In 1992, the lone socialist in Congress, Rep. Bernard Sanders, as he was then known, wasn’t wild about the centrist Arkansas Governor running for president, and he let it be known publicly. “Bernie was the founder of the progressive caucus. Clinton was the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, the whole point of which was to exterminate the progressives,” said Bill Curry, who served as counselor to the president during Clinton’s first term. “They weren’t even two ships passing in the night. They were two ships sailing in the opposite direction.”

One of Bill Clinton’s first acts in office in January of 1993 was to appoint his wife to chair the administration’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Sanders had convened his own, much-smaller task force pushing single-payer health care for Vermont, and he began trying to pull Hillary Clinton in that direction.

In February, Sanders requested a meeting with Hillary, “to bring in two Harvard Medical School physicians who have written on the Canadian system,” according to the records of the administration’s task force. Those physicians were Stephanie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, leading advocates for single-payer health care.

They got their meeting at the White House that month, and the two doctors laid out the case for single-payer to the first lady. “She said, ‘You make a convincing case, but is there any force on the face of the earth that could counter the hundreds of millions of the dollars the insurance industry would spend fighting that?’” recalled Himmelstein. “And I said, “How about the president of the United States actually leading the American people?’ and she said, ‘Tell me something real.’ ”

WASHINGTON -- Key Democratic lawmakers, led by Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), sent a letter on Wednesday to Senate leaders saying they do not support a new House Republican plan designed to ease the passage of President Barack Obama's trade agenda.

Obama needs Congress to approve a program known as Trade Adjustment Assistance, or TAA, in order to pass his broader trade platform. And Wednesday's letter, from Reps. Bass, G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), makes that goal harder to achieve.

Many House Republicans, for their part, also do not support TAA, deriding it as a wasteful social welfare program. Since the GOP does not currently have the votes to pass TAA, Republican leaders hope to win over Democrats by combining TAA with the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade package that benefits sub-Saharan African countries. The goal is to sweeten the pot for members of the Congressional Black Caucus who support AGOA.

But Bass, Butterfield, Lee and Ellison -- all CBC members -- wrote Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Wednesday urging them to discard that strategy. Bass is considered a bellwether vote in the CBC who can carry much of the caucus with her. Ellison and Lee are among the most progressive members of the CBC, and Ellison has been a vocal critic of Obama's trade agenda.

"AGOA is too important to be used as a bargaining chip to pass unrelated trade legislation," the lawmakers wrote in Wednesday's letter.

The Treasury Department is preparing to announce that they are putting a woman on the $10 bill, as a source has confirmed what appears to be a premature tweet.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will announce Thursday that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing will put a woman on the bill as soon as 2020.

While much of the focus for the redesign was on the $20 bill, CNN reported in March that the $10 bill was also due for a makeover, including the possibility of replacing Hamilton.

The Republican presidential candidate’s column ran from 2000 and 2006 and appears to have cut-and-pasted language from sources ranging from the Washington Post to an Arkansas Supreme Court justice’s opinion to a quote from Bill Clinton.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee appears to have committed plagiarism while governor of Arkansas, cut-and-pasting from an array of sources when writing a weekly column that ran on his official state website.

Huckabee wrote columns between 2000 and 2006 that contain language identical to or closely resembling that in articles by news organizations such as the Associated Press and the Washington Post, the testimony of a state police officer before a House subcommittee, an Arkansas Supreme Court Justice’s opinion, a Yale University brochure, and a Clinton Foundation press release, including a quote from Bill Clinton, among other sources.

(Geneva) – Governments should promote the use of strong encryption and protect anonymous expression online. In an era of unprecedentedly broad and intrusive government surveillance, these tools often offer the only safe way for people in repressive environments to express themselves freely.

On June 17, 2015, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression presented his report on the use of encryption and anonymity in digital communication to the UN Human Rights Council. The special rapporteur recognized that encryption and anonymity, as leading instruments for online security, enable people to exercise their rights to freedom of opinion and expression and the right to privacy in the digital age. The report urged countries to ensure that people are free to protect the privacy of digital communications by using strong encryption and anonymity tools.

“Strong encryption and anonymity are critical for protecting human rights defenders, journalists, and ordinary users in the digital age,” said Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Encryption allows us to preserve a safe, private space for free expression at a time when governments are expanding invasive surveillance worldwide.”

Human Rights Watch and 25 other human rights and media freedom organizations released a joint statement on June 17 urging countries to adopt the report’s recommendations.

Californian voters would soon vote on a ballot measure to ban the recognition of marriages between same-sex couples. Should Clinton speak out against the California initiative, as the two leading Democratic candidates running for president had done? What could Clinton say?

Just four years earlier, Clinton had signed the Defense of Marriage Act, the law that stated the federal government would not recognize the marriages of same-sex couples as valid and states didn’t need to do so, either.

The draft statement was emailed out at 1:57 p.m. that Monday.

Seven minutes later, at 2:04 p.m., Liu stopped consideration of the draft before it could even begin. Instead, Liu proposed, the “unnecessary” and “divisive” arguments provided a better path to pursue for any potential statement from Clinton.

On Monday evening, Feb. 28, 2000, the draft Q&A was sent around to several senior staffers. The draft answers for the president stated that Proposition 22 was “unnecessary and divisive” — and characterized the measure as “mainly an unprovoked attempt to pit one group against another and to engage in the politics of division.”

While naming “white privilege” is an important part of exposing and dismantling structural racism, I can see how the term “privilege” is hard to swallow for white folks on the downside of our economic system. Being marginalized in one power system doesn’t mean you can’t be privileged in another. But this particular form of pushback should not be so easily dismissed as generic white resistance to confronting white privilege. Rather, the resistance I experience from poor and working class white people feels like an important opportunity to check my own class privilege and cross-class competence, as well as to develop either different language or perhaps different techniques to help the language resonate more clearly. Force feeding doesn’t work with anyone, and it gets in the way of building cross-race solidarity.

This race/class conundrum is both ironic and predictable. We know from the excellent tools developed by anti-racism trainers and capacity builders like dismantlingRacismWorks and Western States Center that the whole race construct, from its creation, has been intertwined with class. We know that “white” or “whiteness” is not a biological condition, but was deliberately constructed in order to give people of European descent a common identity against Africans and indigenous people. This was necessary because the men with political and economic power were small in number, and they needed to break up the natural affinity poor Europeans felt toward their oppressed brothers and sisters. By doling out a handful of privileges, including the privilege of believing in the myth of meritocracy, the white elite bought racial solidarity from oppressed whites.

In my opinion, some of our modern-day tools for dismantling racism reinforce this construct to the detriment of us all. An un-nuanced approach to understanding white privilege as it intersects with class dynamics prevents us from building a truly powerful coalition of people of color and poor and working class white people.

Newly minted Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump believes he has a way to guarantee that he’ll win the White House: Oprah Winfrey on the ticket.

"I think Oprah would be great. I'd love to have Oprah," Trump told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an excerpt from Trump's first interview after his Tuesday morning presidential announcement.

"I think we'd win easily, actually.”

Trump previously floated Winfrey, one of the most recognizable people in the world, as a potential running mate back in 1999, the last time he formed an exploratory committee for the presidency. When asked by Larry King on CNN if he has a vice presidential pick in mind, her name came to mind.