DemocratSinceBirth

pwnmom

riversedge

DanTex

Cali Democrat

1 | Hillary Clinton

“Wake me up when the Republicans decide who I have to run against.” – HRC

No 2 and 3.

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A new campaign ad going up this week portrays the Alabama Senator as a fierce opponent of Wall Street bailouts.

"Bailouts reward failure and punish taxpayers," the woman in the new spot, Shannon Riley, owner of One Stop Environmental, says. "You know that. Senator Shelby knows that. Then why is Washington so stupid?"

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The problem is that TARP was signed into law in October 2008 by then-President George W. Bush.

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But here's the thing — TARP actually worked. And it didn't merely save the financial industry from apocalyptic collapse. The federal government put $426.4 billion into TARP, and by the time the program ended six years later it got $441.7 billion back.

That's right. The federal government saved the banks and made money doing so. Really, when was the last time a government program made money?

Washington (CNN)—Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said Hillary Clinton has his endorsement in the 2016 contest, even if his close friend Mike Bloomberg launches an independent bid.

Bloomberg is thinking about entering the 2016 presidential race, sources recently told CNN.

That has some asking if Rendell, a former Democratic National Committee chairman, would break away from his fellow party members and endorse his friend, the billionaire former mayor of New York.

In a recent New York Times piece, Rendell said he might pick Bloomberg over Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist.

But Bloomberg over Hillary? No way.

When President Barack Obama was asked by Politico this week whether Bernie Sanders' populist campaign reminded him of his own 2008 run, the president quickly rejected the notion. “No,” Obama responded. “I don't think that's true.”

While Obama didn't elaborate, former top aides weren't reticent to say they view Hillary Clinton—not the insurgent Vermont senator whose rhetoric has drawn comparisons to Obama—as the natural heir to the president.

“Then-Senator Obama ran for President to tackle longstanding challenges that our country had debated for decades but was unable to resolve. A ‘politics as the art of the possible’ candidate,” Ben LaBolt, a national spokesman for Obama's 2012 campaign, said in an e-mail. “Senator Sanders has been in Congress for decades but hasn't tackled any major longstanding challenges—he's been too busy shouting his point of view across the aisle with few results.”

Jon Favreau, who worked on the Obama 2008 campaign before becoming a speechwriter for the president, said Sanders' campaign “resembles Howard Dean's a lot more than it resembles Barack Obama's.” In key respects, he said, “Hillary is much closer to Obama than Bernie is.”

Obama “campaigned as an idealist in terms of the goals he articulated but a pragmatist when it came to the policies needed to reach those goals. And he had very, very detailed policies that were grounded in pragmatism,” said Favreau, who nevertheless praised Sanders as genuine. “Obama has always believed it's more important to take action that actually makes a difference now and improves people's lives instead of settling for the satisfying purity of moral indignation.”

...Some in the media seem to think Hillary Clinton is new or insufficiently committed to solving this problem. As someone who’s known Hillary for a very long time, that’s an impression I’m happy to correct.

Remember, this is the same woman who spent a summer during law school investigating the working conditions of migrant farm workers, compiling evidence to hold their bosses accountable for their health and safety.

She’s the same woman who, after graduating from one of the best law schools in the world, at Yale, walked right past all the big corporate firms on her way to the Children’s Defense Fund. Her salary was considerably smaller, but she found her reward in serving America’s poorest and most vulnerable.

Of course, inequality in our country isn’t just economic – it has a long history of being racial, too. That’s why Hillary went undercover in Alabama, posing as a young mom trying to find an all-white school for her child to prove that segregation still persisted and to end the tax-exempt status enjoyed by schools that discriminated against African-American kids...

The classified material included in the latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails flagged by an internal watchdog involved discussions of CIA drone strikes, which are among the worst kept secrets in Washington, senior U.S. officials briefed on the matter tell NBC News.

The officials say the emails included relatively "innocuous" conversations by State Department officials about the CIA drone program, which technically is considered a "Special Access Program" because officials are briefed on it only if they have a "need to know."

As a legal matter, the U.S. government does not acknowledge that the CIA kills militants with drones. The fact that the CIA conducts drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, however, has long been known. Senior officials, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein and former CIA Director Leon Panetta, have publicly discussed CIA drones.

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On Tuesday, Sen. Feinstein, ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, criticized the original Fox News story about the Inspector General's letter as partisan, and said "none of the emails that are alleged to contain classified information were written by Secretary Clinton."