US Presidential Contenders

[Buster's Uncle]

I read a biography of him back in the late 80s.

[Buster's Uncle]

Obama says Hillary Clinton’s emails never jeopardized America’s national security
Yahoo News
Dylan Stableford  Senior editor  April 10, 2016



(Fox News Sunday)



President Obama says Hillary Clinton showed a degree of “carelessness” in using a private email server as secretary of state, but never jeopardized national security.

“I continue to believe that she has not jeopardized America’s national security,” Obama told “Fox News Sunday” in a wide-ranging interview. “What I’ve also said is that — and she has acknowledged — that there’s a carelessness, in terms of managing e-mails, that she has owned, and she recognizes.”

The president said that there are varying degrees of classified material being handled in the upper reaches of government.

“What I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there are — there’s classified, and then there’s classified,” Obama said. “There’s stuff that is really top-secret, top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.”

“But I also think it is important to keep this in perspective,” he continued. “This is somebody who has served her country for four years as secretary of state and did an outstanding job.”

Obama was also asked if he could guarantee the White House will not interfere with the ongoing FBI probe into Clinton’s handling of her emails.

“I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or FBI — not just in this case, but in any case,” the president said. “Period. Full stop. Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department. Because nobody is above the law.”

“I do not talk to the attorney general about pending investigations,” he said. “I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations. We have a strict line and always have maintained it.”

During the interview — his first with “Fox News Sunday” since becoming president — Obama discussed the GOP response to Judge Merrick Garland, his Supreme Court nominee.

“Originally, the Republicans said they wouldn’t meet with him at all,” Obama said. “Now a number of them have already had meetings. And the questioning that they’re having privately with Judge Garland is something that should be done publicly, through a hearings process, so the American people can make their own assessment. But I recognize there’s pressure on the other side. Our goal is just to make sure that the Senate does its job and treats him fairly.”

The president also defended his response to the recent terror attack in Brussels, dismissing critics who said he should’ve curtailed his diplomatic trip to Cuba and Argentina and returned to the United States.

“In the wake of terrorist attacks, it has been my view consistently — that the job of the terrorists, in their minds, is to induce panic, induce fear, get societies to change who they are,” Obama said. “And what I’ve tried to communicate is, ‘You can’t change us. You can kill some of us, but we will hunt you down, and we will get you.’ And in the meantime, just as we did in Boston, after the marathon bombing, we’re going to go to a ballgame.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-fox-news-sunday-clinton-email-scandal-150010315.html

[Rusty Edge]

I read something at Salon ( I think)  about her applying for a blackberry from the State Dept. and being denied because they weren't secure enough, but she went ahead and used one for State Department business anyway. That sounds like a real problem to me. With that caveat-

"Well spoken, President Obama" - Rusty Edge, April 10th, 2016.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'd heard that one -or a version if it- and someone not-her wasn't doing their job.  If the Secretary of State wants a secure phone to be in plane memes with, then see to it she gets one.

[Rusty Edge]

Well, after reading Obama's eloquent remarks about nobody being above the law ( and if I thought Hillary really believed that, I'd find it easier to vote for her ) that was my context.

When you phrase it like "The Secretary of State wants it done." Then Hannibal's maxim- "We shall find a way, or make one " comes to mind.

[Buster's Uncle]

Exactly.  You know I'm no Hillary-head; just seems to figure.

And her campaign ought to unclench and do something with that plane meme...

[Rusty Edge]

The Boston Globe put out an editorial and a fake front page to help people envision life under The Leader.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/09/etrump/JPOQJZK9hUBdBx5rdPkWFK/story.html

You can click on the "articles" to make it easier to read them. While it lacked anything about The Donald with nukes, I did appreciate the one about him being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Skip the editorial if you like, and just read the sample front page.

[Dio]

I find that article both hilarious and scary at the same time.

[Rusty Edge]

I find that article both hilarious and scary at the same time.

As they said, it was an exercise in taking a man at his word.

[Buster's Uncle]

...Which one should not do with wanton liars, however...

[Buster's Uncle]

Joe Biden: "I Would Like to See a Woman Elected"
Mic
Luke Brinker,  April 11, 2016



Vice President Joe Biden waded into the contentious back-and-forth between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over Clinton's qualifications to serve as president, telling Mic in an exclusive interview that both candidates are "totally qualified" — adding that he'd "like to see a woman elected."

The remarks came during an interview with Mic correspondent Antonia Hylton centered on Biden's crusade against sexual assault, set to be released on Wednesday.

Asked whether Sanders' charge that Clinton's super PAC support and her votes for free trade agreements and the Iraq War rendered her unqualified represented another manifestation of sexism, Biden responded with an emphatic "no."

Sanders' remarks were "totally different" from the often-incendiary rhetoric espoused by Republican presidential candidate Donald T rump, Biden said.

Watch Biden's comments here:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=08mqN9uYQw8" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=08mqN9uYQw8</a>

The way the two-time presidential candidate sees it, the Democrats' war of words is par for the course in national campaigns.

"Look, they're both totally qualified to be president. They both get in a fight. Campaigns do this. It's like saying, you know, 'She's dead wrong' or her saying, 'He's dead wrong' on an issue," the vice president said.

Meanwhile, Biden noted, Sanders did not say Clinton is "not qualified because she's a woman."

Biden — who contemplated entering the 2016 fray himself, before opting against a bid in October — rejected the notion that Clinton is held to a higher standard because she's a woman.

"No, I don't think she's held to a higher standard. This country's ready for a woman. There's no problem. We're going to be able to elect a woman in this country," Biden said.

Asked whether he wanted to see a woman elected, Biden responded, "I would like to see a woman elected."

The vice president's staff then attempted to cut off discussion of the 2016 race, but Biden insisted he had "no problem" with discussing it — while making clear he would not go down "that rabbit [hole]" of offering a formal endorsement.

"The president and I are not going endorse because we both, when we ran said, 'Let the party decide.' But gosh almighty, they're both qualified," he said. "Hillary's overwhelmingly qualified to be president."

A complex history: Biden's remarks — simultaneously defending both Clinton and Sanders, delivering views that could conceivably irk either camp — are reflective of the larger role he's played in campaign politics since deciding against a run of his own.

Though Biden served alongside the former secretary of state in both the Senate and the Obama administration, he's leveled not-so-thinly-veiled criticism of his erstwhile colleague, including in his White House Rose Garden speech announcing his no-go decision.

In the speech, Biden railed against "the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart," declaring, "I don't think we should look at Republicans as our enemies. They are our opposition. They're not our enemies." Those pointed remarks came just days after Clinton, in a Democratic debate, identified Republicans as among the enemies she was proudest of making.

Biden has also questioned Clinton's credentials as a warrior against income inequality, a signature Sanders issue.

In a January interview with CNN, Biden said it was "relatively new for Hillary to talk about" the issue, while "Bernie is speaking to a yearning that is deep and real. And he has credibility on it." Biden later walked those comments back a bit, saying he meant Clinton was a newcomer to the inequality debate because she'd been focused on global affairs as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/joe-biden-see-woman-elected-163000183.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Are Hillary's big speaking fees being used to help fund her campaign?
Yahoo News
Michael Isikoff  Chief Investigative Correspondent  April 11, 2016



Hillary Clinton with summer-camp entrepreneur and Clinton donor Jay Jacobs after her speech to some 3,000 summer-camp professionals at the Tri-State CAMP conference, March 19, 2015, in Atlantic City. (Photo: Mel Evans/AP)



Recently filed campaign finance reports may shed light on how Hillary Clinton is using some of the money she collected from her hefty speechmaking fees from Wall Street banks and other special-interest groups: She is plowing an increasingly large amount of her funds, $560,983 as of last month, back into her presidential campaign.

A Yahoo News review of Clinton’s campaign disclosure reports finds that in the weeks after launching her bid for the presidency in April 2015, the former secretary of state paid $278,821 to her campaign to cover so-called testing the waters expenses. These included consulting and legal fees, travel bills and salaries for top staffers like personal aide Huma Abedin and deputy political director Brynne Craig that were incurred during the early months of last year, when Clinton was officially weighing whether to run for president.

Since then, the reports show, Clinton has kicked another $282,162 into her campaign, with payments to her campaign committee, Hillary for America, averaging about $90,000 a month. Most of that revenue ($228,837) has gone to the Clinton Executive Services Corp., a Clinton family payroll operation that is compensating staffers engaged in campaign-related work for her chief surrogate, her husband and former president Bill Clinton, according to campaign reports and a Clinton campaign official.

The degree to which Clinton is seeking to self-fund her campaign has so far gotten virtually no attention from the media and pales in comparison to the $25 million Donald T rump has loaned his campaign.

Still, “the amount of money is striking,” said Lawrence Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics at the Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. “It seems to be an important piece of the puzzle. One question [about Clinton’s speeches] is why she would take the risk of taking so much money from Wall Street and other interest groups. Now we see the full picture. It appears she needed some of the cash to finance her campaign.”



Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton. (Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)


A Clinton campaign official, who asked not to be identified, said there was “no connection whatsoever” between Clinton’s speaking fees and her later payments to her campaign committee. And campaign finance lawyers agree that Clinton, like T rump, is legally free to spend as much money as she wants on her campaign.

Clinton’s tax returns for 2014 (the last she has publicly released) show that the $10.5 million she earned from speaking fees that year — including talks to Deutsche Bank, GTCR, a Chicago private equity fund, Cisco, Xerox and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, among others — amounted to about two-thirds of her $16 million in gross personal income, with the remaining $5.5 million coming from book royalties. (Her husband reported another $9.7 million in gross income from speaking fees and $36,442 in book income.)

While Clinton’s campaign committee has raised a total of $159.9 million so far, the candidate’s own contributions make her by far the biggest source of funds, exceeding the amounts she has raised from partners and employees of major law firms like Paul Weiss ($232,684) and DLA Piper $225,363), as well as the executives and employees of major companies like Google ($224,817) and Morgan Stanley ($222,177), according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

That could prove awkward for a candidate who has portrayed herself as a campaign reformer and touted the importance of small donors in financing her candidacy. And the timing of some of Clinton’s speeches — especially when matched up against the payments to her campaign — raise questions about whether her lucrative speech fees effectively amount to a “pass through” of money from special interest groups to help bankroll her candidacy, according to Jacobs and other ethics advocates.

This would appear to be especially the case for the $1.4 million she collected for six speeches in the first three months of 2015. It was a time when the “testing the waters” period of her campaign had already begun and Clinton staffers were being hired in New Hampshire and Iowa. Campaign records show that campaign manager Robby Mook began racking up travel bills (later paid by Clinton herself) as early as Jan. 12, 2015; Abedin and Craig began doing campaign work (also later paid by Clinton) three days later. Her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, began billing for campaign-related legal work on Feb. 2.



Hillary Clinton's campaign manager Robby Mook, pictured here at a campaign office in February 2016 in Las Vegas. (Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)


During this period, Clinton collected $674,500 for three speeches in Canada on Jan. 20 and 21, 2015 (one of them paid for and two of them co-sponsored by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.) On March 11, 2015, she received $315,000 for a speech to eBay employees in San Jose. That was followed by a $260,000 payment from the New York chapter of the American Camping Association for a talk in Atlantic City on March 19, her last speech before her April 12, 2015, formal announcement that she was a candidate. (Clinton began writing checks to her campaign the next day, on April 13.)

“It certainly seems like what she was doing was raising money for her campaign,” said Anne Weismann, executive director for Campaign for Accountability, a watchdog group that advocates for greater transparency in politics. “Everybody knew she was going to run at that point.”

Weismann said that under federal election rules, prospective candidates have wide latitude to conduct private business (and later spend their own money) for “testing the waters” expenses before they formally declare their candidacy. “It’s a squishy area of the law,” she said.

But she said the most problematic talk appeared to be the final speech before the camping association. The group is a small nonprofit whose $260,000 payment to Clinton (more than the $225,000 she received for talks to the Bank of America or Morgan Stanley) amounted to more than 10 percent of the group’s $2.1 million budget. That recently prompted the organization to add a special note in its annual tax filing with the charities bureau of the New York attorney general’s office, calling the payment to Clinton (described only as a “high-profile politician”) as a “one-time expense” that is “not expected to occur in the subsequent year.”

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=WyeyzkKxLSY" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=WyeyzkKxLSY</a>

“It’s hard to see how it fits with the mission of that organization to pay $260,000 for a speaker who is about to run for president,” said Weismann. “It all kind of stinks.”

The key figure who arranged the talk was the group’s former president, Jay Jacobs, a prominent summer-camp entrepreneur. He is also the Nassau County Democratic Party chairman, a million-dollar donor to the Clinton Foundation and a Clinton campaign bundler who is throwing a major fundraiser tonight at one of the six camps he owns, the North Shore Day Camp, in Glen Cove on Long Island.

“I made the ask” [to Clinton], Jacobs confirmed to Yahoo News, when asked how the former secretary of state came to speak to the camping group’s annual Tri-State CAMP conference in Atlantic City. Other top officials in the group approached him about the idea because of his well-known relationship with the Clintons, he said. Hillary Clinton, when recently pressed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about  why she was paid  by so much money ($675,000 for three speeches) from Goldman Sachs, replied, “that’s what they offered.”

But that does not appear to have been the case with the nonprofit camping group, according to Jacobs’ account. When he made the request to Clinton’s agent, the Harry Walker Agency, “that’s the fee they came up with,” Jacobs said.

But Jacobs rejected the idea there was anything inappropriate — or political — about Clinton’s talk to the organization. Unlike her speeches to Wall Street, Clinton’s appearance that day — a 30-minute talk followed by a 30-minute Q&A session with Jacobs — was open to the press and received largely positive reviews. She talked about her days attending Girl Scout camp, her angst when she sent Chelsea off to language camp for a week one summer (“It was our worst week — well I’ve had a few bad weeks. But it was up there.”) and how the problems of Washington might be solved if there were “camps for adults.” (“We can have the red cabin, the blue cabin, and have to come together and actually listen to each other.”)

“Nobody in the camping association would have had any thought about her campaign,” Jacobs said. “Nobody — including me — had any thought about the money going into her campaign.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/are-hillarys-big-speaking-fees-being-used-to-help-205257476.html

[Buster's Uncle]

How Bill Clinton lost his legacy
Yahoo News
Matt Bai  National Political Columnist  April 14, 2016



Former President Bill Clinton at a benefit concert for his wife in New York City in March. (Photo: Mike Segar/Reuters)



When Bill Clinton left office in 2001, historians compared him to Teddy Roosevelt. Like the Bull Moose, the Big Dog was unusually young (only 54) and still popular when he finished his presidency. He established his base in New York, about 100 blocks from where Roosevelt was born.

For a while there was even talk of Clinton running for mayor, as Roosevelt once had. What a spectacle that would have been.

Looking back now, though, the comparison seems wildly off. Roosevelt, you may recall, ended up running for president again and then crusading against Woodrow Wilson’s pacifism. To the day he died in 1919, TR jealously protected his twin legacy of reform and internationalism.

Clinton, on the other hand, has run from every big ideological fight like a man on parole. From the moment he stepped out of the White House, the husband of a newly elected senator, his own political interests have been subservient to his wife’s.

Sure, he started a foundation and got crazy rich, but for the last 16 years — a period in which much of what he achieved has been steadily distorted and discredited — Clinton has been chained by the role of dutiful political spouse.

And so this is what it’s come to, as the most talented campaigner of the modern age apologizes for defending his own record and stumps cautiously for Hillary ahead of next week’s New York primary. What was supposed to be the final validation of Bill Clinton’s legacy inside the Democratic Party — the election of his wife as a successor — has now become the only thing left that can save it.

To be clear, Clinton’s governing legacy, unlike Roosevelt’s, featured little by way of transformative legislation. Though he presided over a surging economy, Clinton’s presidency played out mostly like a tragedy in three acts: first the stumble over health care; then the survival of Republican rule through compromise; and finally the sex scandal that crippled his second term.

Whatever lasting achievements Clinton might have claimed as world leader were probably washed away eight months after he left office, when the sudden strike of terrorists exposed a glaring failure of his tenure.

But Clinton’s more lasting political legacy — the thing for which he should have been remembered — was the transformation of the Democratic Party from a tired, marginalized coalition of interest groups to a governing entity that embraced modern realities.

As I was recently reminded watching “Crashing the Party,” an  upcoming documentary about the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s, Democrats by 1992 had lost five of the previous six presidential elections and were losing ground everywhere else. They were perceived, fairly, as reflexively anti-military and anti-business.

Clinton’s central argument, which it took no small amount of courage to make in those early days, was that in order to both win and govern effectively, Democrats had to stop agitating for an ever more expansive government and start trying to build a better one.

That was the philosophy that underlay Clinton’s string of pragmatic achievements: free trade, a balanced budget, welfare reform, the crime bill. For a while, anyway, it seemed like he had left an indelible stamp on the party, widening its focus from the poor and excluded to encompass the broader middle class.

Except then came the Iraq War and the collapse of Wall Street, a crushing recession followed by an even more crushing recession and soaring inequality. Angry liberal populism reemerged as a powerful force, first in Howard Dean’s insurgency and then through the reborn John Edwards and now Bernie Sanders.

At first, both Clintons tried gamely to defend the underpinnings of what became known as Clintonism. “I think that if ‘progressive’ is defined by results, whether it’s in health care, education, incomes, the environment, or the advancement of peace, then we had a very progressive administration,” Clinton told me during an interview in 2006 for my first book, on Democratic politics.

When I had lunch with him in South Carolina the next year, while working on a cover piece for the New York Times Magazine about his legacy, Clinton readily agreed to talk more about it. By then, though, Hillary Clinton’s aides had decided that the more Bill went on about his own centrist legacy, the less helpful he became. They promptly quashed the interview.

Now, some eight years later, the DLC is long dead (succeeded by a group called Third Way), and Clinton’s legacy inside his own party is savaged as never before. He’s derided on the left as a shill for Wall Street, a racist for supporting mass incarceration, a conservative for overhauling welfare.

Clinton refuses to defend his own record at any length, and when he can’t help himself and plunges in anyway — as he did in rightly defending the crime bill to a couple of activists last week — he almost immediately retreats.

It’s hard now to escape the conclusion that Clinton did not ultimately transform his party, the virus of Clintonism having been expelled from its bloodstream. Ordinary Democrats still love the former president, but the Democratic leaders and activists reject pretty much everything he stood for.

In politics, you see, timing is everything. Bill Clinton arrived on the scene at a time when Democrats were desperate and dispirited, and they were willing to entertain any argument that might reverse their string of losses, even if it clashed with their own dogma.

Hillary never had that luxury. She’s trying to fend off her own Jerry Brown circa 1992 at a time when Democrats have been winning presidential elections, and winning parties tend to care a lot about ideological purity. She can’t have Bill out there excoriating populism and protectionism.

Maybe this is Bill Clinton’s penance — the price he pays for having humiliated his wife so publicly in 1998. Maybe in order to salvage what remained of his presidency and his marriage, he ultimately had to be willing to sacrifice his own case for historical relevance.

Maybe this is why Clinton seems so much older all of a sudden, the white hair more brittle, the eyes more watery, the cranelike movements of the arms slower and more deliberate. You can imagine how all that forced silence takes its toll, how physically ruinous it must be to keep the fury inside, when all you want to do is defend yourself.

What we know is that if Hillary Clinton goes on from New York to win the nomination, it will have more to do with the Obama record than with her husband’s. And if she’s elected in November, it won’t validate Bill’s legacy so much as offer him some path to redemption.

Bill Clinton once argued to me that Teddy Roosevelt didn’t see his own progressive legacy affirmed for 24 years after he left office, when his distant cousin, Franklin, was elected with the same name and a similar platform. That may or may not be a sound interpretation of history.

But you can see why it’s a comforting thought.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-bill-clinton-lost-his-1406972950126646.html

[Rusty Edge]

That was a good read.

It takes me back to the days of the dynamic duo, Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh that used to make me ballistic, even when I agreed with them. You know, Bill Clinton being the champion of women in the workplace, Rush being the spokesperson for family values while on his fourth wife, or denouncing Communism while praising the merits of Cuban cigars. Some days I had to shut down the radio.

That guy would also drive me nuts doing some touchy feely I care about this one person thing, instead of walking the walk on policy, and I never understood why when the unions said NAFTA is where we draw the line, and he screwed them, they didn't ditch the party and join the Greens, or something.

Now I know, Clinton was the party savior.

Regardless, right about now I'm wishing for a 3rd term of Bill, considering my potential options.

[Rusty Edge]

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/oy-vey-john-kasich-jesus-splains-to-new-york-jews-how-passover-is-linked-to-christs-blood/

"Uriel Heilman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recommended on Thursday that Kasich abstain from giving Christian Bible lessons to Jewish voters.

“Talking about Christ’s blood during a visit to Borough Park? Oy vey,” Heilman wrote. “Please, somebody, prep this guy Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn want to hear about food stamps, affordable housing, Medicaid. Ix-nay on the Jesus-nay.”
-------------------------------------------
Well, maybe my boy Kasich doesn't have the foreign policy/diplomacy chops I gave him credit for it.