Conservative Happenings

Monday, May 18, 2015

Changes needed in Jade Helm military exercises

Over the past few weeks, my office has been inundated with calls referring to the Jade Helm 15 military exercise scheduled to take place between July 15 and September 15, 2015.

This military practice has some concerned that the U.S. Army is preparing for modern-day martial law.

Certainly, I can understand these concerns.

Rep. Louie Gohmert

When leaders within the current administration believe that major threats to the country include those who support the Constitution, are military veterans, or even "cling to guns or religion," patriotic Americans have reason to be concerned.

We have seen people working in this administration use their government positions to persecute people with conservative beliefs in God, country, and notions such as honor and self-reliance.

Because of the contempt and antipathy for the true patriots or even Christian saints persecuted for their Christian beliefs, it is no surprise that those who have experienced or noticed such persecution are legitimately suspicious.

Having served in the U.S. Army, I can understand why military officials have a goal to see if groups of Special Forces can move around a civilian population without being noticed and can handle various threat scenarios.

In military science classes or in my years on active duty, I have participated in or observed military exercises; however, we never named an existing city or state as a “hostile.” We would use fictitious names before we would do such a thing.

Once I observed the map depicting "hostile," "permissive" and "uncertain" states and locations, I was rather appalled that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority and believe in the sanctity of the United States Constitution.

When the federal government begins, even in practice, games or exercises, to consider any U.S. city or state in "hostile" control and trying to retake it, the message becomes extremely calloused and suspicious.

Such labeling tends to make people who have grown leery of federal government overreach become suspicious of whether their big brother government anticipates certain states may start another civil war or be overtaken by foreign radical Islamist elements which have been reported to be just across our border.

Such labeling by a government that is normally not allowed to use military force against its own citizens is an affront to the residents of that particular state considered as hostile, as if the government is trying to provoke a fight with them.

The map of the exercise needs to change, the names on the map need to change, and the tone of the exercise needs to be completely revamped so the federal government is not intentionally practicing war against its own states.

Via: Highland County Press

[VIDEO] Boston Mosque Obama Hails As “Model” For His Plan To “Countering Violent Extremism” Has Ties To Least 12 Islamic Terrorists…

Via: Weasel Zippers

MSNBC hits a new low (GOOD NEWS FOR ALL OF US)

The mind boggles at the mentality on evidence at the Comcast-owned news network. Kudos to Kristinn Taylor at Gateway Pundit for noticing, publicizing, and saving the evidence after a grown-up (apparently there still is one) at MSNBC deleted the tweet.

Here is the tweet posted after the Savannah, Georgia police released video of a cop being dragged by car he had stopped for questioning.

To add to the hilarity, the video had clown music added to it, as the police officer was dragged along, imperiling his life.

This is National Police Week, murders of police are up 80 some percent and the network is making light of a life-threatening incident of an attack against a police officer.

Will any heads roll? I am not holding my breath. As my colleague Rick Moran puts it, “They are becoming a parody of themselves.” And I guess they know their (diminishing) audience.

Via: American Thinker

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Obamacare Exchanges on Life Support

By Michelle Malkin

At a recent White House science fair celebrating inventors, a Girl Scout who helped design a Lego-powered page-turning device asked President Obama what he had ever thought up or prototyped. Stumbling for an answer, he replied:

"I came up with things like, you know, health care."

Ah, yes. "Health care." Remember when the president's signature Obamacare health insurance exchanges were going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, the remote control, jogger strollers, Siri, the Keurig coffee maker, driverless cars and Legos all rolled into one?

The miraculous, efficient, cost-saving, innovative 21st-century government-run "marketplaces" were supposed to put the "affordable" in Obama's Affordable Care Act. Know-it-all bureaucrats were going to show private companies how to set up better websites (gigglesnort), implement better marketing and outreach (guffaw), provide superior customer service (belly laugh), and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse (LOLOLOL).

You will be shocked beyond belief, I'm sure, to learn that Obamacare exchanges across the country are instead bleeding money, seeking more taxpayer bailouts and turning everything they touch to chicken poop.

Wait, that's not fair to chicken poop, which can at least be composted.

"Almost half of Obamacare exchanges face financial struggles in the future," The Washington Post reported last week. The news comes despite $5 billion in federal taxpayer subsidies for IT vendors, call centers and all the infrastructure and manpower needed to prop up the showcase government health insurance entities. Initially, the feds ran 34 state exchanges; 16 states and the District of Columbia set up their own.

While private health insurance exchanges have operated smoothly and satisfied customers for decades, the Obamacare models are on life support. Oregon's exchange is six feet under — shuttered last year after government overseers squandered $300 million on their failed website and shady consultants who allegedly set up a phony website to trick the feds. The FBI and the U.S. HHS inspector general's office reportedly have been investigating the racket for more than a year now.

Via: CNS News
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Kerry Tells China: ‘Because of Climate Change in U.S. We Are Ending Any Funding’ of ‘Coal-Fired Power’

Secretary of State John Kerry and PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on May 16, 2015. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

(CNSNews.com) - At a joint press conference in Beijing yesterday with People’s Republic of China Foreign Minister Wang Yi, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the Obama administration intends to cooperate closely with the PRC leading into a U.N. climate conference in Paris in December and that the U.S. is “ending any funding” of coal-fired power projects.

President Barack Obama's fiscal 2016 budget proposal calls for increasing taxes on the coal industry by $4.252 billion from 2016-2025 while providing "refundable" tax credits to "renewable" energy projects such as solar and wind power facilities.

“There are three key meetings that we are all working on together to prepare for in order to build success,” said Kerry. “One is the Security and Economic Dialogue that will take place in June in Washington. Two is the summit between President Xi and President Obama to take place in September. And three is the global meeting that we are working on together regarding climate change in Paris in December.”

“The United States and China are also cooperating more closely than ever to address climate change, one of the greatest threats facing our planet today,” said Kerry. “Last fall, our respective presidents came together to announce our countries’ greenhouse gas commitments, the reductions, and we continue to call on other nations around the world to set their own ambitious targets. And we agreed this morning that as we get closer to the UN Climate Conference in Paris later this year, the United States and China, the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters, will elevate our cooperation and coordination so that we can reach the kind of global agreement that we will need to ultimately address this threat.”

“Because of climate change in the United States, we are ending any funding – public money – that funds coal-fired power projects because of their impact on the climate,” said Kerry. “And we encourage China and other countries to do the same.”

“We need to continue to strengthen our communication and coordination on climate change to jointly ensure the success of the upcoming climate conference in Paris later this year,” said the U.S. secretary of state. “Meanwhile, we need to also work together to advance our bilateral practical cooperation on climate change.”

Via: CNS News

How Big Data failed Baltimore

Gyalwang Drukpa, a Buddhist leader from South Asia, prays in front of a mural of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Md., May 7, 2015.

Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters

In the days following the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who sustained a fatal spinal injury in Baltimore police custody, I was taken back to my time in Baltimore, at the height of America’s “tough on crime” era.

I arrived in the city in 1999 as a federal employee, sent to the city health department to support a crumbling local public health infrastructure. I had a deep sense that I wanted to fight the good fight, but at 27 years old – just two years older than Freddie Gray – I had little understanding of what that meant. No sooner had I arrived in Charm City than the Baltimore Sun broke the story that would shape my years there. The headline went something like this: Baltimore’s children are canaries in a coalmine: City does little to combat child lead poisoning.

No one could have known it then but Freddie Gray, who would have been about 10 years old at the time, was one of those poisoned kids in Sandtown-Winchester.

Like other post-industrial cities, Baltimore’s famous row houses were riddled with the stealthy neurotoxin. Deceptively sweet like manna from heaven, lead paint permanently rewired the developing minds of kids in East and West Baltimore who ate the dulcet chips and breathed in their dust. In the poorest neighborhoods, kids moved from leaded-home to leaded-home as their families were evicted, fathers incarcerated, mothers fended for themselves.

Of course, violence, drug-addiction and despair were common. At the time, one in eight Baltimore residents were addicted to heroin, the evidence of which could be found near City Hall where “poppers,” the small needles long-time addicts used to inject the drug just under the skin on their hands, could be found all over the sidewalks and alleys. The dominant narrative confirmed that the city traded in despair: HBO’s “The Corner” aired in 2000 and “The Wire” followed two years later.

Via: MSNBC

Why California's anti-poverty agenda will fail

In January 1992, campaigning in recession-hammered New Hampshire, President George H.W. Bush glanced at his note cards and told an audience, “Message: I care.”

Three years after the Census Bureau began including cost of living in one of its measures of poverty, California’s politicians are finally responding to the bureau’s finding that the Golden State has by far the nation’s most impoverished population. Unfortunately, it’s with their own version of “Message: I care.”

Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, wants to add funds to affordable housing programs that amount to a lottery in which a tiny fraction of poor families win the right to subsidized apartments and homes. Despite decades of evidence in California that this is not a serious approach to reducing the cost of housing – the prime driver of poverty in the Golden State – Atkins depicts her initiative as grand evidence of her commitment to helping the poor.

Now Gov. Jerry Brown is joining in the “Message: I care” push with his proposal for a California version of the federal earned-income tax credit, an idea economists like because it helps people make ends meet without providing disincentives for them to work. Brown’s plan would provide $380 million to the state’s poorest workers. But as with Atkins’ housing initiative, this will have a tiny, trivial effect on poverty.

If California’s most powerful politicians actually wanted to reduce the number of households that struggle to make ends meet, they would start with the basics.

To bring the cost of housing down, they would push to allow far more new construction. This is what New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, perhaps the nation’s leading progressive, is doing.

Via: UT San Diego

Brown’s Arid California, Thanks Partly to His Father

LOS ANGELES — When Edmund G. Brown Sr. was governor of California, people were moving in at a pace of 1,000 a day. With a jubilant Mr. Brown officiating, California commemorated the moment it became the nation’s largest state, in 1962, with a church-bell-ringing, four-day celebration. He was the boom-boom governor for a boom-boom time: championing highways, universities and, most consequential, a sprawling water network to feed the explosion of agriculture and development in the dry reaches of central and Southern California.

Nearly 50 years later, it has fallen to Mr. Brown’s only son, Gov. Jerry Brown, to manage the modern-day California that his father helped to create. The state is prospering, with a population of more than double the 15.5 million it had when Mr. Brown, known as Pat, became governor in 1959. But California, the seventh-largest economy in the world, is confronting fundamental questions about its limits and growth, fed by the collision of the severe drought dominating Jerry Brown’s final years as governor and the water and energy demands — from homes, industries and farms, not to mention pools, gardens and golf courses — driven by the aggressive growth policies advocated by his father during his two terms in office.

The stark challenge that confronts this state is putting a spotlight on a father and son who, as much as any two people, define modern-day California. They are strikingly different symbols of different eras, with divergent styles and distinct views of government, growth and the nature of California itself.

Pat Brown, who died in 1996 at the age of 90, was the embodiment of the post-World War II explosion, when people flocked to this vast and beckoning state in search of a new life. “He loved that California was getting bigger when he was governor,” said Ethan Rarick, who wrote a biography of Pat Brown and directs the Robert T. Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service at the University of California, Berkeley. “Pat saw an almost endless capacity for California growth.”

Via: New York Times

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Mississippi hold-up ends when victim shoots, kills one of his robbers

The victim of a harrowing gunpoint robbery in Mississippi on Saturday grabbed a gun out of his truck and opened fire, killing one robber and sending the other fleeing.

Jackson Police said the victim turned the tables on a pair of robbers after he was robbed of his wallet and forced to drive to an ATM to get money,Mississippi News Now reported.

Police found the body of robbery suspect Edwin Robinson, 23, on Pinewood Drive, a residential street in northeast Jackson. They said the shooting appeared justified.

“I heard about six gunshots at about 6:30 a.m., went to let one of my dogs out and heard some more gunshots,” a resident told the station. “We saw people standing around, and a body and a truck.”

The station said the victim of the stick-up was a doctor. He was not hurt.

Police told the station the doctor was in the driveway of his home when Robinson and another man surprised him. They had guns and announced a robbery.
Via: Fox News

[VIDEO] Sunday Biker Gang Shooting Leaves Nine Dead, 17 Injured

WACO: (May 17, 2015) Rival motorcycle gangs turned a local restaurant into a shooting gallery Sunday afternoon and when the gunfire was over, nine people were dead and 17 were injured..

Waco police Sunday afternoon, assisted by Department of Public Safety troopers, police officers from several cities and deputies from the McLennan County Sheriff's Office were surrounding the Twin Peaks Restaurant, in the Central Texas Market Place after several people were reported shot during a rival motorcycle gang fight, Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said.

Police initially said three gangs were involved, but later said factions from at least five gangs took part in the melee.

Police and troopers were in the parking lot trying to secure the area and protect citizens when a fight broke out inside the restaurant and spilled into the parking lot.

Swanton said the fight quickly escalated from fists and feet to chains, clubs and knives, then to gunfire.

Gang members were shooting at each other and officers at the scene fired their weapons, as well, Swanton said.

Other patrons in Twin Peaks and some employees locked themselves in a freezer to escape the fight.

The scene at the Market Place between Don Carlos and Twin Peaks was absolute chaos, Swanton said.

"It is one of the most violent scene I've seen in my 34 years as a police officer in Waco," Swanton said.

Via: KWTX

Gun Control Success: 30 Shot In Chicago Since Friday…Update: Reportedly Now Up To 42, 12 More Folks Shot…

The article linked above only covers the Saturday shootings. This one covers the Friday shootings, including of an 81 year old grandmother. “This is the genocide that happens in our backyard,” said one neighbor.

But #BlackLivesMatter, right?

Via: Weasel Zippers

Clinton Cash Author: News Orgs Can’t Have Different Rules for ‘Superstars’

Peter Schweizer said he was “dumbfounded” by the revelation that This Week host George Stephanopoulos failed to disclose $75,000 worth of contributions to the Clinton Foundation before interviewing Schweizer about his book questioning the Foundation’s donation practices.

“I knew about the fact that he had worked for the Clintons, but honestly, I sort of believed and assumed that he had sort of put that in the past,” Schweizer said.

Stephanopoulos apologized earlier this week and recused himself from moderating 2016 debates, but Schweizer has said his financial and time commitments amounted to journalistic malfeasance.

“I thought he was simply asking tough questions” during an interview in which Stephanopoulos challenged Schweizer’s partisanship and evidence. “I don’t mind tough questions, but you wonder what’s the motivation: is it the search for truth, or is it because he’s trying to, in a sense, do something to benefit the Clinton Foundation which he obviously has some affinity for?”

Schwiezer pointed out that other newscasters had been fired for donations, including Geraldo Rivera, who claimed ABC had fired him for a $200 political contribution in the 80s. “The question is are journalists in general going to be held to the same standards at networks, or are you going to have superstars who are allowed to do things regular reporters are allowed to do?” he asked.

Schweizer said he would happily reappear for a follow-up interview, though he doubted it would happen, as it would function as an “admission of guilt” on ABC’s part.

Via: Mediaite.com

Soon You Might Be Able To Receive Food Stamps Over The Phone

Soon it could be possible to apply for food stamps over the phone, with proponents arguing that in-person interviews add too much extra administrative cost.

A report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) looked at whether it should get rid of in-person interviews for those who apply to receive benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is commonly known as food stamps. The program is the nation’s largest food-assistance program.

“Regulations require that states conduct face-to-face interviews, unless the state determines that a telephone interview is acceptable due to a hardship on the client,” the report details. “However, over the last decade, most states applied for and received waivers that allow for telephone interviews in all cases, without the need to document a hardship.”

Noting the time requirements and the administration costs, the USDA with the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) conducted a limited real-world test to see if the in-person interviews are needed.

Via: Daily Caller

Audit of L.A. ‘training institutes’ reveals abuse of ratepayer dollars

Ratepayers are mad as hell after Controller Ron Galperin’s financial audit of the Joint Safety and Training Institutes revealed that we have been ripped off by IBEW union boss Brian D’Arcy for tens of millions of dollars. This audit revealed bloated salaries, credit card and expense account abuse, prohibited payments to DWP employees to conduct training sessions, and no bid contracts totaling millions.

The City Administrative Officer’s performance and operational evaluation revealed an inefficient organization without adequate management, oversight, controls, policies, and procedures. As a result, the CAO’s report outlined 36 recommendations, all of which have been agreed to by DWP and the IBEW. This includes appointing an executive director and developing a plan for a money saving merger of the institutes.

The CAO’s report indicated that the Institutes provided some value, including servicing as a catalyst and focal point for training and safety and an incubator for “researching, developing and implementing programs relatively quickly to address specific issues or concerns.”

Because of the lack of adequate controls and performance metrics, there is no way to determine how much bang for the buck the ratepayers received for their $20 million that was funneled to the two nonprofit trusts over the last five years.

Via: California Political Review

3 Armed Intruders Have No Chance Against Well Armed Couple

In a recent home invasion captured on a home surveillance system, 3 armed intruders get a harsh dose of reality when they’re met with fast moving lead projectiles.

The edited video begins on May 12 at 2:11 a.m. The homeowners 2 cats start stirring as the 3 intruders attempt to gain entry.

After breaking in, the trio creeps through the house for several moments. One retrieves a knife, while the others retrieve wire and electrical cable. The homeowners boyfriend (who was asleep in another room) believes the intruders were going to use the wire and cable to tie up his girlfriend and himself.

The intruder with the knife allegedly then walks into the girlfriends bedroom (off camera) and lunges at her. She fires a single shot from a revolver, narrowly missing her would-be attacker. She then pursues the 3 intruders and ends up firing a second shot.

By this time her boyfriend has awoke in the next room, and he too has a weapon to investigate. By this time, the 3 armed intruders have jumped out of an open window.

The boyfriend clears the lower level and hits the panic button on the alarm panel. He then darkens the house and retreats to another room with his girlfriend.

In only 4 days, the above video has garnished over 1 million well-deserved hits on YouTube. It serves as prime example of why every law-abiding American should always be armed.

Via: BuzzPo

She Comes by it Honestly: Hillary’s Dad Was “Always Trying to Screw Somebody”

For all we know about Hillary Rodham Clinton, there is so much more that we don’t know; so much scandal shrouded in secrecy by her team of minions and habit of evading the media. We now know that she comes by it all honestly, though, as her father may have been the biggest liar of them all.

Hillary grew up in modest circumstances in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. Her father, Hugh, who operated a small drapery business, was by all accounts a very gruff parent.

The oldest of three children, Hillary had two younger brothers who were constantly treated differently than she was. According to Tony Rodham, Hillary’s brother, “Hillary was always Dad’s princess. My father adored my sister.”

“Hillary was the only one in the family who really knew how to manipulate Hugh Rodham [Sr.] in order to win his affection,” commented Oscar Dowdy, a cousin. “I grew up with Hillary. I saw how loving and attentive Uncle Hugh was to her. He wasn’t that way to the boys.”

Dowdy also called Hillary’s father “a wheeler-dealer, a shyster-type guy, always trying to screw somebody.”

Sound familiar?

The Rodham family patriarch “resorted to any trick to cut a deal and make a sale,” according to Dowdy. Hillary’s dad also had a reputation for being a show-off, as he would drive around in a metallic gold Cadillac.

Looks like the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Via: BuzzPo

Sunday, May 17, 2015

HILARIOUS Cartoon Relentlessly Mocks Obama’s Global Warming Agenda

Via: BuzzPO

[VIDEO] Kirsten Powers: The Left's War On Fox Women

One of the worst aspects of the illiberal left is its heinous sexism against women with whom they disagree.

Megyn Kelly, a former lawyer, is a serious and highly successful television journalist. When her contract was up for renewal in 2013, the New York Timesreported that both CNN and NBC wanted to hire her away from Fox, a strange thing to desire if Fox News is not a “legitimate” news outlet.

But to the illiberal left, Megyn Kelly is not a reporter or a commentator or a woman to be respected for her achievements. She is a Fox “babe” to be characterized by her looks.

The Huffington Post linked to a New York Times story about Kelly adding the headline, “Megyn Kelly, ‘Attractive-Looking Blond’ Anchorwoman, Leads the Pack at Fox News,” twisting a flattering quote from the story to make it seem as if the only positive attribute she possessed were her looks.

Via: Fox News

Report: Hillary Clinton’s Consigliere Covers Up Her Scandals

If Congress really wants to get to the bottom of Hillary Clinton’s missing Benghazi and pay-to-play emails, it should call her consigliere Cheryl D. Mills to testify — under oath, and under the klieg lights.

A hearing featuring Clinton will be a wasted show trial with a lot of political grandstanding.

But Mills, who served as the former secretary of state’s chief of staff and counselor, knows where the bodies are buried. After all, Hillary tasked her with “identifying and preserving all emails that could potentially be federal records.”

And, presumably, deleting.

Mills has a long track record of hiding Clinton documents.

Since the 1990s, Mills has been at Hillary’s side — first as a White House lawyer, then as her closest and most loyal adviser at the State Department, and now as a key member of the Clinton Foundation board, which is under fire for raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from dubious foreign sources in alleged influence-peddling deals.

Via: New York Post

STATES SAYING 'NO' TO CITIES SEEKING TO REGULATE BUSINESSES

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Alarmed about cities trying to outlaw plastic bags, the director of the Missouri Grocers Association decided to do something about it. So Dan Shaul turned to his state legislator- himself - and guided a bill to passage barring local governments from banning the bags.

Shaul's dual role in state government and business may be a bit out of the norm. Yet his actions are not. In capitols across the country, businesses are increasingly using their clout to back laws prohibiting cities and counties from doing things that might affect their ability to make money.

In the past five years, roughly a dozen states have enacted laws barring local governments from requiring businesses to provide paid sick leave to employees. The number of states banning local minimum wages has grown to 15. And while oil-rich states such as Texas and Oklahoma are pursuing bills banning local restrictions on drilling, other states where agriculture is big business have been banning local limitations on the types of seeds sown for crops.

Via: AP

AG Loretta Lynch – Democrats Not Responsible For Inner City Crime, The Schools Did It

What is happening with the parasitic urban centers of America is that, in spite of their incessant failures, the socialist Democrats continue to be supported and subsidized under a false humanitarian label by the producers of America. It is federal wealth redistribution from those who are willing to work and do what it takes to find a job wherever they can find one, to those who prefer to sit on the couch and watch Oprah. They might be persuaded to take a job if an employer walked up to their door with an offer, but it had better be a good one.

If the Democrats in charge had chosen to become doctors they’d be guilty of malpractice and be standing amid heaping piles of corpses. Having chosen political careers, they are still guilty of malpractice and feeding a massive body count. Marxism doesn’t work but a misdiagnosis of the problem will hide the true root cause.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch blames the public schools, who are dealing with a lack of discipline and respect for policies and the law from their hoodlum students. It is they, she claims, who are at fault for eliminating the offenders from their populations in the interest of educating the other students and their safety.

Rather than acknowledge that the same behavior that puts the students at odds with the school is what later leads them to a jail or prison sentence, Lynch promotes the nonsensical proposition that if the schools only let the bad kids get away with what they’re doing a little more, they’d have a chance to develop normally.

Lynch notes that she’s in agreement with her communist comrades, the Education Secretary, Arne Duncan and the Secretary of Labor, Tom Perez, both of whom are big government advocates purposely placed into those positions to advance the agenda.

She cutely identifies the problem as the “School to Prison Pipeline,” attacking the schools which must deal with undisciplined criminals-in-the-making as the problem rather than one of the first institutional victims who must deal with the parasitic horde of young, entitled anarchists.

Via: UFP News

Clinton is banking on the Obama coalition to win

Hillary Rodham Clinton is running as the most liberal Democratic presidential front-runner in decades, with positions on issues from gay marriage to immigration that would, in past elections, have put her at her party’s precarious left edge.

The moves are part of a strategic conclusion by Clinton’s emerging campaign: that it can harness the same kind of young and diverse coalition as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012, bolstered by even stronger appeal among women.

Her approach — outlined in interviews with aides and advisers — is a bet that social and demographic shifts mean that no left-leaning position Clinton takes now is likely to hurt her when she makes her case to moderate and independent voters in the general election next year.

The strategy relies on calculations about the 2016 landscape, including that up to 31 percent of the electorate will be Americans of color — a projection that may be overly optimistic for her campaign. It factors in that a majority of independent voters already support same-sex marriage and the pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants that Clinton endorsed this month.

The game plan also hinges on a conclusion by Clinton strategists that the broad appeal of issues such as paid family leave, a higher minimum wage and more affordable college will help outweigh any concerns about costs.

Via: Washington Post

Large GOP field has party leaders anxious about their chances in ’16

DES MOINES — To take back the White House after eight years in the political wilderness, Republicans think they must soften their image and expand their appeal in particular to women and Latino voters. As Jeb Bush, a leading presidential contender, puts it, “We’re going to win if we show our hearts.”

But the GOP’s strategic imperative is running headlong into its structural reality.

Party officials are growing worried about a wide-open nominating contest likely to feature a historically large and diverse field. At best, they say, the Republican primaries will be a lively showcase of political talent — especially compared with the relative coronation taking shape on the Democratic side. But officials also acknowledge just how risky their circumstance is for a party that hasn’t put on a good show in a long time.

With no clear front-runner and Bush so far unable to consolidate his path to the nomination — his fumbles over the Iraq war and his brother’s legacy further exposed his vulnerabilities — the GOP’s internecine battle could stretch well into the spring of 2016.

This could cost presidential aspirants tens of millions of dollars; pull them far to the right ideologically, from hot-button social issues to foreign policy; and jeopardize their general-election chances. And in such a muddled lineup — officials are planning to squeeze 10 or more contenders onto the debate stage — candidates will be rewarded for finding creative ways to gain notice.

Via: Washington Post

MSNBC PANELIST: HILLARY ‘NOT MITT ROMNEY,’ HUMBLE ORIGIN MAKE CLINTONS SUITED TO REP MIDDLE CLASS

On Saturday’s “Up with Steve Kornacki” on MSNBC, network regular Angela Rye, the CEO and principal of IMPACT Strategies, argued that despite the massive amount in earnings Bill and Hillary Clinton have compiled over the years in speaking fees, they still will be able to related to middle class values.

“I think part of this is we really do have to remember where these people came from,” Rye said. “Hillary Clinton is not Mitt Romney. This is a women who as soon as she finished law school worked for Marian Wright Edelman for the children’s defense fund. This is someone who fought for health care when it wasn’t a popular notion, and even now arguably not so popular with Jeb Bush’s Apple watch app idea. But I think that even still, we’re talking still about folks who are not that far off from representing middle class values, middle class people and folks who are striving to get into the middle class.”

“I do agree with you that they have epically failed in talking about their financial situation,” Rye continued. “And I hope that as time goes on they’re very clear about how to speak about this.”

Via: Breitbart