At Saturday night’s second Democratic presidential debate, just a day after ISIS launched horrific coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris, moderator and Slate political columnist John Dickerson asked Bernie Sanders a straightforward question: “Sen. Sanders, you said you want to rid the planet of ISIS. In the previous debate you said the greatest threat to national security was climate change. Do you still believe that?”

Sanders didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely.”

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Sanders’ response is gutsy for a challenger that’s recently seen his polling numbers slip to frontrunner Hillary Clinton. But it’s also correct.

Even though the wounds in Paris are still very fresh after Friday’s attacks, Sanders appropriately used this moment to highlight the current and future global tragedies that unmitigated climate change will surely cause. A landmark study earlier this year provided convincing evidence that a multiyear drought linked to global warming helped spark the catastrophic Syrian war, which helped give rise to ISIS. The Pentagon has consistently called climate change a “threat multiplier.” “If we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say,” Sanders said at tonight’s debate, “you're going to see all kinds of international conflict.”

In just two weeks, more than 100 heads of state will gather in Paris to negotiate the world’s first global agreement on climate change. Their job, in the aftermath of the tragic attacks, has never been more important.
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Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley attacked Hillary Clinton on Thursday for using the term illegal immigrants instead of undocumented at a campaign event, and implied the front-runner for the Democratic nomination has been disingenuous in her support for immigration reform.

O’Malley made his remarks in an interview on KLRU’s Overheard With Evan Smith in Austin, where he is seeking to build support among Latinos for his candidacy.

“Before one audience, she will talk about immigration reform and the need for it,” O’Malley said. “Before another audience, she’ll use the term illegal immigrants and boast about having voted to build a wall and barbed-wire fence.”

He was referring to remarks Clinton made on Monday while campaigning in New Hampshire at a town hall, where a voter asked Clinton what she would do to secure the border with Mexico. (O’Malley prefers the term new American.)
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"‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle"

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton drew a foreign policy line between herself and President Obama in an interview this week, saying the President should have assisted Syrian rebels early in the bloody three-year conflict there, and issuing a dig at his Administration’s minimalist doctrine.

The Obama Administration’s wariness about assisting rebels out of fear that aid would fall into the hands of extremists was misguided and ineffectual, Clinton said in an interview with the Atlantic, and allowed for the rise of Islamic extremists who are now threatening to take over wide swaths of Iraq.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad — there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle — the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

Clinton also criticized Obama’s foreign policy mantra on careful American foreign involvement, using a less foul-mouthed version of a doctrinal phrase that began emerging from the White House earlier this year. “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Clinton said.

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CBS NEWS September 22, 2015, 12:01 AM
Hillary Clinton still wouldn't give up on training Syrian rebels

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton advocated early on for training and equipping moderate Syrian rebels to help fight Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. At that time, near the end of summer 2012, the president disagreed with her, only to authorize the program two years later after she had left office.
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Clinton wrote extensively about her advocacy for a train-and-equip program in her 2014 memoir, "Hard Choices."
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"There are real risks to such an approach," she said in the book, citing the Afghan rebels the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan armed during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s who later formed al Qaeda.

"But if rebels could be vetted and trained effectively, it would be helpful in a number of ways. First, even a relatively small group might be able to give a big psychological boost to the opposition and convince Assad's backers to consider a political solution," she wrote.

Clinton argued that the U.S. was sacrificing the chance to bring order to the flow of weapons coming to Syria from various Arab states. Those weapons often went to competing armed groups or found their way into the hands of extremists.

The key, she said, was "vetting the rebel fighters to ensure we first weeded out the extremists."

Recently released e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server reveal new details of how U.S. officials worked closely with the Haitian private sector as they forced Haitian authorities to change the results of the first round presidential elections in late 2010. The e-mails documenting these “behind the doors actions” were made public as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

Preliminary results from the deeply flawed 2010 presidential and legislative elections were announced on December 7, 2010, showing René Préval’s hand-picked successor Jude Célestin and university professor Mirlande Manigat advancing to a second-round runoff. The same day, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti released a statement questioning the legitimacy of the announced results.

Behind the scenes, key actors were already pushing for Célestin to withdraw from the race, according to the e-mails. Just a day after preliminary results were announced, U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten wrote to Cheryl Mills, Tom Adams and Daniel Restrepo, all key State Department Haiti staff. “Boulos + private sector have told RP [René Préval] that Célestin should withdraw + they would support RP staying til 7 Feb.” “This is big,” the ambassador added.



“Boulos” here refers to Reginald Boulos, one of the largest industrialists in Haiti and a member of the Private Sector Economic Forum. Importantly, Boulos also suggested they would support Préval staying in office through February 7, but with the election delayed due to the earthquake, a new president would not be able to take office by then. Many had advocated for Préval’s early departure, and during a meeting of international officials on election day, Préval was even threatened with being forced out of the country.

The e-mail also shows that Merten was in close contact with Michel Martelly’s campaign. Protests had already broken out across Port-au-Prince and in other cities throughout Haiti, with protesters alleging that their preferred candidate, Michel Martelly, should be in the runoff. Merten writes that he had personally contacted Martelly’s “camp” and told them that he needs to “get on radio telling people to not pillage. Peaceful demo OK: pillage is not.” Documents obtained through a separate FOIA request have shown that a key group behind the protests later received support from USAID and went on to play a role in the formation of Martelly’s political party, Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale.
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Boulos cites the private sector’s “behind the doors actions” as having “played a major role” in getting the elections “back on track” by getting Préval to “request the OAS mission, by publicly denouncing the results of the 1st round, and as late as yesterday morning (3 hours meeting with Preval) by convincing him to drop the idea of annulment of the elections.” Boulos boasted: “Everyone in the diplomatic circles and among the Haitian political leaders will confirm the role played by the Private Sector Economic Forum over the past 6 months.”

Boulos also requested that the U.S. continue its support for him and for other Haitian business elites. “We need your support to continue to build a strong and ethical private sector,” he wrote. Boulos’ commitment to building an ethical private sector is questionable, to say the least. During the 1991-1994 coup d’État, Boulos ran a USAID-funded clinic in Cité Soleil which was accused of collaborating with FRAPH, a paramilitary death squad responsible for many killings in the slum. More recently, in January 2006, following the 2004 coup against Haiti’s democratically elected government, Boulos was among a group of Haitian elites who lobbied the U.S. embassy to pressure U.N. troops to conduct assaults on Cité Soleil, and “for more ammunition for the police” to do likewise, which the U.S. charge d’affaires noted would “inevitably cause unintended civilian casualties.” A State Department cable notes: “Boulos began reading off a specific list of needed ammunition …” (The charge, Timothy Carney, green lighted the request, as WikiLeaked cables reveal, and as we discuss in the new book, “The WikiLeaks Files.”)
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Gloria Bromell Tinubu (born February 22, 1953 in Georgetown County, South Carolina) is an applied economist, educator,[1] and political figure. She served on the Atlanta City Council and as a member of the Georgia State Assembly, as well as running as a candidate for Mayor of Atlanta.

Having returned to South Carolina, she entered state politics. In 2012, she ran as a Democrat for Congress in South Carolina's newly established 7th congressional district; she had won the Democratic primary for the district seat with 73% of the votes.[2] She is the first African-American woman in South Carolina to win her party's nomination for Congress.[3]

An unprecedented wave of action is sweeping across 120 college campuses today. Participants in the nationwide “Million Student March” are uniting around three demands: tuition-free public colleges and universities, cancellation of $1.3 trillion in student debt, and a $15 an hour minimum wage for all campus workers. Here are some live updates from campuses across America participating in the historic first-ever national day of action for free college.

The Million Student March at the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus swelled to several hundred this afternoon. This video shows the size of the crowd as they gathered in front of Campbell Hall:
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Hundreds of students took over the Temple University campus in Philadelphia this afternoon. They were later joined by students from Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia campus for a march on city hall:
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At the University of Texas’ main campus in Austin, several hundred students walked out:
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Elsewhere in Texas, the Texas State University campus in San Marcos saw students channeling the South African student movement that recently succeeded in defeating a double-digit tuition hike scheduled to take effect the following academic year, chanting: “Fees must fall!”
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