"Most political pros agree that Clinton will need a huge turnout from the Obama coalition to win. The bad news is that, so far, the Obama coalition is like a non-transferable, single-purpose coupon that can only be used to get Obama elected president. Clinton advocates insist we don't know that yet, which is true. But all the evidence looks bad for Clinton. ...

"The Clinton campaign has hired many of Obama's consultants and gurus in the hopes that they can do for her what they allegedly did for him. They've even tried to replicate Obama's signature 'O' logo into an exciting 'H,' which mostly looks like a road sign pointing to the next exit for a hospital."

"Hillary will have many strengths -- an electoral map that tilts toward the Democrats, a Republican Party that is still suffering a hangover from the Bush years, prodigious fund-raising.

"But her planned road trip to the White House, even if she manages to get to her destination, will be more a grim forced march than a joyful excursion. Its motto might as well be: Oh, the fun we will pretend to have!"

"Although the Republicans will spend the next several months running against one another, none should lose sight of their likely general-election opponent and her message. Making the case for themselves should encompass making the case against Clinton and for conservative principles and policies that will appeal not only to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina Republicans next spring, but to most Americans come November 2016. ...

"No one is inevitable. Hillary Clinton has been hovering about the heights of American political power for nearly three decades, yet she has almost no substantive accomplishments to show for it, and her best plans for the next eight years are likely to be the repurposed policies of Democratic administrations past. She’s beatable, and the substantive work to prepare the ground for defeat should begin now."

"There's an emerging conventional wisdom that the 2016 presidential race, once predicted to be mostly about economic issues, will instead be dominated by foreign policy. ...

"The argument is that the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an ongoing crisis in Syria, the Iranian nuclear negotiations, Russian aggression, and other international issues have elevated foreign policy and national security to a higher position in the presidential debate than seemed likely, say, a year ago. At the same time, with the unemployment rate down to 5.5 percent and job creation improving, economic concerns that dominated the 2008 and 2012 presidential races won't be as critical in 2016.

"At least, that's the idea. And maybe it will happen. (I've written about it myself.) But some newly released figures from the Labor Department are a reminder that economic anxieties underlie everything else -- and the economy will likely remain the biggest factor in the next presidential race."

"The most explosive story in Washington, D.C., this week isn't about Iran but about Iraq. It's about how a runaway special prosecutor wrecked America's chances of defeating the insurgency in the early days of the Iraq war, and left the region - and American foreign policy in the Middle East - in a shambles ever since.

"These revelations come from veteran New York Times reporter Judith Miller's new book, 'The Story: A Reporter's Journey'. It tells how special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald rigged the 2007 perjury trial of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, in the Valerie Plame case, and inadvertently condemned thousands of Americans to be killed and maimed needlessly in Iraq.

"The Plame case has been shrouded in a fog of media-generated myth for almost a decade. The myth maintains that Cheney and Libby deliberately set out to blow the cover of CIA employee Valerie Plame in retaliation for an explosive op-ed that her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, published in the New York Times in July 2003. In that op-ed, Wilson contradicted the Bush administration's assertion that Saddam Hussein had been trying to obtain yellowcake uranium in Niger in order to build an atomic bomb. The leak of Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak - so goes the story - led special prosecutor Fitzgerald on a two-year investigation to find the culprit, culminating in the trial and conviction of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice.

"We now know - and not just from Miller's book - that virtually every element of that story is false."

www.nationalreview.com/article/416681/runaway-prosecutor-who-almost-lost-iraq-arthur-l-herman

"A federal judge denied the federal government's request to lift a hold on President Obama's controversial immigration actions in an opinion released Tuesday night.

"Judge Andrew Hanen wrote that the government misled the court by revealing last month it had granted expanded work permit renewals to 100,000 illegal immigrants before the court blocked the administration from implementing its new policies.

"He added a new hearing in March only 'reinforced' his February decision to issue a 'stay' to block those new policies, meant to delay deportations for millions of undocumented immigrants and provide them with the opportunity to apply for work permits.

"'It is obvious that there is no pressing, emergent need for this program,' he wrote as part of the rationale for not allowing the administration to immediately implement its new policies."

"There is nothing like a journalistic plane crash to inspire newsroom loudmouths to jump on their desks and lecture colleagues about the collapse of standards and crow that they're such exemplars of the craft that never in a trillion years could they or their publication be snookered by a fabulist, a hoaxer, a dissembler or a liar.

"Thanks to the release of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's authorized and comprehensive report on Rolling Stone's horribly flawed (and now officially retracted) expose 'A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,' this sort of posturing is clogging the Web today. I, too, would be doing a condemnation-dance on my desk to celebrate Rolling Stone's stupidity if I wasn't so certain that the lessons the Rolling Stone debacle teach us are fleeting. The time may soon come that the pontificators flop as miserably at the fundamentals of journalism as reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely and her Rolling Stone editors have. ...

"'The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust,' wrote Samuel Butler."

"We now have a definitive answer to the oft-asked but hardly challenging question of whether President Obama wanted a deal with Iran so badly he would accept a truly awful bargain. The answer: Of course he did.

"Iranian negotiators have triumphed on nearly every substantive point: They will get complete sanctions relief and U.N. legitimacy all at once, while keeping thousands of centrifuges, multiple nuclear sites, the right to develop new, more advanced enrichment equipment -- even permission to continue nuclear research at a highly reinforced underground facility that was kept secret from international inspectors for years. In exchange, the West got promises of a new, tough inspections regime, even though there is already a long record of Iran's developing nuclear facilities in secret. The White House says the deal pushes the time it would take Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon to a year, but widely respected arms-control experts have said, given the difficulty of performing good inspections and of building consensus around violations, that this is not enough. ...

"We hope the president and our allies will come to recognize the folly of the tentative deal before it is formally complete. If not, Congress must do everything it can to scuttle it, and show the world -- and our allies -- that U.S. policy has some adult supervision."

"Here is the fact. The intention behind a deal -- to stop Iran from developing, and in the end using, nuclear weapons -- could not be more serious and crucial. The Arab world has entered a war phase that may go for decades. Its special threat is that the struggle is not only an essential one -- Sunni vs. Shia, in a fight to the end -- but that it engenders and is marked by what British Prime Minister David Cameron has called 'the death cult.' Many in the fight have no particular fear of summoning the end of the world.

"Once Iran has what used to be called the bomb, there will be a race among nearby nations -- Persian Gulf states, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey -- to get their own. As each state builds its arsenal, there will be an increased chance that freelancers, non-states and sub-states will get their hands on parts of it."

"U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez now begins a fight for his political life that could last for years. New Jersey would be better off if he would resign and conduct that battle on his own time.

"The state needs a respected senator who is focused on his job, not a tarnished defendant who spends his days fending off credible charges of corruption and raising money for his legal defense.

"Menendez vows that he will not resign. He argues that he should be regarded as innocent until he is proven guilty, a claim that cannot be taken lightly. But that is the standard for imposing criminal sanctions like jail and fines. For senators, the bar should be much higher. ...

"Regardless of the outcome, it is hard to fathom Menendez's lack of judgment after a long career in a state that has been cursed by so much corruption. Why would he even dance close to this line?

"He has done good service to this state over the past 40 years. But that is now tarnished forever. His decision to stay and fight only compounds the damage."