The South Carolina Education Association Recommends Hillary Clinton for President

The South Carolina Education Association (The SCEA), the largest and oldest professional association in the Palmetto State, announced their recommendation in the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton, citing her experience, commitment to educators, and record of fighting for families and children.

“The classroom teachers, counselors, bus drivers, and all the members of The SCEA are on the frontlines of building a stronger and more prosperous America—and I know it is not an easy job. The educators of The SCEA are shaping our future by providing education and support to South Carolina’s children. I know from personal experience that our teachers make a profound difference in children’s lives. My mother had a difficult and painful childhood, and when she didn’t have enough to eat, her first-grade teacher noticed—and quietly shared her own lunch. Decades later, I am grateful to that teacher every day. From my early days working at the Children’s Defense Fund to my success creating a new teacher recruitment program in the Senate, I’ve stood with educators throughout my career and am proud to stand with members of The SCEA,” said Hillary Clinton.

“The South Carolina Education Association is proud to support Hillary Clinton for president because of her unmatched experience working with educators, students and parents. With decades of experience in working to improve our nation’s schools, Hillary will bolster early childhood education and expand opportunities for our students. As president, she will focus our classrooms on learning and will work tirelessly with our schools to ensure at-risk students stay in school instead of the juvenile justice system. Hillary is a leader who will fight to invest in South Carolinians in both rural and urban areas, and we want her as our voice to create great public schools for each child to fulfill his or her potential,” said The SCEA President Bernadette Hampton, a mathematics instructor and former department chair at Battery Creek High School in Beaufort.


The SCEA is the oldest and largest professional association for educators and retired teachers in South Carolina. Classroom teachers, guidance counselors, librarians, principals, superintendents as well as bus drivers, teaching assistants, lunch room operators, maintenance engineers, clerks and secretaries from pre-K to 12th grade and higher education are members of The SCEA.



http://counton2.com/2015/12/11/the-south-carolina-education-association-recommends-hillary-clinton-for-president/

Poll: Millennials support sending troops to fight ISIS, wouldn't serve if US needed more soldiers

Sixty percent of millennials in a Harvard University survey said they support committing ground troops to fight the Islamic State.

Sixty-two percent of millennials said they “would definitely not join” the fight if the U.S. needed more troops to battle the terrorist group.

The findings are part of the university’s Institute of Politics “Survey of Young American’s Attitudes Toward Politics and Public Service.”

The 60 percent and 62 percent results came following a survey of 435 18- to 29-year-olds conducted soon after the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris.


http://lancasteronline.com/poll-millennials-support-sending-troops-to-fight-isis-wouldn-t/article_f3a74466-a028-11e5-b9c4-bb43dfcf1aea.html

What Hillary Gets (And Bernie Sanders Doesn't) About Wall Street

Clinton’s beyond-the-banks rhetoric, in the op-ed and in the debate itself, is meant to position her as tougher on the finance industry than Sanders, a move that is hard for her to make convincingly—one has the sense that Sanders would strip every last cufflink off every investment banker, if he could. If you agree with the Democrats that Wall Street should be reformed, though, Clinton’s more comprehensive solution better grasps the world of finance today. Not only are Sanders’s bogeybanks just one part of Wall Street but they are getting less powerful and less problematic by the year. “It ain’t complicated,” Sanders said during the debate. But Clinton is right: it is.

To critics, the Problem with Wall Street can be separated into five distinct problems: the Wall Street rich are strangling democracy with money and clout; Wall Street’s inherent recklessness will imperil the economy again as it did in 2008, especially if its financial institutions are “too big to fail”; Wall Street speculators are a parasite on the real economy; Wall Streeters don’t pay their fair share of taxes; and their super-salaries are a shocking offense against fairness in an era of acute income equality. (I work on Wall Street, in private equity, and while I don’t think that I earn a super-salary, I also know there’s no way to justify how much I make relative to a nurse.)

Sanders would almost certainly agree that these are problems. He’d probably add a few more just to make his point. (In the debate, he said that Wall Street’s “business model is fraud and greed.”) Yet his answers seem to consist of a broad personal solution and a narrow policy solution. The main way that Sanders would counter Wall Street power is Bernie Sanders, in all his lovably crotchety, Wall Street-donation-denying, incorruptible Bernieness. But when Sanders discusses how this would happen in policy terms he demonstrates an obsessive focus on breaking up the six largest U.S. banks and reëstablishing Glass-Steagall. His Web site, too, is a hedgehog where Wall Street is concerned, burrowing deeply into his big idea of a big-bank breakup.

Clinton’s fox-like, forty-eight-hundred-word plan for smaller, wider reforms contains so many details that it’s impossible not to quibble with some of them. But their breadth and diversity capture Wall Street’s diffuseness and variability. In finance, there is a divide between the “sell side,” the banks selling financial advice and services, and the “buy side,” the thousands of asset managers—mainly hedge funds, private-equity funds, venture-capital firms, and mutual funds—that sometimes use the sell side’s services to invest money. And if there is a central story of Wall Street since the nineteen-nineties, it has been the stagnation of the sell side and the rise of the buy side, because of technology, regulation, and new profit opportunities.

In the past decade, electronic-trading platforms that connect buy-side investors to one another have cleared out floors of traders and other sell-side intermediaries, leading to developments like Morgan Stanley’s recent decision to lay off twenty-five per cent of its bond and currency traders. Meanwhile, many of the Dodd-Frank regulations introduced, after the 2008 financial crisis, forced sell-side banks to shift in countless and surprising ways to less-risky business lines, becoming less profitable as a result. Dodd-Frank’s Volcker Rule, which severely limits proprietary trading, in-house hedge funds, and private-equity funds within banks, came for the banks at an inopportune time: during the middle of a golden age of new profit opportunities for hedge-fund and private-equity managers. The low interest rates that have prevailed since 2002 have impelled institutional investors, like pension funds and college endowments, to seek higher returns on huge volumes of capital through those funds, which now collectively manage about $7.4 trillion. All of this has unquestionably hurt the sell side. In 2014, the net income of the six large banks Sanders worries about was sixty-nine billion dollars, seventeen per cent below 2006 levels. If you exclude Wells Fargo, whose income figures are skewed by a merger, the other banks’ income was down thirty-eight per cent.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/hillary-clinton-gets-bernie-sanders-doesnt-wall-street

Does Bernie want some cheese with his whine?

The campaign of Bernie Sanders says that there’s been a “Bernie blackout” on broadcast network newscasts, claiming that they’ve ignored him compared to major presidential candidates.

The campaign issued a press release on Friday — “Why the Bernie Blackout on Corporate Network News?” — and cited figures from the Tyndall Report showing that he has gotten just a fraction of the attention Donald Trump has. Sanders has drawn 10 minutes of coverage to Trump’s 234 minutes

The campaign makes the point that Trump draws 20%-30% support among primary voters, the same level as Sanders. But ABC’s “World News Tonight” has devoted 81 minutes to Trump’s campaign, compared to just 20 second for Sanders, through the end of November. Sanders drew 2.9 minutes of coverage on “NBC Nightly News” and 6.4 minutes on the “CBS Evening News,” according to the Tyndall data published by Media Matters for America.

The measurement was of time devoted to stories about the Sanders campaign specifically, so coverage of his performance in a debate is not included. So by that measure, Sanders has probably gotten more center-stage exposure on the broadcast networks’ late-night talk shows than on their evening newscasts. He has appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said that the “corporately owned media may not like Bernie’s anti-establishment views but for the sake of American democracy they must allow for a fair debate in this presidential campaign.”


http://variety.com/2015/biz/news/bernie-sanders-donald-trump-1201659715/

Marianne Faithfull - As Tears Go By (VIDEO)

Is Yahoo in a death spiral?

In January, when Yahoo Inc. announced plans to spin off its $31-billion stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, there was talk of how it would liberate Yahoo to focus on its core business of Internet search and content ranging from news to stock market investor tools to online TV shows.

Twelve months later, Yahoo still plans to split off its Alibaba shares, but in a different way. And the focus no longer is on liberation, but on the possibility of selling off its mainstay business.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company announced Wednesday that it would halt the planned spinoff of its valuable stake in Alibaba, and instead spin off the rest of its assets — including Yahoo.com and its stake in Yahoo Japan — into a separate company.

The reasons for the change are technical and involve tax planning. But bottom line, it means that the troubled company can more easily sell itself to willing buyers, if it can find any.


http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-yahoo-spinoff-20151209-story.html

Why Hillary Clinton had a very good year

One year ago, Clinton was the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, perhaps in the best position any non-incumbent has been in modern times. Yet two potentially strong contenders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Joe Biden, were lurking around the edges of the contest, not exactly active candidates but not far from doing what candidates at that stage do. Nor was it entirely clear yet how strong Clinton’s grip on party actors might be when she stumbled the way all candidates do.

A year later, Warren and Biden are no longer threats. While Sen. Bernie Sanders put together an impressive campaign, he’s about as weak a major opponent as Clinton could have imagined drawing. In the closest similar case, Al Gore in 2000 had to defeat Bill Bradley, who was far more broadly acceptable to the party then than Sanders is now, mainly because most Democrats believe Sanders would be a disastrous general-election candidate.

Meanwhile, Clinton has amassed more support from party actors than any previous non-incumbent in the modern era. A potential threat from the House Select Committee that appears to exist just to do opposition research on her has turned into a bad joke. The summer scandals seem to have died down; they could return, but it’s not clear if voters will care. And her performance in the marathon session in front of that select committee quieted the whispers that her age might be an impediment in her campaign.

Sure, not everything is perfect for Clinton. The economy hasn’t boomed, and Barack Obama’s approval ratings remain mediocre, leaving the general election more or less a toss-up at this still early point. And it hasn't been a good year for her record as secretary of State, particularly her close involvement in Libya policy.

But overall I’d consider her at least a contender for “best year” honors — because locking up a presidential nomination early is an impressive (and underrated) accomplishment. (If I had a “best year” vote, I’d likely opt for Paul Ryan, or maybe Marco Rubio, or there’s always Bryce Harper.)



http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-hillary-clinton-president-good-year-20151209-story.html

Bernie Sanders' Biggest Limitation

This weekend while campaigning in New Hampshire, Sanders wove jabs at the "establishment media" into his usual attacks on "establishment politics" as he made it clear he would not dramatically change which issues he discussed. "Don't let CNN or NBC or anybody tell you what the major issues are," he said to cheers.

His supporters love his consistency and willingness to stick it to the corporate media. Trust in media is at an all time low, so he's clearly not alone. But resistance to discuss issues beyond the ones he's comfortable addressing may help explain why he's had trouble winning over Democrats outside his natural base.

In Baltimore, Sanders wanted to talk about racial justice, which is ironic since the issue was foisted upon him earlier this year by Black Lives Matter activists who repeatedly interrupted Sanders events. At the time, he primary viewed racial inequality through the lens of economic injustice. His campaign eventually fully incorporated the Black Lives Matter message and movement and it remains a key pillar of his campaign. But he seems to be having a harder time doing the same for ISIS.

Sanders says he wants to be able to "walk and chew bubble gum at the same time" - discuss the decline of the middle class in addition to ISIS. But some days it seems he only wants to chew bubble gum.


http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/bernie-sanders-biggest-limitation-n477186

Hillary maintains 39% lead in North Carolina

Things are stable on the Democratic side in North Carolina. Hillary Clinton leads with 60% to 21% for Bernie Sanders and 10% for Martin O'Malley. Clinton led by a similar 61/24 margin on our last poll in the state. If there's a momentum candidate it's O'Malley, whose support has doubled from 5% to 10%.

African Americans are the key to Clinton's dominance in the state. She polls at 79% with them to 9% for Sanders and 7% for O'Malley. Clinton's 49/27 lead over Sanders with white voters isn't all that different from the national picture- it's Clinton's overwhelming dominance with black voters and their prevalence in the North Carolina electorate that makes her such a strong front runner in the state. Those numbers don't bode particularly well for Sanders in other southern states either. Beyond leading across the board racially Clinton also leads with liberals, moderates, men, women, older voters, and younger voters alike among North Carolina Democrats.

“Bernie Sanders won’t be competitive in North Carolina- or the South more broadly- until he can increase his appeal to African American voters,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Clinton’s advantage over Sanders with black voters isn’t that much smaller than the general Democratic advantage over Republican voters with them.”


http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_NC_120815.pdf

Bernie should heed this advice from Pres. Obama

From 2008:

Senator John McCain on Wednesday injected another surprise into his presidential campaign, announcing that he would suspend campaigning on Thursday and seek a delay in this week’s planned debate so that he could return to Washington to try to forge a consensus on a financial bailout package.

“I am calling on the President to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself,” Mr. McCain said in New York on Wednesday afternoon. “It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.”

A short time later, Senator Barack Obama appeared at a hastily called news conference in Clearwater, Fla., and said he agreed “there are times for politics and there are times to rise above politics and do what’s right.” But he said he saw no need to cancel the debate, scheduled for Friday night at the University of Mississippi.“This is exactly the time when people need to hear from the candidates,” Mr. Obama said.

He added: “Part of the president’s job is to deal with more than one thing at once. In my mind it’s more important than ever.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/us/politics/25mccain.html?em&_r=0