BY DAVID LAUTER
WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton is not only the best-known but also the most favorably viewed of the potential p**********l candidates from either of the two major parties, according to a new Gallup poll.
The poll was conducted Monday through Wednesday, mostly after the news broke about Clinton’s use of a private email account while she was secretary of State, but before the news conference last week in which she addressed the issue.
Roughly 9 in 10 Americans said they knew enough about Clinton to have an opinion, and the poll released Thursday found that 50% viewed her favorably, while 39% had a negative impression. On both counts, that put her in better position than any of the potential Republican candidates at this early stage of the p**********l race.
But Clinton’s favorability has declined since she left the State Department, as Americans have begun to see her again as a p**********l candidate rather than in the less political role as the nation’s top diplomat. When she left the agency, about two-thirds of Americans polled had a favorable view of her, a number that has dropped steadily as partisanship has taken its toll.
Last June, when Clinton released her book “Hard Choices,” 54% of Americans in a Gallup survey had a favorable view. Comparing that number with the latest figure indicates that the email controversy had not had a significant impact on the public’s perception of Clinton when the new poll was taken.
Among the Republican hopefuls, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were the best-known, with about two-thirds of respondents holding opinions on them.
But in Bush’s case, that opinion was closely divided
— 35% favorable and 33% unfavorable. Christie stood in a worse position, with negative perceptions outweighing the positive, 34% to 31%.
Among the potential contenders for the Republican nomination, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida had the highest net favorability, with 26% holding a positive view and 21% a negative one, the poll found. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also had a net favorable rating, but was somewhat less known, with 20% favorable and 18% unfavorable.
The least popular Republican candidates overall were former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and the two Texans considering running — former Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Ted Cruz. For Santorum, negative views outnumbered positives, 27% to 20%; for Perry it was 32% to 25%, and for Cruz, 28% to 22%.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who some have hoped will challenge Clinton, had a net positive rating, but was far less known than Clinton. The poll showed 22% viewing her favorably and 19% unfavorably. Warren has repeatedly said she is not running and has taken no steps toward starting a campaign.
The Gallup survey questioned 1,522 U.S. adults by land lines and cellphones. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. david.lauter@latimes.com   Twitter: @DavidLauter

BY DAVID LAUTER
WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton is not only the best-known but also the most favorably viewed of the potential p**********l candidates from either of the two major parties, according to a new Gallup poll.
The poll was conducted Monday through Wednesday, mostly after the news broke about Clinton’s use of a private email account while she was secretary of State, but before the news conference last week in which she addressed the issue.
Roughly 9 in 10 Americans said they knew enough about Clinton to have an opinion, and the poll released Thursday found that 50% viewed her favorably, while 39% had a negative impression. On both counts, that put her in better position than any of the potential Republican candidates at this early stage of the p**********l race.
But Clinton’s favorability has declined since she left the State Department, as Americans have begun to see her again as a p**********l candidate rather than in the less political role as the nation’s top diplomat. When she left the agency, about two-thirds of Americans polled had a favorable view of her, a number that has dropped steadily as partisanship has taken its toll.
Last June, when Clinton released her book “Hard Choices,” 54% of Americans in a Gallup survey had a favorable view. Comparing that number with the latest figure indicates that the email controversy had not had a significant impact on the public’s perception of Clinton when the new poll was taken.
Among the Republican hopefuls, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were the best-known, with about two-thirds of respondents holding opinions on them.
But in Bush’s case, that opinion was closely divided
— 35% favorable and 33% unfavorable. Christie stood in a worse position, with negative perceptions outweighing the positive, 34% to 31%.
Among the potential contenders for the Republican nomination, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida had the highest net favorability, with 26% holding a positive view and 21% a negative one, the poll found. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also had a net favorable rating, but was somewhat less known, with 20% favorable and 18% unfavorable.
The least popular Republican candidates overall were former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and the two Texans considering running — former Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Ted Cruz. For Santorum, negative views outnumbered positives, 27% to 20%; for Perry it was 32% to 25%, and for Cruz, 28% to 22%.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who some have hoped will challenge Clinton, had a net positive rating, but was far less known than Clinton. The poll showed 22% viewing her favorably and 19% unfavorably. Warren has repeatedly said she is not running and has taken no steps toward starting a campaign.
The Gallup survey questioned 1,522 U.S. adults by land lines and cellphones. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. david.lauter@latimes.com   Twitter: @DavidLauter

I have never been taught to h**e America, and I never will h**e America. If you think I am not aware of genuine threats that warrant military action, then you assume I'm a complete i***t, so maybe you didn't catch the vague note of sarcasm in my previous post. That aside, the issue here is how to accomplish assuring Iran never has nuclear-weapon capability, without triggering more war. Or is more war worth it in this instance? I haven't gotten a comprehensive answer to this yet. Mostly it's "k**l them before they k**l us". Do you agree that this is the only solution where Iran is concerned?

So, as we warned earlier this week, the international-law game it is. It is no secret that Barack Obama does not have much use for the United States Constitution. It is a governing plan for a free, self-determining people. Hence, it is littered with roadblocks against schemes to rule the people against their will. When it comes to our imperious president’s scheme to enable our enemy, Iran, to become a nuclear-weapons power — a scheme that falls somewhere between delusional and despicable, depending on your sense of Obama’s good faith — the salient barrier is that only Congress can make real law. Most lawmakers think it would be a catastrophe to forge a clear path to the world’s most destructive weapons for the world’s worst regime — a regime that brays “Death to America” as its motto; that has k**led thousands of Americans since 1979; that remains the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism; that pledges to wipe our ally Israel off the map; and that just three weeks ago, in the midst of negotiations with Obama, conducted a drill in which its armed forces fired ballistic missiles at a replica U.S. aircraft carrier. This week, 47 perspicuous Republican senators suspected that the subject of congressional power just might have gotten short shrift in Team Obama’s negotiations with the mullahs. So they penned a letter on the subject to the regime in Tehran. The effort was led by Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who, after Harvard Law School, passed up community organizing for the life of a Bronze Star–awarded combat commander. As one might imagine, Cotton and Obama don’t see this Iran thing quite the same way. There followed, as night does day, risible howls from top Democrats and their media that these 47 patriots were “t*****rs” for undermining the president’s empowerment of our enemies. Evidently, writing the letter was not as noble as, say, Ted Kennedy’s canoodling with the Soviets, Nancy Pelosi’s dalliance with Assad, the Democratic party’s Bush-deranged jihad against the war in Iraq, or Senator Barack Obama’s own back-channel outreach to Iran during the 2008 campaign. Gone, like a deleted e-mail, were the good old days when dissent was patriotic. Yet, as John Yoo observes, the Cotton letter was more akin to mailing Ayatollah Khamenei a copy of the Constitution. The senators explained that our Constitution requires congressional assent for international agreements to be legally binding. Thus, any “executive agreement” on nukes that they manage to strike with the appeaser-in-chief is unenforceable and likely to be revoked when he leaves office in 22 months. For Obama and other global-governance grandees, this is quaint thinking, elevating outmoded notions like national interest over “sustainable” international “stability” — like the way Hitler stabilized the Sudetenland. These “international community” dev**ees see the Tea Party as the rogue and the mullahs as rational actors. So, you see, lasting peace — like they have, for example, in Ukraine — is achieved when the world’s sole superpower exhibits endless restraint and forfeits some sovereignty to the United Nations Security Council, where the enlightened altruists from Moscow, Beijing, and Brussels will figure out what’s best for Senator Cotton’s constituents in Arkansas. This will set a luminous example of refinement that Iran will find irresistible when it grows up ten years from now — the time when Obama, who came to office promising the mullahs would not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons, would have Iran stamped with the international community seal of approval as a nuclear-weapons state. Down here on Planet Earth, though, most Americans think this is a bad idea. That, along with an injection of grit from the Arkansas freshman, emboldened the normally supine Senate GOP caucus to read Tehran in on the constitutional fact that the president is powerless to bind the United States unless the people’s representatives cement the arrangement. Obama, naturally, reacted with his trusty weapon against opposition, demagoguery: hilariously suggesting that while the Alinskyite-in-chief had our country’s best interests at heart, the American war hero and his 46 allies were in league with Iran’s “hardliners.” (Yes, having found Muslim Brotherhood secularists, al-Qaeda moderates, and Hezbollah moderates, rest assured that Obama is courting only the evolved ayatollahs.) When that went about as you’d expect, the administration shifted to a strategy with which it is equally comfortable, lying. Obama’s minions claimed that, of course, the president understands that any agreement he makes with Iran would merely be his “political commitment,” not “legally binding” on the nation. It’s just that Obama figures it would be nice to have the Security Council “endorse” the deal in a resolution because, well, that would “encourage its full implementation.” Uh-huh. Inconveniently, the administration’s negotiating counterpart is the chattiest of academics, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Afflicted by the Western-educated Islamist’s incorrigible need to prove he’s the smartest kid in the class — especially a class full of American politicians — Zarif let the cat out of the bag. The senators, he smarmed, “may not fully understand . . . international law.” According to Zarif, the deal under negotiation “will not be a bilateral agreement between Iran and the U.S., but rather one that will be concluded with the participation of five other countries, including all permanent members of the Security Council, and will also be endorsed by a Security Council resolution.” He hoped it would “enrich the knowledge” of the 47 senators to learn that “according to international law, Congress may not modify the terms of the agreement.” To do so would be “a material breach of U.S. obligations,” rendering America a global outlaw. This, mind you, from the lead representative of a terrorist regime that is currently, and brazenly, in violation of Security Council resolutions that prohibit its enrichment of uranium. Clearly, Obama and the mullahs figure they can run the following stunt: We do not need another treaty approved by Congress because the United States has already ratified the U.N. charter and thus agreed to honor Security Council resolutions. We do not need new statutes because the Congress, in enacting Iran-sanctions legislation, explicitly gave the president the power to waive those sanctions. All we need is to have the Security Council issue a resolution that codifies Congress’s existing sanctions laws with Obama’s waiver. Other countries involved in the negotiations — including Germany, Russia, and China, which have increasingly lucrative trade with Iran — will then very publicly rely on the completed deal. The U.N. and its army of t***snational-progressive bureaucrats and lawyers will deduce from this reliance a level of global consensus that incorporates the agreement into the hocus-pocus corpus of customary law. Maybe they’ll even get Justice Ginsburg to cite it glowingly in a Supreme Court ruling. Voila, we have a binding agreement — without any congressional input — that the United States is powerless to alter under international law. Well, it makes for good theater . . . because that is what international law is. It is a game more of lawyers than of thrones. In essence, it is politics masquerading as a system governed by rules rather than power, as if h*****g a sign that says “law” on that system makes it so. At most, international law creates understandings between and among states. Those understandings, however, are only relevant as diplomatic debating points. When, in defiance of international law, Obama decides to o*******w the Qaddafi regime, Clinton decides to bomb Kosovo, or the ayatollahs decide to enrich uranium, the debating points end up not counting for much. Even when international understandings are validly created by treaty (which requires approval by two-thirds of the Senate), they are not “self-executing,” as the legal lexicon puts it — meaning they are not judicially enforceable and carry no domestic weight. Whether bilateral or multilateral, treaties do not supersede existing federal law unless implemented by new congressional statutes. And they are powerless to amend the Constitution. The Supreme Court reaffirmed these principles in its 2008 Medellin decision (a case I described here, leading to a ruling Ed Whelan outlined here). The justices held that the president cannot usurp the constitutional authority of other government components under the guise of his power to conduct foreign affairs. Moreover, even a properly ratified treaty can be converted into domestic law only by congressional lawmaking, not by unilateral p**********l action. Obama, therefore, has no power to impose an international agreement by fiat — he has to come to Congress. He can make wh**ever deal he wants to make with Iran, but the Constitution still gives Congress exclusive authority over foreign commerce. Lawmakers can enact sanctions legislation that does not permit a p**********l waiver. Obama would not sign it, but the next president will — especially if the Republicans raise it into a major 2016 campaign issue. Will the Security Council howl? Sure . . . but so what? It has been said that Senator Cotton should have CC’d the Obama administration on his letter since it, too, seems unfamiliar with the Constitution’s division of authority. A less useless exercise might have been to CC the five other countries involved in the talks (the remaining Security Council members, plus Germany). Even better, as I argued earlier this week, would be a sense-of-the-Senate resolution: Any nation that relies on an executive agreement that is not approved by the United States Congress under the procedures outlined in the Constitution does so at its peril because this agreement is likely to lapse as early as January 20, 2017. International law is a game that two can play, and there is no point in allowing Germany, Russia, and China to pretend that they relied in good faith on Obama’s word being America’s word. It is otherworldly to find an American administration conspiring against the Constitution and the Congress in cahoots with a terror-sponsoring enemy regime, with which we do not even have formal diplomatic relations, in order to pave the enemy’s way to nuclear weapons, of all things. Nevertheless, Republicans and all Americans who want to preserve our constitutional order, must stop telling themselves that we have hit a bottom beneath which Obama will not go. This week, 47 senators seemed ready, finally, to fight back. It’s a start. — Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment

Typical right wing BS.
The UN Security Council passed a number of resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran, following the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors regarding Iran's non-compliance with its safeguards agreement and the Board's finding that Iran's nuclear activities raised questions within the competency of the Security Council. Sanctions were first imposed when Iran rejected the Security Council's demand that Iran suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities. Sanctions will be lifted when Iran meets those demands and fulfills the requirements of the IAEA Board of Governors.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1696 – passed on 31 July 2006. Demanded that Iran suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities and threatened sanctions.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1737 – passed on 23 December 2006 in response to the proliferation risks presented by the Iranian nuclear program and, in this context, by Iran's continuing failure to meet the requirements of the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors and to comply with the provisions of Security Council resolution 1696 (2006).[7] Made mandatory for Iran to suspend enrichment-related and reprocessing activities and cooperate with the IAEA, imposed sanctions banning the supply of nuclear-related materials and technology, and froze the assets of key individuals and companies related to the program.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747 – passed on 24 March 2007. Imposed an arms embargo and expanded the freeze on Iranian assets.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1803 – passed on 3 March 2008. Extended the asset freezes and called upon states to monitor the activities of Iranian banks, inspect Iranian ships and aircraft, and to monitor the movement of individuals involved with the program through their territory.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1835 – Passed in 2008.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1929 – passed on 9 June 2010. Banned Iran from participating in any activities related to ballistic missiles, tightened the arms embargo, travel bans on individuals involved with the program, froze the funds and assets of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, and recommended that states inspect Iranian cargo, prohibit the servicing of Iranian vessels involved in prohibited activities, prevent the provision of financial services used for sensitive nuclear activities, closely watch Iranian individuals and entities when dealing with them, prohibit the opening of Iranian banks on their territory and prevent Iranian banks from entering into relationship with their banks if it might contribute to the nuclear program, and prevent financial institutions operating in their territory from opening offices and accounts in Iran.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1984 – passed on 9 June 2011. This resolution extended the mandate of the panel of experts that supports the Iran Sanctions Committee for one year.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 2049 – passed on 7 June 2012. Renewed the mandate of the Iran Sanctions Committee’s Panel of Experts for 13 months.

Yes of course workers should have an opportunity to through numbers be allowed to unit in their desire for better pay, benefits etc. But as in what the post is pointing out, you shouldn't be forced to join a union if your in one of the trades or career choices that have promoted them.

A year ago MN created a childcare worker Union. It doesn't actually effect childcare facilities just private in home small business owners. These small business owners had a choice join the Union or be excluded from any and all government subsidy programs.

This is just plain and simply wrong.

I don't know about the rest of you but I see nonunion companies like Honda doing great, paying and treating their employees fairly. They have never had to go begging the governement for anything.

And then you have west coast dock workers making over $125k a year and whining about healthcare taxes.

But non of this matters because it will never be fixed because corporate America and the Federal government are one and the same. We need to stop depending on them for our jobs and our children's futures. We must enact policies that promote and strongly as possible small businesses. Assisting as many Americans as we can to start rebuilding america from the ground up. Helping us help ourselves in creating and yes building it ourselves once more.

Unless of course you want to be controlled by greedy corporations, government beurocrats or mob Union bosses.

I know what the Winter Solstice is, dude. I have studied astronomy for many years.

The Romans worshipped pagan gods and many of those gods were represented by planets, stars, the Zodiac, and celestial events. The Romans chose the Winter Solstice as the time to celebrate their pagan god, Saturn.

I did not say "the Drunken Romans was the cause of this birthplace." Obviously, you have a problem with reading comprehension, so let me see if I can explain this in a way that any simpleton might understand.

On the Winter Solstice, the Romans began celebrating Saturnalia. They had a big party, wine, women, and song. They got drunker than sailors and screwed everything that moved. (I'll leave out the details on why they chose the shortest day of the year to do this.)

The Christians saw that this time of drunkenness and debauchery might be an opportunity to celebrate the BIRTH OF CHRIST without getting their asses kicked all the time. So, they moved the Christmas celebration to coincide with Saturnalia.

That you know "a HELL of a lot about the Bible", is correct. You have obviously rejected the t***h.

The reason Christmas is traditionally held on December 25th, is that the Romans celebrated the Winter Solstice to honor their pagan god, Saturn. They called it Saturnalia and it began on the Solstice and went on for two weeks. The Christians themselves moved their celebration of the birth of Christ to a day when the Romans were completely inebriated and wallowing in their orgies. This allowed the Christians to celebrate Christmas relatively peacefully without the harassment, ridicule, and even persecutions that came upon them when they celebrated a Christian Holy Day.