Bernie Sanders' openness to debate Donald Trump ahead of California's primary -- an idea first floated during a "Jimmy Kimmel Live" interview with the presumptive GOP nominee Wednesday -- has some Democratic lawmakers fuming.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, told Politico Thursday that the possibility of a debate was "bulls***."

"That confirms what we've been saying," Manchin told the news site. "Why would you expect Bernie should be considerate or be nice or be working to bring everyone together? Why? He's not a Democrat."

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Other Democrats, however, have said they believe the debate would have a positive outcome, including Clinton surrogate Claire McCaskill, a Missouri senator.

"The more Donald Trump gets exposed in the context of public policy, the better it is for our country," McCaskill told Politico.
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or the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could signal "the end of the road" for antibiotics.

The antibiotic-resistant strain was found last month in the urine of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Defense Department researchers determined that she carried a strain of E. coli resistant to the antibiotic colistin, according to a study published Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. The authors wrote that the discovery "heralds the emergence of a truly pan-drug resistant bacteria."


Colistin is the antibiotic of last resort for particularly dangerous types of superbugs, including a family of bacteria known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, which health officials have dubbed "nightmare bacteria." In some instances, these superbugs kill up to 50 percent of patients who become infected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called CRE among the country's most urgent public health threats.

Health officials said the case in Pennsylvania, by itself, is not cause for panic. The strain found in the woman is treatable with some other antibiotics. But researchers worry that the antibiotic-resistant gene found in the bacteria, known as mcr-1, could spread to other types of bacteria that can already evade other types of antibiotics.
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A Homeland Security official says 600,000 cyber incidents have occurred so far this fiscal year.

A year after the government disclosed that personal information about millions of current and former federal employees and others had been stolen from two Office of Personnel Management databases, auditors remain skeptical of OPM’s steps to shut the cyber barn door.

“We continue to believe that there is a very high risk that the project will fail to meet its stated objectives of delivering a more secure environment at a lower cost,” the office of the agency’s inspector general said in a report issued Thursday.

The report is the latest in a series from the office criticizing OPM management for not carrying out standard planning steps for such a project, including exploring all the options first and fully understanding the project’s scope, its cost and how it will be funded.

The first of those reports shortly followed OPM’s acknowledgement of breaches of separate databases of federal employee personnel records and of background investigation records.

The former breach involved records of some 4.2 million current and former federal employees, including personal identifying information, educational background, work histories and similar information. The latter involved some 21.5 million current and former federal, military and contract personnel and others who had background investigations performed on them since 2000 and in some cases before. Those checks are performed for reasons including security clearance applications, which require disclosure of highly personal information such as financial or legal troubles, or to gain permission to enter certain government buildings.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke in Las Vegas on Thursday, mounting a fierce attack against Donald Trump and calling the GOP candidate and billionaire businessman an “urgent threat to our rights.”

Clinton’s speech was delivered at the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union conference at The Mirage. Her visit came as Trump amassed enough delegates to clinch the GOP presidential nomination.

“... there has never been more at stake for working families in America than there is right now,” Clinton told the group of several hundred cheering union members.

Specifically, Clinton blasted Trump for signing a contract with a “union-busting” firm and discouraging efforts to unionize at Trump International in Las Vegas. She complimented those workers for organizing, which they have done through the Culinary Union.

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Like unions that organize, Clinton said, all Americans must stand together if they want to defeat Trump.

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Mark Manna, a UFCW area director from Buffalo, N.Y., said supporting Clinton is an easy choice. As a New York state resident, he said, he saw her work as a U.S. senator. Clinton is the only choice for a working American who wants to make a good living, he said, comparing her to Trump.
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Washington voters delivered a bit of bad news for Bernie Sanders’s political revolution on Tuesday. Hillary Clinton won the state’s Democratic primary, symbolically reversing the outcome of the state’s Democratic caucus in March where Sanders prevailed as the victor. The primary result won’t count for much since delegates have already been awarded based on the caucus. (Sanders won 74 delegates, while Clinton won only 27.) But Clinton’s victory nevertheless puts Sanders in an awkward position.

Sanders has styled himself as a populist candidate intent on giving a voice to voters in a political system in which, as he describes it, party elites and wealthy special-interest groups exert too much control. As the primary election nears its end, Sanders has railed against Democratic leaders for unfairly intervening in the process, a claim he made in the aftermath of the contentious Nevada Democratic convention earlier this month. He has also criticized superdelegates—elected officials and party leaders who can support whichever candidate they chose—for effectively coronating Clinton.

As Sanders makes those arguments, he runs up against a few inconvenient realities. He trails Clinton in the popular-vote count and has performed well in caucuses, which consistently witness depressed voter turnout relative to primary elections. What happened in Washington is a painful reminder of this for the campaign: Far more voters took part in Washington’s Democratic primary than its state caucus, preliminary counts indicate. Roughly 230,000 people participated in the Democratic caucus, The Stranger reported in March. In contrast, more than 660,000 Democratic votes had been tallied in the primary as of Tuesday, according to The Seattle Times. That lopsided reality makes it more difficult for Sanders to argue that his candidacy represents the will of the people.

The shocking truth about the last two Republican secretaries of state has finally come out: Colin Powell and aides to Condoleezza Rice trafficked in classified information on their personal email accounts. This is an enormous scandal!

Oh, wait. No, it’s not.

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In addition to the classified email system used in SCIFs, there are personal email accounts. Prior to 2013, these could be accounts inside the relatively unsecure State Department system or private email accounts. If they are private—running through a commercial or personal server—they have to follow some rules set up in the Federal Register. There are no guards, no red-black procedures, no construction rules, no special rooms, no TEMPEST, no TSCM. And most important: Until 2013, there was no rule against using them. In fact, the rules specifically allowed for them. Check out the relevant section in the Code of Federal Regulations (36 CFR Chapter XII, Subchapter B, section 1236.22b) for the rules regarding the use of personal email accounts by any State Department official.

To give an idea of how insecure these communications could be, Powell’s personal email is an AOL account, and he used it on a laptop when he communicated with foreign officials and ambassadors, unless the information qualified for a SCIF. (Clinton sent only one email to a foreign dignitary through her personal account, and her communications with ambassadors were, for the most part, by phone.)

So did Powell and the aides to Rice violate rules governing classified information, since the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) staff has recently determined that some of their years-old personal emails contain top-secret material? No. The rules regarding the handling of classified information apply to communications designated as secret at that time . If documents that aren’t deemed classified, and aren’t handled through a SCIF when they are created or initially transmitted, are later, in retrospect, deemed secret, the classification is new—and however the record was handled in the past is irrelevant.
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The State Department’s independent watchdog has issued a highly critical analysis of Hillary Clinton’s email practices while running the department, concluding that she failed to seek legal approval for her use of a private email server and that department staff would not have given its blessing because of the “security risks in doing so.”

The inspector general, in a long awaited review obtained Wednesday by The Washington Post in advance of its publication, found that Clinton’s use of private email for public business was “not an appropriate method” of preserving documents and that her practices failed to comply with department policies meant to ensure that federal record laws are followed.

The report says Clinton, who is the Democratic presidential front-runner, should have printed and saved her emails during her four years in office or surrendered her work-related correspondence immediately upon stepping down in February 2013. Instead, Clinton provided those records in December 2014, nearly two years after leaving office.

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Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement that Clinton’s use of email was consistent with that of other secretaries and top officials at State and warned that “political opponents of Hillary Clinton are sure to misrepresent this report” for partisan purposes. “The report shows that problems with the State Department's electronic record-keeping systems were long-standing,” he said, adding that “she took steps that went much further than others to appropriately preserve and release her records.”

The 83-page report reviews email practices by five secretaries of state and generally concludes that record keeping has been spotty for years.

It was particularly critical of former secretary of state Colin Powell — who has acknowledged publicly that he used a personal email account to conduct business — concluding that he too failed to follow department policy designed to comply with public-record laws.
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Is the left turning on its darling, Bernie Sanders? On Friday, Netroots titan Markos Moulitsas, namesake of the liberal Daily Kos, dropped a rhetorical bomb on the Bern, blaming the candidate for doing too little to denounce death threats received by the Nevada Democratic Party after Sanders’ state convention delegates complained they had received unfair treatment. “The problem isn't Bernie Sanders' supporters,” Moulitsas wrote. “It's Bernie Sanders himself … [He] refuses to forcefully and unambiguously reject that violence, instead rationalizing and explaining it away with a mix of grievances and outright conspiracy theory.”

Actually, Sanders hasn’t lost much support among his most avid supporters—who do not include Moulitsas, a sometime critic. What we are seeing, however, is that it’s no longer taboo in liberal circles to attack Sanders as he drags out the nomination process at a time when many are itching to turn their fire on Donald Trump. And if his reputation in the party is being damaged outside his base, that will make it harder for him to extract concessions from Clinton regarding the platform and party nomination rules at the convention.

Through much of the campaign, Sanders wore a progressive halo, making it tricky for Clinton to play classic hardball politics (not that she didn’t try). Even if Democratic voters didn’t believe he was the practical choice, his platform still spoke to the ideological aspirations of many in the party. His supporters heard, “I like Bernie, but…” so much that they turned it into a website providing information designed to assuage unsure voters.

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This week another prominent figure in the online progressive community, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, also blamed Sanders directly for the increased animosity, saying: “The 'burn it down' attitude, the upping the ante … seems to be coming from Sanders himself. Right from the top.” Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum said more in sorrow than in anger this week, “It's sort of painful to see a good person like Bernie turned into such a sullen and resentful man.”

Still, neither Marshall nor Drum, like Moulitsas, had been an active Sanders supporter.

[font size="3" color="red"]Two months ago, Moulitsas declared the primaries effectively over and banned from his site “malicious attacks on our presumptive presidential nominee or our presidential efforts.”[/font] {[font color="blue"]Wow, now that would pretty much eliminate everthing the Bernie Fans had to say! BAD, BAD!![/font]_Bill USA} Last month Drum said Sanders was “basically running a con … we were never going to get a revolution, and Bernie knew it all along.” Marshall has been neutral, but has shown flashes of Sanders skepticism, such as when he characterized his economic critique as a “somewhat one-dimensional diagnosis.”[/font]
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