H4A News Clips 5.31.15

1 message attach_file 1

H4A Press Clips

May 31, 2015

Vice President Biden’s son Beau Biden passed away yesterday after battling brain cancer, he was 46 years old.

In political news, Martin O’Malley announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential race.

Politico released a piece about Hillary Clinton’s campaign obtaining access to the full Ready for Hillary email list late last week. And said the list is a data gold mine that will immediately bolster the Democratic front-runner’s fundraising and organizing efforts.

SUMMARY OF TODAY’S NEWS....................................................................... 1

TODAY’S KEY STORIES................................................................................... 2

Hillary Clinton campaign scores Ready for Hillary email list // Politico // Annie Karni - May 30, 2015 2

People are going to be just as excited': Clinton courts Obama's black southern stronghold // Guardian // Sabrina Siddiqui - May 30, 2015............................................................................................................... 3

HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE.......................................................................... 8

Who are the 1 percent who've never heard of Hillary? // Politico // Ben Schreckinger - May 30, 2015 9

Can 2016 Republicans top Hillary on issue No. 1 — the economy? // NY Post // Editorial Board - May 29, 2015.................................................................................................................................................. 9

Hillary’s Libya Emails // The Weekly Standard // Stephen F. Hayes - May 30, 2015.................... 10

That day should come sooner rather than later. Hillary’s Libya Emails // The Weekly Standard // Stephen F. Hayes - May 30, 2015................................................................................................................ 13

OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE............................................. 16

Analysis: Martin O'Malley Is Hillary Clinton's Strongest Rival, But He's Still Behind Her // NBC News // PERRY BACON JR – May 31, 2015.......................................................................................................... 16

Former Md. Gov. O'Malley jumps into 2016 Democratic race // AP // Ken Thomas and Catherine Lucey - May 30, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 18

O’Malley announces presidential bid, visits Davenport // Quad City Times // Jeff Cook - May 30, 2015 20

O' Malley Makes Iowa First Stop in 2016 Kick Off // AP // May 30, 2015....................................... 22

O’Malley’s challenge to Clinton: Ideological or generational? Or both? // WaPo // Dan Balz - May 29, 2015 22

O'Malley announcement remarks as prepared for delivery // WaPo // Martin O'Malley - May 29, 2015 23

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley Announces 2016 White House Bid // WSJ // Scott Calvert - May 30, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 30

Martin O’Malley Phoned Hillary Clinton Ahead of His Presidential Launch // TIME // Kathleen Lange - May 30, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 33

O'Malley's long-shot bid gets complicated start // Politico // Ben Schreckinger - May 30, 2015..... 34

Martin O'Malley Delivers Powerful Campaign Kickoff Speech // Bloomberg // Mark Halperin - May 29, 2015 34

Baltimore’s blight puts O’Malley on defensive in bid for presidency // WaPo // Robert McCartney - May 30, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 35

Martin O’Malley Announces Presidential Campaign, Pushing Image of Vitality // NYT // Maggie Haberman - May 30, 2015............................................................................................................................. 39

Think big, make political revolution // Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier // James Lynch - May 30, 2015 42

Bernie Sanders in Iowa City: Think big, make political // The Gazette // James Q. Lynch - May 30, 2015 43

Lincoln Chafee to announce presidential run on June 3 // Politico // Ben Schreckinger and Jonathan Topaz - May 30, 2015.................................................................................................................................... 45

Democrats Seek a Richer Roster to Match G.O.P. // NYT // Eric Lichtblau and Nicholas Confessore - May 30, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 46

GOP................................................................................................................ 50

Sen. Rand Paul: Tomorrow I Will Stop the Illegal NSA Spying // TIME // Sen. Rand Paul - May 30, 3015 50

Sen. Rand Paul Vows to Prevent Senate From Extending Patriot Act // WSJ // Kristina Peterson and Carole E. Lee - May 30, 2015........................................................................................................................... 52

Walker maintains popularity with 7-point lead // Des Moines Register // Jennifer Jacob - May 30, 2015 55

Fiorina gains in favorability // Des Moines Register // Jennifer Jacobs - May 30, 2015................. 58

Christie to pull New Jersey from Common Core // The Hill // Jonathan Easley - May 30, 2015...... 58

TOP NEWS..................................................................................................... 60

DOMESTIC.................................................................................................. 60

Joe Biden's son, Beau, dies of brain cancer // Reuters // May 30, 2015........................................ 60

Patriot Act Deadline Forces Rare Sunday Senate Session // RCP // James Arkin - May 30, 2015.... 61

Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert accused of hiding sex abuse of former student // Richard A. Serrano and Katherine Skiba - LAT // May 30, 2015...................................................................................... 63

U.S. judge grills lawyer defending Obama's healthcare law changes // Reuters // Lindsay Dunsmuir - May 28, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 65

U.S. Economy Contracted 0.7% in First Quarter // NYT // Nelson D. Schwartz - May 29, 2015....... 66

INTERNATIONAL....................................................................................... 69

U.S. Says China has Artillery on Artificial Islands // AP // Lolita Baldor - May 29, 2015................. 69

Chinese Security Laws Elevate the Party and Stifle Dissent. Mao Would Approve // NYT // Edward Wong - May 30, 2015.................................................................................................................................... 71

Islamic State claims militants carried out twin blasts at Baghdad hotels // WaPo // Mustafa Salim and Loveday Morris - May 30, 2015................................................................................................................ 74

OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS.................................................................. 76

Why Baltimore Blew Up // Rolling Stone // Matt Taibbi - May 26, 2015....................................... 76

It's Not Closing Time on American Exceptionalism // RCP // Jay Timmons - May 30, 2015........... 88

TODAY’S KEY STORIES

Hillary Clinton campaign scores Ready for Hillary email list // Politico // Annie Karni - May 30, 2015

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign late last week obtained access to the full Ready for Hillary email list, a data gold mine that will immediately bolster the Democratic front-runner’s fundraising and organizing efforts.

The campaign gained entry to the independent super PAC’s list through a swap with another independent group, a Democrat with knowledge of the list told POLITICO, and is expected to begin emailing it immediately. The source declined to identify the other group.

Access to the list of close to 4 million names came after senior campaign officials admitted they were relying in part on an outdated supporter list from 2008. For two years, Ready for Hillary’s primary purpose was to create a plug-and-play list of supporter names, with contact information, that represented an energized base of people who could be tapped for money or volunteering.

People are going to be just as excited': Clinton courts Obama's black southern stronghold // Guardian // Sabrina Siddiqui - May 30, 2015

On and off the campaign trail in the Carolinas, voters say they have ‘no hard feelings’ toward Hillary Clinton. They say the opposite about Republicans

Bryan Burns could not make up his mind. Here was this African-American voter in khaki shorts, a v-neck T-shirt and black-rimmed eyeglasses, browsing shops at the Crabtree Valley Mall, on a swelteringly hot Friday in the not-yet summer of the American south.

And there was Hillary Clinton, who needs to win the minds of exactly this kind of southerner, a 30-year-old Virginia native who has spent the last decade living in North Carolina, a state that all but ended Clinton’s 2008 presidential run against Barack Obama. Although he follows politics closely, Burns is not yet fully engaged in the next – the current – contest for the American presidency, despite around-the-clock election coverage by the media, despite Clinton already courting people like him around the country.

As he juggled several shopping bags on his way toward another department store, Burns was unsure but knew this: Clinton’s ultimate image – that of a strong woman – should resonate with the crucial black vote in the Carolinas, potentially helping her to secure enough early momentum in the critical primary state of South Carolina to make the old battleground of North Carolina competitive again.

Not that Republicans stand much of a chance with people like Bryan Burns to begin with.

“She has a history of advocating on behalf of what she believes in and, from a pure historic standpoint, it’d be great if she won,” Burns told the Guardian of Clinton, insisting that Republicans had made few inroads with black voters since Obama took office. “I still see them as catering to their base. Some of the candidates that have come out – Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio – they can branch out into those demographics that [Republicans] haven’t tried to before, but I don’t know if it’ll stick.”

On a swing back to South Carolina on Wednesday, Clinton set out to recapture the support of black female voters – a coalition that twice helped propel Obama to the White House – by sticking to her message with a touch of Southern drawl. Eight years ago, Clinton developed a thorny relationship with black voters her amid a grueling and bitterly contested primary with Obama that was roiled by racial tensions. This time around, the Clinton camp is acting aggressively fast to make sure things turn out differently.

From the moment Clinton declared her second presidential bid last month, the question of whether black voters would re-embrace her has loomed well beyond her small campaign gatherings with mostly white and Hispanic business leaders. But her activities in South Carolina, in many ways, served as a microcosm for how Clinton plans to woo African Americans – especially those who are women.

Before opening up her frontrunner campaign next month with rallies in New York and policy speeches across more swing states, Clinton continued her around-the-table sit-down style with minority women small-business owners and a keynote speech before a group of roughly 200 Democrats, most of them African-American women, in which she spotlighted women’s economic issues such as equal pay for equal work and pay transparency.

Later, at a local bakery, the former secretary of state stumbled upon a pastor, Frederick Donnie Hunt, who was reviewing Corinthians 13 for Bible study. Clinton, a devout Methodist, talked scripture. She spoke of a preacher friend who sends mini-sermons almost daily, leaving Hunt impressed in. “You have my vote,” he told Clinton as she got up to leave, after a conversation that lasted just a couple of minutes.

In interviews in parallel with the highly orchestrated campaign on a road trip through parts of the south – from strip malls and shopping centers along Interstate-85 to a famed chicken-and-waffle joint visited by Clinton herself – dozens more black voters told the Guardian that while they may still be making up their minds about converting from Obama to Clinton, one thing was for sure: African Americans do not see their priorities reflected in the platform of her conservative rivals.

Black voters make up for more than 50% of primary voters in South Carolina, the last of four critical early voting states that Clinton has visited in phase one of her campaign. And while this time she is the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Clinton’s return to the state – and emphasis on her southern roots – offered a clear sense that this time, she is taking nothing for granted.

Clinton already has a built-in edge with black voters due in no insignificant part to the lingering problems Republicans face with minorities.

There are now eight declared Republican presidential candidates and counting – the number could very well double in the coming month – yet few have made early moves to reach out to a demographic that has no favorite.

Kentucky senator Rand Paul is the only candidate who has made criminal justice reform a key tenet of his campaign, telling Republican primary voters during his own swing through South Carolina on Friday that the party needed to do a better job of standing up for minorities. Others have spoken more broadly about the need to reduce income inequality, but at the same time have continued to scorn anti-poverty programs such as food stamps and Medicaid.

“They’re not reaching out. They’re not showing they want to do something for the everyday American,” said Eugene Phillips, 68, a meat cutter at the discount grocery store Save-A-Lot in Columbia. “There’s people out there who are making $13,000 or $14,000 a year – they’re struggling, and they’re on food stamps. Republicans don’t want to give those people a break. They want to cut everything. They want to take money away from the weakest people.”

Sean S, a 25-year-old truck driver, had a similar view of the Grand Old Party. Sitting at the food court inside Columbiana Center, a shopping mall about 10 minutes from where Clinton held her events on Wednesday, the father of two said it was too early for him to decide how he would vote next year.

Most Republicans believe, ‘I make my money so I should keep my money’

Sean S, truck driver, 25

“I’m concerned about health care and trying to help the person that doesn’t have the opportunity to help themselves. But I know that most Republicans believe, ‘I make my money so I should keep my money,’” Sean said. “The Democrats, they do a better job being about helping people.”

Jonita I, a sales associate at a clothing boutique back at the same mall, invoked recent riots in Baltimore over the police killing of Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man, and said the demonstrations had just as much to do with inner-city poverty.

“People are mad, especially minorities and people on welfare that may not have the opportunities that more wealthy individuals do,” said Jonita, 24, who voted for Obama and is leaning toward supporting Clinton. “Republicans should put emphasis on their needs. ... The rich or even the middle class are not struggling the same way or wondering where their next meal is going to come from.”

Such comments serve as a sobering reality for the Republican party’s future, even two years after a scathing autopsy of the 2012 election commissioned by the Republican National Committee called for greater inclusion of minorities. Among the recommendations in the 97-page report were for Republicans to establish a presence in African-American communities, historically black colleges and universities, and at black organizations such as the NAACP.

“We are never going to win over voters who are not asked for their support. Too many African-American voters have gotten in the habit of supporting Democrats without hearing anyone in their community making a case to the contrary,” the report said.

Despite gains in the 2014 midterm elections that helped Republicans regain control of Congress, roughly 90% of African Americans voted Democratic last November. And there is little evidence thus far that the population will be within the GOP’s reach in 2016 – a handicap that could haunt the party even in their southern stronghold.

In North Carolina, the left-leaning Center for American Progress projected that the black population will move from 22% to 22.7% of the vote. If racial and ethnic groups turn out at the same levels they did in 2012, the odds are once again stacked against Republicans.

There’s a lot of racism that people don’t believe is going on – it’s been going on, but now you can see it

Anthony Jefferson, 29, electronics retailer

It will be at least a year before states like North Carolina come into play, as candidates invest both their time and resources on the early voting states that will decide the primaries. But prospective black voters in the Durham-Raleigh area – many of whom voted for Obama twice – are already warming up to the idea of supporting Clinton.

Anthony Jefferson, a 29-year-old from a neighboring suburb who works at an electronics kiosk in the same mall, said conversations with his peers have led him to believe that voters remain enthusiastic about Clinton’s candidacy.

“I feel like people are probably going to be just as excited, because it’s a big step for women,” Jefferson said.

While he ranked the economy as a top priority, Jefferson added that it would be imperative for any major candidate to address issues such as criminal justice and police brutality.

“There’s a lot of racism that people don’t believe is going on – it’s been going on, but now you can see it on social media,” he said. “It’s definitely a problem.”

‘Nothing that happened in ’08 would keep me from supporting her now,’ said a local city councilwoman.

Even though Clinton’s reputation among black voters appears to be on solid ground, her campaign has already made a number of aggressive moves to lock in early support within the African-American community.

The campaign on Thursday tapped a former executive director to the influential Congressional Black Caucus to lead its African-American outreach. And just last month, Clinton focused the first major speech of her campaign, at Columbia University in New York, on criminal justice reform amid the riots in Baltimore.

The moment could have proved awkward for Clinton, given former president Bill Clinton’s enactment of tough-on-crime policies that saw the black prison population grow by more than 50 percent on his watch. While she did not specifically mention her husband in the address, Clinton said it was time to end “the era of mass incarceration”, drew a direct link between prison sentencing reform and reducing income inequality, called for body cameras for police, and pledged federal funds that would enable state and local law enforcement to adopt better practices.

She even alluded to the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer whose acquittal the following year sparked nationwide protests.

“You don’t have to look too far from this magnificent hall to find children still living in poverty or trapped in failing schools,” Clinton said, before referencing the fateful night when Martin went out to buy candy and an iced tea. “Mothers and fathers who fear for their sons’ safety when they go off to school – or just to go buy a pack of Skittles.”

Clinton spokesman Tyrone Gayle said outreach to black voters will continue to be an integral part of her campaign.

“Hillary Clinton is committed to issues important to African-American voters and earning the support of the African-American community,” Gayle told the Guardian. “That’s why the first major speech of her campaign laid out a broader vision for criminal justice reform, why she’s appointed African Americans to senior leadership positions in her campaign, and why she’ll continue outlining proposals that strengthen their families and communities.”

Speaking behind a podium again on the trail in South Carolina, Clinton did not emphasize race – even though last month, another outcry surfaced when Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, was shot in the back and killed by a police officer less than two hours away in North Charleston.

Instead, her pitch was decidedly focused on economic issues such as equal pay, paid family leave and raising the minimum wage, although Clinton pointed out such matters disproportionately affected minority women. The speech was well-received by the majority African-American crowd.

Tameika Isaac Devine, a city councilwoman representing Columbia, said Wednesday’s address resonated with people like herself who are faced with a large number of constituents living in poverty.

“There are a lot of people who just can’t seem to make ends meet,” said Devine, who supported Obama in 2008 but said there are “no hard feelings” for Clinton at this stage.

“Honestly to me, it was just politics. Nothing that happened in ’08 would keep me from supporting her now,” Devine said.

Even so, Clinton used her speech this week – ahead of a more openly public schedule beginning in June, with her husband in tow – to highlight the relationship she developed with Obama after their contentious primary eight years ago.

The Clintons had always shared a positive relationship with African Americans, to the extent that Bill Clinton was even referred to as “the first black president”. But he came under fire while campaigning for his wife in 2008 for appearing dismissive of Obama’s candidacy.

“Give me a break. This whole thing’s the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” Bill Clinton said at the time, angering leaders in the African American community even as he insisted the remark had only to do with Obama’s stance on the Iraq war.

On Wednesday, Clinton raised the issue indirectly herself – with a laugh.

“Some of you may remember we had a pretty vigorous campaign in 2008,” Clinton said, before recounting the story of how she initially declined Obama’s offer to serve as his secretary of state.

“I say to my husband, ‘Can you believe this? I mean, the president-elect has asked me to be secretary of state. I told him no twice, and he said he’s not going to give up until I say yes’,” Clinton said. “And Bill said, ‘Well, as I remember, I asked you to marry me twice.’”

She brought the house down.

Don Fowler, former Democratic National Committee chairman who is close to the Clintons, said the crowd’s response to the Obama anecdote was a clear indication that any battle scars of the past have since healed. He said Clinton’s attentiveness toward African Americans during her South Carolina swing was nothing short of rational, since their votes are mostly up for grabs in the primary as opposed to the general election, when black voters will overwhelmingly swing for the Democratic nominee, who is overwhelmingly assumed to be Clinton – unless someone like Martin O’Malley, declaring his candidacy on Saturday, gets in the way.

“What she did was not, in my judgement, framed against some sort of wall of disapproval by African Americans,” Fowler told the Guardian in a phone interview. “It just doesn’t exist. She is very popular among African American people.”

Phillips, the meat-cutter, agreed, pointing out that he, his wife, and “everyone they know” plans to vote for Clinton.

“A lot of people liked Hillary and Obama – it wasn’t good that we had to choose between them,” he said. “Most people went for Obama, but this time he’s not running. Hillary is.”

HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE

Who are the 1 percent who've never heard of Hillary? // Politico // Ben Schreckinger - May 30, 2015

But for the first six weeks of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, that data trove was unavailable and tied up with lawyers reviewing the options available to the campaign: they could trade an old list for the new list, or rent “a la carte” pieces of the list – like, for example, names of volunteers in Iowa they would need before a campaign stop there. Eventually, however, the campaign decided it was easier to have access to the entire list.

“I could offer about 4 million reasons why the Ready for Hillary list is an important resource,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist who served as a senior adviser to the independent super PAC before it shut down.

To understand why access to the list is so important, consider the recent experience of Lynette Hull, a 17-year-old high school student from Las Vegas who was one of the first interns to sign up with the campaign after Clinton announced she was running.

A national honors society student at Liberty High School, Hull was quickly put to work phone-banking — working through an old database of Clinton supporters to sign up new volunteers.

Can 2016 Republicans top Hillary on issue No. 1 — the economy? // NY Post // Editorial Board - May 29, 2015

Friday’s rotten news guaranteed that the top issue of the 2016 race for the White House will be the economy. The question is whether the Republicans can come up with a prescription that beats Hillary Clinton’s message of Obamanomics Lite.

We yield to no one in our contempt for President Obama’s (mis)management of foreign policy, a litany of woes in which Clinton is fully complicit. But that’s not going to be front-and-center in voters’ minds.

Friday’s numbers show that the US economy contracted in the year’s first quarter. If the second quarter winds up a bit worse than early estimates put it, then the nation’s officially back in recession.

Either way, America’s still stuck in the “new normal” of an economy that’s essentially treading water.

The rich are doing OK, thanks in good part to Federal Reserve policies that keep Wall Street humming, even as Main Street drags. But the non-rich know they’re losing ground.

To be fair, the Fed’s just trying to keep everything from falling apart. It doesn’t have the tools to truly goose the economy. In the end, that’s up to the collective will of millions of private-sector decision-makers.

And the private sector’s just too nervous — about the direction of the world economy; about trends at home; about the likelihood that any big news out of Washington will be bad for business.

Hillary’s basic argument: The economy did great when her husband was president — and never mind that she’s already abandoned every position that made him a “New Democrat.” Toss in few hundred million bucks’ worth of negative ads, and it might be enough.

What Republicans need to demand of their candidates is a clear, credible explanation of why the nation’s on the wrong track, and how to fix it.

That means talking about what Washington’s done wrong — on taxes, regulation and just plain honest leadership. And what Washington’s failed to do — from really fixing the banks to truly caring about the regular Americans out there striving every day.

“Hope and change” beat Hillary once. It’s the way to beat her again.

Hillary’s Libya Emails // The Weekly Standard // Stephen F. Hayes - May 30, 2015

A little more than three hours after the State Department released 848 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the Daily Beast had seen enough to render its judgment: “Sorry GOP. There’s No Smoking Gun In Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Emails.” The subhead: “Conspiracy-minded conservatives, be warned: The trove of Clinton emails doesn’t prove much about her culpability for the infamous 9/11 anniversary attacks.”

t’s the media version of Frank Drebin: Please disperse, there’s nothing to see here. Trey Gowdy, pack your bags and go home.

Of course, no one actually believed that this batch of emails would produce a smoking gun on Benghazi. Hillary Clinton has sought to avoid public scrutiny of her emails since before she was sworn in as secretary of state. When she did turn over some of her emails to the State Department, it was Clinton and her lawyers who decided which ones they would make available and which they would withhold. While it might be useful for Clinton defenders to pretend otherwise, there was no expectation that Clinton would voluntarily share incriminating emails, especially now, in the first weeks of her presidential campaign.

Yet for journalists interested in reporting on Clinton’s emails rather than hastily exonerating their author, the hundreds of pages released last week included a number of disclosures, some of them inadvertent, that raise new questions about Hillary Clinton, the State Department, Libya, the Benghazi attacks, and presidential politics. The good news: Some journalists are looking for answers. And so are the investigators who work for the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Sidney Blumenthal is at the heart of those new questions. A noted conspiracy monger and longtime Clinton confidant, Blumenthal provided Clinton a steady stream of outside intelligence on Libya while she was secretary of state. Some of his information was accurate and some of it was not, but Clinton thought enough of Blumenthal to circulate his reports to top State Department advisers, sometimes with notes ordering them to take some kind of action in response. Clinton downplayed the Blumenthal emails as “unsolicited” thoughts from an old friend. That doesn’t quite capture the dynamic.

For Blumenthal, friendship with the Clintons came with considerable benefits. Blumenthal had been banned from State Department employment by the Obama administration, and it appears that if he couldn’t collect a government check for advising the Clintons, he would collect one from the Clintons directly. Politico’s Ken Vogel reports that Blumenthal was paid $10,000 a month as an employee of the Clinton Foundation from 2009 to 2013 and the same sum as a consultant after he left the payroll in 2013 through March 2015. According to the New York Times, Blumenthal had access to private intelligence on Libya because he was advising “business associates . . . as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government.”

The deteriorating security situation in Libya generally, and Benghazi specifically, was a dominant theme in the emails. Clinton defenders have sought to insulate her from criticism of inadequate security before the attacks by suggesting that decisions about security for U.S. diplomatic personnel were made well below her level. There are many reasons to be skeptical of those claims. The emails make clear that Clinton was deeply involved in virtually every aspect of Libya policy; one internal State Department email lays out the many ways she drove administration decision-making on Libya. Was Clinton a deeply engaged, hands-on manager of every aspect of Libya policy other than security?

If Clinton wasn’t involved in security decisions, the emails make clear that she should have been. Reports that Clinton received and circulated, from both official and unofficial channels, demonstrate the dire security challenges for Americans in Libya.

It’s not just Blumenthal’s emails that raise additional questions. An email sent at 9:17 a.m. on September 15, 2012—four days after the fatal attack in Benghazi—by an aide advises Clinton that Dan Pfeiffer, the director of communications at the White House, “has some sensitive items that he would like to personally show you when he arrives.” Clinton slept in and missed the meeting and wrote back later in the morning to request that Pfeiffer return to brief her. It’s possible that these “sensitive items” had nothing to do with Benghazi. But the request for a meeting came after a flurry of emails the previous evening between officials from the White House, the State Department, and various national security agencies. Those emails concerned edits to the administration’s much-discussed Benghazi “talking points” and included strong objections from the State Department’s “building leadership” to some of the language. White House officials emailed the group to assure everyone that the objections would be addressed the following morning at a meeting of the Deputies Committee.

An email sent to several top administration officials, including top Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, at 11:08 that same morning is introduced this way: “Per the discussion at Deputies, here are the revised TPs for HPSCI [talking points for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]. Let me know what you think.” The language in the revised talking points is redacted in its entirety.

Given what we know about the various iterations of the talking points, it’s unlikely that these redactions conceal anything not already known. But as that example suggests, what’s missing from the emails is often as provocative as the content. On April 8, 2011, Clinton forwarded a Blumenthal email to Sullivan. In the version of that email released by the State Department, most of Clinton’s note is redacted. It reads: “FYI. [Redacted].” But the same email was obtained and published by the New York Times before the State Department release, and in that version, the sentence is unredacted. It reads: “FYI. The idea of using private security experts to arm the opposition should be considered.”

Why did the State Department—or Clinton herself—want that sentence redacted? That’s unclear. And there may well be an innocent explanation. But the note raises additional questions. Did the idea of supplying arms to the Libyan opposition through private security experts receive the consideration Clinton wanted? Did it happen? Was Blumenthal involved?

Beyond these questions, the Select Committee on Benghazi notes several “inexplicable gaps” in Clinton’s email records “during key times of her involvement with Libyan policy.” There are no emails between September 14 and October 21, 2011, five weeks surrounding Clinton’s trip to Libya. (The committee notes that this was when a “now-famous picture of Clinton on her BlackBerry was taken.”) There is another gap between October 21, 2011, and January 5, 2012, “when the State Department was extending the Benghazi mission for another year.” And a third major gap occurs between April 27 and July 4, 2012, a period of “increased security” when the U.S. compound and the British ambassador were both attacked.

It’s hardly necessary to be a conspiracy-minded conserv-ative to be skeptical of the claim that Clinton—who, by the State Department’s own account, drove Libya policy—neither sent nor received any Libya-related emails during these long stretches of heavy Libya-related policy-making.

Perhaps the most important effect of these latest emails is the simplest one. They demolish the claim that we already know the answers to the important questions about the attacks and the administration’s response.

There is much more to learn. The Obama administration only recently turned over related emails to the Accountability Review Board, the State Department’s internal and highly politicized investigation of Benghazi. And the State Department started to provide the Select Committee on Benghazi with emails from Clinton’s top advisers just last week.

This belated, halfhearted cooperation is hardly an indication that the Obama administration is prepared to assist the investigation going forward. The committee continues to press Clinton and the State Department to turn her email server over to a neutral third-party for a thorough examination. Lanny Davis, a most ardent Clinton defender, originally said she would have no problem providing it. But Clinton has since made clear she has no intention of doing so voluntarily.

That doesn’t sit well with the Benghazi committee or House speaker John Boehner. And while sources in both offices caution that no final decisions have been made, every day that passes increases the likelihood that the House will subpoena the server.

That day should come sooner rather than later. Hillary’s Libya Emails // The Weekly Standard // Stephen F. Hayes - May 30, 2015

t’s the media version of Frank Drebin: Please disperse, there’s nothing to see here. Trey Gowdy, pack your bags and go home.

That day should come sooner rather than later.

OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE

Analysis: Martin O'Malley Is Hillary Clinton's Strongest Rival, But He's Still Behind Her // NBC News // PERRY BACON JR – May 31, 2015

Throughout last year, then-Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley was making appearances in Iowa and New Hampshire and giving speeches around the country to tout himself as a potential Democratic presidential candidate. At the same time, a group of liberal activists were organizing a campaign called "Ready for Warren," urging Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to get into the presidential race.

These two developments were related. O'Malley, who was governor of Maryland from 2007 until earlier this year, has been trying to cast himself as the alternative to Hillary Clinton for Democrats who either are tired of the Clinton family or prefer a more liberal candidate. And Democratic activists have essentially ignored O'Malley raising his hand in favor of begging Warren to run, even as the senator keeps insisting she will not.

O'Malley is probably the strongest candidate in the Democratic field to take on Clinton. (Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and ex-Virginia Sen. Jim Webb are also seeking the nomination, and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee is expected to jump in the race as well.)

But O'Malley, like the other three men, is ill-positioned to defeat Clinton.

In 2007, she was the front-runner, but many key party activists and donors were not behind her. A huge bloc instead supported Barack Obama, another group was with ex-North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. And Clinton's vote to back the Iraq War loomed as a divide between herself and Democratic activists, particularly in Iowa.

There remains some tension between liberals and Clinton now. They are worried she is too centrist, unwilling to adopt views like calling for the break-up of large Wall Street banks, as Warren advocates.

O'Malley has sought to court the Warren crowd by adopting liberal policy views, like calling for debt-free college and tougher regulations on banks that were weakened during Bill Clinton's administration.

But it's not clear that Warren herself could defeat Clinton, and O'Malley's campaigning over the last year has not made him the champion of the left so far. Many prominent liberals have either endorsed Clinton, are still waiting for Warren to run or are backing Sanders.

And powerful figures in the party, even in O'Malley's home state of Maryland, have signaled they are not excited about his candidacy. U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland has endorsed Clinton, even though O'Malley's mother (also named Barbara) has worked in Mikulski's Senate office since 1987.

So Clinton is an overwhelming favorite to defeat O'Malley. But if one of her rivals is somehow able to win a few primaries and make Clinton work hard in the Democratic nomination process, it is likely to be O'Malley.

Why? First, Chafee, Sanders and Webb lack the political skills of O'Malley. Chafee and Sanders both won statewide office in tiny states, with Chafee having the advantage of his father, Richard, being his predecessor in the U.S. Senate. Webb has only won one election — to the U.S. Senate in 2006.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley announces his intention to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in Baltimore on May 30. JIM BOURG / Reuters

O'Malley has managed to reach the top of politics in a large, complicated state where a Democrat has to navigate both a large black electorate and a bloc of white Democrats who occasionally vote Republican. He was elected twice to be mayor of Baltimore. O'Malley then won by comfortable margins in the 2006 and 2010 gubernatorial races. (Democratic candidates lost the governorship in the elections that preceded O'Malley (2002) and followed him (2014).

O'Malley was praised for reducing crime in Baltimore as mayor, but there is now much debate over his record there. Violent crime was dropping in nearly every city in America during O'Malley's tenure (2000-2006). And the death of Freddie Gray, the unarmed black man who died in the custody of the Baltimore police in April, brought to national attention both the pockets of deep poverty in the city and its police force's reputation for using excessive force.

As governor though, O'Malley has the kind of record of liberal accomplishments even Clinton would dream of. He signed a repeal of Maryland's death penalty, an increase in the state's minimum wage, a provision that essentially eliminated prison sentences for marijuana users and laws that allowed some undocumented immigrants to get driver's licenses and in-state tuition at Maryland's public colleges. He was also a key driver in the state legalizing same-sex marriage and adopting some of the toughest gun control laws in the country.

O'Malley has also drawn some top political operatives to work on his campaign, most notably Bill Hyers, who managed Bill de Blasio's successful dark horse campaign to become mayor of New York City in 2013.

O'Malley, if he is able to position himself as the leading Clinton alternative, could truly challenge her in Iowa, which has a history of rejecting front-runners from both parties. He is likely to have a moment in the campaign where he is polling close to Clinton, at least in the early states, particularly if he performs well in the candidate debates.

That said, even if O'Malley were to defeat Clinton in Iowa, she would remain the favorite for the Democratic nomination. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton performed well in their presidential races in New Hampshire, which votes second. And polls suggest Clinton has huge edges among the black and Hispanic voters who will be a large part of the electorate in South Carolina and Nevada, respectively.

Former Md. Gov. O'Malley jumps into 2016 Democratic race // AP // Ken Thomas and Catherine Lucey - May 30, 2015

DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) — Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley entered the Democratic presidential race on Saturday in a longshot challenge to Hillary Rodham Clinton for the 2016 nomination, casting himself as a new generation leader who would rebuild the economy and reform Wall Street.

"I'm running for you," he told a crowd of about 1,000 people in a populist message at Federal Hill Park in Baltimore, where he served as mayor before two terms as governor. O'Malley said was drawn into the campaign "to rebuild the truth of the American dream for all Americans."

Following his announcement, O'Malley promptly headed to Iowa, where he is seeking to become the primary alternative to Clinton in the leadoff caucus state. Before more than fifty people at a union hall in Davenport, he touted his executive experience and called for economic reforms, drawing enthusiastic applause.

"We are still in just as grave a danger of having Wall Street excesses wreck our economy again and there's not a need for it. When wealth concentrates as it has, it also concentrates and collects power and we have to retake control of our own government," said O'Malley, who has made frequent visits to Iowa in recent months.

O'Malley, who will appear in New Hampshire Sunday, remains largely unknown in a field dominated by Clinton. Already in the race is Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who could be O'Malley's main rival for the support of the Democratic left.

An ally of former President Bill Clinton, O'Malley was the second governor to endorse Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2007. But he made clear that he thinks Democrats deserve a choice in the 2016 primary.

"The presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth ... between two royal families," O'Malley said. "It is a sacred trust to be earned from the people of the United States, and exercised on behalf of the people of the United States."

He pointed to recent news reports that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein would be "fine" with either Clinton or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a leading Republican contender and the son and brother of presidents, in the White House.

It was a forceful message that O'Malley will focus on overhauling the financial system, a priority for liberals opposed to the bailouts of Wall Street banks.

"Tell me how it is, that not a single Wall Street CEO was convicted of a crime related to the 2008 economic meltdown? Not a single one," O'Malley said. "Tell me how it is, that you can get pulled over for a broken tail light, but if you wreck the nation's economy you are untouchable?"

Aides said O'Malley called Hillary Clinton on Friday to tell her he was running. By Saturday afternoon, Clinton had tweeted, "Welcome to the race, Gov. O'Malley. Looking forward to discussing strong families and communities."

The 52-year-old O'Malley has spoken often about the economic challenges facing the nation and said he would bring new leadership, progressive values and the ability to accomplish things.

"We are allowing our land of opportunity to be turned into a land of inequality," he told the crowd.

O'Malley has presented himself to voters as a next-generation figure in the party, pointing to his record as governor on issues such as gay marriage, immigration, economic issues and the death penalty.

His tenure was marked by financial challenges posed by the recession, but O'Malley pushed through an increase in the state's minimum wage while keeping record amounts of money flowing into the state's education system. He backed a bill to allow same-sex marriage, which lawmakers passed and voters approved in 2012. He oversaw a sweeping gun-control measure and a repeal of the death penalty.

He also raised taxes on multiple occasions — on higher earners, sales of goods, vehicle titles, gasoline, cigarettes, sewer services and more. Republican critics branded him as a tax-and-spend liberal and the GOP defeated O'Malley's hand-picked successor in 2014.

But his record on criminal justice has been scrutinized in recent weeks after riots in Baltimore broke out following the death of Freddie Gray, an African-American man who died in police custody following his arrest last month.

O'Malley was known for his tough-on-crime, "zero tolerance" policies that led to large numbers of arrests for minor offenses. Critics say it sowed distrust between police and the black community. Supporters note the overall decrease in violent crime during his tenure. O'Malley has defended his work to curb crime, saying he helped address rampant violence and drug abuse.

A few demonstrators gathered near the park to protest O'Malley's criminal justice policies as mayor, an office he held from 1999 until his election as governor in 2006. During O'Malley's speech, there was sporadic shouting from protesters, including one who blew a whistle.

O'Malley called the unrest "heartbreaking" but said "there is something to be learned from that night, and there is something to be offered to our country from those flames. For what took place here was not only about race, not only about policing in America. It's about everything it is supposed to mean to be an American."

Megan Kenny, 38, of Baltimore, who held a sign that said "stop killer cops" and yelled "black lives matter," said she thought O'Malley's decision to run was "a strange choice," especially because of the recent rioting. She attributed the unrest to his "ineffective zero-tolerance policy."

O'Malley could soon be joined in the Democratic field by former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, who plans to make an announcement next week, and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, who is exploring a potential campaign.

Sanders has raised more than $4 million since opening his campaign in late April and sought to build support among liberals in the party who are disillusioned with Clinton.

In a sign of his daunting task, Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, his former boss and mentor, is supporting Clinton. She said in a statement that O'Malley "should follow his dreams. And while I've already announced my support for Hillary Clinton, I know that competition is good for democracy."

O’Malley announces presidential bid, visits Davenport // Quad City Times // Jeff Cook - May 30, 2015

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who got his first taste of the Iowa caucuses while working in Davenport for Gary Hart in the early 1980s, brought his own campaign for president here Saturday.

He pledged to fight income inequality, warned Wall Street could still wreck the economy and vowed to work the first-in-the nation caucus state aggressively.

O’Malley, 52, announced his candidacy Saturday morning in Baltimore, where he was the mayor from 1999 to 2007. And he made the first two stops of his campaign in Davenport and, later, Des Moines.

“Over the course of the last 30 years, we have seen in our great nation a growing gap of injustice,” O’Malley said at the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 431, union hall in Davenport.

He blamed “failed trickle down economic policies” for the concentration of wealth, and he warned there is a need for rebalancing, lest there be “pitchforks” brandished in urban and rural areas.

O’Malley argued for greater regulation of banks, against the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership trade deal and pushed for comprehensive immigration reform.

“We are still in just as grave a danger of having Wall Street excesses wreck our economy again,” he said.

O’Malley enters the presidential race far down in the polls. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had the support of 60 percent of likely Iowa caucus-goers, according to a Quinnipiac University poll earlier this month.

O’Malley came in at 3 percent, behind Sen. Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden.

Still, the ex-governor didn’t seem bothered by the gap.

“I believe, and I’ve seen this happen before, and you guys have, too, that the inevitable front runner’s inevitable right up until he or she is no longer inevitable,” he told reporters.

He said a challenger emerges by going “county to county, town square to town square,” talking about ideas.

“That’s what I intend to do, and I think the people of Iowa will respond,” he said.

Tom Engelmann, a longtime Democratic activist and treasurer of the county party, said he thinks that Clinton’s strength in the polls is deceiving and that times have changed for her.

In 2008, he said, “I wouldn’t have had a whole lot of problem with Hillary as president. But now I do.”

Engelmann said he’s considering O’Malley or Sanders and thinks both can still tap into a late-deciding electorate.

Ed Brown, a former Davenport alderman and Democratic activist, said he’s already on board with O’Malley.

“He’s a new face, and that’s what we need in the United States of America,” Brown said. "And I think he’s sincere."

O’Malley, who was Maryland’s governor for two terms, endorsed Clinton for president in 2007, and the two exchanged pleasantries via Twitter after his announcement Saturday.

But the former governor said that times have changed. He said the CEO of Goldman Sachs recently told employees he would be fine with Clinton or Jeb Bush as president. To that, O’Malley said, “the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth by you between two royal families.”

Much of O’Malley’s remarks had to do with what he called the inequities in American life.

“Tell me how it is, that you can get pulled over for a broken tail light, but if you wreck the nation’s economy, you are untouachable?” he asked in Baltimore.

He also told of steps he took there to diminish that, including pushing through an increase in the minimum wage and backing a proposal, eventually approved, to legalize same-sex marriage.

Republicans have criticized his economic policies in Maryland, including some tax increases. And the violence in Baltimore in the aftermath of the shooting of Freddie Gray has drawn attention to his “zero tolerance” policies.

Critics said that it led to mistrust between police and the black community in the city.

O’Malley has defended those policies. Asked in Davenport on Saturday if he had any regrets as mayor or governor, he said he wished the state had moved faster to implement having police wear body cameras.

O' Malley Makes Iowa First Stop in 2016 Kick Off // AP // May 30, 2015

DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) -- Martin O'Malley promptly brought his Democratic presidential campaign to Iowa, offering himself to voters in the leadoff caucus state as a leader who will create jobs and opportunity. He announced his bid for the presidency earlier in the day in Baltimore.

O'Malley spoke to more than 50 people crowded into a union hall in Davenport Saturday afternoon. He touted his record as governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore, talking about raising the minimum wage and investing in education.

O'Malley has made several appearances in Iowa this year, has two paid staffers in the state and plans to add more. He made four trips last year and dispatched 14 staffers to work on state campaigns. He was scheduled to speak in Des Moines later in the day.

O'Malley supporters hope Iowa can help him become the main alternative to front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

O’Malley’s challenge to Clinton: Ideological or generational? Or both? // WaPo // Dan Balz - May 29, 2015

“I’m drawn to tough challenges,” Martin O’Malley said, “and this one is certainly a tough challenge.”

Unruffled in a crisp white shirt and necktie, O’Malley sat in a windowless conference room in his bustling campaign office on Friday afternoon. He was less than 24 hours away from formally launching his candidacy for president in 2016. If anything, he understated the obstacles on the road ahead.

O’Malley is running against the most formidable front-runner the Democrats have seen in many years. Hillary Rodham Clinton currently towers over the field of candidates for her party’s nomination, able to amass resources, talent, political support, volunteers and attention (for good or ill) unmatched by any of her challengers.

O’Malley, among others, will test whether Democrats who say they want a competitive contest for the nomination really mean it. At Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn, her senior advisers anticipate and are preparing for that possibility. But in the face of daunting odds, O’Malley must find the ground on which to fight.

Will he try to make the contest primarily an ideological battle, tapping progressive unrest with the state of the Democratic Party and possibly Clinton to frame a left vs. centrist contest? Will he, as his mentor Gary Hart did when the former senator from Colorado nearly upset Walter F. Mondale in the 1984 Democratic contest, seek to draw a sharp generational contrast, of future versus past, new ideas against a tired Democratic status quo? Or can he make it a combination of the two?

O’Malley said his travels around the country over the past 18 months have led him to conclude that there is “a tremendous hunger . . . for leaders who are willing to embrace new approaches, to break with the orthodoxy of some of the worn out thinking of our past.”

But exactly what is that orthodoxy with which he seeks to break? How much is it the policies of the current Democratic administration, rather than just the Republican economic policies that he and all other Democrats attack? And how explicitly will he be able to show that Clinton embodies that orthodoxy and that he does not?

O'Malley announcement remarks as prepared for delivery // WaPo // Martin O'Malley - May 29, 2015

My fellow Americans.

I want to talk with you today about The American Dream we share…

its powerful history,

its current condition, and most importantly,

its urgent need for rebuilding.

Our nation was founded on two self-evident truths...

That All of us are created equal.

And that we are endowed by our Creator with the rights to Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

With these words, the American dream began.

No fine print. No expiration date.

All of us are included.

Women and men.

Black and white people.

Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Americans.

Young and old. Rich and poor. Workers and Business owners. Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and straight Americans.

Every person is important, each of us is needed.

In our idea of country, there is no such thing as a spare American.

There is, however, a growing injustice in our country today.

It is the gap between the strong and just country our children need for us to be ... and the country we are in danger of becoming.

For today in America, 70 percent of us are earning the same or less than they were 12 years ago. This is the first time that has happened this side of World War II.

Today in America, family owned businesses and farms are struggling to compete with ever larger concentrations of corporate power,...

Fifty years ago, the nation’s largest employer was GM. An average GM employee could pay for a year’s tuition at a state university with two weeks’ wages.

Today in America, with dreams of college, a decent paying job, and a secure retirement slipping beyond the reach of so very many,... the American Dream seems to be hanging by a thread.

And yet, for America there is always a yet.

The final thread that holds us just might be the strongest.

It is the thread of the generosity, the compassion, and the love of one another that brings us together as One American People.

For over 200 years we’ve been the architects of our own future. And now we must build anew today.

My father and mother, Tom and Barbara O'Malley, were born to the Great Depression and grew up as part of that great generation that won the Second World War. My dad flew 33 missions over Japan in a B-24 Liberator, and went on to college only because of the GI Bill.

My mom, herself, flew in the Civil Air Patrol at the age of seventeen.

They raised their children -- the six of us -- to a middle class future secured largely by the sacrifices and better choices of their generation.

But they would never accept the notion that somehow theirs was the "greatest generation." For they believed and they taught us that every generation of Americans has the ability -- and the sacred responsibility -- to become great.

And so we must. No matter how long the odds, no matter how large the challenge, and no matter how tough the fight.

This is the urgent work calling us forward today: to rebuild the truth of the American Dream for ALL Americans. And to begin right now!

Baltimore/Economy

Last month, television sets around the world were filled with the anger and the rage, and the flames of some of the humblest and hardest hit neighborhoods of Baltimore.

For all of us who have given so much of our energies to making our city a safer, fairer, more just and more prosperous place, it was a heartbreaking night in the life of our City.

But there is something to be learned from that night, and there is something to be offered to our country from those flames.

For what took place here was not only about race…not only about policing in America.

It’s about everything it is supposed to mean to be an American.

The scourge of hopelessness that happened to ignite here that evening, transcends race or geography.

Witness the record numbers of young white kids killing themselves with heroin in suburbs and small towns across America.

The hard truth of our shared reality is this: Unemployment in many American cities and in many small towns across the United States is higher now than it was eight years ago.

Conditions of extreme and growing poverty, create conditions for extreme violence.

We have work to do…

Our economic and political system is upside down and backwards and it is time to turn it around.

What happened to our economy -- what happened to the American Dream -- did not happen by chance.

Nor was it merely the result of global forces somehow beyond our control.

Powerful, wealthy special interests here at home have used our government to create -- in our own country -- an economy that is leaving a majority of our people behind.

An economy that has so concentrated wealth in the hands of the very few that it has taken opportunity from the homes of the many.

An economy where a majority of our people are unheard, unseen, un-needed, and left to conclude that their lives and labors are literally worth less today than they were yesterday,... And will be worth less still tomorrow...

We are allowing our land of opportunity to be turned into a land of inequality.

Main Street struggles, while Wall Street soars.

Tell me how it is, that not a single Wall Street CEO was convicted of a crime related to the 2008 economic meltdown. Not. A. Single. One.

Tell me how it is, that you can get pulled over for a broken tail light in our country, but if you wreck the nation’s economy you are untouchable.

This is not how our economy is supposed to work!

This is not how our country is supposed to work!

This is not the American Dream!

And it does not have to be this way!

This generation still has time to become great.

We have saved the world before and we must save our country now – and we will do that by rebuilding the American Dream!

The Agenda

As I look out here this morning over the original "land of the free and the home of the brave," I see the faces of people who have done so much for so many in our City and our State.

Together, we made our City a safer, healthier and better place for kids.

Together, we made our city believe again. We invented a new and better way of governing called CitiStat, and we got things done.

Together, we made our State's public schools the best in the United States. We made college more affordable for more families.

We led our people forward through a devastating national recession. We took greater care to protect our land, our air, and the waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

We passed Marriage Equality and we passed the DREAM Act.

Together, we raised the minimum wage and we sustained the highest median income in America. We achieved top rankings for innovation, entrepreneurship, and minority and women's business development.

Yes, understanding precedes action.

And it took new leadership. New perspectives. And new approaches.

But we believed in the dream,...together we took action to make it real,... and that is exactly what we must do as a nation today.

Our economy isn't money, our economy is people—all of our people.

We measure success by the growing prosperity and security of our people–all of our people.

A stronger middle class is not the consequence of economic growth -- a stronger middle class is the cause of economic growth.

Together, as one nation we must build an American economy that works again for all of us.

That means good jobs and wage policies that allow hardworking families to actually get ahead. That means a higher minimum wage, overtime pay for overtime work, and respect for the rights of all workers to organize and collectively bargain for better wages.

If we take these actions…the dream will live again.

Climate change is real. We must create an American jobs agenda to build a new renewable energy future.

We must launch a new agenda to rebuild America's cities as places of Justice and Opportunity for all.

And if we take these actions… the dream will live again.

For the sake of our country's security, and our country's well-being, and our country's economic growth, we must also bring 11 million of our neighbors out of the shadows by passing comprehensive immigration reform.

Because the enduring symbol of our nation is not the barbed wire fence,... it is the Statue of Liberty.

We are a nation of immigrants. We are a compassionate and generous people. And if we act according to our principles--and the better angels of our nature—if we return to our true selves, the dream will live again.

Make no mistake about it -- our ability to lead the world and be safe in this world depends on the strength of the American Dream here at home. The challenges we face in the world today are different from the challenges we faced in the 1990s.

Together, we must construct a New National Security Strategy and build new alliances that are forward-seeing and forward-acting.

The center of this new strategy must be the reduction of threats. Fast-evolving threats -- from violent extremism, pandemic, cyber attacks, nuclear proliferation, nation-state failures, to the drought, famine, and floods of climate change.

Together, we must craft a New Foreign Policy of Engagement and Collaboration. We must join with like-minded people around the world -- especially with nations here in our own hemisphere -- for the cause we share of a rising global middle class.

We must put our national interest first, we must put America first.

But we cannot rebuild the American Dream here at home by catering to the voices of the privileged and the powerful.

Let’s be honest. They were the ones who turned our economy upside-down in the first place. And they are the only ones who are benefiting from it.

We need to prosecute cheats, we need to reinstate Glass-Steagall, and if a bank is too big to fail without wrecking our nation’s economy…then it needs to be broken up before it breaks us…again.

Goldman Sachs is one of the biggest repeat-offending investment banks in America. Recently, the CEO of Goldman Sachs let his employees know that he’d be just fine with either Bush or Clinton.

I bet he would...

Well, I've got news for the bullies of Wall Street --

The presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth by you between two royal families.

It is a sacred trust to be earned from the people of the United States, and exercised on behalf of the people of the United States.

The only way we are going to rebuild the American Dream is if we re-take control of our own American government!

Conclusion

The poet laureate of the American Dream, Bruce Springsteen, once asked:

Is a dream a lie, if it don’t come true?…

Or is it something worse?

Whether the American dream becomes a lie, or becomes an ongoing truth that our children can enjoy, can build upon, can live, is really up to you and me.

It is up to all of us.

It's not about Wall Street, not about the big five banks, it's not even about big money trying to buy our elections.

It's about U.S.

It is about whether, together, We the People still have the will to become great Americans.

I believe we do.

My decision is made.

Now you will all have a vital choice to make next year, for the good of your families, and for the good of the country you love and carry in your hearts.

It is a choice that people will ask you about for years to come.

And so, when a child with a world of learning ahead asks who you voted for, I want you to be able to tell that child, “I voted for you.”

When you see a dad sweating through another long shift in order to give his daughter a better future, I want you to be able to tell him, “I voted for you.”

When you see a mom working long hours at two jobs for the dream of sending her son to college, I want you to be able to tell her, “I voted for you.”

When you see a young father who hungers for a decent job to support his family, I want you to be able to tell him, “I voted for you.”

The story of our country’s best days is not found in a history book, because this generation of Americans is about to write it!

And that is why today, to you -- and to all who can hear my voice -- I declare that I am a candidate for President of the United States….and I’m running for YOU.

May God Bless you and may God Bless the United States of America.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley Announces 2016 White House Bid // WSJ // Scott Calvert - May 30, 2015

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley launched an underdog presidential bid Saturday morning based on the proposition that his brand of liberal politics is what the Democratic Party and the country need now.

“The story of our country’s best days is not found in a history book, because this generation of Americans is about to write it,” he said before declaring his candidacy in front of several hundred people.

Mr. O’Malley made his announcement at a rally on Federal Hill, overlooking this city where he began his political career as a councilman and was twice elected mayor. Later Saturday, he is scheduled to fly to Iowa—his seventh trip to the early voting state since last June. He plans to attend events in New Hampshire on Sunday.

The 52-year-old Mr. O’Malley faces steep odds against the party’s presumptive favorite, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but says he isn’t deterred by her aura of inevitability or his low standing in polls.

“The presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth…between two royal families,” he said in his speech Saturday, referring to Mrs. Clinton, wife of former President Bill Clinton, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a likely Republican presidential candidate whose father and brother were both presidents.

Mr. O’Malley has tried to position himself to Mrs. Clinton’s left. He opposes a pending Pacific Rim trade deal and the Keystone XL pipeline and favors expanding Social Security benefits. Mrs. Clinton has either sidestepped these issues or remained silent.

“Powerful, wealthy special interests here at home have used our government to create, in our own country, an economy that is leaving a majority of our people behind,” Mr. O’Malley said, flanked by his wife Katie and their four children, with dozens of supporters on stage behind him. “We are allowing our land of opportunity to become a land of inequality,” he said.

Mr. O’Malley is the third candidate to officially declare a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, along with Mrs. Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). Other possible Democratic contenders include former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee.

A tweet Saturday afternoon from Mrs. Clinton’s Twitter account said, “Welcome to the race, Gov. O’Malley. Looking forward to discussing strong families and communities. -H.”

Mr. O’Malley is barely registering in polls, averaging just 0.8% in the Real Clear Politics website’s aggregation of voter surveys—dead last among seven Democrats.

But marketing agency owner Jonathan Oleisky, who joined hundreds of others for the announcement event on a sunny, muggy morning, said he thinks Mr. O’Malley has a shot at winning the Democratic nomination.

“Stranger things have happened in American politics,” said Mr. Oleisky, 49 years old and from Owings Mills, Md. “Just look at Jimmy Carter. Who’d have thought we would elect a peanut farmer from Georgia?”

Mr. Oleisky said he backs Mr. O’Malley for his “progressive outlook” and record in office. “I think Hillary Clinton is incredibly accomplished, but we need new leadership in the country,” he said.

Susan Rohrer, who is in her 60s and traveled to the event from the Washington suburbs, said she likes both Mr. O’Malley and Mrs. Clinton. “It’s going to be hard” choosing between them, said Ms. Rohrer, an English teacher. She said she considers Mr. O’Malley “more progressive” and might support him for that reason. But her “dream” scenario is a Clinton-O’Malley ticket, she said.

Though Mr. O’Malley supported Mrs. Clinton when she ran for president in 2008, he said times have changed and that he represents a “new candidate with a clear voice.” He sometimes plays a borrowed guitar after speeches, a reminder of his days fronting a Celtic rock band called O’Malley’s March.

On the campaign trail, Mr. O’Malley has touted his record as governor in a bid to woo liberal voters. During an eight-year tenure that ended in January, he helped pass legislation to abolish the death penalty, tighten gun restrictions, raise the minimum wage and grant in-state college tuition to some immigrants in the country illegally.

Another part of Mr. O’Malley’s gubernatorial record—tax and fee increases that he said were necessary to maintain services during the recession—proved to be a liability for his preferred successor, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, who lost the governor’s race last fall in a major upset to Republican Larry Hogan.

Since his days as mayor, Mr. O’Malley has emphasized the use of data to monitor and improve the delivery of government services, and he says he has more executive experience than Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Sanders.

But his management of state government suffered two major blemishes. In early 2013, federal investigators found that a violent gang held sway over the state-run jail in Baltimore. Later, Maryland’s rollout of its health-care exchange website under the Affordable Care Act was badly plagued by glitches.

Mr. O’Malley grew up in Montgomery County, Md., in a family steeped in Democratic politics. After law school, he married into a prominent Baltimore Democratic family. His wife, Katie, is a state judge. They have four children and live in Baltimore.

Mr. O’Malley has spent much of his adult life in politics. In his early 20s he volunteered for Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s presidential campaign. In his late 20s he won a seat on Baltimore’s city council.

At age 36, he was elected mayor after campaigning on a “zero-tolerance” platform that held that cracking down on minor offenses can help prevent serious crime. The city’s violent crime rate fell sharply in his seven years as mayor. But critics said too many young African-Americans were arrested for low-level offenses, fueling anger toward police and making it harder for many to get jobs.

Ricky Johnson, a 61-year-old Baltimore resident who attended the announcement, said zero tolerance was a misguided strategy. “That was the only thing I had a gripe with him about,” Mr. Johnson said, praising his tenures as mayor and governor, along with his executive skills. “When he’s in charge, he’s in command,” Mr. Johnson said.

Last month, Mr. O’Malley cut short an overseas trip and returned to Baltimore after parts of the city erupted in riots following the funeral of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died of severe spinal injuries sustained in police custody. Mr. O’Malley endured some heckling when he visited the West Baltimore neighborhood where much of the looting and arson occurred.

Mr. O’Malley said he doesn’t think his policing policies planted the seeds for the recent unrest, noting that many of the protesters were just children when he was mayor. Instead, he pointed to societal inequality and a national economy that he says doesn’t work for poor inner-city Americans.

“When we create conditions and allow conditions of extreme poverty to continue and to expand and in a lot of places to worsen and deepen, then that can give rise to extreme violence,” he said in a recent interview. “That was the eruption you saw the other night.”

Several protesters walked through the crowd as Mr. O’Malley spoke. One woman chanted “Black lives matter” and held a sign saying, “Stop killer cops.” Others blew whistles.

Martin O’Malley Phoned Hillary Clinton Ahead of His Presidential Launch // TIME // Kathleen Lange - May 30, 2015

The call was brief and cordial

Barely 24 hours before launching his campaign to challenge Hillary Clinton, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley phoned the Democratic presidential front-runner to personally inform her of his plans.

The call between the two Democratic rivals was brief and cordial, and came on the same day that O’Malley filed his candidacy papers with the Federal Election Commission, according to two sources familiar with the conversation.

O’Malley, the two-term governor of Maryland who left office in January, is launching his presidential campaign Saturday morning in Baltimore, the city where he spent seven years as mayor.

Clinton and O’Malley have a complicated relationship as fellow Democratic party notables. O’Malley was one of the first Democratic governors to endorse Clinton’s candidacy for president in the 2008 election, and was a major fundraiser for the then-Senator. Last year, former president Bill Clinton strongly praised O’Malley’s time as governor.

But as he has prepared to run for the White House, O’Malley has staked out a position to Hillary Clinton’s left on an array of policies, including trade, Wall Street reform and immigration. While he has largely refrained from directly attacking her, he has made a point of emphasizing their disagreements at every juncture.

On the call, O’Malley told Clinton that he is running because he believes it’s time for “new leadership” of the country. Not coincidentally, the phrase is the slogan for his nascent presidential campaign, visible on half a dozen campaign signs around the stage at his launch event on Baltimore’s Federal Hill.

The 52-year-old plans to emphasize his youthfulness in comparison with Clinton, who is 67 and one of the oldest candidates to ever seek the presidency.

Friday’s call is not the first time Clinton’s campaign has communicated with O’Malley. Around St. Patrick’s Day, Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta held a private meeting with O’Malley and told the former governor that they were going to take any possible campaign seriously.

A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

O’Malley is a longshot candidate for the Democratic nomination, especially when compared to the Clinton juggernaut. Despite frequent trips to Iowa and New Hampshire with all the accompanying press coverage, O’Malley is polling at 1% among Democrats nationally compared with Hillary Clinton’s 57%, according to a May 28 Quinnipiac survey.

O'Malley's long-shot bid gets complicated start // Politico // Ben Schreckinger - May 30, 2015

Martin O’Malley’s presidential bid has always been a long-shot, but the odds looked even longer Saturday as he officially kicked off his campaign from Federal Hill Park.

The run-up to his launch here could hardly have been worse, complicated in recent weeks by unrest in the city where he served as mayor and the unexpected early momentum of another Hillary Clinton challenger: Bernie Sanders.

At one time, O’Malley figured to be Clinton’s default rival for the Democratic nomination. He won two terms as governor of Maryland, winning by wide margins, and honed his national fundraising chops as chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. At 52, he was positioned to make the case that he represents a generational step forward. Yet it’s Sanders — a disheveled, 73-year-old socialist — who so far has captured the imagination of progressives looking for a Clinton alternative.

O’Malley’s camp maintains that the enthusiasm generated by the Vermont senator — who drew overflow crowds at campaign events in Iowa and New Hampshire this week after kicking off his campaign in front of 6,000 supporters in Burlington on Tuesday — is a sign that Democratic voters are hungry for excitement and augurs well for the former Maryland governor.

Martin O'Malley Delivers Powerful Campaign Kickoff Speech // Bloomberg // Mark Halperin - May 29, 2015

Style: Easy on the eyes and ears, optimistic, conversational, and focused. Powered throughout by compelling American dream/working class themes. Tableau of touching introducers and faces on the stage was carefully and well chosen.

Substance: Clarion calls for comprehensive immigration reform and new banking rules. Vague on foreign policy. But suggested additional national goals by talking about his Maryland record.

Best moment: Garnered event's biggest applause with a frontal shot at the royal Clintons and Bushes, a well-crafted and necessary riff to send the message (including and especially to the media) that he knows he has to topple giants to win.

Worst moment: Confusing “I voted for you” closing refrain.

Overall: Smartly written speech powerfully delivered by one of the best orators in American politics. Far from running from his Baltimore record, he embraced it, along with what he did as Maryland's governor. Contrasted himself with Hillary Clinton as more left, more populist, and more of a leader. Saturday morning might not be the best time to make an introduction to America, but O'Malley demonstrated why Bill Clinton tagged him long ago as one of the Democratic Party's biggest stars. If the nomination fight didn't have an overwhelming frontrunner, O'Malley's performance would have been a game changer; instead, it is ringing calling card.

Baltimore’s blight puts O’Malley on defensive in bid for presidency // WaPo // Robert McCartney - May 30, 2015

When Martin O’Malley announces his bid for the presidency Saturday in Baltimore, he is hoping that backdrop will strengthen his effort to become the leading candidate for progressives.

But the backdrop also could be his albatross.

In preparing to seek the Democratic nomination, he has cast himself as the only candidate with the vision, record and hands-on experience to attack urban problems such as poverty and crime.

But the stubborn urban decay that continues to afflict sizable swaths of Baltimore threatens O’Malley’s pitch. The city drew international attention in April when riots erupted in the same troubled neighborhoods where O’Malley had said conditions were “so much better.”

A challenge for O’Malley, analysts say, is that his numerous initiatives for the city — as mayor for seven years and governor for eight — have yielded mixed results.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is a possible Democratic contender for the White House in 2016. Here's his take on gay marriage, income inequality and more, in his own words. (Julie Percha/The Washington Post)

The gleaming offices, restaurants and new housing in the Inner Harbor area are a stark contrast to the boarded-up businesses and homes the world saw on television when Baltimore exploded. The sharp reduction in violent crime is offset by the tension with police that was exposed by last month’s looting.

Given his desire to run as an urban champion, it’s no wonder that O’Malley is quick to object when anyone criticizes Baltimore.

At a public meeting in December, a month before his last day as Maryland’s governor, O’Malley interrupted a fellow Democrat who faulted the city for the thousands of vacant, abandoned buildings that fill its poorest neighborhoods.

“You drive up the streets of Baltimore City, as I do often, and it is just indescribable what we, I guess collectively, have allowed that to become,” Comptroller Peter Franchot said at a Board of Public Works session in Annapolis.

Before Franchot could continue, O’Malley jumped in: “And yet so much better than it was 15 years ago. . . . A lot of people gave their lives [at work] to make it better.” He said Franchot was “30 years late” in sounding an alarm over urban blight.

The mixed results of O’Malley’s tenure can be seen in the frustration he experienced in trying to reclaim the city’s uninhabitable buildings. The city drew applause for acquiring thousands of lots in the hope of promoting their redevelopment.

But the number of vacant and abandoned residential properties increased by 2,570, to more than 15,700, between 2002, when O’Malley’s program began, and 2007, the year he stepped down as mayor to become governor, according to statistics from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance.

View Graphic

Baltimore’s recovery slower than most cities

The alliance said the gain was partly attributable to the city’s success in identifying vacant buildings that it hadn’t known about before. But housing specialists said legal complexities and high costs also stymied efforts by O’Malley and his two successors to fix the problem.

On the plus side, O’Malley won national plaudits for innovative leadership as both mayor and governor, such as for his early adoption of data-driven management. He points to accomplishments such as slashing violent crime, reducing children’s exposure to lead paint, increasing spending on drug treatment and drawing young people back to redeveloped neighborhoods downtown.

But the renaissance of prosperity in some Baltimore communities, principally around the harbor, has not spread to many of the city’s poorer sections. The city’s overall poverty and unemployment rates have remained high — not nearly as bad as in Detroit, but worse than in the District, Pittsburgh, Boston and New York.

A survey released this month by two Harvard economists found that among the nation’s 100 largest cities and counties, Baltimore ranked at the bottom as the jurisdiction where children face the worst odds of escaping poverty.

“Any city has pockets of poverty; it’s really a matter of the depth and scale,” said Jennifer S. Vey, a fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. “The lows are low in Baltimore. . . . You have deep distress in certain pockets.”

O’Malley contends that Baltimore was making better progress than most comparable cities until the 2008 recession.

But his defense of his urban record also poses some political risks. He says the shortcomings arise not from his programs but from national economic policies that foster inequality and from a lack of support from the federal government.

“We haven’t had an agenda for America’s cities for at least two decades . . . probably since Jimmy Carter,” O’Malley said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on May 3.

Taking a robust liberal position, O’Malley has urged increased spending on cities. He wants to raise the minimum wage, as Maryland did with his encouragement as governor.

“We need big investments in affordable housing,” O’Malley said at a forum May 5 in Redlands, Calif. “We need investments in infrastructure, especially mass transit. We also need to target job training.”

That approach could help O’Malley in the Democratic primaries, where he has positioned himself to the left of front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton. O’Malley is competing with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a socialist, for support from liberal activists who see Clinton as too moderate.

But it would face a more skeptical audience in the general election.

“The problem is that it is politically unsalable,” said Donald F. Norris, director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. “We are a nation of suburbs, and suburban residents and elected officials do not care a whit about declining central cities.”

O’Malley hasn’t said how much he thinks his proposed investments would cost or where he would find the money. Haley Morris, an O’Malley spokeswoman, said this week that such questions are premature because O’Malley won’t unveil a comprehensive agenda for cities until several weeks from now.

Since the riots, O’Malley’s record has drawn attention mainly for the aggressive police policies he implemented as mayor. They led to a substantial decline in homicides and other violent crime, but also resulted in a sharp increase in arrests for minor offenses, which alienated poor communities.

O’Malley’s successor as mayor, Sheila Dixon (D), abandoned the “zero tolerance” arrests, and critics noted that homicides continued to decline. Still, O’Malley’s defenders credit him with helping to start the trend, especially by shutting down many of the city’s open-air drug markets

“On one hand, more people got arrest records; on the other hand, murders went down,” said Robert C. Embry, president of the Abell Foundation, which works to reduce Baltimore poverty.

O’Malley also drew mixed reviews for his economic development strategy. As mayor, he directed money and government support toward middle-tier neighborhoods, which he thought offered the best chance of recovery, or toward ones that had access to job centers.

Many urban experts praised the approach as a smart use of scarce resources. But critics said it diverted aid from communities most in need of help.

O’Malley played a key role in pushing forward the redevelopment of a poor neighborhood near the Johns Hopkins medical complex in East Baltimore. He did so partly to keep Hopkins, the city’s largest private employer, from taking its expansion plans outside the city. He also targeted that community because it had a relatively good chance to prosper, owing to its proximity to hospital jobs.

O’Malley also supported Healthy Neighborhoods, a community development effort sponsored by financial and philanthropic organizations that has been credited with helping to stabilize middle- and working-class neighborhoods that were at risk of declining.

“O’Malley recognized that improving neighborhoods is about finding their assets,” said Mark Sissman, president of Healthy Neighborhoods Inc. “He and others at the same time said, ‘Let’s figure out what works and build from those strengths.’ . . . Is there a college that’s important? Is there good public transportation? Are there historic buildings?”

But that progress came with a cost, according to some community activists and business people in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

“O’Malley did well by the harbor, but my community didn’t benefit,” said Doni Glover, a community activist and journalist who lives in Sandtown-Winchester. “My understanding is that for poor, inner-city black neighborhoods in West Baltimore and East Baltimore, his method, his strategy, was just let them rot.”

Sandtown-Winchester was the center of the April protests in Baltimore, which were triggered by the death of Sandtown resident Freddie Gray a week after he suffered a severe spinal injury in police custody.

Perhaps the biggest problem for poor neighborhoods in Baltimore and comparable cities is the shortage of jobs for low-skill workers.

Here, O’Malley drew praise for good management of federal job programs and for protecting funding for public schools. But Baltimore schools remain the worst in the state, by most measures, and it’s still a challenge for job-seekers without automobiles to get to jobs in upscale parts of the city or the suburbs.

“He did a good job of managing the agencies,” said Peter Beilenson, chief executive of the Evergreen Health Cooperative, who served as O’Malley’s city health commissioner. “I don’t think a huge amount was done to make jobs accessible in the neighborhoods, which is truly essential if you’re going to deal with the Sandtown-Winchesters of the world.”

O’Malley strongly backed building the light-rail Red Line, which would improve transit for residents of poor neighborhoods in West Baltimore. But Gov. Larry Hogan (R), who succeeded O’Malley in Annapolis, is considering killing the Red Line on grounds that its price tag of at least $2.6 billion is too high.

In his Project 5000 effort to reduce urban blight as mayor, O’Malley sought for the city to take over 5,000 abandoned properties and prepare to donate or sell them so they could be redeveloped.

The city exceeded the target in gaining control of buildings but then had difficulties disposing of them.

Dixon proposed instead to create a quasi-governmental “land bank” to deal with the issue, but it never got off the ground. The current mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), has embraced a third approach, called “Vacants to Value.” It uses a broad array of methods, including increased demolition funding, infrastructure repairs and housing reinvestment.

None of the efforts have reduced the backlog. The reported total of vacant and abandoned residential properties has continued to creep up and was above 16,100 in 2013.

At the December hearing, Franchot said it was “utterly, totally unacceptable” for Baltimore to have “block after block after block” of homes shuttered with boards or cinder blocks.

O’Malley instead stressed the “great opportunities . . . to repopulate the City of Baltimore.” He added: “It could happen even more quickly with some more capital dollars.”

Martin O’Malley Announces Presidential Campaign, Pushing Image of Vitality // NYT // Maggie Haberman - May 30, 2015

In another campaign year, Martin O’Malley’s résumé and good looks might be irresistible to Democratic primary voters. He is a former big-city mayor whose story of renewal in Baltimore seemed well tailored to an increasingly urban and minority party. He is a former two-term governor of Maryland — and the lead singer and guitarist in a rock ’n’ roll band.

But Mr. O’Malley is running in an election cycle in which Democratic elected officials and donors have overwhelmingly focused attention onHillary Rodham Clinton. And he already faces competition from SenatorBernie Sanders of Vermont for the support of liberals who dislike Mrs. Clinton or merely want to see her pushed further to the left.

After a two-year exploratory phase, Mr. O’Malley, 52, on Saturday began to make a case for why Democrats should bet on him instead of on Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Sanders. His argument was both economic and, in a clear contrast with his significantly older Democratic rivals, generational.

“Today, the American dream seems for so many of us to be hanging by a thread,” he said, announcing his candidacy before hundreds of supporters under a baking sun in Federal Hill Park in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, with the towers of the city’s downtown behind him.

“This is not the American dream,” he added, as his notes flapped in the breeze. “It does not have to be this way. This generation of Americans still has time to become great. We must save our country now. And we will do that by rebuilding the dream.”

In a speech that gave short shrift to foreign policy, Mr. O’Malley worked hard to tap into resentments rooted in the 2008 financial collapse. “Tell me how it is that you can get pulled over for a broken taillight in our country,” he said, “but if you wreck the nation’s economy, you are untouchable.”

His aides say Mr. O’Malley is a true progressive, one who became involved early on the issue of same-sex marriage, and a scrappy underdog who takes to tough political fights. He staked out early ground on an immigration overhaul in 2014, accusing the Obama administration of heartlessness in deporting children who had crossed the border from Mexico.

But Mr. O’Malley was also a staunch supporter of Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 presidential campaign — he called her ideas “new” then — and he rose to prominence as a tough-on-crime mayor in Baltimore, a city scarred by drugs and violence.

In two years of travels to Iowa and New Hampshire, he has frequently been reluctant to discuss Mrs. Clinton or to draw a pointed contrast with her, doing so only obliquely. He has faulted unnamed politicians for “triangulation,” for example, a word associated with the Clintons’ up-the-middle political calculations since the 1990s.

Who Is Running for President (and Who’s Not)?

It is also unclear whether Mr. O’Malley can aggressively raise funds without a devoted base of support, which Mr. Sanders can draw on, or a raft of major donors, which Mrs. Clinton enjoys.

In his remarks on Saturday, Mr. O’Malley seemed to have made peace with that, as he repeatedly portrayed the financial industry in a harsh light.

“Recently the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs let his employees know that he’d be just fine with either Bush or Clinton,” Mr. O’Malley said, referring to Jeb Bush, a likely Republican candidate, and Mrs. Clinton. “I bet he would!”

“Well, I’ve got news for the bullies of Wall Street,” Mr. O’Malley added as the crowd cheered. “The presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth, by you, between two royal families. It is a sacred trust to be earned from the American people and exercised on behalf of the people of these United States.”

The announcement did not go off without a hitch: Mr. O’Malley’s sound system conked out in the middle of a video made for the occasion, just before he took the stage.

His admirers believe he fills a natural void in the Democratic primary.

“Here you’ve got a clear generational divide, and a lot of Americans think about that,” said Gary Hart, a former Colorado senator and Democratic presidential candidate. “They are less inclined to divide themselves in the world between liberals and conservatives, and more between the past and the future.”

It was Mr. Hart’s come-from-behind candidacy in the 1984 Democratic primaries, which ultimately fell short, that helped inform Mr. O’Malley’s thinking about his own race. He often peppers his remarks with variants of Mr. Hart’s campaign mantra: “New ideas, new generation.”

Mr. O’Malley, who grew up in the Washington suburbs, took time off from Catholic University to work on Mr. Hart’s campaign that year. He later moved to Baltimore, married into a political family, became a city councilman and won the first of two terms as mayor in 1999 in a crowded field. He was credited with a crackdown on crime and on drugs.

He went on to win two terms as governor of Maryland. His star still rising, he was often described as a results-oriented policy expert, who signed into law bills allowing same-sex marriage and raising the minimum wage.

But he also presided over a disastrous rollout of a health care exchange under the Affordable Care Act. And his legacy as mayor and then governor was called into question only last month when an unarmed black man, Freddie Gray, died of injuries sustained while he was in police custody here, sparking days of unrest.

Mr. O’Malley returned to the city to walk its streets even as critics of his tough-minded approach to policing — a few of whom protested his announcement — said his policies had created the climate for racial tensions that led to Mr. Gray’s death.

Mr. O’Malley acknowledged Saturday that the episode was “heartbreaking,” but said, “There is something to be offered to our country from those flames.”

“The scourge of hopelessness that happened to ignite here that evening transcends race. It transcends geography,” he said. He argued that poverty and drug addiction were killing young white people, not just blacks, in small towns and in cities, but that politicians had failed to respond.

“We have work to do,” Mr. O’Malley said. “Our economic and political system is upside down and backwards, and it is time to turn it around.”

Think big, make political revolution // Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier // James Lynch - May 30, 2015

Think big, Bernie Sanders told an overflow crowd that clapped, cheered and gave him standing ovations for his call for campaign finance reform, a single-payer Medicare-for-all health care system, free college tuition, universal preschool and paid paternity leave.

Please don’t think small,” said the Vermont senator who is seeking the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

“Think be big. Be involved. Let’s make a political revolution,” Sanders said Saturday morning at the Robert A. Lee Community Center in Iowa City. More than 300 people filled the room and more than 200 listened outside.

Mary Pat Cavanaugh of Iowa City was ready to enlist after listening to Sanders speak and answer questions for more than an hour.

“I’m signing up,” she said, explaining “I can’t live with the way the country is going anymore.”

Her biggest issues – and one of Sanders’ – is income inequality.

“It’s the most immoral. It infuriates me that we let it happen,” Cavanaugh said.

It can be undone, according to Sanders, an independent who self-identifies as a Democratic socialist. It must be undone if the nation is going to address a multitude of issues.

“It’s our job to transfers that wealth back down to the middle class and working families,” he said. “We have to deal with this issues of distribution of wealth, and when we begin to do that we will have the resources to deal with paternity leave, to deal with the mental health care needs of our kids, to make sure that every veteran who comes back from a war gets the health care he or she needs.”

It won’t happen when the top one-tenth of the 1 percent control almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of Americans and is using its wealth to buy the political process in Washington and state capitols. So he called for a constitutional amendment to turn back the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United.

Noting that he was speaking in a university community, Sanders called for free tuition at public colleges and universities.

One of great crises facing this country is the fact that we live in a very competitive global economy. If we are going to compete effectively … we need the best-educated workforce in the world.

Hundreds of thousands of young people can’t afford to go to college and those who graduate often have tens of thousands of dollars of debt, Sanders said.

“What kind of stupidity is it?” he asked.

That touched Connor McPartland, a recent University of Iowa graduate from Missouri, who sported a “Bernie” sticker.

“I have lots of loans and his plan to let me refinance that hits close to home,” he said.

Sanders, who called for an investment in infrastructure to create as many as 13 million good-paying jobs, will need to knit together the Cavanaughs and McPartlands along with those whose priorities include expanding Social Security benefits, raising the minimum wage and opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and increased spending on the military.

“I can’t do this alone,” he said. “I can’t win the election by myself. I can’t governor by myself. The political revolution means that each and every person here and in America in his or her own way has got to take a stand.

“You are not wasting your time,” he concluded. “What you’re doing what is the most patriotic. You are standing up for America and standing up for democracy. That’s what we’ve all got to do.”

Bernie Sanders in Iowa City: Think big, make political // The Gazette // James Q. Lynch - May 30, 2015

Think big, Sen. Bernie Sanders told an overflow crowd that clapped, cheered and gave him standing ovations Saturday for his call for campaign finance reform, a single-payer Medicare-for-all health care system, free college tuition, universal preschool and paid paternity leave.

“Please don’t think small,” said the Vermont senator, who is seeking the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

“Think big. Be involved. Let’s make a political revolution,” Sanders said at the Robert A. Lee Community Center in Iowa City. More than 300 people filled the room, and more than 200 listened outside.

Mary Pat Cavanaugh of Iowa City was ready to enlist after listening to Sanders speak and answer questions for more than an hour. “I’m signing up,” she said. “I can’t live with the way the country is going anymore.”

Her biggest issues — and one of Sanders’ — is income inequality.

“It’s the most immoral. It infuriates me that we let it happen,” Cavanaugh said.

It can be undone, according to Sanders, an independent who self-identifies as a Democratic socialist. It must be undone if the nation is going to address a multitude of issues, he said.

“It’s our job to transfer that wealth back down to the middle class and working families,” he said. “We have to deal with this issue of distribution of wealth. And when we begin to do that, we will have the resources to deal with paternity leave, to deal with the mental health care needs of our kids, to make sure that every veteran who comes back from a war gets the health care he or she needs.”

Noting that he was speaking in a university community, Sanders called for free tuition at public colleges and universities.

“One of great crises facing this country is the fact that we live in a very competitive global economy. If we are going to compete effectively … we need the best-educated workforce in the world,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of young people can’t afford to go to college, and those who graduate often have tens of thousands of dollars of debt, Sanders said.

TOP NEWS

DOMESTIC

Joe Biden's son, Beau, dies of brain cancer // Reuters // May 30, 2015

Beau Biden, son of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, has died after battling brain cancer, the vice president said on Saturday.

"The entire Biden family is saddened beyond words. We know that Beau's spirit will live on in all of us, especially through his brave wife, Hallie, and two remarkable children, Natalie and Hunter," said a statement released by the White House.

Biden was 46 and a former Delaware attorney general. He had been hospitalized this month for treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center outside Washington.

After eight years as attorney general, Beau Biden joined the investor law firm Grant & Eisenhofer in 2015.

He served a yearlong tour in Iraq as a captain in the Delaware Army National Guard and underwent surgery at a cancer center in Texas last year. He suffered a mild stroke in 2010.

President Barack Obama paid warm tribute to Beau Biden, saying he took after his father.

"He studied the law, like his dad, even choosing the same law school. He chased a life of public service, like his dad, serving in Iraq and as Delaware’s Attorney General," Obama said in a statement.

"Like his dad, Beau was a good, big-hearted, devoutly Catholic and deeply faithful man, who made a difference in the lives of all he touched, and he lives on in their hearts."

The vice president has faced family tragedy before. Shortly after winning election to the U.S. Senate in 1972, his wife Neilia and three children were in a car crash. Neilia and their daughter were killed, while their two sons, Beau and Hunter, were injured.

Joe Biden has been Obama's vice president since the president first took office in January 2009. He has a deep knowledge of Washington politics after decades in the U.S. Senate, and a folksy, avuncular style that contrasts with Obama's more aloof manner.

Patriot Act Deadline Forces Rare Sunday Senate Session // RCP // James Arkin - May 30, 2015

The Senate will gavel in a rare weekend session Sunday afternoon, just hours ahead of the midnight expiration of controversial Patriot Act provisions, but the path to a solution remains very much unclear.

At issue is Section 215 of the 2001 Patriot Act, which is used as legal justification for the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone data collection, the program revealed two years ago by leaker Edward Snowden. For the most part, lawmakers currently fall into three camps: those who would like to see the law reauthorized and the program continue unchanged; those who support a reform measure that would end the bulk data collection; and those who would prefer to see the entire Patriot Act expire.

The Sunday session is a direct result of the Senate’s failure to find a solution during a Friday night session last week that carried into the early hours of Saturday, with lawmakers equally eager to solve the problem and make it home for the Memorial Day recess. Two attempts to clear the 60-vote threshold failed: one involved reform legislation that passed overwhelmingly in the House, and the other was to extend the program for two months, thus allowing time for the debate to continue.

After those two votes failed, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to extend the program for one week, then four days, then two days and finally a single day, but opponents objected each time, after which McConnell announced the session this Sunday.

“One more opportunity to act responsibly to not allow this program to expire,” McConnell said. “This is a high-threat period and we know what’s going on overseas, we know what’s been tried here at home. My colleagues, do we really want this law to expire? We’ve got a week to discuss it; we’ll have one day to do it. So we better be ready next Sunday afternoon to prevent the country from being endangered by the total expiration of the program.”

It remains unclear, however, what direction the session will take. McConnell entered motions to recommit for both the House-passed USA Freedom Act and the short-term, two-month extension, which means he can bring both of those up for a vote again. He has not indicated, however, whether either will get another vote Sunday.

Proponents of the USA Freedom Act – which passed the House before recess by a 338-88 margin – argue that it is the only way forward, particularly just hours before the deadline. The House isn’t scheduled to return until Monday afternoon, after the program expires, thus making any short-term fix extremely unlikely. Though the Senate failed to move the House bill by a 57-42 margin last week, there is some confidence that three or more votes could be picked up with the deadline imminent.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, one of the co-sponsors and most vocal supporters of the USA Freedom Act, said he thinks there is a “good chance” it would pass if brought back up for a vote Sunday. Lee said he’s been “working the phones aggressively” during the recess with colleagues who are on the fence.

“There were several people who voted against it Friday night who I know felt that they’d rather have something pass rather than nothing,” he told RealClearPolitics in an interview. “I really think they would have voted for it and I’m even more confident that we’ll have several who voted against it who would vote for it now.”

Part of the problem for McConnell, who preferred a clean reauthorization of the Patriot Act provisions without any changes, as well as supporters of the USA Freedom Act, is Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a 2016 presidential candidate and extremely vocal critic of the NSA’s domestic surveillance practices. Paul staged a filibuster last week, delaying consideration of the Patriot Act provisions, and later blocked multiple attempts by McConnell to renew the program for even as little as one day. He does not support the House bill and voted against it last Friday.

Paul has been forcefully fundraising off his recent Senate action, sending out a slew of emails to supporters during the recess talking about his stance against the NSA and asking for donations. In a lengthy email Friday morning, the libertarian-leaning senator said his 10-½ hour filibuster “has thrown Washington, D.C. into turmoil.”

“When the Senate comes back into session on May 31st, there will be just eight hours for spy state apologists to reach a deal to keep these programs going,” Paul wrote in the email. “Eight hours! I'm determined to do whatever I can to stop them – regardless of the ugly smears I face by both the press and surveillance state backers.”

A super PAC supporting Paul also released a Wrestlemania-style video Friday in anticipation of the special session. It featured Paul’s face Photoshopped onto a buff wrestler’s body and alluded to a showdown between him and President Obama – with the Kentucky senator labeled “The Rand Man” and an announcer calling him a “defender of freedom.” The ad highlighted how important the NSA fight is for Paul’s White House aspirations.

McConnell, who supports his fellow home state senator’s presidential run, has said that he and Paul simply have a difference of opinion on the issue, and that it’s not personal, according to the Associated Press. The majority leader also said that the wide margin of support in the House for the USA Freedom Act “makes it pretty challenging to extend the law as it is."

Lee said the choice is simply to pass the House-passed bill or let the surveillance authorities expire, and that he believes there is no alternative path forward because of the serious time constraints.

The pressure on McConnell to halt his opposition to the House bill has come from all sides. Obama supports the House measure and the White House has increasingly called this week for the Senate to pass it. Democrats have also applied pressure after nearly unanimously supporting the legislation last week – with independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats, the only one voting against cloture. Democratic leadership – Minority Leader Harry Reid and Sens. Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer and Patty Murray – released a joint statement Thursday pushing McConnell to pass the House bill.

“It's been five days since we adjourned while punting this issue until the 11th hour,” the senators said. “In that time, we have not moved any closer towards a solution but we have moved closer to the expiration of these authorities that you insist must not occur. It is time to abandon your opposition to the USA Freedom Act, and pass this bill.”

Lee said he could have potentially supported a short-term extension last week with the goal being to debate amendments to the USA Freedom Act on the Senate floor, but the window for that option has passed.

“I’ve been telling my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats, if you want the provisions at issue to expire Sunday night, do nothing,” Lee said. “If you want them not to expire, I think we’ve got exactly one option to do that, which is passing exactly what the House passed by an overwhelming margin.”

Sunday sessions in the Senate are extremely rare, with the last one coming Dec. 15, 2013 and lasting just 20 minutes, with no votes. The last time the Senate voted on a Sunday was during the fiscal cliff showdown in late December 2012. There have been only eight Sunday sessions for the Senate during Obama’s presidency.

Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert accused of hiding sex abuse of former student // Richard A. Serrano and Katherine Skiba - LAT // May 30, 2015

Dennis Hastert stumbled into political power amid a Republican sex scandal in 1998 that unexpectedly elevated the husky Illinoisan to a position just two heartbeats away from the presidency.

He became the longest-serving Republican House speaker in U.S. history, but remained so proud of his days as a small-town high school teacher and wrestling coach that he relished the Capitol Hill nickname “Coach.”

But this week those once-idolized small-town roots caught up with the 73-year-old Hastert, who in recent years has worked behind the scenes as a Washington power broker.

On Friday, federal law enforcement officials said Hastert had paid $1.7 million over the last four years to conceal sexual abuse against a former male student he knew during his days as a teacher in Yorkville, Ill., where Hastert worked until 1981.

A top federal law enforcement official, who would not be identified speaking about the ongoing federal case, said investigators also spoke with a second man who raised similar allegations that corroborated what the former student said. The second person was not being paid by Hastert, the official said.

The disclosures followed Thursday's federal indictment against Hastert on charges of lying to the FBI about the reasons for large cash withdrawals he is accused of making to buy the man's silence.

“It goes back a long way, back to then,” a second official said. “It has nothing to do with public corruption or a corruption scandal. Or to his time in office.”

Hastert allegedly began by withdrawing $50,000 at a time, but when the

activity was questioned by banking officials, he reduced the withdrawals to under $10,000, the indictment said.

That caught the attention of financial regulators, who suspected Hastert was trying to evade federal reporting requirements.

Concerned that Hastert might be the victim of criminal extortion arising from his government work or involved in some illegal activity, FBI agents asked the former speaker about the withdrawals. Hastert told the agents that he distrusted banks and still had the cash in his possession, according to the indictment.

Former colleagues expressed surprise at the charges. “Anyone who knows Denny is shocked and confused by the recent news,” Sen. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) said Friday. “The former speaker should be afforded, like any other American, his day in court to address these very serious accusations.”

It was another sex scandal that led to Hastert's improbable rise to become House speaker.

He was plucked from a junior GOP leadership position in December 1998 after Republicans ousted former Speaker Newt Gingrich following a poor midterm election showing and then Gingrich's presumed successor, Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana, admitted to an extramarital affair and turned down the post.

In chaos and division, the party turned to a pragmatic, no-drama Midwesterner who was believed to have nothing to hide: J. Dennis Hastert.

Dubbed the “Accidental Speaker,” he dealt with the passage of President George W. Bush's tax cuts and the expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, he oversaw efforts to get money to New York and negotiate the Patriot Act.

Hastert left Congress in 2007, after Democrats had assumed the majority in the 2006 midterm election. Six months later, Dickstein Shapiro announced he was joining its team as a senior advisor, though he had to wait to become a lobbyist because of a federally mandated cooling-off period.

On Thursday, there were signs that Hastert's world had been turned upside down.

A spokesman for the CME Group confirmed that Hastert had resigned from the board of directors of the Chicago-based futures market operator.

Hastert also resigned his position as co-leader of Dickstein Shapiro's Public Policy and Political Law practice, a spokesman for the firm confirmed late Thursday.

Illinois legislators put on hold a proposal to spend $500,000 to put a statue in the state Capitol honoring Hastert. He had declined the offer about a month ago, a spokesman for state House Speaker Michael Madigan said.

On Friday, Hastert resigned from the board of the J. Dennis Hastert Center for Economics, Government and Public Policy at his alma mater, Wheaton College, a small, evangelical Christian college in the Chicago suburbs.

“The college respects Mr. Hastert's distinguished public service record and the due process being afforded him pursuant to the charges that have been filed against him,” Wheaton officials said in a statement announcing his resignation.

Thursday's indictment described misconduct against a person identified only as “Individual A,” noting that Hastert had known the person “most of Individual A's life.”

When asked about the nature of the alleged misconduct, the second official said, “It was sex.”

Hastert has not responded to requests for comment. A representative of the lobbying and law firm where he had worked, Dickstein Shapiro, declined to comment.

The indictment alleged Hastert had agreed to pay a total of $3.5 million to “compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct.”

He made several cash payments beginning in 2010, after being contacted by the individual, the indictment said.

U.S. judge grills lawyer defending Obama's healthcare law changes // Reuters // Lindsay Dunsmuir - May 28, 2015

A U.S. judge on Thursday blasted the Obama administration's motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives over the implementation of the Democratic president's signature healthcare law.

Republicans in the House filed a lawsuit in November, saying administration officials unlawfully bypassed Congress.

At issue are executive changes authorizing Treasury payments to healthcare insurers without the funding being agreed by Congress and delaying implementation of the law's employer mandate, which required employers with more than 50 employees to provide healthcare coverage.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer, appointed by Obama's predecessor, Republican George W. Bush, repeatedly interrupted U.S. Justice Department lawyer Joel McElvain during the hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Justice Department lawyers argue that the House lacks standing to sue, citing a section of U.S. law that means the House would have to prove it has been directly harmed.

"So it is your position that if the House of Representatives affirmatively voted not to fund something ... then that vote can be ignored by the administration, because after all, no one can sue them?" she asked.

McElvain argued that the merits of the case were not being discussed at the hearing, and that any perceived injury was "abstract."

"I'm not asking you to give me your brief. I want you to explain ... why it's not an insult to the Constitution?" Collyer said.

McElvain argued that the House could pass new legislation if it disagreed with the administration's changes, which he said were legal under "pre-existing permanent appropriation."

At another point, Collyer admonished McElvain: "You can't just shake your head and not deal with the question."

The lawsuit is one of a flurry filed against the Obama administration in the past few months challenging executive actions on healthcare and immigration as Republicans seek to amp up pressure on the president.

Jonathan Turley, a lawyer for the House Republicans, said the lawsuit should go forward to show the power of the purse "should not be decorative."

The judge, while appearing sympathetic to the Republicans' decision to bring the lawsuit, said she had not yet decided on the standing issue before her.

The case is United States House of Representatives v. Burwell et al, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, No 14-1967

U.S. Economy Contracted 0.7% in First Quarter // NYT // Nelson D. Schwartz - May 29, 2015

The United States economy got off to an even weaker start this year than first thought, the government reported Friday, as economic activity contracted because of a more dismal trade performance and continued caution by businesses and consumers alike.

The 0.7 percent annual rate of decline in economic output in the first quarter of 2015 was a reversal of the initial 0.2 percent advance for the period reported last month by the Commerce Department.

Although statistical quirks and one-time factors like wintry weather in some parts of the country played a role, as did a work slowdown at West Coast ports, the lackluster report for January, February and March underscores the American economy’s continuing inability to generate much momentum.

APRIL 29, 2015

It was unusually cold and snowy in late January and February in the Northeast. A scene from a grocery store parking lot in Cranberry, Pa., on Jan. 26.Economic Trends: How to Make Sense of Weak Economic Growth in 2015APRIL 29, 2015

On the site of a new building in Philadelphia last month. Construction typically slows in winter, one of the seasonal differences that economists are supposed to take into account.

Statistical Puzzle: Dueling Views on the First-Quarter SlumpMAY 19, 2015

The pullback was the third time that economic activity had posted a quarterly contraction since the current recovery began in mid-2009, with declines in output in the first quarters of 2011 and 2014. Even acknowledging flaws in the way the government takes account of expected seasonal variations, that on-again, off-again pattern helps explain why annual growth rates in recent years have been well below the pace of gains recorded in the 1990s and mid-2000s.

Much of the revision reported Friday was spurred by new data showing that exports fell more than first thought and imports rose higher. Economists at Goldman Sachs noted that the change in the trade balance shaved 1.9 percentage points off overall growth last quarter, the largest quarterly drag from net exports in three decades.

Volatile even in the best of times, the trade balance is especially hard to gauge in the wake of a labor dispute and slowdown at West Coast ports. Although the balance was negative in the first quarter, some experts like Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics say a return to normal trade patterns could propel a healthy rebound in the second quarter.

But he cautioned that the data remained in flux and warned that even his own estimate could end up being wide of the mark.

“Anybody estimating gross domestic product for the second quarter is kidding themselves, because the trade data is so unpredictable at the moment, and we have no hard numbers yet,” Mr. Shepherdson said. “I’m guessing there will be a reversal in trade flows, and we’ll see 3 percent growth in the second quarter. But it could be anywhere between 1 percent and 5 percent.”

Exports had been a particularly bright spot for the American economy in the first years of the recovery, as world trade rebounded from the plunge that followed the financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009. Those gains have moderated more recently, and are likely to remain under pressure as the stronger dollar makes American goods more expensive for overseas buyers.

Most experts had expected the data released on Friday to show a contraction in the first quarter, and virtually no mainstream economists are predicting that the economy is about to fall into a recession. Still, the weak start for the year is a crucial reason that the Federal Reserve has pulled back from any plans to raise short-term interest rates in June, with officials now suggesting that the first rate increase from near zero is not likely to come until September or even later this year.

Although Wall Street and the Fed are already looking ahead to the June 5 report on employment gains in May and other more recent data, the rearview mirror take on economic activity discouraged buying on the stock market. At the end of trading on Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Nasdaq were all off 0.6 percent. Bond yields also crept lower.

After the economy grew at an annual rate of nearly 5 percent in the spring and summer of 2014, some experts concluded that the economy had found its footing and predicted that a healthier, sustained growth rate of near 3 percent was finally at hand.

The new data for the first quarter of 2015, and signs of only a tepid rebound in the current quarter, are forcing some economists to rethink earlier assumptions.

“This isn’t the off-to-the-races kind of expansion we envisioned six months ago,” said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco. “More and more folks are coming around to the view that the long-term growth rate of the American economy is 2 percent, at best. We can’t sustain 3 or 4 percent growth for very long, so it’s two steps forward, one step back.”

Although cloudy, the economic outlook is not particularly dark.

Unemployment has been falling steadily, and experts think it could fall to about 5 percent by the end of the year, from 5.4 percent now. The jobless rate stood at 8 percent a little over two years ago.

The real estate market has also been robust as of late, with a measure of pending home sales last month hitting a nine-year high, according to data released Thursday by the National Association of Realtors. New-home sales and construction were also strong in April.

Indeed, an upward revision in residential construction last quarter offset some of the weakness elsewhere.

Despite the windfall provided by lower gasoline prices, consumer spending, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of economic activity, was only modest. Personal consumption rose by 1.8 percent last quarter, down from 4.4 percent in late 2014.

Experts say some of the weakness in the first quarter of the year reflects how the numbers are analyzed by government statisticians to account for seasonal variations, like the retail slowdown that follows the holiday shopping season or business activity that is lowered as temperatures plunge.

That process, known as seasonal adjustment, may indeed have exaggerated the underlying weakness last quarter, according to an analysis by private economists at firms like Barclays and Macroeconomic Advisers, as well as at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Whatever role that seasonal adjustments did play, however, Mr. Anderson cautioned against dismissing the first-quarter weakness as entirely a statistical quirk.

“Some economists have been trying to explain away the negative numbers,” he said. “I don’t think it’s so easily dismissed. We will get a modest bounce back this quarter.”

In particular, he said, the dollar’s surge against foreign currencies like the euro is hurting manufacturers and other exporters, a trend that is likely to continue even with the resolution of the West Coast port slowdown.

Although Mr. Anderson expects the annual rate of growth to rebound to above 2 percent this quarter and to about 3 percent in the second half of 2015, that still leaves his estimate at 2.2 percent for the annual growth rate for the year. Last year, the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.4 percent.

“There’s some truth to the statistical issues and the one-time factors, but we are still left with a real deceleration,” Mr. Anderson said. “Two percent is probably where the economy will gravitate longer term.”

INTERNATIONAL

U.S. Says China has Artillery on Artificial Islands // AP // Lolita Baldor - May 29, 2015

SINGAPORE -- Two large artillery vehicles were detected on one of the artificial islands that China is creating in the South China Sea, U.S. officials said Friday, underscoring ongoing concerns that Beijing may try to use the land reclamation projects for military purposes.

The discovery was made at least several weeks ago by the United States, but it's not clear if the weapons are still there or if they have been moved or hidden out of sight, officials said.

The revelation comes as Defense Secretary Ash Carter begins an 11-day trip, including several stops in the Asia Pacific. He is slated to speak Saturday at an international security summit here, and is expected to reassert America's views that China and other nations must stop all land reclamation projects in the region.

Pentagon spokesman Brent Colburn said the U.S. was aware of the artillery , but he declined to provide other details, saying it is an intelligence matter. Defense officials described the weapons as self-propelled artillery vehicles, and said they posed no threat to the U.S. or American territories. The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

The sighting was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

U.S. officials, however, have been watching the rapidly expanding land reclamation by China, which, according to estimates, totals more than 2,000 acres in the South China Sea.

The U.S. has been flying surveillance aircraft in the region, prompting China to file a formal protest after a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon recently flew over one of the sites.

Carter on Wednesday made it clear that the U.S. will "fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows." But so far he has said little about what the U.S. is willing to do to get China to stop the island construction.

U.S. and other regional officials have expressed concerns about the island building, including worries that it may be a prelude to navigation restrictions or the enforcement of a possible air defense identification zone over the South China Sea. China declared such a zone over disputed Japanese-held islands in the East China Sea in 2013.

Asked about the latest imagery suggesting China had put weapons on one of the land reclamation islands, China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she is "not aware of the situation you mention, but China has clearly reiterated its position several times on the islands in the South China Sea."

She also pushed back against Carter's criticism, saying that the U.S. should be "rational and calm and stop making any provocative remarks, because such remarks not only do not help ease the controversies in the South China Sea, but they also will aggravate the regional peace and stability."

Carter has been vocal about U.S. opposition to the China construction and on Friday afternoon flew over the crowded Straits of Malacca and Singapore, in part to emphasize the need for continued freedom of navigation in the region.

On board two V-22 Ospreys, Carter and his staff and several members of the media flew over the narrow shipping lanes, which were packed with massive container ships and other vessels.

The busy waterway is "a very striking example of the link between security and prosperity and the importance of having security and stability in the Pacific," said Kelly Magsamen, the Pentagon's principle deputy assistant secretary for Asia Pacific matters.

Colburn, the Pentagon spokesman, added that China's actions in the South China Sea are examples of the types of things that could extend into otherAsia Pacific areas and "could upset the order that has led to the prosperity that the entire region benefits from today."

The Malacca Strait is 550 miles long, but just 1.7 miles wide at its narrowest point. About a third of global shipping moves through the strait -- or about 50,000 ships a year. Any accidental or deliberate blockage of the strait would force ships to switch to longer and more expensive routes.

Chinese Security Laws Elevate the Party and Stifle Dissent. Mao Would Approve // NYT // Edward Wong - May 30, 2015

BEIJING — China’s new national security law, released in draft form this month, has little to say about such traditional security matters as military power, counterespionage or defending the nation’s borders.

Instead, to the surprise and alarm of many people here, it reads more like a Communist Party ideology paper and a call to arms aimed at defending the party’s grip on power. The law, together with two other recently published draft laws, constitutes the most expansive articulation yet of President Xi Jinping’s vision of national security, and the widest interpretation of threats to the Communist Party and the state since the Mao era.

Analysts say the laws are aimed at giving the security forces and courts greater leeway in muzzling Chinese civil society and corralling the influence of Western institutions and ideas, which Mr. Xi views as a threat.

Deploying the kind of retro-nationalist language that has become standard fare under Mr. Xi, the national security law says security must be maintained in all aspects of society, from culture to education to technology, “to realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

“This draft focuses on politics, ideology and culture,” said Zhang Xuezhong, a civil rights lawyer and former law professor at East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai.

The two other draft laws — also related to what might be described as ideological security — are a so-called counterterrorism law and one aimed at controlling the activities of foreign nongovernmental organizations and their Chinese partners.

More than at any other time since the Communists seized power in 1949, some scholars say, the law is being used in the service of ideology and maintaining party survival.

The draft laws, Mr. Zhang said, “really look like an expression of the conservative political thinking of some party leaders, and the legislative organs are merely trying to realize their thoughts.”

Perhaps the most interesting question is why Mr. Xi thinks he needs such laws. Existing laws already enshrine Communist Party power and criminalize any act deemed to encourage “subversion of state power.”

But the new laws provide a firmer legal framework for controlling civil society and Western organizations, scholars say.

The most ambitious of the three, the national security law, solidifies Mr. Xi’s authority over national security by placing a central organ — likely to be the National Security Commission that Mr. Xi founded — in charge of all security matters. An April 23 article in People’s Daily, the official party newspaper, said the new draft of the security law reflected “General Secretary Xi Jinping’s spirit.”

Another reason Mr. Xi wants these laws is more abstract, scholars say. Party ideology no longer plays a central role in the lives of ordinary Chinese the way it did in the Mao era, so the party needs to promote and institutionalize the ideology by whatever means it can, including by writing it into law. That is especially true under Mr. Xi, who since the day he took office in 2012 has promoted old-school party ideology in a way not seen since the aftermath of the June 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

“The ideology is far thinner and holds the attention of the populace far less powerfully than before,” said Stanley B. Lubman, a scholar of Chinese law at the University of California, Berkeley. “As a result, the Chinese Communist Party needs more institutional support than before, and may need even more. This helps to explain the attention that law has recently been receiving since Xi came to power.”

The national security law explicitly mentions the need to teach China’s 1.3 billion people about the security and ideological needs of the state and the party. One clause commands institutions to “strengthen guidance on news, propaganda and public opinion about national security.”

“National security education will be included in the national education system and the public-servant training system to strengthen awareness among the entire populace,” the law says. “April 15 of each year will be set aside as national security education day.”

Legal analysts say the law is expected to be passed no later than March, when the National People’s Congress is to meet in Beijing. It could be passed sooner by the legislature’s standing committee, which also has the power to approve laws.

“I think the frame of the national security law fits the current needs of the nation, since national security as a concept has expanded to more areas,” said Tong Zhiwei, a professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law. “But I don’t agree with some of the wordings in the draft — for example the phrases ‘ideological security’ and ‘cultural security.’ ”

Ideology and culture are not threats to national security, Mr. Tong added.

Mr. Zhang, the lawyer, said the law was “destined to be abused.” With its sanction, he said, “law enforcement officials who want to suppress freedom of speech or set limits on importing foreign publications will be more confident in doing so.”

The two other draft laws have even more concrete provisions for controlling civil society and Western institutions; both could be passed as early as this summer. The foreign NGO law proposes that such organizations be registered and regulated by the Public Security Ministry, a step that William Nee, a China researcher with Amnesty International, equates to treating them “as potential criminals.”

The law would apply to all nonprofit groups, including schools and artistic organizations. Even those groups with no China operations but who want to hold an event here would have to register with the police.

Before registering, foreign NGOs would have to find an official sponsor. To get official backing and to win the approval of the security ministry, the NGOs would have to drop or severely curtail activities that officials might consider politically suspect, like those aimed at helping China build an independent judicial system, for example.

In addition, funding given by foreign NGOs to “more outspoken” Chinese NGOs would “rapidly dry up,” leading to the shutdown of many of those groups, wrote Maya Wang, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. Ms. Wang said the law would affect her group’s activities.

Continue reading the main story

The separate draft counterterrorism law calls for, among other things, foreign technology and financial companies to hand over encryption keys to Chinese agencies and install security back doors in technology. President Obama and other American officials are pressing Chinese leaders to drop those requirements.

During his tenure, Mr. Xi has repeatedly cited Han Feizi, a Legalist philosopher from the Warring States period more than 23 centuries ago. The Legalists said autocratic rule should be codified in law rather than having law limit that rule.

A party conference in October laid the foundation for the party’s use of the law to justify and reinforce its rule. The conference called for policies promoting “the Socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics.” Legal scholars say the party is appropriating the term “rule of law” for propaganda purposes with no intention of allowing the law to circumscribe the party’s authority.

Jerome A. Cohen, a law professor at New York University, said Mr. Xi’s “rule of law seems also a vehicle for strengthening the control of central authority over the unruly lower levels of government and all the distorting influences that impact local court decision-making.”

On a broader level, he said, “Xi has intensified the uses of legislation and judicial practice as instruments of party ideology and policy in order to impose a more repressive regime than China has witnessed since the June 4 era.”

Islamic State claims militants carried out twin blasts at Baghdad hotels // WaPo // Mustafa Salim and Loveday Morris - May 30, 2015

Islamic State militants asserted responsibility Friday for coordinated attacks on two of the Iraqi capital’s most upscale hotels. The bombings claimed at least 15 lives as lavish weekend wedding parties were in full swing.

Two cars rigged with explosives blew up within minutes late Thursday night. At least 15 people were killed and 42 wounded, said a security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give out information.

The bombings are likely to shake a revival of Baghdad’s nightlife, which followed Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s lifting of a decade-old midnight curfew in February.

A statement from the Islamic State posted on the Internet claimed that it carried out the attack, which would be one of the group’s most high-profile in the capital since the militants took control of much of the country’s north last summer.

The statement said an Iraqi operative for the Islamic State parked one car at Baghdad’s Cristal Grand Ishtar hotel, then drove another to the $250-a-night Babylon Hotel and blew himself up there.

The Islamic State’s frequent suicide bombings normally target Shiite neighborhoods in the city, striking restaurants and busy shopping streets.

Iraqi security officials have linked an increasing pace of bombings in Baghdad to rising pressure on Islamic State militants on the battlefield. Iraq’s government security forces and Shiite militias launched an offensive this week to retake the western city of Ramadi from the group.

The first explosion hit the Babylon Hotel in the Jadriya neighborhood, where a bulldozer was scooping up rubble Friday below gaping windows and in front of the destroyed lobby. The hotel, a prominent feature of Baghdad’s skyline, faces the U.S. Embassy and Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone across the Tigris River.

Security camera footage of the attack broadcast on Sumaria television shows what the report claimed was the vehicle carrying the explosives entering the hotel through its security gate — where it is waved on without being checked. Another camera shows the car accelerating toward the hotel lobby.

Furqan Ali, 28, who works in a nearby restaurant, described scenes of chaos as the explosion blew out the restaurant’s windows and workers fled the area of the hotel. Security guards on the gate normally use sniffer dogs, he said, speculating that the bomber had inside help to get through the gate’s normally stringent checks.

The Babylon, run by Warwick International Hotels, had reopened this year after a major refurbishment — including a new swimming pool and spa. It was frequented by foreign businessmen.

The second blast hit near the Cristal Grand Ishtar, formerly the Sheraton. After the blast, black smoke could be seen snaking into the night sky amid the rattle of gunfire and the wailing of ambulance sirens.

The hotel’s manager, Faez al-Sufer, said that the driver had sneaked the vehicle in with a wedding convoy while multiple celebrations crammed the hotel’s function rooms on the first night of the weekend.

“On Thursday, there’s a lot of pressure because of visitors to the nightclub and wedding parties,” he said. “The checking and security procedures were thorough.”

The car with the explosives was left in the hotel’s parking lot, he said, and parts of its engine were later found on the hotel’s sixth floor. At least 30 cars were destroyed, he said. The twisted, blackened hulks littered the parking lot Friday.

Ninety rooms were damaged, the manager said, putting the total cost at about $4 million.

But he said the hotel would still open its doors to wedding parties Friday night. “We will keep challenging the terrorists,” he said.

Sufer said that no one had died in the attack but that at least 10 security guards were injured.

A third bomb was found and defused in the Babylon’s parking lot, said Saad Maan, a spokesman for Iraq’s Interior Ministry.

“They are choosing famous hotels in Baghdad to get attention,” Maan said. “This is part of their strategy.”

Sunni extremists have a history of attacking the Iraqi capital’s most prominent hotels.

In 2010, the Babylon and the Sheraton were hit in a coordinated bombing attack. The Hamra Hotel, often frequented by journalists, was also targeted and never reopened. At least 36 people were killed in those attacks.

OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS

Why Baltimore Blew Up // Rolling Stone // Matt Taibbi - May 26, 2015

When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It changed the subject.

Instead of using the incident to talk about a campaign of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal searches and arrests across decades of discriminatory policing policies, the debate revolved around whether or not the teenagers who set fire to two West Baltimore CVS stores after Gray's death were "thugs," or merely wrongheaded criminals.

From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Akai Gurley to Tamir Rice to Walter Scott and now Freddie Gray, there have now been so many police killings of African-American men and boys in the past calendar year or so that it's been easy for both the media and the political mainstream to sell us on the idea that the killings are the whole story.

Fix that little in-custody death problem, we're told, perhaps with the aid of "better training" or body cameras (which Baltimore has already promised to install by the end of the year), and we can comfortably go back to ignoring poverty, race, abuse, all that depressing inner-city stuff. But body cameras won't fix it. You can't put body cameras on a system.

As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders are only part of the problem. An equally large issue is the obscene quantity of smaller daily outrages and abuses that regularly go unpunished by a complex network of local criminal-justice bureaucracies, many of which are designed to cover up bad police work and keep all our worst behaviors hidden, even from ourselves.

Go to any predominantly minority neighborhood in any major American city and you'll hear the same stories: decades of being sworn at, thrown against walls, kicked, searched without cause, stripped naked on busy city streets, threatened with visits from child protective services, chased by dogs, and arrested and jailed not merely on false pretenses, but for reasons that often don't even rise to the level of being stupid.

"I can guarantee if you look up here and look down there, it might be five people who ain't been fucked over by the police," says Baltimore resident Shaun Young, waving a hand at a crowd of maybe a hundred people gathered at Penn and North, site of the protests. "It's small shit — they get taken advantage of."

A. Dwight Pettit, a legendary African-American civil rights lawyer in Baltimore, says he and others in the city's legal community stopped pursuing what he calls "simple civil rights violations" years ago: the verbal-abuse cases, the humiliating cavity searches conducted in public, the non-lethal beatings. "We were dumping them on each other," he says. "But we had to stop. There were just too many."

Most Americans have never experienced this kind of policing. They haven't had to stare down the barrel of a service revolver drawn for no reason at a routine stop. They haven't had their wife and kids put on an ice-cold sidewalk curb while cops ran their license plate. They haven't ever been told to get the fuck back in their car right now, been accused of having too prominent a "bulge," had their dog shot and their kids handcuffed near its body during a wrong-door raid, watched their seven-year-old dragged to jail for sitting on a dirt bike, or dealt with any of a thousand other positively crazy things nonwhite America has come to expect from an interaction with law enforcement. "It's everywhere," says Christen Brown, who as a 24-year-old city parks employee was allegedly roughed up and arrested just for filming police in a parking lot. "You can be somewhere minding your business and they will find their best way to fuck with you, point blank. It's blatant disrespect."

This system, now standard in almost all of urban America, is Mayberry on one side and trending Moscow or 1980s South Africa on the other. Why? Because America loves to lie to itself about race. It's able to do so for many reasons, including the little-discussed fact that most white people have literally no social interactions with black people, so they don't hear about this every day.

Police brutality is tough to talk about because white and black America see the issue so differently, with white Americans still overwhelmingly supportive and trustful of law enforcement. But the current controversy is as much about how modern law-enforcement practices have ruined the job of policing as it is about racism. There are plenty of good cops out there, but the way policing works in cities like Baltimore, the bad ones can thrive. And disasters aren't just more likely, they're inevitable.

Baltimore is like a lot of American cities. It has a small, spiffy-looking downtown with a couple of nice ballparks and some Zagat-listed restaurants for the tourists to visit. But outside those few blocks, much of it is a dead zone. Whole sections of town are packed with crumbling, trash-infested row houses, and this pothole-strewn mess is where people are somehow expected to live. The drug trade has historically dominated Baltimore's ghettos. But the city is so screwed these days, jokes one African-American resident, that "even the drug game is dead."

It's against the backdrop of abandoned cityscapes like this that the current policing controversy rages. The king of modern enforcement strategies, Broken Windows, isn't designed to promote economic growth in these neighborhoods. It's designed to prevent the "bad" neighborhoods from spilling into the "good" ones.

Broken Windows policing, which gained renown in the Nineties thanks to politicians like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is the mutant offspring of our already infamous race history, a set of high-tech tricks to disguise old-school discriminatory policing as cheery-sounding, yuppie-approved, Malcolm Gladwell-endorsed pop sociology. The ideas grew out of a theory advanced in 1982 by a pair of academics, James Q. Wilson of Harvard and George Kelling of Rutgers. "If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken," the pair wrote in The Atlantic, arguing in "Broken Windows" that disorder and crime were "inextricably linked" and that fixing the former would impact the latter.

The practical application of these ideas was simple. In the interest of public order, cops would stop people in troubled neighborhoods for any infraction, no matter how minor — a broken taillight, a hopped turnstile, an open beer — in hopes of deterring more-serious crimes.

Broken Windows was introduced in New York in 1990, when a Bostonian named Bill Bratton was named the city's Transit Police chief. At the time, New York was plagued by street crime, with a murder rate north of 2,000 killings a year. Any idea that seemed like it had half a chance of working seemed like a good idea.

After Giuliani made Bratton his police commissioner in 1994, the two men took the Broken Windows approach to the next level. New terms entered the lexicon — "zero tolerance," "stop-and-frisk," "community policing" (an Orwellian euphemism every bit as preposterous as the Clear Skies and Healthy Forests initiatives dreamed up by the Bush administration). These new, more interventionist strategies relied on endless streams of adversarial interactions between police and the subject population, stopping and sometimes searching people by the thousands.

Soon, the crime rate began to decline sharply, and the media rushed to laud Giuliani and Bratton for slaying the criminal dragon. Time put Bratton on its cover, dressed in a trench coat and standing at night on a New York street conspicuously empty of anything but a squad car. The headline: "Finally, We're Winning the War Against Crime." Of course, there would later be a tremendous controversy over whether these new policing strategies had anything to do with the drop in New York's crime rate. Other cities that didn't use these programs saw similar declines, in a phenomenon that criminologists are still at a loss to explain.

Bratton instituted a statistics-based system called CompStat, which required precinct captains to give regular reports to their superiors about numbers of arrests, stops and searches. As retired police Capt. Ernie Naspretto explained in a piece for the Daily News years later, it wasn't enough to merely say you were out there on the street, executing mass numbers of field interrogations. "If it ain't on paper, it ain't," he wrote. "Stop-and-frisk became a means for us to show we were still fighting crime."

For the officer on the ground, stop-and-frisk meant a commitment to a new, highly interventionist kind of policing, and one that was inherently discriminatory. Sgt. Anthony Miranda is a retired New York police officer and president of the National Latino Officers Association. He's a tall, powerfully built man who has the air of someone whose sheer size makes telling the blunt truth easier. He recalls a story from the early Eighties about how New York developed its two-faced zero-tolerance enforcement policy, one that would be imitated all over the country.

He walked a beat in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. During the High Holidays, he explains, many residents in the area refrained from using electricity or doing certain tasks, and police traditionally helped. But he was with a group of younger cops who didn't want to just stand around. "So we used to go out there, and if you were parked illegally, bang, you summonsed them," Miranda says. "We were doing what cops were used to doing — giving activity," he adds, referring to tickets and arrests.

After doing that a few times, all of the young cops got called in. "They lined everybody up on the street, had commanding officers come down, and they said, 'You're not out here to give summonses. You're not out here to make arrests. You're out here for armed presence.' "

Miranda remembered that story later on when Broken Windows started under Giuliani. Like a lot of police officers, Miranda liked the idea at first. Broken Windows, he says, seemed like a good tool to bring a crisis situation under control. But after a while, the emergency abated, crime went down, and what he was left staring at as a police officer was a discrepancy. In affluent neighborhoods, that is, generally, white neighborhoods, police tended to show up only when they had no choice. "Domestic violence, a guy firing a weapon, a car accident," he says. "Cases where, if a cop ends up responding, he has to take some action." But, Miranda says, you weren't supposed to go looking for reasons to arrest people in those neighborhoods.

But in poorer neighborhoods, cops weren't waiting for people to call 911 — they were, in police parlance, "self-initiating" the action. "If it's Bed-Stuy or some poor neighborhood in the middle of a ghetto," he says, "it could be a Catholic church and they'll find the priest and bang the shit out of him with summonses."

The sociological idea behind Broken Windows was pitched as something much more benign, of course. It was supposed to be the government version of tough love. And it was an easy sell politically, particularly to white and upper-class New York. From the point of view of the uptown crowd, it was a cheaper solution to urban decay than creating jobs. It also had the advantage of blaming the subject population for the rot and destruction of crime.

The legal precedent for these policies dates back to a 1968 Supreme Court case called Terry v. Ohio, in which the high court ruled that police may approach, search and demand to see the identification of any person the officer has an "articulable" suspicion has committed, or is about to commit, a crime. Although the court ruled that this "suspicion" needed to be more than a mere policeman's hunch and must be based on "articulable facts," the reality is that a) Sherlock Holmes, Thurgood Marshall and Miss Cleo put together couldn't tell you what qualifies as the "articulable" suspicion of a beat cop, and b) this decades-old precedent case essentially transferred the power of the state into the minds of street-level patrol officers.

Giuliani and Bratton, and later Bratton's successor, Howard Safir, made themselves famous crime fighters by vastly increasing the scope and number of such "Terry stops." Sweep up everyone, see what shakes out.

Community policing sounds harmless, like they were just sending patrolmen out to chat with old ladies on stoops about which neighborhood trees were most dangerous for cats. But in practice, it meant sending cops by the thousands into tough neighborhoods to, as Miranda says, "bang the shit" out of locals. Police braced people on sidewalks and in alleyways, asked for IDs, executed pat-downs, turned pockets inside out and emptied pad after pad of summonses.

A City University of New York professor eloquently described the mission creep of Broken Windows last year. "If the problem is a broken window, they should fix the window," professor Steve Zeidman told Reuters. "But somehow we don't fix the window, we just arrest people who start hanging out by the broken window."

At the policy's height, in 2011, New York cops were stopping more than 680,000 people a year (around 89 percent of whom were nonwhite, in a city whose population is more than half white) and issuing upward of half a million summonses a year. Though a landmark 2013 ruling by federal judge Shira Scheindlin would ostensibly outlaw the stop-and-frisk policies, many other cities — among them Philadelphia, Seattle, New Orleans and Boston — would create their own aggressive policing policies. "What New York developed," says Miranda, "was the blueprint other states followed." Smaller towns also adopted it, some with especial verve. A Miami exurb called Miami Gardens executed more than 99,000 stops in a five-year period, and reportedly stopped the same black man 258 times — including dozens of inexplicable arrests for trespassing at the convenience store where he worked.

Bratton moved to Los Angeles in 2002 and promptly launched a similar program there. By 2008, L.A. was making more than 870,000 stops a year, a rate significantly higher than was ever seen in New York. Chicago, too, was recently found to still be stopping people at a rate four times higher than New York at its peak.

Then, of course, there is Baltimore. When onetime Mayor Martin O'Malley launched his own zero-tolerance campaign in the early 2000s, he did so under circumstances similar to those faced by Giuliani and Bratton in New York in the early Nineties. Baltimore was, in O'Malley's words, the "most violent, addicted and abandoned city in America," held back by an exploding crime problem.

Though academics were already claiming that stop-and-frisk tactics didn't work, those critiques didn't yet enjoy the consensus they do now. In fact, stop-and-frisk wasn't just still hot at the time, it was intellectual chic. In 2000, America's leading fast-food philosopher, Malcolm Gladwell, helped launch his career on the back of a half-baked analysis of Broken Windows in a book called The Tipping Point.

So when O'Malley started his version of Broken Windows, he had a mandate, and it's not surprising that Baltimore's program was wildly aggressive. At its peak, in 2005, an incredible 108,000 of the city's 600,000 residents were arrested. Later on, critics like The Wire creator David Simon, would describe O'Malley's police department as obsessed by statistics, determined to produce crime-reduction rates that were "unsustainable without manipulation." The emphasis on stats, Simon said, "destroyed police work," forcing cops into the roles not of investigators and protectors, but of strong-armers bent on producing numbers above all else. Zero tolerance also forced cops to behave in ways that were virtually guaranteed to piss people off on a mass scale.

The policy was ostensibly dialed back in court thanks to a joint NAACP and ACLU lawsuit filed in 2006. But Baltimore remains a place where police stop pedestrians, ask them for ID and sometimes take them for rides if they give the wrong answers. "First thing they say is, 'Gimme your ID,' " says Malik Ansar, 44, who's standing on the corner of Penn and North in the days after Freddie Gray's death. "They look and say, 'Oh, you live in ZIP code 21227. What you doing way over here?' "

Ansar points at a run-down town house behind him. "You can tell him you were born in this house right here. They don't care. They say, 'You live here now?' And you say, 'No, man, I moved outta here 17 years ago.' And they say, 'What the fuck you doing here now?' "

The way residents like Ansar describe it, if you're not at the address listed on a photo ID, you go into the paddy wagon. But if you run, it's worse. "Then, it's an ass-whipping," says a nearby bystander. "Believe me, Freddie [Gray] knew he was gonna get an ass-whipping if he got caught. . . . Everybody knows that. It may not be a real bad one, but you gonna get one."

So most people go along, which at minimum is a huge waste of time. Ansar's friend, who goes by the name of Big T, says if you get picked up at lunchtime, you're lucky if you make it to central booking by five. You spend the whole freaking day in that hot, cramped van.

And once you get to booking? "You're spending the night," says Big T. "It's just them saying, 'We're gonna get you.' "

Many of these "cases" of loitering, or disorderly conduct, or whatever, never amount to anything, and if they do, get dropped as soon as anyone with half a brain and a law degree sees the charging papers. But the endless regimen of street interrogations and "long rides" serves its own moronic purpose, being a clumsy, bluntly illegal method of intimidating residents and searching whole neighborhoods without probable cause.

"They hoping that a warrant pop," says Ansar of the trips to central booking. "And then they hoping that your ass don't be coming around here no more. Because the police be trying to build a reputation."

People are focused on how violative these policies are to the population, but the flip side is that this high-volume, low-yield approach to enforcement is a terrible policy for good cops, too. "Right now, it's like they're saying, 'We have a robbery problem, and we fixed it,' " says Miranda. "Actually, no, you didn't fix it, you just arrested everybody. It's lazy policing."

As fig leaves go, articulable suspicion is a particularly skimpy one, as multiple studies of these tactics have shown. In Newark, for instance, a Department of Justice investigation found that more than 60 percent of police stops failed to articulate reasonable suspicion. An ACLU study of Chicago's stop-and-frisk program found officers routinely cited bogus reasons like a prior arrest or an observable "bulge" as their articulable suspicion.

You can do the math yourself. If cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and New York were, or are, routinely stopping and questioning more than half a million people a year, and if as many as half of those stops lack real cause, then at minimum we're talking millions of potentially illegal incidents.

Decades into this campaign of organized harassment, the worst thing that happened to the cops who stopped thousands upon thousands of people with no good reason was that they started to become the subject of academic studies. In 2013, New York University examined the data relating to CompStat and the Broken Windows arrests and concluded that they had little to no impact on the crime rate.

Despite such conclusions and lawsuit rulings that declared these programs discriminatory, nobody was ever punished. Giuliani didn't show up in Bed-Stuy with a fruit basket. Malcolm Gladwell didn't have to give back his Tipping Point royalties. And nobody had to apologize.

Lack of consequence rarely goes unnoticed in big bureaucracies. So it's hardly surprising that police started crossing a new line: inventing reasons not just for stops and searches but for arrests.

Twenty-year-old Jaleel Fields lives in an East New York project not far from the one where Akai Gurley — if you're keeping score, he was the young black man killed after Michael Brown and before Walter Scott — was shot in a stairwell by a rookie officer last fall. Fields' case is typical in most ways, which is why you didn't hear about it.

A thin young man with a quick sense of humor, Fields was heading to the grocery store in February 2013 and made the mistake of getting into an elevator with two police officers. A civil complaint he later filed describes how the problem started when he laughed as the police argued with another young man in the elevator.

Police claimed that Fields blocked the elevator door, then made things worse after he left the elevator by elbowing a police officer, hiding his hands and struggling. Fields' story is different. "He just came, pushed me straight back to the corner," he says. "He's like, 'Oh, you think you could bump a cop and get away with it?' I looked at him like, 'What? I ain't touch no cop. I ain't touch no cop. What are you talking about?' "

Fields got charged for resisting arrest, attempted assault in the third degree, disorderly conduct, and harassment in the second degree. He had to spend a day in jail. No one outside his family and friends would ever know a thing about this case, except for the atypical part of the narrative, which was that the action in the elevator was captured on video. (The NYPD says it can't comment on a sealed case.) The video clearly shows that Jaleel Fields not only didn't block the elevator door, he expressly stepped aside to let people on and off and stood in a corner for most of the ride. Fields' real crime seems to have been laughing near a couple of cops.

f you live in the other America where this stuff doesn't go on, and you didn't know the context of these "self-initiated contacts," you might look at Jaleel Fields, and his arrest for resisting, and think he was a criminal. You might especially think that if you didn't see the video. "Most people think that there's a high burden for getting arrested, because maybe for them, there is," says Martha Grieco, Fields' attorney. "But they don't pick up kids in these neighborhoods because they do anything. They pick them up as a form of social control. . . . We want your fingerprints in the system. We want your iris scans in the system. We want to know your tattoos."

You can walk into any public defender's office in the country and find stacks of arrest reports in which police say they saw something that common sense tells you almost certainly couldn't be. There is even a name for it: "test-a-lying." One lawyer tells a story of police smelling weed in a closed Ziploc bag from some 150 feet away. Another is representing the estate of a man, ultimately shot by police, who authorities said marched into a state police barracks reeking of marijuana ("Because everybody smokes a huge joint before they go to the police station," the attorney says, noting that no marijuana was found in the victim's system at autopsy). A third has a handful of clients who all apparently made furtive motions in the direction of an officer's gun. "It must be epidemic in New York, these furtive movements for police guns," he says.

Against the Fieldses of the world, the lies of police officers generally work as intended: as effective pretexts to get people searched or fingerprinted and create real criminal records. But the lies almost never cut the other way. In city after city, the laws are set up to make police misconduct of any kind, from a lie in an arrest report all the way up to outright brutality, disappear down a variety of bureaucratic rabbit holes.

Say you live in a large American city — Baltimore, for example. Police stop and search you, something goes wrong and you end up getting your ass kicked. You don't die, and more to the point, nobody films you not dying, which means CNN doesn't show up the next day.

You're hauled off to jail. Sometime between a few hours and a few days later, you learn the charges against you. It's usually a hell of a list, which is part of the game. On what Ansar describes as "that motherfucking paper they slide under the door," you might find yourself charged with resisting arrest, assault against a police officer, criminal possession of marijuana, criminal possession of a weapon, reckless endangerment and whatever else the on-scene officers can think of.

The case is weak, however, so a few days or weeks later a prosecutor tells you charges will be dropped. In being processed, you sign a paper. It reads:

I, (name), hereby release and forever discharge (complainant) and (law enforcement agency), all its officers, agents and employees, and any and all other persons from any and all claims which I may have for wrongful conduct by reason of my arrest, detention, or confinement on or about (date).

This General Waiver and Release is conditioned upon the expungement of the record of my arrest. . . .

You sign, and your "criminal record" disappears, which is great for you. But so does the incident, which is expunged from the public record. And, except in very rare cases, the same police go right back out on the street. The only results of the entire episode are things that can hurt you: Your prints might now be in the system, you might attract future attention by the same police, and your employer might be upset by the whole situation.

This expungement trick is the way it works in Baltimore. To make the charges go away, victims often end up overtly forfeiting a right to sue (by signing a paper to that effect) or effectively doing so by pleading guilty to lesser offenses (undercutting, say, any federal civil rights case they might later want to bring).

If a Baltimore case is bad enough to warrant a financial settlement, the gory details usually end up disappeared behind a nondisclosure agreement. A. Dwight Pettit and Baltimore trial lawyer Larry Greenberg can't tell me about most of their worst cases, because they're sealed. In other words, if the victim takes the city's money after a beating or a false arrest, then the city typically gets to dispose of the incident without apologizing or even publicly acknowledging it.

It's the street-level equivalent of the "neither admit nor deny" settlements that Wall Street offenders made infamous after 2008. A bad thing happens, but somehow nobody is guilty of anything — money just changes hands.

But here's the next catch: It's not much money. There's a liability cap in place in the state of Maryland, limiting victims to $200,000 per person, $500,000 per incident (though there are plans to roughly double those amounts). Other states, like Pennsylvania, Illinois and Colorado, have similar caps.

On the streets of Baltimore last week, African-American residents were furiously repeating the statistic about the city paying out more than $6 million in abuse settlements since 2011. But that number is actually quite small. In New York, which does not have a cap, abuse victims have received more than $420 million since 2009.

But even getting to a settlement is contingent upon the victim acting quickly. In the city of Baltimore, a victim has to file notice of a suit within six months. There are plans to expand that limit to a year, but it's still a tight window. If you don't hire a lawyer right away, you're probably not going to make the deadline.

The game is set up so the only real end for the victim of police abuse to pursue is a check from the government. This brings us to the most shocking and probably most under-reported aspect of the police-abuse story: In most cities it's close to impossible to get a police officer removed for lies, abuse or other forms of misconduct.

A grotesque example is Chicago, where statistics about police abuse leaked out via a civil lawsuit called Bond v. Utreras. In that case, it was revealed that in a two-year period between 2002 and 2004, Chicago police received 10,149 complaints of misconduct, which resulted in only 19 total acts of meaningful discipline (defined as a suspension of seven days or more).

A similar statistical pattern emerged in New York, where after last year's Eric Garner case, the NYPD's Inspector General's office and its Civilian Complaint Review Board both conducted evaluations of chokehold incidents. The upshot of the reports is that between 2009 and the first half of 2014, New Yorkers complained of 1,048 incidents involving chokeholds, which had been banned by the NYPD for more than a decade. Of those complaints, the CCRB "substantiated" only 10. And none of those offending officers saw significant repercussions.

The reason for this is that unless a police officer is criminally indicted after an abuse case, which very rarely happens, the discipline procedure at big-city police departments is generally handled in-house. In New York, a civilian complaint usually has to be substantiated by a review panel, which will either suggest punishment itself or refer the case to a pseudo-court at the police department. There, judges — who are employed by the department — may recommend discipline. But many of these recommendations can be overturned by the police commissioner.

What this means for the people on the streets of urban neighborhoods is simple: For all the hundreds of millions of dollars paid out by cities to abuse victims, very little is actually done to discipline rogue police officers. Cops caught lying in court by judges are not fired. They're back in court giving evidence the next day. "The downside [to lying] for the police is just that the evidence gets tossed," says Pettit, who notes that the problem is especially pronounced in civil courts. "There's no personal accountability. There's no reason not to lie again."

This problem — of police almost never facing consequences — was the obvious subtext of the Baltimore revolts. It's the reason the one thing that calmed the city down was the curiously rapid decision by the new state's attorney, Marilyn Mosby, to file sweeping charges, including manslaughter and murder, against the six police, three white and three black, involved with Gray's arrest.

Pettit notes that Mosby's decision was a rarity in that three of the officers were also charged with false imprisonment. She essentially described the entire arrest as improper and illegal, even going so far as to assert publicly that the pocket knife Gray was carrying was legal. The legal fight to come will therefore put the entire rationale behind Broken Windows on trial, in the sense that prosecutors will argue — if the case actually makes it to court — that the six officers never should have been doing what police have been asked to do in mass numbers every day for 15 years now.

f an individual police officer does have a record of abuse or lies or some other misconduct, most cities make it nearly impossible for anyone on the wrong side of the blue wall to find it.

Every regional police force is governed by its own legal procedure, but New York and California offer excellent examples of the uphill climb toward transparency. In both of those states, a defense lawyer staring at what looks like a bogus police statement has to file a motion to the court asking for disclosure of a police officer's personnel file. In New York, it's called a Gissendanner motion; in California, a Pitchess motion. But to win these motions, you essentially need to have that information already. It's yet another Catch-22. "In 99 percent of these cases, I get nothing," says Nikhil Ramnaney, a Los Angeles defense attorney, stressing that he can't speak for others' experiences.

"Police are always complaining about the 'Don't snitch!' campaigns," says a Baltimore resident named Kato Simeto, an aspiring clothes designer and inventor. "But you almost never see police informing on each other. They're more into 'Don't snitch' than people on the street."

Of course, where bureaucracy fails to cover things up, simple racism often steps in. Just ask Makia Smith, a 33-year-old accountant who grew up not far from where the Baltimore protests broke out. "I was on my way back from Wendy's," she says, recounting an incident in East Baltimore from March 2012. "My two-year-old daughter was in the back, in a car seat."

Caught in traffic, Smith noticed a commotion, with a gang of police officers surrounding a young suspect. As she later alleged in a civil complaint, the boy was on the ground and one of the cops seemed to be getting dangerously aggressive. Concerned, Smith opened the door of her car and held up her phone as though filming the scene. "I was hoping that if they saw me," she says, "then maybe they would stop doing what they were doing."

Instead, she alleges, the following took place: An officer, later identified as Nathan Church, rushed at her, screaming, she says, "You want to film something, bitch? Film this!" Frightened, Smith tried to get back in her car. Church took her phone, smashed it on the ground and kicked it down the street. Then he dragged her out by her hair, at which point she momentarily blacked out. Eventually, she claims, police threw her on the hood of her Saturn, where she snapped awake and saw her two-year-old wailing in the back seat. She began to panic: If she got arrested, who would take care of the baby?

According to Smith's complaint, police told her, in about the least reassuring manner possible, that child protective services was coming to take her daughter. It's an example of how completely black America distrusts the police and the government that Smith chose to allow a little girl standing on the side of the road, a stranger, to take her baby for her, rather than give the child to CPS. As she was dragged off to that seemingly omnipresent paddy wagon, Smith called out her mother's cellphone number, so that the little girl could get in touch with the baby's grandmother.

Smith ended up in jail overnight and didn't reunite with her daughter until 24 hours later. Playing the usual game of police-abuse chicken, authorities hit her with a list of charges, ranging from assault in the second degree against a police officer ("They say I took on four healthy male officers," she says), to resisting, to a host of traffic offenses.

Smith, an educated young woman, did everything right after the incident, hiring a lawyer and successfully navigating the traps and land mines designed to make cases like hers go away. She never signed away her right to sue, never allowed the case to be expunged, never took a pennies-on-the-dollar deal that would have let the police off the hook.

And what happened? The police denied her allegations, claiming the arrest was legitimate, and she watched her case implode in what's supposed to be the corruption-proof stage of the process, a trial by a jury of her "peers."

"The cops' defense team struck every black witness," she says, and her case was heard by an all-white jury, which ultimately found the police innocent of misconduct.

Broken Windows has left a major footprint on modern American society, primarily on the 65 million or so people who have criminal records in this country. That's a population roughly the size of France.

You can easily find the collateral damage from this vast illegal war on crime just by walking into certain neighborhoods and asking. From bad arrests to beatings to broken bones, there are enough horror stories to fill a thousand Ken Burns documentaries. But good luck finding any of that misconduct and abuse on an official record. What you mostly find when you search are a lot of convictions and a whole lot of statistical noise. The dirt, as it often is in this country, is mostly hidden away.

The real problem with Broken Windows is that it brings the same attitude to neighborhoods that corrections officers bring to prisons. "You have guys locked up for serious crimes, you're supposed to be controlling them," says Anthony Miranda. "But in neighborhoods, you're not supposed to be controlling people. You're supposed to be working with them. You're supposed to be serving them. And that attitude is what's missing."

As a former minority officer, Miranda says he and others like him are especially motivated to find solutions: "We're on both sides. We're in the force, but we also live in these neighborhoods. So we need to find an answer."

But the numbers game has rotted the police system to the point where it can't see the forest for the trees. "They don't see it," says Miranda. "They're too ignorant, and it's a shame."

It's Not Closing Time on American Exceptionalism // RCP // Jay Timmons - May 30, 2015

Today, manufacturing in the United States is experiencing a renaissance. It remains an economic powerhouse, propelling prosperity and the American dream forward.

Manufacturing contributes more than $2 trillion to the economy annually -- or 12 percent of the Gross Domestic Product -- and every manufacturing dollar adds $1.37 to our economy.

Last year, U.S.-manufactured exports reached an all-time high. Exports now support more than 6 million manufacturing jobs across the country, and family-owned manufacturers account for more than 96 percent of all U.S. exporters.

The good news is manufacturers in the United States make goods the rest of the world wants. But with export growth slowing, sustaining our momentum hinges upon expanding and strengthening our ability to compete in the global marketplace.

That’s why the Export-Import Bank is so important.

The purpose of the bank is to provide loans, loan guarantees and insurance, which are not provided by commercial banks, to thousands of small and medium-sized companies that need this kind of targeted support the most. Without the bank, many aspiring manufacturers in the United States would find themselves excluded from a global economy where the odds are increasingly stacked against them.

The level of support our international competitors receive dwarfs what the Export-Import Bank gives U.S. manufacturers. Consider these facts: our global competitors use more than 60 other export credit agencies. China alone provides at least five times more support for its exporters than what U.S. exporters get from the bank.

Meanwhile, the Export-Import Bank directly impacts just 2 percent of U. S. imports – and still yields big dividends.

In just the past five years, the bank has supported 1.2 million jobs. And, all the while, the bank has paid for itself by charging fees and interest.

The bank is a targeted tool -- a last resort to help businesses find a foothold in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Unfortunately, the crucial role played by the Export-Import Bank is not as well understood or appreciated, as it should be. As a result, the future of the important jobs-creating tool is now a hostage to Washington beltway politics.

Legislation to reauthorize the bank is stalled in Congress. The short-term extension under which the bank has been operating expires June 20.

As Congress debates, manufacturers are suffering.

They plan months if not years ahead when it comes to bringing a new product to market. They cannot commit to new product development if they have no assurance the bank will still be here. And new business, critical to American jobs, won’t materialize.

The question facing us is elementary.

Do we want U.S. manufacturers to win overseas, or do we want our foreign competitors and their workers to swoop in and seize these opportunities?

Failing to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank is tantamount to unilateral economic disarmament.

All manufacturers and all businesses must step up and educate our leaders in Washington, who have an opportunity to lead us in the direction of more jobs, more opportunity, more prosperity, and greater hope for all Americans. They must not allow us to cede our mantle of economic leadership to our competitors abroad.

Our manufacturing achievements today are dwarfed by tomorrow’s untapped possibilities. To achieve those possibilities, we need better access to the 95 percent of the world’s population and the more than 70 percent of the world’s purchasing power beyond our borders.

The Export-Import Bank can help us secure that great vision.

The bank is a small entity meeting its mission efficiently and effectively. Only a long-term reauthorization will give manufacturers the boost they need. The time for kicking the can down the road through patchwork solutions is over.

Our leaders have a choice to make: Is the time of American exceptionalism over, or do our nation’s best days still ahead of us?

It is past time to do the right thing.

1 attachment

H4A Clips 5.31.15.docx 144 KB

download