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WASHINGTON — A Twitter post recently caught the eye of Bill McKibben, the environmental advocate and godfather of the Keystone XL pipeline protests. It included an image from “The Simpsons” showing Homer and his family basking in mountains of cash in their living room, followed by a report on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearing at a fund-raiser with a lobbyist from the Keystone fight. Mr. McKibben’s environmental organization, 350.org, has been trying to raise awareness about the ties it sees between lobbyists for the oil pipeline and former aides to Mrs. Clinton. He promptly shared the post with his 150,000 Twitter...

http://media.salon.com/2015/05/hillary_warren_de_blasio.jpgEarlier this week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with a gaggle of bored reporters and some boldfaced names in the progressive movement, unveiled a “Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality.” Much like the media event that accompanied its unveiling, the agenda is supposed to be understood as a kind of 21st-century, liberal version of the storied “Contract with America,” the PR stunt that, as legend (erroneously) has it, rocketed Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to power after the 1994 midterm elections. As my colleague Joan Walsh reported on Thursday, this backward-looking attempt to lay out a...

By BI: Republican-sponsored anti-sharia legislation which would ensure that Islamic and other foreign laws are kept out of consideration by South Carolina courts is being stonewalled by Democrat panderers who seek to appease Muslim supremacists pushing hard to get sharia law recognized by American courts. Post and Courier A vote on the anti-Sharia law bill was postponed until Tuesday at the earliest after an hours-long debate over Charleston Republican Rep. Chip Limehouse’s proposal. Limehouse has said a law is needed to prevent radical Islamic beliefs from infiltrating state courts.Democrats said the bill showed why the GOP was unfit to govern...

The House Benghazi Committee is making a personal plea directed at Secretary of State John Kerry amid the State Department’s failure to fulfill longstanding congressional requests for information. In a letter sent this week, Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., asked Kerry for his personal assistance in providing documents described in a November 18, 2014 letter and a March 4, 2015 subpoena to the State Department. The requests cover documents and communications related to ten former senior Sate Department officials.It’s another example of a trend in which federal agencies fail to comply with congressional requests on a timely basis–or at all....

The operator of a political website that parodies the presidential hopes of Hillary Clinton has just gotten a lesson in realpolitik and what happens when someone crosses the Clintons. Marinka Peschmann, a freelance journalist and author, has been marketing a number of different buttons and bumper stickers for the “Hillary 2016: Prison or POTUS” campaign on the website Zazzle.com. One of those caught the eye of Clinton-campaign lawyers and is now no longer available.

According to the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton told a group of her fundraisers that she will have a litmus test for her nominees to the Supreme Court (if she should win the presidency): they will have to agree with her that the 2010 Citizens United ruling must be overturned.  In that ruling the Supreme Court held that corporations have First Amendment rights to engage in political speech and to spend money on such speech.  In making her pledge, Mrs. Clinton follows Bernie Sanders, who is also running for president.If Republican critics of Mrs. Clinton wanted to be demagogues about it,...

Ah. It looks like Bill Clinton is in da house: 'Bill Clinton hopes to be Hillary Clinton’s First Man in the White House, but there’s a big ‘if” … if she invites him to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. ”If she wins the election, the chances are 100 percent that I’ll move back,” the former president told David Letterman Tuesday night on “The Late Show.” ”By the way, if I’m asked!” he added with a smile.' Ha-ha! Cracking jokes about cheating on your wife (because that’s what this all refers to of course): hilarious! Oh man, I can’t stop laughing....

The Republicans are once again investigating how al Qaeda won a major victory by destroying the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and killing American Ambassador Chris Stevens. Hopefully, this time they will abandon conspiracy theories and consider the possibility that American stupidity allowed the massacre to occur.

The 2016 presidential election is attracting an unusually large number of hopefuls. The Republicans will probably field more than a dozen candidates and the Democrats, as many as five. Presently, very few of these supposed contenders have a real chance of becoming president. Republicans Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz are long shots. On the Democratic side, that term applies to everyone but Hillary Rodham Clinton.. ~snip~ If you tell them in private, "You do not have a chance to be president," they will point to underdogs who won, such as Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, or front-runners who...

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, addressed a gathering of Iranian teachers on May 6 who repeatedly responded to his address by chanting in unison: “Allah is great! Khamene’i is the leader! Death to the enemies of the leadership! Death to America! Death to England! Death to the hypocrites! Death to Israel!” According to an English-language transcript of the speech published by the BBC, the Iranian teachers interrupted the ayatollah with chants calling for death to America, England and Israel at three points in his speech. “We say that teachers carry out the task of the prophets; this is the...

It was announced over the weekend that on June 7 John Dickerson will replace Bob Schieffer as the host of CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” CBS News president David Rhodes — whose brother Ben is a top Obama official most famous for editing the truth out of the infamous Benghazi talking points — said of Dickerson, “John is first and foremost a reporter — and that’s what he’ll be as anchor of ‘Face the Nation.’ “His work in the studio will always be informed by what he’s learned in Iowa, in New Hampshire, on Capitol Hill — anywhere there’s news.”...

The chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi says Hillary Clinton’s testimony will be delayed until the panel gets all relevant documents from the State Department. “Simply put, the Committee must have the records of communication requested more than six months ago before the secretary’s appearance can be scheduled,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) wrote Thursday in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry. Gowdy's decision throws cold water on the idea that Clinton, a 2016 contender, could appear before the panel next week, as her attorney offered. In a May 4 letter to Gowdy, Clinton's attorney said the...

That the standards of transparency are seemingly higher for an NFL Super Bowl quarterback than for a former Secretary of State and presidential wannabe does not bode well for our republic nor speak well of the state of the so-called mainstream media. But the double standards regarding media treatment of Tom Brady versus Hillary Clinton are many and troubling. We should all be asking ourselves just why there is more concern and angst over Tom Brady’s use of slightly deflated footballs to get a better grip and improve his chances of winning a football game than regarding Hillary Clinton’s use...

A number of foreign donors pledged new support for Clinton Foundation efforts during a conference in Marrakech last week, raising questions about the strength of Hillary Clinton's campaign promise to cut off foreign donations to her family philanthropy while she runs for president. The Kingdom of Morocco was among the foreign entities that committed to new projects at the Clinton Global Initiative event, which drew dozens of big-ticket donors to the country for a three-day meeting headlined by Bill Clinton. Hillary was slated to attend the Marrakech conference before her name was quietly removed from the schedule earlier this year...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is getting more firepower to help with damage control. Politico writes Correct the Record, an outside rapid response and research group dedicated to defending the records of Clinton and other Democratic presidential candidates, is reorganizing so it can coordinate with the former secretary of state’s campaign and devote all its resources to her. Correct the Record is splitting off from its parent organization American Bridge 21st Century, and will register with the Federal Election Commission as a stand-alone super PAC.

The Senate signed a "blank check" when it overwhelmingly endorsed the emerging Iran nuclear deal last week, and Rep. Mike Pompeo thinks the House can do better, he tells Newsmax TV. "We can do a much more robust piece of legislation," Pompeo, a Kansas Republican, said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show." "[One] that really does, in fact, prevent the administration from signing for a deal which lifts . . . sanctions without any evidence that Iran has actually adhered to anything that they've agreed to. "That's what perplexes me . . . They've now signed a blank check ....

This weekend, a dozen Republican presidential hopefuls showed up at the South Carolina Freedom Summit. They were there to court primary voters who will winnow the presidential field next February. Judging from the speeches, it’s going to be an ugly race. What the candidates are selling, and primary voters are buying, is vituperation against people who don’t look, talk, or pray like the Republican base.............. [SNIP of stuff that sounds good to me - Santorum was on fire] ...............Mexicans, Muslims, gays, rats, roaches. Christian superiority, military contempt for the president, and gauntlets thrown down to queer-loving CEOs. It’s going to...

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No one knows how Hillary Clinton will do as president, if she gets the chance. But we do know she is probably the best qualified presidential candidate ever, at least when it comes to checking off relevant boxes. This comes up today because Joseph Epstein, a writer for the Weekly Standard, claimed she would be an "affirmative-action" president. Let's go through her resume:

Unlike the 2014 Little League World Series champs, who lost their trophy because they fielded ineligible players, the New England Patriots are not going to lose their Super Bowl rings over Deflategate. But it will be instructive to see the public reaction over the National Football League’s announced four-game suspension on Monday of Patriot quarterback Tom Brady over the deflating of footballs at the AFC championship game. Amid growing evidence, he couldn’t plausibly scramble his way out of his previous contention that he knew nothing about the incident in the Patriots’ 45-7 victory over the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC...