podesta_email_01803.txt

podesta-emails 47,029 words email

P21 P20 V9 V11 P19

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- mQQBBGBjDtIBH6DJa80zDBgR+VqlYGaXu5bEJg9HEgAtJeCLuThdhXfl5Zs32RyB I1QjIlttvngepHQozmglBDmi2FZ4S+wWhZv10bZCoyXPIPwwq6TylwPv8+buxuff B6tYil3VAB9XKGPyPjKrlXn1fz76VMpuTOs7OGYR8xDidw9EHfBvmb+sQyrU1FOW aPHxba5lK6hAo/KYFpTnimsmsz0Cvo1sZAV/EFIkfagiGTL2J/NhINfGPScpj8LB bYelVN/NU4c6Ws1ivWbfcGvqU4lymoJgJo/l9HiV6X2bdVyuB24O3xeyhTnD7laf epykwxODVfAt4qLC3J478MSSmTXS8zMumaQMNR1tUUYtHCJC0xAKbsFukzbfoRDv m2zFCCVxeYHvByxstuzg0SurlPyuiFiy2cENek5+W8Sjt95nEiQ4suBldswpz1Kv n71t7vd7zst49xxExB+tD+vmY7GXIds43Rb05dqksQuo2yCeuCbY5RBiMHX3d4nU 041jHBsv5wY24j0N6bpAsm/s0T0Mt7IO6UaN33I712oPlclTweYTAesW3jDpeQ7A ioi0CMjWZnRpUxorcFmzL/Cc/fPqgAtnAL5GIUuEOqUf8AlKmzsKcnKZ7L2d8mxG QqN16nlAiUuUpchQNMr+tAa1L5S1uK/fu6thVlSSk7KMQyJfVpwLy6068a1WmNj4 yxo9HaSeQNXh3cui+61qb9wlrkwlaiouw9+bpCmR0V8+XpWma/D/TEz9tg5vkfNo eG4t+FUQ7QgrrvIkDNFcRyTUO9cJHB+kcp2NgCcpCwan3wnuzKka9AWFAitpoAwx L6BX0L8kg/LzRPhkQnMOrj/tuu9hZrui4woqURhWLiYi2aZe7WCkuoqR/qMGP6qP EQRcvndTWkQo6K9BdCH4ZjRqcGbY1wFt/qgAxhi+uSo2IWiM1fRI4eRCGifpBtYK Dw44W9uPAu4cgVnAUzESEeW0bft5XXxAqpvyMBIdv3YqfVfOElZdKbteEu4YuOao FLpbk4ajCxO4Fzc9AugJ8iQOAoaekJWA7TjWJ6CbJe8w3thpznP0w6jNG8ZleZ6a jHckyGlx5wzQTRLVT5+wK6edFlxKmSd93jkLWWCbrc0Dsa39OkSTDmZPoZgKGRhp Yc0C4jePYreTGI6p7/H3AFv84o0fjHt5fn4GpT1Xgfg+1X/wmIv7iNQtljCjAqhD 6XN+QiOAYAloAym8lOm9zOoCDv1TSDpmeyeP0rNV95OozsmFAUaKSUcUFBUfq9FL uyr+rJZQw2DPfq2wE75PtOyJiZH7zljCh12fp5yrNx6L7HSqwwuG7vGO4f0ltYOZ dPKzaEhCOO7o108RexdNABEBAAG0Rldpa2lMZWFrcyBFZGl0b3JpYWwgT2ZmaWNl IEhpZ2ggU2VjdXJpdHkgQ29tbXVuaWNhdGlvbiBLZXkgKDIwMjEtMjAyNCmJBDEE EwEKACcFAmBjDtICGwMFCQWjmoAFCwkIBwMFFQoJCAsFFgIDAQACHgECF4AACgkQ nG3NFyg+RUzRbh+eMSKgMYOdoz70u4RKTvev4KyqCAlwji+1RomnW7qsAK+l1s6b ugOhOs8zYv2ZSy6lv5JgWITRZogvB69JP94+Juphol6LIImC9X3P/bcBLw7VCdNA mP0XQ4OlleLZWXUEW9EqR4QyM0RkPMoxXObfRgtGHKIkjZYXyGhUOd7MxRM8DBzN yieFf3CjZNADQnNBk/ZWRdJrpq8J1W0dNKI7IUW2yCyfdgnPAkX/lyIqw4ht5UxF VGrva3PoepPir0TeKP3M0BMxpsxYSVOdwcsnkMzMlQ7TOJlsEdtKQwxjV6a1vH+t k4TpR4aG8fS7ZtGzxcxPylhndiiRVwdYitr5nKeBP69aWH9uLcpIzplXm4DcusUc Bo8KHz+qlIjs03k8hRfqYhUGB96nK6TJ0xS7tN83WUFQXk29fWkXjQSp1Z5dNCcT sWQBTxWxwYyEI8iGErH2xnok3HTyMItdCGEVBBhGOs1uCHX3W3yW2CooWLC/8Pia qgss3V7m4SHSfl4pDeZJcAPiH3Fm00wlGUslVSziatXW3499f2QdSyNDw6Qc+chK hUFflmAaavtpTqXPk+Lzvtw5SSW+iRGmEQICKzD2chpy05mW5v6QUy+G29nchGDD rrfpId2Gy1VoyBx8FAto4+6BOWVijrOj9Boz7098huotDQgNoEnidvVdsqP+P1RR QJekr97idAV28i7iEOLd99d6qI5xRqc3/QsV+y2ZnnyKB10uQNVPLgUkQljqN0wP XmdVer+0X+aeTHUd1d64fcc6M0cpYefNNRCsTsgbnWD+x0rjS9RMo+Uosy41+IxJ 6qIBhNrMK6fEmQoZG3qTRPYYrDoaJdDJERN2E5yLxP2SPI0rWNjMSoPEA/gk5L91 m6bToM/0VkEJNJkpxU5fq5834s3PleW39ZdpI0HpBDGeEypo/t9oGDY3Pd7JrMOF zOTohxTyu4w2Ql7jgs+7KbO9PH0Fx5dTDmDq66jKIkkC7DI0QtMQclnmWWtn14BS KTSZoZekWESVYhORwmPEf32EPiC9t8zDRglXzPGmJAPISSQz+Cc9o1ipoSIkoCCh 2MWoSbn3KFA53vgsYd0vS/+Nw5aUksSleorFns2yFgp/w5Ygv0D007k6u3DqyRLB W5y6tJLvbC1ME7jCBoLW6nFEVxgDo727pqOpMVjGGx5zcEokPIRDMkW/lXjw+fTy c6misESDCAWbgzniG/iyt77Kz711unpOhw5aemI9LpOq17AiIbjzSZYt6b1Aq7Wr aB+C1yws2ivIl9ZYK911A1m69yuUg0DPK+uyL7Z86XC7hI8B0IY1MM/MbmFiDo6H dkfwUckE74sxxeJrFZKkBbkEAQRgYw7SAR+gvktRnaUrj/84Pu0oYVe49nPEcy/7 5Fs6LvAwAj+JcAQPW3uy7D7fuGFEQguasfRrhWY5R87+g5ria6qQT2/Sf19Tpngs d0Dd9DJ1MMTaA1pc5F7PQgoOVKo68fDXfjr76n1NchfCzQbozS1HoM8ys3WnKAw+ Neae9oymp2t9FB3B+To4nsvsOM9KM06ZfBILO9NtzbWhzaAyWwSrMOFFJfpyxZAQ 8VbucNDHkPJjhxuafreC9q2f316RlwdS+XjDggRY6xD77fHtzYea04UWuZidc5zL VpsuZR1nObXOgE+4s8LU5p6fo7jL0CRxvfFnDhSQg2Z617flsdjYAJ2JR4apg3Es G46xWl8xf7t227/0nXaCIMJI7g09FeOOsfCmBaf/ebfiXXnQbK2zCbbDYXbrYgw6 ESkSTt940lHtynnVmQBvZqSXY93MeKjSaQk1VKyobngqaDAIIzHxNCR941McGD7F qHHM2YMTgi6XXaDThNC6u5msI1l/24PPvrxkJxjPSGsNlCbXL2wqaDgrP6LvCP9O uooR9dVRxaZXcKQjeVGxrcRtoTSSyZimfjEercwi9RKHt42O5akPsXaOzeVjmvD9 EB5jrKBe/aAOHgHJEIgJhUNARJ9+dXm7GofpvtN/5RE6qlx11QGvoENHIgawGjGX Jy5oyRBS+e+KHcgVqbmV9bvIXdwiC4BDGxkXtjc75hTaGhnDpu69+Cq016cfsh+0 XaRnHRdh0SZfcYdEqqjn9CTILfNuiEpZm6hYOlrfgYQe1I13rgrnSV+EfVCOLF4L P9ejcf3eCvNhIhEjsBNEUDOFAA6J5+YqZvFYtjk3efpM2jCg6XTLZWaI8kCuADMu yrQxGrM8yIGvBndrlmmljUqlc8/Nq9rcLVFDsVqb9wOZjrCIJ7GEUD6bRuolmRPE SLrpP5mDS+wetdhLn5ME1e9JeVkiSVSFIGsumZTNUaT0a90L4yNj5gBE40dvFplW 7TLeNE/ewDQk5LiIrfWuTUn3CqpjIOXxsZFLjieNgofX1nSeLjy3tnJwuTYQlVJO 3CbqH1k6cOIvE9XShnnuxmiSoav4uZIXnLZFQRT9v8UPIuedp7TO8Vjl0xRTajCL PdTk21e7fYriax62IssYcsbbo5G5auEdPO04H/+v/hxmRsGIr3XYvSi4ZWXKASxy a/jHFu9zEqmy0EBzFzpmSx+FrzpMKPkoU7RbxzMgZwIYEBk66Hh6gxllL0JmWjV0 iqmJMtOERE4NgYgumQT3dTxKuFtywmFxBTe80BhGlfUbjBtiSrULq59np4ztwlRT wDEAVDoZbN57aEXhQ8jjF2RlHtqGXhFMrg9fALHaRQARAQABiQQZBBgBCgAPBQJg Yw7SAhsMBQkFo5qAAAoJEJxtzRcoPkVMdigfoK4oBYoxVoWUBCUekCg/alVGyEHa ekvFmd3LYSKX/WklAY7cAgL/1UlLIFXbq9jpGXJUmLZBkzXkOylF9FIXNNTFAmBM 3TRjfPv91D8EhrHJW0SlECN+riBLtfIQV9Y1BUlQthxFPtB1G1fGrv4XR9Y4TsRj VSo78cNMQY6/89Kc00ip7tdLeFUHtKcJs+5EfDQgagf8pSfF/TWnYZOMN2mAPRRf fh3SkFXeuM7PU/X0B6FJNXefGJbmfJBOXFbaSRnkacTOE9caftRKN1LHBAr8/RPk pc9p6y9RBc/+6rLuLRZpn2W3m3kwzb4scDtHHFXXQBNC1ytrqdwxU7kcaJEPOFfC XIdKfXw9AQll620qPFmVIPH5qfoZzjk4iTH06Yiq7PI4OgDis6bZKHKyyzFisOkh DXiTuuDnzgcu0U4gzL+bkxJ2QRdiyZdKJJMswbm5JDpX6PLsrzPmN314lKIHQx3t NNXkbfHL/PxuoUtWLKg7/I3PNnOgNnDqCgqpHJuhU1AZeIkvewHsYu+urT67tnpJ AK1Z4CgRxpgbYA4YEV1rWVAPHX1u1okcg85rc5FHK8zh46zQY1wzUTWubAcxqp9K 1IqjXDDkMgIX2Z2fOA1plJSwugUCbFjn4sbT0t0YuiEFMPMB42ZCjcCyA1yysfAd DYAmSer1bq47tyTFQwP+2ZnvW/9p3yJ4oYWzwMzadR3T0K4sgXRC2Us9nPL9k2K5 TRwZ07wE2CyMpUv+hZ4ja13A/1ynJZDZGKys+pmBNrO6abxTGohM8LIWjS+YBPIq trxh8jxzgLazKvMGmaA6KaOGwS8vhfPfxZsu2TJaRPrZMa/HpZ2aEHwxXRy4nm9G Kx1eFNJO6Ues5T7KlRtl8gflI5wZCCD/4T5rto3SfG0s0jr3iAVb3NCn9Q73kiph PSwHuRxcm+hWNszjJg3/W+Fr8fdXAh5i0JzMNscuFAQNHgfhLigenq+BpCnZzXya 01kqX24AdoSIbH++vvgE0Bjj6mzuRrH5VJ1Qg9nQ+yMjBWZADljtp3CARUbNkiIg tUJ8IJHCGVwXZBqY4qeJc3h/RiwWM2UIFfBZ+E06QPznmVLSkwvvop3zkr4eYNez cIKUju8vRdW6sxaaxC/GECDlP0Wo6lH0uChpE3NJ1daoXIeymajmYxNt+drz7+pd jMqjDtNA2rgUrjptUgJK8ZLdOQ4WCrPY5pP9ZXAO7+mK7S3u9CTywSJmQpypd8hv 8Bu8jKZdoxOJXxj8CphK951eNOLYxTOxBUNB8J2lgKbmLIyPvBvbS1l1lCM5oHlw WXGlp70pspj3kaX4mOiFaWMKHhOLb+er8yh8jspM184= =5a6T -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- *H4A Press Clips* *May 11, 2015* SUMMARY OF TODAY’S NEWS Yesterday Hillary Clinton made Mother’s Day phone calls to 5 campaign contest winners. The women were from Nevada, Iowa, Colorado, Washington state and Minnesota. A Poll indicates that there is no clear Republican front-runner in the New Hampshire presidential nominating contest, while Hillary Clinton retains an overwhelming advantage among Democrats in the Granite State's first-in-the-nation primary. Vox’s Jonathan Allen released a profile on Jake Sullivan highlighting how he advised President Obama and now Hillary Clinton on foreign policy that Vox labels “hawkish”. The New York Times released a profile of Tony Rodham highlighting his past and present political and business endeavors. SUMMARY OF TODAY’S NEWS.............................................................................................. 1 TODAY’S KEY STORIES........................................................................................................... 3 *New Hampshire Poll: Republican Field Tightens, Hillary Clinton Still Out in Front Among Democrats* // Bloomberg // John McCormack - May 10, 2015 3 *Meet the man behind hawkish Hillary Clinton's foreign policy* // Vox // Jonathan Allen - May 11, 2015....... 5 *Tony Rodham’s Ties Invite Scrutiny for Hillary and Bill Clinton* // NYT // Steve Eder - May 10, 2015..... 13 HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE................................................................................................. 16 *As Middle Class Fades, So Does Use of Term on Campaign Trail* // NYT // Amy Chozick – May 11, 2015 16 *Hillary Rodham Clinton keeping an eye on opponents* // The Boston Globe // Annie Linskey – May 11, 2015 19 *Tom Brady and Hillary Clinton are too big to nail* // NY Post // Kyle Smith - May 10, 2015................... 22 *Hillary Clinton Calls For Paid Family Leave On Mother's Day* // PoliticsUSA // Jason Easley – May 10, 2015 24 *Clinton calls Iowa mom for a Mother's Day surprise* // Iowa Register //Ben Rogers – May 10, 2015........... 25 *North Las Vegas woman gets Mother’s Day surprise from Hillary Clinton* // National Review // Laura Myers - May 10, 2015 25 *Hillary Clinton’s Top Five Clashes Over Secrecy* // Long Island Press // Jeff Gurth – May 10, 2015.......... 26 *Hillary Clinton email case reopened by federal judge* // Washington Times // Stephen Dinan – May 10, 2015 30 *Hillary Clinton in Chinatown; spirituality at Stanford* // SF Chronicle // Leah Garchik - May 10, 2015....... 32 *Can Clinton pull off a hat-trick of Democrat wins?* // BBC News // Nick Bryant – May 11, 2015............... 33 *Hillary for New Hampshire open house grassroots event at The Met on Saturday* // The Conway Daily Sun // Lloyd Jones - May 8, 2015 37 *Clinton’s use of ‘super PAC’ pushes limits of campaign finance law* // Sentinel Source // Evan Halper - May 8, 2015 38 *The Clinton Foundation's Behind-the-Scenes Battle With a Charity Watchdog Group* // NY Mag // Gabriel Sherman - May 10, 2015 39 *Under pressure, Clinton Foundation's Canadian arm reveals 21 donors* // McClatchy // Greg Gordon - May 10, 2015 42 *For the Clintons, a big question: What to do with Bill?* // WaPo // Phillip Rucker - May 10, 2015........... 44 *Paul: Clinton made Libya a 'jihadist wonderland'* // The Hill // Mark Hensch - May 10, 2015................... 48 *Hillary’s Immigration* // Iowa Starting Line // Pat Rynard - May 10, 2015............................................. 49 *If Clinton wins White House, an uncertain future awaits her family's charitable foundation* // AP // Julie Pace – May 11, 2015 50 OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE................................................................. 52 *Sanders: I'm 'most progressive' member of Congress * // The Hill // Mark Hensch – May 10, 2015............. 52 *Why Bernie Sanders Thinks He Can Beat Hillary Clinton* // Bloomberg // Ali Elkin – May 10, 2015........ 53 *Bernie Sanders: I can beat Hillary Clinton* // CBS News // Rebecca Kaplan – May 10, 2015..................... 54 *Bernie Sanders pledges not to accept super PAC support* // Washington Times // Jose A. DelReal – May 10, 2015 56 *Bernie Sanders challenges Hillary Clinton on trade deal and Iraq war* // The Guardian // Martin Pengelly – May 10, 2015 57 *Bernie Sanders's presidential candidacy four decades in the making* // Christian Science Monitor // Dave Gram - May 10, 2015 58 *Bernie Sanders Says He Can Beat Hillary Clinton* // Huffington Post // May 10, 2015............................. 60 *Warren-for-president push waning* // Boston Herald // Hillary Chabot – May 11, 2015............................. 61 GOP.............................................................................................................................................. 62 *For GOP, too much of a good thing?* // CNN // Julian Zelizer – May 10, 2015....................................... 62 *GOP Hopefuls Talk Tough on National Security* // WSJ // Janet Hook - May 10, 2015........................... 64 *Carly Fiorina breaks with many in GOP on Obama's trade pitch* // CNN // Eric Bradner – May 10, 2015.... 67 *Carly Fiorina fires back at critics of ‘Domaingate’* // MSNBC // Nisha Chittal – May 10, 2015................. 67 *The Pentagon's Response to Ted Cruz Regarding Jade Helm 15* // Huffington Post // Jason Stanford – May 10, 2015 68 *Mike Huckabee Defends Endorsement of Diabetes Product* // First Draft –NYT // Nicholas Confessore – May 10, 2015 70 *Mike Huckabee: Nothing wrong with diabetes infomercials* // Politico // Eliza Collins – May 10, 2015....... 71 *Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson May Play Key Roles in Republican Race* // NYT // Albert Hunt – May 10, 2015 72 *Lindsey Graham: Hillary Clinton is beatable, but GOP is getting ‘creamed’ at the polls by non-white voters* // RawStory // Tom Boggioni – May 10, 2015 73 *Rand Paul Courts San Francisco’s Techies* // BuzzFeed // Ellen Cushing – May 10, 2015........................ 74 *Rand Paul Talks About Appealing to Young People on Tech Issues* // National Journal // Eric Garcia - May 10, 2015 75 *Rand Paul Plays Down Comments on Military Exercise After Mockery* // First Draft – NYT // Jeremy Peters – May 10, 2015 77 *Hillaryclinton.Net Redirects To Carly Fiorina Campaign Website* // Breitbart // Alex Swoyer - May 10, 2015 77 *Waiting for Jeb to jump* // Politico // Glenn Thrush – May 10, 2015.................................................... 78 *Choices, choices: Republicans ponder crowded field* // USA Today // David Jackson – May 10, 2015......... 82 *Jeb Bush says he, Hillary Clinton would have backed Iraq invasion* // Fox News // May 10, 2015............. 85 *Can Rubio or Bush help Republicans finally win Latino vote in 2016?* // LAT // Mark Z. Barabak - May 10, 2015 86 *Why Carly Fiorina was fired, according to Carly Fiorina* // MSNBC // Anna Brand - May 10, 2015........... 88 *Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson May Play Key Roles in Republican Race* // NYT // Al Hunt - May 10, 2015 89 *Paul Tells Tech-Heavy Crowd He's Against NSA Data Collection* // AP // Ellen Kickmeyer - May 10, 2015 91 *Ben Carson outlines flat-tax proposal* // POLITICO // Eliza Collins - May 10, 2015................................ 92 *In South Carolina, a Republican Scramble to Stand Out* // AP // Bill Barrow and Mitch Weiss - May 10, 2015 93 OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS.......................................................................................... 94 *Hillary Clinton Uses Mother's Day To Talk About Paid Family Leave* // Jezebel // Stassa Edwardsd – May 10, 2015 95 *How Hillary Is Winning* // NYT // Frank Bruni - May 9, 2015............................................................ 95 *Clinton: Direct Evidence vs. Facts* // WSJ // Mike Carroll – May 10, 2015........................................... 98 *George Clooney gushes over Hillary Clinton and his new life with Amal* // Woman’s Day - May 11, 2015. 98 *In Britain, an electoral earthquake shatters pre-election assumptions* // WaPo // Dan Balz - May 10, 2015.. 100 TOP NEWS................................................................................................................................ 100 Domestic................................................................................................................................ 100 *Jimmy Carter falls ill in Guyana, returns to U.S. early* // LAT // Kurtis Lee - May 10, 2015................... 101 *Networks Fret as Ad Dollars Flow to Digital Media* // NYT // Emily Steel and Sydney Ember - May 10, 2015 101 *Nuclear plant to clean up oil spill in Hudson River* // USA Today // Matt Spillane - May 10, 2015.......... 103 International...................................................................................................................... 104 *Saudi Arabia Says King Won’t Attend Meetings in U.S.* // NYT // Helene Cooper - May 10, 2015......... 104 *Chasing a rainbow party* // Economist // May 10, 2015..................................................................... 107 TODAY’S KEY STORIES New Hampshire Poll: Republican Field Tightens, Hillary Clinton Still Out in Front Among Democrats <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-10/new-hampshire-poll-republican-field-tightens-hillary-clinton-still-out-in-front-among-democrats> // Bloomberg // John McCormack - May 10, 2015 There's no clear Republican front-runner in the New Hampshire presidential nominating contest, while Hillary Clinton retains an overwhelming advantage among Democrats in the Granite State's first-in-the-nation primary. Clinton's advantage over her potential Republican rivals has narrowed, however, and the general election in the battleground state looks increasingly competitive, according to a new Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm New Hampshire Poll. The poll also shows that Senator Marco Rubio is rising while support for his fellow Floridian, former Governor Jeb Bush, has fallen off. Rubio and Bush both were the first choice of 11 percent of likely Republican primary voters in the poll, while Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky each scored 12 percent. Clinton is the first choice of 62 percent of likely Democratic primary voters roughly nine months before the primary. That's her best showing since November and suggests a recent wave of influence-peddling allegations about her family's foundation as well as the controversy over her use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state haven't tarnished her with the party's base. There are warning signs for Clinton in New Hampshire. Since the last poll in February, three of the top-polling Republican candidates—Bush, Paul, and Rubio—have moved into striking distance and are now within the poll's margin of error of tying her in hypothetical match-ups. The poll, conducted May 2-6 by Washington-based Purple Insights, shows Bush and Rubio as Clinton's closest competitors in potential head-to-head contests. Both trail her by 2 percentage points. Paul is next, 3 percentage points behind her, followed by Walker, who trails Clinton by 6 points. Clinton's closest New Hampshire primary competitor, Senator Bernie Sanders of neighboring Vermont, was the first choice of 18 percent of likely Democratic voters. Vice President Joe Biden was at 5 percent and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley at 3 percent. Neither Biden nor O'Malley have said they'll run. “Clinton’s strength in the primary remains historic," said Purple Insights' Doug Usher. "But she’s facing the laws of political gravity among independent voters more quickly than her campaign might have hoped.” Clinton's numbers with independent voters were destined to fall at some point, Usher said, as the campaign becomes more fully formed and intensely competitive. Among independent general-election voters in New Hampshire, Clinton is tied or nearly tied with Bush, Paul and Rubio. She does better against Walker with this group, leading 42 percent to 36 percent. Rubio, who announced his candidacy April 13, more than doubled his level of primary support since the poll's last sample, in February. Bush, who isn't expected to formally announce until June, dropped five percentage points, his lowest level since the poll started tracking the state's voters in November. Poll respondent Stephanie Korb, 57, a Republican dental assistant from Belmont, N.H., said she is leaning toward Rubio. “He seems like a less offensive choice than the others,” she said. “I want to hear what the candidates want to do to turn this country around and you're not hearing that.” Support for Paul and Walker have remained steady since February. Paul has formally announced his candidacy, while Walker is expected to hold off until June or later. Donald Trump was selected by 8 percent of likely primary voters—up 5 percentage points from February—followed by 7 percent for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, 6 percent for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, 5 percent for retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, 4 percent for former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, and 3 percent for former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Scoring 1 percent were former Texas Governor Rick Perry, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, and Ohio Governor John Kasich, none of whom have formally announced bids. Walker does best when first and second choices are combined, a positive sign for his prospects in the state. He's backed by 24 percent in that case, followed by 21 percent for Bush and Paul and 20 percent for Rubio. “The Republican primary remains as wide open as ever, and there are no signs here that any candidate has a clear route to winning in New Hampshire,” Usher said. Part of Paul's strength is his ability to attract independent voters, a key group especially in New Hampshire, where they can vote in partisan primaries. He's supported by 18 percent of independents who said they were likely to vote in the Republican primary, easily the most of anyone in the field. That means he's going to want to see the state's Democratic primary remain a lopsided affair, prompting independents to stick with the action on the Republican side and continue to support him. Bush is relatively weak among independents. While drawing support from 15 percent of Republicans, he has the backing of just 6 percent of independents. That's a potential problem for Bush, especially if he runs poorly in the Iowa caucuses set for the week before New Hampshire's primary. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week showed Bush in 7th place in Iowa, so he might need a top finish in New Hampshire to rebound. Fred McGarry, 69, a semi-retired engineer from Deerfield, N.H., said he's leaning toward Bush, although the moderate Republican said he wishes he had other choices. “I'd be happier if his last name wasn't Bush,” McGarry said. “All the others are too far to the right for me and my guess is that some of them will play well in the strongly red states, but not get elected nationwide.” The poll shows gender differences developing among likely Republican primary voters. Paul does twice as well among men as he does among women, while Rubio does slightly better with women than men. Walker also does slightly better among men. Bush performed equally well among both genders. “Walker has got a lot of good credibility and his conservative vocabulary is excellent,” said John Van Uden, 79, a retired manager for a farm equipment company who lives in Bedford, N.H. “He knows what he's talking about from his experience as a governor.” And New Hampshire voters aren't convinced that the next president will be named either Bush or Clinton. Asked to choose which of the two would be the next president, a third of New Hampshire's likely general-election voters said Clinton, 27 percent didn't venture a guess, 22 percent said someone else, and 18 percent said Bush. Among Republican primary voters, 31 percent say they think another Bush will move into the White House in 2017, while 34 percent say someone else, 24 percent said they're not sure, and 10 percent said Clinton. The poll included 500 general-election voters as well as over-samples to have 400 Republican primary voters and 400 Democratic primary voters. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points on general-election questions and plus or minus 4.9 percentage points on primary election questions. Meet the man behind hawkish Hillary Clinton's foreign policy <http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8569345/hillary-clinton-hawkish-foreign-policy> // Vox // Jonathan Allen - May 11, 2015 In late 2010, Tom Nides sat down for lunch with the throwback diplomat Richard Holbrooke on the second floor of Kinkead's, a legendary seafood restaurant near the State Department's headquarters in the Foggy Bottom section of Washington. Nides had just been nominated to succeed Jack Lew as deputy secretary of state, and Holbrooke, who was serving as the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, wanted to give Nides the lay of the land. Nides thought that meant a status update on the region. But Holbrooke, who paid attention as meticulously to the ups and downs of the Washington elite as he did to the twists and turns of international deal-making, intended to detail the department's power structure. As they ate, Holbrooke explained that Nides must acquaint himself with a singular force in Secretary Hillary Clinton's inner circle. "Let me tell you, the only person and the one person you need to get to know, who is loved by everyone in the institution and gets things done, is Jake Sullivan," Holbrooke said. The 38-year-old Sullivan catapulted through the ranks of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, from 2008 Clinton campaign aide to top policy hand at State to national security adviser for Vice President Joe Biden. Now the blue-eyed, sandy-haired Minnesotan has come full circle, having been picked earlier this month for the delicate task of running the Clinton campaign's foreign policy, an area in which the candidate's hawkish instincts diverge from those of war-wary progressives. For liberals hoping Clinton will undergo a left-oriented metamorphosis on foreign policy to match the economic and social policy transformations that have her sounding more and more like an Elizabeth Warren acolyte, Sullivan's selection will be a disappointment. He won't drag Clinton to the left — or anywhere else. "He's in line with her," said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama. "On the spectrum of people in our administration, he tended to favor more assertive US engagement on issues" and "responses that would incorporate some military element." That included early advocacy for arming Syrian rebels when he worked for Clinton at State and the Ukrainian military when he was Biden's national security adviser. "Reject cynicism. Reject certitude. And don't be a jerk." Like Clinton, though, Sullivan is decidedly dedicated to the proposition that no ideology or solution fits every situation. "Reject cynicism. Reject certitude. And don't be a jerk," he advised the University of Minnesota's public policy graduates in a 2013 address. "Now, when I say 'reject certitude,' I don't mean your core principles. You can and must be certain about those ... But in public policy, principles simply point the way — they do not provide specific answers about what to do in specific circumstances." He and Clinton both subscribe to the non-philosophical school of so-called "smart power." A concept developed by Harvard professor and former Defense Department official Joseph Nye, smart power encompasses the use of both hard power favored by hawks (military threat, force, and sanctions) and the soft-power levers favored by foreign policy doves (foreign aid, forging cultural and economic bonds, and negotiation). "Jake was not the most experienced diplomat at the state department i could have chosen..." In the confines of the national political debate, hard power and soft power are black-and-white choices. In the smart power construct, they are not at odds; they are complementary. And while Sullivan is more given to the use of force than many in the Obama administration, he's also shown a willingness to engage diplomatically with some of the toughest customers in the world. He was one of a handful of Obama White House aides looped into the effort to reestablish ties US ties to Cuba. Before that, Clinton dispatched him to Oman in 2012 to begin negotiations with Iran over a possible deal to roll back economic sanctions on Tehran in exchange for restrictions on the country's nuclear enrichment program. "Jake was not the most experienced diplomat at the State Department I could have chosen, but he was discreet and had my absolute confidence," Clinton wrote in her memoir Hard Choices. "His presence would send a powerful message that I was personally invested in this process." "Ugh!" As important as sharing Clinton's worldview, Sullivan's developed a role in her orbit as a solicitor, and distiller, of the best arguments on all sides of a debate, and as someone who is widely trusted as an honest broker among the sometimes warring factions of Hillaryland. Former Undersecretary of State Bob Hormats, who spent eight years working at the National Security Council in the 1960s and '70s, says Sullivan's approach is reminiscent of that of Brent Scowcroft, who served Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush as national security adviser. "He is known to have strong views but also was good at pulling together the views of people whose opinions he trusted" When done well, the national security adviser's job is to collect the wisdom, insights, and policy preferences of the president's war Cabinet and present them with as little prejudice as possible. Sullivan's role on the campaign, like his role at State, is similar to that. There's no learning curve. His tendencies are her tendencies. Veteran Clinton foreign policy aides say he would be on the short list for the national security adviser post if she wins the presidency. "He is known to have strong views but also was good at pulling together the views of people whose opinions he trusted and conveying those to the secretary so she could see different perspectives," Hormats said. "In many ways I think his temperament and his interlocutor role are similar to those of Brent Scowcroft, who was extremely knowledgeable and well-respected for these traits. ... And, like Jake, he stayed out of the limelight." When I emailed Sullivan to tell him I was working on a profile of him, he replied in four characters: "Ready to make commitments" Sullivan, the second of what would become a set of five kids, was born in Burlington, Vermont, a few weeks after Jimmy Carter's 1976 election, and later moved to Minnesota. Until he was well into his 30s, he had only really observed one Democrat in the presidency: Bill Clinton. At Minneapolis Southwest High School, Sullivan was a standout on the debate and quiz bowl teams, garnering "most likely to succeed" honors. He graduated from Yale in 1998, went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and then returned to Yale for law school. That's where he first met Harold Koh, the renowned human-rights lawyer and international law expert. Koh, who would go on to become dean of the law school and then serve as Clinton’s top lawyer at State, recalls Sullivan volunteering to help with the legwork on an amicus brief for the Supreme Court in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas. The case looked like it could be a watershed moment for the attainment — or rejection — of civil rights for the gay and lesbian community. Sullivan felt it was important to push that needle forward. Yale's role brought together Sullivan's values on a domestic policy matter with his interest in international law. His desire to jump into the fray showed he was "ready to make commitments" to social justice issues, Koh said. It was also a sign that he shares Clinton's view that domestic policy is a factor that affects America's ability to lead abroad. In the brief, Koh and colleagues argued that the Supreme Court should weigh the conclusions of foreign and international courts in determining whether a Texas statute banning same-sex sodomy violated the Constitution. The 6-3 majority opinion overturning the Texas law noted, "Other nations, too, have taken action consistent with an affirmation of the protected right of homosexual adults to engage in intimate, consensual conduct." Sullivan would go on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who sided with the majority in the Lawrence case. Years later, when Koh and Sullivan worked together as top State advisers, Clinton delivered a speech in Geneva in which she equated gay rights and human rights, a formulation designed to signal that the US would judge foreign countries' human rights records in part on how they treated members of the LGBT community. "I speak about this subject knowing that my own country's record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect," Clinton said. "So we, like all nations, have more work to do to protect human rights at home." When Sullivan left Biden's office last year, he went back to Yale to be close to his fiancée, Maggie Goodlander, a former adviser to Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who is pursuing a law degree. In New Haven, he and Koh co-taught a class on foreign policy and law, where Sullivan pushed students to deliver debate-style arguments and then critiqued them to show how they could be sharper. Like Clinton, another Yale-trained lawyer, Sullivan simply loves assessing the arguments, Koh said. Winning friends and influencing Obama Sullivan prepped Clinton for her 2008 debates with Obama and other Democrats. He did such a good job that, after the primary, Obama's team borrowed him from Clinton to help the future president get ready for his face-offs with Republican nominee John McCain. When Obama won the White House, Sullivan told friends he planned to head home to Minnesota, where he wanted to practice law and eventually run for office — possibly then–Rep. Michele Bachmann’s House seat. Clinton changed that arc by offering him a newly created job as her deputy chief of staff for policy at the State Department. He was 32 when he was sworn in. He quickly accumulated influence within the department, becoming Clinton's right hand in formulating policy, conducting diplomacy, writing speeches, and, at times, dealing with the media. Colleagues say he showed a unique ability to dive into and out of issues, and to move from the crisis of the moment to long-term planning. And, of course, he had an uncanny knack for knowing what Clinton would want done. A wee-hours reader and emailer, Sullivan developed a reputation for cutting through bureaucratic thickets to get decisions quickly on even minor items. That helped him suck up turf and authority at State, where he was eventually given additional duties as the head of the department's in-house strategic think tank, the Office of Policy Planning. Perhaps most impressive, though, is the way he earned the trust of both Clinton and Obama’s foreign policy team at a time when the two camps were still feeling each other out. Sullivan formed a bond with two of Obama’s national security aides, Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes, often channeling the view of the White House within the State Department. Though he gained notoriety with conservatives for being part of the email chain on Benghazi talking points, the truth is that he was in near-constant communication with the White House on all manner of issues for four years. For example, when Clinton accused Pakistan of harboring Osama bin Laden in 2009, Sullivan quickly reached out to see if Obama’s aides wanted her to walk it back. The answer: double down. The close contact on even minor issues reduced the real and inevitable tension between Obama and Clinton camps that had fought bitterly over the Democratic nomination and didn't always see eye to eye on foreign policy matters. Sullivan, unlike the vast majority of Clintonworld, had formed relationships with Obama's team during the 2008 general election campaign. That's one reason he became a go-to resource for the White House. The other: he was one-stop shopping on policy, diplomacy, and communication. "Jake did everything for Secretary Clinton," Rhodes said. In another episode in 2009, Sullivan took up the White House's cause in pushing for the ouster of Jared Cohen, a member of the Policy Planning Office staff who asked Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance of the company's platform because members of the Iranian Green Movement relied on it to communicate. Obama had just said the US wouldn’t interfere in Iran’s domestic politics, and Cohen’s intervention, which was leaked to the New York Times, made it look like the president wasn’t honoring that promise. From Sullivan's point of view, which matched that of the White House and some veteran diplomats, the story about Cohen's action could backfire on the Green Movement. The demonstrators had signaled they would lose credibility if fellow Iranians saw them as puppets of Washington. Clinton had a different take on the matter, telling her top aides that Cohen’s effort was exactly what the US should be doing. That episode in June 2009 was one of the rare occasions when Sullivan and Clinton diverged. He was at her elbow for nearly every stop on her marathon, four-year tour of the world. When he wasn't literally by her side, it was because he was representing her with foreign officials. "When he shows up somewhere, they know he speaks for Hillary and he speaks to Hillary," Koh said. "The cat's meow" Often, a Washington staffer reflects one or two traits of his or her boss — or quickly learns to adopt them. Sullivan clearly reminds Clinton of herself: lawyerly, organized, detail-oriented, and capable of moving from issue to issue without losing his place. And, of course, his pragmatic streak on policy matches hers. He also shares a few of Bill Clinton's traits, most notably a rare likability. "When Jake Sullivan first came to work for me, I told my husband about this incredibly bright rising star — Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law School — and my husband said, 'Well, if he ever learns to play the saxophone, watch out,'" Clinton once said, adding that when she traveled as secretary of state she talked to people all over the world who wanted to "meet a potential future president of the United States — and of course they mean Jake." As Nides put it, "Hillary thinks he is the cat's meow." While Sullivan has made a big name for himself in Washington over a short period of time, and is well-positioned to join a possible second Clinton administration in a powerful role, he often tells friends he wants to return home — at least for a while — and run for elective office. That may be informed, in part, by his desire to be closer to his roots. With one exception since 2001, Sullivan has traveled to the NCAA men's basketball Final Four city to meet up with his siblings. They show up, without tickets, and try to find their way into the arena, according to a friend. Another friend said growing up in a household full of smart kids has helped Sullivan keep an even keel in the choppy waters of Washington politics and international diplomacy. Teammate of rivals It was back to Minnesota that Sullivan planned to go when Clinton left the State Department in early 2013. He was finally going to set up that run for office. But he ended up staying in Washington for a job that would increase his value to Clinton as a foreign policy adviser and keep him in the middle of an issue — a possible nuclear deal with Iran — that presents tremendous risk to her in 2016. Clinton had refused Obama's request to stay in her job, and the White House didn't want to lose Sullivan, too. The biggest job available was national security adviser to Biden. Sullivan insisted that, once again, he had his heart set on going back home so he could eventually come back to Washington as an elected official in his own right. Obama sealed the deal by telling Sullivan, among other things, that he could be far more influential as Biden's national security adviser than as a junior member of Congress, according to a person familiar with their conversation. It was a line Sullivan had heard before, from Nides and others. Obama, who served less than one term in the Senate, knew from back-benching it on Capitol Hill. And though he was assigned to the vice president's office, Sullivan understood the role would give him access to the president's daily briefing on intelligence and put him in the Situation Room for National Security Council meetings. In those ways, it represented an ideal training ground for becoming the president's national security adviser. White House officials say there was never any tension surrounding Sullivan's decision to work for Biden — a path Clinton encouraged him to follow — because everyone knew that if she ran for president, Sullivan would go with her. He had risen with her, and his views on US engagement with the world fit hers much better than Obama's or Biden's. Biden, for example, was against the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and striking Libya. Sullivan participated in a series of meetings with Clinton and foreign officials in Paris and the Middle East in which the Libya coalition was stitched together. He handed her the phone when she asked Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, from a television greenroom in Tunisia, to abstain from a Security Council vote on Libya. From the vice president's office, he continued to be part of the US negotiating team on an Iran deal that Republicans, and some Democrats, say places too much trust in Tehran. The administration believes it is the only path to ensuring Iran is unable to develop a nuclear weapon in short order. After Sullivan left the administration last year — for the teaching post at Yale rather than a run for Congress — he continued to participate in the P5+1 talks with Iran. "You can't be effective that way" A few weeks after Holbrooke advised Nides to develop a relationship with Sullivan, Holbrooke's heart burst in a meeting with his deputy Frank Ruggiero, Clinton, and Sullivan at the State Department. In typically animated fashion, he had been arguing against the administration's policy on dealing with the Taliban as Obama tried to wind down the war in Afghanistan. In Holbrooke's view, it was worth sitting down with Taliban leaders to see if a deal could be struck in which they would sever their relations with al-Qaeda and live by the new constitution of Afghanistan. The White House position was that those concessions should be pre-conditions of negotiating with the Taliban. Holbrooke thought they should be pre-conditions for a deal, but not for a meeting. On that matter, Sullivan was with the White House. As Holbrooke made his impassioned plea to Clinton, he heaved and turned red. His aorta had torn open. Sullivan and Ruggierio came to his aid and hustled him to a nearby elevator so he could be rushed to George Washington University's hospital. Holbrooke died a couple of days later. He had once told a colleague, after finding himself talking to Sullivan when he called for Clinton, that Sullivan could someday be secretary of state. Less than two years after Holbrooke's death, Sullivan was assigned to reach out to Iran about a possible nuclear deal, without apparent pre-condition. He continued to work on the developing deal even after he left Washington. The controversial premise on which it hinges — that the agreement can be so sound as to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — is politically risky for Clinton. She has left her options open, for the moment, saying last month that "diplomacy deserves a chance." Her top foreign policy aide's involvement in the negotiations may make it harder for her to distance herself from a deal, but she has not committed to supporting one. Like Clinton, Sullivan, for better and worse, has shown situational flexibility in his approach to foreign policy. Often, there's no perfect choice on the table. And what works for one problem may not work for another. "The minute you start treating public policy problems like arithmetic problems, with an absolute right and an absolute wrong answer, quit," he told the Minnesota graduating class. "You can't be effective that way. In a world of imperfection, you will not find a flawless position, which means that whatever position you adopt will inevitably have weaknesses or blind spots. You should acknowledge them." Tony Rodham’s Ties Invite Scrutiny for Hillary and Bill Clinton <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/us/politics/tony-rodhams-ties-invite-scrutiny-forhillary-and-bill-clinton.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0> // NYT // Steve Eder - May 10, 2015 The heavyset 60-year-old man who walked with a cane seemed an unlikely speaker at the glamorous launch party for a cosmetics company held in Santa Monica, Calif., in March. But Tony Rodham appeared at ease among the special guests and well-heeled investors, offering them encouragement as well as an invitation. “If there’s anything I can ever do for any of you, let me know,” Mr. Rodham said. “I’ll be more than happy to do it.” A promotional video of the party that the cosmetics company later released identified the speaker as “the youngest brother of former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton,” a relationship that has been Mr. Rodham’s calling card since the days of the Clinton White House. On and off for two decades, the affable Mr. Rodham has tried to use his connections with his sister and his brother-in-law, former President Bill Clinton, to further a business career that has seen more failures than successes. The connections to the Clintons have given Mr. Rodham, a self-described “facilitator,” a unique appeal and a range of opportunities, like addressing Chinese investor conferences and joining an advisory board of a company seeking permission to mine for gold in Haiti. But his business dealings have often invited public scrutiny and uncomfortable questions for the Clintons as Mr. Rodham has cycled through a variety of ventures, leveraging his ties to them and sometimes directly seeking their help. When Mr. Clinton worked as a co-chairman of Haiti’s earthquake recovery commission, Mr. Rodham and his partners sought a $22 million deal to rebuild homes in the country. In court proceedings three years ago in an unrelated lawsuit, Mr. Rodham explained how “a guy in Haiti” had “donated” 10,000 acres of land to him and described how he had leaned on Mr. Clinton to get the rebuilding project funded amid bureaucratic delays. “I deal through the Clinton Foundation. That gets me in touch with the Haitian officials,” Mr. Rodham said, according to a transcript of his testimony. “I hound my brother-in-law, because it’s his fund that we’re going to get our money from. And he can’t do it until the Haitian government does it. “And he keeps telling me, ‘Oh, it’s going to happen tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’ Well, tomorrow hasn’t come yet.” Mr. Rodham’s Haiti project never did happen. The Clinton Foundation said in a statement that it was not aware of Mr. Rodham’s Haiti project and had no involvement in it. Mr. Clinton’s office said he had not been involved in any of Mr. Rodham’s pursuits in Haiti. But Mr. Rodham was able to prevail on the former president for help in other ways. When Mr. Rodham was short on cash in 2010, Mr. Clinton helped get him a job for $72,000 a year raising investments in GreenTech Automotive, an electric car company then owned by Terry McAuliffe, an old friend of Mr. Clinton’s and now the governor of Virginia. “I was complaining to my brother-in-law I didn’t have any money. And he asked McAuliffe to give me a job,” Mr. Rodham said during the court proceedings, which were the result of a lawsuit over unpaid legal bills filed by his lawyer in a child support case. A brother down on his luck seeking help from more successful siblings is a familiar story, and presidents and their families have hardly been immune from that sometimes uncomfortable situation. For the Clintons, Tony Rodham has not been the only source of embarrassment. Mrs. Clinton’s other brother, Hugh Rodham, stumbled through an unsuccessful campaign for the Senate in Florida during Mr. Clinton’s first term. Roger Clinton, the former president’s brother, served a year in federal prison on a cocaine distribution charge. And all three were involved in lobbying Mr. Clinton for pardons for their associates as he left office, prompting a congressional inquiry. “They’re all colorful,” Rahm Emanuel, a former Clinton aide who later became mayor of Chicago, said in an interview in 2001. “They’re all living large.” As Mrs. Clinton began her 2016 campaign for the presidency, Hugh Rodham and Roger Clinton had faded from public view, but Tony Rodham emerged as a controversial figure. A government investigation in March found that GreenTech, which sought green cards for its Chinese investors through an American government program, had received special treatment in the handling of its visa applications. The report described instances when Mr. McAuliffe and Mr. Rodham contacted an official from the Department of Homeland Security to complain about the pace of the visa process. Mr. Rodham’s unsuccessful pursuit of housing contracts in Haiti, which has not previously been reported, raised new questions. As Mrs. Clinton campaigns, she speaks fondly of her brothers. At a stop in Iowa, she recalled them working together at her father’s drapery business. Her official campaign biography prominently mentions them. “She loves her family more than anything,” said Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton. “Her brothers have always been there for her, and she will always be there for them. Each, though, have their own lives, their own jobs, their own ups and downs.” As the youngest of three children, Tony Rodham has lived in the shadow of his sister. He never finished college, and he worked at a variety of jobs — as a prison guard, private detective and at the Democratic National Committee — until after the Clintons were in the White House, when he became a consultant and deal broker. He was once married to Nicole Boxer, the daughter of Senator Barbara Boxer of California. He lives with his second wife, Megan, and two young children in a large house on a hill in Vienna, Va., a suburb of Washington. He declined to speak to a reporter who went to his door one afternoon in April, and he did not respond to other messages seeking comment for this article. But in a statement from Mr. Rodham passed on by the Clinton campaign, he said that he wanted to protect his family’s privacy and that he would not engage in disputing claims about him, which he said he considered to be political attacks. His wife said the family was excited about Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for president. “The kids love their Aunt Hillary,” she said. “We are supportive, and we are excited.” Mr. Rodham described his dire financial situation during the court proceedings in 2012. As a result of a series of failed business deals — including some in oil and gas, water, housing, tutoring and pharmaceuticals — he said he had not made a mortgage payment in 10 months and was fighting home foreclosure. The Clintons, he said, had been generous, even paying for his son’s schooling, but they were not going to give him more money. “Hillary and Bill are done,” he said. “I mean, look at what they’ve done for me. They’ve given me money all the time.” Mr. Clinton’s willingness to assist in getting him work with Mr. McAuliffe was helpful, Mr. Rodham said, but at $6,000 a month, it was not enough. “It’s kind of like the job he got me a long time ago when I worked in the prison,” he said. Even more important, according to Mr. Rodham, was what he said was going to be Mr. Clinton’s help on his Haiti rebuilding project. That project came about when Sheldon Drobny, an old friend, contacted Mr. Rodham about making a connection for a Chicago-area contractor, who wanted to become involved in building houses in Haiti. “We were trying to help. Period,” Mr. Drobny, a co-founder of Air America Radio, the former liberal talk network, said in a phone interview. He called the effort “humanitarian.” Mr. Drobny said he had connected with Mr. Rodham because of what he believed were his ties to the Clinton Foundation, which was playing a central role in the rebuilding efforts. Ultimately, he said, nothing happened “because the Haiti government was not cooperative.” The Clinton Foundation said in its statement that aside from supporting a housing exposition in Haiti, it had not been directly involved with any housing projects. The foundation also said Mr. Rodham’s project had not been among the more than 300 submitted for consideration at the expo. Mr. Rodham projected that he could make $1 million on the Haiti deal if it came to pass — enough money, he said in his court testimony, to take his family to Disney World and cover his debts, including his legal bills and his long overdue federal taxes. Mr. Rodham eventually settled his bill with his former lawyer, Gwendolyn Jo M. Carlberg. Ms. Carlberg said in a phone interview that, despite her lawsuit, she did not have a negative view of Mr. Rodham. “I found a lot of good in Tony,” she said. He is still sought after for deals and personal appearances. That was the case in March when Mr. Rodham attended the celebration of Wynn Beauty & Health in Santa Monica, which included a performance from an “American Idol” contestant. In addition to appearing in the promotional video, Mr. Rodham posed for at least a dozen photos. But after a reporter contacted Wynn Beauty & Health, Mr. Rodham was removed from the video and photos of him disappeared from the company’s Facebook page. In an email, the company said that Mr. Rodham was not involved in the business and that he had appeared at the celebration only as a longtime friend offering congratulations. HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE As Middle Class Fades, So Does Use of Term on Campaign Trail <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/politics/as-middle-class-fades-so-does-use-of-term-on-campaign-trail.html> // NYT // Amy Chozick – May 11, 2015 Hillary Rodham Clinton speaking last month with voters in Marshalltown, Iowa. She has made "everyday Americans" a focus of her campaign, staying away from the term "middle class." Hillary Rodham Clinton calls them “everyday Americans.” Scott Walker prefers “hardworking taxpayers.” Rand Paul says he speaks for “people who work for the people who own businesses.” Bernie Sanders talks about “ordinary Americans.” The once ubiquitous term “middle class” has gone conspicuously missing from the 2016 campaign trail, as candidates and their strategists grasp for new terms for an unsettled economic era. The phrase, long synonymous with the American dream, now evokes anxiety, an uncertain future and a lifestyle that is increasingly out of reach. The move away from “middle class” is the rhetorical result of a critical shift: After three decades of income gains favoring the highest earners and job growth being concentrated at the bottom of the pay scale, the middle has for millions of families become a precarious place to be. A social stratum that once signified a secure, aspirational lifestyle, with a house in the suburbs, children set to attend college, retirement savings in the bank and, maybe, an occasional trip to Disneyland now connotes fears about falling behind, sociologists, economists and political scientists say. That unease spilled out during conversations with voters in focus groups convened by Democratic pollsters in recent months. “The cultural consensus around what it mean to be ‘middle class’ — and that has very much been part of the national identity in the United States — is beginning to shift,’’ said Sarah Elwood, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and an author of a paper about class identity that one Clinton adviser had studied. Rising costs mean many families whose incomes fall in the middle of the national distribution can no longer afford the trappings of what was once associated with a middle-class lifestyle. That has made the term, political scientists say, lose its resonance. “We have no collective language for talking about that condition,” Dr. Elwood said. The result is a presidential campaign in which every candidate desperately wants to appeal to middle-class Americans — broadly defined as working-age households with annual incomes of $35,000 to $100,000 — but does not know how to address them. That has led to some linguistic maneuvering. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, has said what makes America unique are the “millions and millions of people who aren’t rich.” Mr. Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is seeking the Democratic nomination, has talked about “working families” and “people working full time.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, has made “hardworking men and women across America” the focus of his message. “It used to be ‘middle class’ represented everyone, actually or in their aspirations, but now it doesn’t feel as attainable,” said David Madland, managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the Clinton campaign. “You see politicians and others grasping for the right word to talk about a majority of Americans.” Candidates realize they cannot win election without widespread appeal among the 51 percent of Americans who, according to Gallup, identify as middle or upper-middle class. That compares with an average of 60 percent who identified the same way in polls conducted from 2000 through 2008. But sociologists say such surveys obscure how Americans feel about the characterization — and how much the middle class has shrunk. They call the new economy an “hourglass” with a concentration of wealth at the top and low-paying service jobs at the bottom and “a spectacular loss of median-wage jobs in the middle,” said William Julius Wilson, a sociologist and Harvard professor. In surveys, more Americans still choose ‘middle class’ when asked which category they belong to, because they do not want to identify as rich or poor and because no new phrase exists to describe middle-income earners who view their social class as vulnerable. Working class, once associated with manufacturing jobs, now mostly connotes low-paying service jobs. “People are looking for some way to say, ‘I recognize I’m a little below the middle,’” said Dennis Gilbert, a professor of sociology at Hamilton College who has published books on American class structure. Before presidential campaigns tested replacement terms, academics started to adopt phrases like the “near poor” or “the sandwich generation.’’ After the Great Depression, “submerged middle class” became popular to describe families who could rise if aided by the New Deal. “What do you call people who don’t have good jobs but who aren’t poor?” said Andrew J. Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Labor’s Love Lost,” about the rise and fall of working families. The words may be endangered, but the idyllic image of the American middle class that took hold after World War II and became the backbone of everything from selling appliances to pitching presidential candidates still looms large on the campaign trail. When candidates talk about the middle class, they increasingly use the words as a nostalgic term, a reminder about what the American economy has been and what it could again become — with the right president, of course. The 67-year-old Mrs. Clinton regularly walks down memory lane with stories about her middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Chicago, invoking an era when parents who were not rich could raise a child who would become a senator, a secretary of state and a potential president. In addition to her signature phrase, “everyday Americans,” Mrs. Clinton often says: “We need to make the middle class mean something again.” The line, her campaign said, was informed by the growing school of thought that in 2015, “middle class” makes a majority of voters more anxious than optimistic.. “In the 1960s, ‘middle class’ felt like it fit your lifestyle,” said Felicia Wong, the president and chief executive of the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank with ties to Mrs. Clinton’s economic team. Even if families fall in the middle in income distribution, they cannot afford many of the necessities, much less the luxuries, traditionally associated with being middle class, Ms. Wong said. Household incomes for the middle class have been stagnant, while the costs of middle-class security — which economists define as child care, higher education, health care, housing and retirement — increased by more than $10,000 from 2000 to 2012, according to a Center for American Progress report, “Middle-Class Squeeze.” “If you’re technically in the 50th percentile in income distribution but you can’t afford to send your kids to college or take a vacation, are you middle class or not?” Ms. Wong said. But skeptics say that “everyday Americans” and the other phrases candidates use to fill the void are overly vague and upbeat and obscure a bleak reality. “If you had a candidate running around talking about the ‘submerged middle class,’ voters would run the other way,” said Frank Levy, an economist and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The phrases can be awkward, too, or slow to catch on. Mrs. Clinton has a mantra: “Everyday Americans need a champion.” But when she visited a high school in Las Vegas last week to talk about immigration, she found the students had welcomed her with a handmade sign with her campaign slogan. They had botched the punctuation — and a bit of the meaning, though perhaps it still resonated. “Everyday, Americans need a champion,’’ it read. Hillary Rodham Clinton keeping an eye on opponents <https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/05/10/hillary-rodham-clinton-keeping-eye-opponents/EYsSvlwNCspLHmfbpTkMJI/story.html> // The Boston Globe // Annie Linskey – May 11, 2015 WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton is leaving nothing to chance this time around. The Clinton presidential operation may look like a juggernaut from the outside, but her attempts to marshal early support in the home states of long shots are evidence that she feels the need to protect every flank, no matter how weak the opposition appears. In Rhode Island, office space for a local Clinton campaign headquarters was identified early in the campaign; in Maryland, several lawmakers have already lent their names to Clinton for fund-raisers. And in Vermont, she moved quickly to sew up support. These aren’t states that typically get much attention from presidential candidates. But all three are home to underdogs who have announced, or are considering, their own bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination. That makes the states turf Clinton can’t ignore. “She knows there is going to be a media onslaught against her,” said Joe Paolino, a former Providence mayor who will be leasing her campaign office space in Providence. “She isn’t taking anything for granted. This is not a walk in the park for her.” Eight years ago, Clinton also basked in the aura of inevitability only to be out-organized and out-campaigned by Barack Obama. Clinton’s campaign has pledged that it will avoid mistakes from that race, so this time around her campaign is leaner. The staff is smaller. The offices are less lavish. Tyrone Gayle, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said the organization is making a concerted effort nationally. “Hillary Clinton is committed to earning every vote,” said Gayle in a statement. Two of Clinton’s challengers are new to the Democratic Party, and therefore lack strong ties with the local party establishments. For Clinton, that made for easy endorsement pickings in Vermont, where Democratic Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger revealed his support for her the same day that Bernie Sanders, an independent and former Burlington mayor, said he would challenge her for the Democratic nomination. The Clinton campaign reached out to line up the endorsement before Sanders’ announcement, according to a source familiar with the conversation, reflecting an attention to detail. Vermont’s other senator, Patrick Leahy, is also backing Clinton. Sanders’ camp brushed off the endorsements. “Would you rather have politicians or the people backing you?” said Sanders’ spokesman Michael Briggs. Sanders has gone on to raise more than $3 million since he got in the race on April 30; mostly from small donations, according to his campaign. And he’s getting a close look from Iowa caucus-goers, according to a survey out last week. His support rose to 15 percent from zero in February, according to a poll by Quinnipiac University. Much of it came from people in the liberal wing of the party who hoped Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren would jump into the race. She polled at 19 percent three months ago but was dropped from the more recent survey because she’s not running for president. Another Democratic newcomer challenging Clinton is former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee. On April 9, he said he’d consider a presidential bid. Within days, current Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, a longtime Clinton supporter, told the Associated Press she wouldn’t back the home state candidate, in part because it is “time to put a mom in the White House.” Then word leaked to the local press that Clinton was preparing to set up operations in the state — even open an office in Providence. Debbie Rich, a spokeswoman for Chafee, declined to comment on Clinton’s campaign activities, other than to point out that her campaign’s office address was publicized “right after” Chafee revealed he was considering running. The Clinton campaign wouldn’t comment on the Rhode Island office and noted that the only official state headquarters to launch so far are in her home state of New York and in New Hampshire, where a Manchester operation opened last week. Next month, Clinton will make an appearance in Rhode Island for fund-raiser at the home of loyalist Mark Weiner, said Paolino, who is helping to organize the event. He predicted the state’s “entire Democratic establishment” will be behind Clinton. That’s not surprising, since Chafee was a Republican when he represented the state in the US Senate and an independent when he was elected governor in 2010. Perhaps the bigger threat to Clinton’s nomination comes from Maryland, where the former governor, Martin O’Malley, has long been considering a presidential campaign. He, too, has seen Clinton incursions in his state. Shortly after the November 2014 elections, in which O’Malley’s chosen successor lost to a Republican, the Ready for Hillary super PAC scheduled two fund-raisers in his home state sponsored by a raft of Maryland politicians. The organizers wanted a strong showing of local officials backing Clinton. “They were bombarding us with calls,” said one Maryland lawmaker who was asked repeatedly to participate. Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip, tried to gin up support for a Clinton “grass-roots organizing meeting” held Saturday in Bethesda, O’Malley’s childhood town. The former governor’s supporters say that the group backing Clinton represents “establishment” thinking. “It just points to the fact that O’Malley is new blood with new ideas and a ‘can-do attitude’ and the establishment doesn’t normally endorse that,” said Terry Lierman, a former Maryland Democratic Party chairman. And the O’Malley camp is taking back some ground. Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett, who supported a Ready for Hillary fund-raiser last year, plans to hold a house party for O’Malley this weekend, according to a copy of the invitation. Clinton will be trying to vacuum up cash in the state at the same time. A fund-raiser for her candidacy is set for next month, said former Maryland attorney general Doug Gansler, who has signed on with her as a “Hillstarter.” “She’s going to have to raise a lot of money,” he predicted. Across the Potomac River, former Virginia senator Jim Webb is also considering a run for the White House and has been making stops in Iowa and New Hampshire. Should he decide to take on Clinton, he, too, will have a formidable Clinton ally in his backyard: Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a man who has been close to the Clintons since the 1990s. Tom Brady and Hillary Clinton are too big to nail <http://nypost.com/2015/05/10/tom-brady-and-hillary-clinton-are-too-big-to-nail/> // NY Post // Kyle Smith - May 10, 2015 Where have we seen the Tom Brady scandal before? A global celebrity appears almost certainly to be involved in a massive, possibly years-long web of corruption that makes many past events look suspicious. The central figure simply declines to provide evidence that might be damning (or exculpatory). And the supervising authority shrugs and says, “What can we do? The subject declined to cooperate.” Because said supervising authority has deep business and personal ties to the subject it’s supposed to be investigating. Congratulations, Tom Brady and Hillary Clinton. They won’t punish you much, if at all. They won’t even really come after you. You’re both too big to nail. You both have ardent fans who won’t believe the preponderance of evidence already available, aren’t particularly interested in hearing more evidence and wouldn’t change their minds even if shown a video of, say, Brady sticking a needle into a ball in the locker room or Hillary telling the Russians, “Just leave a bag of cash over there, and our uranium is yours.” Modal Trigger No matter what they do wrong, fans will never punish Tom Brady or Hillary Clinton. They both even have a daddy figure giving amazingly unconvincing and legalistic denials: Patriots owner Bob Kraft said of lawyer Ted Wells’ Deflategate investigation, “To say we are disappointed in its findings, which do not include any incontrovertible or hard evidence of deliberate deflation of footballs at the AFC Championship Game, would be a gross understatement.” Hey, Bob, next time just say, “We didn’t do it.” You kind of sound like Bill Clinton defending Hillary: “There is no doubt in my mind that we have never done anything knowingly inappropriate in terms of taking money to influence any kind of American government policy.” Putting Brady on the bench for a couple of weeks wouldn’t do anything to change the fact that the history of integrity of NFL games is in question. The Patriots committed an outrageous act of cheating that should have vacated their AFC Championship win. Withdraw their Super Bowl title? They had no right to play in that game in the first place. Millions of dollars legally changed hands in the expectation that the NFL was maintaining integrity. It wasn’t. How deep and wide is the Patriots’ cheating operation? How long was it underinflating footballs to make them easier to grip and less likely to be fumbled? The NFL doesn’t know and doesn’t want to find out. It could order Brady (and his coaches, and everyone else connected with the Patriots) to turn over texts and phone records and email records. But it won’t, just as the Obama administration won’t force Hillary to hand over her server and other communications equipment for inspection and won’t hire a special prosecutor to issue subpoenas and gather facts. How deep and wide is the Patriots’ cheating operation? How long was it underinflating footballs…? The NFL doesn’t know and doesn’t want to find out. In each case, the so-called “supervisor” is simply a warm and friendly colleague who is in business with the target. The NFL can’t afford to have the full truth about Deflategate, and its place in the long history of Patriots cheating, known. If there is a text out there that conclusively damns Brady, then the league’s greatest performer, its best team, and the most-watched broadcast in the history of television are all rendered part of a neo-Black Sox scandal. The league cannot afford to have its reputation so tarnished. Its interest is in doing the absolute minimum to make it appear that it did a thorough investigation, then put it all to bed as rapidly as possible. The TV networks that are in business with the NFL have the same interest. Where is the NFL’s curiosity about the fact that, since a rule change in 2006, allowed teams to manage the footballs used by their own quarterbacks, the Patriots have had an almost uncanny ability to prevent fumbles, and that their players fumble a lot more when wearing other uniforms? A statistician for FiveThirtyEight.com published this week a chart (“using both binomial and Poisson models”) that put the odds against the Patriots’ fumble rate occurring by chance at more than 10,000 to one. Those are roughly the same odds that anything important and football-related happens in the Patriots locker room without the knowledge of Bill Belichick. Belichick was, of course, “cleared” by the report, which means no wrongdoing has been found. Why would it? If two locker-room flunkies take the fall, that would be ideal for the NFL. Ted Wells, the lawyer who issued the report, specializes in defending white-collar criminals. The NFL has been a client of his law firm for many years, and he has every incentive to make his client look good. Wells’ partner Brad Karp, a co-author of the report, has long represented the NFL in its concussion litigation, involving hundreds of lawsuits and many, many billable hours for the Paul, Weiss Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison law firm. These men aren’t prosecutors. They aren’t disinterested outsiders. They’re in business with the NFL. But, hey, let’s give the NFL a little credit. If it hired its own defense team to pretend to investigate itself, that’s more than Hillary did. Hillary Clinton Calls For Paid Family Leave On Mother's Day <http://www.politicususa.com/2015/05/10/hillary-clinton-calls-paid-family-leave-mother.html> // PoliticsUSA // Jason Easley – May 10, 2015 Hillary Clinton’s Mother’s Day call for paid family leave illustrates why she is such a formidable presidential candidate. Former Sec. of State Clinton said, “It is outrageous that America is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t guarantee paid leave. I have this new granddaughter, and I want her to have every opportunity, but I want every child in our country to have every opportunity. We know that when women are strong families are strong. When families are strong countries are strong. What more can we do so that it isn’t quite so hard? The answer is that we can do a lot if we do it together.” Hillary Clinton is redefining and taking back the word opportunity for Republicans. In the Republican vernacular, the term opportunity is something that is reserved for wealthy men and corporations. Clinton is defining opportunity as equality and fairness, not just for women, but for children and families. Her view of opportunity is what makes Hillary Clinton the candidate who could be 2016’s most pro-children and pro-family candidate for the White House. President Obama has fought hard for equal pay for women and paid family leave, but one gets the sense that it is Hillary Clinton who can achieve these goals. It has been decades since the country has seen a candidate for president who so clearly knows who she is. Despite the media attacks and hand-wringing, there is a basic comfort that millions of voters already feel with Clinton. The contrast is best understood by watching a stampede of faceless and shapeless Republican candidates trying to bend themselves into what voters want. When it comes to Hillary Clinton, it is all right there. Hillary Clinton presents a vision for the future that looks both attainable and easy to see. Clinton calls Iowa mom for a Mother's Day surprise <http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/11/hillary-clinton-mothers-day-phone-call-iowa-kelly-drake/27104775/> // Iowa Register //Ben Rogers – May 10, 2015 Kelly Drake received a phone call from a politician on Mother's Day that was different than most. Not every Iowa mother gets to chat with a presidential candidate, after all. Drake, 51, of Ankeny, won a contest put on by Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign, where recipients received a phone call from the former secretary of state wishing them well on Mother's Day. Josh Shelledy, Drake's son, entered her in the drawing. He said he knew his mother was an avid supporter of Clinton, and he thought there was no better gift. Shelledy's hunch was spot-on. "I thought it was amazing," Drake said. "I think a lot of her and she is an amazing person, and for her to wish me happy Mother's Day is awesome." MORE: Complete coverage of Hillary Clinton Drake said she was impressed with the sincerity of Clinton's phone call and the fact that she didn't talk about politics. "I just thought she was a mother to a mother, and I thought that was great," Drake said. Drake said it was the best Mother's Day gift she could have received. North Las Vegas woman gets Mother’s Day surprise from Hillary Clinton <http://m.reviewjournal.com/trending/north-las-vegas-woman-gets-mother-s-day-surprise-hillary-Clinton> // National Review // Laura Myers - May 10, 2015 Amy Ponce of North Las Vegas got a Mother’s Day surprise on Sunday — not breakfast in bed or a new pair of slippers — but a call from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who wished her “a happy day.” “At first I thought it was a joke,” said Ponce, 37, whose 18-year-old son, Austin, won a campaign contest for his mother. Five winners received calls, including in Nevada, Iowa, Colorado, Washington state and Minnesota, the campaign said. It was a special year for Clinton, too, her first as a grandmother. “I’ve been a mother for more than 35 years now, and I’m still not sure how my mother did it,” Clinton said in a statement. “She didn’t always have an easy life, but she managed to remain strong and kind and always remember everyone who helped her.” Amy Ponce, who is married, also has a 12-year-old daughter. She said that until Clinton emerged on the political scene she hadn’t been politically active. In fact, she voted for the first time in 2008 — but for Clinton’s Democratic rival, Barack Obama, who won millions of new voters. Perhaps it wasn’t Clinton’s time, but now Ponce said the former first lady and secretary of state appears to be a strong contender. “I think we’re leaning that way,” to vote for Clinton, she said. “That would be real neat” to have the first female president. “We definitely would be voting Democratic.” Asked about her previous voter apathy, Ponce said, “For me, it was probably a lack of time. And probably a lack of being educated enough on making the right decision.” Ponce said the call with Clinton was short and sweet, at about 1:30 p.m. “It was something you don’t get a chance to do everyday,” she said. Ponce has been paying close attention to some hot- button campaign issues, however. She’s a Patient Services Representative in a pediatrician’s office, giving her insight into how Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act is playing out. “Definitely a good law, but a few flaws,” Ponce said. “I’ve heard from a lot of people personally that it still is not quite as affordable as they had anticipated.” Austin Ponce appears to be the politician in the family. He said he’s looking forward to voting for the fist time in a presidential election in 2016 and he’s hoping to volunteer for the Clinton campaign as well. He thanked his teacher Ms. Karlye Mull for encouraging him and said he’s taking advanced placement government classes with her this year. “It really helps when you have a teacher who’s passionate about the subject,” Ponce said, adding he’ll keep his family involved, too. Hillary Clinton’s Top Five Clashes Over Secrecy <http://www.longislandpress.com/2015/05/10/hillary-clintons-top-five-clashes-over-secrecy/> // Long Island Press // Jeff Gurth – May 10, 2015 Hillary Clinton at Book Revue Hillary Clinton signing copies of her book "Hard Choices" on Wednesday Aug. 6, 2014 at the Book Revue in Huntington. (Spencer Rumsey/Long Island Press) Back in April of 2007, when she was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination for the first time, then-Senator Hillary Clinton lashed out at the secrecy of the George W. Bush administration. She told a New Hampshire audience that if elected she would implement a “plan to enhance accountability and transparency” and “to replace secrecy and mystery with openness.” One part of her plan: “It’s time our government went fully online as well.” She lost her bid to be the Democratic presidential nominee. But 20 months later, before then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama took that job and she became secretary of state, she set up a private computer server registered to her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., to handle all her official, as well as private, emails for the next four years. Her decision — a secret until earlier this year — impeded efforts by the press and others to review State Department actions. Now it is Hillary Clinton’s record of transparency that has come under fire. At a press conference in March, she acknowledged that in retrospect “it would’ve been better for me to use two separate phones and two email accounts.” She has asked the State Department to release her official emails, a process that could take months. Few public figures have been as scrutinized as Hillary Clinton. Sometimes her disclosures go beyond what is required, but she’s also racked up a reputation for secrecy that at times has returned to haunt her. Here are five examples covering the last two decades. Some are drawn from a 2007 book I did, with Don Van Natta Jr., entitled “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton” (Little Brown & Co.). Clinton’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. 1) 1992: The Commodity Trades During Bill Clinton’s first run for the White House, his campaign declined to release all of the couple’s tax returns. Later it emerged that the campaign had weighed requests from the press and decided not to do so, because a few of the returns showed Hillary Clinton’s spectacular success in commodities trading, in which she made almost $100,000 from an initial investment of $1,000 in a matter of months, for a return of almost 10,000 percent. Hillary Clinton threatened a campaign lawyer who had access to the material with retribution if she released the data: “You’ll never work in Democratic politics again,” the lawyer, Loretta Lynch, says Clinton told her. It wasn’t until 1994, as the New York Times prepared to publish an article detailing the trades, that the Clintons made the returns public. 2) 1993: The Health Care Task Force As First Lady, Clinton led a presidential task force to overhaul the U.S. health-care system. The group, which produced a 1,342-page bill that failed to win Congressional approval, came under intense criticism from lawmakers and interest groups for meeting behind closed doors. Several court challenges were brought in an attempt to open the process. Ultimately the courts provided a partial legal victory to the administration. Clinton later wrote she didn’t mind the criticism since she was “trying to do something important for people” but she acknowledged the failure was partially the result of her “own missteps” in “trying to do too much, too fast.” 3) 1994: Records from the Rose Law Firm U.S. investigators in 1994 subpoenaed the First Lady’s billing records from her years at the Rose Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, documents that had been also sought by reporters. A focus of their interest was her legal work for a failing savings and loan, but records of those billings weren’t found. Much later, Clinton’s long-time assistant, Carolyn Huber, said she found in the White House residence an additional box of records that contained the billing memos. They were turned over to the independent counsel in 1996. Clinton testified she had no knowledge of how the records wound up where they did. 4) 2006: The Energy Task Force Late in her first term as U.S. senator from New York, Clinton set up an energy task force to help her work through the issue, deliver a major speech on the subject and prepare for a possible presidential run, participants in the task force told us for the book. They produced a 40-page report in April 2006. The whole project, including the existence of the group, its members and its work product was a secret, designed, participants said, to encourage frank discussions of the issue. The leader of the task force headed an investment firm with major holdings in the energy sector. Senators routinely get input from outsiders, and no law requires their disclosure, but a secret task force is unusual. 5) 2015: The Family Foundation The Clinton family foundation, now called the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, made disclosures that exceed the legal requirements. Charities are not required to list donors, but as part of Clinton’s selection as secretary of state the foundation agreed to disclose the identity of contributors and restrict solicitations from foreign governments. Still, the information on the foundation’s website is less than full. Donors are identified but not the exact amount of each donation or the date of those contributions. Instead, donations fall under ranges and are listed cumulatively. The foundation did not announce that it started raising money from foreign governments after Hillary Clinton left office. But last month the Wall Street Journal pieced together some new foreign donations after the foundation’s web site was updated. That article was the first in a spate of news accounts raising questions about foreign money coming into the Clinton network as she prepares a run for president. The foundation has said the donors are carefully vetted and their money goes to important charitable projects. Julian Castro is ‘only’ veep prospect for top Clintonians, says source // Washington Times // Joseph Curl - May 10, 2015 ANALYSIS/OPINION: Top members of Team Hillary are already pushing Julian Castro as her vice presidential nominee, with one source telling me last week that right now, there isn’t even a second choice. “There’s only one person the top guys are looking at right now, and that’s Julian,” said the source, who is close to top Clinton officials. “They know the Republicans are making a big push this cycle for the Hispanic vote, so that makes Castro an easy pick — and an obvious pick.” The source said the Clintons still remember that Julian Castro, along with his brother, Joaquin, were early backers of Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 run, and the Clintons are known to pay back their friends, just as they do their foes. Although Mrs. Clinton is far from clinching the Democratic nomination for president, her path is fairly uncluttered. So far, she faces a 73-year-old senator from Vermont and a one-time governor of Maryland. But the former is a socialist who longs for redistribution of wealth and the latter was once mayor of Baltimore, which imploded in race riots. Neither is seen as a serious threat. Also in the wings is Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, but the Clinton source said the odds of Mrs. Clinton picking another woman for the ticket are “zero.” The source said that also likely eliminates Wendy Davis, the liberal darling of Texas Democrats. There are a few others that make the shortlist, according to several other top Democrats. Sen. Mark Warner might be able to secure Virginia, as could former Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine, both men being former governors of the commonwealth. Jay Nixon, the governor of Missouri, is also mentioned, but the Clinton source laughed that idea off: “You think they’ll really put out bumper stickers that say Clinton/Nixon? Good guy, but no chance.” And Evan Bayh, the longtime Indiana politician who served two terms in the Senate, also makes the shortlists of many, but he is a creature of Washington and some Clinton insiders say Mrs. Clinton is looking for an outsider, preferably from a state that isn’t a solid Democratic stronghold. That desire puts a few others in play, like retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who would allay some fears that Mrs. Clinton is weak on defense, and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa, home of the first political caucuses of the 2016 campaign. A new name is also floating around: Martin Heinrich, the 43-year-old senator from New Mexico. For the past several cycles, the Western state has been in play and, more important, his short time in Washington (just two years), along with his youth (Mrs. Clinton is 67) makes him a conceivable running mate. Others, like Charlie Crist of Florida or Vice President Joseph R. Biden, are nonstarters. And don’t look for Mrs. Clinton to pick a former U.S. president — her husband. No chance. That leaves Julian Castro at the top of the list. He, too, brings the bloom of youth: At just 40 years old, he’s also highly accomplished — a two-term mayor of San Antonio (Democrats are making a play for Texas in 2016) and, most recently, President Obama’s pick to be secretary of housing and urban development. Interestingly, the Castro brothers — twins born to a single mother whose own mother had come across the Mexican border as a 6-year-old orphan — don’t speak Spanish. That means at least three Republicans in the race — Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — will be the Spanish speakers, but not Mr. Castro. Mr. Castro brings a slew of desirables. He has declared that “Joaquin and I got into Stanford [University] because of affirmative action,” even though he said he scored just 1,210 on my SATs, “which was lower than the median matriculating student.” Mrs. Clinton is planning to push affirmative action as a key campaign issue. More, the Castro brothers are a rags-to-riches story — but always with the help of government, another key tenet of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. And Julian Castro has pushed gay issues throughout his career, an issue dear to Mrs. Clinton. Julian Castro knows that his moment may soon arrive, but downplays the veep talk. “At the moment I’m focusing on my role as HUD secretary,” he told Buzzfeed. “At the right time later on down the road, I anticipate getting involved. It’s clear both parties are going to speak to the Latino community in this cycle. What’s also clear is only the Democratic Party has embraced policies that have improved the economic prospects for the Latino community,” he said. He’s not a shoo-in, of course, and much will depend on how desperate Mrs. Clinton is a year from now. (Remember Sarah Palin?) But Mr. Castro delivers on all the big issues Mrs. Clinton hopes to hit hard in her campaign, and right now, he seems to be the only talk in Team Clinton Town. Hillary Clinton email case reopened by federal judge <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/10/federal-judge-reopens-hillary-clinton-email-case/> // Washington Times // Stephen Dinan – May 10, 2015 Joint request to turn over messages agreed upon A federal judge has reopened an open-records case trying to pry loose some of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails, marking the first time a court has taken action on the email scandal. Judge Reggie B. Walton agreed Friday to a joint request by the State Department and Judicial Watch, which sued in 2012 to get a look at some of Mrs. Clinton’s documents concerning a public relations push. Both sides agreed that the revelation that Mrs. Clinton had kept her own email server separate from the government, and exclusively used her own email account created on that server, meant that she had shielded her messages from valid open-records requests. Now that she has belatedly turned some emails over, the government offered — and Judge Walton confirmed in his ruling — that the agency should search them all to see whether any should have been released to Judicial Watch. “This is the first case that’s been reopened,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said Friday. “It’s a significant development. It points to the fraud by this administration and Mrs. Clinton.” Judicial Watch has filed a series of open-records requests seeking State Department emails and, when the administration failed to comply, has gone to court to force them. Just last week Judicial Watch filed a new batch of eight lawsuits trying to shake loose some of the secret emails, and said that was just the first round. The State Department said it doesn’t comment on open-records lawsuits. Publicly, the department has struggled to handle the inquiries over Mrs. Clinton’s emails. Officials didn’t acknowledge that there were missing emails until prodded by the House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya. After that prod, the department asked Mrs. Clinton to turn over emails that contained government business. She provided about 30,000 emails, but said she discarded another 32,000 she deemed weren’t government business, and then wiped the server. She has refused requests by the Benghazi inquiry chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican, to turn the server over to a neutral third party. On Friday, Mr. Gowdy released an interim report detailing his first year of investigation, citing “obstacles and frustrations” in dealing with the administration. He said they have talked with new witnesses who hadn’t been interviewed by any other Benghazi probe, and had unearthed documents that haven’t been part of other investigations. But he said Mrs. Clinton’s emails remain a large question mark, and the State Department still hasn’t turned over emails from her senior staff. “The State Department has told the committee that it cannot certify that it has turned over all documents responsive to the committee’s request regarding the former secretary’s emails,” Mr. Gowdy said in his report. Mr. Gowdy also hinted that Congress’s investigative powers may be limited when it comes to trying to force a president and his team to come clean. “The legislative branch’s constitutional toolbox seems inadequate to uphold our task in seeking the truth,” Mr. Gowdy said, pointing to the administration’s unwillingness to serve subpoenas on itself, neutering much of Congress’s investigative power. Mr. Fitton said that’s why his group’s lawsuits are so critical, saying Congress’s hands are tied and the Justice Department hasn’t committed to conduct an investigation of another part of the Obama administration. “It’s going to be independent actions by JW at this point,” Mr. Fitton said. “This is how anything is going to break loose.” Hillary Clinton in Chinatown; spirituality at Stanford <http://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/garchik/article/Hillary-Clinton-in-Chinatown-spirituality-at-6252053.php> // SF Chronicle // Leah Garchik - May 10, 2015 Hillary Rodham Clinton was in town for fundraisers, one at the Century Club, hosted by Susie Buell, and the other at the home of Tom and Kat Steyer. She also found time to talk about immigration with Democratic state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, and urban issues with Mayor Ed Lee, who, as Carla Marinucci wrote, suggested they meet at the Red Blossom Tea Co. •Tea house proprietor Alice Luong had met the mayor a couple of times, but didn’t know until five minutes before he arrived that he’d be having tea there. “I really thought it was just the mayor coming to visit merchants in Chinatown, which he often does. We see him walking around.” When Clinton arrived, “we were pretty ecstatic. ... I explained to Madam Secretary that this is how we brew tea, and when we were doing the tasting, she asked quite a lot of questions” about water temperature and tea varieties. “I assume she is a tea drinker,” Luong said. Lee’s assistant paid for the Tasting Flight consumed by the mayor and the candidate, and “Madam Secretary’s staff” bought some teas to take away. “I think Madam Secretary prefers a stronger, darker tea. We brewed a cup for her to take into the car.” As to the handle by which Luong repeatedly referred to Clinton, “I asked the assistant what I should call her. She’s no longer a senator and she’s so accomplished. The assistant said, 'Whatever you like.’ But we’re very Chinese, very traditional. We address her by her post.” •Fervent Clinton supporter Eleni Kounalakis, who’d been on Michael Krasny’s “Forum” show that morning, talking about her book, “Madam Ambassador,” attended the Buell event. She was surprised when Clinton greeted her with, “Eleni, I heard you on the radio this morning!” The candidate’s either got an amazing ability to multitask or a very efficient staff. •The Steyer event started at 11 in the morning. By 4 p.m., he was cool and composed, as though he’d had nothing else to do that day, giving a reading from Ezekiel at Stanford’s Memorial Hall. And more about that below. The Stanford event was the investiture of the Rev. Professor Jane Shaw as dean for religious life. Shaw, who got her doctorate at UC Berkeley, was at Oxford when she was hired as dean of Grace Cathedral, a job that brought her back to the Bay Area. At Stanford, she will teach in the department of religious studies as well as preside as dean, providing what Stanford President John Hennessy said was “ethical and spiritual leadership for the university.” The church, built in 1903, is filled with stained glass and curved wooden ornamentation; it feels warm, welcoming. Every aspect of the investiture ceremonies, which included multifaith prayers and music by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, seemed to flow from the passage read by Steyer, which refers to the possibility of giving new life to dry bones, that is, healing misery and renewing hope. Shaw’s friend Anna Deavere Smith delivered a sermon referring to Baltimore, her hometown, as a “city of dry bones. ... Everything is rubble now from the streets of my youth.” Police, she said, have had to do the “dirtiest work of all,” and now it is time for others to tackle poverty, despair, no matter how uncertain they are of solutions. “If we wait for clarity, it will never happen. 'Confidence,’ I tell students, 'is overrated. Give doubt a try.’” At Stanford, said Hennessy, “real smart and ethical people are working to solve the world’s problems. ... Jane made us realize we need complex answers to complex questions.” Then he draped around Shaw’s neck a white silk scarf he had received from the Dalai Lama, and poof, she was thereby invested. In another part of the program, undergrad Elizabeth Woodson had read from a Quaker text, proposing the goal of allowing “the stranger and the things we find strange, let themselves do and be who they are.” So after the ceremonies, when we went outside for drinks and cookies, including S-shaped ones covered with dyed red sugar, although I wondered if Berkeley foodies would stand for blue-dyed confections, I just let those cookies be what they were, and gobbled one right down. And as Steyer and Woodson said — I’m told this is a tradition in high Protestant churches — here ends the reading. Can Clinton pull off a hat-trick of Democrat wins? <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32632767> // BBC News // Nick Bryant – May 11, 2015 Not since the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman have the Democrats won three presidential victories in a row. The 2016 election presents the party with a rare opportunity to pull off a historic hat-trick. America's political geography gives the Democrats an enormous advantage. So, too, does the country's changing demography, because constituencies that favour the Democrats are growing in electoral influence. Despite the Republicans' current strength in congressional and gubernatorial politics - presently, the GOP holds the House of Representatives and the Senate, along with 31 governors' mansions - the party is weak in presidential politics. It has lost four of the past six presidential elections. In five of those, the Democrats have won the popular vote. The "blue wall" is especially advantageous. That is the name given to the 18 states, as well as the District of Columbia, that have voted Democrat in every presidential election since Bill Clinton's first victory in 1992. Democratic Blue Wall: California (55), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), Hawai'i (4), Illinois (20), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), Michigan (16), Minnesota (10), New Jersey (14), New York (29), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (20), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Washington (12), Washington DC (3), Wisconsin (10). What makes the blue wall such a towering edifice is the size of its building blocks: some of the country's most populous states, like California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey. To win the Electoral College, the institution that elects the president on a state-by-state basis, the victorious candidate requires 270 votes. Strong core support For the past six elections, the states that make up the blue wall have yielded 242, just 28 short of the target. The Republicans have a wall of their own: 13 states that have voted for the GOP's presidential candidate in the past six elections. But those states amount for only 102 Electoral College votes between them. To some, then, the "Red wall" looks more like a flimsy picket fence. line Republican Red Wall: Alabama (9), Alaska (3), Idaho (4), Kansas (6), Mississippi (6), Nebraska (5), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (9), South Dakota (3), Texas (38), Utah (6), Wyoming (3). line The Blue Wall is by no means insurmountable. Though it held firm at the 2000 and 2004 elections, George W Bush emerged the victor. Many of these blue states, like New Jersey, Massachusetts and Illinois, have Republican governors, and the GOP has not given up hope of turning them red. Pennsylvania, with its 20 Electoral College votes, is particularly high on the their target list. But the wall does grant the Democrats an inbuilt advantage in the Electoral College. Just consider this statistic. Since 1992, the Republicans have achieved an average of 211 Electoral College votes. The Democrats' average is 327. Demographic advantage Demographics also appear to favour the Democrats: the support they are now receiving from minorities, Millennials (voters under 30) and women. The Democrats have opened up a huge lead among minority voters, a growing and increasingly important part of the electorate. At the last presidential election, 71% of Latinos voted for Barack Obama, up from 67% in 2008. Some 73% of Asian-Americans also voted Democrat, along with 93% of African-Americans. Younger voters, who tend to be more liberal-minded on issues like same-sex marriage and immigration, are also leaning towards the Democrats. Some two-thirds of Millennials voted for Obama in 2012. A majority of women have also favoured the Democrats in recent presidential elections. Fifty-five per cent of women voted for Obama in 2012, while the figure for unmarried women was even higher at 67%, partly because the Republican Party has become associated with restrictions on abortion. Obviously all is not lost for the GOP, not least because the party has demographic advantages of its own. In 2012, 59% of white voters plumbed for Mitt Romney. Among the so-called silent generation, those born between 1925 and 1945, the Republicans have a lead of 47% to 43%. But America is becoming less white, and that presents problems for the Republicans. Their prime strategy since the civil rights era of the 1960s, after all, has been to target white voters, regardless of their income levels. Obama support Next year, the GOP will be hoping that the so-called "Obama coalition" of minorities, Millennials and women, does not become the "Hillary Coalition," if, as expected, she wins the Democratic presidential nomination. Black voters will not turn out in such high numbers for Hillary, they reckon. The GOP also hopes to make inroads into a Latino vote deterred from backing Republicans because of the party's tough line on immigration. Hillary Clinton Can Hillary Clinton follow her husband into the White House? Party strategists believe there is truth in Ronald Reagan's famous observation: "Latinos are Republicans. They just don't know it yet." As for the Millennials, a string of recent polls suggest that their support for the Democrats is waning - although a survey conducted in April by the Harvard Institute of Politics suggested that 55% of voters under the age of 30 would prefer the White House to remain in Democratic hands. There are Democrats who believe that the Hillary coalition could be even more formidable than the Obama coalition. Campaigning to become America's first female president, she will hope to attract higher levels of support from white women, more than half of whom voted Republican in 2012. She might attract more male white voters than Obama. Yet Democrats run the risk of over-confidence, a mistake made by Republicans following the back-to-back victories of George W Bush. In those heady days, strategists like Karl Rove spoke assuredly of an emergent permanent Republican majority, only to see Obama score two victories. More recently, GOP morale has been boosted by the work of the political journalist John Judis, who predicted at the start of the century an "emerging Democratic majority". In January, Judis penned a revisionist essay headlined "The Emerging Republican Advantage," which argued that the Republican triumph at last November's congressional mid-term elections was "the latest manifestation of a resurgent Republican coalition". White vote The Republicans were even more dominant among white voters, he observed, which was problematic for the Democrats because they still required between 36% and 40% of the white working-class vote to win the presidential election. But it is always a mistake to equate strength in congressional politics with success in presidential politics. Between 1968 and 1992, for instance, the Democrats dominated the House of Representatives. For that entire era, a Democrat sat in the powerful speaker's chair. But during that era, the Democrats won just one presidential election, when Jimmy Carter edged out Gerald Ford in 1976. The electorate that votes in congressional elections is different in size and make-up to that which turns out in presidential polls. History suggests it will be hard to win three consecutive victories. Since the war, the Republicans have only managed it once, when George Herbert Walker Bush followed Ronald Reagan into the White House. Could Hillary Clinton do what no Democrat has done for more than 65 years? Hillary for New Hampshire open house grassroots event at The Met on Saturday <http://www.conwaydailysun.com/newsx/local-news/120551-hillary-for-new-hampshire-open-house-grassroots-event-at-the-met-on-saturday> // The Conway Daily Sun // Lloyd Jones - May 8, 2015 Hillary Clinton isn't planning to be in the Granite State this weekend, but that hasn't stopped her supporters from scheduling a meeting to plot campaign strategy for the Democrat front-runner to become the party's nominee for the presidency. Hillary for New Hampshire's supporters and volunteers is hosting a grassroots open house on Saturday at 11:15 a.m. in the meeting room at The Met Coffee House in North Conway Village. "We're doing this in all 10 counties," Harrell Kirstein, spokesperson for Hillary for New Hampshire, said by phone Thursday. "This will be the Hillary Clinton campaign's first event in Conway." Kirstein, who was campaign communications director for Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen's successful re-election campaign last year, said that at the open houses, "Hillary for New Hampshire will ask volunteers to activate and organize friends and neighbors in their community to take part in this campaign. "This grassroots organizing series," he said, "will be a chance for longtime friends of Hillary's to reengage in her campaign, as well as a welcome invitation for new supporters to get involved for the first time." Clinton announced April 12 that she is running for president, and she immediately became the front-runner, not only for the Democrats, but for the Oval Office. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is also seeking the nomination from the Democrats. He entered the race April 30, and actually made a campaign stop in Mount Washington Valley 48 hours later, on May 2, speaking at the White Mountain Hotel in Hale's Location. The Republican field doubled to six prominent GOP hopefuls this week when Carly Fiorina, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard; Ben Carson, the director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom; and Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and FOX news host, all threw their hats into the ring days apart. The trio join Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas, who announced he was running March 23), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky., announced April 7), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla., announced April 30). None of the GOP candidates since announcing has visited the valley, although Paul, who was the Carroll County Republican Committee's Lincoln Day Dinner keynote speaker on March 20, gave strong indications then he was leaning towards a run. "I think things are starting to get interesting," Kirstein said of the presidential race. Kirstein said members of the public can sign up at hillaryclinton.com/newhampshire to receive more information on open houses and other events happening in New Hampshire. Full details on other open houses will be released ahead of individual events. Clinton’s use of ‘super PAC’ pushes limits of campaign finance law <http://www.sentinelsource.com/news/mct/clinton-s-use-of-super-pac-pushes-limits-of-campaign/article_9d367ded-4727-59d7-ac8d-608190e87c6d.html> // Sentinel Source // Evan Halper - May 8, 2015 Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign team had hoped to frame her trip hopscotching through the mansions of some of California’s deepest-pocketed donors this week as an exercise in modesty, highlighting the relatively low price of a ticket to the events as a reflection of her commitment to cultivating the grass roots. But that narrative quickly unraveled when word got out that the candidate was also using the California trip as an occasion to begin courting an entirely different group. Clinton, who has emphasized campaign finance reform in the early stage of her latest White House bid, has apparently already decided the modest approach alone won’t be enough. She is going after much bigger checks, much sooner, and in a much more aggressive way than her campaign had revealed. The candidate will be pushing the boundaries of campaign finance law further than any Democratic presidential contender ever has by directly asking donors to give to a friendly “super PAC” that can raise unlimited amounts of campaign cash from donors, according to a person familiar with her plans. That effort started in California on Wednesday, when Clinton met in San Francisco with potential donors of the organization, Priorities USA Action. She had another meeting in Los Angeles on Thursday. Clinton’s plans to raise money for Priorities USA was first reported by The New York Times. Campaign officials aren’t commenting. Clinton would not be the first contender in this year’s race to go after such cash. On the Republican side, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has been soliciting checks for as much as $1 million for his super PAC. Candidates avoided such activity in the 2012 race, adhering to a law that says they cannot coordinate directly with the groups. (Bush, though, has not yet declared his candidacy and is free to work with the group until he does so.) But the increasingly permissive approach of the Federal Election Commission, whose members are deadlocked over the question of how candidates can and cannot engage with super PACs, is leading the presidential contenders to take ever bolder approaches. Clinton supporters say she is caught up in a campaign arms race and she has no choice but to use the tools her opponents have at their disposal. Still, the quick shift on fundraising puts Clinton in an awkward position. “Just three weeks ago, Hillary Clinton decried unaccountable money in politics and even called for amending the Constitution to ban it,” said Jeff Bechdel, communications director for America Rising, a conservative research group. “Today, she announced she’s going to personally court donors and raise money for her own super PAC. ... Clinton’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.” The California trip was supposed to be a chance for Clinton to showcase a more modest approach to fundraising, one that squared with what she promised would be a campaign that is humble, lean and focused on the values of everyday Americans. Even though the events were to be held in the homes of billionaires and mega-millionaires, donors were not to give more than $2,700. Those who want to give more than that can encourage others to give checks, becoming what’s known as a campaign bundler. Clinton’s campaign calls its bundlers “Hillstarters,” and those designated as such get perks that include invites to receptions with the candidate. Clinton is making it much easier to get in this circle of fundraisers than she did eight years ago, when supporters had to raise $100,000. Now, they need only to generate $27,000 for the campaign. The Clinton Foundation's Behind-the-Scenes Battle With a Charity Watchdog Group <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/clinton-foundation-vs-a-charity-watchdog.html> // NY Mag // Gabriel Sherman - May 10, 2015 Last Wednesday, Bill Clinton ratcheted up Clintonworld’s counter assault on Clinton Cash, the book by conservative author Peter Schweizer that ignited the latest media frenzy over the former First Couple’s $2 billion foundation. “There's just no evidence," Clinton defiantly told CNN's Christiane Amanpour, during an interview at the Foundation’s confab in Morocco. "Even the guy that wrote the book apparently had to admit under questioning that we didn't have a shred of evidence for this, we just sort of thought we would throw it out there and see if it flies, and it won't fly." Clinton’s analysis is flawed in at least one regard. As my colleagueJonathan Chait recently wrote, the Clintons’ web of murky relationships and opaque finances exacts a political cost whether or not their critics ever find a there there. The Clintons, more than anyone, should know that negative press — true or not — can have potentially catastrophic consequences. Remember, it was David Brock’s 1993 American Spectatorarticle alleging that Arkansas State Troopers arranged Bill’s trysts which sparked Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit, which led to the Supreme Court case, which led to Monica Lewinsky lying under oath about the affair, which led Linda Tripp to turn the tapes over to Ken Starr, which led to impeachment. Related Stories The Disastrous Clinton Post-PresidencyIf This Is the Best Defense of the Clinton Foundation, She’s in Trouble The Clinton Foundation scandal cycle is already spinning off new complications. A case in point: After being the subject of a spate of negative newspaper accounts about potential conflicts of interest and management dysfunction this winter — long before Clinton Cash — the Clinton Foundation wound up on a "watchlist" maintained by the Charity Navigator, the New Jersey-based nonprofit watchdog. The Navigator, dubbed the "most prominent" nonprofit watchdog by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, is a powerful and feared player in the nonprofit world. Founded in 2002, it ranks more than 8,000 charities and is known for its independence. For a while, the Clinton Foundation was happy to promote Charity Navigator’s work (back when they were awarded its highest ranking). In September 2014, in fact, the Navigator's then-CEO, Ken Berger, was invited to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative. Of course that was before the Foundation was placed on a list with scandal-plagued charities like Al Sharpton's National Action Network and the Red Cross. Since March, the Foundation has embarked on an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign to get removed from the list. Clinton Foundation officials accuse the Navigator of unfairly targeting them, lacking credible evidence of wrongdoing, and blowing off numerous requests for a meeting to present their case. "They're not only punishing us for being transparent but are not being transparent themselves," Maura Pally, the Foundation's acting-CEO, told me by phone from Morocco last week. "Charity Navigator doesn't disclose its donors but we do and yet that means we're suffering the consequences." Navigator executives counter that the Foundation has demanded they extend the Clintons special treatment. They also allege the Foundation attempted to strong-arm them by calling a Navigator board member. "They felt they were of such importance that we should deviate from our normal process. They were irritated by that," says Berger. The feud is a microcosm of all that is exhausting about the Clintons' endless public battles. Generally, it goes like this: bad press about their lack of transparency sparks some real world consequence or censure, the Clintons complain that they’re being held to an unfair standard while their critics contend that they expect to be able to write their own rules, and the resulting flare-up leads to more bad press. The trouble with Navigator started on Wednesday morning, March 11. Foundation officials became alarmed when they received an anonymous email from the watchdog's Donor Advisory committee informing them they would be added to the list on Friday, March 13, unless they could provide answers to questions raised in newspaper accounts. Among the press controversies the Navigator cited: A Wall Street Journal report that noted "at least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during [Hillary Clinton's] tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation.” Politico, meanwhile, revealed that the Foundation failed to report to the State Department a $500,000 donation from the Algerian government, a violation of the ethics agreement the Clintons had arranged with the Obama White House. Politico also reported that the Foundation’s former CEO, Eric Braverman, quit after a “power struggle” with “the coterie of Clinton loyalists who have surrounded the former president for decades.” With the publication of Clinton Cash on the horizon, Clintonworld surely knew landing on the Navigator’s watchlist would be a public relations debacle. By early March, Clinton campaign officials were holding regular war room meetings to orchestrate their defense against the book. Over the next few days, Foundation officials desperately attempted to contact Navigator executives to rebut their claims but, inexplicably, couldn’t get through to anyone on the phone. On the evening of Friday, March 13, Pally sent a detailed email rebuttal. "All of the other organizations on your watchlist have had substantiated allegations of financial, fiscal or other impropriety,” she wrote, according to an email the Foundation provided toNew York. “The stories you cite about the Clinton Foundation merely point to donations, or gossip around our operations, none of which constitute any wrongdoing.” It didn't work. During a tense phone conversation on the afternoon of March 17, Pally and Berger argued over the merits of the media's claims about the Foundation. Pally said they were without substance; Berger insisted that since the newspapers published the articles, they were relevant. "Our whole thing is: if major media outlets say there's something here that you should be aware of, we're not going to be judge and jury on what the media says," Berger later told me. "We felt there had been enough questions." As a matter of practice, the Navigator doesn’t conduct its own investigations. On its website, they state: “Charity Navigator…takes no position on allegations made or issues raised by third parties, nor does Charity Navigator seek to confirm or verify the accuracy of allegations made or the merits of issues raised by third parties that may be referred to in the CN Watchlist.” The Navigator invited the Foundation to respond publicly on their website. Instead, Pally asked Berger to meet and review confidential copies of the Foundation's handbook, “Global Code of Conduct,” and board bylaws. Berger declined, feeling it was another effort of back-room dealing and spin. "We were not opposed to having a sit-down meeting. The point was, what is it that we're going to cover? We've already been around the block. What's the value of this?" Last week, after I contacted the Foundation about being on the watchlist, Pally rekindled talks with the Navigator. "I remain at a loss as to what information we can provide to address Charity Navigator’s concerns and be removed from the Watchlist," she wrote Tim Gamory, the Navigator's acting CEO. (Berger left the group last month to start his own consulting business.) Sure enough, the watchlist designation has provided Clinton’s antagonists with more ammunition with which to attack Hillary’s campaign. Already, critics are citing Charity Navigator’s list as a reason to open a federal investigation into the Clintons’ finances. For its part, the Clinton camp sees the episode as another reason to feel aggrieved. But even some Clinton advisers have been frustrated that they don’t appear to have learned from past self-inflicted wounds. One source told me that last year, a senior adviser lobbied the Foundation to appoint a Republican co-chairman to its board, which was stacked with Clinton loyalists. The adviser submitted a list of GOP names. “It was to shield [the Clintons] from the things they’re reading about now,” the source said. “It didn’t happen.” Unfortunately for Hillary’s campaign, the Navigator’s policy is that charities that land on the list stay there for a minimum of six months. Sandra Miniutti, the Navigator’s spokesperson, told me that, in order to get off the list, the Clintons need to publicly address each of the controversies raised by the media with a convincing response. The clock is ticking. Under pressure, Clinton Foundation's Canadian arm reveals 21 donors <http://www.sentinelsource.com/news/mct/under-pressure-clinton-foundation-s-canadian-arm-reveals-donors/article_15e0c887-62ce-5971-a2aa-3414e76c22b3.html> // McClatchy // Greg Gordon - May 10, 2015 WASHINGTON — Under pressure to lift the veil of secrecy over who bankrolled his Canadian charity that's affiliated with the Clinton Foundation, Vancouver-based mining mogul Frank Giustra late Friday released the names of 21 of its largest donors, most with connections to the mining and oil-drilling industries. The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada) did not list the amounts of the various donations. It said it only disclosed the identities of those leading contributors who provided written authorization, while releasing a second legal opinion asserting that under Canadian law, the rest of its 1,100 contributors should be kept confidential unless they agree to be identified. Those named include Giustra, a major Clinton Foundation benefactor who has forged a globetrotting philanthropic partnership with former President Bill Clinton, Giustra's estranged wife, Alison Lawton, and his family foundation. The partnership's secrecy has triggered controversy because the contributors' money ultimately benefited the U.S.-based foundation that Clinton built into a global force to fight poverty and disease, posing possible undisclosed conflicts of interest for his wife, Hillary Clinton, during her tenure as secretary of state between 2009 and 2013. Disclosures about these entanglements — and questions about whether some are being concealed — are now dogging Hillary Clinton as she seeks the Democratic presidential nomination. Before she took office, the Clinton Foundation agreed to disclose all of its donors and to limit donations from foreign governments. On its website, the foundation lists the names of more than 300,000 donors, organizing them by dollar ranges, and says it will update the list quarterly during her presidential candidacy. The Canadian affiliate said Friday it has taken no donations from foreign governments. While Giustra says the Canadian partnership turns over all of its revenue to the Clinton Foundation, it operates as a separate entity. Giustra said this week that $16 million of the money was raised at a star-studded 2008 gala on Toronto's waterfront, which was attended by some 1,200 people. Most of the donors identified Friday fit into a tight ring of Giustra's present and former mining industry friends, associates and financiers. Prominent among those listed was Ian Telfer, whose company, Uranium One, swallowed Giustra's firm, handing him windfall profits, after it won the right to mine key uranium deposits in Kazakhstan and in the United States. The New York Times has reported that Giustra's UrAsia Energy Inc. consummated a deal for the Kazakhstan deposits in 2005, days after Giustra and Bill Clinton met with the country's president, though Giustra has contended the purchase would have gone forward anyway. Public records reviewed by McClatchy show that Telfer's Fernwood Foundation, which also was among those named, donated $2.45 million to the Clinton Giustra Canadian partnership over several years. Sergey Kurzin, a Russian-born engineer who has publicly taken credit for arranging the meeting involving Clinton and Kazakhstan's president, also acknowledged donating. The Toronto Globe and Mail reported in 2008 that Kurzin pledged $1 million at the gala. Kurzin also gave $50,000 to $100,000 directly to the Clinton Foundation. However, the biggest donors to the Canada partnership were Giustra, who has pledged $100 million to the Clinton Foundation and donated more than $30 million directly so far, and his Radcliffe Foundation, which gave more than $18 million between 2007 and 2013, according to public records. Others on the list include: —Pacific Rubiales Energy Corp., a Canadian petroleum firm in which Giustra invested and which pursued drilling interests in Colombia. —Gran Colombia Gold Corp., a Canadian firm with mining interests in the South American nation. —Endeavour Mining Corp., a Canadian-based gold mining firm, and its chief executive officer, Neil Woodyer. —Stephen Dattels, a British-based mining industry financier. —GMP Securities, LP, a Canadian firm that has been instrumental in underwriting mining ventures. —B2Gold Corp., a Canadian gold-mining firm. —Sam Magid, a former business Giustra business partner. —The London-based Dragon Group of companies, which deal in silver, copper and diamonds. For the Clintons, a big question: 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 // Phillip Rucker - May 10, 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 the 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.” Paul: Clinton made Libya a 'jihadist wonderland' <http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/241555-paul-clinton-made-libya-a-jihadist-wonderland> // The Hill // Mark Hensch - May 10, 2015 Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) argued Sunday that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policies had created a terrorist utopia in Libya. “Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya, I think, made it less safe,” Paul told host John Catsimatidis on his New York radio show “The Cats Roundtable.” “It was a big mistake for us to go in there in the first place, because a lot of the times when we topple secular dictators, we’ve gotten chaos and then we’ve gotten the rise of radical Islam,” he said of Clinton’s decision in 2011 to help oust then-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. “It made it a hotbed for jihadists,” Paul added. “And, in fact, I Libya is now a jihadist wonderland.” Paul’s harsh criticism comes as the 2016 presidential race first heats up. The Kentucky lawmaker is seeking the GOP nomination, while Clinton is pursuing the Democratic bid. Paul on Sunday additionally touted his liberty credentials as the best in the entire 2016 field. “I’m one of the few in the race that thinks that we need to defend the country, but sometimes being involved in foreign war doesn’t help us,” he said. “And I’m one of the few who thinks we need to talk about defending the entire Bill of Rights, not just a couple of ones cherry-picked here and there,” Paul said. Paul said among the GOP contenders, he stood out for his opposition to the nation’s current intelligence policies. “I’m probably the only Republican in the race who thinks that the government shouldn’t be collecting all of our phone records … without a warrant,” he said. “I want to be a part of the leave-me-alone coalition, which basically says if you’re not hurting anybody, the government, particularly the federal government, ought to stay out of your life,” Paul added. Paul’s remarks followed a federal appeals court ruling Thursday that the bulk warrantless collection of phone records by the National Security Agency was illegal. The GOP senator hailed that judgment Friday as a “monumental decision for all lovers of liberty.” He vowed Sunday to continue his work on privacy rights while still making progress on what he saw as the average American’s real concern. “The top three issues are the debt, the debt and the debt,” Paul said. Hillary’s Immigration <http://iowastartingline.com/2015/05/09/sunday-grab-bag-gops-keystone-conundrum-hillarys-immigration-and-isis/> // Iowa Starting Line // Pat Rynard - May 10, 2015 Progressives who decry Hillary Clinton as insufficiently liberal have increasingly fewer examples to point to. This week while in Nevada, Clinton staked out very progressive views on immigration, calling for a full pathway to citizenship, supporting executive actions that are to the left of President Obama’s stances, and signaled strong protection for DREAMers. Immigration activists were absolutely ecstatic with her remarks. Some in the party’s left who distrust Clinton won’t believe it, but her words and the forcefulness in which she delivered them is a big deal. It’s also a fascinating look into Clinton’s electoral strategy. If she wanted to, she could play it safe on certain issues and run a centrist campaign to win over what’s left of America’s swing voters. This is clearly a play at building upon the same coalition of young and ethnically diverse people that Obama used for his victories. Her immigration stance could rejuvenate Hispanic support for Democrats, many of whom have felt burned by Obama’s presidency, a time during which his administration has deported more people than any one before him. All of this is very, very good news on both the policy side of things, but also on the electoral side of the future of the Democratic Party. If Clinton wins White House, an uncertain future awaits her family's charitable foundation <http://bigstory.ap.org/article/1f7b174b170b44d3a7644f16fdd2555d/if-clinton-wins-family-foundation-faces-uncertain-future> // AP // Julie Pace – May 11, 2015 WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton's family foundation, already the subject of intense scrutiny in the early days of her White House campaign, faces an uncertain future if she is elected president. Among the unresolved questions: Who would be able to raise money for the Clinton Foundation? Could it begin new projects, both at home and overseas? Is there any way it could operate unburdened by conflicts of interest, real or perceived, while one of its founders sits in the Oval Office? "I'm not sure the rules have been invented to apply to this situation," said Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector, a network of nonprofits, foundations and corporate giving programs. While Clinton stepped down from the foundation's board after launching her 2016 campaign, husband Bill and daughter Chelsea still hold leadership roles. They currently have no plans to stop their fundraising and management activities during the campaign, nor is there a blueprint for their involvement if Hillary Clinton wins the election, people close to the foundation said. Options being considered include Chelsea Clinton taking the helm, with her father playing a more behind-the-scenes role; fully banning the acceptance of donations from abroad; and implementing a more rigorous vetting process for domestic donors. Neither the foundation nor Clinton's campaign will pledge publicly to give voters answers about the organization's future before the November 2016 election, but some people close to the Clintons want decisions made before Election Day. The people close to the Clintons and the foundation spoke on condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal planning. Campaign officials are also pushing the Clinton Foundation to be more aggressive in answering the criticism of its high-dollar fundraising. The organization has raised more than $2 billion since former President Bill Clinton left office, money it uses to run 11 initiatives focused on global health, climate change, economic development, wellness and opportunities for women and girls. That aggressive fundraising is currently the subject of intense scrutiny, as Republicans and others look for potential conflicts of interests and signs that donors to the foundation sought to influence the Obama administration during Hillary Clinton's four years as secretary of state. The Clintons deny any improprieties. But the former president has started to hint that if his wife wins the White House, he may have to step down from the organization to avoid blurring the lines between U.S. government policy and the interests of donors. "I might if I were asked to do something in the public interest that I had an obligation to do. Or I might take less of an executive role," Clinton said in a recent interview with NBC News. "But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it." Some people close to the Clintons and the foundation say it's unlikely the former president could continue directly raising money if his wife wins election. But they say that could be a slow and difficult realization for him to come to, given how much of his post-White House legacy is linked to the foundation's work. "The challenge isn't necessarily the organization surviving the founders — it's the founders letting go of the organization," said Steven Lawrence, the research director at the Foundation Center, an organization that collects data on philanthropic organizations. There is far less certainty about the role Chelsea Clinton might play in the foundation's future. The 35-year-old has taken on a more direct role in recent years and is an obvious choice to take over from her parents. But despite being well-liked by donors, some question whether she would be able to raise the same level of money as her popular father. Clinton Foundation officials have discussed how to sustain the organization financially if the former president can no longer directly raise money. The conversations with donors and others have focused not just on the prospect of Hillary Clinton becoming president, but also the possibility that Bill Clinton's health leaves him unable to keep up his role as chief fundraiser. A drive launched in 2013 has endowed a $250 million fund to help keep programs running under those circumstances. Donna Shalala, the former Health and Human Services secretary and University of Miami president who takes over as the foundation's president and chief executive next month, is expected to do her own accounting of its activities. Her appointment is also seen as a signal to donors that there would be continuity in leadership if the Clinton family becomes less involved in its operations. The foundation is also weighing whether new projects, both in the U.S. and abroad, could start during a Clinton presidency, or whether worry about potential conflicts of interest would limit it to its existing work. While the foundation says there were no conflicts during Clinton's four years as the nation's chief diplomat, the potential for such conflicts is far greater should she become president. The foundation has already agreed to stop taking money from most foreign governments during her campaign, with exceptions for six Western nations. Campaign officials suggested additional changes to foundation activities are not imminent. Spokesman Brian Fallon said that for now, Clinton is "proud of the foundation's work and glad that her husband and daughter continue to lead its day-to-day mission." OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE Sanders: I'm 'most progressive' member of Congress <http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/241564-sanders-im-most-progressive-member-of-congress> // The Hill // Mark Hensch – May 10, 2015 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on Sunday that he considered himself the most liberal lawmaker in Congress. “I think it’s fair to say I am perhaps the most progressive member of Congress,” Sanders told host Bob Schieffer on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “I am proud of being the longest-serving independent in the history of the United States Congress,” he added. Sanders, a 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, additionally reiterated his interest in copying some policies from socialist European nations. “We can learn a whole lot from some of those countries,” he said, citing Austria, Denmark and Germany as examples. “College education is free in those countries,” Sanders said of those nations’ undergraduate educational programs. “That makes a lot of sense to me,” he said. Sanders also advocated eliminating the role of wealthy special interests in political campaign spending. “Billionaires like the Koch brothers are owning the political process,” he said of businessmen David and Charles Koch. “Billionaires should not be able to buy elections,” he said. Sanders argued that if elected president, he would additionally vet potential Supreme Court justices by their desire to overturn the landmark Citizens United ruling on campaign contributions. “That decision has undermined U.S. democracy,” he said of the case, which prohibits restrictions on political expenditures from organizations on the basis of free speech. Sanders’s rejection of political action committees is a key part of his 2016 campaign. The Vermont lawmaker argued on Sunday his freedom from wealthy special interests separates him from Hillary Clinton, the other current contender for the Democratic nomination. “We are going to raise the kind of money to run a strong campaign,” he vowed of contributions he would earn from average Americans. Why Bernie Sanders Thinks He Can Beat Hillary Clinton <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-10/why-bernie-sanders-thinks-he-can-beat-hillary-clinton> // Bloomberg // Ali Elkin – May 10, 2015 Bernie Sanders acknowledges he won't outspend Hillary Clinton, but that doesn't mean he can't beat her. Appearing on CBS's Face the Nation, the Democratic nomination seeker, a self-described independent socialist senator from Vermont was asked if he really thinks he can beat Democratic front runner. "The answer is yes," Sanders said. “We've had close to 90,000 contributions.” His confidence lies in Clinton's ties to billionaires and the dissatisfaction with income inequality throughout the country. "There is, in my view, massive dissatisfaction in this country today with the corporate establishment and the greed of corporate America in an incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and income, which currently exists," Sanders said. Sanders said that unlike Clinton, he will not have a super-PAC to raise unlimited funds for his campaign. He pointed out the smaller donations that have been made to his campaign. While he doesn't expect to outspend Clinton, Sanders said that might not matter. "Look, we announced a week and a half ago," Sanders said. "Since that time, we have had 200,000 people go to BernieSanders.com to sign up for the campaign. We've had close to 90,000 contributions. Do you know what the average contribution was? It's about $43, 43 bucks, from middle-class working families. So I don't think we're going to outspend Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or anybody else, but I think we are going to raise the kinds of money that we need to run a strong and winning campaign." In a new Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm New Hampshire poll, Sanders trails Clinton by 44 points in the Granite State. Bernie Sanders: I can beat Hillary Clinton <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-i-can-beat-hillary-clinton/> // CBS News // Rebecca Kaplan – May 10, 2015 Bernie Sanders, Vermont's independent senator and a self-proclaimed Democratic socialist, says he can beat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016. On CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Sanders said he thinks he can oust the former secretary of state because, "there is, in my view, massive dissatisfaction in this country today with corporate establishment and the greed of corporate America and the incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and income, which currently exists." And Sanders said his record on that issue over the past 25 years shows that he has led the way in standing up for working families and taking on "the billionaire class," Wall Street, private insurance companies and drug companies. Sanders is hesitant to criticize Clinton, saying that he respects and admires her. But pressed on the question of why he would make a better Democratic nominee, he points to three things: his opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership, a massive Asia-Pacific trade agreement being negotiated, his vote against the war in Iraq and leadership fighting against it, and the work he has done opposing the Keystone XL pipeline. "I'm not quite sure Hillary Clinton has come out with a position on that," he said. Political insiders break down the 2016 presidential race In a separate interview on "Face the Nation," Democratic strategist Stephanie Cutter said it is still "pretty likely" Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, but that Sanders "has a role to play" in the debate. "I think that there's nobody in the race right now who presents a real challenge to her in terms of taking the nomination away. But it's important to remember and we've been through this process many times, that we are many, many months away from the nomination, never mind the election," she said. Former House Speaker and 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who appeared alongside Cutter on the show, seemed to concur, when he said, if "you were betting today, you would say she is overwhelming favorite to be the nominee." "If she doesn't get the nomination, it will be because 'not Hillary' beats 'Hillary,'" he said. "It won't be because some candidate beats Hillary." In his "Face the Nation" interview, Sanders reserved the bulk of his criticism for the Supreme Court and its role in opening up a flood of money into politics through the 2010 Citizens United decision. "As a result of this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, clearly the billionaires, Koch brothers and others, are owning the political process. They will determine who the candidates are," Sanders said. He pledged that he would use the issue as a litmus test for anyone he would nominate to the Supreme Court as president. "That nominee will say that we are going to overturn this disastrous opinion on Citizens United because that decision is undermining American democracy. I do not believe that billionaire should be able to buy politicians," Sanders said. Clinton will help raise money for a super PAC supporting her candidacy during 2016 even though she has pledged to "get unaccountable money out of [the political system] once and for all," even if it takes a constitutional amendment to overturn the court decision. "With some Republican candidates reportedly setting up and outsourcing their entire campaign to super PACs and the Koch Brothers pledging $1 billion alone for the 2016 campaign, Democrats have to have the resources to fight back," a Clinton aide told CBS News last week. "There is too much at stake for our future for Democrats to unilaterally disarm." Even that decision didn't draw fire from Sanders. "I understand where she's coming from," he said, though he added that he will not have a super PAC supporting his campaign. Sanders noted that since he announced his candidacy at the end of April he has received nearly 90,000 donations, and the average is $43. "I don't think we're going to outspend Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or anybody else, but I think we are going to raise the kinds of money we need to run a strong and winning campaign," he said. Gingrich, whose campaign was kept alive in part because of donations from billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, said that there is "a declining value when you get above a certain number" in campaign cash. "The key for a candidate, which I failed, was to get above a critical mass," Gingrich said. "If [2012 GOP nominee Mitt] Romney couldn't have outspent me three to one, I might have become the nominee. But there's a point at some time, somewhere between five and 20 to one, where you drown. Nobody who is the nominee in the general election is going to get outspent by a huge number because the country is too polarized on what kind of future it wants and both sides can generate huge amounts of money." Cutter said that the amount of money in politics has made voters cynical, and people begin to tune out the huge amounts of money and negativity in modern political campaigns. "We do need to figure out how we take action to get this money out of the system," she said. Bernie Sanders pledges not to accept super PAC support <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/05/10/bernie-sanders-pledges-not-to-accept-super-pac-support/> // Washington Times // Jose A. DelReal – May 10, 2015 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday reiterated his pledge not to accept super PAC support but stopped short of knocking Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s decision to court allied super PAC donors. “I understand where she is coming from. [But] I will not have a super PAC,” Sanders, who last month launched a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “...I don't think we're going to outspend Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or anybody else, but I think we are going to raise the kinds of money that we need to run a strong and winning campaign.” Although Sanders did not criticize Clinton about her tacit support for an allied super PAC, about which The Washington Post’s Matea Gold reported last week, he nonetheless stressed — without naming names — his belief that the American political system gives outsize influence to millionaires and billionaires. He said a central consideration for Supreme Court nominees should be their position on the Citizens United decision. [Hillary Clinton cements her support for allied super PAC.] “Let me say it this way: If elected president, I will have a litmus test in terms of my nominee to be a Supreme Court justice, and that nominee will say that we are going to overturn this disastrous Supreme Court decision on Citizens United,” he said. “Because that decision is undermining American democracy. I do not believe that billionaires should be able to buy politicians.” Asked about the differences between Clinton and him, Sanders — who described himself as "the most progressive member of the United States Senate" — said he has voiced strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Keystone pipeline while Clinton's positions remain unclear. He also knocked Clinton on her oft-criticized 2002 vote to authorize the use of military force in Iraq. “In terms of foreign policy, Hillary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq. Not only did I vote against it, I helped lead the effort against what I knew would be a disaster. In terms of climate change, I have helped lead the effort against the Keystone pipeline. I'm not quite sure if Hillary Clinton has come out with a position on that. So those are just some of the areas where we differ.” Sanders suggested that the “massive dissatisfaction in this country today with the corporate establishment” could give him an edge in the Democratic primary. "[L]et me say that I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. I respect her and I admire her. But I think we're living in a very strange moment in American history," he said. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a White House contender in 2016, is known for his stances on budget issues and war. Here's the Vermont senator's take on Obamacare, Social Security and more, in his own words. (Julie Percha/The Washington Post) Bernie Sanders challenges Hillary Clinton on trade deal and Iraq war <http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/10/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-trans-pacific-partnership> // The Guardian // Martin Pengelly – May 10, 2015 Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, on Sunday outlined what he said were differences between his campaign and that of the clear frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. Sanders again linked the former secretary of state to the “billionaires” he says dominate US politics, but widened his criticisms to include the former secretary of state’s positions on international trade agreements, the Iraq war and the threat of climate change. Sanders and Clinton are the only candidates so far to have declared on the Democratic side; Clinton leads polls on the issue by more than 50%. Appearing on CBS on Sunday, Sanders was asked what was wrong with Clinton as a Democratic candidate for president. “Let me give you an example,” Sanders said. “Congress is in the midst of a debate on the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP, an agreement with 12 Asian countries]. I am strongly opposed to that trade agreement on the grounds that it follows in the footsteps of other disastrous trade agreements that have cost us millions of jobs.” Last month, Sanders wrote an op-ed column for the Guardian on the TPP, the largest trade deal in US history, in which he said: “The TPP is simply the continuation of a failed approach to trade – an approach which benefits large multinational corporations and Wall Street, but which is a disaster for working families. The TPP must be defeated.” TPP is supported by the Obama administration but opposed by many in the Democratic party. In an interview with Yahoo Politics that was published on Saturday, Obama said a prominent voice against TPP, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, was “absolutely wrong” on the issue. Clinton has so far handled TPP with extreme care – last month her campaign chief, John Podesta, was caught in private remarks to donors saying: “Can you make it go away?” On Sunday, Sanders broadened his attack: “On foreign policy, Hillary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq … Not only I voted against, I helped lead the effort against what I knew would be a disaster. “On climate change, I have helped lead the effort against the Keystone pipeline. I’m not quite sure Hillary Clinton has come out with a position on that. So those are just some areas where we differ.” Sanders also repeated his determination to overturn the 2010 Citizens United supreme court decision, which gave rise to unrestrained spending on elections. “As a result of this disastrous Citizens United supreme court decision, clearly the billionaires, the Koch brothers and all this, are owning the political process,” he said. “They will determine who the candidates are. “Let me say this: if elected president, I will have a litmus test in terms of my nominee to be a supreme court justice. And that nominee will say that we are going to overturn this disastrous supreme court decision because that decision is undermining US democracy. I do not believe billionaires should be able to buy politicians.” Clinton has said she will form a super PAC, the type of fundraising body brought into being by Citizens United, to fight her 2016 campaign. Sanders, who said on Sunday that in two weeks since he declared his candidacy he had received 200,000 website sign-ups to volunteer and close to 90,000 financial contributions at an average of $43 each, said: “I understand where she’s coming from. I will not have a super PAC.” Sanders confirmed that though he is a self-described “democratic socialist” – he was again asked to describe what that meant, and again pointed to Scandinavian countries’ approaches to healthcare, education, childcare and more – he was running for the White House as a Democrat. He added that he was “perhaps the most progressive member of the Senate”. Bernie Sanders's presidential candidacy four decades in the making <http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2015/0510/Bernie-Sanders-s-presidential-candidacy-four-decades-in-the-making> // Christian Science Monitor // Dave Gram - May 10, 2015 MONTPELIER, VT. — Once a democratic socialist, always a democratic socialist. Once a scold of big money in politics, still a scold.... No one can accuse Sen. Bernie Sanders of flip-flopping over his four decades in public life. Rock steady, he's inhabited the same ideological corner on the left from which he now takes on Hillary Rodham Clinton in an improbable quest for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Here he is in 1974, as the 32-year-old candidate for U.S. Senate of a fledgling leftist party in Vermont called Liberty Union: "A handful of banks and billionaires control the economic and political life of America. ... America is becoming less and less of a democracy and more and more of an oligarchy." And now, in an Associated Press interview: "This is a rigged economy, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is not working for ordinary Americans. ... You know this country just does not belong to a handful of billionaires." Some see him as a broken record, others as a person who has been telling the truth all along and just waiting for enough people to listen. "The fascinating thing about Bernie right now is that the agenda has caught up with Bernie," said Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont political science professor and longtime Sanders watcher. During Sanders' near decade as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s, during his eight terms holding Vermont's lone seat in the House of Representatives, and during his near decade in the Senate, the message has stayed the same: The rich are absconding with an immorally large part of the country's wealth, and ordinary people have been getting the short end of the stick. Clinton has gone from opposing same-sex marriage rights to supporting them. Sanders, now 73, favored gay marriage rights before it became fashionable in Democratic circles. He voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in the mid-1990s signed by Clinton's husband, President Bill Clinton. The law, which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in 2013, allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed under the laws of other states. Early in her primary campaign, Clinton has spoken about the gap between the rich and the middle class, in an appeal to the party's liberal wing. The Republican contenders, too, are taking up the problem of income inequality, although with much different solutions in mind than the Democrats. Steady-as-he-goes Sanders has been at it for decades. He's admired Canada's single-payer health care system since way back, talking up "nationalized health care" during his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1988. When Republicans charge that Democrats would bring European-style socialism to the U.S., Sanders says bring it on. "I can hear the Republican attack ad right now: 'He wants America to look more like Scandinavia," George Stephanopoulos said while interviewing Sanders on ABC's "This Week." Sanders replied, "That's right. That's right. And what's wrong with that? What's wrong when you have more income and wealth equality? What's wrong when they have a stronger middle class in many ways than we do, a higher minimum wage than we do, and they're stronger on the environment?" If he's undergone any transformation, it's in his political affiliations. He long ago dropped the Liberty Union banner and has run as an Independent in his successful elections in Vermont. He says he remains one "in my heart," but has caucused with Democrats in Congress. He chose to go for the Democratic nomination and, if he loses the party primaries, says he won't run for president as an Independent. An independent presidential bid could split the liberal vote and help elect the Republican candidate. Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed Bernie Sanders Says He Can Beat Hillary Clinton <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/10/bernie-sanders-hillary-cl_n_7251704.html> // Huffington Post // May 10, 2015 Presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is confident that he can beat Hillary Clinton and become the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate. “In my view, there is a massive dissatisfaction in this country with the corporate establishment, the greed of corporate America, and the incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and income that currently exists,” Sanders said Sunday morning on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” explaining why he thinks he can beat Clinton despite her massive financial advantage. “We won’t outspend Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, but we will raise the kind of money needed to run a strong campaign,” he predicted. Sanders promised on Sunday that he would not have a super PAC to raise money for his campaign. According to Sanders, he has received nearly 90,000 contributions, averaging about $43, since announcing his candidacy a week and a half ago. Sanders, who described himself as “the most progressive member of the U.S. Senate,” vowed that if elected, he would work to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and rein in campaign spending allowances. While Sanders voiced his respect and admiration for Clinton, he noted that she voted in favor of the 2003 Iraq War and has avoided taking a stance on the Keystone XL pipeline. Sanders, who opposed both, has also led the fight against a bill that would grant the president fast-track authority on trade agreements. Warren-for-president push waning <http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/hillary_chabot/2015/05/chabot_warren_for_president_push_waning> // Boston Herald // Hillary Chabot – May 11, 2015 Grass-roots efforts to cultivate an Elizabeth Warren presidential run appear to be withering on the vine as the 2016 Democratic primary firms up, with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the race, and erstwhile Warren activists abandoning their labor of love. “Whether they are slowing down or not, their momentum is slowing,” said Steve McMahon, a Democratic strategist in Washington, D.C., who hasn’t committed to a presidential candidate. “It’s one thing to support a hypothetical candidate before Hillary gets in, and it’s one thing to support an opponent to Hillary before Bernie gets in,” McMahon said. “But a lot of progressives who like Warren, at this point support Hillary and want her to win and don’t want her to be hurt in a contentious primary.” Jim Demers, a prominent New Hampshire Democratic strategist who’s backing Clinton, said the Granite State push to draft U.S. Sen. Warren has been missing in action recently. “It seems like it has lost a lot of attention, at least in New Hampshire. I haven’t seen the organizer out in a couple of weeks,” Demers said, adding that Clinton may be winning over the Warren crowd with recent moves like embracing one hot-button issue that Warren backers wanted on the agenda — immigration. “We’re already starting to see some of the issues they were hoping would be in the campaign,” he said. Hard-line progressive groups like Democracy for America and MoveOn are behind the Warren-for-president movement, but Warren’s repeated refusals to run combined with progressive darling U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ entrance into the race has impacted their campaign. But those behind the Ready For Warren and Run Warren Run organizations aren’t ready to give up. One key strategist behind the Ready for Warren push said the group plans to release another round of big-name former President Obama supporters who are asking Warren to jump into the 2016 campaign. “If anything, we’re stronger now that not just Hillary but Bernie are in the race,” said the strategist, who asked to remain on background. There’s already evidence of some defectors, however. Artists for Warren recently endorsed Sanders and Carl Gibson, a progressive activist, journalist and former Warren-for-president supporter, wrote a column recently urging the movement to get behind Sanders. “The quicker her fans stop waiting in vain, the better chance Sanders will have to fight for the values voters associate with Warren,” Gibson wrote. GOP For GOP, too much of a good thing? <http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/10/opinions/zelizer-gop-too-much-competition/> // CNN // Julian Zelizer – May 10, 2015 (CNN)The Republicans are going to have another free-for-all primary season on their hands. Their contest for the presidential nomination is attracting a huge crowd. For a political party that once insisted on order and hierarchy, always making clear who the next deserving nominee was going to be, today the GOP has taken on the character of a political circus. With the assistance of super Pac donors who have the capacity to singlehandedly finance candidacies and a decentralized political media with many outlets that are searching for fresh stories, a number of candidates -- Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham -- have formally or informally entered the contest. Julian Zelizer There are others, including Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Wisconsin's Scott Walker, New Jersey's Chris Christie and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry who may jump in as well. We seem to be seeing a replay of 2012 where the primaries resembled a WWE battle royal with a huge number of contestants packed inside the steel cage. Is this good for the party? Is this good for democracy? At one level, it is always good for a party to have some real competition for the top spot in a presidential campaign. The multiplicity of voices will allow the party to showcase a wider range of ideas and to foster a more robust debate about the direction of the party. Many experts would agree that Hillary Clinton will benefit from having a challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who will pressure her to deal with issues from the left. Too many candidates means diluted look at issues But there is difference between a healthy primary competition and an overabundance of candidates. What kinds of problems might result from the current trend among Republicans? The most important is that of the wide-open entrance system is creating a huge amount of political space for people with super Pacs to exercise influence. The only way that many of these candidates can mount any kind of challenge is to find powerful donors who are willing to provide them with the money that they need. As Newt Gingrich did in 2012, candidates are turning to people like Sheldon Adelson who are becoming the new kingpins in American politics. Or to Miami billionaire Norman Braman, who the New York Times reported, is providing Marco Rubio with immense financial support. Over the long run, this will certainly have a corrosive effect on our democratic system as the flow of private money into elections intensifies. Hypercompetitive, unfiltered primaries also result in a dilution of media attention for any single candidate, including competitors to the leading candidates. The media tends to quickly shift its attention the candidate of the week. The result is that we lose the kind of public focus on sustained indepth coverage that is often helpful for voters to better evaluate the choices that they face. Opinion: What U.S. conservatives can learn from David Cameron After Jeb Bush started to seriously show is interest in running, there were a number of important investigative reports about his time as governor of Florida. But those stories already seem like the good old days as the press has shifted to Ben Carson and others. There are so many stories about so many candidates, it is extraordinarily difficult for voters to keep their attention on ongoing investigative work amidst all the noise. When the debates begin, we will once again see events where each candidates has even less time to answer questions. As Peter Beinart argued in The Atlantic, in the Democratic primaries Sanders has a serious chance to gain attention for his economic issues because the competition on the Democratic side is not so flooded. What happens with extremist views A primary system that allows for so many voices to gain high-visibility platforms also allows for fringe views to gain mainstream attention. This was evident in 2012, when Donald Trump entered the race and found that his birther arguments were gaining national attention. This wasn't good for the GOP, which had to deal with rather extremist views showcased front and center. Already, as Tim Egan recounts, we have seen a number of shocking statements, ranging from Ben Carson saying that people went into prison straight and came out gay as evidence that people choose homosexuality (Carson later apologized for the remark), to Ted Cruz voicing support for Texans who fear a military takeover of their state. It can also have dangerous implications for civil dialogue if fringe elements gain treatment as legitimate voices of concern. From the perspective of the party, one of the threats is that this number of candidates creates an abundance of opportunities for each to go for the jugular against their opponents. With such a crowded field, the incentives increase for each person to become more vicious in their treatment of each other. We saw this in 2012 when the most devastating attacks on Mitt Romney came from Newt Gingrich, who characterized him as a wealthy scion of capital who had been willing to burn entire communities in the pursuit of profit at Bain. The benefit for Republicans is that in contrast to a seemingly predetermined contest in the Democratic Party, the competition could be more compelling for voters, so they will pay closer attention, and create the impression that the GOP is offering greater diversity within its ranks. But the costs to the party could be significant. Political competition is a good thing. But it is time to think a little bit about the value that political parties used to bring when they helped to filter through the noise, throwing their support behind others and giving fewer opportunities for marginal candidates to consume too much valuable political time and resources. Of course, there needs to be a balance between a system of gatekeepers and what we have today. So some competition is a very good thing but too much can be damaging. GOP Hopefuls Talk Tough on National Security <http://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-hopefuls-talk-tough-on-national-security-1431297310> // WSJ // Janet Hook - May 10, 2015 Republicans running for president face an electorate riddled with anxiety about national security and terrorism—a big mood swing from 2012 and a mixed blessing for the GOP in 2016. As a weekend candidate forum here illustrated, voters’ heightened interest in world affairs gives Republicans a fresh opportunity to lambaste President Barack Obama and show some hawkish swagger toward terrorists. “We will look for you. We will find you. And we will kill you,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, borrowing lines from the action movie “Taken” and getting robust applause from the conservative audience of about 2,200. But the GOP contenders also face pressure to explain how they—governors, senators and political outsiders with little experience managing world affairs—could shoulder the burden of being leader of the free world. “Commander in chief is not an entry-level position,” said former Sen. Rick Santorum, in a line that could cast doubt on the credentials of the entire GOP field, including Mr. Santorum who lost his Senate seat in 2006. A spirited foreign policy debate allows Republicans to unify in attacking their likely Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But it also opens a split within the GOP. That division is best illustrated by two presidential contenders who didn’t attend Saturday’s candidate forum: Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who argues for greater restraint in U.S. military intervention than most Republicans, and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the most hawkish members of the party. Mr. Graham, who is expected to announce his bid for the presidency June 1, has drawn his differences with Mr. Paul in unusually personal terms. “He is one step behind leading-from-behind,” Mr. Graham said in a USA Today interview broadcast Sunday. “I think he’d be the worst possible person to send into the ring when it came to foreign policy.” South Carolina is a particularly welcoming place for Republicans staking out a hawkish platform. The state, which hosts the third presidential nominating contest in 2016 after Iowa and New Hampshire, has eight military bases, more than 74,000 military personnel, including nearly 58,000 military retirees, according to a recent report by the University of South Carolina. But voters’ concern about national security isn’t just limited to military-connected communities. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found voters nationally are more concerned about security issues than they were four years ago, before the last presidential election. Asked what issues should be the government’s top priority, 21% of poll participants said national security and terrorism—up from 6% in 2012. The shift is especially big for Republicans, who made it their No. 1 issue: 27% named it the top priority, up from 8% in 2012. That could make this the first election since 2004, when the Iraq war weighed on voters, that candidates’ foreign affairs credentials and defense policy stands could factor heavily into presidential politics. Just in the past year, Americans have been rattled by the rise of Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and the beheadings of the militant group’s captives, Russia’s takeover of part of Ukraine, and hostilities in the Middle East. Chad Groover, chairman of the Greenville County Republican Party, said those developments have made national security more important than ever among voters here. “If you had asked me a year ago, I would not have said that. I would have said bread-and-butter issues were primary,” Mr. Groover said. “But the way the world is going, with the advent of ISIS, we see the need to have a strong focus.” Adding to voter anxiety is the recent episode in Garland, Texas, where two gunman, believed to be inspired by Islamic State, were killed as they prepared to attack a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest. “When it’s right in your backyard, it wakes you up,” said Terri Russ, a health-care worker from Columbia, S.C., who attended the Greenville summit. Republicans, in their speeches, applauded the police officer who foiled the plot by killing the attackers. “Thankfully, one police officer helped those terrorists meet their virgins,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R.,Texas). Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who spoke at the South Carolina event before traveling to Israel for the first time, acknowledged his need to study up on international issues. “It’s something that, even though as a governor I don’t deal with it day in and day out, it has increasingly become one of the most important things for me to focus in on,” said Mr. Walker, who hasn’t yet formally announced his campaign for president. Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said that as a business woman she had dealt directly with more heads of state—including Russian President Vladimir Putin—than any other GOP candidate. “The world is a more dangerous and a more tragic place when America is not leading,” she said. While few candidates gave many specifics about what policies they would implement, Ms. Fiorina did. She called for a series of steps to flex U.S. military muscle, including rebuilding the Sixth Fleet in Europe, restoring the missile defense program, and conducting military exercises in the Baltics. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also didn’t attend the South Carolina forum Saturday, instead delivering a commencement address at Liberty University in Virginia. But he weighed in Sunday on a question concerning the use of military force that poses a unique challenge to him among GOP candidates, defining his views compared to his brother’s, former President George W. Bush. In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Bush said that he would have authorized the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq, although he acknowledged that it was a mistake that more was not done to guarantee security in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was removed from power. He reminded the interviewer that Mrs. Clinton, then a U.S. senator also supported the Iraq invasion. And he said his brother agreed that mistakes were made after Saddam’s fall. “So just for the 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,” he said. Mr. Paul didn’t attend the GOP summit because he was in California to open a Silicon Valley campaign office. Although Mr. Paul is not an isolationist in the mold of his father, libertarian Ron Paul who ran multiple long-shot campaigns for president, the senator is more cautious about U.S. military intervention than other 2016 candidates. Early polls suggest he is in a weaker position in South Carolina among Republicans than in Iowa and New Hampshire. Mr. Graham, who didn’t attend the summit in his home state because of family obligations, has been, with his hawkish close ally Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a frequent critic of Mr. Paul. Mr. Paul could not be reached for comment Sunday on the latest Graham criticism, but in an April interview with Fox News about similar criticism, he said Messrs. McCain and Graham were part of a group he considered “lapdogs” for Mr. Obama’s military initiatives overseas. Carly Fiorina breaks with many in GOP on Obama's trade pitch <http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/10/politics/carly-fiorina-trade-barack-obama-election-2016/> // CNN // Eric Bradner – May 10, 2015 Washington (CNN)Carly Fiorina says she supports free trade -- yet she doesn't want President Barack Obama to have the congressional green light to finalize a massive Pacific Rim deal. The former Hewlett Packard executive who's seeking the Republican presidential nomination said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Obama "does not have a track record of the details matching his selling point." Therefore, she said, she opposes trade promotion authority -- legislation that would allow Obama to submit the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership to Congress for an up-or-down vote with limited debate and no amendments. That authority, trade negotiators say, is key to getting other countries to sign off on a final deal. Republican congressional leaders have strongly backed Obama's request for the authority. But a bill that would grant it is imperiled as liberal Democrats who oppose expanded trade and tea party Republicans who distrust Obama have linked together to oppose it. "The truth is, we don't know what's in this deal," Fiorina said. "I think it's important to understand some of the fine print of what's in this deal," she said. "For example, is China allowed to join this Pacific trading agreement in a couple of years, yes or no?" Obama has pointed to the deal, which includes Japan, Australia, Canada and Mexico, as a way to counter China's growing influence in the Asia-Pacific. But China is not involved in the negotiations, which are ongoing. "The point is, what exactly is in this agreement?" Fiorina said. "Because this administration unfortunately has a track record of burying things in fine print ... that turn out to be very different from their selling points." Carly Fiorina fires back at critics of ‘Domaingate’ <http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/fiorina-fires-back-critics-domaingate> // MSNBC // Nisha Chittal – May 10, 2015 Almost immediately after former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina announced she was running for president last week, her staff was dogged by questions about why they had failed to secure the Web domain carlyfiorina.org, which had been purchased by a Democratic activist who used it to post a message about how many people HP had allegedly laid off while Fiorina was the company’s chief executive. As Fiorina made the media rounds over the next week, she responded to questions from the media about the domain gaffe with a sense of humor – and with a few tricks up her sleeve. During a Wednesday appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” Meyers asked Fiorina about the domain, and Fiorina responded by asking Meyers, “Do you know who owns SethMeyers.org?… I do. I just bought it in the green room!” That domain now redirects to Fiorina’s campaign website. On Sunday morning, she appeared on “Meet The Press” with Chuck Todd, and shortly after the show, she revealed on Twitter that her team had also purchased chucktodd.org – which also now redirects to Fiorina’s website. And late on Sunday, reporters began to notice that HillaryClinton.net now redirects to CarlyForPresident.com as well. It might be easy to assume that this was another work of mischief by the Fiorina campaign – but a spokeswoman for Fiorina confirmed to msnbc that, in fact, the Fiorina campaign did not buy the domain. It’s unclear who owns it and when it began redirecting visitors to Fiorina’s website. “Many reporters were nearly giddy about what I’ve affectionately labeled #domaingate when it came to Republicans, but none had bothered to check hillaryclinton.net or hillaryforpresident.com. I’m now looking forward to all the stories similarly labeling this a major gaffe by the Clinton campaign,” Fiorina spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said in an email. Domain gaffes have started to become a regular occurrence on the campaign trail in this still-nascent presidential contest. First, when Ted Cruz announced he was running for president in March, reporters pointed out that his team had not been able to purchase TedCruz.com, which had been owned for several years by another Ted Cruz, and which displayed a pro-President Obama message. Rand Paul’s campaign reportedly spent $100,000 securing the rights to RandPaul.com. Now, Hillary Clinton has her own gaffe on her hands with HillaryClinton.net and HillaryForPresident.com, which redirects to theamerican.net, the personal website of a conservative activist. Clinton’s missed domains also seem additionally noteworthy given that the Clinton team has staffed up with many of the top tech talent that worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Future candidates, take note: it would be wise to take the time to buy up every permutation of your name on the Web – or risk letting it fall into someone else’s hands. The Pentagon's Response to Ted Cruz Regarding Jade Helm 15 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-stanford/the-pentagons-response-to_b_7251254.html> // Huffington Post // Jason Stanford – May 10, 2015 Recently, Senator Ted Cruz from Texas asked the Pentagon to clarify its intentions with military exercises in Central Texas called "Jade Helm 15." The Pentagon's response follows: Dear Senator Cruz: Thank you for your inquiry into whether the Jade Helm 15 military exercise is the first wave of a federal takeover of Texas, the Trojan Horse, as it were, of the end of sovereignty in the Lone Star State. Our response, contrary to the long tradition of official correspondence and military bureaucracy, is concise: no. But that's just what you would expect us to say, isn't it? Perhaps, then, you would prefer not an official proclamation but a reasoned answer. As a master debater in college (Princeton, right?), you surely appreciate the reliability of logic, your public statements over the past few years notwithstanding. If you are disinclined to take the United States Armed Forces at their word when we promise no ill intentions towards Texas, then perhaps your considerable and vaunted intellectual powers, which once posited the regrowth of hymens as a guard against unauthorized incursions in domestic affairs, could be swayed by incontrovertible fact. I know you think highly of our capabilities. Why else would you advocate for a short war with Iran? If we are indeed that powerful, we could probably launch an attack from any of the 15 U.S. military bases already within Texas' borders. While Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher may have found it necessary, even attractive, to invade countries that can easily be overrun, the present DoD considers such lopsided contests at best unsporting. As someone who was not born within the borders of this country, it might interest you to know that Texas is already part of the United States. In fact, Texas has twice joined the Union. The first time your adopted state joined the USA in 1845 it set in motion events that led to the Mexican-American War. Later, when Union troops conquered the Southern rebellion, Texas rejoined the Union. It is not, therefore, farfetched to think that Texas' relationship to the rest of the United States could involve war, but please also keep in mind that when we refer to the United States of America, Texas is being implicitly included. We thought about calling it the United States of America and Texas, but we were afraid people might think Texas was a retrograde backwater of reactionary lunatics who think Moses was a Founding Father and laugh at you. This is way better. Please also consider there are a great many things about Texas and Texan culture that could be threatened by another unnecessary armed conflict between Texas and the United States. We like Texas barbecue. That Green Beret who carried the flag out for the Texas Longhorn football team? That was pretty cool. The wildflowers along the highways are no joke. The late Texan Chris Kyle, the "American sniper," is a hero to many. Texas gave the world Lyndon Johnson, a staggering gift for which America was perhaps not entirely prepared. Without the Lone Star State, the Western swing band Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys would have appeared under the performing name Robert Wills and His Playboys, which is ghastly, or not have existed at all, a possibility that DoD has officially classified as "too awful to contemplate". And we really dig the self-awareness, the love of self that, while occasionally metastasizing into paranoid delusions such as those that motivated your original query, also make Texas a culture with an indelible sense of place. But, we reiterate, that place is in the United States. On previous visits, we noticed that many of your residents enjoy Social Security and Medicare (you're welcome), volunteer for the armed services, treasure federal parks, wildlife preserves, and wilderness areas, and earn and spend currency backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. With a quick Internet search, I also learned that nearly a third of Texas' total revenue is from Federal funding. In fact, millions of your schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America almost every day. And unlike yourself, they apparently mean it. There is a fundamental misapprehension that we feel is at the root of your query about our intentions was revealed in a recent comment you made to the press. We are assured it is a military training exercise. I have no reason to doubt those assurances, but I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty, because when the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don't trust what it is saying. If, Senator Cruz, you believe that the United States military is a political tool of its civilian leadership, you have reached a conclusion unsupported by fact, history and good sense. The troops swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States. To besmirch their loyalty to the country, even in the service of making hackneyed political points in the Republican primary, does not make you a patriot, but a partisan. Even a Princeton and Harvard Law man should know the difference. Also, it makes you the rudest Canadian we've ever run across. Sincerely Yours, Secretary Ashton Carter Mike Huckabee Defends Endorsement of Diabetes Product <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/05/10/mike-huckabee-defends-endorsement-of-diabetes-product/> // First Draft –NYT // Nicholas Confessore – May 10, 2015 Mike Huckabee, the Republican presidential candidate, defended his endorsement of a dubious diabetes remedy on Sunday, telling an interviewer that “if that’s the worst thing somebody can say to me” then “I’m going to be a heck of a good president.” The former Arkansas governor, who wrote a book about weight loss after dropping 100 pounds, has more recently appeared in infomercials hawking a “weird spice, kitchen-cabinet cure” for diabetes that consists mostly of dietary supplements. He has also endorsed the treatment, which medical doctors caution against using, through his vast mailing list, along with a cure for cancer said to be hidden in verses of the Bible. But Mr. Huckabee, appearing on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” downplayed the supplements on Sunday, arguing they were a minor part of the treatment he promoted. “One of the elements of the plan was dietary supplements, but it’s not the fundamental thing,” Mr. Huckabee said. “The fundamental thing is always, as you and I both know, it’s exercise, it’s good eating habits, it’s maintaining sugar levels, it’s not eating a bunch of junk food, processed food, lots of carbs, sugar, those type of things.” Mr. Huckabee, who broke off as a spokesman for the diabetes product not long before announcing he would make another bid for the White House, also suggested it was unfair to press him on the issue. “I don’t have to defend everything that I’ve ever done,” Mr. Huckabee said. “I’m not doing those infomercials, obviously, now as a candidate for president.” Mike Huckabee: Nothing wrong with diabetes infomercials <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/mike-huckabee-nothing-wrong-with-diabetes-infomercials-117795.html> // Politico // Eliza Collins – May 10, 2015 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Sunday defended his endorsement of a diabetes kit whose effectiveness has been challenged. “If that’s the worst thing that somebody can say to me, is that I advocated for people who have diabetes to do something to reverse it and stop the incredible pain of that, then I’m going to be a heck of a good president,” the former Arkansas governor said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” In an infomercial that had been airing for the Diabetes Solution Kit, Huckabee said he lost 110 pounds and reversed his diabetes. CBS host Bob Schieffer said National Journal reported that the infomercial for the product was “simply not supported by the medical community.” And Huckabee answered a question from Schieffer, who also has diabetes, about whether the kit included pills. “No, no, there was not pills — that’s a misnomer. One of the elements of the plan was dietary supplements, but it’s not the fundamental thing,” Huckabee said, explaining the key elements of the plan were healthy eating, exercise and maintaining blood-sugar levels. Diabetes is one of the top four diseases that are costing Americans in the health care system, Huckabee said, adding that the disease needs to be approached by looking for cures rather than just through treatment. Huckabee said he’s no longer doing the infomercials now that he is a presidential candidate. Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson May Play Key Roles in Republican Race <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/us/politics/mike-huckabee-carly-fiorina-and-ben-carson-may-play-key-roles-in-republican-race.html> // NYT // Albert Hunt – May 10, 2015 None of the three candidates who joined the Republican presidential contest last week — Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson — will win the nomination. That’s the view of politically smart strategists who nevertheless say that all three, especially Mr. Huckabee, could play important roles in shaping the race. First, here’s why these latest entries are unlikely to prevail. The Republican coalition has three pillars, all relatively conservative: economic, national security and social issues. A candidate has to be acceptable to at least two of the three. At this stage, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and perhaps Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky make the grade. Mr. Huckabee — the populist Baptist preacher, former Arkansas governor and talk-show host — doesn’t. He is adored by the social right, hated by economic conservatives and isn’t respected by many national security hawks. Moreover, there’s skepticism about his ability to raise the funds to go the distance. In 2008, after winning the initial Iowa caucuses, he lacked the resources to compete through the nominating process. There’s a general sense that 2012 was his time. He passed. Mr. Carson, a prominent physician, and Ms. Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, are political novices, neither has ever been elected to office. The supposed appeal of nonpoliticians in America is superficial. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll released last week, almost 70 percent said they would be uncomfortable with a presidential candidate who lacks previous experience in government. Mr. Carson and Ms. Fiorina, both cancer survivors, have appealing narratives. Mr. Carson’s résumé is more impressive: He is one of the world’s most renowned pediatric neurosurgeons. (He once operated on our son.) Ms. Fiorina was fired as C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard and generally gets negative reviews for her performance. The possible import of Mr. Carson, who espouses a hard-right line and has attracted a following in places such as Iowa, is that movement conservatives account for half of the vote in several early contests. Governor Walker and Senator Rubio could get a small slice of those votes, as will Senator Paul, whose basic appeal is to libertarians. More than 40 percent of the vote is likely to go to a movement right aspirant. In 2012, the Iowa caucus was won with 24 percent of the vote, in a smaller and less capable field. The difference between Mr. Carson getting 5 percent and 10 percent may well decide if one of the movement right candidates tops 20 percent, which could be first place. The top two right-wing candidates are Mr. Huckabee and Senator Cruz. A no-holds-barred debate between these tough customers, similar in ideology, vastly different in style, would be worthy of Las Vegas. Senator Cruz, a brilliant lawyer and champion debater, would assail Mr. Huckabee as a tax-increasing governor who commuted the sentences of hardened criminals, including one who went on to commit murder. The folksy and fiery Mr. Huckabee could attack the Texas senator for supporting President Obama on free trade and for his ties to Wall Street and the Republican donor class. Ms. Fiorina’s corporate background is probably better preparation for politics than brain surgery. She’s unlikely to make embarrassing gaffes like Mr. Carson’s recent charge, which he later retracted, that people enter prison as heterosexuals and leave gay. Elements of the Republican establishment welcome Ms. Fiorina’s candidacy. She’s the only woman, and the party has a gender problem. She’s a willing attack dog against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Yet if she ever does better than the point or two that she scores in current polls, it would likely be at the expense of an establishment type such as Mr. Bush. In the most wide open Republican race in the past half-century, there are no certainties, and maybe even no likelihoods. A year from now it’s improbable that we’ll look back on the events of the past week as seminal, but they may affect how the race looks then. Lindsey Graham: Hillary Clinton is beatable, but GOP is getting ‘creamed’ at the polls by non-white voters <http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/lindsey-graham-hillary-clinton-is-beatable-but-gop-is-getting-creamed-at-the-polls-by-non-white-voters/> // RawStory // Tom Boggioni – May 10, 2015 In an interview on USA Today’s “Capital Download,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) said he was “98.6 percent sure” he’ll run for the Republican presidential nomination, but admitted that the GOP has a problem with non-white voters where his party is getting “creamed.” Graham said that he will announce his candidacy soon, joining an already crowded field of candidates, all of whom believe they can beat presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. “There’s a reason there’s a lot of people running on our side,” Graham explained. “We all think we can beat Hillary. The world is falling apart. I think I have a good background. Experience and judgement to re-set what I think is radical Islam running wild. We’re gonna get hit hard if something doesn’t change.” While Graham believes that Clinton is beatable, he doesn’t believe that it will be easy. “I think she’s going to be a tough candidate, but I think she represents the third term of a failed presidency,” Graham said. “The only way we’d lose this election is if we beat ourselves, and that’s very possible. But we’re getting creamed with non-white voters.” Talk then turned to the contentious immigration debate within the Republican Party, with Graham taking a softer and more conciliatory approach to undocumented immigrants. “If I were president of the United States, I would veto any bill that did not have a pathway to citizenship,” Graham explained. “You would have a long, hard path to citizenship … but I want to create that path because I don’t like the idea of millions of people living in America for the rest of their lives being the hired help. That’s not who we are.” No interview with Graham would be complete without him taking a shot at rival Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, with Graham questioning Paul’s foreign policy positions, saying he “is leading from behind.” “At the end of the day, his world view has not stood the test of time and I think he’d be the worst possible person to send into the ring when it came to foreign policy,” Graham said, adding that Clinton “could get to his right very easily.” Rand Paul Courts San Francisco’s Techies <http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellencushing/rand-paul-among-the-techies#.ttL5qJVxDp> // BuzzFeed // Ellen Cushing – May 10, 2015 The Republican presidential hopeful talks Snapchat and won’t take questions In San Francisco. It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon in one of the most liberal cities in America, and Rand Paul — the Republican United States senator from Kentucky running for president — is talking about Snapchat. “We use Snapchat more than anybody else out there,” he brags during a speech in San Francisco. The crowd loves it. It’s a Snapchat kind of crowd. Paul is speaking from a concrete-floored South of Market coworking space, StartupHouse, that will soon become the campaign’s home in San Francisco. The audience is made up of more than a hundred Rand fans and at least a dozen reporters. One entire wall is covered in chalkboard paint and pink and blue handwritten messages. Startup-y miscellany clutters nearly every empty surface — papers, all manner of cords and chargers, one $4,400 check, uncashed. One guy is wearing a shirt that says “freelance developer.” Another has a laptop sticker that reads “I don’t believe the liberal agenda.” He’s livetweeting. The event is called — and, really, there is nothing else it could be called — Disrupting Democracy. It’s all very two point omg. And it is certainly very new. As Vincent Harris, a Paul staffer who sat near the back tweeting from the senator’s Twitter account, told BuzzFeed News, Paul’s campaign is the only one with a tech advisory board, a CTO, a digital strategist, and offices in both San Francisco and Austin, Texas. Another attendee, Matt Shupe, a thirtysomething political consultant, points out that it’s rare for a politician on either side of the aisle to treat California as anything other than an ATM, hosting free, open events such as this one. Paul’s commitment to courting Silicon Valley is genuine, if a bit puzzling — California hasn’t gone red in a presidential contest since 1988, and as San Francisco Chronicle political columnist Carla Marinucci noted toward the end of the panel, “the tech community voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in the last election.” But Silicon Valley is nothing if not relentlessly optimistic in the face of mounting obstacles and historic reality. There’s a case to be made that liberal San Francisco’s backlash against the Google Busses and the Twitter tax breaks have served to alienate the tech community, and that, if pitched right, Paul’s particular brand of civil libertarianism could square with Silicon Valley’s iconoclastic ethos. At any rate, the people crowded into StartupHouse seemed to believe it could. “We’re here in San Francisco to show that we’re a different kind of Republican, and we’re here to compete for every vote,” Paul said at the end of his short speech, to positively thunderous applause. After the event — a clean 38 minutes, including opening remarks and a panel discussion — he was mobbed by people requesting selfies and autographs; one fan, a youngish guy in a corduroy blazer, chased the Senator about his startup, a voter engagement app. Think Rand Paul as VC. And then, he was out. Outside on the sidewalk past the scrum of picture-takers and startup-pitchers, I chased Paul down. Although he’d fielded questions from attendees, he had dodged the press. I wanted to see if I could ask him a quick question. But he wasn’t having it. This stop was but one of many. So the Senator from Kentucky trotted off into the sun, surrounded by aides and bodyguards. I squinted after them, trying to see the car he got into — look for the tell-tale Uber sticker or Lyft mustache — but no luck; he had already turned a corner. Rand Paul Talks About Appealing to Young People on Tech Issues <http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/rand-paul-talks-about-appealing-to-young-people-on-tech-issues-20150510> // National Journal // Eric Garcia - May 10, 2015 In a speech in San Francisco, presidential candidate Rand Paul told Silicon Valley conservatives that he could win over Californians and other voters not normally associated with the Republican Party largely on issues of civil liberties and technology. At the Disrupting Democracy speaker series hosted by Lincoln Labs, a tech-friendly conservative organization, Paul made the case for appealing to younger voters by way of ending mass data collection, an activity he said went against one of the main reasons young people voted for Barack Obama in 2008. "I also think people who voted for President Obama was because they thought he was a civil libertarian," Paul said. Saturday's speech was part of Paul's message of reaching to nontraditional GOP voters. Last year, he spoke at the University of California at Berkeley, which is not viewed as a conservative bastion. Paul made the case that criminal justice reform could be a way to appeal to voters, noting that the Republican Party often touts itself as the party of the Second Amendment. "I want to also be the party of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment but also the Fifth and Sixth Amendment," Paul said. As part of this, Paul talked about restoring the right to vote for convicted felons. Paul also held firm to his opposition to net neutrality, saying he had not seen concerns about internet monopolies that could control rates being manifested. "I don't think there is yet evidence that there's absolute control of rates," adding if there was any organization involved with monopolies, it was government monopolies. Paul also dismissed the idea that it would make it harder for small startup companies to succeed. "The government didn't create Facebook and the government didn't create Google," he said. Another issue to which Paul stated his opposition was the refinancing student loans, an idea championed by some progressives, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren. "It'd lead to chaos," he said, also criticizing the White House proposal for free community college as "absurd," and instead suggested his proposal to make college tuition tax-deductible. "People said there wouldn't be enough money for government; well, government would have to be smaller," Paul said. Meanwhile, Paul pushed back on an idea being promoted by the California secretary of state to make voter registration automatic. "I am of the belief that getting off your sofa to participate is required," Paul said, adding that he did not like the idea of having ballots mailed to voters, even though some have posited that Republicans are more likely to vote by mail, while Democrats are likely to vote early and in person. Rand Paul Plays Down Comments on Military Exercise After Mockery <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/05/10/rand-paul-plays-down-comments-on-military-exercise-after-mockery/> // First Draft – NYT // Jeremy Peters – May 10, 2015 SAN FRANCISCO — Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has been mocked by liberal pundits who accused him of fanning conspiracy theories about a military exercise along the Texas border, an event that some on the far right believe is a covert effort to impose martial law. But in an interview this weekend, Mr. Paul said he had no idea what the training exercise — known as Jade Helm — was when he was first asked about it last month on an Iowa radio program. “Someone on a radio program asked me what it was. I didn’t know,” Mr. Paul said after he christened a new work space for his presidential campaign in the Bay Area. He expressed befuddlement at how his comments about “that ridiculous Jade something” had been blown out of proportion. “I said sure, I’ll ask my staff to look into it because I didn’t know what it was,” he said. The comments that drew ridicule by people like Bill Maher, who accused Mr. Paul of pandering to the right-wing fringe, occurred on the Jan Mickelson program. Mr. Mickelson brought up the exercise, telling the senator, “I’d like to know what the rest of the story is on that.” Mr. Paul replied, “We’ll look at that also.” Other Republicans, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, have gone further. Mr. Cruz said he had no reason to doubt the military’s motives, but added that the paranoia was expected because the Obama administration has stoked questions about its honesty. “I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty because the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration.” Hillaryclinton.Net Redirects To Carly Fiorina Campaign Website <http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/05/10/carly-fiorina-launches-domaingate-buys-hillaryclinton-net/> // Breitbart // Alex Swoyer - May 10, 2015 GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has launched #DomainGate on Twitter. She is seemingly buying up celebrity domains to push her campaign message. Those going to hillaryclinton.net, for example, find themselves at Fiornia’s campaign Website. Breitbart News previously reported Fiorina schooled Seth Meyers on his show, Late Night with Seth Meyers by buying SethMeyers.org. Meyers noted that someone had purchased CarlyFiorina.org using it to bash Fiorina as former CEO of Hewlett Packard. “Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain. So I’m using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard,” read a note on CarlyFiorina.org. The site displays a page of frowning faces, captioned by: “That’s 30,000 people she laid off. People with families.” It appears Fiorina didn’t stop with SethMeyers.org. She appeared on Meet The Press Sunday and redirected ChuckTodd.org to her site as well. If you got to any of the three sites, you are redirected to her campaign site, CarlyforPresident.com. Waiting for Jeb to jump <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/jeb-bush-2016-election-waiting-to-declare-117791.html> // Politico // Glenn Thrush – May 10, 2015 By the end of last week, almost everyone had jumped into the pool. Almost everyone except John Ellis Bush, who still sits at the water’s edge of the 2016 presidential campaign, suit dry except for the stray splash thrown his way by his jostling Republican rivals Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. It wasn’t clear at the time, but is increasingly so now, that Jeb Bush’s decision last December to signal, but not formally announce, his candidacy was a short-term logistical masterstroke befitting his family’s reputation for mastering the mechanics of elections. His undeclared status has freed him to raise what aides are saying will be as much as $100 million from rich patrons and outside groups (the second he files presidential paperwork, he’s prevented from requesting big super PAC checks), and it has temporarily shielded him from being the target of shots many of his would-be opponents are leveling at Hillary Clinton. (Aside, that is, from lots of hand-wringing about the increasingly hereditary nature of American politics, and mockery of his insistence that he’ll be his “own man” on foreign policy.) This inversion — building a campaign on the back of a super PAC instead of vice versa — is novel and could be a model for the future, but it also puts a lot of pressure on an opaque candidate who publicly has done little more than a set of sporadic, low-octane speeches with few specifics to offer. Given his fundraising focus, he’s already dogged by the notion, eagerly pushed by his enemies among the party’s tea party hard-liners, that he’s a bankroll in search of a soul. Which is why we’ll see the media coverage of the Republican presidential race coalesce, and soon, around a single question: Is Bush actually the front-runner, or just a guy with a lot of money trying to buy the nomination? A dozen or so Republican operatives and donors I spoke with last week, most of them open to a Bush candidacy, didn’t have a clue how that question will be ultimately be answered, but it’s a decisive one, and they are antsy to find out. The early polls, which show Jeb getting clobbered in Iowa, barely ahead — if at all — in New Hampshire, and trading a narrow lead nationally with his fellow Floridian Marco Rubio, are predicting a ferociously competitive campaign. But who knows how it will play out when Bush actually announces? “A month ago, the whole story was that Hillary was rusty, that she hadn’t been out there doing anything,” said a veteran GOP operative who worked on one of George W. Bush’s campaigns. “Well, she’s been out there taking hits for a month. Jeb hasn’t. It’s time to get this thing going.” Nicolle Wallace, a White House communications director to George W. Bush who started her political life as a 25-year-old adviser to Jeb Bush in Florida, also sees undeniable parallels with the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. “I think some of their strengths are parallel. Some of their strengths are on the policy side, not the retail political side. I think some of their strengths are in a room, not on a stage,” she told me during a taping of last week’s POLITICO podcast. “I think they have some of the same weaknesses, too. They’re both in a constituent-free zone. Neither of them represents anybody right now. Neither of them is advocating on anyone’s behalf, except their own campaigns. And I think it’s awkward, frankly, for both of them.” Bush’s campaign is slowly, inevitably pushing him into the water, nudging him into more high-stakes situations ahead of a formal announcement that could come as early as mid-June. People close to the campaign tell me he plans to do some press-the-flesh retail campaigning on a trip to New Hampshire in late May — and his Liberty University commencement address on Saturday was a risky operation, considering the rock-star reception conservative fire breather Ted Cruz received at the Jerry Falwell-founded school when he announced his candidacy there in March. Bush, a midlife convert to Roman Catholicism, used the speech to emphasize that he is a man of deep belief — a key signifier in a party that values faith. But he also sought to differentiate himself from other candidates who more explicitly bring their religious fervor to their politics, namely Huckabee and Cruz, warning against feeding into Democratic arguments that the GOP is turning into a party of religious rigidity. “The mistake is to confuse points of theology with moral principles that are knowable to reason as well as by faith,” Bush said, pointedly refusing to bash the move toward legalizing same-sex marriage that Cruz has embraced as an affront to his faith. “And this confusion is all part of a false narrative that casts religious Americans as intolerant scolds, running around trying to impose their views on everyone.” The timing of the Liberty address also spoke to Bush’s conflict-avoidance strategy. He skipped the crowded, potentially more contentious venue of the South Carolina Freedom Summit in Greenville attended by just about every other candidate in the field except Rand Paul and Chris Christie. The Republican most unconstrained in his willingness to attack Bush declared his intention to run last Wednesday. Huckabee, the roly-poly former Arkansas governor who reportedly made a fortune selling a dubious diabetes cure, is viewed by most of the news media as comic relief (he once quipped that “Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office,” when asked what his savior would say about the death penalty), but he could prove to be a very dangerous foil for a patrician candidate with the last name Bush. No candidate in the race on either side is more comfortable throwing around the populist economic rhetoric than Huckabee, who, despite his $3 million mansion on the Gulf Coast and affection for private jet travel, seems genuinely irked that his party keeps pushing fancy-pants plutocrats to the top, and he appears to relish taking on Bush. The signature rhetorical move of the early 2016 Republican primary is the dual-purpose swipe: a shot at Hillary Clinton that doubles as a Bush diss. (Rubio, lumping Clinton and Bush together, recently declared, “I think the 21st century is going to be better than the 20th century.”) Huckabee’s swipes at Bush are even less thinly veiled than that — and they are aimed directly at Bush’s big-money donor base, in mid-American populist language that could have come from leftist hero Elizabeth Warren — or William Jennings Bryan for that matter. “The Dodd-Frank banking bill was written to punish the banks that supposedly got us in trouble,” he told a small audience in South Carolina on Friday. “They are bigger now than they ever were.” He has a knack for making personal attacks seem folksy and somehow not out of line. Back in 2008, he went on Jay Leno’s show to poke fun at Mitt Romney, who had emerged as a serious challenger to eventual GOP nominee John McCain. “People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them of the guy they work with rather than the guy who laid them off,” Huckabee said, a soundbite studied, amplified and broadcast to much effect by President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign against Romney. Huckabee is already at it again this year, with the unrestrained zeal of a man aiming less for real power than one last folk-hero turn on the national stage. “I don’t come from a family dynasty, but a working family. I grew up blue collar, not blue blood,” he said during his campaign kick-off announcement last week, with special emphasis on the final two words of the sentence. Everyone knew he was talking about Bush. Will it matter? Huckabee’s impressive victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses makes him a force to be reckoned with, but he isn’t doing quite as well in Iowa this time — in part because voters have seen his act before, in part because Cruz is making a harder-edged appeal for evangelicals — he’s currently a middle-of-the-pack 11 percent in recent polls. But Bush is in far worse shape — at 5 percent with disapproval ratings north of 50 percent. Of course, on the map of 2016, New Hampshire looms even larger, just as it did for Romney four years ago, but even this won’t be an easy one for Bush. A WMUR Granite State poll taken earlier this month showed him leading the increasingly packed pack with 15 percent of the vote, but Rubio is a close second at 12 percent. That Bush is increasingly, inevitably, becoming a focal point of 2016 came as welcome news in the utilitarian, poorly air-conditioned warren of re-purposed bank back offices that serves as Hillary Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn. There was a clear feeling, for the first time, among Clinton’s inner circle last week that she won’t be alone on the firing line for long. “The whole dynamic of the race changes when the Republicans start attacking each other, when Jeb gets in,” Tom Nides, a former Clinton State Department aide close to the campaign, told me. Indeed, while Bush-bashing is likely to become a favored new sport among the 20 Republicans clamoring for attention, Clinton’s cardinal advantage as a candidate — the absence of deep intraparty division over her candidacy — might have actually paid real dividends for the first time last week. To the uninitiated in Clinton world, it was a week awash in badish news: Bill Clinton was on NBC during an Africa trip defending his foundation’s multiple mistakes in hyperdefensive, cringe-inducing 1990s legalese (his staff had done nothing “knowingly improper,” he said); Hillary Clinton agreed to testify in public session during House Republican hearings on Benghazi; and she drew her first declared primary opponent, Vermont independent Bernie Sanders. But none of those hits seemed to faze the Clinton people who have begun their slow, steady occupation of the bars and brew pubs of nearby Brooklyn Heights. For the first time in her month-old candidacy, Clinton went on the offensive and pitched something bold: a promise not only to support but also to expand President Barack Obama’s immigration reform executive order, which has offered 5 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. “I would do everything possible under the law to go even further,” Clinton told a predominantly Hispanic audience in Las Vegas on Tuesday, signaling the possibility of halting deportations for parents of “Dreamers,” children whose parents brought them to the U.S. illegally. The national media was still chewing over the implications of the Clinton speech two days later, on Thursday, when Sanders made his formal announcement, which was easily overshadowed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and some other Republicans blasting Clinton’s idea as “amnesty,” Bush and Chris Christie dodging the question, and White House officials griping that Clinton didn’t give Obama enough credit. No doubt, Sanders’ core case against Clinton, that she is just another defender — and major financial beneficiary — of a system that protects the ultrawealthy at the expense of everybody else will have its day when Sanders scores points in a debate or surges in an Iowa poll. “There will be a time this fall, mark my words, when Bernie Sanders or [former Maryland governor and possible Democratic presidential candidate] Martin O’Malley will have his moment,” one senior Clinton aide told me. “But it’s not going to be because we haven’t addressed issues like economic inequality.” How much does Clinton’s left flank need protecting? Not quite as much as last time. Clinton’s people have been aggressively promoting the storyline that she is a looser, more relaxed, more authentic candidate than in 2008, but for now it’s not personality but the absence of a threatening progressive challenger — armed with an issue as damaging as her ‘yes’ vote on the Iraq War — that is allowing Clinton to go on offense. More importantly, the Clinton team believes she won’t have too much trouble debunking the notion she’s not a true liberal: Clinton will take her hits from the Warren-Sanders wing of the party for her associations with Wall Street, they say, but she is completely in step with the broader progressive agenda on jobs, unions, the environment, social issues and especially immigration. Indeed, as Sanders was entering the race, some Clinton surrogates were making the case that the wild-haired Brooklyn native was to the right of Clinton on gun control — helpfully reminding reporters that Sanders, while representing liberal but gun-loving Vermont, has sided with the National Rifle Association on many gun-control measures, including Bill Clinton’s Brady Law. Yet the challenges posed by Huckabee to Bush and by Sanders to Clinton are real, and rooted in a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo, a dissatisfaction that can’t help but be a liability for perhaps the two candidates in modern history most representative of the dynastic political establishment. If they somehow manage to make it to the general election, voters will witness a multibillion-dollar dual-rebranding initiative designed to turn two American royals into commoners. It’s already begun: Hillary’s first political act as a 2016 candidate was visiting a Chipotle, incognito, in her “Scooby Van” to order a chicken burrito bowl. Not to be outdone, Jeb — with, no doubt, the devastating 1992 image of his father standing dumbstruck before a New Hampshire supermarket scanner — insisted upon a public rebuttal. I go to Chipotle, too, Jeb insisted. Then he paused. “Drive my own car. Park my own car. Get out of my own car.” Choices, choices: Republicans ponder crowded field <http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/10/republicans-2016-jeb-bush-scott-waljer/27079325/> // USA Today // David Jackson – May 10, 2015 Republican primary voters face an unusual test in 2016. Multiple choice. The party that usually features well-established favorites in its primary races is now looking at a free-for-all with more than a dozen aspirants, each of whom facing his — and her — own unique test: standing out in a very crowded field. "It feels like anybody can just jump in!" said Kirstin Griffin, 43, a Greenville preschool teacher's aide who listened to some of the candidates at a weekend forum in upstate South Carolina. "I think it's good," she added. "Everyone has to prove themselves." That's what brought Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson, John Bolton, George Pataki, Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump to a weekend "Freedom Summit" in downtown Greenville. It's why Jeb Bush delivered a commencement address at Virginia's Liberty University, the religious school founded by Jerry Falwell. In the coming months, candidates such as Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee — and perhaps Chris Christie, Lindsey Graham and John Kasich, as well — will travel to Pizza Ranches in Iowa, high schools in New Hampshire and barbecue pits in South Carolina. They'll be giving interviews to local media, making online sales pitches, and — for those who can afford it — cutting spots for local radio and television ads. In August, the crowded Republican field will try to draw contrasts in what likely will be the most important encounters: debates. All this activity has a single goal: getting attention from voters in early caucus and primary states. "I am looking for charisma in a candidate," said Dan Herren, 43, an advertising account manager for radio stations in South Carolina. "You have to communicate effectively." Herren and other South Carolina Republicans who watched candidates at the Peace Center for the performing arts said they want a nominee who can forcefully carry the conservative message on issues like immigration, reducing the federal debt and fighting terrorism. They're also looking for someone who can actually win the general election in 2016, probably against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. "Let's face it," Herren said. "Hillary Clinton is a lot like her husband. ... She can communicate very well." Katie Stoddard, 31, a public relations specialist from Greenwood, S.C., said that, right now, the Republican candidates are stuck on "talking points" and giving people "a lot of the same-old-same-old." At some point, she said, the GOP contenders will have to start giving voters more specifics. "Fundraising is going to be big," she added. Also big is the series of Republican Party-sponsored debates expected to begin in August. "That's going to separate the men from the boys, as they say," said Peggy James, 78, a retired retail manager from Mauldin, S.C. Sipping a Pepsi in the lobby the of the Peace Center, James said candidates have to prove to GOP voters they have sufficient "fire in the belly" to make a successful race. "They show it by conviction (voters) can feel," she said. "You can see it." The Republicans will be looking for votes in what may be the most wide-open GOP race in seven decades. In years past, Republicans have tended to bestow presidential nominations on the next one in line. Think Richard Nixon in 1960 (and 1968), or Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988, or Bob Dole in 1996. Even John McCain, after faltering early in the 2008 campaign, rallied in part because of his status as a political veteran. Mitt Romney played the role of heir apparent in the 2012 race. Republicans have also had well-funded "establishment" candidates at the start of races. Early support helped George W. Bush stave off McCain's "maverick" challenge in 2000. Even when the Republicans have competitive races, they tend to be smallish affairs. Dwight Eisenhower overtook conservative stalwart Robert Taft in 1952. Another conservative leader, Barry Goldwater, held off a series of more moderate challengers to claim the GOP nomination in 1964. This time around, "it's no one's turn," said Bruce Haynes, a Republican consultant who hails from South Carolina. "We're shopping in the new car lot," he said. One model is Jeb Bush, the son and brother of Republican presidents, who is likely to be the best-funded candidate. But party members in South Carolina and elsewhere question the former Florida's governor's commitment to conservatism, as well as the prospects of a "third Bush" seeking the presidency. Other candidates are also stressing their gubernatorial experience. This group includes current state executives Walker (Wisconsin), Christie (New Jersey) and Jindal (Louisiana), as well as ex-governors Perry (Texas) and Huckabee (Arkansas). Another sitting governor — John Kasich of Ohio — may also join the GOP fray in the coming weeks. A group of senators is also pursuing the Republican nomination. Rubio of Florida, Cruz of Texas and Paul of Kentucky have formally declared their candidacies, and Graham of South Carolina may soon follow suit. The Republican field also includes non-officeholders who are campaigning against what they call "professional politicians." The outsider group includes businesswoman Carly Fiorina and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Businessman and television personality Donald Trump is again flirting with a Republican presidential bid. As voting time approaches early next year, candidates will begin staking out early states best suited to them. The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary are expected to be in early in February; Nevada and South Carolina figure to hold contests in late February. "You pick your spots," said Republican analyst Rich Galen. Right now, Republican voters are still in the "flavor of the month" stage, said Linda Slaton, 67, a retired speech therapist from Greenville. "They'll weed out," she said. "It's nice to have choices." Jeb Bush says he, Hillary Clinton would have backed Iraq invasion <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/10/exclusive-jeb-bush-says-hillary-clinton-would-have-backed-iraq-invasion/> // Fox News // May 10, 2015 Former Florida GOP Gov. Jeb Bush says that he would have authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq but acknowledges that mistakes were made after Saddam Hussein had been removed from power, in an exclusive interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. “I would have [authorized the invasion], and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got,” Bush told Kelly in a wide-ranging interview that will be aired Monday night. Bush says the United States failed to focus on security first, which he argues led Iraqis to turn on the military because there was no protection for families. However, he challenged the idea that the security issue was a point disagreement between him and his brother, President George W. Bush, who ordered the invasion. “By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush,” Jeb Bush said. “Yes, I mean, so just for the 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.” Bush also talked about his views on immigration reform and whether he could get his ideas through a GOP primary should he decide to run for president. “I mean, there’s got to be a point where we fix this system so that legal immigration is easier than illegal immigration and show some respect for people,” he said. To “a kid that might have been here 10 years, that might be a valedictorian of their high school, to say, 'No, no, no, you’re not allowed to go to college,' I just think there’s a point passed which we’re over the line. “ On the issue of whether he could persuade people in the conservative wing of the party to agree with him, Bush said that he believed he could but that standing by his beliefs at the same time is equally important. “But here’s the deal, Megyn, if I go beyond the consideration of running to be an actual candidate, 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?” Can Rubio or Bush help Republicans finally win Latino vote in 2016? <http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-adv-latinos-presidential-race-20150510-story.html?track=lat-pick> // LAT // Mark Z. Barabak - May 10, 2015 Once an afterthought, Latino voters have moved to the center of the 2016 presidential campaign, the object of early and unprecedented courtship by candidates on both sides. The efforts, both substantive and symbolic, reflect a political map that has changed dramatically with the transformation of states such as Nevada, Colorado and others that are no longer the white, Republican bastions of old. President Obama twice carried Nevada, Colorado, Virginia and Florida, thanks in good part to strong support among their growing Latino populations; in Nevada, the Latino share of the vote has tripled in the last 20 years. All four are once more expected to be among the few competitive states in 2016. Jeb Bush “I know about the immigrant experience because I married a beautiful girl from Mexico. My children are bicultural and bilingual,” Republican Jeb Bush points out. (Alex Wong / Getty Images) A key question is whether the eventual Democratic nominee can cement those gains for elections to come, or Republicans can reverse their dismal performance of the last two presidential contests and, by doing so, expand their narrow path to the White House. Republicans seem to stand their best chance in years of harvesting Latino support with the candidacy of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants; and the expected run by the state's former governor, Jeb Bush, whose wife is Mexican-born and who is fluent in both the Spanish language and Latino culture. Every week seemingly brings a new Bush appearance before Latino voters — a town hall in Puerto Rico, a speech to evangelical leaders in Houston — where he delivers, in English and Spanish, a message unlike any heard from previous Republican presidential hopefuls. First, though, he and Rubio have to navigate their party's nominating process, a course dominated by white conservatives who favor a hard-line approach to immigration reform, the very issue that has driven so many Latinos into the arms of Democrats. "In essence, Hispanic voters tell us our party's position … has become a litmus test, measuring whether we are meeting them with a welcome mat or a closed door," members of a Republican task force wrote in a postmortem after the party's nominee, Mitt Romney, won fewer than 3 in 10 Latino votes in 2012. The most specific policy recommendation in the 97-page autopsy was support for comprehensive immigration reform, which, translated, means going beyond the law enforcement remedies favored by the party's bedrock supporters. Of the top-tier candidates, only Bush and Rubio have embraced that approach. It was hardly coincidental that Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton last week unveiled her immigration policy in Las Vegas or that, in doing so, she checked off much of the wish list of Latino activists, including a path to citizenship for millions of people in the country illegally and more compassionate enforcement of the country's border laws. Nevada enjoys a prominent place on the nominating calendar, now slotted as the third to vote after contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. But more than that, the state mirrors the broad demographic changes that are reshaping politics across the country by the day. In 1994, more than 90% of Nevada voters were white, a number that shrank to 67% in 2012. Over the same period, the Latino share of voters grew from 5% to 15%, a percentage expected to increase further by 2016. (Nationally, Latinos accounted for 10% of the vote in the last presidential race. They are expected to account for nearly half of the growth in the eligible electorate between now and 2030, according to research by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center.) If a Democrat hopes to be president, he or she must not only reassemble Obama's winning coalition, which included Latinos and other minorities, but ensure that those voters turn out in robust numbers. Clinton's immigration proposals seem calculated to do just that, leaving Republicans the unpalatable choice of seconding her views — and alienating their conservative base — or rejecting them and risking further estrangement from Latino voters. Nevada offers an object lesson. Last year, with a virtually uncontested governor's race and little effort by state Democrats to spur turnout, Latino voters stayed home in droves. As a result, Republicans not only swept every statewide constitutional office, they knocked off a supposedly safe Democratic House member here in Las Vegas and seized control of the state Legislature for the first time since the 1920s. "Democrats can't take those voters for granted," said David Damore, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, expert on Latino political participation. "They need to spend money on outreach, get-out-the-vote, Spanish-language advertising. Without them, Democrats don't win." Marco Rubio enters 2016 race touting youth, avoiding messy issues Marco Rubio enters 2016 race touting youth, avoiding messy issues Clinton apparently got the message: Two of her first Nevada hires, campaign director Emmy Ruiz and organizing director Jorge Neri, helped Obama win 70% of the state's Latino vote in 2012. For Republicans, the imperative is less urgent, given their overwhelming support among white male voters. But their nominee can't afford a Romney-style blowout. Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster working for Rubio, believes the party's eventual nominee will need to win more than 40% of the Latino vote to carry the White House, a performance only two Republicans — Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — have approached in the last 35 years. (Obama won 67% of the Latino vote in 2008 and 71% in 2012.) This time Bush's brother, Jeb, has been most conspicuous in his courtship of Latino support. "We're an immigrant nation and we should be proud," he recently told supporters during a stop in Puerto Rico. "I know about the immigrant experience because I married a beautiful girl from Mexico. My children are bicultural and bilingual." Rubio, of course, needn't reach to make that cultural connection. If anything, he seems to downplay his Latino heritage as he appeals to white conservative audiences. But implicit in his very candidacy is the chance for Republicans to make history by nominating their first-ever minority standard-bearer, who, as a youthful Latino, reflects the demographic wave inexorably remaking the country, state by state. For decades, Latinos were characterized — patronized, some said — as a slumbering giant: large in number, potentially powerful but largely apathetic and politically impotent. No more. Now voters such as Santos Garcia have become highly sought-after. "They're going to want our support," said Garcia, a 59-year-old kitchen worker at Harrah's casino on the Las Vegas Strip. "Without the Spanish vote they know they can't win. So they're going to come look for us." Why Carly Fiorina was fired, according to Carly Fiorina <http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/why-carly-fiorina-was-fired-according-carly-fiorina> // MSNBC // Anna Brand - May 10, 2015 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina on Sunday once again defended her tenure — and firing — as the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, saying that “it is a leader’s job to challenge the status quo, and when you do, you make enemies.” Fiorina during an interview on “Meet the Press” pointed to the rocky recession that led to layoffs at the technology company. When pressed by host Chuck Todd, who flat out asked “So, why were you fired?” Fiorina responded as she has before, even using identical phrasing. “Well, they did fire me. I’ve been very open about that. I was fired in a boardroom brawl,” Fiorina said. “We had board members who were leaking information out of the boardroom.” On why the stock at HP, on the day she was fired, went up nearly 7%, Fiorina fired back, “the stock has gone down during my tenure, as did every other single technology company.” Related: Fiorina on CarlyFiorina.org: ‘You can’t buy every domain name’ After Fiorina officially declared her candidacy for president in 2016 last Monday, the URL carlyfiorina.org illustrated via endless sad-faced emojis the number of people laid off at HP. “Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain. So I’m using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard. It was this many,” the site read, followed by 30,000 unhappy faces. “What people fail to comment on is the fact that we doubled the size of the company,” Fiorina hit back on Sunday. For the past six days, Fiorina has been all over the media largely attempting to set her record straight at HP, gain much-needed face recognition, and criticize Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In her announcement video, Fiorina showed a clip of Clinton before even showing herself. It was a move that let her essential role in the election be known as the anti-Hillary. Earlier this weekend, Fiorina spoke at the South Carolina Freedom Summit — alongside other Republican presidential hopefuls — to again pit herself against Clinton. “Like Hillary Clinton, I too am running for president of the United States. But unlike Hillary Clinton, I’m not afraid to answer questions about my track record or my accomplishments or my principles,” Fiorina said, adding that Clinton doesn’t have a “record of accomplishment.” On Sunday, Florina reiterated this sentiment. “I understand the executive decision making, which is making a tough call in a tough time, for which you are prepared to be held accountable,” she told Chuck Todd. “Something that at least Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a track record of.” Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson May Play Key Roles in Republican Race <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/us/politics/mike-huckabee-carly-fiorina-and-ben-carson-may-play-key-roles-in-republican-race.html> // NYT // Al Hunt - May 10, 2015 WASHINGTON — None of the three candidates who joined the Republican presidential contest last week — Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson — will win the nomination. That’s the view of politically smart strategists who nevertheless say that all three, especially Mr. Huckabee, could play important roles in shaping the race. First, here’s why these latest entries are unlikely to prevail. The Republican coalition has three pillars, all relatively conservative: economic, national security and social issues. A candidate has to be acceptable to at least two of the three. At this stage, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and perhaps Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky make the grade. Mr. Huckabee — the populist Baptist preacher, former Arkansas governor and talk-show host — doesn’t. He is adored by the social right, hated by economic conservatives and isn’t respected by many national security hawks. Moreover, there’s skepticism about his ability to raise the funds to go the distance. In 2008, after winning the initial Iowa caucuses, he lacked the resources to compete through the nominating process. There’s a general sense that 2012 was his time. He passed. Mr. Carson, a prominent physician, and Ms. Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, are political novices, neither has ever been elected to office. The supposed appeal of nonpoliticians in America is superficial. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll released last week, almost 70 percent said they would be uncomfortable with a presidential candidate who lacks previous experience in government. Mr. Carson and Ms. Fiorina, both cancer survivors, have appealing narratives. Mr. Carson’s résumé is more impressive: He is one of the world’s most renowned pediatric neurosurgeons. (He once operated on our son.) Ms. Fiorina was fired as C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard and generally gets negative reviews for her performance. The possible import of Mr. Carson, who espouses a hard-right line and has attracted a following in places such as Iowa, is that movement conservatives account for half of the vote in several early contests. Governor Walker and Senator Rubio could get a small slice of those votes, as will Senator Paul, whose basic appeal is to libertarians. More than 40 percent of the vote is likely to go to a movement right aspirant. In 2012, the Iowa caucus was won with 24 percent of the vote, in a smaller and less capable field. The difference between Mr. Carson getting 5 percent and 10 percent may well decide if one of the movement right candidates tops 20 percent, which could be first place. The top two right-wing candidates are Mr. Huckabee and Senator Cruz. A no-holds-barred debate between these tough customers, similar in ideology, vastly different in style, would be worthy of Las Vegas. Senator Cruz, a brilliant lawyer and champion debater, would assail Mr. Huckabee as a tax-increasing governor who commuted the sentences of hardened criminals, including one who went on to commit murder. Continue reading the main story The folksy and fiery Mr. Huckabee could attack the Texas senator for supporting President Obama on free trade and for his ties to Wall Street and the Republican donor class. Ms. Fiorina’s corporate background is probably better preparation for politics than brain surgery. She’s unlikely to make embarrassing gaffes like Mr. Carson’s recent charge, which he later retracted, that people enter prison as heterosexuals and leave gay. Elements of the Republican establishment welcome Ms. Fiorina’s candidacy. She’s the only woman, and the party has a gender problem. She’s a willing attack dog against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Yet if she ever does better than the point or two that she scores in current polls, it would likely be at the expense of an establishment type such as Mr. Bush. In the most wide open Republican race in the past half-century, there are no certainties, and maybe even no likelihoods. A year from now it’s improbable that we’ll look back on the events of the past week as seminal, but they may affect how the race looks then. Paul Tells Tech-Heavy Crowd He's Against NSA Data Collection <http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/10/paul_tells_tech-heavy_crowd_hes_against_nsa_data_collection_126549.html> // AP // Ellen Kickmeyer - May 10, 2015 SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul sparked applause from a tech-heavy audience Saturday when he criticized the government's bulk collection of data but drew a more tepid response for his opposition to so-called net neutrality. Appearing at a tech start-up office space in the South of Mission district, Paul reiterated his stance against the National Security Agency collecting and storing data on nearly every American's phone calls. The practice, aimed at preventing terrorism, has divided Republican presidential candidates. Tech entrepreneurs, typically zealous in guarding their online privacy, welcomed Paul's pledge to rein in U.S. intelligence agencies' broad data captures of phone calls and Internet use. "The NSA doesn't need to be recording all of our phone calls," said Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky. He added, "There's not one other candidate ... willing to say, 'On Day One, I'd stop it all. I'd end all bulk collection of records.'" Congress is debating the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, which is set to expire on June 1. Supporters of the surveillance law, including presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., say it's critical to anti-terrorism efforts. Paul and fellow Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, see the law as a privacy infringement. Net neutrality opposes an Internet fast lane, with speedier connections at higher prices, for those who can afford to pay more. Paul, however, argued that market forces demand that if wealthier people are willing to pay more, they get the chance. He also asserted that mandated same-speed Internet for all is a market distortion akin to subsidized bread in the Soviet Union. When a moderator of a panel said Paul's proposal to let graduates deduct their college costs on their taxes over their lifetime would only benefit the wealthy, Paul responded, "Poor kids go to Harvard, too." Paul's appearance in a liberal bastion of a liberal state is part of his effort to expand the traditional boundaries of support for a Republican presidential campaign. "Some people want to know what the hell is a Republican doing in San Francisco," he said. "I would say, it's about time." Ben Carson outlines flat-tax proposal <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/ben-carson-outlines-flat-tax-proposal-117785.html> // POLITICO // Eliza Collins - May 10, 2015 Low-income taxpayers can — and want — to pay taxes, Ben Carson said on Sunday. The retired neurosurgeon who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, said on “Fox News Sunday” he had adopted a flat-tax proposal from tithing in the Bible, citing a 10 percent rate as an example. It’s “very condescending,” he said, to say that poor people can’t pay at the same tax rate as the wealthy. “I can tell you that poor people have pride too,” said Carson, who grew up in a low-income family in inner-city Detroit. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md., Friday, Feb. 27, 2015. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) Carson rejected host Chris Wallace’s information from the Tax Policy Center that in order for the government to raise as much money as it does now the flat tax rate would have to higher than 20 percent. “If you eliminate the loopholes and the deductions, then you’re really talking about a rate between 10 and 15 percent,” Carson said his experts’ research has shown. “Let’s have a battle of the experts.” A flat tax would help the government run like a business rather than the “great inefficient behemouth that we have now,” he said. “If everybody is paying, it makes it very difficult for these politicians to come along and raise taxes” Carson said of his proposal for a new streamlined, flat-tax system. In South Carolina, a Republican Scramble to Stand Out <http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/10/in_south_carolina_a_republican_scramble_to_stand_out_126548.html> // AP // Bill Barrow and Mitch Weiss - May 10, 2015 GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) -- Republicans making their pitch to be the party's 2016 presidential nominee aimed to out-do each other Saturday in arguing that President Barack Obama is a failed leader. But hitting Obama with the usual critiques - from his 2010 health care overhaul to allegations of missteps on foreign policy to the rise in the national debt during his time in office - also made it hard for the gaggle of White House aspirants to stand out during a forum in South Carolina hosted by the conservative group Citizens United. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker tried by touting his ability to beat whomever is nominated by the Democratic Party, reminding activists that he won three statewide elections in four years in a state twice carried by Obama. "The last time a Republican carried the state for president was 1984," he said. "That's a tough state." He even took the crowd back to his decision to run for county executive in heavily Democratic Milwaukee County. "Never ever had there been a Republican in that spot before," he said. Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, continued her tactic of going straight at Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic favorite for 2016. "She is not trustworthy, and she does not have a record of accomplishment," Fiorina said. In an interview before his turn on stage, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal pointed to his work on policy, saying he's the only potential candidate in the field who has "spent the last 18 months coming up with detailed ideas on health care, on foreign policy, on energy." Once on stage, Jindal spent considerable time touting his credentials as a social conservative, including his pushback against criticism from some in the business community over "religious liberty" laws that have become a flashpoint in the national debate over same-sex marriage. "Don't even waste your breath trying to bully the governor of Louisiana," Jindal said, repeating what he said was his message to corporate leaders. Rick Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2012 before fizzling out against eventual nominee Mitt Romney, warned that Republicans eager to retake the White House after Obama's two terms in office must stay focused on reaching working-class voters. "We have to be a pro-worker party," he said. "We have to be the party for a rising tide lifting all boats. There are millions and millions of Americans who have holes in those boats." Florida Sen. Marco Rubio took a hard line on foreign policy, saying the nation must get tougher with terrorists. Adapting a line from the movie "Taken," he said: "We will look for you. We will find you. And we will kill you." Texas Sen. Ted Cruz trumpeted his unapologetic approach on Capitol Hill, where he helped engineer a partial government shutdown in 2013. And he told activists that they should compare his style with his rivals, all of whom insist they are conservative. "Have you had anyone up here today say, 'I'm an establishment moderate who stands for nothing?'" he said. "So how do you tell the difference? The scriptures tell us, 'You shall know them by their fruits." That means, he said, asking candidates, "You say you believe these principles. When have you fought for them?" Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry let loose a series of broadsides at Obama and his policies, drawing cheers from the crowd for a withering critique that covered immigration, the Affordable Care Act, the Islamic State militant group and the federal budget. His bottom line: "We've seen gross incompetence. We're here to declare that we're not going to take it anymore." Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who, like Fiorina, announced his candidacy earlier this week, is running as the outsider. "I'm not a politician," he said. "That's what sets me apart." Those not in South Carolina on Saturday included former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who delivered the commencement address at Liberty University in Virginia; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who was campaigning in northern California; and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who was in South Carolina on Friday. Citizens United President David Bossie dismissed the idea that the large number of GOP candidates muddled their messages and called the wide field an advantage. "These men and women all believe in American exceptionalism," Bossie said. He added that along with criticizing Obama, Republicans should focus their ire on Clinton - a point on which many in the crowd agreed. "Any one of them would be better than the disaster we've got now," said Gary Gunderson of Abbeville, South Carolina. His wife, Margaret, chimed in: "Or Hillary." OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS Hillary Clinton Uses Mother's Day To Talk About Paid Family Leave <http://jezebel.com/hillary-clinton-uses-mothers-day-to-talk-about-paid-fam-1703456690> // Jezebel // Stassa Edwardsd – May 10, 2015 Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign video is a Mother’s Day themed affair. In it Clinton pays homage to her own mother, celebrates the birth of her granddaughter, and shifts into the issue of paid family leave. “It’s outrageous that America is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t guarantee paid leave,” Clinton says. It’s a typical campaign video in many respects, she plays on the old cliché of politicians kissing babies. And the language is also familiar political-speak: “When women are strong, families are strong,” Clinton says in a voice over. While some (ahem, Maureen Dowd) have criticized Clinton for using both her daughter and granddaughter to cynically “soften” her image, the campaign video is an interesting study in a relatively new type of political populism and, however faux it may be, it’s nice at least to see that reframed around issues that are deeply important to many American women. Whether or not you love Clinton or hate her (or feel deeply ambivalent about her), her candidacy seems to be rooted in pushing so-called “women’s issues” to the forefront. And maybe I’m soft because it’s Mother’s Day and I’m typing this post with one hand and a two-year-old on my knee, but if the only way we can talk about issues like paid leave or equal pay is with familiar clichés and sappy music, then I’ll take it for now. How Hillary Is Winning <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-how-hillary-is-winning.html?ref=opinion> // NYT // Frank Bruni - May 9, 2015 As fleetly as Hillary Clinton vacuums up the money, she piles up the paradoxes. She showed fatal weaknesses the last time she chased the presidency and her inevitability evaporated like a California puddle, but she’s somehow inevitable all over again. Invincible, even. Journalists have to remind themselves daily not to type or say “presumptive Democratic nominee” before her name. She’s fashioning herself as someone uniquely attuned to “everyday Americans” while her husband fashions $500,000 speeches as amulets against the bill collector. Someone’s got to pay for the burrito bowls. And her Republican rivals convince themselves that “I’m not Hillary” is their strongest argument and best bet, although the reverse holds true. At least for now, not being any one of them is her ace in the hole. The 2016 race in its adolescence is between the dependably messy, perpetually maddening spectacle of the Clintons and a party with a brand-decimating profusion of mad hatters like the two who announced their bids and grabbed the spotlight last week, Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson. Advantage: Hillary Clinton. That’s a clear takeaway from several surveys of voters released last week. They showed that despite her email shenanigans, despite the ethical muddle known as the Clinton Foundation, despite the growing confusion about whether the Hillary Clinton of 2016 will be of an ideological piece with the Hillary Clintons of yesteryear, voters will gladly take her, considering the alternatives. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, she was six points ahead of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in head-to-head contests with either. She was 10 points ahead of Scott Walker. Inexplicably and rather alarmingly, she was only three ahead of Rand Paul. The mysteries of the American electorate are boundless. Meanwhile a New York Times/CBS News poll found that over the past month and a half, during which she weathered a veritable hurricane of negative news coverage, her favorability rating improved, and the percentage of voters who see her as a strong leader rose to 65 from 57. Nearly 80 percent of the Democrats surveyed deemed her honest and trustworthy. Hillary Rodham Clinton at Columbia University in New York last week.Hillary Clinton’s Appeal Survives Scrutiny, Poll SaysMAY 5, 2015 There are many explanations. For starters, the hurricane I mentioned was experienced as a drizzle, if that, by many Americans, who aren’t exactly riveted by political news. Inasmuch as they notice journalists pouncing on the Clintons, they’re apt to shrug. The substance of the accusations is eclipsed by the familiarity of the tussle. It’s like lions on an impala: bloody, yes, but the natural order. And the Clintons are being accused of what? Greed? There’s plenty of that to go around. Just ask Huckabee, a self-styled man of God and slave to Mammon. As recounted by Trip Gabriel in The Times, Ron Fournier in the National Journal and Max Brantley in Salon, he’s a case study in financial high jinks, a master class in shamelessness. He reportedly used the Arkansas governor’s office “as a personal ATM,” in Fournier’s description, channeling public money toward private expenditures (a doghouse, Taco Bell) and accepting tens of thousands of dollars in highly questionable gifts, some from people who later received prominent political appointments. More recently he did an infomercial hawking dietary supplements as a diabetes cure, even though reputable physicians and medical associations call it poppycock. Only three of the following four adjectives correctly describe that decision: tacky, mercenary, irresponsible and presidential. Clinton benefits from not being Huckabee, who described Obamacare’s contraception provision as a big-government sop to women who can’t “control their libido,” blamed an absence of God in schools for the deadly shooting rampage in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 and then proceeded to write a book with a title that put firearms on a comforting par with breakfast food. Run, don’t walk, to pick up your copy of “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.” Clinton also benefits mightily from not being Carson, who has lumped together homosexuality and bestiality and has likened Obamacare to slavery, President Obama to a psychopath and the United States under President Obama to Nazi Germany. It is said that Carson is a talented brain surgeon. I’m taking my cerebellum elsewhere if it ever comes to that. And Clinton benefits as well from not being Carly Fiorina, who also declared a candidacy for the presidency last week. When Americans look askance at professional politicians, it doesn’t mean that they long for the polar opposite and are poised to award the presidency to someone who, in Fiorina’s case, has never held elected office, routinely failed to vote in the past, bungled her role as a surrogate for John McCain in 2008, had a miserable showing in her 2010 race for the United States Senate against Barbara Boxer, and claims a business expertise that’s long been in vigorous dispute. Her campaign will be powered by hubris, not logic. REPUBLICANS crow about their deep bench. And they do have some formidable candidates, including Marco Rubio, who is an anti-Hillary in ways that could indeed work for him, and Jeb Bush. But Rubio and Bush share the bench with an unruly crowd that pulls them and the party too far to the right. Republicans also take heart from their majority in the Senate and their greater number of governors. But voters behave somewhat differently in presidential elections than in other ones, which is one reason Wisconsin has remained blue even during Walker’s red reign. The party’s image hasn’t gone through the intended upgrade after its defeat in 2012. According to the Times/CBS poll, just 29 percent of Americans now view Republicans favorably, though 43 percent feel that way about Democrats. That number is unlikely to improve much with the likes of Huckabee, Carson, Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum roaming Iowa and foaming at the mouth. Besides, these two words come into play: Supreme Court. I know voters who’d give more consideration to Rubio, Bush, Chris Christie or John Kasich if they didn’t fear the kind of jurist one of them might nominate at the behest of the religious right. And the next president could easily wind up filling two vacancies on the high court. That thought is the soil in which love for Hillary Clinton flowers. It’s a prompt for people who otherwise suffer bone-wearying Clinton fatigue to focus on her unquestioned smarts over her questionable scruples, her experience over her i.o.u.s, her sturdiness over her slipperiness. There’s a case to be made for her, and there’s motivation to make that case. In another recent poll, by CNBC, she was the preferred candidate of voters with a net worth of $1 million or more. Apparently they, too, have made peace with her. Or maybe they just recognize a kindred spirit. Clinton: Direct Evidence vs. Facts <http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-direct-evidence-vs-facts-1431288821> // WSJ // Mike Carroll – May 10, 2015 May 10, 2015 4:13 p.m. ET Regarding Kimberley Strassel’s “The Clinton Scandal Manual” (Potomac Watch, April 24): I’m a former judge. Let me pose this hypothetical: I am soon to hear a big case involving various parties. One of the parties offers a lucrative fee to my spouse for a speech, or they donate a large amount of money to my beloved charitable foundation. If I go ahead and hear the case, and people later complain I was compromised and violated my fiduciary duty to the public, could I simply reply, as almost every Hillary Clinton defender has done, “there’s just no evidence.” Of course, there are almost always no “direct evidence facts” because there is no overt quid pro quo. It’s a covert wink-and-nod sort of thing where there’s plausible deniability (you know, “there’s just no evidence”). Many people are in prison today based on circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence—being indirect facts that tend to inferentially prove other vital facts—is legal evidence. Clinton apologists are purposely trying to equate “evidence” with only direct evidence. It is such an inherently corrupt practice and betrayal of one’s fiduciary duty to receive any benefit of any value to any family member from a subject your principal has entrusted you to administer, that if a judge does it, he or she will be removed. The rules are clear. They recognize that the obvious corruption that flows from such obvious influence peddling is a violation of the canon of ethics. The judicial ethics board doesn’t need any “evidence” showing that you actually were swayed by the benefit conferred. No. The mere receipt is sufficient for removal from office. “There’s just no evidence” doesn’t cut it as a defense. Mike Carroll Tuscola, Ill. George Clooney gushes over Hillary Clinton and his new life with Amal <http://www.womansday.com.au/celebrity/hollywood-stars/george-clooney-gushes-over-hillary-clinton-and-his-new-life-with-amal-12522> // Woman’s Day - May 11, 2015 Outspoken Democrat George Clooney has thrown his support behind the US party’s new Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton as he continues to gush about his new bride Amal and how she changed his outlook on life. “I think that she’s a tremendous candidate,” George said of the new Democratic Presidential nominee in an interview with Fusion TV. He continued: “I know her and I think the world of her and I think that I would be very happy if she was president” When he was asked if he could consider campaigning on Hillary’s behalf, George said: “Sure, whatever she wants. In whatever way I can help.” George, 54, was quite a vocal supporter of the last Democratic candidate and current President, Barack Obama, hosting a fundraiser for him in 2012 that brought in over $15 million. With Hillary’s campaign advisors having set an initial fundraising target of $100 million, an endorsement from the charming movie star could prove quite a boon to the party. George’s endorsement for Hillary comes just days after a hugely positive endorsement of his new wife, Amal, 37, whom he sheepishly admitted he was intimidated by as he first asked her out, in an interview with Access Hollywood. "It's always intimidating. She's an incredibly warm, wonderful person so it's always intimidating. I think everyone gets intimidated," George said of the pressure involved when asking the stunning Human Rights lawyer out. It reportedly didn’t take long for Tomorrowland star George to realise that the stunning British beauty with the impressive C.V. was in fact “the one”. "I think it was about three days in, I knew she was the one," George said. "I knew when I met her that she was super­­-extraordinary. I wondered if I would ever get a chance to date her. We were friends for a while and luckily she said, 'yes'." Like any couple though, George admits that they don’t see eye to eye on everything. "I watch sports, and it kills her," George said in an interview with Extra. "I got her into March Madness a little, I'm a huge Kentucky fan, so she got into that, but it was enough." Amal, who tied the knot with George in a lavish ceremony in Venice last year, attended the premiere of the dashing star’s latest flick Tomorrowland in Hollywood over the weekend. The pair played happy families with her 13-year-old lookalike niece Mia Alamuddin in tow. Amal of course looked as glamorous as ever. George gushed about his wife even further at the premiere, going as far as to say Amal “changed everything” about his world view. “All I know is that it sort of changed everything in terms of what I thought my future – my personal future – was going to be,” he told People magazine at the event. “But I’ve always been an optimist about the world,” the actor, 54, continued. “I wasn’t always completely optimistic about how it was going to work out personally for me. But now I am.” In Britain, an electoral earthquake shatters pre-election assumptions <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-britain-an-electoral-earthquake-shatters-pre-election-assumptions/2015/05/09/12506bd2-f632-11e4-bcc4-e8141e5eb0c9_story.html> // WaPo // Dan Balz - May 10, 2015 LONDON — It was both energizing and bracing to watch the election returns roll in here Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday — energizing because the unfolding story bore little resemblance to the polls and forecasts; bracing for the very same reason and for what that said about all the pre-election analysis. Public polls — and they were many and often — predicted a wholly different result. What the country was told to expect was the second hung Parliament in a row, and the prospect of tortuous negotiations and maneuvering to construct a new government. Dan Balz is Chief Correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s National Editor, Political Editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent. View Archive Instead, the Conservative Party under Prime Minister David Cameron produced a stunning victory, giving his party its first outright majority since the Tories yielded power to Tony Blair’s New Labor Party in 1997. Cameron didn’t call it the “sweetest victory” of all for him and the Conservatives for no reason. Rather than falling back in strength after five years in power as the head of a coalition government as might be expected, Cameron was able to enlarge his party’s numbers, to 331 seats in the 650-seat Parliament. Cameron emerged politically and personally strengthened, if nonetheless left to deal with the huge challenges the election so aptly defined and highlighted, from the place of Scotland in what could be an increasingly divided United Kingdom, to Britain’s future place in the European Union and the world. With a slender majority and a potentially rebellious back bench, his leadership could be constantly tested as he tries to sort these out. In contrast to the Conservatives, the Labor Party was left shattered by the final results, with a 99-seat deficit in Parliament, its traditional stronghold in Scotland in the grip of the Scottish National Party and its top two leaders now on the sidelines. TOP NEWS Domestic Jimmy Carter falls ill in Guyana, returns to U.S. early <http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-jimmy-carter-ill-in-guyana-20150510-story.html> // LAT // Kurtis Lee - May 10, 2015 Former President Jimmy Carter returned to the United States from Guyana on Sunday after becoming ill. A statement released by Carter's nonprofit foundation, the Carter Center, did not offer much about the 39th president's condition. It said he "was not feeling well" and needed to return to Atlanta. Carter, 90, was in the South American country to observe its general election, which is scheduled for Monday. For the most part, Carter has remained in good health recently, and he has been active in traveling. Earlier this month, he visited the Middle East. Former President George H.W. Bush, the oldest living president, has had several hospital visits in recent years. In December, Bush, also 90, spent nearly a week in a Houston-area hospital after experiencing shortness of breath. Carter's visit to Guyana was part of an ongoing effort by the Carter Center to observe peaceful elections around the world. "President Carter is hopeful about Guyana's election and expressed his commitment and that of the Carter Center to supporting Guyana in the days ahead, stressing the need for a peaceful process before, during and after the election," the center said. Networks Fret as Ad Dollars Flow to Digital Media <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/business/media/networks-fret-as-ad-dollars-flow-to-digital-media.html?google_editors_picks=true> // NYT // Emily Steel and Sydney Ember - May 10, 2015 Beginning Monday, television networks will roll out the red carpet for marketers during the annual bazaar known as the upfronts, trying to lure them into committing tens of billions of ad dollars for the coming TV season. If things go well, the networks will sell as much as 75 percent of their advertising time in the negotiations that follow a week of flashy presentations and star-studded parties. But behind that lavish veneer, the mood at some television networks is nervous and the sales pitch urgent. That is because broadcast and cable companies are asking marketers to open their wallets at a time of great anxiety in the industry, when TV ratings have collapsed and networks are fending off fierce competition from digital outlets. Television viewing has plummeted 9 percent so far this season compared with the previous season, according to MoffettNathanson Research. To explain the drop, some industry executives and analysts point to the rapid increase in the amount of time people spend watching Netflix and other streaming alternatives. Netflix viewing accounted for about 43 percent of the decline in traditional TV viewing in the first quarter of this year, according to MoffettNathanson. In the past, a decline in ratings did not always damage the networks during the upfronts. As audiences fragmented, conventional television remained the best approach for reaching huge numbers of viewers. Even as digital media grew, advertisers kept pouring more money into TV. They dipped into their print advertising budgets to fuel spending on digital ads. But now even traditional television is splintering, especially as the major broadcast networks make their programming available for streaming. With the number of digital alternatives growing quickly, and with marketers seeking greater flexibility in how they allocate their spending, the industry is bracing for what many expect to be an anemic upfront market. That would follow a soft market last year, which was one of the weakest the industry has seen, said Michael Nathanson, an analyst for MoffettNathanson. “The story around the ratings decline has been a persistent drumbeat that’s reached a fever pitch this year, to the point where marketers are thinking, ‘We need to seriously think about alternatives,’ ” said Amanda Richman, president for investment and activation at Starcom USA, a Publicis Groupe-owned media buying agency whose clients include large advertisers like Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods and Procter & Gamble. “It feels like this is a pivotal year,” she said. The total amount of money advertisers commit during the upfronts this year is expected to tumble 7 percent, according to Magna Global, an ad-buying group owned by the Interpublic Group. That represents a 10 percent drop in spending committed to broadcast networks and a 5 percent drop for cable networks. John Janedis, a media analyst at Jefferies, is predicting total ad spending commitments to drop about 6 percent, to about $20 billion, with ad rates flat or up 3 percent. “Clearly, we’re going through a transition here,” Chase Carey, chief operating officer of 21st Century Fox, said during an earnings call last week. “Advertisers, without a doubt, have more choices. They want more flexibility in some ways. You could say the upfront we’re about to go into, while important, is probably a bit of an antiquated practice, given where the world is heading.” For the advertising world, that direction is toward digital, and more of that money is likely to come from the share that has gone to the networks. While some streaming services like Netflix do not accept advertising, marketers are increasingly seeking out other new digital outlets that do, like Snapchat, Vine and YouTube, where viewers — especially younger ones — are spending an increasing amount of time. “We’re at the tipping point now where the very role of TV in our mix is under consideration,” said Ivan Pollard, a top marketing executive at Coca-Cola North America. “Ten years ago, they held a much stronger hand than they hold today, but they all know that. They’re talking differently to us.” Magna Global predicts that total TV ad revenues will be flat over the whole year, even as spending on digital media increases 19.1 percent. The group forecasts that digital media ad revenues will match television ad revenues by the end of 2016, each accounting for about $67.5 billion in spending and about 38 percent of the total ad market. “There’s no question that we’re seeing a new advertising reality here, because money definitely has migrated out of traditional media into new media,” Robert A. Iger, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, said during an earnings call last week. He added that he expected his company’s networks, which include ABC, ESPN and the Disney Channel, to fare “just fine” during the upfronts. To compete, television networks are featuring a host of their own digital offerings during this year’s upfronts, along with more data and targeting capabilities, qualities that are extremely important to marketers as they seek to increase the effectiveness of their ads. Executives are also highlighting television’s ability to reach broad audiences, and big events, like sports and awards shows, also dominate. Rivalries among TV networks are becoming ever more cutthroat as they compete for their share of the ad-spending pie. That puts even more pressure on the networks to produce attention-grabbing hits. “There are certain networks that have done very well this year, certain networks that haven’t done so well,” Leslie R. Moonves, chief executive of CBS, said during an earnings call last week. “I’m not going to go into great detail, but you could figure that out yourselves. So we are up, and we expect it to be a good marketplace.” Some analysts warn against predicting TV’s demise just yet. “It is less impactful than it was, but it so dwarfs everything else,” said Brian Wieser, a media analyst with Pivotal Research. “We’re getting closer to the point when the world changes. We just haven’t seen it yet.” Nuclear plant to clean up oil spill in Hudson River <https://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn&ei=I95PVdLILYS2sAX71YGwBg&ved=0CAUQqS4oBQ> // USA Today // Matt Spillane - May 10, 2015 BUCHANAN, N.Y. – The owners of the Indian Point nuclear power plant plan to clean up what may be several thousand gallons of oil that spilled into the Hudson River following a transformer fire that shut down part of the plant, a federal official said Sunday. Gov. Andrew Cuomo was scheduled to discuss the cleanup at a news conference Sunday at the plant, which is located across the Hudson River from Stony Point in Rockland County. The fire, which began at 5:50 p.m. Saturday, sent smoke billowing into the air and oil overflowing the plant's moat, said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The plant's fire suppression system automatically sprayed water on the transformer fire," Sheehan said. "Oil made its way into the drains and into the water. Several thousand gallons may have overflowed the transformer moat." Sheehan said Entergy Corp. is hiring an environmental contractor for the clean up. A strong odor of oil could be smelled Sunday across from the plant. The fire didn't cause the release of any radiation and didn't pose a threat to workers or the public, according to a statement on Entergy Corp's website. The fire was first declared out at about 6:15 p.m. Saturday, but flames rekindled at 6:37 p.m., Sheehan said. Firefighters from Verplanck and Buchanan entered the plant and used foam to put out the blaze, which was extinguished by 8:05 p.m. Transformer fire shuts down N.Y. nuclear power plant Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors went to the plant Saturday night and will be reviewing what caused the transformer fire. Sheehan said the initial inspection found the plant's procedures and fire-suppression system worked. Indian Point classified the explosion and fire as an "unusual event," the lowest of four levels of emergency classification used by the regulatory agency, Sheehan said. He said the explosion and fire was considered "unusual" because it occurred within the plant's fenced in protected area. The transformers are used to step up power produced by the plant before it is transmitted to the grid, Sheehan said. The facility opened in September 1962. On Saturday evening, Cuomo said officials and commercial crews — supervised by the state Department of Conservation — were working to prevent oil from seeping into the Hudson River. "This was a relatively minor situation, but when you're talking about a nuclear power plant there are no really minor situations," Cuomo said Saturday night, calling the plant "controversial" because it is "a stone's throw from one of the most densely populated urban areas on the planet." International Saudi Arabia Says King Won’t Attend Meetings in U.S. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-king-wont-attend-camp-david-meeting.html?_r=0> // NYT // Helene Cooper - May 10, 2015 WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia announced on Sunday that its new monarch, King Salman, would not be attending meetings at the White House with President Obama or a summit gathering at Camp David this week, in an apparent signal of its continued displeasure with the administration over United States relations with Iran, its rising regional adversary. As recently as Friday, the White House said that King Salman would be coming to “resume consultations on a wide range of regional and bilateral issues,” according to Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman. But on Sunday, the state-run Saudi Press Agency said that the king would instead send Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi interior minister, and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the defense minister. The agency said the summit meeting would overlap with a five-day cease-fire in Yemen that is scheduled to start on Tuesday to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid. Arab officials said they viewed the king’s failure to attend the meeting as a sign of disappointment with what the White House was willing to offer as reassurance that the United States would back its Arab allies against a rising Iran. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi interior minister. King Salman is expected to call President Obama on Monday to talk about his decision not to attend the summit meeting, a senior administration official said on Sunday. The official said that when the king met Secretary of State John Kerry in Riyadh last week, he indicated that he was looking forward to coming to the meeting. But on Friday night, after the White House put out a statement saying Mr. Obama would be meeting with King Salman in Washington next week, administration officials received a call from the Saudi foreign minister that the king would not be coming after all. There was “no expression of disappointment” from the Saudis, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “If one wants to snub you, they let you know it in different ways,” the official said. Another senior administration official said the White House did not believe that King Salman’s absence was because of any disagreement. Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said King Salman’s absence was both a blessing and a snub. “It holds within it a hidden opportunity, because senior U.S. officials will have an unusual opportunity to take the measure of Mohammed bin Salman, the very young Saudi defense minister and deputy crown prince, with whom few have any experience.” But, Mr. Alterman added: “For the White House though, it sends an unmistakable signal when a close partner essentially says he has better things to do than go to Camp David with the president, just a few days after the White House announced he’d have a private meeting before everything got underway.” Mr. Kerry met on Friday in Paris with his counterparts from the Arab nations that were invited to the summit meeting — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman — to discuss what they were expecting from the summit meeting, and to signal what the United States was prepared to offer at Camp David. But administration officials said that the Arab officials had pressed for a defense treaty with the United States pledging to defend them if they came under external attack. But that was always going to be difficult, as such treaties — similar to what the United States has with Japan — must be ratified by Congress. Instead Mr. Obama is prepared to offer a presidential statement, one administration official said, which is not as binding and which future presidents may not have to honor. The Arab nations are also angry, officials and experts said, about comments Mr. Obama recently made in an interview with The New York Times, in which he said allies like Saudi Arabia should be worried about internal threats — “populations that, in some cases, are alienated, youth that are underemployed, an ideology that is destructive and nihilistic, and in some cases, just a belief that there are no legitimate political outlets for grievances.” At a time when American officials were supposed to be reassuring those same countries that the United States would support them, the comments were viewed by officials in the gulf as poorly timed, foreign policy experts said. In addition, the Arab countries would like to buy more weapons from the United States, but that also faces a big obstacle — maintaining Israel’s military edge. The United States has long put restrictions on the types of weapons that American defense firms can sell to Arab nations, in an effort to ensure that Israel keeps a military advantage against its traditional adversaries in the region. That is why, for instance, the administration has not allowed Lockheed Martin to sell the F-35 fighter jet, considered to be the jewel of America’s future arsenal, to Arab countries. The plane, the world’s most expensive weapons project, has stealth capabilities and has been approved for sale to Israel. In Paris on Friday, Mr. Kerry said that the United States and its Arab allies, which constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council, were “fleshing out a series of new commitments that will create between the U.S. and G.C.C. a new security understanding, a new set of security initiatives that will take us beyond anything that we have had before.” The king is the latest top Arab official who will not be attending the summit meeting for delegations from members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The United Arab Emirates is also sending its crown prince to the meetings, the officials said. The Emirati president, Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, was never expected to attend, because of health reasons, American and Arab officials said. The sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said al Said, also will not be attending because of health reasons, officials said. Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States, declined to say exactly what his government was pushing for from the United States when he spoke at a conference in Washington on Thursday. “The last thing I want to say is ‘here’s what we need,’ ” he said at a panel discussion sponsored by the Atlantic Council in Washington. “That’s not the right approach. The approach is, let’s come here, let’s figure out what the problems are, how we can work together to address our needs.” King Salman’s decision to skip the summit meeting does not mean that the Saudis are giving up on the United States — they do not have many other options, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “As upset as the Saudis are, they don’t really have a viable alternative strategic partnership in Moscow or Beijing,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. But, he added, “there’s a growing perception at the White House that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are friends but not allies, while the U.S. and Iran are allies but not friends.” Chasing a rainbow party <http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21650926-new-leader-and-new-challenges-democratic-alliance-chasing-rainbow-party> // Economist // May 10, 2015 SOUTH AFRICA'S main opposition party has elected its first black leader, a step rightly thought necessary for the Democratic Alliance (DA) to shake its image as a "white party" and challenge the mighty African National Congress (ANC). Mmusi Maimane, aged just 34, won his election by a landslide at a weekend DA party congress in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth. The only other candidate was Wilmot James, aged 61. Mr James is a mixed-race, respected elder statesman of the party, but is seen as lacking the dynamism needed to give the party a boost and attract new voters. Mr Maimane, who was raised in Soweto, is the DA's parliamentary leader—he will keep this post—and on weekends a pastor at a Christian church in Cosmo City, a Johannesburg suburb. He has the oratory of a preacher, too, and is widely praised for his ability to hold a crowd. Helen Zille, the outgoing DA leader, avoided openly backing a candidate but had previously described Mr Maimane as symbolising the party's future. But some doubt his ability to sell dubious voters on the DA. "I don't think they have an ideal candidate,” said Eusebius McKaiser, a political analyst and author of a book titled "Could I Vote DA? A Voter's Dilemma". “The fact that Mmusi is black helps,” but, he said, it won’t by itself attract black votes. Mr Maimane will need to go beyond feel-good tales about his own rise from Soweto and abstract notions of a rainbow, "non-racial" party, and address the hard issues facing South Africa. The liberal DA portrays itself as a party of competency and efficiency, with its Western Cape base considered the best-run province in South Africa. Its congress was a well-organised, slickly run affair, in contrast to the ANC's chaotic last elective congress, in Mangaung (though the DA had far more white people awkwardly dancing to the music of Brenda Fassie, a famed anti-apartheid singer). There were many tributes to Miss Zille, who during her term increased the DA's share of the vote from 17%, in 2009, to 22% in last year's election. With Mr Maimane as leader, the party’s biggest challenge now will be to speak to a broader range of voters, in particular to black South Africans in the ANC's rural heartland. His first test will be the 2016 local elections, with a close race expected in the battleground municipalities of Johannesburg, Pretoria and Nelson Mandela Bay, which includes Port Elizabeth. While the DA remains the main opposition party, it has been overshadowed in recent months by the leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by Julius Malema, a former ANC Youth League leader who, like Mr Maimane, is 34. The attention-grabbing, radical EFF has found support among young black voters, frustrated with the lack of change and opportunity in South Africa. When Mr Maimane was asked by The Economist how he planned to tackle the EFF, he dodged the question. Instead, he spoke about the party's presence at universities and touted the DA's recent surprise victory in student-council elections at Fort Hare, Nelson Mandela's alma mater in the Eastern Cape. That was indeed a win for the party, but the work ahead will be a good deal tougher. -- *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.