Hillary Clinton at a town hall meeting this week at Morris College in Sumter, S.C. (Mark Makela/Getty Images) “Everybody does it,” is an excuse expected from a mischievous child, not a presidential candidate. But that is Hillary Clinton’s latest defense for making closed-door, richly-paid speeches to big banks, which many middle-class Americans still blame for their economic pain, and then refusing to release the transcripts.This raises a few key points.
A televised town hall on Tuesday was at least the fourth candidate forum in which Mrs. Clinton was asked about those speeches. Again, she gave a terrible answer, saying that she would release the transcripts “if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans.” . . . .
Public interest in these speeches is legitimate, and it is the public — not the candidate — who decides how much disclosure is enough. By stonewalling on these transcripts Mrs. Clinton plays into the hands of those who say she’s not trustworthy and makes her own rules. Most important, she is damaging her credibility among Democrats who are begging her to show them that she’d run an accountable and transparent White House.
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I’ve learned that Six Feet Under and ER alumna Justina Machado has been cast as the lead in One Day At A Time, Netflix’s
Latino family remake of Norman Lear’s classic sitcom. The 13-episode
series, from Sony Pictures TV, co-stars Oscar winner Rita Moreno.The multi-camera comedy, written by Gloria Calderon Kellett (How I Met Your Mother) and Mike Royce (Everybody Loves Raymond), revolves
around a Cuban-American family. It centers on Penelope (Machado), a
recently separated former military mom who is navigating a new single
life while raising her radical teenaged daughter and socially adept
tween son, with the “help” of her old school Cuban-born mom and a
friends-without-benefits building manager named Schneider. Moreno will
play the grandmother. A single mom, Penelope is a former Army medical
specialist, now running a doctor’s office and dreaming of medical
school. In the original series, the lead role of the divorced mom was
played by Bonnie Franklin.Royce
and Kellett executive produce the reimagining of the 1975 series
alongside Lear, Michael Garcia and Brent Miller. Netflix had no comment.
Rick
Tyler, former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential
campaign, in Storm Lake, Iowa, in January. (Photo: Scott Bauer/AP) Cruz’s
decision to fire Tyler, who was one of his earliest hires, was widely
seen by the media as an effort to turn the page on the narrative that
his campaign has been engaging in dirty tricks. In the wake of Iowa,
where Cruz staffers misleadingly suggested that Ben Carson was about to
drop out of the race, the Rubio campaign has repeatedly claimed that
Cruz is “willing to do or say anything to get elected,” and GOP
frontrunner Donald Trump has been even more direct, calling Cruz a
“liar” at nearly every campaign stop. The charges seem to have resonated
with evangelicals in South Carolina, where Cruz delivered a
disappointing third-place finish despite the state’s conservative
reputation and favorable demographics.Trump
immediately took to Twitter to crow that the Tyler incident reinforced
what he’s been saying about Cruz all along. “Ted Cruz has now apologized
to Marco Rubio and Ben Carson for fraud and dirty tricks,” Trump
tweeted. “No wonder he has lost Evangelical support!”The
Rubio campaign soon piled on, with spokesman Alex Conant insisting that
it was actually Cruz, not Tyler, who was at fault and using the fracas
as an opportunity to repeat his team’s favorite line about Cruz.“Rick
is a really good spokesman who had the unenviable task of working for a
candidate who is willing to do or say anything to get elected,” Conant
said in a statement, adding that “there is a culture in the Cruz
campaign, from top to bottom, that no lie is too big and no trick too
dirty.”The
Cruz campaign disputed Conant’s accusation. “Marco Rubio’s attacks have
been misleading from the beginning, and we’ll continue talking about
that,” said Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier. “We believe voters are
smart enough to recognize the difference.”What
isn’t clear is whether Tyler’s firing will change anyone’s impression
of Cruz — or whether, in fact, Nevadans will care at all. In the Durango
YMCA gymnasium, television reporters from NBC and Fox News rushed in
front of their cameras to do standup reports about Cruz’s decision,
speculating on the air about how it will impact the race. But most
voters interviewed by Yahoo News had no idea who Tyler was.
In the midst of Apple’s legal battle with the FBI, there has been no shortage of tech leaders who have come out and applauded Apple’s position on user privacy and its refusal to help the FBI bypass the iPhone’s security measures. From Sundar Pichai
and Jack Dorsey to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it almost seems as if
Tim Cook’s public letter last week has unified large segments of the
tech community behind a common cause.But
not every tech leader and luminary necessarily sees things from Apple’s
point of view. So while Tim Cook maintains helping the FBI would set a
dangerous precedent, Microsoft founder Bill Gates begs to differ.DON’T MISS: Galaxy S7 vs. iPhone 6s: The 5 most important ways Samsung outshines AppleDuring a recent interview with the Financial Times,
Gates challenged Tim Cook’s assessment that helping the FBI access the
San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone would be akin to establishing a backdoor
that would wreak havoc on user privacy.“This
is a specific case where the government is asking for access to
information,” Gates explained. “They are not asking for some general
thing, they are asking for a particular case. It is no different than
[the question of] should anybody ever have been able to tell the phone
company to get information, should anybody be able to get at bank
records. Let’s say the bank had tied a ribbon round the disk drive and
said ‘don’t make me cut this ribbon because you’ll make me cut it many
times’.”In a similar vein, FBI director James Comey recently emphasized that
the software solution the FBI is seeking is narrow in scope and that
the agency doesn’t “want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master
key loose on the land.”Apple of course doesn’t quite see things that way. In an FAQ published
on Apple’s website on Monday, the company specifically addressed the
argument raised by Gates, Comey and others who believe Apple should
accommodate the FBI’s demands.In
the physical world you can destroy something and it’s gone. But in the
digital world, the technique, once created, could be used over and over
again, on any number of devices.Law enforcement agents around
the country have already said they have hundreds of iPhones they want
Apple to unlock if the FBI wins this case. In the physical world, it
would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of
millions of locks. Of course, Apple would do our best to protect that
key, but in a world where all of our data is under constant threat, it
would be relentlessly attacked by hackers and cybercriminals.
Gov. John Kasich of Ohio addresses a town hall event in Fairfax, Va., on Monday. (Photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols tried to downplay the governor’s comments.“John Kasich’s campaigns have always been homegrown affairs,” Nichols said in a statement to NBC News.
“They’ve literally been run out of his friends’ kitchens, and many of
his early campaign teams were made up of stay-at-home moms who believed
deeply in the changes he wanted to bring to them and their families.
That’s real grassroots campaigning, and he’s proud of that authentic
support. To try and twist his comments into anything else is just
desperate politics.”Kasich himself later apologized.“Sure,
I’m sorry,” Kasich told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Anybody who’s offended, of
course. I’m not — look. Of course, I’m more than happy to say I’m sorry
if I offended somebody out there, but it wasn’t intended to be
offensive.“"Sometimes
when you operate on the high wire without a net, you’ll fall off and
not say things exactly the way you want to,” he said. “But let me be
clear: The beginning of my campaign for public office, I did town halls.
Except they were in people’s homes. They were at breakfast tables, they
were during — at evening when we had coffee, and I recruited people.
And I want to be clear: We had a lot of women that played a major role
in my political campaign.”On this point, Kasich appears to be right. In
1978, when Kasich mounted his state senate run, just 33 percent of
women aged 16 to 64 worked full-time in the United States, according to a survey published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2013, that figure was over 53 percent.And
women continue to volunteer at a higher rate than men “across all age
groups, educational levels and other major demographic
characteristics,” according to a BLS report released last year. About 28 percent of women volunteered in 2014, the survey found, compared to 22 percent of men.Still, it’s not the first time the Ohio Republican’s tongue has gotten him into trouble this cycle.
(Photo Illustration: Yahoo News, photos: AP, Robert F. Bukaty/AP)In
the latest sign that hedge fund gurus have little influence over the
political marketplace, Wall Street billionaire Steven Cohen and his wife
pumped another $2 million into a super-PAC backing Chris Christie’s
presidential candidacy less than three weeks before the New Jersey
governor flamed out in the New Hampshire primary, according to newly
filed campaign finance reports.The
Jan. 22 contributions by Cohen and his wife, Alexandra Cohen, to the
pro-Christie super-PAC, America Leads, amounted to 55 percent of the
$3.6 million raised by the group last month, the reports show. The fresh
contributions brought to $6 million the amount the Cohens had invested
in America Leads over the past year in an effort to elect Christie
president, making the couple by far the largest bankrollers of his
failed candidacy.The role of Cohen was highlighted in a recent Yahoo News article
disclosing that the hedge fund kingpin had principally financed an
America Leads TV ad during the New Hampshire primary deriding rival John
Kasich as a one-time “Wall Street banker.” This would seem an ironic
line of attack, given that Cohen was long one of the most well-known and
controversial figures on Wall Street and, in recent years, the focus of
an insider trading investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney in
New York, Preet Bharara.The
investigation resulted in Cohen’s now defunct firm, SAC Capital, paying
a $1.8 billion fine and, just last month, shortly before his latest
six-figure contribution, reaching a final settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that bans him from investing money for others until 2018.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz campaigns Feb. 21 in Pahrump, Nevada (Photo: John Locher/AP)LAS VEGAS — Donald Trump has led the GOP field in every single poll taken in Nevada since he entered the race last June
, often by as many as 20 percentage points. And after his resounding
victory in South Carolina, the tinsel-haired mogul is the heavy favorite
to win yet again when Nevada Republicans come out to caucus on Tuesday.But
as recent back-to-back visits to the neighboring Las Vegas headquarters
of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz made clear, neither campaign seems
particularly concerned about Trump — or any of the other Republican
candidates — in the final days of the Silver State contest. They’re far
more focused on each other.That’s
because both camps believe that with Trump coasting on his celebrity,
as usual, they can reshape the results and beat expectations on Caucus
Night by quietly, methodically mastering the unglamorous work of getting
out the vote. Their thinking is that in a state where the polling is particularly unreliable,
the process is particularly chaotic, and the turnout is particularly
low, the ground game could have bigger effect than anywhere else.“Oh,
you have to see this,” a gray-haired Rubio volunteer with a thick
Southern accent told Yahoo News, gesturing toward her laptop. On the
screen was a picture of Cruz’s louche, smirking face superimposed on the
body of a naked man lounging in a rubber-duck-filled bathtub — a cheeky
response, posted online by a Rubio fan, to the Cruz campaign’s poorly photoshopped image of Rubio shaking hands with President Obama.“He has all his ducks in order!” the volunteer chirped. “Isn’t that hilarious?”An
hour later at Cruz HQ, which is tucked into somewhat seedy strip mall a
few doors down from a shop selling vaporizers and bongs, staffers could
barely contain themselves when a reporter mentioned that he had just
visited Rubio’s command post in the fancier office complex one block
west on Tropicana Avenue.“How
many people were there?” snapped Matthew Bell, a field representative
for Cruz. “As many as we have here?” Told that the number of Rubio
volunteers — about a dozen — matched the number of Cruz volunteers, Bell
looked deflated.The
mutual obsession makes perfect sense. Early on, Jeb Bush, who suspended
his campaign Saturday after a distant fourth place finish in South
Carolina, built what was widely considered the best operation here; the
consultant who was running his campaign, Ryan Erwin, led Mitt Romney to
caucus victories in both 2008 and 2012. As Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison,
Rubio’s Nevada campaign chairman, told Yahoo News, “Technically, Bush
did everything right.” And yet the latest polls, taken before Bush
dropped out, showed him in last place locally, behind even Ben Carson and John Kasich.Carson
and Kasich remain in the race, but neither is poised to make much of an
impact. Like Bush, Carson was on the ground early, but he’s been losing
steam for months, and his last-place showing in the Palmetto State
won’t help. And Kasich isn’t even visiting Nevada between now and Caucus
Day.That
leaves Cruz and Rubio. With Trump appearing to hold a sizable lead —
and with the two young senators from Florida and Texas having just
finished neck-and-neck in South Carolina — the battle for second place
will likely be the marquee event Tuesday night.
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For a team of champions to go through what we have this year even I can’t explain.Those improved performances will only come with a less rigid midfield pairing. Either Mikel or Matic has to be sacrificed in the name of Chelsea’s season.
Things have been better recently, but we’re still not winning games quite as we used to. No one can put his finger on what’s happened at Chelsea.
[…] I’ve never been one to deliver speeches in the dressing room, like a John Terry, Frank Lampard or [Didier] Drogba, but I’ve always tried to lead in my own way on the field: demanding the ball, trying to make a difference. The day I’m 100 per cent again, I’m convinced Chelsea will perform better too.
