Author Archives: Denise Simon

Prepare for Biden, Kerry or even Bloomberg?

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The Hillary camp is in full implosion and they are panicked over Bernie. There major ad buys in place in California where Hillary is trailing Sanders. If Sanders does win California….her camp officially breaks. But wait, there is more. There are at least 3 investigations going on in Hillary’s realm, the Foundation, Benghazi and lastly the email/server scandal.

So, the text messages are flying, the phone calls are burning the DC wires and meetings behind closed doors are underway…..now what? A hybrid brokered Democrat conventions? But there is a big push to remove the DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

It is quite curious how Obama has maintained his distance in the Democrat election cycle.  Could there be a Sanders Warren ticket?

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Democratic pollster Doug Schoen has penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal predicting that Hillary Clinton could be denied the Democratic Party nomination if Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wins the June 7 California primary.

Breitbart: According to Schoen, a loss for Clinton would not only demonstrate her weakness as a national candidate, but could also turn the tide of opinion in the embattled Democratic National Convention and among wavering “superdelegates” — party bigwigs with an independent vote.

Specifically, Schoen argues, Sanders could seize the opportunity to change the convention rules to force superdelegates to cast their ballot for whichever candidate won their state. (In many states, Sanders won delegates at the ballot box, only to lose to Clinton overall because of her superdelegate lead.)

In addition, he says, Vice President Joe Biden may be eager to enter the fray.

Schoen writes:

A Sanders win in California would powerfully underscore Mrs. Clinton’s weakness as a candidate in the general election. Democratic superdelegates—chosen by the party establishment and overwhelmingly backing Mrs. Clinton, 543-44—would seriously question whether they should continue to stand behind her candidacy.

There is every reason to believe that at the convention Mr. Sanders will offer a rules change requiring superdelegates to vote for the candidate who won their state’s primary or caucus. A vote on that proposed change would almost certainly occur—and it would function as a referendum on the Clinton candidacy. If Mr. Sanders wins California, Montana and North Dakota on Tuesday and stays competitive in New Jersey, he could well be within 200 pledged delegates of Mrs. Clinton, making a vote in favor of the rules change on superdelegates more likely…

Mr. Biden would be cast as the white knight rescuing the party, and the nation, from a possible Trump presidency. To win over Sanders supporters, he would likely choose as his running mate someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren who is respected by the party’s left wing.

(Read Schoen’s full article here.)

In addition, Schoen writes, Clinton faces increasing pressure from the FBI investigation into her personal e-mail server and apparent conflicts of interest involving her family foundation and her performance as Secretary of State.

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Hillary and her team are in a panic and should be. California Governor Jerry Brown endorsed Hillary, but is that enough?

The Democratic front-runner changed her schedule for this week, canceling a Thursday event in New Jersey in order to be in California on the days leading up to next Tuesday’s election there. Polling last week showed a race that’s almost tied.

And on the republican side, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has released the names of the veteran’s charities he donated to after recent pressure from the media.

In addition to touting endorsements from the state’s Asian-American lawmakers, Clinton’s campaign is running targeted ads and conducting voter outreach in Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Korean.

Brown repeated Clinton’s claim that she has an insurmountable lead in the race to claim a majority of delegates to the Democrats’ convention in July.

In a written statement, the governor stopped just short of saying Sanders should step aside.

“For her part, Hillary Clinton has convincingly made the case that she knows how to get things done, and has the tenacity and skill to advance the Democratic agenda”, said Gov.

Obviously, the general election contest has only recently begun in earnest.

“Hillary Clinton, with her long experience, especially as Secretary of State, has a firm grasp of the issues and will be prepared to lead our country from day one”.

Even though she will likely secure the nomination in New Jersey, which also goes to the polls June 7, Clinton has banked on the support of non-white Americans. The Clintons strongly denounced the accusations.

But now Brown will be summarily dismissed like Tom Hayden, Dolores Huerta, Planned Parenthood, John Lewis, Barney Frank, and an ever-growing list of progressives who are written off as shills, sell-outs, know-nothings, and don’t-matters, all because they have chosen to support Hillary over Bernie. Brown and Bill Clinton fought an acrimonious presidential primary battle in 1992. Bernie Sanders, she often tried not to feed liberal suspicions that she is a hawk. “Our country faces an existential threat from climate change and the spread of nuclear weapons. Following a rally in Oakland on Monday, Sanders appeared in the stands at Oracle Arena to watch the Golden State Warriors complete their come-from-behind, Game 7 victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference finals. However, that has not stopped Sanders’ campaign in California, even though he has acknowledged there is only a “narrow path” remaining for him to claim the party’s nomination. Because as our colleague Dante Chinni writes, the moment Sanders exits the race, her poll numbers against Trump will increase. More here.

Hillary Campaign Desperate Weekend Memo

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Campaign Chairman: Clinton Knows Email Setup Was A “Mistake”

Buzzfeed: John Podesta sent hundreds of top Clinton supporters a memo over the weekend following the critical IG report on the former secretary of state’s email setup.

   

In a memo to top supporters, Hillary Clinton’s top official sought to clarify the campaign’s response to a new report from the State Department inspector general and move past a controversy that has dogged the candidate now for 15 months.

The 600-word letter from John Podesta, Clinton’s chairman and longtime adviser, addresses the IG report’s various findings, but comes back to a single point again and again: that Clinton knows the use of a personal email server was a “mistake.”

“And she has taken responsibility for that mistake,” Podesta wrote to several hundred of the campaign’s most active supporters and financial backers.

The memo, obtained by BuzzFeed News, went out by email over Memorial Day weekend, five days after the release of the highly critical IG report. The investigation, separate from an ongoing FBI inquiry, concluded that Clinton failed during her tenure as secretary of state to comply with record-keeping policies.

In the days after the IG’s findings became public, Clinton made appearances on four television networks to push back on the report as nothing new. “There may be reports that come out, but nothing has changed,” she said. “It’s the same story.”

(The IG report included some new details of how Clinton’s email arrangement was set up, including correspondence from within the State Department.)

The Podesta memo takes a more contrite posture, reminding backers three separate times that Clinton has called the email setup a mistake and continues to do so in the wake of the IG report. “The secretary has once again acknowledged this was a mistake,” Podesta writes. “If she could go back, she’d do it differently.”

Podesta also takes up one of the report’s key findings: that Clinton’s email practices did differ significantly from past secretaries of state, contrary to the candidate’s frequent argument that, broadly, her email use was not “unprecedented.”

Clinton used a non-government account to conduct State Department business, as did former secretary of state Colin Powell. But no other former secretary of state has maintained government correspondence on a private home-based server.

Although Clinton argued again in a Univision interview on Wednesday that her use of a personal account was “not at all unprecedented,” the memo from Podesta alludes to the distinct aspects of her arrangement. At the time, he writes, “she believed she was following the practices of other secretaries and senior officials.”

The IG report concluded that Clinton had an “obligation” to discuss such an arrangement with State Department officials, including for security reasons, but found “no evidence” that she “requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server.”

The report came as an unwelcome development for Clinton’s campaign, just days before officials expect to clinch the Democratic nomination when polls close on June 7. The email scandal, dragging into its second year, has not helped Clinton fight the perception that she is untrustworthy or too often mired in controversy.

“We understand the questions about Secretary Clinton’s email practices,” Podesta writes in his memo. But, he adds, “voters will look at the full picture of everything she has done throughout her career. We have faith in the American people.”

Read the full memo below:

To: Interested Parties
From: John Podesta, Campaign Chair
Date: May 28, 2016

As Hillary Clinton nears the point where she will officially clinch the Democratic nomination for President, we intend to spend the coming months focused on the issues of greatest concern to the everyday lives of working families.However, we know that our opponents will continue to try to distract us with attacks, including on issues like Secretary Clinton’s use of personal email while at the State Department.

Since last year, Secretary Clinton has said her use of a personal email server was a mistake. And while there have been ongoing reviews of this matter, the completion of the Inspector General’s examination gets us one step closer to resolving this.

While the rules surrounding use of a personal email account were clarified after Secretary Clinton left office – and the Inspector General recommends the State Department take measures to even further clarify them – the Secretary has once again acknowledged this was a mistake. And she has taken responsibility for that mistake – including in many interviews she’s done since the report’s release.

What she thought would be a convenient way to communicate with family, friends and colleagues – by using one email account for both her work related and personal emails – has turned out to be anything but convenient. If she could go back, she’d do it differently.

Parts of the report underscore what Secretary Clinton has said all along about her email practices as Secretary of State. For instance, the report confirms Secretary Clinton’s email account was well-known by many State Department officials throughout her tenure, and there is no evidence of a breach of her email server.

Had Secretary Clinton known of any concerns about her email setup at the time, she would have taken steps to address them. She believed she was following the practices of other Secretaries and senior officials.

What has also been missed in a lot of the discussion is that the report brings to light the longstanding and systemic problems in the government’s electronic recordkeeping systems.

Secretary Clinton believed her emails to and from officials on their state.gov accounts were automatically captured and preserved in the State Department’s electronic system.

It was not until the Department contacted her in 2014 that she learned this was not the case. And since then, she has taken unprecedented steps to ensure public access to her emails — providing the Department with all of her work-related emails, totaling 55,000 pages, and calling for their release.

Secretary Clinton also agrees with the Inspector General’s recommendations that electronic recordkeeping practices and policies need to be upgraded. Printing out 55,000 pages of emails is not a good use of time or resources, nor should it be the standard for preserving records given technology available to us today.

There is a lot at stake in this election. This week Donald Trump officially clinched enough delegates to become the Republican nominee. That means an unqualified loose cannon is within reach of the most powerful job in the world.

While we understand the questions about Secretary Clinton’s email practices, we are confident that voters will look at the full picture of everything she has done throughout her career. We have faith in the American people. They know we have to be focused on solutions that will make a real difference in people’s lives.

Hillary Clinton will continue to dedicate her campaign to getting results on behalf of America’s working families. She rejects the strategy of pitting Americans against each other in favor of an approach that recognizes how much stronger we are when we come together. With your help, we will take that message across the country and earn a great victory this November.

Public School Costs/Results

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It would be important for all owners of real estate regardless of whether there are school aged children to ask some hard questions of the respective school system. Chicago is a symptom of a big problem where results are quite questionable.

The Real Cost of CPS Borrowing: District Now Owes $38,000 per Student

ManhattanInstitute: By all accounts, Chicago Public Schools has made significant academic progress over the last 15 years. Since 2003 the district’s proficiency rates on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam have more than doubled in math and have nearly doubled in reading.

But this progress is now threatened by severe financial mismanagement. The district faces a budget crisis driven by the rising cost of past, unpaid bills that is crowding out spending on today’s teachers and students.

CPS’ budget crisis was not created overnight. For more than a decade, the district has struggled with a widening structural budget deficit. Since 2001, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil increased by nearly 40 percent. In 2001, CPS spent close to $12,000 per student; in 2015, $16,432. Yet revenue has not kept pace: CPS per-pupil revenue has not matched per-pupil spending, with revenue falling short, on average, by $1,000 per pupil since 2001. More recently, the revenue gap has widened to nearly $3,000 per year.

CPS has papered over its annual shortfalls by borrowing vast sums from bond markets. As a result, CPS bonds are now rated as “junk” and the district has to pay a huge premium to get anyone to buy them (three times the rate for benchmark government bonds).

What’s more, by failing to make the necessary pension contributions, CPS has borrowed even larger amounts from its current and former teachers through the pension fund—today the district owes the fund billions upon billions. CPS owes bondholders and the pension fund more than $38,000 for every student, up from less than $10,000 in 2001.

Rising debt service costs are beginning to take a real bite out of district resources. And CPS has scrambled to keep pace while protecting classroom spending. Since 2011, CPS has made nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in budget cuts “away from the classroom,” with administrative and programmatic spending hit especially hard. Nevertheless, from 2001 to 2015, annual per-pupil inflation-adjusted spending has been hit hard as well:

  • Spending on textbooks has declined by 36 percent.
  • Spending on classroom supplies has fallen by nearly 60 percent.
  • Budgets for elementary school sports (coaching stipends and equipment) have been cut by the millions.
  • Annual per-pupil spending on capital repairs and replacement has dropped by 55 percent.

Because the majority of a school district’s spending is on salaries and benefits, there is only so much that can be cut beyond that. Which is why Chicago’s teachers are feeling the budgetary pressure. Since 2001, CPS teacher salaries, as a share of total CPS spending, have fallen by more than 10 percentage points, while pension contributions have jumped, from 2 percent of total CPS spending to more than 10 percent.

Teachers’ retirement benefits have also been reduced. Changes for new teachers instituted in 2011 represent an average total compensation cut of about 10 percent compared with teachers who began working before the changes took effect. For career teachers the drop is even larger—representing a reduction of more than 40 percent of the total potential benefit value.

There are only three ways to right CPS’ sinking financial ship: Secure additional revenue, reduce teachers’ retirement benefits, or cut services for current students. Start with revenue. Given that the Legislature is mired in a long-running budget standoff, securing significant additional state aid seems unlikely. Raising more local revenue faces another constraint: Chicago’s property tax increases are capped at the rate of inflation.

As for cuts to retiree benefits, the Illinois Supreme Court has prohibited pension reductions for all but future hires, thereby disallowing even the modest changes to teachers’ benefits. For these reasons, major service cuts to Chicago’s public schools—however undesirable—appear most plausible.

Afghanistan: Schools are Bunkers

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This was Afghanistan in 1960’s.

How Afghan Classrooms Became Bunkers

HRW: Since the 2001 U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan, Western countries have invested heavily in education there. But as security across the country deteriorates, schools in many places are under threat, not only from resurgent Taliban forces but also from the very Afghan security forces that are mandated to protect them.

2016-May-Afghanistan-1

Increasingly, the country’s national forces are using schools—many of them constructed by foreign donors and often the only concrete-reinforced, multi-story buildings in smaller villages—as their military bases during offensives into Taliban-held areas. Even if the buildings remain unscathed, the military occupation interrupts children’s education. But all too often, the schools become battlegrounds as the Taliban counter-attacks government positions, leaving the buildings damaged or in ruins and denying children an education until they can be rebuilt, if ever.

In 2015, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan documented 20 cases in which government security forces and armed opposition groups occupied schools for military purposes. During a brief research mission in April, Human Rights Watch identified 11 schools that were under occupation and being used for military purposes in just one small area of the Baghlan province alone, suggesting that the problem is underreported and getting worse. An investigation by the Guardian newspaper in April uncovered two British-built schools in Helmand province being used as Afghan army bases, including one in which students were still attending school on a lower floor.

The Ustad Golan Jelani Jelali Middle School, in the village of Postak Bazaar in the Baghlan province, is a case in point. Its most recent troubles are only the latest in a long litany of woes. In 2010, the Taliban laid siege to the school when it was occupied by the Afghan police, gunning down seven policemen inside a classroom. “Their blood just wouldn’t wash away,” a school official told me, “so we had to chip it away from the wall with an axe.”

 

In 2015, the Afghan police were back at the school, setting up base with sandbagged positions on the second level while students tried to continue their schooling below. Alarmed school officials managed to get a letter from the Kabul authorities ordering the police to leave, but the police commander ignored them, saying that he was staying put. When the students needed to take exams, school officials again presented the letter to the commander, but his police officers fired their guns in the direction of the assembled teachers and students, forcing them to flee.

Nearly a year later, the police were still occupying the school despite the repeated entreaties of the teachers and school officials. When we visited in April, the Taliban fighters were closing in, putting the children’s school right on the front lines of a brutal conflict. A school official told us:

Now the Taliban are getting closer, and we have had to close the school because of the security. All of the schools in our area are closed for the moment. The Taliban front line is now just 30 meters from the school. The students, out of fear, are not coming to school. We went to see the police chief again, but he just said that as with the prior agreement, the police stay on the second floor and we can use the school on the first floor.

The Taliban, too, have used schools in the area as military bases, refusing to abandon them even in response to pleas from village elders desperate to save their schools. The Swedish government financed construction of the Khail Jan Shahid Primary School in Omar Khail. In 2015, the school opened its doors to 350 boys and girls. Soon afterward, Taliban fighters came to occupy the school, refusing to leave when asked by village elders.

Early this year, government forces attacked the Taliban forces based at the school, raking the building with gunfire and mortar rounds. The Taliban fled, but the school compound was left in ruins less than a year after it had opened. Even in its ruined state, the school continues to serve as a military base. When Human Rights Watch was there in April, a contingent of Afghan local police paramilitaries occupied the building.

For many families in Afghanistan, education for their children remains one of the few routes out of poverty. The increasing presence in schools of government security forces and the Taliban is not only putting education out of reach but also destroying much of the educational infrastructure that Afghanistan’s donors have invested in so heavily over the last 15 years. In many villages, it is also turning Afghan security forces into despised occupiers rather than giving villagers a sense of security.

Parents of girls are particularly less likely to allow their children to attend school if it means co-habiting a school with armed men or facing a potential attack. When a school or the route to the school is perceived as becoming more dangerous or when a school closes and students are forced to travel farther to one that is still open, girls are far more likely than boys to be kept home by anxious parents.

People in the United States and Europe who take pride in the fact that their governments are supporting education in Afghanistan are likely to take a dim view of their aid money being used to essentially build bases for security forces. Governments that have taken steps to limit the use of schools for military purposes by their own armed forces will be in a better position to credibly work with the Afghan government to discourage it in Afghanistan, ensure that occupied schools are vacated, and promote security force policies and practices that better protect schools.

An international Safe Schools Declaration, which provides guidance on how to better protect schools from attacks and military use, is helping to focus attention on the issue. Since the declaration was published, 53 states, including Afghanistan and many other conflict-affected countries, have made a political commitment to this effort. About half of the European Union countries have signed on. For countries that sign on, the next step is to incorporate these protections into domestic policy and operational frameworks. For those states that haven’t yet endorsed the declaration, which is one year old today, that’s a clear first step to demonstrating their commitment to safer schools around the world.

Ultimately, signing on to the Safe Schools Declaration is the easy part. A true commitment to protecting schools from attacks and preventing their use for military purposes requires political will and action on the ground. It requires governments to be willing to issue orders to their troops not to occupy schools and to hold security forces that ignore such orders, such as those occupying schools in Afghanistan, accountable.

Every day, children in many parts of Afghanistan risk their lives to reach their schools and get the education they hope will give them better futures. The continuing use of such schools by Afghan security forces and the Taliban risks depriving yet another generation of Afghan children of an education and puts children in the direct line of fire. Even in a place as torn by conflict as Afghanistan, children have a right to a safe school that shelters them from the effects of war, and Afghanistan’s government and donors need to do more to protect that most basic of rights.