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Has anybody noticed how quickly HUD Secretary Julian Castro has FADED as a possible VP pick for Hillary Clinton? Last year he was considered to be the VP-in-waiting but now we are getting a bunch of stories about possible Hillary running mates, and poor Julian is barely mentioned. I think Julian's fade began with a Politico story a few months ago in which Castro was portrayed as a complete lightweight. Perhaps Team Hillary inspected Julian closely and discovered a Beta Male who would wither in debate with a Republican VP pick. I do know his tenure as mayor of San...

Hillary Clinton is considering selecting another woman as her vice presidential running mate, according to campaign officials. Following her convincing win over her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders in New York last week, she has already begun turning her attention to November's general election. This offers the intriguing possibility of not just the first female party nominee but the prospect of an all-woman ticket. This week, John Podesta, her campaign chairman, told the Boston Globe that women would certainly be on the list of possible vice-presidential candidates: “We’ll start with a broad list and then begin to narrow it. But there...

Jim Donnelly is a registered Republican who is disgusted. His lifelong party, he believes, has done little for anyone but the wealthy, the well-connected, and its own leaders. "I'm a strong Republican and this is the worst I've ever seen it," said Donnelly, 73, a retired factory production manager who lives in Lansdale. "In Washington, D.C., and in Harrisburg, the Republicans are only looking out for themselves. I don't see any Republican I like except for Donald Trump - because he says it the way it is." Donnelly has a lot of company in Pennsylvania. For decades, the state has...

The great white environmentalist sharks smell blood in the water. It’s gushing from mortally wounded US coal companies that the Obama EPA has gutted as sacrifices on the altar of “dangerous manmade climate change” prevention and other spurious health, ecological and planetary scares.Peabody Energy, Arch Coal and other once vibrant coal producers have filed for Chapter 11 protection, shedding some $30 billion in shareholder value and tens of thousands of jobs in their companies and dependent industries. The bloodletting has left communities and states reeling, union pension funds and 401k plans empty, and the health, welfare, hopes and dreams of...

On his Real Time show on Friday, HBO comedian Bill Maher referred to the U.S. military as a "mass murder machine" as he recalled that the reason he likes Bernie Sanders so much is because the Vermont socialist is the only presidential candidate who would argue against building a bigger military. A bit earlier, as he discussed with the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright the possibility of Saudi government officials being linked to the 9/11 attacks, Maher also made a crass reference to Tea Party conservatives -- whom he has mocked in the past as "teabaggers" -- by referring to Muslim...

This month, having lost massively to Hillary Clinton across the Southeast, Sanders commented that the bevy of early Southern primaries “distorts reality.” In other comments soon thereafter, perhaps covering for what was obviously a lapse in political acumen, he clarified that those early states are the most conservative in the country. Not really. And not really. While some segments of the South are undeniably conservative, Dixie is also home to a large and reliably Democratic cohort — African Americans. Many of the most liberal people serving in today’s Congress were elected by Southerners, and especially black Southerners. The reality is...

My unscientific poll of Maryland voters in next week’s Democratic presidential primary gives Bernie Sanders a 100 percent lead in early returns. “I just voted for Bernie Sanders today,” said Thomas Frank, author of several books, including 2004’s best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and this year’s Listen, Liberal: or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? “I advance voted in Maryland. I have my little ‘I Voted’ sticker on my shirt,” Frank told me in an interview this week. Frank spoke with Sanders back in 2014, when he was deciding whether to run for president and whether to...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s effort to close out the Democratic race may be going awry, as a new poll shows she’s in danger of losing California to Sen. Bernie Sanders. According to a new Fox News poll conducted April 18-21, Clinton has the support of 48 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, while Sanders is right behind with 46 percent. That’s the closest margin yet between the two in the state, which awards more delegates to the Democratic National Convention than any other. Clinton holds a substantial delegate lead over Sanders and remains heavily favored to win the...

Sanders, he says, is a "false prophet" who could be as dangerous as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.With Donald Trump putting Mexico at the center of the Republican presidential conversation, the country's former president, Vicente Fox, has gone hard at the GOP front-runner, saying, "He reminds me of Hitler." But Fox, who served as president from 2000 to 2006, has some comparisons for Bernie Sanders that are not much more flattering. "In Latin America, we have a century of experience of suffering from messianic, populist leaders that have broken our economies, that have brought poverty into all of Latin America,"...

t seems a concerted effort is under way to conceal the identity of the Harvard law student who hurled anti-Semitic epithets at Israel's former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during her recent address at the university. During the question and answer session at her speaking engagement, someone identified merely as "the president of a student organization," invoked an age-old anti-Semitic slur, asking Livni, "how is it that you are so smelly?” He then repeated the question: "A question about the odor of Ms. Tzipi Livni, she’s very smelly, and I was just wondering." CanaryMission.org notes that great lengths are being taken...

The chair of the Michigan Republican Party has pledged to vote for Donald Trump at the Party's National Convention. She also happens to be the niece of one of the GOP's most prominent Trump critics -- Mitt Romney. Ronna Romney McDaniel said she hasn't spoken with the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican nominee about her decision.

Blunders on Israel abound in the Bernie Sanders camp. On April 14, Sanders suspended his new national Jewish outreach communicator, Ms. Simone Zimmerman, after just two days on the job. Her sacking followed discovery of her calling Benjamin Netanyahu “an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative a[**]hole,” accusing him of “sanctioning the murder of over 2,000 people,” and presiding over a “brutal military occupation” of the West Bank (a canard I debunk here). In an April 1 interview with the NY Daily News, Mr. Sanders stated that Israel killed over 10,000 Gazans in the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas. He later...

President Barack Obama will host a Passover seder this year, but not on either of the nights it is required according to Jewish custom. A spokeswoman told JTA that Obama will host the seder next week following his return from travel overseas. Obama will be in Saudi Arabia on the first and second nights of Passover, Friday and Saturday, attending a regional cooperation summit.

Just when you think once-prestigious Harvard could fall further from grace, Harvard students hurled anti-Semitic epithets at Israel's former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during her recent talk at the University. Last Thursday, Harvard Law School hosted a panel discussion with guest speakers Dennis Ross and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. During a question and answer session a president of a student organization mocked the Israeli leader, asking her, “How is it that you are so smelly?” When his question drew stunned silence, he clarified his "question." “A question about the odor of Ms. Tzipi Livni, she’s very smelly, and I...

History came on horseback here early Monday morning, with the breathless cries of a rider warning: “The Regulars are just down the road! They’re massing for battle.” Decked in lobster-red, marching up what’s now Massachusetts Avenue and onto the Common, the British soldiers did come, finding a ragtag band of local militiamen standing their ground, unwilling to disperse. The story of what happened next — the shot of unknown provenance, the lopsided battle, the American Revolution — has been told and retold for 241 years. But it was fresh to some of the thousands of spectators and performers at the...

In 8 out of 10 national polls, Hillary Clinton’s favorability ratings are negative by 15 points or more. According to recent CBS and NBS/WSJ polls, Clinton holds negative favorability ratings by 23 and 24 point margins, respectively. A progressive said to “get things done” won’t be able to win the White House with such negative national ratings. In contrast, Bernie Sanders is the only leading candidate with positive favorability ratings, and this has nothing to do with Clinton being more “vetted.” Bernie doesn’t need private servers and speaks to millions of people in open forums; Clinton is the antithesis of...

Last week, President Obama and Vice President Biden held a hastily arranged secret meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen. According to the one paragraph statement released by the White House following the meeting, Yellen, Obama, and Biden simply "exchanged notes" about the economy and the progress of financial reform. Because the meeting was held behind closed doors, the American people have no way of knowing what else the three might have discussed. Yellen's secret meeting at the White House followed an emergency secret Federal Reserve Board meeting. The Fed then held another secret meeting to discuss bank reform. These...

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – As Donald Trump looks poised for victory in New York, he continues to lead with Republican voters on this side of the Hudson as well, according to the latest Rutgers-Eagleton Poll. Breaking the 50-percent mark in New Jersey for the first time since announcing his candidacy last summer, Trump was named by 52 percent of registered Republican voters as their first choice if they had to cast their primary vote today. Ohio Gov. John Kasich has ascended to a distant second in the Garden State, with 24 percent. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz comes in third at...

The United States will push for a two-state peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians until the end of President Barack Obama's mandate, Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Monday, according to AFP. Speaking in Washington to a conference held by J Street, Kerry said attacks like Monday's on an Israeli bus in Jerusalem only underlined the need for a negotiated solution. "Despite the fact that we have spent time and effort to try to get there for these past few years I can tell you that for these next nine months we will not stop working to find...

Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe is not the only thing that isn’t necessarily working in her favor these days. Even less flattering is the popularity of Bernie Sanders, whose campaign -- according to conventional wisdom -- should have been suspended long ago. And now, instead of promoting her vision for America and the world, Hillary finds herself sidetracked into defense mode over the high fees and undisclosed lowdown in her speeches to Wall Street moguls. She’s under threat of an FBI investigation over possible e-mail and server abuses. She’s even had to dodge the protesting rabble at her outrageously pricey celebrity fund-raisers....