TSA head of security forced out amid furor over long airport lines

TSA administrator Peter Neffenger

The Transportation Security Administration's head of security operations was removed from his post Monday, law enforcement sources told Fox News.
The departure of Kelly Hoggan was one of a series of shakeups at the agency amid a furor over growing security delays at American airports.
Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee expressed outrage in a May 12 hearing over a $90,000 bonus package Hoggan received, even after reports surfaced of systematic security screening failures at airports around the country. Those security lapses were detailed in a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report last year.
TSA administrator Peter Neffenger announced Darby LaJoye, former head of security operations at Los Angeles International Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport, as Hoggan’s replacement effective immediately, according to the email obtained by Fox News. 
In that same memo Neffenger said LaJoye’s expertise has “driven a renewed agency-wide focus on security effectiveness,” which is an issue TSA has been wrestling with since last year’s scathing DHS inspector general's report, and now, with passengers experiencing extraordinarily high screening line wait times at airports around the country. 
Wait times have eclipsed three hours at many airports, a phenomenon Neffenger and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson have attributed, in part, to a shortage of TSA officers combined with heightened air traveler volume. 
It is for those reasons the agency’s chief announced Monday the establishment of a national command center at TSA headquarters. The Incident Command Center will “closely track daily screening operations, shifting officers, canine resources, the National Deployment Force and other resources to meet mission demands in advance of predicted passenger volume,” Neffenger wrote in the email.  
As part of an immediate strategy, Secretary Johnson and Administrator Neffenger unveiled a ten-point plan earlier this month aimed at streamlining TSA screening wait times. That effort expedites the hiring of hundreds of TSA officers, maximizes the use of overtime for existing staff, and reduces the size and number of carry-on bags passengers can travel with. 
But despite TSA’s best efforts, the agency is still warning airline passengers to expect wait times and to “manage expectations” when preparing for travel. While acknowledging the hardship increased wait times pose, both Johnson and Neffenger have vowed not to compromise aviation security in the face of heightened passenger volume.

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Cuban rules out third-party bid, open to being Clinton, Trump's VP

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said Sunday that he'd "absolutely" consider being either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
And if neither of those two scenarios work out, maybe he'll run for president in 2020 or 2024, the NBA team owner and reality show star told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Cuban said Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, has a "real chance to win" but that his statements sound like "he's proposing things based off the last person he talked to."
The interview followed a recent Washington Post story in which Cuban's name was mentioned as a possible independent candidate whom some Republicans were trying to recruit to challenge Trump in the general election.
Cuban also appeared to dismiss an independent 2016 run to beat Trump or Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, and the idea of running on the Libertarian Party ticket.
“I haven't really delved into the Libertarian Party to know where they stand,” he said. “I'm not sure they would want to bring somebody in that isn't quite a match with their views. But you know, it's too late for this election.”

Populist paradox: Why Donald Trump could grab some Bernie voters

One of the strangest questions in politics is whether disaffected Bernie backers might wind up on the Trump train.
It scrambles all the usual Beltway assumptions on left-right politics. After all, how could diehard supporters of Bernie Sanders—who’s so far left that he’s unhappy with eight years of Obama liberalism—move to a Republican who wants to build a wall on the Mexican border and temporarily bar Muslim immigrants?
Part of the answer is that the electorate has changed. And part is that voters don’t operate the way pundits do, with an issue-by-issue checklist that requires ideological consistency.
Trump rails against a rigged system. Sanders rails against a rigged system. Trump even says the Democratic Party is screwing Bernie and, in a bit of mischief-making, urges him to run as an independent. 
They both tee off on unfair trade deals and play to middle-class economic anxieties. That populist approach touches a nerve far more than a bunch of carefully worded position papers.
“A lot of those people would come with me,” Trump said of Sanders supporters yesterday on “Fox & Friends.” “I'm no fan of Bernie Sanders, but he's right about one thing: trade agreements.”

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Many Americans go with their gut. Trump comes from outside the political system. Sanders is a veteran senator but until last year wasn’t even a Democrat. They are both leading movements. No wonder there’s some overlap.
In the end, I think most of those feeling the Bern will fall into line and back Hillary Clinton. But the fact that Trump has a shot at a good chunk of them—which could help put a few Democratic-leaning states in play—is a sign of the scrambled politics of 2016.
It’s also a sign of a changing electorate. Trump was arguably the least conservative Republican in that field of 17. Sanders would have been the most liberal Democratic nominee since LBJ.
National Review Editor Rich Lowry picks up that point:
“Sanders’s and Trump’s styles and affects are very different — the rumpled, oddball lecturer in Socialism 101 vs. the boastful, power-tie-wearing business mogul — but they have worked in tandem to ensure that the center of gravity in this fall’s presidential election will be further to the left than it has been in decades.”
Lowry argues that “Sanders and Trump have executed a squeeze play on the Madam Secretary. Sanders pushed her to the left on trade and Social Security in the primary, when she disavowed the Trans-Pacific Partnership that she helped negotiate and embraced increasing Social Security benefits. She probably won’t be snapping back to the center on those issues in a general election because it would open her up to Sanders-like attacks from Donald Trump. Such is the shift in the tectonic plates of our politics that the presumptive Republican nominee for president, endorsed by voices on the right ranging from Sean Hannity to Mitch McConnell, is making a far-fetched but not entirely irrational pitch for the support of fans of a Vermont socialist.”
Let’s take this a step further. If both parties are edging left, it doesn’t come as some kind of backlash to a right-wing administration.
Charles Krauthammer declares that “after nearly two terms of Barack Obama’s corrosively unsuccessful liberalism — both parties have decisively moved left. Hillary Clinton cannot put away a heretofore marginal, self-declared socialist. He has forced her into leftward genuflections on everything from trade to national health care. At the same time, Bernie Sanders has created a remarkably resilient insurgency calling for — after Obama, mind you — a political revolution of the Left…
“The Republicans’ ideological about-face is even more pronounced. They’ve chosen as their leader a nationalist populist who hardly bothers to pretend any allegiance to conservatism. Indeed, Donald Trump is, like Sanders, running to the left of Clinton on a host of major issues including trade, Wall Street, NATO, and interventionism.”
This was deemed heresy by true-blue conservatives during the primaries, but I kept reminding folks it would make Trump a stronger general-election candidate if he got that far.
And there is growing nervousness on the left that Hillary could lose to The Donald: 
“Clinton has no chance of winning a majority of working-class white voters,” Salon says. “They have voted heavily Republican for years, especially working-class men. In the 2014 midterm elections, for example, working-class whites voted for Republicans by a 30-point margin. But Clinton needs to win some of them. In 2012 Barack Obama won the support of about 35 percent of working-class whites, which was enough to help him win reelection…
“If she lets Trump position himself as the tribune of the working class, she’ll only dig a deeper hole for herself with blue-collar voters.”
It’s no secret that an evolving electorate is driving some of this political upheaval. The growing proportion of minority voters means a Republican has to win more white voters to offset losses in that community. A new generation of younger voters takes for granted such matters as same-sex marriage, which used to be a Republican wedge issue.
And voters who came of age during the Iraq war may share a wariness of military intervention, reflected in Trump’s frequent criticism of George W. Bush’s invasion.
Perhaps Trump, who doesn’t emphasize social issues, and Sanders, who doesn’t emphasize foreign policy, both sensed this new reality. And maybe the idea that they share a certain appeal isn’t so crazy after all.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

Polls show Clinton, Trump tied in likely November matchup, record un-favorability

Two polls released Sunday show Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton tied with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in a likely general election race, after having a double-digit lead just months ago.  
Clinton leads Trump 46-to-43 percent in a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, compared to a similar one in April in which Clinton had an 11-point lead.
The new poll also shows Clinton primary rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders leading Trump by 15 percentage points, 54-to-39 percent, in a hypothetical November matchup.
“Polls this far out mean nothing,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “They certainly mean nothing to me. And I think that if people go back and look, they really mean nothing in terms of analyzing what's going to happen in the fall.”
Earlier Sunday morning, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed voters favored Trump over Clinton 46-to-44 percent. The numbers also show Clinton losing an identical 11-point lead since earlier this spring.
Both polls were within the statistical margin of error, which means Clinton and Trump are essentially tied.

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Trump said on the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend” show that he suspects some of the support is coming from Sanders’ backers, now that their candidate faces very long odds in winning the Democratic nomination.  
“I hear and I look at polls, and I hear a lot of those people are coming with us,” Trump said in a phone interview. “A lot of the Bernie Sanders’ voters, they do not like Hillary Clinton.  … A lot of those people will come with me.”
The Washington Post/ NBC poll also shows a majority of the electorate has an unfavorable impression of Clinton, a former secretary of state, and Trump, a billionaire businessman, and that likely voters are “motivated as much by whom they don’t like as by whom they do.”
According to The Washington Post: “Never in the history of the Post-ABC poll have the two major party nominees been viewed as harshly as Clinton and Trump.”
The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reported voters also have record-low opinions of those two candidates.
“Trump and Clinton are currently the two most unpopular likely presidential nominees in the history of the NBC/WSJ poll,” the pollsters said.

US lifts Vietnam arms embargo in move to counter China

President Obama lifted the 41-year-old U.S. arms embargo against Vietnam Monday in an apparent effort to shore up the communist country's defenses against an increasingly aggressive China. 
Obama announced the full removal of the embargo at a news conference in Hanoi alongside Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang. The American president said the move was intended as a step toward normalizing relations with the former enemy and to eliminate a "lingering vestige of the Cold War."
Obama added that every U.S. arms sale would be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
U.S. lawmakers and activists had urged Obama to press for greater human rights freedoms in the one-party state before lifting the embargo. Vietnam holds about 100 political prisoners and there have been more detentions this year.
Washington partially lifted the embargo on arms in 2014, but Vietnam wanted full access as it tries to deal with China's land reclamation and military construction in the disputed South China Sea. Vietnam has not bought anything, but removing the remaining restrictions shows relations are fully normalized and opens the way to deeper security cooperation.
"At this stage both sides have developed a level of trust and cooperation, including between our militaries, that is reflective of common interests and mutual respect" Obama said.
Obama said the United States and Vietnam had mutual concerns about maritime issues and the importance of maintaining freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. He said that although Washington doesn't take sides on the territorial disputes, it does support a diplomatic resolution based on "international norms" and "not based on who's the bigger party and can throw around their weight a little bit more," a reference to China.
Lifting the arms embargo will be a psychological boost for Vietnam's leaders as they look to counter an increasingly aggressive China, but there may not be a big jump in sales. 
Obama was greeted Monday by Quang at the Presidential Palace, where Obama congratulated Vietnam for making "extraordinary progress." Quang praised the expansion in security and trade ties between "former enemies turned friends" and called for more U.S. investment in Vietnam. He said there was enormous bilateral trade growth potential.
Obama is the third sitting president to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Four decades after the fall of Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, and two decades after President Bill Clinton restored relations with the nation, Obama is eager to upgrade relations with an emerging power whose rapidly expanding middle class beckons as a promising market for U.S. goods and an offset to China's growing strength.
The United States is eager to boost trade with a fast-growing middle class in Vietnam that is expected to double by 2020. That would mean knocking down auto, food and machine tariffs to get more U.S. products into Vietnam.
During his three days in Vietnam, Obama will make the case for stronger commercial and security ties, including approval of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Trade agreement that is stalled in Congress and facing strong opposition from the 2016 presidential candidates.

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Conservatives brace for GOP platform battle in Cleveland

What does Trump have in store for the GOP convention?

While Republicans work through their issues with Donald Trump as their standard bearer, the presumptive presidential nominee and conservatives could be headed for a convention showdown over what the party stands for -- and the possibility Trump may try to tweak the party platform in his own image.
And while Trump has made no public moves to do so at this point, that doesn't mean conservative warriors won't be ready in case he does. 
“I have one goal now, and it is simple -- to get as many solid, constitutional conservatives to Cleveland and onto the platform and rules committees,” Iowa GOP Rep. Steve King told FoxNews.com. 
The platform, in the GOP's own words, is a document outlining "who we are and what we believe." The language can be fiercely contested, and the possibility of such a debate may be driving ex-candidate Ted Cruz's push to ensure his delegate allies go to the convention. King is one of those Cruz delegates who plans to be on the floor, fighting for a conservative platform.  
“I have not yet seen a real effort to change the platform. But my point from the beginning is that we have to be prepared,” he said.
Another Cruz supporter, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, reportedly sent an email asserting it was “imperative that we fill the Rules and Platform Committees with strong conservative voices like yours.” 

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The concerns reflect the broader tension in the party between Trump and stalwart conservatives not quite convinced he's one of them. Recognizing the need to assuage such concerns, Trump dispatched campaign chairman Paul Manafort to Capitol Hill on Thursday for a series of meetings with Republican Party leaders.
“He suggested that there weren’t going to be any changes to the party platform,” Rep. Scott DesJarlais told BuzzFeed News.
The Tennessee Republican, a Trump endorser, added there “was good two-way dialogue” on issues. Manafort also met with Cruz supporter Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Senate aides.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who has tried to smooth over tensions in the party over Trump's primary victory, has offered similar assurances the platform will not be substantially changed in July.
"I don't think Donald Trump is interested in rewriting the platform of the Republican Party," he told The Associated Press last week.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions from FoxNews.com on whether it planned to seek any changes. 
But Trump's rhetoric and the party platform adopted in 2012 would appear sharply at odds in some areas. 
On trade, for example, the 2012 platform states, “Free Trade Agreements negotiated with friendly democracies since President Reagan’s trailblazing pact with Israel in 1985 facilitated the creation of nearly ten million jobs supported by our exports.”
Trump has blasted trade deals like NAFTA, and just hours after Manafort worked Capitol Hill, Trump said at a fundraiser for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie: " We’re losing $500 billion in trade with China. Who the hell cares if there’s a trade war?"
He rebuffed criticism from “very conservative ideologues,” stressing that he is “a free trader, but I’m only a free trader if we make good deals.”
On entitlements like Medicare, meanwhile, the platform says: “We must restructure the twentieth century entitlement state so the missions of important programs can succeed in the twenty-first century.”
Yet even before he officially jumped in the race, Trump tweeted last May that he was “the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid.” 
The question is whether Trump tries to make these positions part of the official party mission statement. 
“How Donald Trump approaches the debate over the platform will send a very clear message to the grassroots about just how conservative he really is and how serious he is about uniting the party,” said the Heritage Foundation's Lee Edwards, who has attended more than a dozen party conventions.
Edwards said conservatives also “will want to have strongest pro-life plank possible. How [Trump] responds will be a key test about how accommodating he can be on other issues.” 
Trump indeed has expressed a willingness to change the platform to include abortion exceptions in the case of rape, incest and the life of the mother.
“Yes, I would. Absolutely, for the three exceptions, I would. I would leave it for the life of the mother, but I would absolutely have the three exceptions,” Trump said during an April appearance on NBC News’ “Today" show.  
Like Trump, Republican nominees John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 also stated support for those three exceptions, but neither sought to change the language of the platform.
While delegates will not arrive in Cleveland until July, the process of selecting members of the platform committee and drafting the platform itself is well underway.
According to the party rules, each state nominates two people to serve as members of that committee.
As the convention draws closer, a website and online surveys will be used to gather feedback on the platform, according to convention spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski. The committee members will meet the week of July 11 to complete the drafting, and release the document at the beginning of the convention. 
It will eventually be voted on and adopted, in some form. 
Michael Barone, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and principal co-author of the annual Almanac of American Politics, suggested most of the document will not be contentious. “While there are real differences and fissures on policy like trade and the direction of American foreign policy, I don’t see all of those becoming matters of debate in the platform. It is a non-binding document,” he said. 
The platform may be purely symbolic, but Iowa's King said it represents the belief system of the Republican Party. 
"These are principles important to the millions of conservatives who stayed home last election," he said. "[Trump] needs to speak to them."

In year of supposed angry electorate, just one congressional incumbent ousted in primary

In the year of the supposed angry electorate, millions of frustrated voters have put their weight behind the outsider presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but continue to back congressional incumbents -- ousting only one so far in hundreds of 2016 primaries contests.
The lone victim was Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah, but his ouster appeared more about questionable ethics than frustration with Washington insiders. The 11-term congressman is facing a 29-count federal indictment related to racketeering, bribery and mail fraud.
“The year of the outside candidate is a neat, tidy package put out by the media to a certain extent,” David Payne, a Republican strategist and partner at Vox Global, said this week. “But it’s only part of the story. Look at all of the insiders who are picking up 60 percent of the vote.”
Payne argues that House districts have been “so carefully constructed” by state party officials and others to “remain stable” that few primary races are now competitive.    
To be sure, members of Congress rarely lose a primary race, in which incumbents (typically) face a challenge from candidates in their own political party.
Over the past three election cycles, just 17 congressional incumbents have been ousted in a primary -- four House members in 2014, five House members and one senator in 2012, and four House members and three senators in the so-called 2010 Tea Party revolution.

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With claims to seven upsets in the 2010 primaries, the conservative, grass-roots Tea Party movement will likely have more success than the 2016 electorate in ousting incumbents.
The 2010 defeat of three-term Utah GOP Sen. Bob Bennet, a reliable conservative, by Tea Party-backed Mike Lee indeed rattled the political class.
But the race that now seems to stick with voters and others is the 2014 upset of House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor. The Virginia Republican and member of House leadership was stunningly upset that year by Dave Brat, a first-time candidate with Tea Party support.
The post-script to the race suggests Cantor paid too little attention to his district.
But Beyond getting ousted over so-called “ideological purity,” Capitol Hill lawmakers also often lose primaries amid an ethics scandal, as a result of redistricting, include eight in 2012, or are “accidental candidates” who get elected when, for example, their party’s top candidate unexpectedly drops out.
This year, Trump, a billionaire businessman and first-time candidate, beat more than a dozen Republican lawmakers or former elected officials to become the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.
And Sanders, a self-describe democratic socialist, has kept his insurgent campaign alive in the Democratic primary by portraying front-runner Hillary Clinton as a Washington and Wall Street insider.
Louis Jacobsen -- a columnist for the magazine “Governing” and a senior correspondent for the Tampa Bay Times’ “PolitiFact” -- suggested Friday that if the angry electorate indeed exists, only “big personalities” on the national stage appear capable of getting voters riled and into polling stations.  
“I’m not seeing a whole lot of it” in gubernatorial and other state-level races, Jacobsen said.
He argued that congressional districts have become so blue or red over the years that it’s nearly impossible for a challenger to be more conservative or more liberal that a sitting House member. And he suggested that Congress appears “amorphous” among voters, who tend to know more about presidential candidate, which results in more targeted anger.
Such a theory might help explain why Hill lawmakers continue to win 2016 primaries despite have historically low approval ratings.
A recent Gallup survey found just 17 percent of Americans approved of the job Congress is doing. That rating has not exceeded 20 percent since October 2012.
“Voter generally feel (members) aren’t very good,” Jacobsen said.

Progressive blogger 'fired' for Twitter attack on Clinton supporters Tanden, Center for American Progress

Hillary Clinton (r) with President of the Center for American Progress Neera Tanden

An up-and-coming progressive blogger was purportedly fired Friday for his Twitter fight with one of the movement’s most power figures, Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress.
The exchange started when Matt Bruenig, a blogger for the liberal think tank Demo, started tweeting about an unflattering story in The Nation about Bernie Sanders supporters, according to Gawker.
Tanden was a policy adviser for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barak Obama and for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 White House bid.
The Center for American Progress is a research group whose public policy work has for decades shaped the political agenda of progressives and other elected Democrats.
The group’s first president was John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign director and a Bill Clinton chief of staff.
Tanden eventually entered the Twitter exchange Friday between Bruenig and the author of The Nation story, tweeting: “Good to know this stuff isn't just for me!”

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Bruenig responded with several caustic tweets including one about Taden’s alleged endorsement of cutting welfare benefits for the poor.
“You don’t get to be president of CAP without starving some poor mothers,” he wrote in one tweet.
In subsequent tweets, Bruenig called Tanden “geriatric” and wrote: “Scumbag Neera uses welfare when she needs it then takes away from others when they need it. Disgusting.”
Tanden has purportedly acknowledged her family having needed welfare. She apparently has never backed welfare reform. But Tanden was a policy adviser in the Clinton administration that reduced welfare benefits in 1996.
Demo told Gawker that the group and Bruenig were “parting ways,” after having “agreed to disagree on the value of the attack mode on Twitter.”
Gawker reports that a source said Bruenig was fired.
Demo made an online apology for Bruenig’s “scumbag” remark and suggested in a press release that his employment was terminated upon learning the extent of his “online harassment of people with whom he disagrees.”
Bruenig has declined to comment.
Tanden purportedly told Gawker in an email: “I find the whole situation unfortunate. Mr. Bruenig has made contributions on the poverty discourse and I wish him well in the future. I would welcome an actual discussion of ideas with him.”