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How did Howard Dean go from vivid voice of the New Left to political hack defending Hillary Clinton at all costs? Joe Scarborough called Dean on it today, telling Howard he had become the "New England version of James Carville." Dean, on today's Morning Joe, dismissed the latest Washington Post story suggesting possible financial improprieties at the Clinton Foundation as "a breathless piece of hot air" and, incredibly, Dean said he'd advise Hillary not to address the rising tide of questions. The depth of Hillary's dilemma is reflected in the fact that defenders like Dean are reduced to claiming that...

Jonathan Allen of General Electric Vox wrote a loving paean about Hillary Clinton's speech today at Columbia University which touched on the Baltimore riots. However, what was really notable about his article is what it left out. An inadvertently jarring laugh line which Allen very conveniently skips.  It might have been overlooked by Allen but Hillary's unintended humor has caused a lot of laughter on the Web. We shall get to that but first let us watch Jonathan Allen grow misty eyed over Hillary's speech:

On the heels of the social unrest caused by a string of law enforcement involved deaths of African-American males across the country, today Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for an end to mass incarceration. However, a little more than 20 years ago in 1994, Clinton spoke in support her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, and his sweeping crime bill that would build more federal prisons and “lock up violent offenders so they can never could get out again.” In a 1994 CSPAN interview, then-first lady Hillary Clinton pushed for the stalled crime bill saying, “This bill will put more police...

Clinton recently shifted her position on the issue of same-sex marriage slightly. Last summer, in a testy interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Clinton said while she supports same-sex marriage, the issue "had always been a matter left to the states." In a statement released via a spokeswoman earlier this month, Clinton now said she hopes it would become a "constitutional right." “Hillary Clinton supports marriage equality and hopes the Supreme Court will come down on the side of same-sex couples being guaranteed that constitutional right,” Hillary for America spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod said in a statement to ABC News.

CONFIRMED: Court records show Freddie Gray was receiving a structured settlement from Allstate Insurance and attempted to convert it into one lump sum in early March ———————————————————————————————————————————– EXCLUSIVE: The Fourth Estate has learned that Freddy Gray’s life-ending injuries to his spine may have possibly been the result of spinal and neck surgery that he allegedly received a week before he was arrested, not from rough excessively rough treatment or abuse from police. The Fourth Estate has contacted sources who allege that Freddy Gray received spinal and neck surgery a week before we was arrested, and was allegedly receiving a large...

Facing increased scrutiny following the launch of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, the Clinton Foundation has acknowledged mistakes on its tax returns in recent years. In a blog post on Sunday, Clinton Foundation acting CEO Maura Pally said that the charity will likely refile forms for some years after completing an external review. "Yes, we made mistakes, as many organizations of our size do, but we are acting quickly to remedy them, and have taken steps to ensure they don't happen in the future," Pally wrote. She added, "We are committed to operating the Foundation responsibly and effectively to continue the...

Former President Bill Clinton accepted more than $2.5 million in speaking fees from 13 major corporations and trade associations that lobbied the U.S. State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, an International Business Times investigation has found. The fees were paid directly to the former president, and not directed to his philanthropic foundation. Many of the companies that paid Bill Clinton for these speeches -- a roster of global giants that includes Microsoft, Oracle and Dell -- engaged him within the same three-month period in which they were also lobbying the State Department in pursuit of their policy...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) reportedly plans to use her influence in the Senate to make Hillary Clinton become her type of presidential candidate. In a New Yorker profile published on Monday, an unnamed Warren adviser told Ryan Lizza that the senator "can get Hillary to do whatever the hell she wants." Accordingly, the source said, there's no reason for Warren to challenge Clinton's bid for the White House. "I think she's in a beautiful position right now because she can get Hillary to do whatever the hell she wants," the adviser said. "Now the question is, will Hillary stick to...

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign will be in serious jeopardy if she's challenged by a fellow Democrat, says Bill Kristol, founder and editor of The Weekly Standard and an ABC News contributor. "She's in real trouble the moment a Democratic candidate or potential candidate, elected official, attacks her," Kristol said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV. ---snip--- Kristol, who attended the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas over the weekend, said he was very impressed with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the first Republican to declare his candidacy for president. "The big story of the weekend was Cruz....

Is Hillary Clinton co-opting Elizabeth Warren’s progressive message? Warren has a one-word answer: “Eh.” The Massachusetts senator and liberal hero added to her inscrutable initial response in an interview with the New Yorker: “She’s laying out her vision for the country and she deserves an opportunity to do that.” But the opaqueness of her answer will raise eyebrows about Warren’s role as a Democratic party powerbroker as she continues to put pressure on Clinton from the left. As Clinton turns towards populism to shore up the Democratic base in her run for the White House, her rhetoric increasingly sounds like...

The Clintons are going to wear us all out. Even the patience of Democrats is already beginning to wear thin. As Bill Clinton denies that a certain meeting ever happened — a meeting that resulted in income to the family's foundation that wasn't claimed on their taxes, a dodge that certainly wasn't recorded in emails Hillary Clinton deliberately destroyed — you get the sense that support for the Clintons is beginning to crack. The best Democrats can do is throw up their hands. What difference does it make if all of the above are violations of the ethics and transparency...

In recent days, revelations from the forthcoming book “Clinton Cash” have revealed controversial Clinton Foundation financial deals, some including with the federal government. The revelations have led to a campaign by Clinton allies to downplay the notion of wrongdoing. However, as a video montage shows in 2009, it was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who championed this new “controversial” expansion of public and private sector mergers, which left the Obama administration free to pick so-called “winners and losers” from a pool of Clinton foundation donors. Announcing the new “Global Partnership Initiative,” in 2009 at the Global Philanthropy Forum Conference, then-Secretary...

On the Thursday edition of NBC’s Late Night, host Seth Meyers jumped aboard the Clinton campaign’s push to discredit the upcoming book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer by mocking Schweizer’s background, previous book titles, and chalking the book up to be nothing more than the latest work from “the cottage industry of anti-Clinton books that come out every year.” Dubbed the topic of the latest “A Closer Look” segment, Meyers introducted the book and that it’s been mentioned in the news before making a Game of Thrones reference to go after the GOP: “Now, when a new anti-Clinton book comes...

You might think that the White House would have something of substance to say about the repeated violations of a memorandum of understanding between the administration and the Clinton Foundation that prohibited it from accepting donations from foreign governments while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Wrong! When pressed by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl on Friday about whether the White House was concerned by the Clinton FoundationÂ’s various indiscretions, or even its failure to disclose foreign donations including those from Uranium One, White House Press Sec. Josh Earnest seemed to suggest that they were not (h/t Washington...

Tough-on-crime policies that emphasized arrests and convictions for relatively minor offenses have failed the country, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday, leading to overcrowded prisons and too many black men "missing" from their families and communities. "We need to restore balance to our criminal justice system," Clinton told an audience at Columbia University in New York. Calling for an "end to the era of mass incarceration," Clinton endorsed body cameras for police nationwide to record interactions between officers and potential suspects. Making her most specific policy proposals since launching her campaign earlier this month, Clinton said it's time...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave the most substantive speech of her nascent presidential campaign so far on Wednesday. In her address at Columbia University, Clinton called for a major overhaul in the US criminal justice system. She repeatedly lambasted "the mass incarceration that we currently practice" and overly punitive, "arbitrary" criminal statutes, which she said result in racial discrimination. "There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts. There is...

“It’s time to change our approach,” Clinton said in her first major policy address since launching her presidential campaign earlier this month. “It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration.” Clinton spoke in the days after violence and protests have swept through the streets of Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a spinal-cord injury while in police custody. In a speech at Columbia University, Clinton spoke of protests over policing in Ferguson, Missouri; Charleston, South Carolina; and in New York, and repudiated policies dating to her husband Bill Clinton’s presidency that lengthened...

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, on Wednesday dove into the debate over the death of Freddie Gray, the young black man whose death has triggered days of protests in Baltimore. In her speech at Columbia University, Clinton outlined a broader vision of criminal justice reform. “What we have seen in Baltimore should indeed--and I think does--tear at our souls,” Clinton said. Her speech strove to put Gray’s death in police custody in the broader context of poverty in Baltimore. Clinton reminded the audience that one out of every three young black men in the city are unable to find...

Hillary Clinton's first official foray into the 2016 presidential campaign is raising questions about whether the former first lady, senator and secretary of state can find the same common ground with voters -- and the same success -- her husband did in winning two terms in the White House. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose ability to convey to individual voters an air of personal concern for the issues that affected them and their families -- a campaign technique referred to as "retailing" -- Hillary Clinton's initial attempt to connect with voters at an Iowa coffee house and her stealth visit to...

Hillary Clinton is no stranger to gun control. When she announced her run for the presidency two weeks ago I posted a little round-up of all the comments she has made on the record about her desire for things like mandatory registration, assault weapons bans, and that gun owners are potential terrorists. It seems that she is taking things a step further now, as her campaign has hired the Minnesota state director of the Michael Bloomberg funded gun control group “Everytown for Gun Safety” to manage her Minnesota campaign.