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Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s dramatic and defiant flight to Israel to protest the U.S. ban on flights to Ben Gurion airport got me thinking. Can anyone imagine Hillary Clinton doing anything so daring, so anti-authoritarian, as that? Has she ever done anything truly shocking and trend-setting? And that brings me to the ideal candidate to take her on from the left: Bloomberg. He has been a Democrat, a Republican and an independent (a man for all voters!). He is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage (much earlier than Clinton was), anti-gun, anti-smoking and anti-trans fat. Although he is a billionaire, he...

Hillary Clinton’s $35 doorstop of a memoir is a flop. It was a best-seller to hard-core Democrats, but her advance is estimated at $14 million, which means Simon & Schuster is taking a bath in the hopes of a publishing a future president. Worse yet, The Washington Post reported that according to an Amazon.com measurement of which electronic books are most-read, Clinton’s book came in dead last among recent political books. Every time people highlight something in a book on their Kindles, Amazon records that data. By that measure, most readers barely started it. “The deepest into ‘Hard Choices’ the...

Though set to retire from the U.S. House after her term expires at the end of this year, Michele Bachmann may not be done with electoral politics. The Minnesota congresswoman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate told RealClearPolitics on Tuesday that she is considering a second White House run. Bachmann made the revelation during an interview, in which she was asked for her view on whether any Republican women might seek the Oval Office in 2016. “The only thing that the media has speculated on is that it’s going to be various men that are running,” she replied. “They haven’t speculated,...

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence would like to ride into the presidency as he has his governorship: On the coattails of his predecessor, former Gov. Mitch Daniels. Unlike his years in Congress, PenceÂ’s governorship has been largely marked, not by forging crucial and substantive policies that reign in the administrative state and advance the cause of liberty, but by a refusal to make waves. In our current climate, that means governing as a technocratic Progressive. So while treating Hoosiers to essentially the stable status quo Daniels earned making tough and politically risky decisions, Pence has been traveling the country, proclaiming his...

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the Republican Party’s bookish former vice presidential nominee, is starting to look like a candidate for the presidency in 2016. In August, Ryan will publish a book with a distinctly campaign-themed title, The Way Forward. On Tuesday, the Federal Election Commission approved of a nationwide book tour sponsored by Ryan’s publisher and the Political Action Committee the Wisconsin congressman founded, Prosperity Action PAC. “The book will address “the state of the conservative movement in America today, discuss how it contrasts with liberal progressivism, and explain what must be done to save what Representative Ryan refers to...

President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty for illegal aliens via the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and other executive orders is a “magnet” for illegal immigration, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News on Tuesday. “All of that is a magnet and a beacon for people to come,” Paul said when asked about Obama’s executive immigration orders during a brief interview outside the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) headquarters. “You can’t have any kind of beacon without securing the border first. It really illustrates what conservatives have been saying all along, myself included: You can’t vote for immigration reform,...

In recent days the Weekly Standard and Washington Free Beacon have brought to light a now-scrubbed recommended reading list for students that had resided on Sen. Rand Paul’s website. Why the focus on a book list, and why was the book list scrubbed? The answer to the second question could lie in the answer to the first: the foreign policy recommendations in the reading list take a variety of controversial stances, suggesting that the U.S. is to blame for the rise of Islamic supremacism in the Middle East, that the “Israeli Lobby” controls U.S. foreign policy to America’s great detriment,...

It seems almost too obvious to mention, but presidential candidates need a clear idea of why they want to be president. In the past few days, Democrats have heard that their still-undeclared front runner, Hillary Clinton, needs time to think about the question. Meanwhile, another undeclared hopeful, Elizabeth Warren, is thrilling liberal audiences with a forceful, point-by-point declaration of the principles that would guide her as president. The contrast is striking. Clinton is offering Democrats her resume. Warren is offering them a plan.

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You can’t exactly accuse someone who just finished a book tour of hiding, but Hillary Clinton certainly is ducking a lot of questions. And that’s understandable, because she would have a lot of problems coming up with answers that wouldn’t hurt her prospects for the presidency. At the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin notes: Maggie Haberman of Politico confirms first that Hillary Clinton is entirely inaccessible to the media and second that none of those denied access thought it important to let the public know Clinton is hiding from questions. Haberman observed, “What has been really striking about Hillary Clinton’s book...

...Rubio (R., Fla.) told NPR Hillary Clinton is “extremely vulnerable.... ...then called Clinton “a 20th century candidate”, saying, “I think she does not offer an agenda for moving America forward in the 21st century, at least not up till now.”

Bill Clinton reportedly has a buxom blond mistress who visits so often when Hillary Clinton isn’t home in Chappaqua that the former president’s Secret Service detail have given her an unofficial code name: Energizer. This is according to Ronald Kessler in “The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of Presidents,” due Aug. 5 from Crown Forum. Kessler is no stranger to the controversies surrounding the Secret Service. He broke the story that Secret Service agents protecting President Obama in Cartagena, Colombia, hired prostitutes, and put the president in jeopardy.

We do not need Hillary or Warren or any career politician. We do not need another leader in debt to big business, financial backers or his party agenda. We do need someone truly independent of all political pressures, capable of resolving all the damage done to this country. The names that come to mind are Ben Carson, Mitt Romney and maybe Ted Cruz. What say you all?

President Barack Obama said Joe Biden would make a "superb" president, but questioned whether his vice president or potential rival Hillary Clinton would want to endure another campaign for the White House, a media report Monday said. Obama, in an interview with the New Yorker, said Biden "has seen the job up close, he knows what the job entails. He understands how to separate what's really important from what's less important. I think he's got great people skills. He enjoys politics, and he's got important relationships up on the Hill (in Congress) that would serve him well." "Joe would be...

When asked just how vulnerable former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is to a challenge from her left, the Acela Corridor’s political class is quick to note that 2016 is not 2008. They observe that the factors which made Clinton vulnerable to a challenge from then Sen. Barack Obama in 2008 simply do not exist today. For example, those grounded political reporters say, the former secretary is wildly popular among Democrats. They cite polling data which shows the former secretary leading her most likely challenger – the sitting Vice President of the United States – often by more than...

Hillary Clinton isn’t likely ever to become president of the United States. In fact, there is a greater possibility than is generally recognized by the Washington cognoscenti that she won’t even run. If she does, though, the barriers she faces will prove overwhelming. Her 2008 campaign was her last good shot for the office, and she failed. Since then, numerous developments have conspired steadily to diminish her prospects. Those prospects are now near zero. This analytical framework holds absolutely no credulity in Washington, where thinking rarely extends beyond the conventional. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Mrs. Clinton’s nomination...

...Obama said Joe Biden would make a "superb" president, but questioned whether his vice president or potential rival Hillary Clinton would want to endure another campaign for the White House, a media report on Monday said. Obama, in an interview with the New Yorker, said Biden "has seen the job up close, he knows what the job entails. He understands how to separate what’s really important from what’s less important. I think he’s got great people skills. He enjoys politics, and he’s got important relationships up on the Hill (in Congress) that would serve him well."

Former President Bill Clinton said his wife Hillary Clinton needs time to think about her message to voters would be is she runs for president in 2016. She "really does need some time to think through this,” now that her memoir Hard Choices has been published, he said in an interview with CNN. "We've reached a point in our life when we think you really shouldn't run for office if you don't have a clear idea of what you can do and a unique contribution you can make and you can outline that," Clinton added. "Now that the book is...

In May, Politico's reporting inside Democratic circles led them to the strange conclusion that the one thing that could sink Hillary's hopes of winning the White House was the press corps. A Clinton insider announced: “She wants to be president; she doesn’t want to run for president...The worst part of running for president for her, clearly, is dealing with the press.” In July, Politico interviewed former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who made some sense of this bizarre-sounding notion. The media has for many years defended and protected and glamorized the Clintons. But Abramson said Hillary expects the...

DETROIT — On the night before her Friday keynote address to a gathering of progressive activists here, Sen. Elizabeth Warren tried to slip into a hotel restaurant for a quiet dinner. But the former law professor has become a liberal superstar, and when a few admirers spotted her walking to the corner of the dining room, they cheered loudly. A moment later, more joined in the applause. Then one urged her, “Run for president!” The next morning at Netroots Nation, where Warren (D-Mass.) gave a fiery sermon for economic populism — “The game is rigged, and it isn’t right!” —...