Tea Party affiliate FreedomWorks refocuses, changes to stay relevant in 2016

FreedomWorks, often considered the ideological brains behind the 2010 Tea Party wave, is trying to reinvent itself for the 2016 elections and beyond, even borrowing from the progressive playbook.
Chief Executive Officer Adam Brandon said Friday the group is refocusing its strategy -- from expanding its digital outreach and getting more involved in such torch-bearing issues as civil asset forfeitures and mandatory-sentencing reform to providing more financial support for conservative Capitol Hill lawmakers so they can keep challenging the Washington establishment.
“As the battle moves, we need to be able to participate in different ways,” Brandon said recently from the group’s Washington headquarters.
He and others say the Republican Party’s most conservative wing, particularly in the House, is under increasing pressure to go along with leadership or risk losing re-election money.
“I want to make it easy for you to win but not have to worry about K Street backing,” Brandon said.
Tea Party-backed Rep. Thomas Massie, elected in 2012, suspects he’s in that category.

The Kentucky Republican had little problem raising enough money from business interests and others to win reelection last year, reporting $46,000 from tobacco, trucking, health care and other industries in just the first quarter of 2013.
He since voted against returning Ohio Rep. John Boehner as House speaker and he broke with GOP leaders when they avoided a standoff with President Obama over immigration reform.
Now, in the first quarter of 2015, Massie has collected just $1,000 from political action committees, or PACs, which funnel contributions to candidates from business, labor or ideological interests.
He and other conservative caucus members bluntly say the reason business contributions have fallen is that GOP leaders are retaliating.
"Those who don't go along to get along aren't going to get as many PAC checks," said Massie, making an allegation that Republican leadership flatly denies.
FreedomWorks was found in 2004 with the assistance of former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey as a conservative advocacy group that helped in campaigns and trained and mobilized volunteers.
However, the group didn’t come into real prominence until it helped organize the 2009 Tax Day protest and other Tea Party-type rallies that led to Republicans taking over the House in the 2010 midterms.
The other significant strategy change for Freedom Works is recent months is the group’s efforts to get “early money” to candidates -- much like Emily’s List has done with pro-choice female Democrats to encourage top talent to run and to attract more donors.
“If you jump, they’ll be plenty of water in the pool for you,” Brandon said of the strategy.
He and others thinks Emily’s List is now among the most influence PACs in politics.  
This is not first time that FreedomWorks has announced a shift in direction since helping lead the anti-tax revolts and backing enough candidates touting that message to the help Republicans in the 2010 wave election.
As the victories piled up on election night, Brandon vowed to Slate.com that his group would now start holding newly-elected candidates to their less-government, less-taxes promises.
The entire Tea Party movement, in fact, has been under pressure to change over the years, amid arguments that related groups have repeatedly backed candidates incapable of winning general elections -- particularly in 2012 when GOP Senate candidates Todd Aiken, Missouri, and Richard Mourdock, Indiana, made controversial remarks about rape that cost them their races and hurt the Republican Party’s bid to take control of the Senate.
Brandon says FreedomWorks is pleased with the 2014 election results -- helping such Tea Party-endorsed candidates as Republican Ben Sasse win a Senate seat in Nebraska and creating competitive House races in such places as Washington state, where Republican and ex-NFL star Clint Didier lost by just 2,000 votes.
Still, a Tea Party-backed candidate lost in essentially every 2014 Senate primary in which a Democrat could have won the general election, including those in Georgia, Kentucky and North Carolina, and failed to unseat 77-year-old Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, consider among the most vulnerable of 2014 incumbents.
FreedomWorks has had to form a “hard dollar” PAC, to raise the so-called early money.
Brandon said having to form nonprofits, PACs and Super PAC has been a time-consuming legal challenge, but with the new FreedomWorks PAC his group now has all of the tools while maintaining its core values.
“If you’re running (again) for dog catcher, our question is still ‘Did you cut the budget and catch more dogs,’ ” he said.
Joe Desilets, managing partner at the D.C.-based political consulting firm 21st & Main, says an ongoing concern is the proliferation of PACs being started by “any former candidate, campaign staffer, activist or consultant with access to an email or donor list” because they are overwhelming donors and their email in-boxes
“The enthusiasm and desire to get involved and have an impact on behalf of conservative candidates is great,” he said. “But it hurts the established and effective conservative organizations that all of these new groups want to emulate.”
Desilets also said groups that want to be effective in 2016 indeed must craft a more robust digital strategy that includes online ad buys and mobile campaigns, considering roughly 75 percent of Americans now use smartphones, with the percentage even higher among such key demographics as millennials, Hispanics and single women.
Brandon says FreedomWorks is focusing on just two or three 2016 Senate races and 10 to 15 House races.
The group has been eyeing Arizona GOP Rep. Matt Salmon to challenge incumbent Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain and Florida GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis for the Senate seat being vacated by 2016 Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio.
DeSantis earlier this month officially announced his Senate candidacy, and Salmon has yet to say anything about a potential Senate bid.

Protesters flood Cleveland streets after officer's acquittal

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Police in riot gear made more than a dozen arrests Saturday as protesters stormed the streets of Cleveland after a judge found a white city police officer not guilty in the deaths of two unarmed black suspects killed in a barrage of police gunfire.
The protesters gathered in downtown Cleveland and west side neighborhoods after the acquittal of patrolmen Michael Brelo.
About 150 protesters marched down the middle of downtown Cleveland, temporarily blocking intersections as they chanted anti-police slogans.
The protesters, who were marching behind a large banner that said "Stop murder by police," passed by large crowds leaving a Cleveland Indians game and made downtown vehicle and pedestrian traffic even more congested.
Police tweeted they arrested a male for assault after he threw an object through a window, and the Northeast Ohio Media Group reported that three people were arrested near the Quicken Loans Arena , while officers showed protesters cans of pepper spray as they approached those being arrested. Some police were wearing riot gear.
An Ohio judge said in his written verdict delivered to a crowded courtroom Saturday that Brelo’s actions in the November 2012 shootings were justified because he believed that someone in the car containing Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams fired shots at police in the beginning, middle and end of the chase. Brelo is still on unpaid suspension while officials consider administrative charges against him.

The Department of Justice said Saturday it plans to "review all available legal options."
"We will now review the testimony and evidence presented in the state trial" to determine if "additional steps are available and appropriate," the department said after the acquittal of Brelo on voluntary manslaughter charges.
Vanita Gupta, head of the department's civil rights division said the review is separate from its efforts to resolve a pattern of civil rights violations at the Cleveland police department. A report in December outlined a string of examples of excessive force, including officers who unnecessarily fired guns, hit suspects in the head with weapons, and punched and used Tasers on people already handcuffed.
The acquittal came at a time of nationwide tension among police and black citizens punctuated by protests over deaths of blacks at the hands of white officers -- and following a determination by the Justice Department that city police had a history of using excessive force and violating civil rights.
Before issuing his verdict, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge John O'Donnell noted the recent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore over the deaths of black suspects but said he would not "sacrifice" Brelo to an angry public if the evidence did not merit a conviction.
"Guilty or not guilty, the verdict should be no cause for a civilized society to celebrate or riot," he said.

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May 23, 2015: A protester is arrested after the acquittal of Michael Brelo, a patrolman charged in the shooting deaths of two unarmed suspects. (AP)

Community and city leaders braced for the possibility of unrest in response to the verdict, which came as investigators work toward making a decision on whether charges will be filed in the death of a black 12-year-old boy carrying a pellet gun who was shot by a white rookie officer late last year.
Shortly after the verdict was reached, about 30 sheriff's deputies stood in front of the courthouse bearing clear shields as protesters with bullhorns chanted. One demonstrator bowed his head with hands folded in front of the phalanx of deputies, praying in silence.
The deputies then moved inside the entrance of the justice center, and the plaza in front of the building was soon cordoned off.
Brelo, 31, faced as many as 22 years in prison had the judge convicted him on two counts of voluntary manslaughter.
O'Donnell spent nearly an hour summing up his conclusion, an involved explanation that included mannequins marked with the gunshot wounds that the two motorists suffered on Nov. 29, 2012.
O'Donnell said that while Brelo likely fired fatal shots in the final seconds of the encounter in a school parking lot, other officers fired fatal shots as well.  Brelo could have been convicted of lesser charges, felonious assault, but O'Donnell determined his actions were justified by the circumstances of the chase, which included reports of shots being fired from the beat-up Chevy Malibu that Timothy Russell was driving.
Brelo sat stoically throughout the four-week bench trial, his parents often in the courtroom. Thirteen officers fired at a car with Russell and Malissa Williams inside after a long, high-speed chase, but only Brelo was charged criminally because prosecutors said he waited until the car had stopped and the pair no longer a threat to fire 15 shots through its windshield while standing on the hood of the car.
Russell, 43, and Williams, 30, were each shot more than 20 times. While prosecutors argued they were alive until Brelo's final salvo, medical examiners for both sides testified that they could not determine the order in which the fatal shots were fired.
Brelo has been on unpaid leave since he was indicted May 30, 2014.
The chase and shooting began when Russell's car backfired as he sped past Cleveland police headquarters. Police officers and bystanders thought someone inside had fired a gun. More than 100 Cleveland police officers in 62 marked and unmarked cars got involved in a pursuit that saw speeds reach 100 mph during the 22-mile-long chase.
Authorities never learned why Russell didn't stop. He had a criminal record including convictions for receiving stolen property and robbery and had been involved in a previous police pursuit. Williams had convictions for drug-related charges and attempted abduction. Both were described as mentally ill, homeless and addicted to drugs. A crack pipe was found in the car.
The shooting helped prompt a months-long investigation by the Justice Department, which concluded last December that the Cleveland police department had engaged in a pattern and practice of using excessive force and violating people's civil rights. The city and DOJ are currently negotiating a reform-minded consent decree that a federal judge will approve and independent monitors will oversee.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine at the conclusion of a probe by the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation said there had been a systemic failure within the command and control structure of the Cleveland police department during the chase. BCI turned over its findings to the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office, which presented evidence to a grand jury that led to Brelo's indictment.
The grand jury also charged five police supervisors with misdemeanor dereliction of duty for failing to control the chase. All five have pleaded not guilty. No trial date has been set for the supervisors.
Two years after the deaths of Russell and Williams, a white officer fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park after police received a report of a man with a gun. Surveillance video showed the officer firing on Rice within two seconds of his patrol car skidding to a stop next to him.
In addition to the Rice case, the county prosecutor's office is looking into the death of a black woman who died in police custody while lying face first on the ground in handcuffs. The family of Tanisha Anderson, 37, has sued the city of Cleveland and the two police officers who subdued her. They say she panicked Nov. 12 when officers put her in the back of a patrol car after they'd responded to a call about Anderson having a mental health crisis.
Russell's sister, Michelle, said Brelo would ultimately face justice, despite the judge's decision. The city of Cleveland has paid the families of Russell and Williams a total of $3 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit.
"He's not going to dodge this just because he was acquitted," Michelle Russell said. "God will have the final say."

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Internal emails show Clinton got detailed intel on 'planned' Benghazi hit

WASHINGTON –  Internal State Department emails in the aftermath of the Benghazi terror attack show then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received detailed information indicating the strike was planned by well-trained fighters, yet her office continued to push the narrative days later that it began "spontaneously."
The messages were among 296 emails released Friday by the State Department, in the first batch of emails to be made public from Clinton's tenure as secretary of state. Totaling 896 pages, the emails show a series of Libya dispatches Clinton received from a confidant, as well as the barrage of messages among her and her aides after Sept. 11, 2012.
Those messages depict the rapidly changing understanding of what happened at the U.S. compound that night, and the administration's internal struggle to settle on a public narrative.
As previously reported, confidant Sidney Blumenthal fired off two memos in the two days after the attack. But the full email release shows he gave a highly detailed picture of what "sources" said had happened that night. Initially, on Sept. 12, he sent Clinton an email linking the attacks to anger over an anti-Islam Internet video which had triggered protests across the region.
CLICK TO READ THE EMAILS. 
But the next day, he sent Clinton an email with very different information, saying officials believed the attackers were with the Islamist militia Ansar al-Sharia. He wrote that officials thought the attackers "prepared" for the strike and "took advantage of the cover" from demonstrations over the video. Further, he cited sources saying roughly 21 fighters left from a base in East Benghazi and "infiltrated the crowd" and began opening fire on the U.S. consulate. Libyan officers, he wrote, said the attacks were "planned" for roughly one month.

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• Hillary's Benghazi e-mails reveal conflicting narratives

Fighters with the brigade were described as "well-trained, hardened killers, many of whom have spent time in Afghanistan and Yemen."
Despite the guidance, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice went on several television programs Sept. 16 to claim the attacks were "spontaneous," and not premeditated, and link them to protests over the anti-Islam video.
The department appeared to back her. In an email sent that day from top department official Jake Sullivan to Clinton, he said Rice had made clear "our view" that "this started spontaneously and then evolved."
Yet on Sept. 24, after a fierce political debate had broken out over the nature of the attacks, the same official sent Clinton a compilation of her own statements on Benghazi, assuring her "you never said spontaneous or characterized the motives" and only said "some sought to justify" the attack by citing the video.
The exchanges are sure to fuel the long-running debate over why some in the administration initially pushed the video explanation and played down the idea that the attack was planned. Fox News reported earlier this week that a Defense Intelligence Agency report from Sept. 12 also said there were indicators the attack was planned and meant as retaliation for a drone strike that killed an Al Qaeda strategist.
Fox News also reported in October 2012 that a set of internal emails declared Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility for the attack in Benghazi virtually as the raid played out. The emails were sent by the State Department to a variety of sources.
The emails released Friday are just a fraction of what the department has in its custody -- after it was revealed that Clinton used a private email address and server, and turned over her files to the department.
Spokeswoman Marie Harf said the emails were given to a House committee investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.
She said redactions were made according to Freedom of Information Act standards. The documents cover emails between 2011 and 2012 related to the Benghazi facility and its security, and to the broader issue of a U.S. diplomatic presence in Libya.
Harf said the emails "do not change the essential facts or our understanding " about the attacks that killed four Americans on Sept. 11, 2012. The State Department is still reviewing 55,000 further pages of emails from Clinton's private email account. They'll be published on a rolling basis.
Another email in the batch showed Clinton received information on her private email server that has now been classified about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi. The email in question, forwarded to Clinton by Sullivan, her deputy chief of chief, relates to reports of arrests in Libya of possible suspects in the attack.
The information was not classified at the time the email was sent but was upgraded from "unclassified" to "secret" on Friday at the request of the FBI, according to State Department officials. Because the information was not classified at the time the email was sent, no laws were violated, but Friday's redaction shows that Clinton received sensitive information on her unsecured personal server.
No other redactions were made to the collection of Benghazi-related emails for classification reasons, the officials said.
It is at the end of a chain of communication that originated with Bill Roebuck, the then-director of the Office of Maghreb Affairs, that pointed out that Libyan police had arrested several people who might have connections to the attack. The redacted portion appears to relate to who provided the information about the alleged suspects to the Libyans. A total of five lines related to the source of the information were affected, but only the 23 words were deleted because the FBI deemed them to be classified.
Benghazi committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., questioned the email release in a written statement on Friday, calling it part of a "self-selected public record."  
"It is also important to remember these email messages are just one piece of information that cannot be completely evaluated or fully understood without the total record. The Committee is working to collect and evaluate all of the relevant and material information necessary to evaluate the full range of issues in context," he said. "We will not reach any investigative conclusions until our work is complete, but these emails continue to reinforce the fact that unresolved questions and issues remain as it relates to Benghazi."
He reiterated that the committee wants Clinton to turn over her personal server and "the full body of emails over to a neutral, detached, independent third party for review."

Foundations plan to pay news media to cover radical UN agenda

EXCLUSIVE: The United Nations Foundation created by billionaire Ted Turner, along with a branch of media giant Thompson Reuters, is starting to train a squadron of journalists and subsidize media content in 33 countries—including the U.S. and Britain--in a planned $6 million effort to popularize the bulky and sweeping U.N.-sponsored Sustainable Development Goals, prior to a global U.N. summit this September. where U.N. organizers hope they will be endorsed by world leaders.
The unprecedented media push is formally intended to start on May 25 but is already underway. It is intended to help breathe some new life into a sprawling U.N. effort--supported by, among others, the Obama administration--to create a global social and environmental agenda for the next 15 years.
It is taking place in parallel with an equally strong but unrelated media cheerleading push by supporters of strong climate change action to help set in stone a new global greenhouse gas emissions treaty at a Paris summit in December.
A junior partner in the U.N. Foundation media training and subsidy effort is a not-for-profit organization known as the Jynwel Charitable Foundation Limited, whose co-director is a flamboyant Malaysian financial named Jho Low. Jynwel, a Low family creation, also recently plunked down $25 million to take over a sputtering U.N. humanitarian news agency known as IRIN and sharpen its message.
The training and subsidy effort “comes at a time when people want to know what it will take to eradicate extreme poverty and tackle the big questions related to sustainability,” Kathy Calvert, CEO of the U.N. Foundation, told Fox News. “If our work helps encourage the media to dive deeper into these issues, we are achieving something that is core to our mission but also a public good worthy of 2015's moment in history.”
“This is an important year or a robust decision on what the world and the U.N. will do in the next 15 years,” added Arron Sherinian, the Foundation's chief communications and marketing officer. “We thought we would do well to connect as many people to the conversation as possible.”
In fact, the media-training-and-subsidy blitz could also be described as extraordinary bid to pump up public interest and editorial support for a vast and wobbly U.N. campaign to create a new social and environmental agenda that is too nebulous to criticize and too ponderous to implement with any coherent effect. Nonetheless, that agenda is intended to drive national social, economic and environmental agendas for the next 15 years.
The new goals, known as the SDGs, have been under formal discussion in various U.N. fora for the past year. They consist of 17 major goals and 169 related targets and amount to a broad-based socialist and/or progressive agenda that by 2030 promises to end poverty and all forms of malnutrition everywhere, “attain healthy lives for all,” “reduce income equality within and between countries,” and “promote sustainable production and consumption,” among many other things.
The subtargets cover everything from “create and diversify seed and plant banks,” to “end preventable newborn, infant and under-five deaths,” to “achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including young people and persons with disabilities,” along with much, much more.
The goals are. the centerpiece of what the U.N. calls the “post-2015 development process” They are a grab-bag of environmental and social development measures that are too sprawling in scope and too open-ended to be effective, or apparently even to be widely understood.
So far as the new training and subsidy initiative is concerned, however, the problem is seen less in terms of problematic content and more in terms of popularizing the message by refocusing and re-educating the media—as well as helping to pay some of them for delivering the new intellectual freight.
“Very often the problem of the UN is that the speeches long, full of acronyms, and the jargon is difficult to understand,” Dominique Villa, head of the Thompson Reuters Foundation, told Fox News. “Making the jargon of the U.N. understandable is quite important.”
Under the plan, Villa's foundation, Thompson Reuters' non-profit arm, will carry out the training under contract from U.N. Foundation. (The Thompson Reuters Foundation, according to its website, also carries on for-profit training sessions.)
Journalists from Australia to Peru, and from Britain to Zimbabwe will be given five-day training programs by instructors drawn largely from the ranks of former Reuters journalists. The material will include encompass among other things how to better understand and explain U.N. opaque concepts of sustainability, with at least one section devoted to “financial and economic concepts,” Villa said.
Training sessions for the journalists—whose parent organizations are as yet unnamed—are slated to run through August.
U.S. training sessions will take place in New York and Los Angeles, although who will be given instruction—and whose editorial platforms will be subsidized—has not yet announced. Overall subsidies are expected to range between $25,000 and $100,000, with 15 recipients named by the end of May and another 15 by the end of June.
“Depending on financing we might be able to add a few more outlets to the list” a U.N. Foundation spokesperson told Fox News.” She emphasized that the subsidies are “grants designed to enhance the capacity of media organizations to partner on these issues. Full editorial control of content remains with the media outlet.”
Individual media outlets would announce their participation “once partnership details are finalized,” she said.
The subsidy approach, U.N. Foundation's Sherinian said, was “not dissimilar” to the funding that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided for sveral years to the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian, to publish what amounts to sponsored news about economic development issues, including the Foundation's campaign to extirpate AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
“We are asking the media to do what they do well,” Sherinian added. “If a media organization has the ability to do what it has done well, and if it could do more innovative work,” then “we are asking them to engage on the issue.”
The effort would also include “putting them in touch with people on the ground doing implementation work”--in other words, those who are actually going to put the goals into practice.
Not all of the funding for the effort has yet been raised, he added. “We are in both implementing and fundraising mode.”
At the same time as the U.N.-supporting foundations are boosting coverage of the “post-2015 development agenda,” an even bigger media coalition has just announced it will start lumping content for collective use in support of a new U.N.-sponsored treaty on greenhouse gases, which is supposed to be agreed upon at a summit meeting in December in Paris.
The so-called Climate Publishers Network, a 25-member group that includes The Guardian as well as such high-profile newspaper as Le Monde in France and El Pais in Spain, as well as the China Daily, have agreed to drop their mutual licensing fees to allow all network members to share their coverage on the climate change issue prior to the December 11 summit.
The network arrangement is slated to disband immediately afterward.
The U.N. Foundation's Sherinian said that the two programs “were not formally affiliated in a specific way,” and said he could not confirm “if or how the outlets involved in the Climate Publishers Network coincide with those involved in our program to date.”
But like the Climate Publishers with their self-imposed shut-off date, he said the U.N. Foundation would not commit to maintaining the SDG subsidy effort beyond this year—it was, he said, “too early to say.”
The same could be said of the success of either full-court effort to help build a media groundswell for the expansive and expensive U.N.-supported objectives.

Senate approves 'fast track' trade bill, measure goes to House

In a victory for President Barack Obama, the Senate passed bipartisan legislation Friday night to strengthen the administration's hand in global trade talks, clearing the way for a highly unpredictable summer showdown in the House.
The vote was 62-37 on the bill, which would let Obama complete trade deals that Congress could approve or reject, but not change. A total of 48 Republicans supported the bill, but only 14 the Senate's 44 Democrats backed a president of their own party on legislation near the top of his second-term agenda.
A separate measure to prevent parts of the anti-terror Patriot Act from lapsing, and a bill to prevent a cutoff in federal highway funding also awaited action by lawmakers who covetously eyed a weeklong vacation — set to begin whenever the work was done.
Senate passage of the trade bill capped two weeks of tense votes and near-death experiences for legislation the administration hopes will help complete an agreement with Japan and 10 other countries in the Pacific region.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Obama's indispensable ally in passing the bill, said it would create "new opportunities for bigger paychecks, better jobs, and a stronger economy.
"The tools it contains will allow us to knock down unfair foreign trade barriers that discriminate against American workers and products stamped "Made in the USA," he said.
The House is expected to debate the issue as early as next month.
There, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, supports the bill. But dozens of majority Republicans currently oppose it, either out of ideological reasons or because they are loath to enhance Obama's authority, especially at their own expense.
And Obama's fellow Democrats show little inclination to support legislation that much of organized labor opposes.
In the run-up to a final Senate vote, Democratic supporters of the legislation were at pains to lay to rest concerns that the legislation, like previous trade bills, could be blamed for a steady loss of jobs.
"The Senate now has the opportunity to throw the 1990s NAFTA playbook into the dust bin of history," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. He referred to the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed two decades ago, and a symbol to this day, fairly or not, of the loss of unemployment to a country with lax worker safety laws and low wages.
Wyden and others said this law had far stronger protections built into it.
One final attempt to add another one failed narrowly, 51-48 a few hours before the bill cleared.
It came on a proposal, by Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who supported the trade bill, and Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who opposed it. They sought to made allegations of currency manipulation subject to the same "dispute settlement procedures" as other obligations under any trade deal.
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned earlier that its approval could cause Obama to veto the legislation. The president has said it could cause the demise of the current round of talks with 11 other Pacific-area nations, and also could pose a threat to the monetary policy that is designed to help the U.S. economy run better.
Portman, who was U.S. trade representative under former President George W. Bush, scoffed at threats of a veto. "I don't think so," he said in remarks on the Senate floor. "I think he (Obama) understands the importance" of his ability to conclude trade deals without congressional changes.
An alternative proposal backed by the White House merely stressed the importance of U.S. negotiators seeking ways to end the practice of currency manipulation, which can lower the price of foreign-made goods and place American-made products at a competitive disadvantage. It cleared on a vote of 70-29.
To mollify Democrats, the bill also included $1.8 billion in retraining funds for American workers who lose their jobs as a result of exports. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said the program duplicated other federal efforts, but his attempt to strip out the funds was defeated, 53-35.
The political alignment on the Patriot Act legislation was different, with the administration and McConnell on different sides.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest prodded the Senate to accept a House-passed bill renewing anti-terrorism programs due to expire June 1. He said that to do otherwise would put at risk "the ability of our national security professionals to keep us safe."
But the House bill included a provision to eliminate the National Security Agency's ability to collect mass telephone records of Americans. Instead, the material would remain with phone companies, with government searches of the information allowed by court order on a case-by-case basis.
"The untried — and as of yet, nonexistent — bulk-collection system envisioned under that bill would be slower and more cumbersome than the one that currently helps keep us safe," McConnell said in remarks on the Senate floor. At worst, he added, "it might not work at all."
The highway bill was the least controversial of the three on the Senate's pre-vacation agenda, but only because lawmakers agreed in advance on a two-month extension of the current law. The House and Senate will need to return to the issue this summer.
Lawmakers whose time generally is scheduled far in advance adjusted as best they could as the Senate struggled with work put off until the last minute.
"It's not the weather, it's the Senate that's the problem," said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., hoping to make it home by Saturday night for a turn as pianist with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.

Senate blocks House bill on NSA surveillance, 2-month extension

The Republican-led Senate blocked a House-passed bill and several short-term extensions of the USA Patriot Act early Saturday.
The big stumbling block was a House-passed measure to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic phone records. Instead, the records would remain with telephone companies subject to a case-by-case review.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell favored retaining the program, but fellow Kentuckian and Republican presidential contender Rand Paul blocked any extension no matter how brief past the midnight May 31 expiration.
"This week, I stood on the floor for roughly 11 hours in defense of the Fourth Amendment and successfully blocked the renewal of the Patriot Act,” Paul said in a statement.
“We should never give up our rights for a false sense of security. This is only the beginning-- the first step of many.  I will continue to do all I can until this illegal government spying program is put to an end, once and for all."
McConnell announced early Saturday that the Senate would begin a week-long Memorial Day break and return Sunday, May 31, just hours before the programs lapse.
The Senate had been pressured by the White House to pass the House bill, which drew a large bipartisan vote last week and had the backing of GOP leaders, Democrats and the libertarian-leaning members.
However, the Senate blocked the bill by a vote of 57-42, just shy of the 60-vote threshold to move ahead.
The vote was followed by the rejected of a two-month extension to the existing programs. The vote went 54-45, short of the 60-vote threshold once again.
After the two votes, McConnell repeatedly asked for an even shorter renewal of current law ticking down days from June 8 to June 2. However, opponents of the post-Sept. 11 law objected every time.
Whatever the Senate approves, must be passed by the House, which had already left for Washington for the Memorial Day recess.
Officials say they will lose valuable surveillance tools if the Senate fails to go along with the house. But key GOP senators, including McConnell, disapprove of the House’s approach.
In the near term, the Justice Department has said the NSA would begin winding down its collection of domestic calling records this week if the Senate fails to act because the collection takes some time to halt.
At issue is a section of the Patriot Act, Section 215, used by the government to justify secretly collecting the "to and from" information about nearly every American landline telephone call. For technical and bureaucratic reasons, the program was not collecting a large chunk of mobile phone records, which made it less effective as few people continued to use landlines.
When former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the program in 2013, many Americans were outraged that the agency had their calling records. President Obama ultimately announced a plan similar to the USA Freedom Act and asked Congress to pass it. He said the plan would preserve the NSA's ability to hunt for domestic connections to international plots without having an intelligence agency holding millions of Americans' private data.
Because the government had the extraordinary powers, Section 215 of the Patriot Act was designed to expire at midnight May 31, unless Congress renews it.
Under the USA Freedom Act, the government would transition over six months to a system under which it queries the phone companies with known terrorists' numbers to get back a list of numbers that had been in touch with a terrorist number.
But if Section 215 expires without replacement, the government would lack the blanket authority to conduct those searches. There would be legal methods to hunt for connections in U.S. phone records to terrorists, said current and former U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. But those methods would not be applicable in every case.
Far less attention has been paid to two other surveillance authorities that expire as well. One makes it easier for the FBI to track "lone wolf" terrorism suspects who have no connection to a foreign power, and another allows the government to eavesdrop on suspects who continuously discard their cellphones in an effort to avoid surveillance.

Islamic State group radio claims Saudi mosque suicide attack; promise more 'black days' for Shiites

CAIRO –  The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Saudi Arabia, warning that more "black days" loom ahead in a direct challenge to the rulers of the Sunni kingdom.
Friday's attack was the kingdom's deadliest militant assault since a 2004 Al Qaeda attack on foreign worker compounds, which sparked a massive Saudi security force crackdown.
However, this Islamic State attack in the village of al-Qudeeh in the eastern Qatif region targeted Shiites, whom ultraconservatives in Saudi Arabia regularly denounce as heretics.
The statement on the Islamic State group's al-Bayan radio station, read aloud Friday night and posted Saturday morning to militant websites associated with the extremists, identified the suicide bomber as a Saudi citizen with the nom de guerre Abu Amer al-Najdi. The station also identified the attack as being carried out by a new Islamic State branch in "Najd Province," referring to the historic region of the central Arabian Peninsula home to the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
The mosque attack killed at least 21 people and wounded 81, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.
The Islamic State group -- formerly Al Qaeda's branch in Iraq which broke away and overran much of that country and neighboring Syria -- has become notorious for its attacks on Shiites, including a deadly Shiite mosque bombing in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, that killed more than 130 people. It was blamed for the killing of eight Shiites in a mosque shooting in eastern Saudi Arabia in November.
The al-Bayan message warned Shiites of coming "black days that will hurt you," pledging to expel all Shiites from the Arabian Peninsula.
The attack comes as Saudi Arabia is part of a U.S.-led coalition targeting the Islamic State group. In late April, Saudi officials arrested 93 people they said were involved in an Islamic State plot to attack the U.S. Embassy and other targets.
There already are heightened Sunni-Shiite tensions in the region as Saudi Arabia and Shiite power Iran back opposite sides in conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

Inevitability Cartoon

Officers indicted in death of Freddie Gray

All six officers charged in the police-custody death of Freddie Gray were indicted by a grand jury, a prosecutor said Thursday.
The indictments were very similar to the charges Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced about three weeks ago. The most serious charge for each officer, ranging from second-degree "depraved heart" murder to assault, still stood.
Gray suffered a critical spinal injury after police handcuffed, shackled and placed him head-first into a van, Mosby has said. His pleas for medical attention were repeatedly ignored, she said.
Mosby said prosecutors had presented evidence to the grand jury for the past two weeks. Some of the charges were changed based on new information, but she didn't say what that new information was. She also did not take questions.
"As is often the case, during an ongoing investigation, charges can and should be revised based upon the evidence," Mosby said.
In all, three of the officers had additional charges brought against them while three others had one less charge.
Gray was arrested April 12. He died in a hospital a week later and became a symbol of what protesters say was police brutality against blacks.
Two officers, Edward Nero and Garrett Miller, were indicted on second-degree assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment.
Caesar Goodson, who drove the transport van, faces manslaughter and second-degree "depraved heart" murder. Sgt. Alicia White, Lt. Brian Rice and officer William Porter are each charged with manslaughter, second-degree assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment.
Gray died on April 19, one week after he was critically injured, and his death inspired outrage among Baltimore residents that spawned protests that at least two points gave way to violence, looting and arson. In the wake of the riots, Democratic Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake implemented a curfew for all Baltimore residents, and Republican Gov. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency.
Gray was arrested in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of West Baltimore. According to court documents, Gray made eye contact with a police officer and took off running. He was apprehended two blocks away and arrested for possession of what Miller wrote in charging documents is illegal under a city ordinance.
Mosby said the arrest was unlawful because the knife is legal under state law.
None of the officers secured Gray's seatbelt in the van, a violation of police policy. Soon after he was placed in the van, Goodson stopped to secure him with leg irons because he had become "irate," police said.
After a ride that included several more stops, including one to pick up a second passenger, the van arrived at the Western District station house. By that time, Gray was non-responsive.

All for nothing? US vets who fought for Ramadi angry over fall to ISIS

Iraqi War veteran Sgt. Ben Rangel remembers fighting to secure the city of Ramadi when he first arrived in Iraq for a tour of duty in 2004. He also recalls the bloodshed.
Now, like other veterans who fought Iraqi insurgents for the capital city of Iraq's Anbar province, as well as the loved ones who died in fierce battles there, Rangel bristles at the sight of the ISIS flag-waving above the government complex. Many are wondering why their hard-fought gains were so easily surrendered when Iraqi forces, following the U.S. pullout, were unable to stand up to the black-clad terrorist army.

“It’s hard to watch and then be told that it’s all part of a successful plan.”
- Pete Hegseth,Concerned Veterans for America

“We lost a lot of men,” Rangel, a former infantryman with the 2^nd battalion/5^th Marines Fox Company, told FoxNews.com. “The fighting in Fallujah got a lot of attention in the news, but Ramadi was a very important city because of the supply route that ran through it to Baghdad.
“We were fighting non-stop for three months," he said. "Our mission was always to make sure that the supply route was secure.”
Ramadi, once a city of 750,000, lies some 70 miles west of Baghdad in the Sunni-majority province. During the Iraq War, which raged from 2003 to late 2011, nearly 5,000 coalition forces were killed and more than 32,000 wounded. Some of the war's fiercest fighting occurred in Anbar province, including in Falluja and Ramadi.
Rangel’s battalion lost 23 men during the fighting, and the veteran lost a close friend when that man's unit struck an IED along "Route Michigan," the military's name for the supply road that leads from Baghdad into Syria, passing through Fallujah and Ramadi.
“I never got to see him again,” the Marine recalled.
Despite the hardships and loss of men, over the next few years, Ramadi was eventually secured.
“All that fighting had paid off,” Rangel said, adding that the city was completely out of the clutches of the insurgency when he went back with his unit in 2007, a year after the infamous Battle of Ramadi in 2006, to train Iraqi police forces.
Nearly a decade after Rangel and others fought to free Ramadi, the city is poised to become a bloody battleground yet again. Iraqi troops, driven out by a much smaller ISIS army over the weekend, are poised to mount a counter-offensive, aided by a coalition of Shia Muslim fighters. But the failure by Iraqi forces to hold the city has already led to a humanitarian crisis, as an estimated 25,000 Iraqi refugees have fled for safety, most of them heading along Route Michigan for Baghdad.

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Sgt. Ben Rangel, seen here in a a photo taken in the City of Ramadi in 2004, said the fighting was "non-stop" against the insurgency at the time.

“It’s gut-wrenching and disgusting to me that we choose to stand by and do nothing,” Debbie Lee, whose son Marc Alan Lee was the first Navy SEAL to be killed in the Operation Iraqi Freedom while fighting insurgents in Ramadi, told FoxNews.com. “Our troops are more than capable to secure that city and they are just not given the ability.
“It’s because they [Washington] refuse to send troops that we are seeing this insurgence,” she added.
The U.S. has been coordinating airstrikes since last August, pounding ISIS positions in both Iraq and Syria. But the Obama administration has said it does not want troops back on the ground in Iraq, and has said it is up to the Iraqis to defend their land from the terrorist army. Weapons the U.S. gave to the Iraqis, including tanks, have fallen into the hands of ISIS when the Iraqi forces fled, first in Mosul last year and now, most recently, in Ramadi.
Sgt. Rangel, whose unit helped train Iraqi forces in 2007, said he never had a lot of confidence in them,.
"At one point we had to take over for the Iraqi police because many of them were helping insurgents,” he said. “It was very difficult to know who the enemy was. One minute, they [insurgents] would be in civilian clothes, the next they were picking up rifles and attacking us.
A senior military official confirmed to Fox News Channel on Wednesday that the Obama administration is looking into arming Sunni tribes to help national forces and Shia militia retake Ramadi. However, public comments from another Pentagon official suggest that not much more assistance will be provided.
“We are confident that we have the right strategy at this time,” U.S. Central Command spokesman, Col. Patrick Ryder, U.S. Air Force said Wednesday. “Momentum will continue to be on our side.”

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Sgt. Rangel, served with the the Marine Corps' Fox Company and returned in 2007, after Ramadi was secured, to help train Iraqi police forces.

Pete Hegseth, CEO of Concerned Veterans for America and a Fox News contributor, said veterans who fought and bled to free Ramadi from insurgents a decade ago have little reason for confidence in the current effort.
“It’s hard to watch and then be told that it’s all part of a successful plan,” Hegseth said. “Ramadi was a model success story and we continue to see all of the gains we made there be somewhat reversed.
"It’s a slap in the faces of families of soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice,” he added.

US warns China not to challenge military flights over South China Sea

The U.S. warned China Thursday against confronting U.S. aerial patrols over the South China Sea days after a verbal dispute between a Chinese military dispatcher and a U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft. 
The Los Angeles Times reported that the Navy released two videos and an audio recording of the confrontation, which took place on Wednesday when the Chinese dispatcher demanded eight times that the Navy P8-A Poseidon leave the area as it flew over Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Island chain, where China has conducted extensive reclamation work.
"Foreign military aircraft, this is Chinese navy. You are approaching our military alert zone. Leave immediately," the dispatcher said on the recording. After the American crew responded that it was flying over international waters, the Chinese dispatcher responded "This is the Chinese navy ... You go!"
The incident was the latest example of friction between Washington and Beijing, with China seeking to assert its expansive claims to the South China Sea and the U.S. pushing back and attempting  to demonstrate that China's massive land reclamation does not give it territorial rights.
Daniel Russel, the top U.S. diplomat for East Asia, said the flight of a U.S. reconnaissance plane in international airspace over the South China Sea was a regular and appropriate occurrence. He said the U.S. will seek to preserve the ability of not just the United States but all countries to exercise their rights to freedom of navigation and overflight.
"Nobody in their right mind is going to try to stop the U.S. Navy from operating. That would not be a good step. But it's not enough that a U.S. military plane can overfly international waters, even if there is a challenge or a hail and query" from the Chinese military, he said.
"We believe that every country and all civilian actors also should have unfettered access to international waters and international airspace," he said.
Speaking at a regular daily briefing Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei reiterated Beijing's insistence on its indisputable sovereignty over the islands it has created by piling sand on top of atolls and reefs.
While saying he had no information about the reported exchange, Hong said China was "entitled to the surveillance over related airspace and sea areas so as to maintain national security and avoid any maritime accidents.
"We hope relevant countries respect China's sovereignty over the South China Sea, abandon actions that may intensify controversies and play a constructive role for regional peace and stability," Hong told reporters.
China claims virtually the entire South China Sea as its own, along with its scattered island groups. The area that is home to some of the world's busiest commercial shipping routes is also claimed in part or in whole by the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.
The U.S. and most of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) want a halt to the projects, which they suspect are aimed at building islands and other land features over which China can claim sovereignty and base military assets.
The U.S. says it takes no position on the sovereignty claims but insists they must be negotiated. Washington also says ensuring maritime safety and access is a U.S. national security priority.
China is also at odds with Japan over ownership of a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that are controlled by Tokyo but also claimed by Beijing, leading to increased activity by Chinese planes and ships in the area, which lies between Taiwan and Okinawa.
Both sides have accused the other of operating dangerously, prompting fears of an incident such as the 2001 collision between a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. surveillance plane in which the Chinese pilot was killed and the American crew detained on China's Hainan island.
Also Thursday, the Chinese air force announced its latest offshore training exercises in the western Pacific as part of efforts to boost its combat preparedness.
People's Liberation Army Air Force spokesman Shen Jinke said the exercises were held in international airspace but gave no specifics. In its report on the drills, state broadcaster CCTV showed a video of Xian H-6 twin-engine bombers, a Chinese version of Russia's Tupelov Tu-16, in flight and landing at an air base, although it wasn't clear when the video was shot.

Clinton Foundation reveals up to $26.4M in previously undisclosed payments

The Clinton Foundation acknowledged Thursday that it had received millions of dollars in payments that had not previously been disclosed under a 2008 ethics agreement with the Obama administration. 
The Washington Post, citing foundation officials, reported that the payments were categorized internally as "revenue" instead of donations, which exempted the organization from including them in its public list of contributions.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has faced questions about whether the foundation fully complied with the agreement it made with the Obama administration when Clinton was nominated to be America's top diplomat. Questions have also been raised about whether the foundation's lengthy list of donors tied to foreign governments presented a conflict of interest for Clinton while she was Secretary of State or whether such conflicts might arise should she become president.
According to the Post, the previously undisclosed money was paid in the form of speaking fees for Hillary and former President Bill Clinton, as well as their daughter Chelsea. The foundation does not say how much the Clintons were paid for each speech, only giving a range. The total amount in new payments is between $12 million and $26.4 million.
According to new information released by the foundation, the Clintons have made a total of 97 speeches to benefit the foundation since 2002. Those speeches have been sponsored by a number of institutions, including colleges and universities, corporations, and at least one foreign government, Thailand.
The Post reports that the organizations that paid to hear Hillary Clinton speak to them include large financial institutions Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Another organization, founded by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, paid between $250,000 and $500,000 to hear the former Secretary of State. In all, 15 speeches by Hillary Clinton were newly disclosed by the foundation, which did not provide any dates for the events.
Former President Bill Clinton gave 73 of the 97 newly disclosed speeches, including the speech paid for by Thailand's Energy Ministry, which contributed between $250,000 and $500,000.  Other organizations addressed by Bill Clinton include the U.S. Islamic World Forum (between $250,000 and $500,000 contributed), a South Korean energy and chemical company ( between $500,00 and $1 million), the China Real Estate Development Corp., and the Qatar First Investment Bank (both paying between $250,000 and $500,000).

Funny but not Really Cartoon

‘What the hell?’ Boehner rips VA for firing almost nobody, year after Shinseki resignation

House Speaker John Boehner tore into Veterans Affairs leadership Wednesday, alleging that nearly a year after then-Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned amid the scandal over veterans care, his successors have done little to fix the agency -- or even discipline those involved in the wait-times crisis.
"Just one person has been fired. One," Boehner said in a scathing House floor speech. "What the hell happened to the rest of them? "
He appealed for the agency to take care of America's veterans as well as they take care "of the bureaucrats."
Boehner, R-Ohio, said he is especially frustrated that so few VA officials have been fired, despite evidence that at least 110 VA facilities kept secret lists to manipulate and hide long wait-times.
In February, VA Secretary Robert McDonald claimed in a TV interview that the department had "fired" 60 people connected with the scandal.
That estimate was later revised down to 14. But The New York Times reported in late April that, according to documents given to Congress, only one person had actually been fired -- Phoenix VA hospital director Sharon Helman. Another retired under pressure and another's "termination" was pending. Several others were disciplined in other ways.
Boehner likened some of the punishments to a "slap on the wrist," noting some got transfers and others got paid leave. And "all of them went on collecting checks from taxpayers," he said.
Further, Boehner said, the number of patients facing long waits is about the same as it was last year, while the number of patients waiting more than 90 days has nearly doubled.
The VA's problems are so deep that -- despite a new law that overhauled the agency and authorized $16 billion in new spending over three years -- it can't even build a hospital, Boehner said, referring to a half-finished project in Denver that is $1 billion over budget.
Boehner said more legislation to hold the VA accountable is likely.
"But only the administration can change the culture from within," he said.
As Memorial Day approaches, President Obama "owes the American people a real, long-term plan to fix the VA," Boehner said. "Not a promise or a pledge or a rearranging of deck chairs: a real plan to clean up this mess."
A VA representative has not yet responded to a request for comment on Boehner's allegations.

Fox News, Facebook to host first GOP primary debate of 2016 race

Fox News and Facebook will host the first Republican primary debate of the 2016 presidential race on Aug. 6 in Ohio, the network announced Wednesday.
The debate, to be presented in conjunction with the Ohio Republican Party, will be held at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.
The announcement comes as the Republican field is still taking shape. Six primary candidates have formally declared their intention to seek the nomination -- but several more are expected to declare in the coming weeks, contributing to one of the largest-ever GOP primary fields.
The Aug. 6 debate will be moderated by Fox News' Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace.
The format will allow Fox News viewers and Facebook users to share video questions via the social media site, some of which will be used for the debate, the network said.
Fox News' Executive Vice President of News Editorial Michael Clemente also announced the criteria for candidates:
They must meet all constitutional requirements; must announce and register a formal campaign; must file all required paperwork with the Federal Election Commission; and must place in the top 10 in an average of the five most recent, recognized national polls leading up to Aug. 4.
Those who do not place in the top 10 will be provided additional coverage and air time, Clemente said in a statement.
The debate will be presented live from 9-11 p.m. ET, on Fox News Channel, with additional coverage on Fox News Radio, Fox News Mobile and FoxNews.com.
Andy Mitchell, director of News and Global Media Partnerships at Facebook, said, "Facebook's scale and foundation in real identity give Fox News and the Republican contenders for the nomination the opportunity to open up the debate to Americans in a new and unique way."
Ohio GOP Chairman Matt Borges reiterated the crucial role his state is playing this cycle in both the primary process and general election -- as the site of the 2016 Republican National Convention, and a crucial swing state.
"A Republican can't win the White House without carrying our state, so there's no better place to host the first primary debate," he said.

‘They will pay off’: Employers, advocates help returning vets face next battle -- landing a job

For many veterans coming home after multiple tours over 14 years of war, getting a job in the civilian world has been their most personal battle yet, marked by disappointments and dead ends.
But, thanks to a slowly improving job market and active efforts by veterans' groups, officials and recruiters in private-sector companies, that dim outlook is beginning to brighten.
Though still higher than the national average, the unemployment rate among recent veterans has steadily declined. Veterans' advocates say, perhaps most importantly, the mindset in corporate America is starting to change.
It boils down to this: Seeing that hiring a veteran is not just a good deed. It can be a smart hire.
"I think there is a commitment by the corporate community and associations and groups like ours that are trying to make people understand ... We make it a point that veterans should be viewed as an investment, not as a charity," said Mark Szymanski, a spokesman with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of American (IAVA).
This is only the start. Tens of thousands of returning veterans are still looking for work. And the mission of IAVA -- founded in 2004 to help returning vets reintegrate into the workforce -- and similar groups has become only more critical as the Iraq war ended (despite the subsequent return of U.S. forces to combat ISIS) and the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan drew to a close.

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• Walmart Boosts Hiring of Veterans

The progress, though, can be charted. At its peak, joblessness for those serving since 9/11 (which labor statisticians refer to as Gulf War-era II vets) was nearly 12 percent in 2011. In January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that number had fallen steadily to 7.2 percent in 2014. On a monthly basis, the latest BLS figures show that among all post-9/11 veterans, the number was 6.9 percent for April, up slightly from 6.5 percent in March.
First lady Michelle Obama, speaking in April on behalf of the four-year-old Joining Forces White House initiative to support vets and their families, credited employers across the country who she said heeded "the call."
"[These] companies were seeing for themselves that hiring our military members and our spouses wasn't simply the patriotic thing to do, it was the right thing to do for their bottom line," she said.
The first lady said that businesses have hired or trained more than 850,000 veterans and military spouses, which she called an "outstanding" number.
Their unemployment rate is still higher than the national one, which was pegged at 5.4 percent for April, and 6.7 percent at the end of 2014. According to recruitment officials who spoke with FoxNews.com, there are several factors at play. Aside from fierce competition in the job markets, many vets don't know where and how to get assistance in finding the right job. All of their contacts are inside the military, and largely unhelpful for networking. Some don't know what to do after years of being told what to do.
Finally, employers themselves don't always understand the value veterans could bring to their workplace.
Many are trying to change that. Since 2011, Verizon has had an active veterans' advisory panel and a robust recruiting program that also includes job-seeking assistance offered at job fairs across the country, and virtual workshops, according to Evan Guzman, the head of Military Programs & Veteran Affairs at Verizon's corporate offices in New Jersey.
"It really started out as a campaign of winning hearts and minds [of the internal organization]," convincing executives that hiring vets was a win-win for everyone, Guzman said. Verizon has hired 3,000 post-9/11 vets since 2013.
Aside from its own efforts, Verizon is also part of the Veterans Employment Initiative at the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC), which brings together greater Washington, D.C. firms, many of them defense and technology contractors, to recruit and mentor vets through transition.
This includes resume building, interviewing and, of course, networking. "It's one thing to leave the military with a resume," said Guzman, "but if you can't network, you're going to find yourself stuck."

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Shown here is a veterans recruitment event sponsored by the Northern Virginia Technology Council. (Courtesy of NVTC)

NVTC's member companies told FoxNews.com that they have tens of thousands of applications coming into them every week (there are currently 198,000 veterans' resumes on file at NVTC's website). NVTC has worked with 368 vets directly for transition and placement, and provided one-on-one mentors for 78.
"There is a lot of outreach going on," said Gabe Galvan, the Veterans Affairs portfolio director for the MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit organization that operates research and development centers for the federal government. Some 20 percent of its workforce are veterans, including severely disabled. "We have a supply of people leaning in who can deliver these structures of support to the veterans," he said. They also have also designed a "boot camp" to get other employers on board.
Eric Bartch, who runs the veterans outreach program at CACI, a major federal defense contractor based in Northern Virginia, says its important that the employers are providing a pipeline for vets, and veterans seek that connection out. Otherwise, they are sending resumes blindly to companies, which might as well be a black hole. CACI gets over 1,400 veteran applications a week, and over 5,000 a month, he said. Right now its workforce is 30 percent veteran, and of that number, 7 percent are disabled.
"There is just so much competition," Bartch said. "[Veterans] really need to have someone inside the company to be their advocate, look for those military support teams that most companies have now -- reach out to them first." He said CACI is part of a healthy network of companies in the area, along with Joining Forces and other groups, providing a bridge. Veterans that are in demand include those with IT, cybersecurity, security, logistics and litigation skills.
But outside the Beltway, the job market is not as flush with federal contracts, and not every company has a small army of people working solely in veterans outreach. The economy is still struggling, especially in America's small towns and rural areas.
"The gap is closing but the economy is still sluggish. The companies, in many cases, don't have the openings," said Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., who as chairman of the Oversight & Investigations subcommittee has been at the forefront of probes into the rash of scandals at the nation's VA health care facilities.
"In Kentucky and West Virginia, coal companies are closing down. This is hurting people because they can't come home and work. A lot of your grunts come from small towns, they hope to make a new life for themselves and then come home to find their town just isn't hiring," he told FoxNews.com.
Many of the young vets coming home from war have a double strike by being out of the civilian workforce for years -- if they ever were in it. Young infantrymen and women for example, don't know what their battlefield skills are good for. Then there is prejudice.
"People are still concerned about hiring a vet with a disability and mistake a disability for inability, though I think some of those concerns of five or six years ago have gone down. But it has been difficult for employers to understand," Murphy said.
Veterans offer "safety, teamwork, loyalty and knowing how to get the job done," he told FoxNews.com. "I just met a former general in charge of hiring for a company who said he is hiring veterans because they can read maps. You just can't train someone on the assets the military builds into you."
This is where groups like IAVA come in. They work with employers to make sure they are not just in "reactionary" mode, hiring vets to plug gaps in low-wage paying jobs, or because they feel compelled to. They also want to take that "grunt" and help him or her sell themselves to the employer.
Matt Ross, project manager for the employment programs at IAVA, is planning the group's May 18 Career Boot Camp in New York City. He recalls one of his own early interviews when transitioning out of the military. "I told [the interviewer] I was a rifleman," he recalled.
After she asked what that meant, "I drew a blank, I hadn't prepared for that. I could have said, it meant accountability for equipment, [and experience in] logistical and operational planning."
It's that type of prep work the Boot Camp hopes to offer.
Employers will be there, too. "We're not out there begging for jobs, or to give people a break," said Szymanski. "We're saying, invest in a veteran, invest in their programs, because they will pay off and our country will be better."

ISIS controls 50 percent of Syria after takeover of Palmyra, monitoring group says

The Islamic State terror group controls over half of Syrian territory after seizing the village and archaeological site of Palmyra in the central part of the country Thursday, activists monitoring Syria's civil war said.
Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Associated Press the extremists overran the archaeological site, just to the southwest of the modern settlement on Palmyra, shortly after midnight local time.
An activist in the central province of Homs who goes by the name of Bebars al-Talawy also says that Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, now controls the ruins at the UNESCO world heritage site famous for its 2,000-year-old towering Roman-era colonnades and other ruins and priceless artifacts. Before the war, thousands of tourists a year visited the remote desert outpost, a cherished landmark referred to by Syrians as the "Bride of the Desert."
Both activists said Thursday that ISIS had not damaged the ruins so far. ISIS has previously destroyed major archaeological sites in Iraq that predate the founding of Islam. Sky News reported that hundreds of statues and artifacts had been taken to safety ahead of the ISIS advance, but larger items, such as stone tombs, could not be removed in time. 
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that ISIS had also seized control of Palmyra's military air base, prison and intelligence headquarters. The Associated Press reported that the prison, known as Tadmur, is where thousands of Syrian dissidents have been imprisoned and tortured over the years.
An amateur video posted online showed ISIS fighters, allegedly inside the prison, burning a giant poster of Syrian President Bashar Assad and cheering as flames rose around them against the night sky. The video and its location could not be independently verified, but appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting of the events.

Late Show Cartoon

Clinton breaks media silence, answers reporters’ questions on emails and more

Hillary Clinton, having faced weeks of criticism for ducking the press since entering the presidential race, finally broke her media silence Tuesday, fielding multiple questions from reporters during a stop in Iowa -- addressing, albeit briefly, the two controversies dogging her campaign.
On the controversy surrounding her use of a private email address and server while secretary of state, Clinton insisted: "I want those emails out."
On questions about the transparency surrounding foreign-government donations to the family foundation, Clinton said she's "proud" of the organization, and the donations just show that others are supportive of the work it does.
While the Democratic presidential candidate's responses may not have been surprising, her engagement with the press marks a departure from the way she's run her campaign since entering the race a month ago.
She largely has kept to low-key, tightly orchestrated campaign events, eliciting concerns from reporters and criticism from Republicans that she's staying inside a "bubble."
Clinton has done no formal interviews since entering, while occasionally fielding a question bounced at her from the press corps.
Tuesday's back-and-forth was one of the most extensive Q&A's since she held a press conference addressing the email scandal -- before declaring her candidacy.
On the email controversy, Clinton on Tuesday insisted the matter is in the State Department's hands and said she wants them released as soon as possible.
"Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do." Asked if she would demand their release, Clinton said of the emails, "They're not mine. They belong to the State Department."
Clinton reiterated her push to release the emails shortly after a federal judge rejected the State Department's proposal to disseminate portions of the emails by next January and said the agency must instead conduct a "rolling production" of the records.
The court ordered the department to produce the schedule for that rollout by next week, and a department spokesman said they would comply.
Clinton spoke after a small business event for her campaign in Iowa, the home of the nation's first presidential caucuses. The disclosure that she conducted State Department business on a private email account has been a controversy from the very inception of her campaign this year and raised questions about her commitment to transparency.
More questions were raised Tuesday after The New York Times published emails showing she may have had a second personal email address, despite claims she only used one as secretary of state.
During the Tuesday court hearing, a federal judge gave the State Department a week to craft a schedule for releasing the records, according to Vice News lawyer Jeffrey Light.
The agency made its initial proposal in a federal court filing Monday night, in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Vice News.
In the filing, John F. Hackett, who is responsible for the department's responses to FOIA requests, said that following a review of the emails, the department will post the releasable portions of the 55,000 pages on its website. He said the review will take until the end of the year -- and asked the court to adopt a completion date of Jan. 15, 2016, to factor in the holidays. That's just a couple of weeks before the Iowa caucuses and early state primaries that follow.
In Monday night's filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Hackett said the State Department received the 55,000 pages of emails from Clinton in paper form. Aside from those, Clinton's office has deleted about 30,000 emails deemed personal.

Louisiana religious liberty bill goes down in defeat as Republicans side with LGBT activists

UPDATE: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an Executive Order late Tuesday to protect religious liberty and prevent the state from discriminating against those with deeply held religious beliefs.
“In Louisiana, the state should not be able to take adverse action against a person for their belief in traditional marriage,” Jindal said. “That’s why I’m issuing an Executive Order to prevent the state from discriminating against people, charities and family-owned businesses with deeply held religious beliefs that marriage is between one man and one woman.
Earlier story:
Louisiana Republican lawmakers sided with Democrats, big business and LGBT activists to kill a bill that would have protected individuals and religious institutions opposed to same-sex marriage.
In doing so, lawmakers defied the objections of an overwhelmingly majority of voters and handed Gov. Bobby Jindal a significant defeat for his legislative agenda.
A house legal committee voted 10-2 on Tuesday to shelve the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act – a measure that critics said could sanction discrimination against same-sex couples.
However, the proposed law clearly stated its sole purpose was to prevent the government from discriminating against a person or a non-profit because of their support for traditional marriage.
“These ten legislators voted today against freedom and against two-thirds of Louisianans who support the Marriage and Conscience Act,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and a supporter of the bill. “This is a failure of leadership and goes to the heart of what’s wrong with American politics today.”
Perkins was referring to a WPA poll commissioned by the Louisiana Family Forum and FRC that indicated 67 percent of likely voters supported the bill. Even more shocking – 63 percent of Democrats supported the bill.
“These elected leaders effectively endorsed government discrimination against individuals and nonprofits simply for believing in marriage between a man and a woman,” Perkins said. “No person or nonprofit should lose tax exempt status, face disqualification, lose a professional license or be punished by the government simply for believing what President Obama believed just three years ago – that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.”
Among those strong-arming the bill was IBM – which is building a technology jobs center in Baton Rouge.  An IBM executive penned a letter to The Times-Picayune warning that “IBM will find it much harder to attract talent to Louisiana if this bill is passed and enacted into law.”
Gov. Jindal scoffed at such threats in an April 23 op-ed published by The New York Times.
“I have a clear message for any corporation that contemplates bullying our state: save your breath,” he wrote.
He said he would not be deterred by corporations that were pressured by radical liberals.
“As a nation we would not compel a priest, minister or rabbi to violate his conscience and perform a same-sex wedding ceremony,” Jindal wrote. “But a great many Americans who are not members of the clergy feel just as called to live their faith through their businesses. That’s why we should ensure that musicians, caterers, photographers and others should be immune from government coercion on deeply held religious convictions.”
Equality Louisiana accused Johnson of trying to bring discrimination to the state through the back door. They partnered with Louisiana Progress Action and other groups to oppose the bill.
“I remain convinced that the bill is bad for Louisiana – bad for our state’s economy and bad for our state’s people,” Equality Louisiana’s Matthew Patterson said in a statement.
State Rep. Mike Johnson authored the bill. The Republican, from Bossier City, took a beating not only from the Left – but also from fellow Republicans.
A Republican city councilman in Baton Rouge called him a “despicable bigot of the highest order.”
“It’s shameful,” Johnson told me. “He never met me before he said that. He never read the legislation. People will say what they say – I can’t control that.”
However, it appears that Republican lawmakers bought into the lies and distortions propagated by activists and big business.
“This bill is a simple measure to protect religious freedom,” Johnson said. “A few well-funded activist groups have intentionally mischaracterized the bill – spreading fear and intimidation and misinformation.”
Johnson said he was not at all surprised by the survey that found even Louisiana Democrats supported his doomed measure.
“The people of Louisiana are at their heart very patriotic, very conservative – even in the Democrat party,” he said. “They understand that religious liberty ought to be protected.”
Johnson said he has seen the future of religious liberty in America – and it is grim.
He foresees a day when Christian churches could lose their tax-exempt status and Christian schools could lose their accreditation. He foresees a day when those who refuse to endorse same-sex marriage could be prohibited from practicing their profession.
That’s why he pushed the legislation.
“If society’s views on marriage are going to change – if the Supreme Court declares there is a right to same-sex marriage – we have to do all we can to ensure that religious liberty is not a casualty of that new and emerging idea,” he said.