— Bernie Sanders’ campaign expressed concern before Saturday night’s debate about CBS’ decision to put additional emphasis on foreign policy in the wake of the Paris attacks that left 129 dead.

Many expected that Hillary Rodham Clinton would show a command of global issues that the senator from Vermont lacked, further consolidating her status as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

Clinton indeed highlighted her experience, but the shift wound up working to Sanders’ advantage. For the first 30 minutes of the two-hour debate, the former Secretary of State was on the defensive about everything from the Obama administration being caught off guard by the rise of the Islamic State to her 13-year-old vote for the Iraq war.

“Regime changes have unintended consequences,” Sanders said. “On this issue, I’m a little more conservative than the secretary.”

— It was a taste of the debate as a whole, which turned to a far greater extent than the previous meeting on Clinton’s record and positions. With only three candidates on stage, Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley also got more time to speak. In Las Vegas, the candidates were unprepared to attack Clinton on foreign policy. No one even challenged her when she characterized Libya as a success story. This time it was Clinton who had to explain why removing Muammar Gaddafi was justified.
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Lis Smith ?@Lis_Smith

My dad worked in WTC from the day it was built to the day it went down. @HillaryClinton, never invoke 9/11 to justify your Wall St positions

Lis Smith ?@Lis_Smith

Deeply, deeply offensive to families--including mine--that were forever changed by that tragedy.

?@BenJ_Rosenblatt Benjamin Rosenblatt

Deeply offensive to us New Yorkers. Appreciate her work on 9/11 health, but this is insulting.

The top moment on Facebook from the Democratic debate Saturday night in Iowa was an exchange between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton about Wall Street and campaign finance, according to data provided by the social media platform.

"I'm not asking Wall Street or the billionaires for money. I will break up these banks, support community banks and credit unions. That's the future of banking in America," Sanders said during one segment.

Clinton shot back at Sanders, arguing that he "basically used his answer to impugn my integrity."

"You know, not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors, most of them small, and I am very proud that for the first time the majority of my donors are women, 60 percent. I represented New York and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked, where we were attacked. We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild," Clinton said.

Terrorism and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) topped Facebook's list of most discussed issues at the debate. Climate change, Wall Street, Iraq and the minimum wage were also hot topics.
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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.”

-snip-

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."