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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took time to hang out with the press Monday night, joking with a room packed with national political reporters about their sometimes-testy relationship. "I'm well aware that some of you may be a little surprised to see me here tonight. My relationship with the press has been at times, shall we say, complicated,'" Clinton said to laughs at a dinner for the Robin Toner Program in Political Reporting in downtown Washington, D.C. "But I am all about new beginnings: A new grandchild, another new hairstyle, a new email account, a new relationship with the...

President Obama met with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for about an hour at the White House on Monday as Clinton moves closer to launching her long-awaited presidential campaign. “President Obama and Secretary Clinton enjoy catching-up in person when their schedules permit," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement. "This afternoon they met privately for about an hour at the White House and discussed a range of topics."

The war of words over climate change is getting blisteringly hot between Gov. Jerry Brown and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, with the Republican presidential candidate blithely dismissing the Democratic governor as one of those “global warming alarmists” who relies on ridicule and insult. A Brown campaign strategist shot back Monday that the “factually irrational” Cruz is apparently now determined to “stand out from a pack of troglodytes in the GOP race for the White House.” The public slap down — and the dis of Brown — came as Cruz formally announced his run for the White House at Liberty University...

Giuliani: Well, his — his grandfather introduced him to Frank Marshall Davis, who was a Communist. Readers of The Fact Checker wanted to know if Giuliani’s comments were accurate. So we reached out to Cliff Kincaid, president of America’s Survival, a group that seeks to expose Communist and Marxist influences. The Pinocchio Test We carefully considered the facts underlying this assertion, and the evidence is slim. We may never definitively know one way or another, but it is time to put it to rest. Three Pinocchios

Ted Cruz is set to announce is candidacy for President of the United States. Rand Paul is apparently going to announce early next month before going on a campaign tour. Until today technically the only candidate was Jeb Bush, who announced late last year his intentions. At the time everyone thought that Bush was going to force everyone else to declare their candidacy early. It doesn’t appear that has happened, Cruz and Paul have appeared in no rush to make a formal announcement. Scott Walker, perhaps the front runner in the race, still hasn’t formally announced his candidacy and there’s...

This week, the media’s reaction to the Israeli election seemed indistinguishable from the reaction of the Obama White House. Not only were journalists surprised by Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory on Tuesday (they apparently believed pre-election surveys showing his party trailing by 2 to 4 seats; they ended up winning by 6 seats), but they seemed distressed by the result. On Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News, fill-in anchor Lester Holt predicted the results “could destroy any chance of a peace plan.” Over on CBS that night, correspondent Barry Petersen fretted that because of Netanyahu’s victory, “peace will be hard....Not a lot of optimism...

President Barack Obama said he takes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “at his word” for saying that an independent Palestinian state will never coexist with Israel as long as he is in office, yet another sign of the strained relations between longtime allies. […] Obama, who placed a congratulatory telephone call to Netanyahu on Thursday, said he indicated to the prime minister that the U.S. remains committed to a two-state solution as the only way to keep Israel secure. …

WASHINGTON — President Obama said he has told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the Israeli leader’s remarks in the closing days of his re-election campaign had upended the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and ran counter to the very nature of Israeli democracy, an unusually forceful and public condemnation of the top official of a vital United States ally. In his first public comments on the matter since Mr. Netanyahu’s victory in Tuesday’s elections, Mr. Obama said the prime minister’s pre-election statement that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch had all but foreclosed the chance for negotiations to resolve...

Two victories this week for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one seismic, the other minor though not insignificant. First, he won a solid re-election victory that affirmed his dire warning of the peril from a nuclear-armed Iran. Secondly, he persuaded an influential American liberal that his campaign warning that Israel's Arab citizens might swing the election against him was not a despicable, race-baiting tactic as alleged by other liberals. Netanyahu may never learn of this second vote of approval from liberal comedian Bill Maher, but it remains worth savoring for conservatives here in the U.S. (VIDEO-AT-LINK)It was heard on last...

Geraldo Rivera told the Fox & Friends troika that Benjamin Netanyahu was a divisive and petty leader who had fractured U.S.-Israeli relations — as a certain mustachioed someone has been warning for years. “If I were President Obama, I would have sent Bibi Netanyahu a congratulatory postcard by snail mail on a form written ‘congratulations on your recent election,’” Rivera said. “It is the appropriate thing to do to someone who has absolutely insulted the American constitutional system.” “It caused a division in the U.S./Israeli relationship that has never existed before,” he continued. “And then for Bibi Netanyahu to run...

The Republican-led House passed budget resolutions every year since taking control in the 2010 midterms, while Senate Democrats under Harry Reid refused to pass any at all for four years. After less than 24 hours, though, a Republican “failure” to come up with an agreement between the House and the Senate is not just “cataclysmic” already, but proof that the GOP can’t handle the “basic functions of governing.” Republicans handled it for four years while Democrats failed to perform the basic function of legislating, but somehow that didn’t get seen as “cataclysmic” for them at Politico. Maybe Politico’s analysts could...

On Friday, all three network morning shows touted President Obama's petulant "congratulatory" phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the commander-in-chief issued diplomatic threats to the newly reelected Jewish leader and America's closest ally. Leading off a full report on NBC's Today, correspondent Katy Tur blamed Obama's pettiness on Netanyahu: "This call was billed as a congratulations, but after Benjamin Netanyahu's provocative address to Congress and his statements opposing a Palestinian state, the phone call was anything but a friendly pat on back, as the President gave the Israeli leader a stern message....and warning the U.S. is...

Netanyahu Tactics Anger Many U.S. Jews, Deepening a Divide By LAURIE GOODSTEIN MARCH 20, 2015 Long before the latest election in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu was a polarizing figure among American Jews. But even many of his supporters said this week that they were appalled at his last-minute bid to mobilize Jewish voters by warning that Arabs were going to the polls in droves, and his renunciation of a two-state solution to the Palestinian crisis. Mr. Netanyahu’s party won the election and cheers from harwkish American Jews. But in interviews this week, rabbis, scholars and Jews from across the country and...

Under pressure from powerful allies in the region, Jordan is seizing on an ideological schism in its local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as an opportunity to push for a more pro-regime movement. This month Jordan transferred official recognition of the Brotherhood, which has operated in the kingdom for 70 years, to the liberal wing of the movement. In so doing, it deprived the traditional movement of its final legal foothold in the Arab world, furthering setbacks it suffered in Egypt and the Gulf Arab states. Jordan’s move, which follows years of growing distrust of the organization, carries significant risks....

Sometimes the most inside-baseball political stories tell you something essential about a presidential candidate. That's what happened this week to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who apparently wants to win the Iowa caucuses so badly that he's willing to torch his staff and his reputation to do it. The Walker campaign recently announced that it had hired Liz Mair, a highly regarded Republican consultant. Mair has also played pundit at times, and is generally more pro-gay rights and pro-immigration than the average Republican. But that's typical of Republican consultants in general. It is assumed that policy is set by the candidates...

For the nation’s left-leaning entertainers, the most interesting thing about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz this week is his callous willingness to scare toddlers for fleeting political gain. In fact, beyond Cruz’s apparent intention to run for the White House in 2016, this latest craze was of singular interest to Late Night host Seth Meyers. Meyers welcomed Cruz on to the show on Tuesday night, and the pair had a rather jovial exchange. Things got a little tense, though, when Meyers engaged in a tortured and contrived effort to put Cruz in a corner on the issue of global warming (starting...

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had a poisonous relationship long before Mr. Netanyahu swept to victory on Tuesday night in elections watched minute-by-minute at the White House. But now that Mr. Netanyahu has won after aggressively campaigning against a Palestinian state and Mr. Obama’s potential nuclear deal with Iran, the question is whether the president and prime minister can ever repair their relationship — and whether Mr. Obama will even try. On Wednesday, part of the answer seemed to be that the president would not make the effort. In strikingly strong criticism, the White...

National Geographic claims creationists are at war with science by Lita Cosner and Keaton Halley Published: 19 March 2015 (GMT+10) National Geographic (NG) is a respected popular science magazine with millions of subscribers. So it is unfortunate when they use that platform to promote anti-creation propaganda under the guise of science. The cover of the March 2015 issue is “The War on Science”, and the featured article by science writer Joel Achenbach, “The age of disbelief”, intends to explain why so many people doubt the scientific establishment on a range of issues—from global warming to vaccines to the Apollo moon...

"More specifically, Netanyahu's Likud Party won by siphoning voters away from the other right parties who will become its coalition partners. Mainstream Israeli opinion has shifted to the right: to win, Likud didn't need to win over a swath of centrist voters. It needed to jazz up the Right with nasty rhetoric about Palestinians and Arabs." "Meanwhile, Likud is going through a process that some observers have referred to as Tea Party-ization. Younger Israelis tend to be more conservative, increasingly empowering the more right-wing factions inside Likud. That causes center-right voters to defect to centrist parties, pushing the party ever...

The U.S. government suppressed information about chemical weapons it found in Iraq, and several servicemembers were injured by their exposure to those weapons, The New York Times is reporting. In an article published late Tuesday, the newspaper says it found 17 American servicemembers and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to mustard or nerve agents after 2003. They were reportedly given inadequate care and told not to talk about what happened. "From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam...