Hillary Rodham Clinton announced on Sunday that she would seek the presidency for a second time, establishing herself as the likely 2016 Democratic nominee, according to The New York Times.
“I’m running for president,” she said with a smile near the end of a two-minute video released just after 3 p.m. Sunday.
“Everyday Americans need a champion. And I want to be that champion,” Mrs. Clinton said. “So I’m hitting the road to earn your vote — because it’s your time. And I hope you’ll join me on this journey.”
This is how it works. Politicians need money to run a campaign to get elected to office.
If a politician doesn’t do what the big donors want, the donor will withhold campaign donations – not only from you, but from your colleagues as well.
According to Reuters, big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren’s call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in “symbolic” protest, sources familiar with the discussions said.
That’s right – they didn’t say “withholding donations to Senator Warren.”
They said “withholding donations to Senate Democrats.” People who may not even be connected to Senator Warren, but are simply in the same party.
It is a ruthless move – typical of American politics.
Representatives from Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party’s tone toward Wall Street, sources familiar with the discussions said this week.
Are these the same Wall Street banks that made dangerous investments during the 2000’s, allowing people to take out mortgages, knowing that many would not be able to pay it back?
Reuters called it a “symbolic” move, because the amount of money banks can contribute directly to a Senator’s campaign is limited to $15,000.
However, Reuters ignored the fact that organizations can donate money to third-party organizations that then contribute to a campaign.
“Bank officials said the idea of withholding donations was not discussed at a meeting of the four banks in Washington but it has been raised in one-on-one conversations between representatives of some of them,” states Reuters. They said there was no agreement on coordinating any action, and each bank is making its own decision.
Are these the same Wall Street that later asked for government bailouts?
Secretary of State John Kerry called the open letter penned by 47 Republican senators to Iran’s leaders over negotiations on that country’s nuclear program “absolutely calculated,” “unprecedented” and “unthought-out,” states the Washington Post.
“It’s false information and directly calculated to interfere and basically say, ‘Don’t negotiate with them, you’ve got to negotiate with 535 members of Congress.’ That’s unprecedented. Unprecedented,” Kerry said in an interview Sunday with CBS News.
Congressional Republicans have thrown rules out the window.
Will the strategy yield rewards? CNN looks at some of Washington’s “rules.”
A number of Republican senators are souring on the open letter 47 Republicans sent condemning the nuclear negotiations with Iran, according to MSNBC.
Democrats, of course, were angry over the letter, and roundly criticized it. They argued that it undermined the president and hurt the negotiations with Iran.
Arizona Republican Senator John McCain said on Tuesday night he wasn’t sure it was the best way to handle the situation.
“Maybe that wasn’t the best way to do that, but I think the Iranians should know that the Congress of the United States has to play a role in whether an agreement of this magnitude,” he said of the letter, according to MSNBC.
Republican Senator Bob Corker, chair of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee pushed back against the letter in an interview with The Daily Beast.
“I didn’t think it was going to further our efforts to get to a place where Congress would play the appropriate role that it should on Iran,” he said. “I did not think that the letter was something that was going to help get us to an outcome that we’re all seeking, and that is Congress playing that appropriate role.”
Arizona’s Republican Senator Jeff Flake said: “I just didn’t feel that it was appropriate or productive at this point. These are tough enough negotiations as it stands, and introducing this kind of letter, I didn’t think would be helpful,” he said.
New York’s Rep. Peter King, a hawkish Republican, said Tuesday he didn’t “know if I would have signed the letter. I don’t trust the president on this, quite frankly, though I don’t know if I’d go public with it to a foreign government,” he said.
“A group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they sign with President Barack Obama’s administration won’t last after Obama leaves office.
CNN states the letter was addressed to “the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Bloomberg:
“Organized by freshman Senator Tom Cotton and signed by the chamber’s entire party leadership as well as potential 2016 presidential contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the letter is meant not just to discourage the Iranian regime from signing a deal but also to pressure the White House into giving Congress some authority over the process.
“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system … Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement,” the senators wrote. “The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”
CNN states that Hillary Clinton criticized the Senate Republicans who wrote the letter aimed at undermining the President’s nuclear negotiations with Iran. She called the move “out of step with the best traditions of American leadership.”
The Democratic front-runner for the 2016 presidential campaign told reporters at the United Nations on Tuesday that “one has to ask, what was the purpose of this letter?”
“There appear to be two logical answers,” Clinton said, according to CNN. “Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians or harmful to the commander-in-chief in the midst of high-stakes international diplomacy. Either answer does discredit to the letter’s signatories.”
How awkward that fellow Americans forced her to defend the situation.
The letter warns Iran’s leaders that a lasting nuclear deal would have to be approved by Congress.
Senator Tom Cotton, who spearheaded the letter, said Tuesday he’d welcome “even Hillary Clinton,” the presumptive Democratic presidential front-runner, to sign the letter. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a potential 2016 contender, signed the letter Tuesday, according to his spokeswoman.
“I suspect she might have reservations about this ill-fated nuclear deal with Iran as well,” Cotton said to CNN’s News Day.
Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham are among the 47 Republicans who signed Cotton’s letter.
In the video above, Cenk Uygur of TYT Network gives a scathing rebuttal.
Republicans caved in on funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter of Majority Report discuss whether Democrats are now “showing spine.”
The New York Times:
“The fight over funding the Department of Homeland Security that began with Republicans thundering about a lawless president abusing power to change immigration policy ended with a quiet capitulation Tuesday when the House voted to fund the agency and avert a partial shutdown.”
The New York state government ordered e-mails to be deleted during corruption probe.
The IB Times reports, in a memo obtained by Capital New York, state officials announced that the mass purging of email records is beginning across several state government agencies.
The timing of the announcement, which is following through on a 2013 proposal, is worth noting: The large-scale destruction of state documents will be happening in the middle of a federal investigation of public corruption in New York.
As IB Times reports, earlier this month in New York, a fire tore through a warehouse full of old government records from the bygone paper era.
Many probably felt relief in thinking that such records are now often digitized and therefore not at risk of being accidentally incinerated. Yet as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is showing this week, many records are vulnerable to another form of destruction: deliberate deletion.
“The Cuomo administration has now fully implemented a policy of automatically deleting emails of rank-and-file state workers that are more than three months old, resulting in an effective purge of thousands of messages in recent days, according to Capital.
“According to memos obtained by Capital, mass deletions began Monday at several state agencies after officials finished consolidating 27 separate email platforms to a single, cloud-based system called Office 365. It lets I.T. administrators purge any older messages, and can be set up to do so each day.”
Cliff Schecter joins Majority Report to discuss the fight over the filibuster, which is not just between Democrats and Republicans, but also between House Republicans and Senate Republicans.
31 of the 50 governors are Republicans. 69 out of the 99 state legislative bodies (Houses and Senates) are Republican dominated.
The state legislators have been able to expedite one of their top policy priorities – restricting access to abortion – given the historic gains they made in last year’s midterm elections, according to the Huffington Post.
State lawmakers have raced to file bills concerning all aspects of the procedure. As of last week, lawmakers have introduced more than 100 bills regulating abortion in more than half of all states, according to data from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.”
This is how it works. Politicians need money to run a campaign to get elected to office.
OK, Fine. 