Stop this boomlet before it starts.

Jeb Bush during the first round of the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament in Pebble Beach, Calif., this February.

Michael Fiala / Reuters

I'm not of the generation of political reporters who have long known Jeb Bush, and who say on the Sunday shows that he's a strong candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

I've actually met him only once, in a gorgeous breakfast room atop Manhattan's Bloomberg Tower, in front of a sweeping view of the East River. The breakfast was part of a series with a distinctly Bloombergian vibe: editors rather than reporters, healthy snacks, elite centrism. I asked Jeb there about the Republican Party, whose mantle he's now apparently considering seeking. He didn't need much prodding, either, to go after his fellow Republicans or to blunder into making news.

"Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad — they would have a hard time if you define the Republican Party — and I don't — as having an orthodoxy that doesn't allow for disagreement, doesn't allow for finding some common ground," Bush said, adding that he views the hyper-partisan moment as "temporary."

"Back to my dad's time and Ronald Reagan's time — they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support," he said. Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did."

The notion that Jeb Bush is going to be the Republican presidential nominee is a fantasy nourished by the people who used to run the Republican Party. Bush has been out of a game that changed radically during the 12 years(!) since he last ran for office. He missed the transformation of his brother from Republican savior to squish; the rise of the tea party; the molding of his peer Mitt Romney into a movement conservative; and the ascendancy of a new generation of politicians — Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, among them — who have been fully shaped by and trained in that new dynamic. Those men occasionally, carefully, respectfully break with the movement. Scorning today's Republican Party is, by contrast, the core of Jeb's political identity.

In that, Jeb is like ex-Republican Mike Bloomberg and like the failed GOP apostate Jon Huntsman: He's deeply committed to centrist causes — federalized education, legal status for undocumented immigrants — that alienate key Republican groups; and he's vaguely willing to go along with vestigial conservative issues that Republicans don't care as much about, like standing up for Wall Street (Jeb was on a Lehman Brothers advisory board before that bank's collapse, and now sits on a Barclay's board) and opposing marriage equality, a stance he's sought to downplay by focusing on states' rights.

Bush was in the Bloomberg Tower for a board meeting of the personal foundation of the former New York mayor, whose aggressive campaigns for gun control make him, after President Obama, perhaps the most hated figure among pro-gun Republicans. The foundation's focus includes two particularly bitter pills for Republicans: shutting down coal-fired power plants and campaigning globally for the kinds of new taxes on junk food whose introduction in New York City infuriated the right.

Jeb would have to defend his association with Bloomberg in a campaign, though his defenders will cry that it's a kind of guilt by association. (Fairness isn't the core value of political campaigns.) Fairer is to judge him on two issues to which he's deeply committed, education and immigration.

On the former, Jeb is one of the nation's leading champions of Common Core standards, a move toward nationalizing America's patchwork education; his foundation recently launched an ad campaign promoting them. The move is driven by a broad consensus of labor and business groups, as well as philanthropists like Bill Gates, but it has proven intensely unpopular with a Republican base generally suspicious of federal control and specifically focused on local autonomy in education.

"I guess I've been out of office for a while," Bush told Fox News this week. "So the idea that something I support that people are opposed to, it means that I have to stop supporting it if there's not any reason based on fact to do that? I just — maybe it's stubbornness, but I just don't seem compelled to run for cover when I think this is the right thing to do for our country."

Then there is immigration. As has been true since before his brother was president, there's an elite consensus behind "comprehensive immigration reform" that would provide legal status and a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. Bush is a particularly impassioned spokesman for this consensus.

"Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans, over the last 20 years," Jeb said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in June 2013. "Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity."

This Sunday, he went further in describing the motives of some undocumented immigrants in deeply positive terms.

"Yes, they broke the law, but it's not a felony," Jeb said. "It's an act of love. It's an act of commitment to your family."

The problem: The only people absent from this consensus are the leaders of his own party. House Republicans have for a decade bottled up "amnesty."

Indeed, Bush's devout casting of the immigration debate as a matter of core human values, not a legitimate policy dispute, is exactly what doomed Rick Perry in 2012: The Texas governor told Republicans who disagreed with him on immigration, "I don't think you have a heart."

This isn't the fruit of some opposition research dossier, which would dig deep into his personal and professional lives since he left the spotlight. This is an hour or two of research by our politics intern, Gideon Resnick, on the causes that are on top of the former governor's agenda. And this is difficult to square with today's Republican Party.

And then there's execution. Jeb's tortured musings about his missed opportunity in 2012 were a remarkable exercise in political indiscipline.

"This was probably my time," Bush told CBS This Morning in June 2012. "There's a window of opportunity, in life, and for all sorts of reasons."

"Although I don't know, given what I believe and how I believe it, I'm not sure I would have been successful as a candidate, either. These are different times than just six years ago, when I last ran, or even longer than that," he said.

Jeb's visit to New York in 2012 was a relatively rare outing to the non-Sunday show press, and as the quote suggests, he found himself making news that he didn't intend to make, losing control of his image to the speedy, Twitter-driven political conversation before we'd finished our fresh-squeezed orange juice. Politicians are at their root in the media business — they're communicators, distributing words, videos, images, and ideas — and it was painfully clear as he spoke that Jeb (like Bill Clinton) was a man of languorous 1990s media cycles who had little sense of the fragmented new one.

This is not to say Jeb doesn't have assets. The Bush name is no longer toxic; indeed, his brother is now remembered fondly by most Republicans. He was a successful governor of a big key state, with a reputation for moderation, even if it's been a while. And he can surely raise money. When I tweeted some skepticism about Jeb on Monday morning, two progressive journalists, Chris Hayes and Judd Legum, immediately responded with the conventional wisdom: Republicans "tend to go with moderates and known quantities," as Legum said.

So that's the best case: Mitt Romney. The worst case? Mitt with a dollop of Fred Thompson, the halfhearted victim of a halfhearted draft.

“I get frustrated. But someone has to do this job,” Cummings said.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — In the last month, House Democrats have twice tried to force a vote condemning the behavior of Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa.

The day after Issa cut off Rep. Elijah Cummings' microphone, he watched quietly, face expressionless, as Rep. Marcia Fudge read the resolution while House Democrats stood around her.

It was only the latest episode in the enduring, turbulent feud between the two leaders atop the House Oversight Committee. Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS, Obamacare — Oversight's battles have been ongoing.

The basic charges remain the same: Issa says Cummings is an obstructionist who defends the White House at all costs. Issa's chairmanship and investigations have infuriated Democrats since practically the moment he took the gavel. They decry Issa's investigations s hyper-partisan, whose tendency to overreach has even rankled fellow Republicans.

But along the way, the volatile committee has made Cummings into one of the most important ranking members for the minority .

The deeply intense Cummings says he took on the role of Issa antagonist somewhat begrudgingly. To hear Cummings tell it, the spotlight he now finds himself in was never something he purposefully sought.

"I didn't ask for this, they asked me," he said in a sit-down interview with BuzzFeed. "I saw it as an opportunity to make sure that fairness was brought to the process and that we held government to a higher standard."

Indeed, in 2010, both the White House and the Democratic leadership encouraged Cummings run for the ranking member slot — over former Rep. Ed Towns who had seniority on the committee.

"I told Issa if he really listened to me and if he really was about what he said when he reads that preamble every time, we're probably on the same page on most things," Cummings said. "For me, government working right is very important."

It was around then that the battles between Issa and Cummings started. When announcing that he'd run for the spot, Cummings said in a statement that Democrats would "take every opportunity to defend against partisan attacks and the dismantling of policies that ensure security for hardworking Americans," a statement Issa and his staff repeatedly point to as evidence that Cummings had only ever intended to be an obstructionist on the committee.

"He has no genuine interest in working, on a bipartisan basis, to expose the full truth," Issa said last June after Cummings said that the investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups was "solved." (Cummings later clarified his remarks, telling Politico it was the "witch hunt" that needed to end.)

But it's the ability to counter Issa at every turn that has elevated Cummings stature among his Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill. The oversight committee hasn't been able to produce a whole lot in the way of oversight or reform, and they blame each other for that. But to Democrats, Cummings is doing exactly what he is supposed to be doing.

"It was quite clear he had the skill set and the intestinal fortitude to go the battlements when necessary. I don't think anyone had any illusions about what it was going to be like," said oversight member Rep. Gerry Connolly of Democrats urging Cummings to run. "I think it's worse than people thought but there were no illusions about what we were facing."

"Congressman Cummings is a respected leader who is admired for his courage, commitment to the truth, and his compassion for all Americans," Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in at statement to BuzzFeed. " "Every day, he works to ensure that government always works for the American people, and that dedication has made him an invaluable asset to our nation. House Democrats are proud of the work Elijah has done as Ranking Member, and as a native Baltimorean, I take special pride in his success."

This week, the committee will move forward with a vote to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt for refusing to answer questions and repeatedly pleading the fifth. Issa proclaimed she had waived her Fifth Amendment rights by providing an opening statement at a hearing a few months ago. But Lerner and the IRS investigation became somewhat of a background story to the feud between Issa and Cummings when the mic-cutting incident dominated headlines that week.

That's par for the course on a normal week when press releases and accusations fly between the two sides and it's not hard to see the deep distrust the two have for each other.

Before each hearing, Cummings said he prays. "I ask God to guard my tongue, my heart and my mind. I just believe in that."

"It allows me to go a place that's very, very serene," Cummings said.

But when Issa abruptly adjourned a hearing with Lerner without allowing Democrats to make statements or ask questions arguing the hearing was simply a continuation of one that had been put on pause — Cummings serenity was put to the test. After a bit of back and forth, Issa cut off the mics and signaled his staff to do so by drawing his hand across is neck.

And that's when Cummings was no longer serene.

"If you will sit down and allow me to ask a question—I am a member of the Congress of the United States of America," Cummings told him, nearly yelling. "I am tired of this."

"We have members over here," Cummings said, gesturing at Democrats. "Each of whom represents 700,000 people. You cannot just have a one-sided investigation. There is absolutely something wrong with that. It is absolutely un-American."

Issa apologized to Cummings but did say on Fox News that the ranking member had thrown a "hissy fit" and Issa felt he'd followed the rules of the House.

For his part on the episode, Cummings was philosophical. "As you get older you come to a point where you face your own mortality and you begin to look at time as very precious," Cummings said. "And that's how I view my time when I sit in a four hour hearing or 20-minute hearing where I'm not allowed to speak."

Democrats seized the issue, producing the resolutions for the floor votes to condemn Issa.

"In a lot of ways, that incident elevated Elijah's stature and I think it significantly diminished the chairman's," Connelly said. "I can't tell you how often out and about, with family friends, even strangers talk about that."

It's not all bitterness on Oversight: Both Cummings and a spokesman for the committee pointed to handful of issues where the chairman and ranking member have worked together. But even those statements were couched.

"Although Ranking Member Cummings has never lived up to his rhetoric of supporting fact-based oversight," spokesman Frederick Hill said in a statement to BuzzFeed. "Chairman Issa has appreciated his willingness to put those differences aside and work towards committee consensus on key common sense legislative initiatives including spending data transparency, contracting reform, and strengthening whistleblower protections."

Cummings also pointed to many of those same instances where he and Issa have been able to work together. He said hoped there would be areas where they'd be able to work together again — and that his frustrations with the committee were just that.

"When I look at the energy and time we spend in hearings and to think of what comes out, is not very much…But I don't get angry," Cummings said. "I get frustrated. But someone has to do this job… We do not know how long we will be there, but we are called to be in that moment in that job. I believe this is a moment, for whatever reason, for me to be right here."

"Is it frustrating? Sure. But what isn't frustrating?"

Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King was speaking at a Breitbart National Security Action Summit in March where said the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer “didn’t do nearly as much damage as Snowden did.” Dahmer raped, murdered, and ate 17 people over the course of more than a decade in the late 1970s and 1980s.

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While commenting on David Oritz’s stealth selfie with Obama for Samsung , White House spokesperson Jay Carney joked that that the president might use executive powers to ban selfies for everyone.

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“Nothing Obama or the EU can say or do will change that now.”

The Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas — Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday the Russian annexation of Crimea was a "foregone conclusion" and Russia has always considered the region its territory.

"I don't think there is any way of keeping Putin from going into Crimea," Carter said. "Russia has always considered Crimea to be part of Russia, from when I was president and Lyndon Johnson too."

"I think three-fourths of Crimean people wanted to be part of Russia, so that was a foregone conclusion," he went on to say. "Nothing Obama or the EU can say or do will change that now. We have to stop Putin now. He can't be permitted to take military action in eastern Crimea."

Carter is speaking and signing books at the Civil Rights Summit at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Texas.

Former president knocks Obama for not addressing the problem earlier.

Benny Johnson / BuzzFeed

AUSTIN, Texas — President Jimmy Carter conceded Tuesday there was probably gender pay discrimination during his administration, but also said President Obama could be doing more to address disparities in income between men and women.

Carter admitted that gender pay discrimination "probably did exist" in his administration, but said he does not have the exact statistics.

"I would guess that those salary discriminations and discrepancies where there when I was [president]," Carter said, going on to say he championed a historic number of female appointments while in office.

The former president suggested that the current administration could have done more, and more quickly, on gender inequality.

"They have been in office for five years now," Carter said. "They could have started working on this the first week [Obama] was in office."

President Obama signed two executive actions Tuesday the administration says are intended to address income disparities between men and women who work as federal contractors. One bars contractors from retaliating against conversations between employees about salaries; the other orders new data collection on pay.

Carter, who has just released a book on womens' challenges globally, was speaking at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin.

The mobile home park Republican Terri Lynn Land talks of in ads is now vacant. One hundred and seventy families were forced to move out to make way for commercial development.

She previously was the secretary of state of Michigan and a member of the Republican National Committee.

Her real estate assets are worth tens of millions of dollars, according to financial disclosure reports. The money is mostly in apartment complexes in western Michigan. They are worth at least $34 million.

"So he built a little motel," Land said at a campaign stop, speaking about her grandfather, an immigrant. "Then he started a trailer park and that is where I grew up. My grandmother did the books and she was a tough taskmaster. I actually mowed lawns and was changing sheets in the motel for my grandma. I learned about hard work and I learned how business in a family can come together."

"She lived at the trailer park, working alongside her family mowing lawns and changing sheets at the motel," says a Land ad.

Her campaign website also cites the experience: "As both the business and Terri grew, Terri worked alongside her family at the motel, cleaning rooms, changing the beds, and working various jobs around the property."

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“We must become as radical as we are creative,” California Assemblyman Tim Donnelly said, according to the recording of a 2006 speech obtained by BuzzFeed. “We must be as determined as those who wish to take over our state and take over our country.”

Tim Donnelly, Republican candidate for governor.

Stephen Lam / Reuters

LOS ANGELES — BuzzFeed obtained a recording Tuesday of Tim Donnelly, Republican candidate for California governor, comparing illegal immigration and securing the border to war in a 2006 speech.

"We are on the brink of a battle," Donnelly said during the speech. "We must become as radical as we are creative. We must be as determined as those who wish to take over our state and take over our country," he said.

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday on the speech, which Donnelly gave to about 200 people at a Save Our Nation event on March 25, 2006.

He said there was "a growing insurgency, right here in Los Angeles" and other cities, and compared it to insurgencies in cities like "Baghdad, Samarra, and Tikrit." He also asked those whom he was speaking to if they would "rise up" and take the place of his ancestor Jim Bowie, who was said to have killed a dozen Mexican soldiers at the Alamo.

"I am a decedent of Jim Bowie, who died at the Alamo," Donnelly said. "It is rumored that he took a dozen Mexican soldiers to their deaths before they finally killed him. How many of you will rise up and take his place on that wall?"

Donnelly used or referenced the phrase "I have a dream" several times in the speech, and wondered what percentage of people in the United States illegally were criminals were rapists, murderers, child molesters, or terrorists.

"In the name of diversity, we are bringing millions of people into our country who want nothing to do with diversity," he said. "Their creed is for anyone in the Hispanic race: everything. For anyone outside it, nada. Nothing."

Donnelly's campaign did not immediately respond to comment, but he told Los Angles Times reporter Chris Megerian Tuesday that though he wasn't backing away from his comparisons to war, he might word what he said differently today.

"Although I might say some things differently," he said, "I am not backing away from the fact that we are in a war ... I don't know what you call it when drug cartels are operating in all of our national forests, growing marijuana."

Donnelly's Republican challenger, Neel Kashkari, called the comments "outrageous and divisive" in a statement.

"Once again Assemblyman Donnelly's comments are outrageous and divisive," he said. "This is not who we are as Republicans and is not who we are as Californians. We need positive leadership that unites us to tackle the serious challenges that California families face."

Listen to the 2006 speech:

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The LBJ Library is holding a summit this week celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

The opening video at the summit — which will include speeches by Presidents Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama — features this historic photo of lunch counter protests:

Chris Geidner/BuzzFeed

But outside the auditorium, attendees are warned that "any disruption" could lead to "criminal charges."

Chris Geidner/BuzzFeed

Thailand was the top location for likes on Leslie Gooch’s page. When asked about it, her campaign denies it, and accuses her primary opponent of doing it.

Her Facebook page has 824 likes.

Via Facebook: lesligoochforcongress

The majority of her Facebook likes come from Bangkok, Thailand and the number saw a dramatic spike in the last few weeks.

Via Facebook: lesligoochforcongress

The number goes up and down depending on when you refresh the page. On some refreshes, the number goes well below 800.

Via Facebook: lesligoochforcongress

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The accusation comes in an NLRB ruling announced Tuesday.

WASHINGTON — The National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that it will consolidate several labor complaints against a major cell phone service provider over the past several years.

The ruling will allow for a joint decision from the NLRB on T-Mobile and MetroPCS's alleged anti-union practices nationwide. There will be several months of hearings before a final ruling is brought down.

In the ruling, the NLRB outlined some of the practices the Communications Workers of America say are illegal.

The allegations include an "overly broad and discriminatory" employee handbook that bans employees from organizing and stresses multiple times the importance of keeping the contents of the handbook, as well as other various business activities, secret.

It further says certain managers interrogated employees about their union memberships and activities.

A spokesman for T-Mobile refused to comments on the specifics of the ruling, but issued a general statement to Buzzfeed.

"Because this is pending right now, we can't comment on specific accusations," T-Mobile spokeswoman Anne Marshall said. "T-Mobile looks forward to presenting all the evidence before an administrative law judge."

One manager in Albuquerque, N.M. is accused of telling employees they could not "high-five" if they participated in any sort of activity related to a union.

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Jack Donaghy lashes out again — this time at Garrett Jackson, a former aide to Mitt Romney. Alec Baldwin said, “You’re on your knees in that photo. What’s up with that Garrett?”

Alec Baldwin, who lost his MSNBC show after allegedly using an anti-gay slur, is in the midst of an attempt to rehabilitate his image around LGBT issues. He's set to lead a discussion April 27 with openly gay former Congressman Barney Frank about a new documentary, Compared to What: The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank, at the Tribeca Film Festival.

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Via Twitter: @dgjackson

Inside the social network’s quest to reach voters in the biggest election ever.

Punit Paranjpe/Raveendran/AFP

India's general election this year will be the largest democratic election that has ever been conducted in the world — and also one of Facebook's most ambitious pushes into electoral politics.

As Indians head to the polls over the next month to elect a new ruling party and prime minister, Facebook has launched a multifaceted campaign in the country, exploring what people want from Facebook on a political level and introducing new features, as likes have surged for candidates.

The scale of the elections, estimated to cost $600 million, is staggering. Ballots will be cast at 930,000 polling booths and 1.4 million electronic voting machines, with 11 million people — both civilians and government officials — helping facilitate. More than 100 million Indians are newly eligible to vote, bringing the total Indian electorate up to 815 million people.

Half of India's total population is younger than 24, and about 150 million people in India's total electoral pool are first-time voters. According to some estimates, more than 40% of India's eligible voters are between 18 and 35 years old. Surveys have found that 70% of all Indian students own smartphones. This is all to say: For the first time in Indian history, there is a significant overlap between the urban, educated, tech-savvy India and the India that lines up to cast its vote.

"Our mission is to make the world more open and connected," Facebook's Public Policy Manager Katie Harbath told BuzzFeed in a phone interview. "Part of that is helping to connect citizens with the people who represent them in government. Elections are the first way that citizens have that opportunity to voice their opinions."

The scale of the Indian elections is also an enormous opportunity for Facebook, which recently announced its ambitions to reach 1 billion users in India. Already, India is the only country aside from the United States where Facebook's consumer base exceeds 100 million, and it's certainly the only country in the world where Facebook can hope to corral 1 billion new users.

"Of the 800+ million people eligible to vote in India, 170 million of them are on the Internet and well over half of Internet users in India are using Facebook," Facebook spokesperson Andrew Stone told BuzzFeed in an email. "In fact, you may have seen that just this morning we made the announcement about having reached 100 million active Facebook users in India."

Elections serve as an excellent recruiting tool for Facebook and similar initiatives have been deployed in other nations holding elections in recent years. This year, that includes Brazil, Indonesia, and Colombia, as well as the European parliament elections. Last year, Facebook launched similar initiatives in Germany and Australia, when those countries were hosting elections.

And Facebook, in turn, is emerging as an increasingly central medium for electoral politics, with both paid ads and widely shared content within its networks emerging as key ways for politicians to communicate with voters.

So far, the Facebook India campaign has been both exploratory but also assertive, gradually introducing new features into the feeds of users.

On March 26, a week and a half before voting first opened, Facebook India put out an open call to ask users how they were using Facebook in the elections.

In early March when the elections were first announced, Facebook India launched an election tracker that tracks mentions of the leading candidates and parties, ranking them from most mentioned to least. This is modeled after a similar app Facebook launched in the United States during the 2012 presidential elections.

Via Facebook: FacebookIndia

As of Wednesday, the top of the Facebook India homepage now features an "I'm a Voter" button, which will remain visible for the duration of the Indian elections. Clicking it allows users to share with all of their friends that they voted. The visibility of this button is contingent on voting eligibility; it is only visible to Facebook users over the age of 18, and only on days when voting is taking place in the region they are in.

The idea is to drive Indians to the polling stations. A UC San Diego study during the 2012 U.S. presidential elections found that social pressures, specifically on social networks and specifically from close connections, are a major influence on whether individuals vote or not. Although 4% of Facebook users who clicked the "I voted" button on Facebook admitted to not actually having voted, rates of voting were highest among those who had seen a message seeing that their friends had voted — particularly close friends.

In an election already historic for its scale, this Facebook initiative might — this is the hope — increase voter turnout by acting as a multiplier.

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Mexico says the crossing was accidental and followed a counter-narcotics operation.

Two Mexican soldiers crossed into U.S. territory not far from this Customs and Border Protection facility near Sasabe, Arizona.

John Stanton

EL PASO, Texas — Mexican officials have confirmed that two Mexican soldiers accidentally crossed into the United States following a January counter-narcotics operation along an isolated part of the U.S.-Mexico border.

In an April 1 letter to BuzzFeed, Ariel Moutsatsos, minister for press and public affairs with the Mexican Embassy in Washington, said, "We are now able to confirm that on the morning of [Jan. 26] there was an unintended border crossing by two members of the Mexican Army." The soldiers crossed into U.S. territory near Sasabe, Ariz.

The incident, first reported on BuzzFeed, came to light after Sen. Tom Coburn questioned why the Customs and Border Protection Administration had not conducted an investigation and raised concerns that the crossing could point to connections between the two soldiers and cartels operating in the area. Mexican officials have strenuously rejected those concerns.

Following "an exhaustive search" of records, Mexican officials said the crossing was simply an accident — which is not entirely uncommon in the desert region of the border.

According to the letter, the soldiers were "part of a counternarcotics operation which had taken place a few minutes prior on the Mexican side of the border. The two members of the Mexican army did not see any sign notifying them that they were crossing the border."

U.S. Border Patrol officials and local Mexican army officials discussed the incursion "and agreed that the incident was an isolated and unintended occurrence that was not cause for further investigation."

Moutsatsos again dismissed any concern that the crossing points to a cooperation between the Mexican military and drug runners, writing, "an unintended border crossing such as this one, is far from enough to even suggest or speculate that Mexican military elements are providing assistance to criminals."

Letter from the Mexican Embassy

Click here to view the document.

“We’re looking at each state and their labor laws,” the official said.

AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke

WASHINGTON — The union that is working to organize student athletes at Northwestern University is beginning to look at state laws to see how athletes at public colleges might be able to unionize as well.

The National Labor Relations Board only has jurisdiction over private businesses, which means its decision for Northwestern won't affect public universities. To organize those athletes, the labor law of each state would have to be revised.

"We're looking at each state and their labor laws," United Steelworkers Political Director Tim Waters said. "But it's a process, you know. We're very deliberate."

The United Steelworkers is working with the National Collegiate Players Association to help the players unionize.

Ever since an NLRB regional board ruled that Northwestern athletes should be able to unionize, Waters says he's been inundated with calls from athletes around the country who also want to organize. He said part of the reason the union is looking into understanding each state's law is so they can provide athletes with accurate information.

The process is in the very early stages, will take a long time to develop and may never pan out in some or all cases, but at least one state lawmaker has already started thinking about it.

After University of Connecticut basketball star Shabazz Napier said there are some nights he goes to bed "starving," Connecticut state Rep. Patricia Dillon said she'd be willing to propose legislation to allow players to unionize if she could.

Waters said Napier's allegations didn't surprise him.

"I think [Napier's] comments really probably shocked some people. It didn't shock us, we've heard that 1,000 times," Waters said. "I've talked to players that have absolutely no money. They maybe come from families that don't have money to give them ... I've had players tell me they move a stove out of the kitchen to put a cot in to go to sleep at night."

Waters wouldn't say which athletes had reached out to him. He also wouldn't comment on whether the players or the union have felt pressure from outside groups or the school in the lead up to Northwestern's election, which will take place April 25.

"I'm not gonna comment on that but I'm gonna leave that to you to figure out what you think would be the common sense answer to that," he said.

Northwestern and the NCAA have spoken out against unionization in the past, and on Wednesday Northwestern filed a request for review from the full NLRB in Washington. If the NLRB agrees to review the case, which is likely due to its high-profile and far-reaching implications, it could take months to decide.

Several experts predict the case may then go to federal court and could take years to resolve.

"I think eventually players are going to have the right to organize everywhere," Waters said. "I don't think that's today. But I think hopefully and pragmatically looking at the map and thinking about what's going on and the change that's coming to the NCAA, eventually one day all these athletes will have the right to organize."

In Arkansas, friends who met Clinton in the ’70s are tired of living the ’90s over and over again. The endless hunt for who Hillary Clinton really is. “Everything old is new again.”

Stephan Savoia / AP Photo

When Ann Henry opened her hardback copy of Living History — a memoir by her old friend, Hillary Rodham Clinton — a faded magazine clipping fell out. The page, ripped from a 2003 copy of Newsweek, bears the headline, "Say Goodbye to the Virago." Henry has kept it tucked inside the book's front flap for 11 years.

The column, written by Anna Quindlen, casts Clinton as the "damned if she does and damned if she doesn't" leading woman, pilloried by the press, "expected to be tough as nails and warm as toast." Quindlen, Henry thought, had nailed it.

"I actually looked up the definition of 'virago,'" she said during an interview at her home in Fayetteville, Ark. "Well, there are two: one is a strong woman who has a vision, but the other is a harridan screaming bitch."

Henry first met Clinton 40 years ago at a University of Arkansas reception for new law faculty at a Holiday Inn. Since that August day, Henry has watched with exasperation and resignation as Clinton, at the hands of reporters or right-wing critics, has been treated like the virago character again and again, she said.

In the Clintons' home state, Henry isn't alone. Friends bemoan what they describe as an unending fixation on the first family. No dispute, they say, is ever put to rest; no portrait, they say, is ever full enough, intimate enough, to give way to a satisfactory picture of the "real Hillary Clinton" the media has hunted, in books and magazines, articles and television interviews, for years.

During Clinton's first presidential bid, Henry was one of dozens asked to record videos testifying to the candidate's "softer side." The project — "The Hillary I Know" — captured a longstanding discord between the friends who have known Clinton for decades, and the people still trying to know her decades later.

The search for the next scandal, or for a more revealing glimpse of the woman who could, again, be the country's next president, is what Max Brantley calls "the eternal question." The Arkansas Times editor has covered the Clintons since 1974. "It's a continuation of the same," he said. "Everything old is new again."

"It never ends," said Henry.

The latest descent back into the 1990s came in February, when a cache of documents housed at the University of Arkansas sparked a familiar chain reaction of coverage, history, and confusion. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative site, published selections from the archives in what the Drudge Report teased as an explosive report on the Hillary "Sex Files."

The papers belonged to Diane Blair, a political science professor at the University who passed away in 2000. Blair was Clinton's best friend in Arkansas. The 109 boxes of documents, donated posthumously to the university by Blair's husband Jim, include her record of phone calls and conversations with Clinton, then first lady. The writings offered a glimpse into Clinton's disdain for Washington, her distrust of the media, and her reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal — but they offered little in the way of revelations.

Brantley, the Arkansas Times editor, said the notes provided were a rare "window" into Clinton's thoughts on the affair. "But did they finally catch the road-runner? Well, no." Still, after the Free Beacon report, the Blair papers became front-page news, and reporters from national outlets flew to Arkansas to leaf through the boxes themselves in the harshly lit Mullins Library basement.

The media stir rattled the network of Arkansan Clinton friends, who knew Blair, too. They talk about the proceedings of the 1990s — about Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, Whitewater and Travelgate — with a special kind of acuteness reserved for those who experienced the blow-ups at close range.

When David Brock, the former conservative reporter who once sought to upend the Clinton administration, returned to Little Rock last month to deliver a speech extolling Hillary, few were quick to forget the scandals he first helped ignite. "They're very much seared onto my brain," Bruce Lindsey, Bill Clinton's White House lawyer, told the Washington Post.

Friends at home are now wary of the next onslaught, delivered by conservatives like Sen. Rand Paul, who earlier this year invoked Bill Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, characterizing the relationship as "predatory behavior."

"I knew Diane Blair. She was a brilliant kind thoughtful woman who obviously seemed to be palpably supportive of the Clintons," said Don Ernst, who worked for Bill Clinton in the governor's office. "This is a matter of people looking for anything to conjure up the old arguments. It's another grasp at the same stuff."

More than a month after the initial uproar, the Blair papers were still a topic of speculation and dismay in Arkansas, and in Washington and New York. Had Diane intended to make public the 40 or so pages of detailed notes about Clinton? Had Jim, her widower, read the papers before giving them to the university? Bill Clinton himself placed a call to Jim Blair in February to find out.

Vic Nixon, the Methodist minister who married the Clintons in 1975, suggested that Clinton never suspected Blair's writings would be made available. "We can reserve judgment about whether or not that was appropriate," said Nixon. "But I would certainly think that Hillary would have been speaking to her as an intimate friend, without ever thinking that one day this would be available."

Reached by email, Jim Blair, 78, said he was "nonplussed" by the attention precipitated his late wife's documents. "The papers had been in the public domain since at least 2010 and I didn't see anything in them that hadn't been written about countless times," said Blair, a retired attorney, since remarried.

Blair also said he made "no attempt" to read the 109 file boxes of papers before donating them. "When I gave the papers to the university I was totally grief stricken and trying to fulfill one of Diane's dying wishes," he said. (He and Henry both suspect Diane kept such careful notes for a book project of some kind.)

After the Free Beacon printed excerpts from the documents online, Blair said he received the call from the former president, whom he considers a "close personal friend" and sees occasionally for dinner in New York.

"When the initial story broke on the Free Beacon or whatever it is, he called me asking if there was something new that the Clintons or their staff didn't know about," Blair said. "I told him no."

On Feb. 15, just a few days after Blair's name hit the headlines, the former president made a trip to Fayetteville for the anniversary celebration of the University of Arkansas' national basketball championship.

There, friends joined Clinton for a private reception. Blair, who attended, said he had a brief conversation with Clinton about the documents. Henry also approached Clinton and reassured him about the papers. "'There's not anything there that hasn't come out a million times,'" she recalled telling him.

Henry was a close friend of Blair's, too. The two shared weekly lunches. Their kids were in each other's weddings. Henry recalls summer afternoons at the pool, sitting beside Diane and Hillary. She has not read her friend's papers, but said she sees what's coming. "It's a whole thing ginning up. That's what really bothers me."

For the Clintons and their friends, it's the same refrain as before, reliving the known past again and again.

We've been answering questions for years, Hillary Clinton once told Barbara Walters. "And eventually they're answered and they go away, and more questions come up, and we'll just keep doing our best to answer them," she said. "We'll just keep plowing through and trying to get to the end of this."

That was nearly 20 years ago, amid the investigation over the real estate deal known as Whitewater.

Beyond the scandals of the 1990s — Whitewater would become one of many — there remains the constant, unresolvable public pursuit to capture who exactly Hillary Clinton is. It's an obsession Clinton herself characterized just Tuesday as the "relentless scrutiny that now stalks" people in public life.

"It gives you a sense of being kind of dehumanized," she said.

"You really can't ever feel like you're just having a normal day. And you have to get over that."

As the White House pushes legislative action, many others are looking for executive action to protect LGBT employees of federal contractors. “It seems like most people can do more than one thing at a time. So, let’s hope he does,” former NAACP chair Julian Bond says.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a visit to Bladensburg High School in Bladensburg, Md., on April 7.

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters / Reuters

AUSTIN, Texas — President Obama will celebrate the legacy of President Lyndon B. Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act on Thursday in a speech at the former president's library.

But on the issue of discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers, advocates remain critical of Obama's record.

White House officials have repeatedly professed an interest in passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act — passed by the Senate last fall — as the president's preferred route for protection against LGBT job discrimination. Until last week, though, administration officials hadn't given any other reason as to why Obama has not signed the proposed executive order to bar federal contractors from the same type of discrimination.

In fact, Obama himself had told the Houston GLBT Political Caucus more than six years ago, in 2008, that he would be supportive of establishing an LGBT nondiscrimination policy for federal contractors if elected president.

But on April 3, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the order would be made "redundant" if ENDA was passed into law. LGBT advocates and allies, though, have pushed back, urging the president to sign the executive order and to press for ENDA's passage.

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBT rights group, has been a steadfast supporter of Obama, but Carney's comments led the organization to lash out in an organizational statement: "We couldn't disagree more." The group's president, Chad Griffin, told BuzzFeed on Wednesday that Obama would "send a vital message of support for equality" were he to sign such an executive order.

The administration's inaction thus far on the issue — which the administration first announced in April 2012 — has confounded LGBT advocates, who had included the proposed order in a list of priorities for the White House, both at Obama's election in 2008 and re-election in 2012.

Now, as Obama heads to Austin to address the civil rights summit taking place this week at the LBJ Library, those advocates are, once again, looking for action on the issue.

"The Obama administration should use the two years that remain to expand those workplace protections to include LGBT Americans, and they need the president to pick up his pen and sign a new order before time runs out," Tico Almeida, the head of Freedom to Work, told BuzzFeed. "The LBJ Library would be the perfect venue for President Obama to announce that critically important civil rights work is about to begin. There isn't a single valid excuse to delay these workplace protections any longer."

LGBT leaders are not alone. Former NAACP chairman Julian Bond — who was honored at the Civil Rights Summit taking place this week at the LBJ Library — told BuzzFeed Wednesday, "It seems like most people can do more than one thing at a time. So, let's hope he does."

One of the few out LGBT members of Congress, New York Rep. Sean Partick Maloney, pointed to the political landscape he sees in the House as another reason for Obama to act on the executive order, telling BuzzFeed, "With little willingness from Speaker [John] Boehner and his Tea Party Caucus to support basic workplace protections, millions of hardworking Americans are depending on the president to act immediately as we continue the fight to pass ENDA."

Earlier this year, more than 200 members of Congress — including Maloney — wrote to Obama, asking him to sign such an executive order. On Wednesday, Sen. Jeff Merkley — another signatory of the letter and ENDA's lead sponsor in the Senate — asked Labor Secretary Tom Perez whether he had seen the letter. "I read the letter," Perez said, "and I believe we actually responded to the letter if my memory serves me, or we're in the process of responding." Merkley's office told BuzzFeed later Wednesday that the senator has not, in fact, received any response to the letter.

The use of the executive order by past administrations is actually pretty deep — including during the Johnson administration.

On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. It was a little more than a year later, on Sept. 24, 1965, that Johnson also signed Executive Order 11246, an order setting out the federal government's nondiscrimination policies — including the provision that remains, though amended, to this day: "Nondiscrimination in Employment by Government Contractors and Subcontractors."

In addition to requiring contractors to agree that they "will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin" — later expanded to include a ban on sex discrimination — the order gave the secretary of the Labor Department the authority to "investigate the employment practices of any Government contractor or subcontractor."

LBJ Library

In the days before Johnson signed that order, Vice President Hubert Humphrey wrote a four-page memorandum to Johnson on Sept. 17, 1965, detailing the federal government coordination on civil rights in education and employment. In the employment section, Humphrey pointed to coordinated action in the administration — including "the Contract Compliance System enforcing the Executive Orders applicable to Government contractors" — as a means of making "a significant contribution in eliminating discrimination" in some fields of work.

"It would be great for President Obama to celebrate not only the Civil Rights Act, but also LBJ's federal contractor executive order that has worked in tandem with the statute for the past five decades to expand workplace opportunity for all Americans," said Almeida, of Freedom to Work.

Johnson was not the first president to take action to stop discrimination among federal contractors. President Franklin D. Roosevelt began the movement to stop such discrimination in 1941 — a decision made in order to stop a threatened march on Washington by A. Philip Randolph. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy had amended and expanded the initial order before Johnson's signing of Executive Order 11246. Presidents since Johnson — up to and including Obama himself this week — have amended and expanded the order.

"President Obama's record on civil rights is particularly historic because he has consistently gone out of his way to link the lives of LGBT Americans to the broader step-by-step struggle for liberty and justice for all," HRC's Griffin noted. "I hope he continues that trend when he speaks in Austin tomorrow to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a transformative year for the civil rights movement — but I also hope he'll look to history for the next step forward."

Specifically, Griffin pointed to Johnson and Roosevelt's actions, saying, "Even as President Obama continues to be a tireless supporter of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, his administration should send a vital message of support for equality by issuing a similar executive order barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity to mark this anniversary."

Action from the administration does not, however, appear likely — at least not in Austin.

The day after Carney said such an order would be redundant, Deputy Press Secretary Joshua Earnest was asked on April 4 about Executive Order 11246 — and whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act made that order redundant. Earnest replied, "I'll be honest with you, I'm not familiar … with that specific executive order, but we can certainly look into it for you." Carney had responded similarly when the same question was posed to him on April 12, 2012 — the day after the administration first announced that Obama would not be signing the proposed federal contractor order.

On Tuesday of this week, Obama actually amended Executive Order 11246 — but in another area, increasing protections for employees of federal contractors on issues of pay equity and sex discrimination.

Of that order, Obama said, "[I]n this year of action I've used my executive authority whenever I could to create opportunity for more Americans" — taking action where Congress has not. Of his equal pay amendment to Executive Order 11246, Obama said, "[U]ltimately, equal pay is not just an economic issue for millions of Americans and their families. It's also about whether we're willing to build an economy that works for everybody … and whether or not we're willing to restore to the heart of this country that basic idea — you can make it, no matter who you are, if you try."

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The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals will be considering the constitutionality of Utah’s ban on same-sex couples’ marriages on Thursday. Hours before the arguments, an acknowledgement from Utah’s lawyer about same-sex parenting critic.

Jax Collins (left) and Heather Collins share a kiss after getting married at the Salt Lake County Government Building in Salt Lake City, Utah, Dec. 23, 2013.

Jim Urquhart / Reuters

DENVER — On the eve of arguments at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals over Utah's ban on same-sex couples' marriages, the state filed a last-minute notice with the court distancing the state from a professor whose work was recently lambasted by another federal judge.

In a letter marked on the docket as having been filed at 6:22 p.m. Wednesday, Gene Schaerr — the lawyer defending Utah's ban for Utah Gov. Gary Herbert — told the court that he was sending the unusual document "in response to recent press reports and analysis of the study by Professor Mark Regnerus," who the state relied on in its briefing at the appeals court for information about "the debate over whether same-sex parenting produces child outcomes that are comparable to man- woman parenting."

After claiming that the Regnerus study — mentioned in two footnotes in the state's brief — had "very limited relevance" to the state's argument, Schaerr writes, "[T]he Regnerus study cannot be viewed as conclusively establishing that raising a child in a same-sex household produces outcomes that are inferior to those produced by man-woman parenting arrangements."

The move comes less than three weeks after a federal judge in Michigan — who heard testimony from Regnerus in the case challenging that state's marriage ban — concluded of his authority as an expert, "The Court finds Regnerus' testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration." LGBT advocates and Regnerus' own colleagues had similarly criticized the study.

It was not immediately clear how or whether the court would utilize the state's letter in the arguments scheduled to start at 10 a.m. Thursday in the Denver courthouse of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The appeals court hearing is a part of the rapid movement on the marriage issue since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on recognizing such marriages last June in the case of United States v. Windsor. Since then, every federal trial judge to hear a marriage case or a case about recognizing out-of-state marriages of same-sex couples has decided in favor of the same-sex couples. Five courts of appeals now are considering such cases, and Thursday's hearing in Denver is the first post-Windsor appeals court hearing on the issue.

The judges slated to hear the case are Judge Paul J. Kelly Jr., appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992; Judge Carlos F. Lucero, appointed by President Clinton in 1995; and Judge Jerome A. Holmes, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006. Kelly was a state lawmaker in New Mexico for four years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lucero, the first Hispanic judge to sit on the 10th Circuit, was a private lawyer in Colorado before his appointment. Holmes, the first black judge to sit on the 10th Circuit, clerked for the 10th Circuit before entering private practice and then serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in Oklahoma before reentering private practice there.

Schaerr — a D.C. lawyer who left his job as a partner at the prominent law firm of Winston & Strawn to represent Utah — will be facing off against Peggy Tomsic, the lawyer from the Salt Lake City firm of Magelby & Greenwood that brought the challenge to the amendment.

Tomsic will be arguing for the same-sex couples who brought the challenge to Utah's ban, which was struck down on Dec. 20, 2013, by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby. Shelby did not issue a stay, putting his ruling on hold, and more than 1,300 same-sex couples married after both Shelby and the 10th Circuit denied the state's request for a stay. The marriages did stop, at least temporarily, when the Supreme Court issued a stay during the appeal on Jan. 6.

The decision from the 10th Circuit will have an impact on similar laws across the circuit, which includes Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming. New Mexico already has marriage equality, but all the other states in the circuit except Wyoming have constitutional bans on same-sex couples' marriages. Wyoming only has a statutory ban on such marriages.

In addition to the Utah case, the same judges in the 10th Circuit will be hearing Oklahoma's appeal of a January ruling striking down that state's marriage ban.

Read Utah's letter:

Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, has harsh words for comments that NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett made at a recent TED talk. Ledgett said, “President Madison would have been proud” of the process to authorize the NSA’s activities.

"It's idiotic, what he just said. It's extraordinarily disrespectful of the Constitution and extraordinarily disrespectful of the privacy rights of the American citizens," Welch said in a radio interview with Democracy Now that aired Wednesday.

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"It's idiotic, what he just said. It's extraordinarily disrespectful of the Constitution and extraordinarily disrespectful of the privacy rights of the American citizens. Here's why: Jim Sensenbrenner was a conservative Republican who helped write the law. In what he — and he's appalled by the overreach of the intelligence-gathering agencies and the NSA. And here's why. There was, in the law, the right to go to the FISA court on the basis of reasonable suspicion to examine, let's say, my phone records; there was some articulable suspicion that passed the judgment test of the judge in FISA, and you could get my records. What NSA has done is said that they can get everybody's, all Americans' emails, texts and telephone messages — all of them — just on the basis of the law in this authorization. That is like so over-broad and so disrespectful that there's no end to what they can do."

Here's the full video of Ledgett's TED talk, where he said that "President Madison would have been proud" of the process to authorize the NSA's activities.

"It's important to know that the programs that we're talking about were all authorized by two different presidents, two different political parties, by Congress twice, and by federal judges 16 different times. And so, this is not NSA running off and doing its own things. This is a legitimate activity of the United States foreign government that was agreed to by all the branches of the United States government. And President Madison would have been proud."

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“This type of rhetoric does not help us move this country forward,” Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin said on Fox and Friends Thursday morning.

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LINK: Why The Democrats Won’t Stop Saying “Koch Brothers”