Politico is at it again, deciding that Hillary Clinton will be "haunted" in the general election, should she get the nomination, by six "choice remarks and positions" she's taken in 2015. Because you know, unlike Clinton, the eventual Republican nominee will have never said anything controversial.
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But on to the real meat of the story, which posits that the things Clinton has said and positions she's taken will fuel a potential general election campaign against her. Those issues: on ISIS ("We now finally are where we need to be." Note that the Iraqis just had a pivotal victory against ISIS in Ramadi); on Republicans (the enemy she's most proud of, compared to the kinds of things Republicans have been saying about her and her husband for the past 23 years); on the nothingburger email scandal (her joke about wiping her server "like with a cloth or something"; and her support for closing the gun show loophole and an assault weapons ban.
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Clinton certainly isn't running a perfect primary campaign and wouldn't be perfect in the general, but the idea that anyone in this Republican field could make hay on any of these things is pretty laughable. This Republican field, full of blowhards and pathological liars. Not that Politico won't do its very best to help.

Hillary Clinton spoke Tuesday afternoon to a packed house at a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, finishing her next-to-last public campaign event of 2015. Later in the day she was scheduled to deliver another address in the Granite State before taking a few days off from the campaign trail.

During her Portsmouth event, she emphasized her plan to focus efforts on Alzheimer’s research -- a proposal she unveiled last week -- and took several questions from the crowd that largely focused on other issues she frequently discusses, such as gun control, college debt and improving the economy.

“The decision that New Hampshire makes is so important and I’ve had a great time traveling across the state, meeting by now thousands and thousands of people,” she said in her opening remarks. “I know that we are going to make the right decision not because my name will be on the ballot but because all of us know what the stakes are and how high they happen to be.”

A man in Germany has died after blowing up a condom machine in an apparent robbery attempt on Christmas Day.

The 29-year-old man was hit in the head by a piece of metal from the machine as he attempted to take cover from the explosion.

He was accompanied by two other men who escaped the explosion and fled the scene in a car, leaving money, condoms and the pieces of the vending machine scattered in their wake.
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The two men then attempted to tell hospital staff their friend had injured his head by falling down the stairs, but staff grew suspicious of the story and called police.

more debates are the last thing he needs

Setting aside the idea that Wall Street, collectively, is as capable of conspiring effectively as Sanders believes (if it did, I doubt that we would have experienced the 2008 crisis, or that as many institutions or individuals within them would have been caught off guard, or nabbed by regulators for doing stuff that they shouldn’t), I’m not convinced that Clinton is the patsy that Sanders would like us to imagine her as being.
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It’s true that Clinton’s reform plan for Wall Street isn’t as dramatic as that proposed by Sanders. She wants to keep the Dodd-Frank Act in place and keep funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at robust enough levels to ensure the organization is effective in fulfilling its mandate. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who oversaw the creation of the CFPB and who has been an outspoken critic of Wall Street, hailed this and some other aspects of Clinton’s plans, even though the two differ on the extent to which Wall Street should be regulated.
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Clearly, aggressive risk taking by banks was a major cause of the financial crisis. But of the institutions that were most directly responsible for triggering the 2008 crisis – Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie Mae – none was a big bank created by the repeal of Glass-Steagall. They were traditional investment banks, savings and loan institutions, insurance companies and a government-backed housing finance entity.
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But it’s far from certain that simply restoring Glass-Steagall would be a panacea, or that failing to do so suggests that Clinton is in the bankers’ pockets. Indeed, Clinton’s plan has the virtue of stretching beyond the banks, and recognizing that real financial power on Wall Street often resides elsewhere: in the hands of hedge funds, private equity funds, offshore institutions, high-speed traders, and other kinds of trading platforms. The banks may be big and powerful, but they are the employees of these shadow institutions and individuals – folks like hedge fund manager John Paulson, whose firm made $15bn and who personally made $4bn (or $10m a day) shorting mortgage securities during the financial crisis. Clinton’s suggestions for regulating Wall Street call for more oversight of this “shadow” world.

The recent polling surge by Donald Trump has launched a thousand stories about Trump’s “unprecedented campaign.” But it’s nothing all that unusual: Similar surges occurred for almost every Republican candidate four years ago, including Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich (twice).

History’s lesson isn’t necessarily that Trump’s candidacy will go bust tomorrow, however. There are plenty of examples of fringe or factional candidates who held on to their support for much longer than the month or two that Cain and Bachmann did. Sometimes, they did well enough in Iowa or New Hampshire, or even won them. Pat Buchanan claimed New Hampshire in 1996, for instance, while Mike Huckabee won Iowa in 2008. Steve Forbes took 30 percent of the Iowa vote in 2000.

The lesson, rather, is that Trump’s campaign will fail by one means or another. Like Cain, Bachmann and Gingrich, Buchanan, Huckabee and Forbes came nowhere close to winning the Republican nomination.

The recent spike in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border brought US Customs and Border Protection commissioner R Gil Kerlikowske to the Rio Grande Valley sector this month.

“Historically the numbers would not be at the levels we see right now,” Kerlikowske said, while standing in a warehouse where about 20 migrant children rested on large green mattresses, wrapped in reflective plastic blankets. “The concerning part is, are we seeing the new normal?”

A total of 10,588 unaccompanied children crossed the US-Mexico border in October and November, more than double the 5,129 who crossed during the same two months in 2014, federal statistics show. The number of family members crossing together, meanwhile, has nearly tripled, to 12,505. And though the influx began in July, the numbers were slightly higher this fall, a time when colder weather usually drives down the number of migrants crossing.

Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, made a surprise stopover in Pakistan on Friday to meet his counterpart, Nawaz Sharif – the first time an Indian premier has visited the rival nation in over a decade. The visit, requested by Modi just hours earlier before he flew back home from Afghanistan, raised hopes that stop-and-start negotiations between the nuclear-armed neighbours might finally make progress after three wars and more than 65 years of hostility.

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Modi was on his way home after a visit to Russia. He stopped off in the Afghan capital, Kabul, earlier on Friday, where he inaugurated a new parliament complex built with Indian help. The Lahore visit comes after India and Pakistan resumed high-level contact with a brief conversation between Sharif and Modi at climate change talks in Paris late last month, part of efforts to restart a peace dialogue plagued by militant attacks and longstanding distrust.

A spokesman at Sharif’s office earlier said the two leaders were to discuss a range of bilateral issues, including the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, the most contentious issue dividing the nations. A close aide to Modi said the visit was a spontaneous decision by the prime minister and his national security adviser, Ajit Doval, and that it should not be seen as a sudden shift in India’s position. “But yes, it’s a clear signal that active engagement can be done at a quick pace,” the aide said, declining to be identified.