to trim the cost of government. What the trick is is identifying the priorities and putting the money there," Schafer said. "(Research) is an easy one to cut because there is no immediate benefit seen. It comes in minute, little advances but over the long-term you increase the food supply, you make it safer and more affordable. Research, to me, is more important than some other programs." Ken Blanchard, a professor of political science at Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., said it's almost impossible to remove or drastically overhaul a Cabinet department. He noted that President Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency in 1980 by promising to abolish the Education Department, which was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter a year earlier. "Cabinet agencies are like Dracula. No matter how many times you draw the stake in their heart or expose them to light they are always back again for the next movie," Blanchard said. "You've got so many vested interests that the agency manages to put its tendrils into in so many parts of the rest of the country and various private interests. It's just almost impossible" to make a major change to a Cabinet department, he said. Rand Paul’s ‘Fast Track’ Dilemma <http://www.wsj.com/articles/rand-pauls-fast-track-dilemma-1431387236> // WSJ // Bob Davis – May 11, 2015 Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has emerged as a top spokesman for a view on trade legislation that could complicate President Barack Obama’s push to pass a major Pacific trade pact. The 2016 presidential candidate says he is a “big believer in free trade” but has qualms about the legislation, known as fast track, designed to help pass major trade deals with limited involvement by the Senate. Some other Republicans are expressing similar misgivings in both the House and Senate. With a key Senate procedural vote on fast track set for Tuesday, Mr. Paul is in the crosshairs as groups on both sides of the issue vie for his vote. Last week he said he hadn’t made up his mind on fast track. But on Monday, Mr. Paul told WMUR in New Hampshire that he opposed fast track, in part, because of his frustration about the secrecy surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “I’ve told leadership I’m a ‘no’ vote on trade promotion authority,” Mr. Paul told the station, according to an account on WMUR.com. “I’m hesitant to give blanket authority on stuff we haven’t seen.” He said he might be persuaded in the future to back fast track if he approved of provisions in the TPP. At a Heritage Foundation forum earlier this year, he indicated sympathy for arguments that the procedure weakens congressional authority and that trade pacts should be treated like treaties—meaning they would need a two-thirds majority of the Senate for approval, as opposed to the simple majority the Pacific pact requires. His business allies in Kentucky and elsewhere are strong fast-track supporters, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has made winning his vote a priority. “His vote is important, given his credibility with conservative-leaning folks,” said Christopher Wenk, the Chamber’s executive director of international policy. The Chamber is working with four big Kentucky business organizations to woo Sen. Paul. But many of Mr. Paul’s grass-roots supporters are trade skeptics—and outright hostile to fast track. In a late April Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, Paul supporters by a 41% to 36% margin said free trade had hurt the U.S. With Mr. Paul, “you have mixed elements and motivations,” said conservative legal scholar Bruce Fein, a Paul adviser who opposes fast track. “He’s an unorthodox candidate.” President Obama is trying to rally Democratic support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. What would this trade pact do? How is Mr. Obama answering critics from within his own party? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer. Under fast track, formally called trade promotion authority, Congress agrees to vote yes or no on a trade pact but not to amend it. All major trade deals for decades have passed Congress that way. That is because trade partners won’t reveal their bottom lines in negotiations if they think Congress could step in afterward and rewrite the contents of a trade deal. With fast track, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman has said, the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes the U.S., Vietnam and Japan, could be concluded in a few months. But a number of conservative lawmakers, even those who say they back trade expansion, oppose fast track as an abrogation of congressional power. GOP Rep. Steve Russell of Oklahoma, who calls himself a “constitutional conservative,” says opening up trade is “not a bad thing,” but won’t vote for fast track. Rep. Walter Jones (R., N.C.), who opposes fast track, called Mr. Paul the “national spokesman on the issue of sovereignty.” Four Senate Republicans opposed fast track when it last came before Congress under President George W. Bush. Two other GOP 2016 presidential candidates, Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, both back fast track. Mr. Paul’s openness to free trade and the Pacific pact has made him a target of intense business lobbying. The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce is dispatching a top representative, Bryan Sunderland, to make a personal appeal, as well as asking its members to lobby Mr. Paul themselves. “Our hope is that when he hears from Kentucky business leaders who have been with him for years, that will resonate,” said Trey Grayson, president of the North Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, which also is lobbying Sen Paul. But the squeeze is coming from the other side, too. One Paul supporter, Robert Berry of Broomfield, Colo., who calls himself a libertarian activist, said fast track could be a “make or break vote” for Mr. Paul. “It seems a little cute that you’d be for a [trade] pact that much of your base despises, but you are wavering on legislation that would make it a reality,” Mr. Berry said. Rand Paul Campaign Takes a Licking in New Hampshire <http://time.com/3854594/rand-paul-licking-video/> // TIME // Philip Elliott - May 11, 2015 It’s unlikely many people in the audience at a New Hampshire town hall meeting noticed anything amiss Monday. But a 90-second confrontation between an aide to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and a Democratic operative jumped out immediately online. As shown in the brief video, a tussle between the two ended with the Paul staffer licking the camera. “Just when you thought Rand Paul’s campaign couldn’t get any stranger, his senior staffer in New Hampshire decided to taste our tracker’s camera lens today,” said Preston Maddock, a spokesman for American Bridge 21st Century, the liberal group that had sent the operative. “It was truly bizarre, creepy and unprofessional.” Despite American Bridge’s indignation, it was exactly the type of moment they were looking for: embarrassing, awkward and buzzworthy. Opposition researchers, as the practitioners call themselves, have long been part of campaigns, digging up dirt on rivals and passing it to reporters and activists. But in recent years, they’ve become active participants as well, sending one-person camera crews to document as many of the rival candidates’ campaign stops as possible and maybe even unintentionally provoke them. The same American Bridge tracker from the New Hampshire town hall last chased former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown as he canoed on the Contoocook River during his failed attempt to return to the Senate representing New Hampshire. It’s an equal opportunity pastime. American Bridge and its Republican counterpart, America Rising, are each million-dollar organizations dedicated to documenting the stumbles of the presidential candidates and those around them. The goal is to discredit the candidates to voters and to amplify their errors with raw footage of candidates behaving oddly. The biggest catch—and one that only encouraged the trend—was in August of 2006, when then-Sen. George Allen of Virginia introduced his audience to a tracker from Democratic rival Jim Webb’s campaign. The tracker’s name? S.R. Sidarth. “This fella here, over here with the yellow shirt—Macaca, or whatever his name is—he’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere,” said Allen, who went on to lose to Webb. Critics said “macaca” was a slur against the tracker, who is Indian-American. Other campaigns and political parties quickly identified the value of sending a staffer to tail rivals with a video camera, just in case they fumbled or responded to harassing questions. The addition of YouTube and other video sharing services only hastened the ease with which campaigns could share video to supporters and reporters alike. It has changed how candidates interact with voters and reporters alike. In 2010, Senate hopeful Sharron Angle fled journalists in Reno. Trackers from the Nevada Democratic Party documented the Republican’s refusal to answer questions from reporters. The video of reporters chasing Angle from an event, and her speeding away in a white SUV, reinforced opponents’ arguments that she was not up for the job. In 2012, Republican Rep. Allen West of Florida was asked during a town hall appearance how many lawmakers were Marxists or socialists. West took the question seriously: “There’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party that are members of the Communist Party.” The local news carried his comments, but the addition of video—easily shared online—made it a topic on social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. West narrowly lost his re-election bid. Candidates can even get in trouble for trying to avoid confrontation. In 2014, as cameras rolled, immigration activists confronted Paul while he was campaigning in Iowa with Rep. Steve King. The activists, who were brought to the country illegally as young children and want to be treated as citizens now, confronted King about his views on immigration. Paul, who was sitting across from King, looked to communications aide Sergio Gor. Taking his cue, Paul put down his burger, pushed back his plastic picnic chair and walked quickly away from the table. King, meanwhile, stayed and sparred with the DREAMer. The video quickly ricocheted around the Internet. American Bridge officials were hoping Monday’s licking incident would have similar viewership. Asked about Mondays incident, Gor declined to identify the licker or say if he worked for the campaign in an official capacity. Instead, he issued a statement completely unrelated to the incident. “Sen. Rand Paul visited New Hampshire today to accept the endorsement of 20 New Hampshire state representatives who support his run for the White House, and to visit with and take questions from the voters,” Gor said. “It was a great day of events.” Chris Christie Racked Up $300k of Food and Alcohol on Expense Account <http://time.com/3853598/chris-christie-expense-account-new-jersey/> // TIME // Sam Frizell - May 11, 2015 New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spent $300,000 of a government state allowance over five years in office to buy food, alcoholic drinks and desserts, according to a new analysis of state records. In addition to his $175,000 salary, Christie receives $95,000 a year for purposes vaguely defined in the state budget for official purposes like state receptions, operating an official residence, or other expenses. And numbers published by local website New Jersey Watchdog show Christie, a Republican presidential hopeful, took full advantage of the stipend over his five years as governor. He spent $76,373 during 53 shopping runs at Wegmans Food Markets, and $11,971 in purchases at ShopRite supermarkets during 51 visits, in addition to another $6,536 in seven visits to ShopRite’s liquor stores. The site is published by the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. All the food purchases were for official purposes, an aide in Christie’s office said, including receptions and general upkeep at the governor’s mansion. During the 2010 and 2011 NFL football seasons, Christie also spent a total of $82,594 at the MetLife Stadium, where the New York’s Giants and Jets play their home games. The New Jersey Republican State Committee later reimbursed the money Christie spent at MetLife to the state. Gov. Christie’s office said the money was used for official political functions to host dignitaries and legislators. “Whenever the Governor hosts an event in his official capacity, the discretionary account is available to pay for those costs associated with official reception and hosting and related incidental expenses,” said Christie’s press secretary Kevin Roberts in a statement. “Nonetheless in early 2012, the Governor made the decision that costs associated with hosting at the sporting venues were better paid with non-state funds, and those expenses incurred during 2010 and 2011 were reimbursed by the NJGOP.” Christie every year returns leftover funds from the $95,000 allowance to the state. The amount Christie returned annually to the state increased from $2,716 in 2010 to $30,377 last year. Marco Rubio Pushes Extension of NSA Phone Metadata Program <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-11/marco-rubio-pushes-extension-of-nsa-phone-metadata-program> // Bloomberg // Ali Elkin - May 11, 2015 Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio continued his tough talk on national security on Sunday, saying the risk of a terrorist attack in the United States is at a post-9/11 high. Arguing for an extension of the National Security Agency's phone metadata program in light of threats like those from the Islamic State, the Florida senator wrote in a USA Today op-ed, “The government is not listening to your phone calls or recording them unless you are a terrorist or talking to a terrorist outside the United States.” He added, “There is not a single documented case of abuse of this program.” His comments follow a Saturday appearance at the South Carolina Freedom Summit, where he emphasized a hard line on terrorism. “Have you seen the movie Taken? Liam Neeson. He had a line, and this is what our strategy should be: 'We will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you,'” said Rubio, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence, at the cattle call for White House hopefuls. As Bloomberg's Bob Van Voris reported last week, a recent federal appeals court ruling against the data collection comes as the Patriot Act’s Section 215, “under which intelligence agencies have justified the phone surveillance, is set to expire June 1 unless Congress passes a bill backed by Senate Republicans to extend it through the end of 2020. Because the court didn’t rule on the program’s constitutionality, lawmakers could choose to amend the act to explicitly authorize the data collection.” We Can’t Turn To The Leaders Of Yesterday <https://medium.com/@marcorubio/we-can-t-turn-to-the-leaders-of-yesterday-485c03126602> // Medium // Marco Rubio - May 11, 2015 You’ve seen “A New American Century” everywhere since I announced for President. But what does that really mean? Let me tell you. Families are working harder than ever, but living paycheck to paycheck. Students are doing exactly what we told them to do and getting a college education. Yet they are graduating with mountains of debt and a degree that has no career path. The news says evil is winning and we are less capable than ever to stop it. Is it decline? Is it the normal course of history? No. It’s a direct result of our leaders who have trapped us in the past. Leaders from yesterday still believe in outdated economic policies. They have forgotten one of the timeless truths of our world: Jobs and prosperity are tied to our ability to compete internationally. Today we face a fundamental economic transformation that leaves us with a choice. We can embrace the future or be left behind by history. In the New American Century we will reform our tax code and update our economic policies to make America the best place in the world to work, start a business and cultivate innovation. It’s time to leave yesterday behind. Scott Walker Helps Journalists in Wisconsin Cover His Trip to Israel <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/05/11/scott-walker-helps-journalists-in-wisconsin-cover-his-trip-to-israel/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Politics&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body> // NYT- First Draft // Nick Corasanti – May 11, 2015 Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was adamant that his trip to Israel this week be a “listening tour” that focused exclusively on Israel, not about his presidential-campaign-in-waiting. “We wanted to make it an educational focus, not just a media trip,” he told reporters before he left. That meant no reporters, no video cameras, no photographers, nada. Just Mr. Walker, his team and members of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a pro-Israeli group heavily financed by the casino billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson. That doesn’t mean they want the news media at home to be left in the dark, however. Mr. Walker has been sharing photographs and updates from his Twitter account. And Matt Brooks, the coalition’s executive director, has been posting pictures of Mr. Walker’s tour on Twitter as well. What Ben Carson's Flat Tax Would Do to the Poor <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-11/what-ben-carson-s-flat-tax-would-do-to-the-poor> // Bloomberg // Peter Coy – May 11, 2015 Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson told Fox News Sunday that it's "very condescending" to poor people to tax them at lower rates than rich people. He called for a flat tax along the lines of a biblical tithe, in which rich and poor alike pay a tenth or so of their income in taxes. "Now, some people say it's not fair because, you know, the poor people can't afford to pay that dollar," Carson told host Chris Wallace. "That's very condescending. You know, I grew up very poor. I’ve experienced every economic level. And I can tell you that poor people have pride, too. And they don't want to be just taken care of," Carson said. What does economics have to say about Carson's flat tax? It's hard to say because the retired neurosurgeon (profiled here by Bloomberg Politics) hasn't fleshed out his concept. Also because "very condescending" isn't a term that economists use very often. What's sometimes forgotten is that there's no giant increase in taxes when your income climbs. One thing is indisputable: An unadulterated flat tax—which Carson may or may not favor—would raise taxes on the poor and reduce them on the rich. That would almost certainly decrease net national happiness. The reason is obvious: People who are just barely getting by, living from paycheck to paycheck, would find it very hard to pay more in taxes than they do now. People who make a lot of money have far more breathing room. They may not enjoy paying the taxes they pay now, but paying any given dollar in tax is easier for them than it is for someone at the bottom of the income scale. The implication is that the benefit to them of paying less tax would be less than the loss to the poor of paying more. (This is the economic concept of "marginal utility.") The theory of the flat tax is that it preserves incentives to work and invest because people don't have to pay punishingly high rates on each extra dollar of income. What's sometimes forgotten is that there's no giant increase in taxes when your income climbs into a new bracket. You pay the highest rate only on the portion of income that's above the threshold. The rest of your income continues to be taxed at lower rates—which are detailed here. There are ways to keep a flat tax from pinching the poor. One is to create a generous per-person exemption—so, for example, the first $25,000 of income per person isn't subject to tax. The granddaddy of flat taxes, proposed in the early 1980s by Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka of the Hoover Institution, provided that the first $25,500 of wage and pension income for a family of four would be tax-free. A more complicated way is to exempt from the flat tax certain necessities such as food and medicine. Carson may have some kind of break for the poor such as these in mind. If so he didn't tell Chris Wallace. "It’s a distinct possibility that he hasn’t fully developed his tax plan," says Tax Foundation economist Kyle Pomerleau. Whether an unadulterated flat tax would be less "condescending" to the poor than today's tax code is more of a value judgment than an economic question. The staff of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation—which serves both Republicans and Democrats in Congress—delved into questions of fairness in a March 3 report called "Fairness and Tax Policy" (available for download here). Carly Fiorina Changes Mind On Amending Constitution To Bar Same-Sex Marriage <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/11/carly-fiorina-marriage_n_7260282.html> // Huffington Post // Amanda Terkel – May 11, 2015 Scott Olson via Getty Images GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said she does not support amending the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, a reversal of a position she held a few years ago. "I think the Supreme Court ruling will become the law of the land, and however much I may agree or disagree with it, I wouldn't support an amendment to reserve it," Fiorina said Saturday. "I very much hope that we would come to a place now in this nation where we can support their decision and at the same time support people to have, to hold religious views and to protect their right to exercise those views." The former Hewlett-Packard CEO made her comments in an interview with the conservative blog Caffeinated Thoughts after a speech to the Dallas County Republicans in West Des Moines, Iowa. As Right Wing Watch noted, Fiorina previously supported such an amendment. While running for Senate in 2010, Fiorina filled out a Christian Coalition survey and indicated that she backed a federal marriage amendment. Although Republican support for marriage equality is growing, the GOP presidential candidates still oppose it. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently introduced two bills to stop same-sex marriage, including one that would establish a constitutional amendment to protect states that define marriage as being between one man and one woman from legal action. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who is exploring a run for president, has said that although he personally does not support same-sex marriage, he has little appetite for working to repeal it. TOP NEWS DOMESTIC Administration Gives Conditional Approval for Shell to Drill in Arctic <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/white-house-gives-conditional-approval-for-shell-to-drill-in-arctic.html?smid=tw-share> // New York Times // Coral Davenport - May 11, 2015 WASHINGTON — The Obama administration gave conditional approval on Monday for Shell Gulf of Mexico, Inc. to start drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean this summer. The approval is a major victory for Shell and the rest of the petroleum industry, which has sought for years to drill in the remote waters of the Chukchi seas, which are believed to hold vast reserves of oil and gas. “We have taken a thoughtful approach to carefully considering potential exploration in the Chukchi Sea, recognizing the significant environmental, social and ecological resources in the region and establishing high standards for the protection of this critical ecosystem, our Arctic communities, and the subsistence needs and cultural traditions of Alaska Natives,” Abigail Ross Hopper, director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said in a statement. “As we move forward, any offshore exploratory activities will continue to be subject to rigorous safety standards.” The Interior Department decision is a devastating blow to environmentalists, who have pressed the Obama administration to reject proposals for offshore Arctic drilling. Environmentalists say that a drilling accident in the icy and treacherous Arctic waters could have far more devastating consequences than the deadly Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010, when an oil rig explosion killed 11 men and sent millions of barrels of oil spewing into the water. The move came just four months after the Obama administration opened up a portion of the Atlantic coast to new offshore drilling, adding a new chapter to the president’s environmental legacy. On some fronts, President Obama has pursued the most ambitious environmental agenda of any president, issuing new regulations intended to curb climate change, working toward an international global warming accord, and using his executive powers to put public lands off-limits from development. But he has also sought to balance those moves by opening up untouched federal waters to new oil and gas drilling. The Interior Department’s approval of the drilling was conditional on Shell’s receiving approval of a series of remaining drilling permits for the project. “The approval of our Revised Chukchi Sea Exploration Plan is an important milestone and signals the confidence regulators have in our plan,” said Curtis Smith, a spokesman for Shell. “However, before operations can begin this summer, it’s imperative that the remainder of our permits be practical, and delivered in a timely manner. In the meantime, we will continue to test and prepare our contractors, assets and contingency plans against the high bar stakeholders and regulators expect of an Arctic operator.” Environmental groups denounced the move and said that Shell had not demonstrated that it can drill safely in the Arctic Ocean. Both industry and environmental groups say that the Chukchi Sea is one of the most dangerous places in the world to drill. The area is extremely remote, with no roads connecting to major cities or deep water ports within hundreds of miles — which makes it difficult for clean-up and rescue workers to get to the site in case of an accident. The closest Coast Guard station with equipment for responding to a spill is over 1,000 miles away. The weather is extreme, with major storms, icy waters, and waves up to 50 feet high. The sea is also a major migration route and feeding area for marine mammals, including bowhead whales and walruses. “Once again, our government has rushed to approve risky and ill-conceived exploration in one of the most remote and important places on Earth,” said Susan Murray, a vice president of Oceana, an environmental group. “Shell’s need to validate its poorly planned investment in the U.S. Arctic Ocean is not a good reason for the government to allow the company to put our ocean resources at risk. Shell has not shown that it is prepared to operate responsibly in the Arctic Ocean, and neither the company nor our government has been willing to fully and fairly evaluate the risks of Shell’s proposal.” The Obama administration had initially granted Shell a permit to begin offshore Arctic drilling in the summer of 2012. However, the company’s first forays into exploring the new waters were plagued with numerous safety and operational problems. Two of its oil rigs ran aground and had to be towed to safety. In 2013, the Interior Department said the company could not resume drilling until all safety issues were addressed. In a review of the company’s performance in the Arctic, the department concluded that Shell had failed in a wide range of basic operational tasks, like supervision of contractors that performed critical work. The report was harshly critical of Shell management, which acknowledged that it was unprepared for the problems it encountered operating in the unforgiving Arctic environment. But the administration contends that as long as Shell passes a final set of permit reviews, it can proceed to drill this summer. The Obama administration has also issued new drilling safety regulations intended to prevent future accidents like the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010. Last month, the Interior Department proposed new rules to tighten safety requirements on blowout preventers, the industry-standard devices that are the last line of protection against explosions in undersea oil and gas wells. The 2010 explosion was caused in part when a section of drill pipe buckled, which led to the malfunction of a supposedly fail-safe blowout preventer on a BP well. Wellmark spurns Obamacare exchange, but two competitors don't <http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/health/2015/05/11/wellmark-participate-obamacare-exchange/27114395/> // Des Moines Register // Tony Leys - May 11, 2015 Moderate-income Iowans who want to use Affordable Care Act subsidies to purchase health insurance still won't be able to choose policies from Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield next year. But they should be offered policies from at least two competitors. UnitedHealthcare, the nation's largest health-insurer, confirmed Monday evening that it plans to start selling policies to Iowans this fall on the online public marketplace, known as HealthCare.gov. Coventry Health Care, which this year is most Iowans' sole choice on the system, said it will continue marketing plans on the public marketplace. The online system, also known as an exchange, is the only place where Americans can buy policies that qualify for the Obamacare subsidies. The addition of UnitedHealthcare means Iowans who want subsidized insurance could choose from plans offered by at least two companies. That allows consumers to compare prices, benefits and the networks of doctors and hospitals enrolled in each plan. Insurance Commissioner Nick Gerhart said he expects a third, unidentified company to file an application this week to sell policies to Iowans on the exchange. Companies must declare this week whether they will be selling plans to Iowans on the public exchange. "It's good news. People are going to have some choices," he said. Wellmark, which dominates the state's health insurance market, disclosed Monday that it has decided for the third straight year not to offer policies on the online public marketplace. "It's not a matter of if we will participate, it is really a matter of when," Wellmark Vice President Laura Jackson said in a conference call. She said the decision was made to protect the 1.8 million Iowans who already have Wellmark insurance. UnitedHealthcare spokeswoman Jessica Kostner said her Minnesota-based company expects "to have a competitive product available for Iowa consumers that will be valuable in terms of quality, access, affordability, innovative design and service excellence." Most Iowans who make less than 400 percent of the poverty level — or about $47,000 for a single person — can qualify for Affordable Care Act subsidies to help pay for premiums. But only about 38,000 Iowans — about 1 percent of the population — have received such subsidies, averaging $260 per month. Iowa has one of the lowest participation rates in the country, and a national expert said that's partly because the state's main insurer is not participating. Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, said Iowa, South Dakota and Mississippi are the only states where the major Blue Cross insurance plan is declining to participate in the Obamacare marketplace. Wellmark also is the main Blue Cross carrier in South Dakota. A Kaiser Foundation analysis found that just 20 percent of Iowans who could have qualified for premium subsidies last year took advantage of them, which was the lowest level in the country. South Dakotans, at 21 percent, were the second-least likely. "That seems like more than a coincidence," Levitt said. The national average was 42 percent. Mississippi's rate was 37 percent. Levitt said some Iowans probably made a rational choice to maintain their unsubsidized Wellmark plans rather than accept a small public subsidy to switch to an unfamiliar carrier. But he said other consumers might not be aware of their options because the main insurer in the state is not using its marketing muscle to promote the subsidies. Levitt said competition from multiple insurance carriers helps keep costs down and gives customers options of networks of enrolled health care providers. "More choice means consumers have a better chance of being able to go to the doctors and hospitals that they want," he said. Consumers can still purchase Wellmark's individual insurance policies off the public marketplace, but those plans don't qualify for subsidies. However, the new plans must meet all new federal rules, including that they don't ask whether applicants have pre-existing health problems. Jackson also disclosed Monday that her company is seeking to raise premiums by an average of 28 percent for about 30,000 individual customers who bought Wellmark policies since the Affordable Care Act took full effect in 2014. She said her company lost money on that group of customers, mainly because they used more health care, including prescription medications, than expected. She said Wellmark and other insurers had expected the new customers would use relatively large amounts of health care, because many of them were previously uninsured. But the demand for services was even greater than predicted, Jackson said. The company also had to pay bills for 135 people who bought policies, used services and then canceled their policies, she said. A few of those people died, but many of them simply canceled after receiving pricey care, such as having a baby or undergoing hip-replacement surgery, she said. The rate increase would not affect most Wellmark customers, who purchase insurance via employers or who bought individual policies before 2014. The premium increase also would not affect people who purchase Medicare supplement policies from Wellmark. The proposed increase for individual, Affordable Care Act-compliant plans will be the subject of a July 25 hearing organized by the Iowa Insurance Division, a Wellmark spokeswoman said. She added that the company plans to raise premiums on small-employer plans by 5.9 percent to 10.7 percent. The company has until June 8 to propose increases on 110,000 individual policies that predate implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Levitt, the Kaiser Foundation expert, said it's too soon to tell whether Wellmark's 28 percent proposed increase will be unusual for 2016. However, he said there is reason to think that Wellmark faces especially large costs in the pool of people in its new plans. The carrier retained many relatively healthy people in its old pools of customers, who could pass now-banned inquiries into their health status. And it isn't offering the carrot of public subsidies to attract other relatively healthy people into its new plans, he said. So the people most likely to buy the carrier's new plans are those with serious health problems, he said. Most Iowans this year only had one carrier to choose from on HealthCare.gov. That carrier, Coventry, told the Register it intends to continue selling policies on the exchange for 2016. Another carrier that sold on the exchange, CoOportunity Health, went belly-up last winter after selling thousands of subsidized policies to Iowans. Brian Gillette, chief operating officer of the Iowa insurance agency Group Benefits Ltd., said he wasn't surprised to see Wellmark continue to stay out of the Obamacare marketplace, especially as the U.S. Supreme Court is considering a major challenge to the law. That case, known as King v. Burwell, calls into question whether it's legal for the federal government to pay subsidies for policies purchased on the federal version of the exchange, which Iowa and many other states are using. The Supreme Court is expected to rule next month. No one is sure what would happen if the justices declare the subsidies illegal. HHS: Insurers must cover all birth control <http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/241617-obama-admin-all-approved-types-of-birth-control-must-be-free-under> // The Hill // Peter Sullivan – May 11, 2015 Insurers must cover a wide range of contraceptive methods at no cost to consumers, the Obama administration said Monday in new guidance to health insurance companies. The guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) makes clear that insurers are obligated under the Affordable Care Act to cover at least one version of each of the 18 federally approved birth control methods. “Today’s guidance seeks to eliminate any ambiguity,” HHS said. “Insurers must cover without cost-sharing at least one form of contraception in each of the methods (currently 18) that the FDA has identified for women in its current Birth Control Guide, including the ring, the patch and intrauterine devices.” The agency made the announcement after a series of reports indicated insurers had conflicting policies on covering contraceptives, despite ObamaCare’s requirement that contraception be offered at no cost. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group, reported last month that some insurers were not providing all 18 forms of contraception at no charge. Five of 20 insurance plans it reviewed charged women for a vaginal ring, and one plan did not cover the contraceptive at all. A separate report from the National Women’s Law Center found problems with coverage of the vaginal ring, the patch and an intrauterine device (IUD). In some cases, insurance companies would "even suggest that a woman switch methods if she does not want any out-of-pocket costs," according to the report. America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the insurers’ trade group, had condemned that study as presenting a "distorted picture of reality." “Today’s guidance takes important steps to support health plans’ use of medical management in providing women with safe, affordable health care services," AHIP President Karen Ignagni said in a statement. "Health plans are committed to promoting evidenced-based decision-making and to ensuring all consumers understand how their coverage works.” AHIP is happy that the new guidance allows insurers to still use so-called medical management techniques, aimed at controlling costs. So while insurers have to cover one of each of the 18 types for free, they can still take steps like charging patients for more expensive brand-name versions instead of generics. Democrats in Congress, led by Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), had been pushing the administration to clarify the rules for birth control coverage. “I’m pleased that with this announcement [HHS] Secretary Burwell is acting to address these violations as well as others that have become barriers to accessing critical preventive care, especially for those in the transgender community,” Murray said in a statement. The guidance makes clear that insurers cannot limit preventive services for transgender people based on their sex assigned at birth. The 18 federally approved types of birth control that now must be offered free include morning-after pills and IUDs, which have been controversial and labeled by conservatives, such as the owners of Hobby Lobby stores, as “abortifacients,” meaning they cause abortion. The 18 types of contraception are: • Sterilization surgery • Surgical sterilization implant • Implantable rod • Copper intrauterine device • IUDs with progestin (a hormone) • Shot/injection • Oral contraceptives (the pill), with estrogen and progestin • Oral contraceptives with progestin only • Oral contraceptives, known as extended or continuous use that delay menstruation • The patch • Vaginal contraceptive ring • Diaphragm • Sponge • Cervical cap • Female condom • Spermicide • Emergency contraception (Plan B/morning-after pill) • Emergency contraception (a different pill called Ella) Last updated at 1:43 p.m. Tex. bill would bar local officials from issuing same-sex-marriage licenses <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tex-bill-would-bar-local-officials-from-issuing-same-sex-marriage-licenses/2015/05/11/a4657d24-f807-11e4-9030-b4732caefe81_story.html?hpid=z1> // Washington Post // Sandhya Somashekhar - May 11, 2015 Texas Republicans are pushing legislation to bar local officials from granting same-sex couples licenses to marry, launching a preemptive strike against a possible U.S. Supreme Court ruling next month that could declare gay marriage legal. Supporters of the measure, which is scheduled for a vote as soon as Tuesday in the Texas House, said it would send a powerful message to the court. Taking a cue from the anti-abortion movement, they said they also hoped to keep any judicially sanctioned right to same-sex marriage tied up in legal battles for years to come. The measure, by Rep. Cecil Bell, a Republican from the outskirts of Houston, would prohibit state and local officials from using taxpayer dollars “to issue, enforce, or recognize a marriage license . . . for a union other than a union between one man and one woman.” Bell said the bill “simply preserves state sovereignty over marriage.” Gay rights advocates condemned it as mean-spirited and discriminatory. “It’s shocking that Texas lawmakers would pursue a path that would set up this showdown between the Texas legislature and the courts,” said Rebecca Robertson, legal and policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. The move comes as the Supreme Court is poised to rule on whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage or if states have the authority to define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman, as the Texas Constitution does. If the court finds a universal right to same-sex marriage, that provision of the Texas Constitution would be swept aside. But a legislative ban on the issuance of marriage licenses could stand, resulting in a potentially costly and drawn-out confrontation between the state government and the federal courts. As of late Monday, more than half the members of the Texas House had signaled support for the measure, virtually ensuring its passage if it overcomes potential procedural hurdles and reaches the floor before a Thursday deadline. If it passes the House, the measure would move to the Texas Senate, where it is also likely to be favorably received. Conservatives’ battle The measure’s passage would represent a big victory for social conservatives, who have been freshly invigorated by the fight over same-sex marriage and are laying plans to use every tool at their disposal to thwart it. Earlier this year, the Alabama Supreme Court ordered county officials not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, directly contradicting the ruling of a federal judge who struck down that state’s same-sex-marriage ban. Other states have enacted laws aimed at protecting religious objectors who do not want to participate in gay weddings. “This is indicative of this clash that we’re seeing and will see at an increased level with the Supreme Court ruling coming,” said Mat Staver, president of the Liberty Counsel, a public-interest law firm that promotes conservative Christian stances. Still, opponents of same-sex marriage face ever more difficult odds. Gay marriage is now legal in 37 states and the District, and support for it is rising. Nationally, a record 6 in 10 people said they supported same-sex marriage in a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted last month. Even in Texas, opposition to gay marriage is dwindling. Polling conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute in 2014 shows that nearly half of Texans, 48 percent, support same-sex marriage, and 43 percent oppose it. In a teleconference with reporters, critics of the Texas measure predicted that it would provoke a backlash like those that roiled Indiana and Arkansas this year, after those states attempted to enact religious protections that were viewed as anti-gay. But gay rights advocates are worried about the bill. The state’s legislative session is scheduled to end in just three weeks, leaving little time to rally opposition. Meanwhile, they fear that a victory in Texas could prod other states to copy the approach. That could lead to a standoff much like the conflict that arose in the 1950s over school desegregation, gay rights advocates said. That battle eventually ended in the capitulation of resistant Southern states — but only after years of litigation slowed the advance of civil rights. “Texas is pioneering a new strategy to prevent equality for its LGBT residents, to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court and even roll back gains that have been made in the state,” said Chuck Smith, president of Equality Texas, a gay rights group. The measure “seeks to subvert any ruling this summer by the U.S. Supreme Court that would allow the freedom to marry for loving, committed lesbian and gay couples in Texas and around the country,” Smith said. Abortion analogy Supporters of the legislation said the proper analogy is not school desegregation but abortion rights. Abortion has been legal since 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark Texas case, Roe v. Wade. In recent years, however, conservative lawmakers have enacted a slew of bills that have reduced access to the procedure — for example, by requiring clinics to be built to expensive hospital-like standards or putting restrictions on the use of abortion-inducing drugs. Many of these measures have been challenged in the courts, with mixed results, and some are likely to end up before the Supreme Court. But in Texas, they have already contributed to the closure of more than half of the roughly 40 clinics operating in the state just two years ago, according to the Texas ACLU. “Texas, above all states, has . . . done everything we can to eliminate abortion,” even as it remains technically legal, said Steven ­Hotze, president of Conservative Republicans of Texas, a political action committee that pushed for the same-sex-marriage bill. “By taking a stand on homosexual ‘mirage’ — and I call it ‘mirage’ because it’s counterfeit, it’s false, it’s a lie — it will send a loud signal and be a rallying cry across the country for those who do not want to redefine marriage.” INTERNATIONAL Pakistanis Knew Where Osama Bin Laden Was, U.S. Sources Say <http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pakistanis-knew-where-bin-laden-was-say-us-sources-n357306> // NBC News // Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Robert Windrem and Andrea Mitchell – May 11, 2015 Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a "walk in" asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding - and these two sources plus a third say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along. The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking couriers to his walled complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The new revelations do not necessarily cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency's operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission. The official story focused on a long hunt for bin Laden's presumed courier, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. While NBC News has long been pursuing leads about a "walk in" and about what Pakistani intelligence knew, both assertions were made public in a London Review of Books article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Hersh's story, published over the weekend, raises numerous questions about the White House account of the SEAL operation. It has been strongly disputed both on and off the record by the Obama administration and current and former national security officials. The Hersh story says that the "walk in," a Pakistani intelligence official, contacted U.S. authorities in 2010, that elements of ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, knew of bin Laden's whereabouts, and that the U.S. told the Pakistanis about the bin Laden raid before it launched. The U.S. has maintained that it did not tell the Pakistani government about the raid before it launched. On Monday, Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren called Hersh's piece "largely a fabrication" and said there were "too many inaccuracies" to detail each one. Col Warren said the raid to kill bin Laden was a "unilateral action." Both the National Security Council and the Pentagon denied that Pakistan had played any role in the raid. Pakistani media personnel and local resiAAMIR QURESHI / AFP/Getty Images Pakistani media personnel and local residents gather outside the hideout of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan after the U.S. raid that killed him. "The notion that the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false," said NSC spokesman Ned Price. "As we said at the time, knowledge of this operation was confined to a very small circle of senior U.S. officials." The administration's responses do not address the specific allegations in the Hersh article, including the existence of the "walk in" asset. Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, dismissed Hersh's account. "I simply have never heard of anything like this and I've been briefed several times," said McCain, R.-Arizona. "This was a great success on the part of the administration and something that we all admire the president's decision to do. " The NBC News sources who confirm that a Pakistani intelligence official became a "walk in" asset include the special operations officer and a CIA officer who had served in Pakistan. These two sources and a third source, a very senior former U.S. intelligence official, also say that elements of the ISI were aware of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad. The former official was emphatic about the ISI's awareness, saying twice, "They knew." Another top official acknowledged to NBC News that the U.S. government had long harbored "deep suspicions" that ISI and al Qaeda were "cooperating." And a book by former acting CIA director Mike Morrell that will be published tomorrow says that U.S. officials could not dismiss the possibility of such cooperation. None of the sources characterized how high up in ISI the knowledge might have gone. Said one former senior official, "We were suspicious that someone inside ISI … knew where bin Laden was, but we did not have intelligence about specific individuals having specific knowledge." Multiple U.S. officials, however, denied or cast doubt on the assertion that the U.S. told the Pakistanis about the bin Laden raid ahead of time. Nepal Rattled by Powerful New Earthquake East of Capital <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/world/asia/nepal-earthquake-east-of-kathmandu.html?ref=world> // NYT // Austin Ramzy – May 12, 2015 HONG KONG — A powerful earthquake shook Nepal on Tuesday, less than three weeks after a devastating temblor there killed more than 8,000 people. Early details were scarce, but some deaths and collapsed buildings were reported. Residents of Kathmandu reported that buildings swayed in the earthquake, which was felt as far away as New Delhi. The United States Geological Survey assigned the quake on Tuesday a preliminary magnitude of 7.3, with an epicenter about 50 miles east of Kathmandu, near the border with China. The April 25 earthquake registered magnitude 7.8 and was centered west of Kathmandu. “We’re obviously hearing of buildings destroyed, buildings collapsed, buildings falling, we’re hearing about casualties, but the numbers are not known yet,” said Jamie McGoldrick, Nepal resident coordinator for the United Nations Development Program. He said several international rescue teams, including American and Indian teams, were still in Kathmandu but had not yet been asked to deploy. Four people died in Chautara, a town in the Sindhupalchowk district northeast of Kathmandu where several buildings collapsed, said Paul Dillon, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration. “A search and rescue crew of some locals and international groups are digging through rubble as best they can,” Mr. Dillon said. “We are seeing huge damage in our district,” said Krishna Prasad Gaiwali, the chief district officer in Sindhupalchowk. “It was terrible, really terrible. Buildings were shaking too much for too long.” Since the April 25 quake, people across Nepal have feared another powerful one, in part because the first one left many buildings cracked and unstable. An American structural engineer who examined buildings in Bhaktapur, a city near Kathmandu, said that he believed one-third of the buildings he had seen would have to be demolished. Nevertheless, many families have moved back into their apartments, after living under tents for the week after the first quake. Kunda Dixit, the editor of The Nepali Times, described “some degree of panic” in Kathmandu as the tremor “just became bigger and bigger and bigger, started rocking more and more and more.” He said that office workers ran into the street and that electric power was out and telephones were jammed. “It started slow, it kept on swaying, and the birds were up in the air,” he said. “I looked outside and the electricity polls were just swaying from side to side, the wires were swaying.” Bikash Suwal, a trekking guide in Kathmandu, said that he and other colleagues had fled from an office on the fourth floor of a building and sought safety in the open. He said that he had not seen any buildings fall or people injured, but residents worried that the damage closer to the epicenter could be serious. Cellphone calls to that area were not going through, he said. He said that residents in Kathmandu would face a choice of staying outside overnight, and risk being caught in the rain, or going indoors and risk another quake. “I will stay at home, but other people, I don’t know,” he said. Dhruba Prasad Ghimire, an aid worker who had been distributing food in a village west of Kathmandu, said buildings there shook and residents ran into the open in fear as the quake triggered landslides on nearby hills. But he said he had not seen anybody injured among the residents, and the buildings still standing in the village had not fallen down. “It was very frightening again, but we will keep giving out food,” he said in a brief telephone interview. “We are O.K., but there were landslides and more of the aftershocks — you could see the ground falling down on the hills.” He said, “People will be frightened. We don’t know if there will be more of these earthquakes.” John Kerry and Vladimir Putin to Hold Talks in Russia <http://time.com/3853535/john-kerry-putin-russia/> // TIME // Matthew Lee - May 11, 2015 (WASHINGTON) — The State Department says Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Russia this week for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It will be his first trip to Russia since the start of the Ukraine crisis, which has badly damaged relations between Moscow and the west, and only his second since taking office. The State Department said Kerry will meet Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Tuesday. After his brief stop in Russia, Kerry will travel to Turkey for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers and return to Washington for a summit of Gulf Arab leaders that President Barack Obama is hosting at Camp David. Kerry last visited Russia in May 2013. OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS Clinton clobbers Rubio on immigration <http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/241614-clinton-clobbers-rubio-on-immigration> // The Hill // Brent Budowsky – May 11, 2015 Hillary Clinton's bold initiative last week to call for a path to citizenship and other dramatic reforms of immigration policies creates a brilliant contrast to the incoherent and weak immigration position of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and the hostile negativity of leading Republicans to immigration reform. Don't believe what you read about the GOP making significant inroads in the Hispanic vote in 2016. The Democrats have the upper hand on issues important to Hispanic voters, ranging from economics to immigration to healthcare and both Bill and Hillary Clinton have long had a special relationship with Hispanic voters. Last week, Hillary Clinton took forceful command of the immigration issue, a smart move that dramatizes the substantial advantage that Clinton and Democrats have over Rubio and Republicans. When the Senate passed historic immigration reform, in part because of the great leadership of Rubio, I applauded him for a profile in courage that demonstrated real leadership. What has happened since? Rubio has disowned his former position, disavowed his greatest legislative accomplishment in the Senate and destroyed his credibility on immigration. It is sad to see. Rubio's profile in courage became a profile in cowardice. Rubio now opposes his previous good work on immigration and says he has learned his lesson. The lesson he learned is apparently to never show courage or leadership without obtaining permission from the right wing of the Republican Party. Let's see if former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) — who sometimes seems to support historic immigration reform, sometimes seems to waffle about it, and sometimes seems to oppose it — has the courage of his convictions and defies the Republican right on a matter the right sadly considers a holy grail of modern conservatism. I respect Rubio, have at times praised him and consider him a serious candidate for the presidency. Yet, to my knowledge, no candidate has ever been elected president after disowning the major achievement in his career; one which would have been an argument in favor of presidential stature and now diminishes it. America is a nation of immigrants. Historic immigration reform is urgently needed. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the leader of Democrats in the Senate, understands this. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the leader of Democrats in the House, understands this. Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, understands this and leads the charge for it. Republican leaders in Congress reject this and the junior senator from Florida was for it — before he was against it. Clinton’s claim that illegal immigrants pay more in taxes than some corporations <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/05/11/clintons-claim-that-illegal-immigrants-pay-more-in-taxes-than-some-corporations/> // Washington Post // Glen Kessler - May 11, 2015 “In New York, which I know a little bit about because I represented it for eight years and I live there now, our undocumented workers in New York pay more in taxes than some of the biggest corporations in New York.” –Hillary Clinton, roundtable in North Las Vegas, May 5, 2015 Several readers contacted The Fact Checker asking about this assertion by the former secretary of state, made as she discussed her policy goals for tackling illegal immigration. They wanted to know how this statement was possible. Her statement is vague enough that one could interpret it as meaning that individual workers pay more in taxes than corporations, but Clinton’s campaign said that she was talking about undocumented workers as a group. Even so, is her claim possible? The Facts The Clinton campaign initially pointed to an opinion column by Albor Ruiz in the Daily News, dated April 20, 2015, titled, “Corporate giants often get huge tax breaks, while poor, undocumented immigrants have paid billions in state taxes.” We often warn that opinion columns are not necessarily as good a source of information as articles based on straight news reporting. Ruiz, for instance, relied on facts on corporate taxes from the Web site of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), which does not disclose sources for its assertions. Ruiz claimed that although “many of these corporate behemoths pay zero taxes, the eternally vilified undocumented immigrants in New York paid $1.1 billion in state taxes in 2012.” The figure about taxes paid by undocumented workers comes from a report issued by the left-leaning Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. We have no major issues with the methodology used in that report, except to note that it is a very broad estimate, based on assumptions about the number of immigrants, the average size of immigrant families, the range of income of immigrant workers, the number of homeowners and effective tax rates. A change in any one of those assumptions would alter the result. For New York, for example, the report estimated that in 2012 there were 873,000 illegal immigrants, with an average family income of $32,600. Eighteen percent were estimated to be homeowners. They supposedly paid $566 million in sales and excise taxes, $186 million in state and local income taxes, and $342 million in property taxes, for a total of more than $1 billion. (Note that more than 50 percent of the figure comes from sales taxes, which every person and company pays just anytime something is purchased.) But the most important aspect of the report is that it looks at state, local and property taxes paid by immigrants — not federal taxes. The Sanders Web site is about federal taxes. So Ruiz — and Clinton by extension — are mixing apples and oranges. Thus, for the purposes of this fact check, we are not going delve deeply into the question of whether some big corporations do not pay much – or even zero — in federal taxes. The issue is very complicated and not very well reported in the U.S. media. (See, for example, how Fortune documented flaws in a New York Times report on General Electric.) A company’s annual 10-K filing in March generally will only have estimated numbers, as the actual tax return generally is not filed until later in the year. Total tax numbers can be determined from looking at cash flow statements, but one generally cannot figure out what taxes are being paid. Yet it is silly to assert that these companies pay no taxes at all, because at the very least they are paying property taxes, sales taxes and employment taxes. The only New York-based companies mentioned in Ruiz’s column were Verizon and Citicorp, so let’s take a closer look at them. Verizon, for instance, announces how much it expects to pay in such taxes. In 2012, it says it paid $1.7 billion in property and other taxes and $1.3 billion in employment taxes. The income tax bill in 2012 was relatively low — $351 million — but it jumped to $4 billion in 2014. That brought Verizon’s total tax bill above $7 billion in 2014. As for Citicorp, spokeswoman Molly Millerwise Meiners said the company in 2012 paid nearly $1 billion in U.S. taxes (not including sales and excise taxes), including $300 million in state and local taxes, at least $110 million in property and use taxes, and $500 million in employment taxes. Sales taxes would bring the number even higher. Citi, of course, had enormous losses during the financial crisis which wiped out its federal income tax bill in 2012, but in 2014, she said, federal income taxes alone were about $1 billion. David Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative at Fiscal Policy Institute, which co-released the ITEP report, said that Clinton was trying to make the point that undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than most people recognize. But he acknowledged that “if you really want to make a thorough comparison, you would have to include other taxes corporations may pay.” Indeed, the accounting firm Ernst & Young estimates that that state and local business taxes totaled $643 billion in 2012. About one-third of the total stemmed from property taxes and one-fifth from sales taxes. There were also tens of billions paid in public utilities taxes, excise taxes, business license taxes, unemployment insurance taxes and other state business taxes. Matt Gardner, executive director of ITEP and a co-author of the report, said it’s correct that many big companies pay no income taxes in certain years but it makes little sense to compare those numbers to a group of people. “If she means undocumented workers as a group, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison,” he said. “You could pick any large segment of the population and state, probably correctly, that that group pays more taxes than certain specific corporations. It’s just not obvious why that’s a very meaningful comparison to make.” “The point she was making is that undocumented immigrants pay more in state and local taxes alone than some of our biggest companies pay in either state or federal corporate income tax,” said Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin. “That is a striking fact. And that’s why she raised it.” The Pinocchio Test Even if Clinton incorrectly stated her talking point, this is a tendentious argument that is probably made even less relevant by 2014 tax data. (Note how the taxes paid by Verizon and Citicorp increased as the economy began to pick up.) If she is only talking about state and local income taxes, that’s just $186 million, according to the ITEP estimate for New York. Verizon and Citicorp still exceed that number on state and local taxes alone. Undocumented immigrants obviously pay a lot of taxes, especially sales taxes. Clinton would have an even stronger case to highlight the tax contribution of illegal immigrants if she mentioned that the Social Security actuary estimated that illegal immigrants paid $12 billion in Social Security taxes in 2010 alone, with little hope of ever receiving benefits. (They used false or duplicative Social Security numbers.) That’s even more than the ITEP estimate for state/local income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes paid by illegal immigrants across the nation. But comparing the taxes of hundreds of thousands of people to the tax bill of one corporation is a stretch and fairly misleading. Even the companies that pay little or no federal income taxes end up paying lots of other taxes. So it’s a nonsense comparison. We wavered between Three and Four Pinocchios, but ultimately settled on Four. As a former senator, Clinton should know better. Hillary Clinton hasn’t answered a question from the media in 20 days <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/05/11/hillary-clinton-hasnt-answered-a-question-from-the-media-in-20-days/?wprss=rss_politics> // Washington Post // Chriz Cillizza - May 11, 2015 Welcome to day 29 of the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign! In those 29 days – including April 12, the day she announced, and today – Clinton has taken a total of eight questions from the press. That breaks out to roughly one question every 3.6 days. Of late, she's taken even fewer questions than that. According to media reports, the last day Clinton answered a question was April 21 in New Hampshire; that means that she hasn't taken a question from the media in 20 straight days. Carly Fiorina, one of the many newly minted Republicans running for president, is doing everything she can to shine a light on Clinton's close-mouthed approach with the press. This came from Fiorina deputy campaign manager Sasha Isgur Flores this morning: In the last eight days, Carly has been interviewed almost 30 times and answered well over 300 questions. She continues to impress voters, pundits, and reporters alike with her willingness to share her thoughts and ideas – and to answer any question, from whether she likes hot dogs to how she would tackle the crisis in the Middle East. ... This is in stark contrast to many other candidates – and most especially to Hillary Clinton. And it's not just the Republican candidates attacking Clinton on her silence. The New York Times posted an item on its "First Draft" blog last week titled "Questions for Hillary Clinton: Immigration" in which Amy Chozick wrote: "This is the first installment of a regular First Draft feature in which The Times will publish questions we would have asked Mrs. Clinton had we had the opportunity." And, late last month, I offered up seven questions Clinton should answer. The Clinton campaign's response to all of this? Blah. Reporters whining – like they always do. And, as every Clinton staffer is quick to note, she has answered questions from lots of regular people during her first month as a candidate – holding roundtables in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. They are also quick to note that she makes opening statements at these roundtables. She's taking questions from voters! She's talking about policy! You guys just don't like it because she's not falling all over herself to jump through your hoops! So, for roughly the billionth time, let me make two points in response to that way of thinking. 1. Making policy statements/opening statements does not remove the need to answer actual questions from reporters. 2. While answering questions from hand-picked audience members is not without value, no one could possibly think it is the equivalent of answering questions from the working press. As I have written before, Clinton needs the media at this point in the campaign far less than someone like Carly Fiorina does. Clinton is not only universally known but also has a huge primary lead and is ahead of all Republican contenders in general election matchups as well. Fiorina, on the other hand, is known by roughly no one, and to the extent anyone does know her, it's for the way she left HP. Still, this is the new Clinton campaign, right? The one where she and the people around her pledged to deal differently with the press? Little did we know that "different" in this case meant "next to not at all." Yes, we are one month into the campaign. And yes, Clinton and her team wanted to start very low-profile this time around – to avoid making the mistakes she made in 2008. So, it's possible things could change. But if past is prologue, I wouldn't bet on it. I Am A Dreamer Who Met Hillary Clinton <http://letstalknevada.com/i-am-a-dreamer-who-met-hillary-clinton/> // Lets Talk Nevada // Blanca Gamez - May 11, 2015 This past Tuesday, six undocumented individuals — Astrid Silva, Erika Castro, Rafael Lopez, Betsaida Frausto, Juan Salazar and myself — had the opportunity to have an open and honest conversation with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at Rancho High School in Las Vegas. The fellow participants and I looked forward to not only sharing our stories, but to have the chance to ask Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton questions surrounding the topic of immigration. Prior to speaking with Secretary Clinton, we were told this was an un-rehearsed conversation, to not hold back, and to ask questions so we could get her stance on the various issues that plague the undocumented community. As the six of us waited in anticipation for Secretary Clinton’s arrival, we shared our stories with one another as a means to calm our nerves. Secretary Clinton has been scrutinized in the media due to her comments in the past on the topic of immigration, unlike the Republican presidential candidates who make comments about not following through with President Obama’s executive orders and their critical stance on comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. Secretary Clinton has taken the opposite approach, agreeing to follow through with President Obama’s plans and she will urge Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Once we were seated, the conversation commenced with Secretary Clinton sharing her own immigration story. She said that when she was young girl she visited the labor camps of migrant workers. She recalled witnessing the workers returning home from a hard day out in the fields and how the children would run to welcome home their fathers, the same way she would when her father came home from work. She further discussed that we do not need a second-class system; this is a country where people should be treated with respect. Following her introductory speech, she turned to each of us and asked us to share our own stories which entailed when we arrived in the United States, background on our families and how the President’s executive actions impacted our lives. As we shared our stories we asked questions. Our questions varied, as we all have different ways immigration impacts us. Examples of these questions included members of the trans-community who are not provided adequate legal representation when they are detained in detention facilities, the 3 to 10 year unlawful presence bars for when an individual enters the country without inspection (illegally) and faces leaving the country for 3 to 10 years as they fix their status, and what would be done to include those who did not qualify under the President’s executive orders? I was completely surprised by Secretary Clinton’s responses to the various questions that we asked from her. She not only answered the questions, but delved deeper into the issues, which are rarely spoken about. Secretary Clinton spoke about the injustices faced by inmates in the detention centers, as large corporations fund these centers and have a bed mandate which requires a certain amount of beds to be filled every day. This is something that many are unaware is happening. Additionally, she shared that she plans to find a solution for the 11 to 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country, even if she has to go further than President Obama’s executive actions. The conversation then shifted into re-unification of those who have become separated from their families, to raising the minimum wage, and to student loan debt. I think all of us, including the audience members and the media, thought we were going to hear the same old talking points. Yet, during the conversation, Secretary Clinton took a problem solving detailed approach to the topic of immigration, something she had not done in the past and she delved further than any of the other presidential candidates. Her answers stunned me as they were not the usual answers you’d expect to hear from someone. Rather, they were answers that were accompanied by facts. Leaving the conversation, I can say I was very pleased with Secretary Clinton’s answers. Yet we Dreamers must hold her to them as she continues on the campaign trail, and if she is elected as our next President of the United States. Barack Obama’s Hillary Clinton Problem <http://blogs.rollcall.com/white-house/barack-obama-hillary-clinton-problem/?dcz=> // Roll Call // Steven Dennis - May 12, 2015 You knew it was coming: The White House is starting to get a case of Clintonitis. With Hillary Rodham Clinton the overwhelming favorite to carry the Democratic torch next year — and now an official candidate starting to spout policy positions — the White House has been forced to parry an ever-increasing barrage of questions. Speaker John A. Boehner got the ball rolling by asking President Barack Obama to enlist Clinton’s help to pass fast-track trade authority. That had White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest retaliating, suggesting such a move would signal desperation from the GOP. “It seems a little early for a pretty desperate act like that, to basically suggest that you need a candidate for office from the other party to help you advance the agenda when you’ve got the majority in the House of Representatives,” Earnest said. He later had to use all the rhetorical tools in his arsenal to avoid commenting on Clinton’s push to set up a deferred action process for the parents of “DREAMers,” who brought their children to the United States illegally years ago, so they can avoid deportation. Reporters asked if an expansion of Obama’s executive actions would be legal. “That will be something for future presidents and ultimately future courts to decide,” Earnest replied. What about Clinton’s plan? “I’m not a judge and I didn’t go to law school, so I’m not going to be in a position to render a legal opinion …” he said. But the White House has already issued its legal opinion that the president went as far as he could go. The strategy seems to be: When in doubt, refer to Clinton’s team. “I’ll let Secretary Clinton and her campaign describe exactly what steps they envision taking, and I’ll allow them to make the case about why it’s legal,” Earnest said. Senators on Capitol Hill face a similar dynamic, with DREAM Act sponsor Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., claiming ignorance as to what might be possible with executive orders when asked whether he agrees with the president’s assertion he has done everything he can — or if he agrees with Clinton there’s room to go further. Then there are the missing Clinton emails and foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of State. Earnest — and Obama — have done their best to keep the presidential campaign at bay, aided by a Clinton campaign that, until very recently, had been sandblasted of anything approaching serious policy proposals. (Her website still doesn’t have an issues page.) The White House has even kept meetings Obama has held with Clinton — and former President Bill Clinton — off the public schedule. That’s only going to get more awkward as the campaign gears up and Clinton starts laying out an agenda, which necessarily will include either new items or recycled Obama proposals that failed to launch (universal pre-school, anyone?). The president can expect a lot of “Why didn’t Obama do that?” questions. If the White House simply blames Congress — a standard fallback — that would undercut Clinton’s ability to claim she’ll get things done. Unless, of course, she and her team were to join in on the chorus of criticism about Obama’s congressional relations. The New York Times reported last month that while Clinton was campaigning in Iowa, she told lawmakers privately she could do a better job working with Congress. The Times reported it was one of her best-received lines. “One of her biggest messages was, ‘I know how hard it is to work with Congress; I’ve done it before, and I will continue to when I’m in the White House,’’’ state Rep. Mary Mascher of Iowa City, who attended the closed-door meeting, told the newspaper. There’s also the potential for moments that could have the feel of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. going off-script and endorsing gay marriage ahead of the president. The bolder Clinton and her team become, the more awkward the non-answers from Earnest and company will be. There also is the real possibility of Clinton undermining the remaining parts of the Obama agenda that can get through a GOP Congress as she seeks to rally the Democratic base and shore up her left flank against the likes of Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and, maybe, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. That includes the trade agenda and assorted other messy compromises to come. A senior administration official minimized the issue, saying there’s no daily call with the Clinton team yet to vet issues, although the two camps keep in touch. Many Clinton hands are veterans of the administration, including former Obama Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri. “They have been focused on driving a contrast with GOPers, not with us,” the official told CQ Roll Call. “That’s not just a testament to our shared values and priorities. It’s a reflection of the president’s political standing.” Obama, after all, remains very popular within the Democratic Party and his national poll ratings have nudged higher. Indeed, his approval ratings lately have eclipsed Clinton’s. Smart Social Programs <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/opinion/smart-social-programs.html?ref=opinion> // New York Times // Jason Furman - May 11, 2015 WASHINGTON — DO government efforts to support low-income families work? Since the War on Poverty in the 1960s, skeptics have argued that even if these programs provide temporary relief, the only long-term impact is increased dependency — witness, they say, the persistent lack of mobility in places like inner-city Baltimore. But a growing body of research tells a very different story. Investments in education, income, housing, health care and nutrition for working families have substantial long-term benefits for children. Consider Moving to Opportunity, an experiment in the 1990s that gave families housing assistance, in some cases contingent on their moving to less poor neighborhoods. Initial evidence from the randomized trial was disappointing, finding little or no improvements in test scores for children or earnings for adults. A new paper by the Harvard economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence F. Katz, however, followed the children for another decade. It found that traditional rental vouchers had increased their earnings as adults by 15 percent, and experimental vouchers, which required people to move to less poor neighborhoods, by 31 percent. The additional tax revenue from these higher earnings was enough to repay the program’s cost. This is only the latest in a number of recent studies that use big data to understand the longer-term effects of a range of government programs. One intriguing recent study by the economists Anna Aizer, Shari Eli, Joseph P. Ferrie and Adriana Lleras-Muney examined the records of 16,000 children whose families applied for a temporary income-support program that was in effect from 1911 to 1935. By comparing the outcomes of those who received the benefit to those of similar children who were denied, the researchers found that the program resulted in more education, higher earnings and lower mortality. Social Security data were used to follow program beneficiaries until as late as 2012, allowing researchers to show that the benefits of receiving even a few years of assistance as a child could persist for 80 years or more. Although we do not have 100 years of follow-on data from today’s programs, recent research following children as they entered their 20s and 30s has produced similarly striking findings. Studies show that the earned-income tax credit, one of the government’s largest tools to reduce child poverty, may also reduce the incidence of low birth weight, raise math and reading scores and boost college enrollment rates for the children who benefited. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, has been shown to have similar benefits for child recipients that can last decades. Receiving Medicaid in childhood makes it substantially more likely that a child will graduate from high school and complete college and less likely that an African-American child will die in his late teens or be hospitalized at 25. For women, Medicaid participation in childhood is associated with increased earnings. A body of research on the long-term effects of high-quality preschool programs and other early-childhood interventions, like home visits by health professionals, consistently finds that they improve a range of adult outcomes, from higher earnings to reduced crime rates. Other research has found that Head Start achieves similar results. There are three noteworthy elements in this new research. First, the benefits often are not captured by short-term outcomes like improvements in children’s test scores, which typically last only a few years before fading. Second, while program design certainly matters — and can matter a lot — much of the benefit appears to derive from helping low-income families pay for basic needs like food, housing or health care, or simply reducing the intense economic pressure they face. This relates to findings that poverty may increase intense stress, inhibiting young children’s cognitive development. Third, in many cases, the additional tax revenue from the higher long-run earnings generated by the program is sufficient to repay much or even more than all of the initial cost. In addition to long-term benefits, the safety net, of course, supports many Americans right now. In 2013, income and nutrition assistance programs lifted 46 million people, including 10 million children, out of poverty, while health programs benefited tens of millions more. As a result, the proportions of Americans who are poor and uninsured have fallen over the past several decades. Moreover, safety-net programs do not discourage work in any big way. Instead, the E.I.T.C. rewards low-income parents for working. And child care and pre-K programs make it easier for parents to work in the first place, while also putting children in a better position to succeed. President Obama’s goal is greater mobility and higher incomes. We know that the large cuts to nutrition assistance, health care, housing vouchers and other programs contained in the recent congressional budget resolution would not only hurt the poor today but also shortchange our economy’s future. In contrast, the evidence strongly supports making child care and preschool available to all families with young children, restoring housing vouchers that were cut during the sequester and expanding tax credits for working families. We cannot solve poverty or lack of mobility overnight, but contrary to what the skeptics say, investing in families works — not just for them, but for all of us. HBO’s Veep Just Got Very Real About the Hillary Clinton Campaign <http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/05/veep-hillary-clinton-campaign-amy-quits> // Vanity Fair // Joanna Robinson - May 11, 2015 No matter what, Veep—HBO’s satirical comedy about a fictional female president—was going to draw comparisons to Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Oval Office. As perhaps the most prominent female political figure in U.S. history, Clinton is an inevitable inspiration for the show. But while last night’s episode didn’t specifically put Clinton and her campaign in its satirical crosshairs, it did frankly address the stakes of a potential Hillary Clinton presidency. When this season kicked off with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character Selina Meyer out of the vice president role and not only acting as commander-in-chief, but also running for reelection, creator Armando Iannucci knew Clinton and her campaign would be on everyone’s mind. “We weren’t consciously aping Hillary when we wrote Selina. It’s inevitable now I suppose that Hillary is campaigning as Selina is president that there will be comparisons made,” he said on a recent episode of Sirius XM’s Pop Politics. But that’s likely not a coincidence. Iannucci— the canny satirist behind political properties like In the Loop, In the Thick of It, and, oh yes, Clinton: His Struggle with Dirt—said in the same interview that he tries “to make a couple of guesstimates as to where reality might be when the show goes out,” in order to keep his political commentary fresh. But the hilariously inept and craven Selina only bears a very superficial resemblance to Hillary. (Louis-Dreyfus uses Clinton’s make-up artist and last season’s haircut plot was based on a Hillary incident.) This isn’t exactly John Travolta doing a Bill Clinton impression in Primary Colors. So when Selina’s campaign manager Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky) let her long-simmering rage boil over at her inept boss, it’s not a condemnation of Hillary the politician in any way. (In fact, Iannucci has said that “talking to people at the State Department, they only had good things to say about [Hillary] as a boss.”) But what Amy said is a piercing reminder that, like it or not, a Hillary Clinton presidency has incredibly high stakes. As she quit the Meyer campaign, Amy said, through gritted teeth: You have made it impossible to do this job. You have two settings—no decision and bad decision. I wouldn’t let you run a bath without the Coast Guard and the fire department standing by, but yet here you are running America. You are the worst thing that has happened to this country since food in buckets and maybe slavery. I’ve had enough. I’m gone. You have achieved nothing apart from one thing. The fact that you are a woman means we will have no more women presidents because we tried one and she fucking sucked. Other than those literally superficial hair and makeup aspects above, Veep has avoided taking on Hillary directly while still touching on other members of the Clinton clan. Selina’s big teleprompter gaffe that opened Season 4 is actually based on a Bill Clinton incident from 1993. And Ianucci asked actress Sarah Sutherland—who plays Selina’s daughter Catherine—to “have a look at footage of Chelsea [Clinton] doing public stuff.” But while Ianucci may claim that vice presidents like Biden, Gore, and Cheney are all inspirations for Selina, there’s no doubt Hillary has always been there in the background. He recently connected the dots between Louis-Dreyfus’s Selina and Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of an eager, campaign-ready Clinton on Saturday Night Live. He referred to it as “That air of ‘I am going to be the first woman president of the United States. You do know that. Have you forgotten that?’” No one’s forgotten, and with the political landscape still starved for female representation, the stakes on that first female commander-in-chief will, to paraphrase the more eloquent Amy Brookheimer, be sky high. -- *Alexandria Phillips* *Communications | Press Assistant* *Hillary for America * https://www.hillaryclinton.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "HRCRapid" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.