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Joe Biden had good reasons to huddle privately with Elizabeth Warren on Saturday at his official residence. The Massachusetts senator may have chosen not to run next year, but her populist rhetoric and agenda dominate the 2016 Democratic contest. Should Biden challenge Hillary Clinton for the nomination, he will need either Warren’s neutrality or her blessing.

Socialist Bernie Sanders isn’t the only candidate pounding the drums of class warfare. Hillary claims “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” attacks high-level corporate salaries, and says that “we have to go beyond Dodd-Frank” in passing laws to rein in Wall Street firms. All of these themes are straight from Elizabeth Warren’s playbook and bear scant resemblance to the centrism that Bill Clinton embraced as president in the 1990s.

But Warren is stoutly refusing to endorse any candidate, so far preferring to use her leverage to influence the entire Democratic field. In an interview on Friday, she told WBZ in Boston: “I don’t think anyone has been anointed.”

From Malmö comes the news that the Sweden Democrats, scrubbed-up neo-fascists who have forsaken the Roderick Spode uniforms, have become Sweden’s most popular political party, commanding the allegiance of a quarter of Swedish voters.

The 25 percent mark is of some interest: It’s about where Donald Trump stands in the most recent Republican primary poll and where Bernie Sanders stands in Democratic primary polls. It’s a little bit ahead of the 20 percent mark, where the Danish People’s party stands, and a little bit behind Nigel Farage’s UKIP, while in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front took 25 percent of the vote in local elections earlier this year. Somewhere between one in four and one in five seems to be, for the moment, the golden ratio of pots-and-pans-banging politics.

For the right-leaning movements, the common issue is immigration. Senator Sanders, a professing socialist from Vermont, may seem like an outlier in this gang, but his views on immigration are substantially the same as those of Trump and by no means radically different from those of Marine Le Pen, even if his speeches are edited for progressive audiences; he charges that a shadowy cabal of billionaires (the name “Koch” inevitably looms large) wants to flood the United States with cheap immigrant labor to undermine the working class: “Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them,” he says, with emphasis on the eternal infernal Them. “Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first — not wealthy globetrotting donors.” Strangely, Sanders protests that Trump is a beastly beast for holding roughly the same views. “All kinds of people,” indeed — not our kind of people.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/democratic-blues-121561.html#.Vdi8_5d1bYi As historians begin to assess Barack Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of […]

If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised.
American Jewry is being tested today as never before. The future of the community is tied up in the results of the test.

If the Jews of America are able to mount a successful, forceful and sustained opposition to President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which allows the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism to become a nuclear-armed state and provides it with $150 billion up front, then the community will survive politically to fight another day.

If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised.

Hillary Clinton’s “inevitable” cruise to the presidency has crashed onto the twin sandbars of the Sanders surge and the FBI’s seizure Wednesday of the private computer server and thumb drives that likely contain classified documents. Thus, it is useful to review her initial statements on E-mailgate. In hindsight, she swaddled journalists in lies.

“I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail. There is no classified material,” Clinton declared at her March press conference.

This was a lie. There was classified material.

Among the 30,490 e-mails that Clinton handed the State Department last December, the inspector general for the intelligence community (ICIG) sampled 40 and discovered that four (or 10 percent) were classified. Of these, two (or 5 percent) “when originated” were designated “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN.”

This information was not just sensitive, such as the date when Clinton might visit, say, Islamabad — which could tantalize the Pakistani Taliban. Rather, this involved such things as satellite images and electronic intercepts. Executive Order 12356 of 1982 specifies that these secrets’ unauthorized disclosure could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” If the ICIG’s sample mirrors Clinton’s other e-mails, some 1,500 could be top secret.

Hillary Clinton’s spinmeisters are working overtime to deal with the latest developments in her ongoing e-mail scandal. They have an increasingly tough road to hoe as the Clinton cover-up begins to unravel.

The FBI investigation of the handling of classified information on Hillary’s personal e-mail account, which she used for all her government business while serving as Secretary of State, is underway. Her campaign announced on August 11th that she has directed her aides at long last to turn over to federal investigators her private server and a thumb drive containing copies of her e-mails. Hillary’s campaign is trying to portray her decision as evidence of her cooperative spirit. This is utter nonsense, considering that she has refused to turn over her server for months to any independent third party. Last March, during a press conference she held at United Nations headquarters shortly after the e-mail scandal first broke, Hillary declared that “the server will remain private.” Moreover, her lawyer David Kendell, who had possession of the thumb drive, said that the server and its backup located at a technology company in Colorado had been wiped clean. If that is true, and the e-mails she has not already turned over cannot be retrieved through technical means, Hillary could be in hot water on obstruction of justice grounds alone.

It is oft-remarked that the Democratic party is less an ideological enterprise than a mere coalition of interest groups. This is certainly true when it comes to higher-education reform, which Democrats reliably approach from the perspective of giving more money to college students, more money to college graduates, and more money to colleges themselves — all three groups, of course, leaning to the left.

The college plan Hillary Clinton announced today is not quite as bad as typical attempts, since it incorporates a few decent ideas from the right and center that did not make it into President Obama’s community-college plan. But it’s not much better.

Clinton’s offer is less aggressive than that offered by her opponents Senator Bernie Sanders and Governor Martin O’Malley: It promises, instead of their four years of free college, two free years of community college and four debt-free years at an in-state public university. But the fundamental structure is the same, and it is the same structure that has helped push college costs to the incredible levels where they are today.

Hillary’s plan is almost entirely silent on controlling the total cost of college.

Why a lot of progressive received wisdom was exploded in Thursday’s GOP battle.

Last week’s Republican primary debates have quickly become a cultural and political phenomenon. Even progressive pundits have been forced to acknowledge the high quality of the Fox News moderators, the toughness of their questions, and the sheer entertaining excitement of the shows. Contrary to the usual soporific political debates, with robotic recitations of prefabricated talking points, this one had fireworks and substance. Let’s hope this new paradigm for presidential debates carries through all the way to next year’s presidential debates.

But there’s another value to the debates. A lot of progressive received wisdom was exploded last Thursday night. First is the notion that Democrats are smarter and better informed than Republicans, who are typically dismissed as badly educated, anti-science, stuck in the racist and sexist past, and tools of capitalist hegemons. The great variety of candidates, the intelligence of their answers (with, in my view, the exception of Donald Trump), the freshness of their ideas, and the range of personal experience and achievements, exploded that cliché, and all contrasted starkly with the other side’s anointed candidate.

Hillary Clinton, an old pol well beyond her sell-by date, cannot stand comparison to the fresh, young best of the Republican field. She is the quintessential Washington insider and operative, without a fraction of the achievements of Carly Fiorina or Dr. Ben Carson or any of the governors on the stage, or a particle of the charisma of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. She is a grotesquely hypocritical class warrior, a denizen of the 1%, as shrewd a financial manipulator and piratical capitalist as the Wall Street fatcats she routinely demonizes––and who contribute to her campaign. She talks only in vague ignorant bumper-sticker slogans like “income inequality” and “war on women.”

Amid the Trump psychodramas, the public has forgotten not just Hillary Clinton’s latest contortions over her emails, but Mrs. Clinton herself. Hillary has assumed the position of a tired vice president in waiting, without any of the perks that might accrue from a lame-duck president to his dutiful VP.

Ostensibly Clinton’s candidacy is to be a continuation of her boss’s eight years. The problem, however, is that for all Obama’s iconic status, the president polls well below 50% in approval ratings. He lost both the House and Senate, and the majority of state governorships and legislatures are now Republican, if not solidly conservative.

His signature legacies — Obamacare, the Iran nuke deal, open borders, and massive deficits — poll poorly. Is borrowing another $8 trillion Clinton’s agenda? Cutting another 25% from defense? No one believes that Obama’s liberal boilerplate — more government regulation, zero interest rates, higher taxes, bigger deficits, smaller defense, more illegal aliens, greater racial hyphenation — is working.

As the U.S. Presidential campaign starts its inevitable ramp up, one issue investors should consider is each candidate’s views on energy especially since energy policy has been consistently important in recent elections.

For all of the talk about clean energy, the reality is that U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have come down primarily as a result of shale gas and oil displacing coal. Solar power is only just now getting to the point where it is cost effective versus conventional fossil fuels, and wind power is a bit further along, but still has a ways to go before it becomes a reliable generation source. Presidential candidates, especially on the left, prefer to talk more about clean energy than the benefits of fracking, but investors need to consider both aspects of energy policy.

On the Republican side, there are so many candidates that the nuances of most individual views have been lost amongst the shuffle. Nonetheless, a few trends do stand out. For instance, from front-runner Jeb Bush on down through the pack, most of the Republican group is skeptical about the impact man-kind is having on the Earth’s climate. Just about all are in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline and presumably would be supportive of more domestic fossil fuel production in general.

There are a few differences here and there, however.

For example, as governor of Florida, Bush did support various conservation efforts such as the Florida Forever Program, which focused on acquiring and preserving environmentally significant properties.

Other Republicans have offered varying degrees of opinion and proposed action on energy policy. For instance, Scott Walker of Wisconsin has come out clearly in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline as well as fracking, but he has also expressed support for a devolved set of EPA powers. The EPA as currently constructed is a national institution, but there are also state-level equivalents throughout all 50 states. Walker is in favor of removing powers from the EPA and putting them in the hands of individual states in order to create a more customized and tailored regulatory environment by region. Walker’s view is that devolving these powers would lead to greater authority at the local level and more accountability to the residents impacted by those decisions.