Tulsi Gabbard missed veterans hearing to surf with reporter

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) missed a hearing on veterans issues in August because she was surfing with a reporter who was producing a profile of the freshman congresswoman, the Honolulu Civil Beat reported.

She later used the video associated with the profile as part of a fundraising appeal.

Gabbard was scheduled to attend a field hearing being held in Honolulu by the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee addressing issues with the Veteran Health Administration. Gabbard was shown leaving the shore at 9:15 a.m. in the video, which was produced by Yahoo News. The meeting was set to begin at 10 a.m.
One of the panelists at the hearing was Wayne Pfeffer, the director of the VA Pacific Islands Health Care System, who Gabbard had previously demanded be fired.

When asked previously why Gabbard did not appear at the panel, the congresswoman’s office had not mentioned that she was surfing with reporter Chris Moody. Her spokeswoman told the Civil Beat, an online news outlet, that the Yahoo News crew had gotten stuck in traffic, delaying the shoot and causing her to miss most of the meeting.



http://thehill.com/homenews/house/219899-report-hawaii-dem-missed-veterans-hearing-to-surf-with-reporter

Thinking They’re ‘Unqualified’ Is A Big Reason More Women Don’t Run for Office

For one thing, there appears to be more self-doubt on the part of these high-powered women. A 2004 report by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox found that of a pool of prospective candidates — lawyers, business people, political activists — men were about twice as likely as women to say that they were qualified to run. Twenty-eight percent of women said they weren’t qualified at all, while only 12 percent of men found themselves lacking in some way. In the pop psychology parlance of 2016, we might note a whiff of imposter’s syndrome in these numbers.

It might not come as a surprise that just as women generally hold themselves to a higher standard in their self-examination before running for office, voters measure female candidates by different metrics than male candidates; there’s a very specific type of scrutiny that women politicians fall under. Women who might run for office seem to intuit that; a 2015 paper from the political scientists Kristin Kanthak and Jonathan Woon found that women are “election averse.” “Women’s entry into the candidate pool increases only if we simultaneously guarantee that campaigns are completely truthful and eliminate the private costs of running for office,” Kanthak and Woon found.

In a memo out this month from Lake Research Partners, Chesapeake Beach Consulting and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, entitled “Politics is Personal: Keys to Likeability and Electability for Women,” suggestions such as “Voters like informal photos of women candidates engaging with children” and “Voters like women officeholders who share credit with their teams, in addition to taking credit as an individual leader,” were on offer.

The memo, of the brass tacks strategy variety, says quite a bit about the line that female candidates must walk. “Women face a litmus test that men do not have to pass,” reads a passage in the document. “Women have to prove they are qualified. For men, their qualification is assumed.”

That’s why Sanders’ statement about Clinton’s qualifications cuts so deep — it seemed to send a volley at the fortress of qualification female candidates build up as proof of their worthiness to the public at large.


http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-calling-hillary-clinton-unqualified-smacks-of-sexism/

Hillary wins Larame County caucus

A ray of good news for our candidate.

Aurora victim's stepfather blasts Sanders over gun views

Lonnie Phillips is filing for bankruptcy because he owes $203,000 to the company that sold his stepdaughter’s killer 4,000 rounds of ammunition over the Internet.

A federal judge threw out his lawsuit against Lucky Gunner, and now the Phillips family must pay its legal fees under Colorado law.

As the Democratic primary race turns to New York, where the gun issue looms large, Clinton will seize upon their story and those like it. The Phillips’ daughter, Jessica Ghawi, died in the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo.
Lucky Gunner was shielded from prosecution under a 2005 law that grants gun makers and sellers immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with their products. Sanders voted for the law, though he’s recently wavered over whether he supports it.

“We don’t have that much money to pay them, and they can take our house,” Phillips told USA TODAY. “Right now we’re living in a trailer traveling and speaking around the country trying to get people to understand how egregious this law is.”

“I don’t think he had any idea of the repercussions this law would cause,” Phillips said of Sanders. “I would like Bernie Sanders to at least apologize to us for the heartache this has caused.”


http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/04/07/bernie-sanders-guns-aurora/82721118/

MCU Supercut - The Road To Civil War (VIDEO)

Sanders supporter publishes “hit list” of superdelegates

A supporter of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has published a “hit list” of Democratic super delegates, which includes the apparent home addresses of several superdelegates, including at least one woman. (Thayer is now claiming that he’s not a Sanders supporter — his Twitter feed suggests otherwise. More on that at the end of this story.)

The Sanders supporter, Spencer ThⒶyer — who uses the anarchist symbol to spell his name — is is urging fellow Sanders supporters to “harass” Hillary Clinton’s superdelegates, in order to get them to change their vote to Bernie Sanders.

The site, called “The Superdelegate Hit List,” includes the names, addresses, phone numbers, and social media accounts of the Democratic super delegates.


http://americablog.com/2016/04/sanders-supporter-publishes-hit-list-super-delegates-including-home-addresses-women.html

The Real Reason It’s Hard to Take Bernie Sanders Seriously on Wall Street Reform

In fact, the problem with Sanders' approach to Wall Street regulation is that he’s too focused on breaking up the banks—so much so that he's pinning his hopes on regulatory schemes of dubious legality, to the exclusion of equally important issues. The Clinton campaign often criticizes Sanders for failing to address the shadow banking sector—the vast network of financial firms that, while not technically banks, act a lot like them, and which played a central role in the 2008 crisis. But even on the issue of the banks themselves, Sanders is oddly myopic.

As Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari recently outlined, there are (at least) three broad ways you can try to deal with the issue of “too big to fail.” First, you can deal with the “big” part and just break them up, either through an approach like Glass-Steagall's, or perhaps by simply capping their total assets. (The latter would probably be more effective, since pure investment banks can get plenty large. Remember Lehman Brothers?) There are advantages to this approach. The failure of a small- or medium-size bank is probably less likely to pose an existential risk to the global economy, and as a side benefit, you might create some extra competition in the market for financial services while reducing the political power of individual institutions (though probably not the financial sector as a whole).

But the biggest problem with just breaking up JPMorgan and Bank of America and calling it a day is that downsized banks are still perfectly capable of taking stupid risks and failing. And if enough of them go bust at once, it can create systemic problems. For instance, the 1980s savings and loan crisis, which involved the failure of more than 1,000 small thrifts, ended up costing U.S. taxpayers some $124 billion and likely damaged the economy. That's why many financial reform advocates—most notably Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig—have argued that instead of shrinking banks, we should make them fail-proof by keeping them from borrowing too much. The most direct way to do that is through dramatically higher capital requirements, which force banks to fund more of their business through things like cash from retained profits and selling stock, rather than debt. (The less your bank is fueled by borrowing, the less likely it is to go bust if your loans and other investments go sour.) Dodd-Frank already raised capital requirements for the largest financial firms, but many think the government should go much further.

Finally, you can also try to reduce risk in the financial markets by simply taxing them, since making it expensive to borrow an obscene amount and leverage up your bets should encourage banks to do less of it. This is basically Clinton's preferred method, and while it might be the lightest-touch approach of the three, the way that financial institutions have slimmed down to avoid Dodd-Frank's regulatory requirements suggests it could be very effective. Plus, it has the advantage of directly addressing risk instead of size. Too-big-to-fail isn't quite such a problem if you don't have to worry about the fail part.


http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/04/06/the_real_reason_it_s_hard_to_take_bernie_sanders_seriously_on_financial.html

Sandy Hook family member wants Bernie Sanders apology over gun stance

Washington (CNN)The daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary School principal who was killed at Newtown told CNN Bernie Sanders owes victims' relatives an "apology for putting the gun lobby above our families."

Erica Smegielski, a 30-year-old Hillary Clinton supporter, tweeted "shame on you, @BernieSanders" Tuesday after he told The New York Daily News he would not have supported the victims suing the gun manufacturers.

"Shame on you, @BernieSanders try living one hour of our lives. Love, the #SandyHook Principal's Daughter," Smegielski wrote, linking to the The Daily News front page, blaring "Bernie's Sandy Hook shame."

Sanders was asked by the Daily News whether family members of the Sandy Hook victims should be allowed to sue gun manufacturers, and he responded, "No, I don't."

http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/05/politics/bernie-sanders-sandy-hook-guns/index.html