Joining today's show are Katty Kay, Mike Barnicle, Sam Stein, Richard Haass, Mark Halperin, Michael Steele, Harold Ford Jr., Fmr. Secy. Madeleine Albright, Fmr. Rep. Eric Cantor, Rep. Tom Cole, Chuck Todd, Justice Stephen Breyer, Peter Gammons, Sen. John McCain, Rick Stengel, Jonathan Capehart, Alexandra Pelosi, Brian Sullivan, Elizabeth Gore and more
It is a full house today on the show.
National embarrassment: Bryce Harper, Jonathan Papelbon scuffle. A Washington Nationals season that began with World Series aspirations reached a new low Sunday afternoon, as Bryce Harper and Jonathan Papelbon got into a physical altercation in the team dugout.
After Harper flied out in the eighth inning Sunday, he and Papelbon exchanged words when the NL MVP front-runner got back to the dugout.
Papelbon then reached for Harper's throat with his left hand and shoved the outfielder back toward the bench with both arms. Teammates then pulled the pair apart.
"He apologized, so whatever. I really don't care. ... It's like brothers fighting. That's what happens."
Bryce Harper, on his dugout scuffle with teammate Jonathan Papelbon
Papelbon entered the game against his old team, the Philadelphia Phillies, in the top of the eighth inning.
In the ninth, Papelbon gave up Andres Blanco's two-run, go-ahead homer as the Phillies scored eight times en route to a 12-5 win.
Papelbon (4-3) then loaded the bases, hitting Odubel Herrera with his final pitch, before being removed by manager Matt Williams -- and leaving the mound to a chorus of boos from the Nationals Park crowd.
Harper did not go out to his position in right field for the ninth and was replaced in the lineup.
After the game, a much more subdued Papelbon said he and Harper had talked things out.
"It's squashed and it's good, we've moved on," Papelbon said.
"I grew up with brothers, he grew up with brothers, I view him as a brother," Papelbon said. "And sometimes in this game, there's a lot of testosterone and things spill over."
"He apologized, so whatever," Harper said. "I really don't care. ... It's like brothers fighting. That's what happens."
Williams described it as a "family issue" within the Nats, but conceded it wasn't a great moment for the players or the organization.
"It's no fun when stuff like this happens, but it does happen, and you must deal with it, and that is what we do," Williams said.
When asked if he'd ever fought a teammate before, Harper quipped, "I'm used to fighting the other team."
It has been a tumultuous week for Papelbon. On Wednesday he plunked Baltimore star Manny Machado and was given a three-game suspension by Major League Baseball. Papelbon appealed, allowing him to continue playing. Following that game, Harper said he expected to be plunked by the Orioles in retaliation, though that never came to be.
Washington was eliminated from postseason contention Saturday and has lost five of its past six games.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
Syria conflict: Russia wants 'co-ordination' against IS.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for a regional "co-ordinating structure" against jihadist militant group Islamic State (IS).
Mr Putin reiterated his support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who Western countries and the Syrian opposition have said must go.
The crisis is expected to be high on the agenda at the UN in New York.
Mr Putin will hold rare talks with US President Barack Obama to discuss the issue later on Monday.
Relations between Russia and the West have been strained over Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula last year and support for separatist rebels.
Putin centre stage, by BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg
A famous Russian expression talks about "killing two hares with one shot". But Vladimir Putin doesn't do things by halves: he'll be trying to slay a whole multitude of political and economic hares with one trip to New York.
His UN speech and meeting with President Obama will put President Putin centre stage: a return to the international limelight for a leader shunned by the West over the conflict in Ukraine.
Mr Putin told US TV that the Syrian president's forces were the only legitimate conventional army in Syria
And if he convinces President Obama to put aside their differences and join together in the fight against Islamic State, Russia stands to gain on many levels: by retaining a degree of influence in Syria; by boosting Russian national security (Moscow acknowledges that IS constitutes a threat to Russia); and, crucially, by improving Russia's international image - rebranding her from pariah to partner and refocusing attention from the conflict in Ukraine.
If Vladimir Putin achieves that, it could be the first step towards easing Western sanctions.
First, though, he will need to convince the US to trust him. It may be a hard sell.
'Recruiting sergeant'
In a separate development, UK Prime Minister David Cameron is expected to soften his stance against Mr Assad in a speech this week.
He is due to tell leaders at a summit in New York that Mr Assad could remain temporarily in power at the head of a transitional government.
Mr Cameron - along with Mr Obama and French President Francois Hollande - has previously demanded that Mr Assad be removed from power as a condition of any peace deal, a position consistently rejected by Mr Putin.
Speaking as he arrived in New York on Sunday, Mr Cameron said: "[Bashar al-] Assad can't be part of Syria's future. He has butchered his own people. He has helped create this conflict and this migration crisis. He is one of the great recruiting sergeants for Isil [IS]."
Meanwhile, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani - a key regional ally of President Assad - said the government in Damascus "can't be weakened" if IS militants are to be defeated.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.
European leaders are intensifying calls for a diplomatic push in Syria in the wake of a massive influx of refugees heading for Europe.
US Secretary of State John Kerry (L) discussed the crisis with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Sunday
The urgency of finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict has also been reinforced by a Russian military build-up in Syria in support of Mr Assad's government.
Iraq on Sunday announced that it had signed an agreement on security and intelligence co-operation with Russia, Iran and Syria to help combat IS.
US 'concerns'
In an interview with CBS television, Mr Putin said the Syrian president's troops were "the only legitimate conventional army there".
He said the troops were fighting terrorist organisations, and Russia "would be pleased to find common ground for joint action against the terrorists".
Mr Putin added Russia would not participate in any troop operations in Syria.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, however, said the efforts were "not yet co-ordinated" and the US had "concerns about how we are going to go forward".
People gather at a site hit by what activists said was an air strike by forces of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, in Hesh village in the southern countryside of Idlib on 27 September 2015
Syria's civil war
What's the human cost?
More than 250,000 Syrians have been killed and one million injured in four and a half years of armed conflict, which began with anti-government protests before escalating into a full-scale civil war.
And the survivors?
More than 11 million others have been forced from their homes, four million of them abroad, as forces loyal to President Assad and those opposed to his rule battle each other - as well as jihadist militants from IS. Growing numbers of refugees are going to Europe.
How has the world reacted?
Regional and world powers have also been drawn into the conflict. Iran and Russia, along with Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, are propping up the Alawite-led government. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are backing the Sunni-dominated opposition, along with the US, UK and France.
Syria's civil war explained
Diplomatic goals behind Putin's Syria build-up
On Sunday, France said it had carried out its first air strikes against IS in Syria, destroying a training camp.
A US-led coalition has been carrying out air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq for more than a year. France, like the UK, has previously confined its air strikes against the Islamic State group to Iraqi airspace.
The UK announced earlier this month it had carried out a drone strike against two British citizens in Syria but has yet to fly manned operations in Syrian airspace.
Map showing air strikes against targets in Iraq and Syria
More than 200,000 Syrians have been killed since the country erupted into civil war in 2011, and Islamic State took control of swathes of the country in 2014. Mr Assad has been accused of killing tens of thousands of his own citizens with indiscriminate bombing in rebel-held areas.
Approximately four million Syrians have fled abroad so far - the vast majority are in neighbouring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan - and more are on the move.
Map: Syrian asylum claims in Europe and registered refugees in the Middle East
‘Throwing somebody under the bus’: Hillary Clinton’s Meet the Press interview was as bad as you’d expect. A seemingly frustrated Hillary Clinton strove on Sunday to link the latest flap over her personal email server with the string of scandals and attacks Republicans raised against her in the 1990s.
“During the ’90s, I was subjected to the same kind of barrage,” the former first lady said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” noting that New York voters elected her a senator despite the attacks.
“When I ran for the Senate, they overlooked all of that,” the former secretary of state and front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination continued. “I was elected senator after going through years of back and forth.”
After a series of questions from host Chuck Todd about her emails, including a new charge that a recently released email exchange with former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus occurred earlier than she acknowledged using her personal account, an exasperated-sounding Clinton asked Todd whether his next question would be about “another conspiracy theory.”
She rejected the notion that her decision to use a personal email server as secretary of state was meant to evade public records searches, noting that congressional investigators unearthed many of her emails before she released them because they were obtainable through public systems. She acknowledged, however, the “drip, drip, drip” of accusations leveled at her, but couldn’t guarantee when they would stop.
“There’s only so much I can control,” Clinton said, characterizing her responses as entailing “more transparency and more information than anybody I’m aware of that’s ever served in the government.”
She used a personal email server, she said, because her husband, former President Bill Clinton, had set it up in their house after leaving office.
Clinton also defended herself on Sunday from charges that she’s altered her positions on issues like same-sex marriage, the Iraq War and the Keystone XL pipeline out of political expedience.
“I just don’t think that reflects … my assessment of issues, and I don’t think it reflects how people who are thoughtful actually conduct their lives,” she said, suggesting she takes positions based on the information available to her at the time.
Bill Clinton blames Republicans, media for extending wife Hillary's email controversy. Former President Bill Clinton is blaming Republicans and the media for the controversy related to wife and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, saying the GOP has led a “full-scale frontal assault” on her campaign.
Clinton entered the race as the clear party front-runner. But her poll and favorability numbers have dropped since news broke in March that she used a private server and email accounts for official business while serving as secretary of state.
“I have never seen so much expended on so little,” the former president said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN. “The other party doesn’t want to run against her. And if they do, they’d like her as mangled up as possible.”
Clinton maintains that she didn’t break any rules or laws by using the private system, including those on sending and receiving confidential emails. But she has admitted to making a mistake in judgment and has said she is sorry, in an effort to bury the controversy.
She has turned over thousands of official emails that the government is releasing in batches. And federal officials reportedly will be able to recover those she deemed private and deleted, which is prolonging the controversy.
Bill Clinton likened the email controversy to questions over the Whitewater land deal that he faced during his 1992 presidential campaign. Saying the furor was more politics than substance, Clinton argued that his wife has been open in answering questions and will bounce back from a decline in the polls.
“She said she was sorry that her personal email caused all this confusion,” he said. “And she’d like to give the election back to the American people. And I trust the people. I think it will be all right.”
Clinton added that the news media also played an inappropriate role in his wife’s troubles.
“You know, at the beginning of the year, she was the most admired person in public life,” he said. “What happened? The presidential campaign happened. And the nature of the coverage shifted from issue-based to political.”
In addition, the Obama administration on Friday reportedly discovered a chain of emails that his wife failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of her work-related correspondence as the country’s top diplomat
Their existence challenges her claim that she has handed over the entirety of her work emails from the account.
"I think that there are lots of people who wanted there to be a race for different reasons,” Bill Clinton said. “And they thought the only way they could make it a race was a full-scale frontal assault on her. And so this email thing became the biggest story in the world.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
All eyes on Putin. At a time of icy relations with the U.S., Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a rare -- and surprising -- interview to 60 Minutes.
The following is a script from "Putin" which aired on September 27, 2015. Charlie Rose is the correspondent. Andy Court, producer.
There aren't many world leaders who have generated as much interest as Russia's Vladimir Putin. All eyes will be on Putin when he speaks at the U.N. tomorrow and meets with President Obama, at a time when he has placed himself and his country in the middle of the most pressing issues of our times. He helped the U.S. and its Western allies broker the nuclear deal with Iran, and now, with a Russian buildup of aircraft, military equipment and personnel in Syria, he has put himself and his country at the center of that civil war and the fight against ISIS.
putinmain.jpg
Russian President Vladimir Putin CBS NEWS
Now, when his relations with the United States seem to be at a post-Cold War low, suffering under Western economic sanctions imposed on Russia, Putin may be looking for a way to restore his international influence and gain the respect he seeks for his homeland.
Just before his trip to the U.S., Putin invited us to meet him at his state residence outside Moscow where we found him characteristically confident and combative as he made the case that the focus in Syria should be on fighting ISIS rather than removing Syrian President Assad.
60 MINUTES OVERTIME
VLADIMIR PUTIN ON THE "POSITIVE" IMPACT OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS
Charlie Rose: So you would like to join the United States in the fight against ISIS? That's part of why you're there. Others think that while that may be part of your goal, you're trying to save the Assad administration because they've been losing ground and the war has not been going well for them. And you're there to rescue them.
President Putin: Well, you're right. We support the legitimate government of Syria. And it's my deep belief that any actions to the contrary in order to destroy the legitimate government will create a situation which you can witness now in the other countries of the region or in other regions, for instance in Libya where all the state institutions are disintegrated. We see a similar situation in Iraq. And there is no other solution to the Syrian crisis than strengthening the effective government structures and rendering them help in fighting terrorism. But, at the same time, urging them to engage in positive dialogue with the rational opposition and conduct reform.
Charlie Rose: As you know some of the coalition partners want to see President Assad go first before they will support.
President Putin: I'd like to recommend to them the following. They should send this message to the Syrian people. It's only the Syrian people who are entitled to decide who should govern their country and how.
Charlie Rose: President Assad, you support him. Do you support what he is doing in Syria and what is happening to those Syrian people, those many millions of refugees and the hundreds of thousands of people that have been killed, many by his own force?
President Putin: Well, tell me, what do you think about those who support the opposition and mainly the terrorist organizations only in order to oust Assad without thinking about what will happen to the country after all the government institutions have been demolished? Today, you have repeatedly said that Assad is fighting against his own population. But look at those who are in control of 60 percent of the territory in Syria. It's controlled by either ISIS or by others--
Charlie Rose: Al-Nusra?
President Putin: --such as al-Nusra and other terrorist organizations. They are recognized as terrorist organizations by the United States, by other states and by the United Nations.
Charlie Rose: Are you prepared to put Russian combat troops on the ground in Syria if it's necessary to defeat ISIS?
President Putin: Russia will not participate in any troop operations in the territory of Syria or in any other states. Well, at least we don't plan on it right now. But we are considering intensifying our work with both President Assad and with our partners in other countries.
Charlie Rose: I come back to the problem that many people look at. And they believe that Assad helps ISIS. That his reprehensible conduct against the Syrian people using barrel bombs and worse is a recruiting tool for ISIS and that if he was removed, transitioned, at some point, it would be better in the fight against ISIS, al-Nusra and others.
President Putin: Well, speaking in a professional language of intelligence services I can tell you that this kind of assessment is an "active measure" by enemies of Assad. It is anti-Syrian propaganda.
Charlie Rose: Much is being read into this including this, that this is a new effort for Russia to take a leadership role in the Middle East and that it represents a new strategy by you. Is it?
President Putin: Not really. No. More than 2,000 fighters from Russia and Ex-Soviet Republics are in the territory of Syria. There is a threat of their return to us. So instead of waiting for their return, we are better off helping Assad fight them on Syrian territory. So this is the most important thing which encourages us and pushes us to provide assistance to Assad. And, in general, we want the situation in the region to stabilize.
Charlie Rose: But your pride in Russia means that you would like to see Russia play a bigger role in the world and this is just one example.
President Putin: Well, it's not the goal in itself. I'm proud of Russia, that's true. And we have something to be proud of, but we do not have any obsession with being a superpower in the international arena.
Charlie Rose: But you are in part a major power because of the nuclear weapons you have. You are a force to be reckoned with.
President Putin: I hope so. I definitely hope so. Otherwise why do we have nuclear weapons at all?
Recent tension between the United States and Russia began after Ukraine's president Yanukovych was overthrown and fled to Russia. Putin responded by annexing Crimea, leading the U.S. and Western allies to impose tough economic sanctions against Russia.
President Putin: Ukraine is a separate and major issue for us. It is our closest neighbor. We've always said that this is our sister country. It's not only a Slavic people. We have common history, common culture, common religion, and many things in common. What I believe is absolutely unacceptable is the resolution of internal political issues in the former USSR Republics, through "color revolutions," through coup d'états, through unconstitutional removal of power. That is totally unacceptable. Our partners in the United States have supported those who ousted Yanukovych.
Charlie Rose: You believe that the United States had something to do with the ousting of Yanukovych, and he had to flee to Russia.
President Putin: I know that for sure.
Charlie Rose: How do you know that for sure?
President Putin: I know those people who live in Ukraine. We have thousands of contacts with them. We know who and where, when, who exactly met with someone and worked with those who ousted Yanukovych, how they were supported, how much they were paid, how they were trained, where, in which countries, and who those instructors were. We know everything.
For the record, the U.S. government has denied any involvement in the removal of the Ukrainian leader.
Charlie Rose: You respect the sovereignty of Ukraine?
President Putin: Sure. But we want countries to respect the sovereignty of other countries and Ukraine in particular. Respect for sovereignty means to not allow unconstitutional action and coup d'états, the removal of legitimate power.
Charlie Rose: How will the renewal of legitimate power take place in your judgment? How will that come about? And what role will Russia play?
President Putin: Russia has not taken part and is not going to take part in any actions aimed at removing the legitimate government.
Charlie Rose: You have a military presence on the border of Ukraine. And some even argue that there have been Russian troops in Ukraine.
President Putin: Well, you do have a military presence in Europe?
Charlie Rose: Yes.
President Putin: American tactical nuclear weapons are in Europe. Let's not forget that. What does this mean? Does it mean that you've occupied Germany or that you've transformed the occupation forces into NATO forces? And if we have our military forces on our territory, on the border with some state, you believe this is a crime?
What Vladimir Putin thinks about America and about President Obama might surprise you. That, and some insights into his personality, when we come back.
Vladimir Putin has wielded power in Russia for more than 15 years, longer than many czars. He has not only reshaped his own country, but has begun to play a larger role in international affairs, as an occasional ally, but more often foe of U.S. policy.
Presidential candidates have portrayed him as a bully, a gangster or pragmatic opponent who can be bargained with.
One thing we found: a strong personality who will engage in a conversation with blunt talk, charm and wit.
Charlie Rose: You're much talked about in America. There's much conversation. More so than any--
President Putin: Maybe they have nothing else to do in America but to talk about me.
Charlie Rose: No, no, or maybe they're curious people. Or maybe you're an interesting character. Maybe that's what it is. They know of a former KGB agent who came back and got into politics in St. Petersburg and became deputy mayor and then came to Moscow. And the interesting thing is they see these images of you bare-chested on a horse. And they say, "There is a man who carefully cultivates his image of strength."
President Putin: You know, I'm convinced that a person in my position must provide a positive example to people. And those areas where he can do this, he must do this.
Charlie Rose: You enjoy the work, you enjoy representing Russia and you know-- you've been an intelligence officer. Intelligence officers know how to read other people. That's part of the job, yes? Yes?
President Putin: It used to be. Used to be. Now I have a different job and that's been for quite a long time.
Charlie Rose: Somebody in Russia told me there is no such thing as a former KGB man. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.
President Putin: Well, you know, anything that we do, all this knowledge we acquire, all the experience, we'll have it forever and we'll keep that. And we'll use it somehow. So, in this sense, yes. They're right.
Charlie Rose: A CIA operative once said to me that one of the training you have is you learn the capacity to be liked as well because you have to charm people. You have to charm people, you have to, yes, seduce them. Let me--
President Putin: Well, if the CIA told you then that's the way it is because they are an expert on that.
Charlie Rose: You have a popularity rating in Russia that would make every politician in the world envious. Why are you so popular?
President Putin: There is something that I have in common with everycitizen of Russia, the love for our motherland.
Charlie Rose: Many of us were moved by an emotional moment at the time of the World War II memory because of the sacrifices Russia had made. And you were seen with a picture of your father with tears in your eyes.
President Putin: My family suffered very major losses during the Second World War, that's true. In my father's family, there were five brothers. I think four of them died. On my mother's side the picture was pretty much the same. Russia has suffered great losses. And of course we can't forget that. And we must not forget that. Not to put blame on somebody, but to prevent anything like this from happening in the future.
Charlie Rose: You also have said that the worst thing to happen in the last century was the collapse of the Soviet empire. There are those who look at Ukraine, especially Ukraine and Georgia, and they believe that you do not want to recreate the Soviet empire, but you do want to recreate a sphere of influence, which you think Russia deserves because of the relationship that has existed. Why are you smiling? Why?
President Putin: You're makingme happy, because we're always suspected of some ambitions. And they always try to distort something. I indeed said that I believe that the collapse of the USSR was a huge tragedy of the 20th century. You know why?
Charlie Rose: Why?
President Putin: Because, first of all, in an instant 25 million Russian people found themselves beyond the borders of the Russian state, although they were living within the borders of the Soviet Union. Then, all of a sudden, the USSR collapsed -- just overnight, in fact. And it's turned out that in the former Soviet Republics -- 25 million Russian people were living. They were living in a single country. And all of a sudden, they turned out to be outside the borders of the country. You see this is a huge problem. First of all, there were everyday problems, the separation of families, social problems, economic problems. You can't list them all. Do you think it's normal that 25 million Russian people were abroad all of a sudden? Russia was the biggest divided nation in the world. It's not a problem? Well, maybe not for you. But it's a problem for me.
Charlie Rose: There are many people who are critical of Russia, as you know. They say that it's more autocratic and less democratic. They say that political opponents and journalists have been killed and imprisoned in Russia. They say your power is unchallenged. And they say that power and absolute power corrupts absolutely. What do you say to those people who worry about the climate, the atmosphere in Russia?
President Putin: Well, there can be no democracy whatsoever without compliance with the law. Everyone must observe the laws. This is the most important thing which we must bear in mind. As for these tragic events, such as the death of people, including journalists, unfortunately they do occur in all countries of the world. But if they happen in our country, we do the utmost to find the criminals and to punish them. But the most important thing is that we will continue to improve our political system so that every citizen can feel that they do influence the life of the city, of the country and of the society and so that the authorities will feel responsible with regard to those people who trust them during election campaigns.
Charlie Rose: If you, as a leader of this country, insist that the rule of law be adhered to, if you insist that justice be done, if you because of your power, then it could go a long way to eliminating that perception.
President Putin: Well, a lot can be done. But not everyone succeeds with everything from the very start. How long did it take the democratic process to develop in the United States? Do you believe that everything is perfect now from the point of view of democracy in the United States? If everything was perfect there wouldn't be the problem of Ferguson. There would be no abuse by the police. But our task is to see all these problems and to respond properly.
Charlie Rose: So the people who killed Nemtsov will be prosecuted to the fullest?
President Putin: Yes. I said it right away that this is a shame for our history and criminals must be prosecuted and punished.
Charlie Rose: Are you curious about America? More than simply another nation that you have to deal with?
President Putin: Of course we are curious about what's going on. America exerts enormous influence on the situation in the world, as a whole.
Charlie Rose: What do you admire most about America?
President Putin: I like the creativity.
Charlie Rose: Creativity?
President Putin: Creativity when it comes to your tackling problems. Their openness, openness and open-mindedness. Because it allows them to unleash the inner potential of their people. And thanks to that, America has attained such amazing results in developing their country.
Obama and Putin to Meet on Sidelines of United Nations General Assembly.
An all-star star lineup of world leaders will take the stage at the United Nations on Monday, but all eyes will be on the sidelines for the first meeting between the estranged U.S. and Russian leaders in nearly a year.
President Barack Obama and Moscow-based counterpart Vladimir Putin will come face-to-face at a time when relations between the U.S. and Russia have fallen to near Cold War-level lows amid disagreements over Syria and Ukraine.
The two countries were unable to agree on the premise of the meeting — the White House says that Putin reached out, which the Kremlin disputes — or even what the two leaders will discuss.
The White House initially said the talks will focus on Ukraine, while the Kremlin said Syria and the fight against ISIS will be at the fore. The Obama administration has since confirmed Syria will be on high on the agenda.
Putin told "60 Minutes" on Sunday that he and Obama "listen to each other in a way," but when asked if the U.S. president considers him an equal said: "How could I know what he thinks?"
Before he gets to hear for himself, both Putin and Obama will address the world leaders gathered from the floor of the U.N. General Assembly.
Both are expected to speak of Syria and the need for a political transition — but diverge on matters of that country's President Bashar Assad. Obama is expected to stress the White House line that Assad must go, while Putin is expected to put Assad up as the only option to defeat ISIS.
The Russian leader insisted on that point in his interview with "60 Minutes," saying that "there is no other solution to the Syrian crisis than strengthening the effective government structures and rendering them help in fighting terrorism."
Putin said that Russia "will not participate in any troop operations" in Syria at the moment, but is looking into "intensifying" its work with Assad.
That work has been under a microscope of late: Russia's recent military buildup in Syria has flummoxed and concerned U.S. officials, who fear Moscow has been sending in weapons to shore up Assad.
Monday's meeting will give Obama an opportunity to ask Putin directly about Russian military forces in Syria — though few expect Moscow is interested in joining the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition.
"It's time for clarity and for Russia to come clean and come clear on just exactly how it proposes to be a constructive contributor to what is already an ongoing multi-nation coalition," said Celeste Wallander, the White House National Security Council's senior director for Russia. "That's a question for President Putin, and it's a question we'll be posing to President Putin."
"We're just at the beginning of trying to understand what the Russians intentions are in Syria, in Iraq, and to try and see if there are mutually beneficial ways forward here," a senior State Department Official said Sunday. "We've got a long way to go in that conversation."
Ahead of the Obama-Putin encounter, Secretary of State John Kerry had a "preparatory" meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in New York where both Syria and Ukraine were discussed.
The "very constructive" discussion involved a "very thorough exchange of views on both the military and the political implications of Russia's increased engagement in Syria," according to the senior State Department official.
Putin insisted that Russia's presence in Syria was "under entirely legal international contracts," telling "60 Minutes" that it only has supplied weapons to the government, personnel training and humanitarian aid.
He also criticized U.S. efforts to train moderate opposition and suggested Washington was in violation of international law by supporting non-state structures.
Kerry struck a slightly more conciliatory note on Sunday, saying from New York that discussions with Russia were "the beginning of a genuine effort to see if there is a way to de-conflict, but also to find a way forward that will be effective in keeping a united, secular Syria that can be at peace and stable again."
Beyond bridging the divides over Syria, Obama and Putin also were poised to discuss the problem of Ukraine — one of the main drivers of the broadening wedge between the U.S. and Russia.
After Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, the U.S. and other Western nations imposed sanctions on Moscow. The U.S. also has accused Russia of supporting an insurgency in eastern Ukraine —allegations Moscow staunchly denies.
"The situation in Ukraine continues to be of significant concern and our support for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine will be front and center throughout our discussions, particularly with President Putin," Ben Rhodes, White House national security adviser, told reporters on Thursday.
However, the ongoing conflict in Syria — and Moscow's unmitigated support for embattled Assad — appears to have eclipsed the urgency of the Ukraine conflict heading into the annual General Assembly.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani speaks at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
In geopolitics, this is the greatest show on earth. For the best part of a week, the world’s leaders – more than 150 of them – will mingle, bargain and argue over the state of the world at the UN general assembly in New York.
For much of the proceedings, “show” is the operative word. When the presidents and prime ministers mount the green marble podium, there will be a strong element of theatre. They will be playing to different galleries, declaiming their positions to their peers in the chamber, but also to domestic audiences.
The drama will be greater than ever this year, at the 70th session of the UN general assembly, known inside the institution by its acronym Unga (rhyming with hunger). Within the space of two hours on Monday morning, Presidents Barack Obama, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Hassan Rouhani and François Hollande will take their turn to speak. Each will try to anticipate and respond to the other, seeking rhetorical advantage and one-upmanship in their claims to global leadership. The global balance of power will be laid out in the open.
The UN general assembly’s ‘greatest hits’ over the years.
The leaders will huddle on Sunday to discuss climate change and global development goals. They will discuss the future of UN peacekeeping on Monday, with several countries pledging troops to the task, and on Tuesday, debate strategies of defeating the Islamic State and other violent extremists.
The greatest wild card this year will be Putin. It will be the first time he has shown up to talk at Unga for a decade, and he flies to New York at a critical time. While he has eased the pressure on Ukraine, dialling down Russia’s covert military campaign alongside the separatists in the east, Putin at the same time has raised his country’s stakes in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad, setting up an air base in Latakia and consolidating Russia’s hold on a naval base at Tartus.
In so doing, he has backed up by force of arms the argument he has been trying to win since the war started more than four years, and 250,000 lives, ago: that the only road to peace is through support for Assad and a concerted campaign against Isis.
The US, its western allies, and most human rights advocates see the continuing slaughter through an inverse lens. In their view, Isis and other extremist groups are the symptoms of the chaos wrought by the Assad regime through the daily barrel bombing of civilians in rebel areas.
It sounds like a fundamentally different view but it has been based on a bluff that Putin has called. Neither the US nor its European allies are prepared to risk military action to try to remove Assad. They can agree to bomb Isis because it advertises its atrocities online and explicitly threatens the West.
Obama will be co-hosting a summit meeting on countering Isis starting on Tuesday morning. Putin is not expected to attend, as he seeking to claim his own leadership of the anti-Isis campaign.
That iwill be the state of play when Obama meets Putin on Monday afternoon, at what is likely to be the most critical summit of the week. The president will be seeking assurances of Russian agreement to a relatively brisk abdication by Assad (months rather than years) in return for legitimising the Russian boots-on-the-ground campaign in Syria. But right now, those are assurances Putin seems in no mood to give.
Over much of the previous decade, in Putin’s absence, the central drama at Unga has been provided by the Iranian state and its volatile relationship with the US – from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s baiting of his American houses to the tentative rapprochement of his successor, Hassan Rouhani.
Barack Obama boards Marine One as he travels to New York City to attend the United Nations General Assembly and other events. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Barack Obama boards Marine One as he travels to New York City to attend the United Nations General Assembly and other events. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/Pool/EPA
The symbolic highlight of the Unga in 2013 was a phone conversation between Obama and Rouhani as the latter was in his car heading to the airport. Two years on, US-Iranian exchanges are now routine. A deal on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme was finally clinched in July, and in getting there the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, spent more time in each other’s company than any other two foreign ministers on earth.
On Monday, Zarif will be meeting ministers from the six nations who negotiated the nuclear agreement, in order to discuss its implementation. But the White House has said there is still no meeting expected between Obama and Rouhani this year. Rouhani told National Public Radio that Iran was ready to start discussing Syria with the US “right now” but a personal encounter has not been approved by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. The nuclear agreement has yet to have a diplomatic domino effect. Iran and the US remain far apart on each other’s role in the Middle East. Iran has reportedly not been invited to Obama’s summit on countering Isis.
The White House says, however, that the president will have a brief meeting with Raùl Castro, who will be addressing the general assembly for the first time on Monday afternoon. Obama met the Cuban leader at the Summit of the Americas in Panama in April, and Kerry went to Havana to reopen the US embassy in August, ending a 54-year break in relations. A follow-up Obama-Castro handshake is intended to underline the normalisation in relations, and be another showcase for the benefits of diplomacy. The challenge this year, though, will be making progress in the deeply troubled relationship with Putin, particularly on Syria and Ukraine, and that will be a tougher nut to crack.
Trump gets down to business on 60 Minutes. Scott Pelley interviews Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who lays out key policy details and reveals a major part of his tax proposal.
The following script is from "Trump" which aired on September 27, 2015. Scott Pelley is the correspondent. Robert Anderson and Aaron Weisz, producers.
Picture a bar graph that averages the best political polls. Donald Trump stands above the crowded skyline of Republican candidates like one of his boastful buildings. First in the nation, first in Iowa, first in New Hampshire, and first, for the last 11 weeks. Political architects are amazed because Trump rose on a shaky foundation, his "shoot from the lip" style managed to offend women, Latinos, and American POWs. Now, with summer over, and four months to Iowa, voters captivated by a larger than life personality begin to want the fine details. That's what we were looking for, this past Tuesday, when we met Trump, on top, in his Fifth Avenue penthouse in Manhattan. He surprised us with news about his tax plan.
Scott Pelley: So, now you've got everybody's attention.
Donald Trump: I do have their attention.
Scott Pelley: Revolution is easy, governing is hard and what I'd like to get to is how you intend to govern the country if you are elected president. What's your tax plan?
Donald Trump: It's a substantial reduction for the middle-income people. Because our middle class, Scott, is being absolutely decimated. It will be a corporate also reduction, I think it'll be a great incentive for corporations.
Scott Pelley: Who are you going to raise taxes on?
Donald Trump: If you look at actually raise, some very wealthy are going to be raised. Some people that are getting unfair deductions are going to be raised. But overall it's going to be a tremendous incentive to grow the economy and we're going to take in the same or more money. And I think we're going to have something that's going to be spectacular.
Scott Pelley: But Republicans don't raise taxes.
Donald Trump: Well, we're not raising taxes.
Scott Pelley: What kind of Republican are you?
Donald Trump: I mean the only, well, I'm a pretty good Republican. But, I will tell you this, I do have some differences. I don't want to have certain people on Wall Street getting away with paying no tax.
Scott Pelley: You say you're gonna lower taxes on the middle class, what are we talking about?
Donald Trump: Well, we're talking about numbers that will be announced over the next two days. And they'll be significant for the middle class.
Scott Pelley: Do you know what the numbers are?
Donald Trump: I know 'em right now.
Scott Pelley: Well, why don't you tell me? This is 60 Minutes. It's time to tell the folks at home the details of what you intend to do.
Donald Trump: I know. I know. I will say this, there will be a large segment of our country that will have a zero rate, a zero rate. And that's something I haven't told anybody.
Scott Pelley: You're talking about--
Donald Trump: We're talking about people in the low-income brackets that are supposed to be paying taxes, many of them don't anyway.
Scott Pelley: You're talking about making part of the population exempt from income tax?
Donald Trump: That is correct.
Scott Pelley: You're talking about cutting corporate income taxes?
Donald Trump: That is correct.
Scott Pelley: But there's a $19 trillion federal debt.
Donald Trump: That's right. We're gonna grow the economy so much--
Scott Pelley: You can't afford to do those things--
Donald Trump: --no, no, but if the economy grows the way it should grow, if I bring jobs back from China, from Japan, from Mexico, from so many countries, everybody's taking our jobs.
Scott Pelley: How do you get 'em back?
Donald Trump: You get 'em back--
Scott Pelley: Those $20 an hour jobs that this country was built on.
Donald Trump: Right. Exactly. You get 'em back by taking them away from other countries. I mean, if you look at China, we have--
Scott Pelley: How does the president do that?
Donald Trump: Well, the president does it by not allowing places like China to devaluate, you know, they devalue their currency, Scott, to such an extent that it's impossible for our companies to compete every time they do that, they suck the blood right out of our country.
Scott Pelley: You're not running for president of China.
Donald Trump: No, I'm running--
Scott Pelley: You're not going to be able to prevent the devaluation of the currency.
Donald Trump: Oh absolutely. Sure you are, sure you are. Look, they don't respect our president. They don't respect our country. They will respect me. They won't be doing it. But here's what we have to do. If they don't come to the table, they're going to have a tax when they put their products into this country. And they're going to behave.
Scott Pelley: So you would tax their--
Donald Trump: I would--
Scott Pelley: --products coming into the United States. You're talking about a trade war.
Donald Trump: I don't want to say tax anything. I'm talking about a fair war. I'm talking about also, I have the smartest people on Wall Street lined up already. They're going to represent us on Japan, on Mexico. Mexico, by the way, is taking our jobs. I love the Mexican people. They're great people. But the leadership is too smart for our country. Ford Motor Company, moving a $2.5 billion plant to Mexico. Mexico--
Scott Pelley: But there's nothing you can do about that as president.
Donald Trump: Sure there is.
Scott Pelley: How do you keep them from exporting American jobs to Mexico?
Donald Trump: Let's say Ford-- let's say Ford moves to Mexico. If they want to sell that car in the United States they pay a tax. Here's what's gonna happen, they're not going to build their plant there. They're going to build it in the United States.
Scott Pelley: But there is a North American Free Trade Agreement.
Donald Trump: And there shouldn't be. It's a disaster.
Scott Pelley: But it is there.
Donald Trump: OK, yeah, but--
Scott Pelley: If you're president, you're going to have to live with it.
Donald Trump: Excuse me, we will either renegotiate it or we will break it. Because, you know, every agreement has an end.
Scott Pelley: You can't just break the law.
Donald Trump: Excuse me, every agreement has an end. Every agreement has to be fair. Every agreement has a defraud clause. We're being defrauded by all these countries.
Scott Pelley: It's called free trade--
Donald Trump: No it's not.
Scott Pelley: --and it is a plank--
Donald Trump: It's not the--
Scott Pelley: --of the Republican platform.
Donald Trump: Scott we need fair trade. Not free trade. We need fair trade. It's gotta be fair.
Trump's differences with Republicans and Democrats have him rising on a mood of national frustration. In our CBS News poll, nearly half of Republicans in the early primary states say they're not dissatisfied with Washington, they're angry. They tell us business knowhow matters more than a political resume. When they see the multibillionaire in his private 757, 80 percent of Republicans say they see a strong leader.
Donald Trump: So I want to build our country. Our country's been decimated. We have spent so much money in the Middle East and other places. We-- our roads are falling apart, our bridges are falling apart. Everything's falling apart. We have to rebuild our country.
Scott Pelley: This sounds great. How are you going to pay for it?
Donald Trump: We're going to absolutely be able to pay for it. My economy will expand so rapidly-- we're going to take jobs back from other countries. And we will be able to pay for it.
Scott Pelley: Are you serious about deporting 12 million illegal immigrants?
Donald Trump: Well, nobody knows the number. But the answer is-- you just said it, they're illegal immigrants. They're here illegally.
Donald Trump: First of all, I have to start a little bit differently. We're going to build a wall and we're going to create a border. It's going to be a great wall and it's not going to be very expensive. And it's going to be peanuts compared to the kind of numbers, you know?
Scott Pelley: How are you going to build a wall--
Donald Trump: It's called management.
Scott Pelley: --that is cheap and impenetrable?
Donald Trump: It will be a real wall. It'll be a wall that works. It'll actually be a wall that will look good, believe it or not. 'Cause what they have now is a joke. They're-- they're ugly, little and don't work.
Scott Pelley: Let's assume your wall has gone up.
Donald Trump: Good.
Scott Pelley: Eleven, 12 million illegal immigrants--
Donald Trump: Or whatever the number is.
Scott Pelley: Still in the country, what do you do?
Donald Trump: If they've done well they're going out and they're coming back in legally. Because you said it----
Scott Pelley: You're rounding them all up?
Donald Trump: We're rounding 'em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And they're going to be happy because they want to be legalized. And, by the way, I know it doesn't sound nice. But not everything is nice.
Scott Pelley: It doesn't sound practical.
Donald Trump: It is practical. It's going to work. They have to come here legally. And you know, when I talk about the wall, and I said it before, we're going to have a tremendous, beautiful, wide-open door. Nice big door. We want people to come into the country.
Scott Pelley: You know, the problem with a lot of these ideas is that the president of the United States is not the CEO of America.
Donald Trump: That's right.
Scott Pelley: The constitution is going to tell you no.
Donald Trump: We'll see.
Scott Pelley: The Congress is going to tell you no.
Donald Trump: We'll see.
Scott Pelley: The Supreme Court is gonna tell you no.
Donald Trump: Well, we'll see.
Scott Pelley: And you're not used to working in an environment like that.
Donald Trump: Look--I do it all the time.
Scott Pelley: Who tells you no?
Donald Trump: I do it all the time. Not that many people-- I do it all the time. And I deal with governments all the time. I have, overseas, I have vast holdings overseas.
Scott Pelley: What is the role of the U.S. military in the world?
Donald Trump: I want to have a military that's so strong, so powerful, so modern, has the greatest equipment in the world and that everybody says, "We're not gonna mess with them." And we don't have that now.
Scott Pelley: When has the U.S. military been too small to accomplish its mission?
Donald Trump: It's not a question of too small.
Scott Pelley: We're--
Donald Trump: We don't have leadership.
Scott Pelley: We're at war with ISIS as we sit here. How do you end it?
Donald Trump: I would end ISIS forcefully. I think ISIS, what they did, was unbelievable what they did with James Foley and the cutting off of heads of everybody I mean these people are totally a disaster. Now, let me just say this, ISIS in Syria, Assad in Syria, Assad and ISIS are mortal enemies. We go in to fight ISIS. Why aren't we letting ISIS go and fight Assad and then we pick up the remnants? Why are we doing this? We're fighting ISIS and Assad has to be saying to himself, "They have the nicest or dumbest people that I've ever imagined."
Scott Pelley: Let me get this right, so we lay off ISIS for now?
Donald Trump: Excuse me, let --
Scott Pelley: Lay off in Syria, let them destroy Assad. And then we go in behind that?
Donald Trump: --that's what I would say. Yes, that's what I would say.
Or, he had another idea, leave it to an old adversary.
Donald Trump: If you look at Syria. Russia wants to get rid of ISIS. We want to get rid of ISIS. Maybe let Russia do it. Let 'em get rid of ISIS. What the hell do we care?
Scott Pelley: OK, that's Syria. What do you--do in Iraq--
Donald Trump: With that--
Scott Pelley: --with ISIS?
Donald Trump: Look with ISIS in Iraq, you gotta knock 'em out. You gotta knock 'em out. You gotta fight 'em. You gotta fight 'em. You have to stand--
Scott Pelley: On the ground?
Donald Trump: --if you need you're going to have to do that, yes.
Scott Pelley: Troops on the ground.
Donald Trump: Yes.
Fifteen years ago he advocated a preemptive strike on North Korea's nuclear program, which he still sees as a major threat.
Donald Trump: Well, you're going to have to do something at some point.
Scott Pelley: You would drop a bomb on their nuclear reactor?
Donald Trump: I would do something. You have to do something about North Korea. Now what I would do is I would make China respect us because China has extreme control over North Korea. And I would say, "China, you better go in there and you better do something because economically it could cause China--"
Scott Pelley: And they're going to listen to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump: Yeah, they're going to listen to me.
Scott Pelley: They don't listen to the president of the United States--
Donald Trump: They're going to listen to me.
Scott Pelley: But Donald Trump they're going to listen--
Donald Trump: Just like I have the Chinese banks in my buildings, they listen to me, they respect me. China has almost complete control over North Korea. China will do that. And if they don't do that, they have to suffer economically because we have the engine that makes China work. You know, without the United States or without China sucking out all our money and our jobs China would collapse in about two minutes.
Scott Pelley: What's your plan for Obamacare?
Donald Trump: Obamacare's going to be repealed and replaced. Obamacare is a disaster if you look at what's going on with premiums where they're up 40, 50, 55 percent.
Scott Pelley: How do you fix it?
Donald Trump: There's many different ways, by the way. Everybody's got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, "No, no, the lower 25 percent that can't afford private. But--"
Scott Pelley: Universal health care.
Donald Trump: I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now.
Scott Pelley: The uninsured person is going to be taken care of. How? How?
Donald Trump: They're going to be taken care of. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. And, you know what, if this is probably--
Scott Pelley: Make a deal? Who pays for it?
Donald Trump: --the government's gonna pay for it. But we're going to save so much money on the other side. But for the most it's going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition with lots of competitors with great companies and they can have their doctors, they can have plans, they can have everything.
Scott Pelley: In your book, "The America We Deserve" you proposed raising the social security retirement age to 70. Is that still your plan?
Donald Trump: Yeah, not anymore because now what I want to do is take money back from other countries that are killing us and I want to save social security. And we're going to save it without increases. We're not going to raise the age and it will be just fine.
Scott Pelley: How are you going to do that? It is a basket case.
Donald Trump: Through capability. We will set it up by making our country rich again.
Scott Pelley: You know, the heart of all of your plans seems to be we're going to be rich.
Donald Trump: We are going to do great. As a country we are going to do great.
Scott Pelley: You know, neither party likes you very much. How are you going to get--
Donald Trump: I would say that's true, yes.
Scott Pelley: How are you going to get anything through Congress?
Donald Trump: When you say the party, the establishment doesn't. For instance, I noticed that--
Scott Pelley: Well that's who Congress is. How are you going to get anything--
Donald Trump: --that's--oh, I'll get along-- I get-- I've gotten along with politicians my whole life. I've made a fortune on politicians. Nobody knows politicians better than I do. I get along with politicians.
Scott Pelley: You're not going to be able to buy them anymore.
Donald Trump: No, no, I'm not going to buy 'em. I'm not going to buy 'em. I'll get along with 'em. You gotta get along and you gotta get people to do what you it's called leadership. We don't have any leadership right now.
In Dallas this month, he nearly filled a 20,000 seat arena. Our poll shows that his support extends from Republicans to Independents, young and old, Evangelical and not. But his poll numbers did slip slightly last week. And nationally among all voters, majorities of blacks and Hispanics disapprove. Trump told us he will pay for his campaign all the way through the nomination.
Donald Trump: Yea, I'm totally willing to. I'm self-funding my campaign. Now once you get into nomination then the Republican Party kicks in and they raise all this money and they do whatever they have to do. But I am absolutely 100 percent doing it myself.
Scott Pelley: You love hearing about yourself.
Donald Trump: I do.
Scott Pelley: It is oxygen to you. What does that tell us about Donald Trump?
Donald Trump: No, if I'm on a show I'll turn on the show. But I don't think I'm any different than anybody else. If somebody's--
Scott Pelley: I was in your office, all the magazines on your desk--
Donald Trump: Well, I have a lot of covers.
Scott Pelley: --are covers of you.
Donald Trump: I think I have more covers--
Scott Pelley: All the pictures on the wall are pictures of you.
Donald Trump: --well, it's cheaper than wallpaper.
Scott Pelley: What are we supposed to take from that?
"I don't like lies. I don't mind a bad story. If you did a bad story on me for 60 Minutes, if it were a fair story I wouldn't be thin-skinned at all."
Donald Trump: You know, look, I'm on a lot of covers. I think maybe more than almost any supermodel. I think more than any supermodel. But in a way that is a sign of respect, people are respecting what you are doing.
Scott Pelley: So this is the corner office at Fifth Avenue and 57th. Probably the most expensive intersection in the world.
Donald Trump: I would say it is absolutely.
But there isn't enough respect, he told us, for the business he built. Trump Real Estate scrapes the skies of the world, apartments, offices, hotels, casinos, famous golf courses, and television shows. He started with his father's successful real estate and now, Trump says he's worth $10 billion -- others estimate four -- real estate values are notoriously variable.
Scott Pelley: And your father also used to tell you-- if I have this right, "Attack, attack, attack."
Donald Trump: I'll tell you what, my father was a really good man with a tremendous heart. But he was a tough cookie.
With a tougher hide, perhaps, than his son, who has sometimes gone to war with reporters.
Scott Pelley: Why so thin-skinned?
Donald Trump: I don't like lies. I don't mind a bad story. If you did a bad story on me for 60 Minutes, if it were a fair story I wouldn't be thin-skinned at all. You know, some of the media is among the worst people I've ever met. I mean a pretty good percentage is really a terrible group of people. They write lies, they write false stories. They know they're false. It makes no difference. And frankly I don't call it thin-skinned, I'm angry.
Scott Pelley: An impression is created though that you like to dish it out but you can't take a punch.
Donald Trump: Oh I think I can take it. I could take it if it's fair. Again, if people say things that are false which happens a lot with me-- if people say things that are false I will fight, like, harder than anybody. If I do something wrong, and that happens, and they write a fair story that I did something wrong, there's nothing to fight about. I can handle that. I don't like lying. You know, I'm a very honorable guy, I don't like lies.
Scott Pelley: What personal hardship has defined your character?
Donald Trump: Well, I think I've had some. I had a brother who was a fantastic guy, Fred. And he was a young man and he passed away at a fairly young age. And, he was an alcoholic. He would tell me constantly, "Don't drink." And I've never had a drink. I own the largest winery on the East Coast and yet I don't drink which is a little weird. But he said, "Don't drink. Don't smoke." And he would tell me all the time. 'Cause he had a problem with it. He died of alcoholism.
That is a warning that he's pressed on his children, three of whom run his companies.
Donald Trump: I have children that are very good children. And-- and so far-- I knock on wood. Right, you know, who knows.
Scott Pelley: Very accomplished. Your three older children.
Donald Trump: Terrific people. But I say, "No drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes."
Scott Pelley: Millions of people are wondering right now whether you are serious or whether this is a reality show. Yesterday you said, if the presidency doesn't work out, I'll go back to my business.
Donald Trump: Well, that's true.
Scott Pelley: Do you intend --
Donald Trump: I mean, that's true. I can't guarantee that --
Scott Pelley: --to be president, or not?
Donald Trump: Totally. But that's true. I always like to have a downside. I love my business. I didn't want to do this. I just see our country as going to hell. And I felt I had to do it.
As we all know by now, John Beohner announced his resignation just as the Pope was about to do his speech at Ground Zero on Friday. The Briefing, Vol. III, Issue 31-
Boehner lame-duck: Conservatives mostly celebrated the announcement from Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, that he was retiring as Speaker of the House (and from Congress) at the end of October. More on what that means in a moment.
But if conservatives are going to be expressing emotion at the moment, it should probably instead be concern — especially about what Boehner could do before his term is over.
There is much talk now about who will succeed Boehner. But at this moment, there is no announced or likely candidate for Speaker who supports reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank. Even Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Boehner’s next-in-line and the putative establishment candidate for speaker, has already come out against it, and any prospective conservative challenger will surely oppose it as well.
Conservatives have complained a lot about Boehner’s speakership, often about things that he had little or no control over. But they should be positively alarmed to hear of Boehner’s aspirations to move Ex-Im reauthorization as part of his swan song. The other things Boehner hopes to move include a transportation bill and a budget deal that changes the current budget cap arrangements.
Ideology aside, it stands to reason that the guy who’s quitting next month should not be setting the agenda for years to come. But the spending caps and the expiration of Ex-Im are also among the biggest accomplishments conservatives can claim from the Boehner era.
paul ryancandidacy for Speaker. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has ruled himself out. So has House Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., who has said he will run for Majority Leader if Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., becomes Speaker. McCarthy will probably seek the position (he hasn’t announced yet), and there will probably be others as well — perhaps Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, or Pete Sessions, R-Texas.
Party members are expected, on the House floor, to back whomever the party chooses in advance in a closed-door vote. In that closed-door vote, as many ballots will be held as is necessary to produce a majority winner.
It’s too early to say how that battle will turn out, but it’s never too early to point out that it probably doesn’t matter as much as you think who replaces Boehner. What really matters is not who leads, but what the caucus will tolerate from him. The caucus is not going to change overnight, and so Boehner’s exit probably won’t have the effects that some conservatives seem to expect.
All other things being equal, it’s probably better to have someone in the slot who is ideologically reliable. But a more conservative Speaker or majority leader does not necessarily make for a more conservative House agenda.
Changes in party leadership matter mostly from a technical perspective rather than an ideological one. New leaders may be stronger or worse fundraisers — an important thing to remember, since that’s a huge part of the party leader’s job. They might be more or less competent at specific things, such as whipping votes or outmaneuvering the opposition. They may have broader visions (think Newt Gingrich) or narrower ones (think Dennis Hastert).
But party leaders cannot be counted on to change the people who elect them., i.e. the members of their caucus. The idea that a stronger, more conservative Speaker gets you a whole new House Republican caucus is widespread, but incorrect. All it really guarantees is a new set of House leaders that conservatives can be disappointed by later on.
A great leader can change the political character of a nation and its population. Presidents Reagan and Clinton can both be viewed in hindsight as leaders who successfully persuaded millions of people to change their politics. But the electors of a party leader are all seasoned politicians and members of a legislative body. They are less susceptible to a leader’s transformative charms and more precise about their own self-interest. Unlike the broader electorate, they can also dump their leader at any moment they wish — there’s no fixed term.
Parties adopted the caucus system and selected legislative leaders for purposes of efficiency. A group of 240 congressmen, left to act independently, will accomplish far less and find itself thwarted more often if its members do not mutually agree to entrust major decisions about tactics and legislative agenda to a smaller group. Members’ opinions will always vary and often clash, but when they move to the floor, everyone has to be on the same page. This is why members of both parties are always expected to vote with their party leadership on floor rules, even if they sometimes vote against them on legislation and amendments.
This all means that a legislative leader’s personal ideology matters less than one might expect. A more conservative Speaker or Majority Leader does not necessarily mean a more conservative House. In fact, a relatively moderate leader could steer his caucus in a far less moderate direction (take Harry Reid as an example of this for the Democrats). A relatively conservative leader can defang his party’s conservatives (take Tom DeLay as an example of this).
The methods and results of leadership are effects, not causes, of a caucus’s ideology. There is only one way to make leaders think and behave differently, and that is to elect more members who will prompt them to think differently.
To understand why this is so, consider it from the leaders’ perspective: They spend their every waking hour raising money for their members, and listening to complaints from each one that their priorities are being neglected or that their seats are in danger if they follow the party’s plan to vote for this or that. A leader who fails in keeping his constituents (his members) happy and getting them re-elected will not last long, and so he is always looking for ways to accommodate everyone as he can, and then demanding from them from when he has to.
Conservatives want one of their own as speaker now, but that is not a sufficient condition to bring about change in the House. Whoever becomes Speaker will have to face the same challenges and lead the same group of congressmen as Boehner, and as a result, his (or her) decisions will probably look a lot like the ones Boehner has been making.
This implies that most of Boehner’s decisions as Speaker since 2011 have been predetermined for him in the House. The great danger at this moment, as noted above, is what Boehner could try to do now that he has nothing to lose.
The bottom line: If you want a more conservative leader, it won’t do to choose a different guy with a better voting record or even a more confrontational disposition. Rather, you need to elect a larger and more conservative crop of congressmen, or otherwise change the calculation for everyone (for example, by electing a Republican president or a Senate supermajority).
This is the work of multiple consecutive elections — something Democrats accomplished when the elections of 2006 and 2008 empowered their liberal wing. Republicans, for all of the success they enjoyed in the Obama era, never managed to pull off two in a row, and so the desire for change remains pent-up and frustrated.
Ideally, the next Speaker will be a conservative who is eventually willing at times to do what Speaker Dennis Hastert never would — to work against a Republican president. Part of the reason public approval of Congress has been so low for so long is that congressional leaders have been institutional failures. Instead of working for what their voters believe in, they tend to play goalkeeper and protect a president of their own party from any embarrassment. This cost Harry Reid dearly in 2014 — it cost Republicans dearly in 2006.
Which is to say, the Republican congressional leadership is probably despised for all the wrong reasons. The problem has never been a failure to symbolically defy President Obama. The great crime against conservatism in the Bush era, and the movement’s greatest modern obstacle, was a Republican Congress content to play a subservient role to a Republican president’s agenda.
More than merely finding a conservative replacement for Boehner, conservatives need to think about the long term. The real goal is one that’s much more difficult than simply replacing a Speaker or even ousting one. The focus must be on finding and electing dozens of new Republican candidates to Congress who will back up any Speaker who is willing to defy a straying President Bush, Fiorina or Rubio.
Scott Walker: He was once the on-paper frontrunner. But at the end of last week — amid all the other news — Walker was already an afterthought.
He was probably wise to drop out of the race before it became absolutely necessary, because that was where things were headed. But the big question is how everything went so terribly wrong for him.
The immediate cause of Walker’s demise was his decision to spend big on staff and run a campaign that wasn’t sufficiently focused on Iowa. But the reason this strategy could never work was his decision to pull out the weather vane on a number of key issues. Walker might have been able to overcome his relatively poor grasp of foreign policy or his weakness in dealing with the press, but his truly fatal decision was the one he made when he began pandering on issues like ethanol (he went from against to for) and immigration reform (for to against).
Walker’s advantage as a candidate had been that he had the record to prove his bonafides. No one could credibly claim he wasn’t a conservative, because he had walked the walk. He had done the hard part already. Republican primary voters would respect him for the battles he’d fought, even if they didn’t agree with him on every issue.
But that sort of respect evaporates when a candidate shows that he will say almost anything to get more people to like him. As Yogi Berra might have put it, people don’t always want to be told what they want to hear. The Walker who held off Wisconsin’s unions — the one who stuck to his guns and bravely suffered the consequences until achieving victory — just never showed up in the 2016 presidential race.
HillaryClintonHillary Clinton: Clinton is now at the point where she performs worse in a general election among female voters than Joe Biden would against any of the leading GOP candidates. And women, of course, are the great hope of her campaign — they are supposed to provide that extra oomph next November, her replacement for Obama’s unprecedented (and probably unrepeatable) support among black voters.
Democratic voters are beginning to worry, and accordingly Clinton’s nationwide primary lead has sagged to just seven points in what essentially looks like a three-way contest between her, Biden, and Bernie Sanders.
Biden will probably have the money he needs, having locked down many Obama donors. But he has to make up his mind soon. As we have noted previously, Bill Clinton was the last successful Democratic candidate to wait until October of the off-year to announce. Biden faces much more formidable obstacles this year than Clinton did in 1991 — to be precise, Biden faces Team Clinton. Perhaps Obama overcame her, but can this old white man do it?
Biden also needs to make sure that when he enters the race, he does so at Clinton’s expense. It’s no good for him just to split an anti-Clinton vote with Sanders — he has to erode her support and tough it out as Sanders wins the first few primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, as he might well do in a three-way race.
Clinton continues to look like a general election loser, at least assuming Donald Trump doesn’t win the GOP nomination. But don’t underestimate Team Clinton’s willingness to draw Biden blood in a fight to the bitter end. This is probably her last shot.
As we all know by now, John Beohner announced his resignation just as the Pope was about to do his speech at Ground Zero on Friday. The Briefing, Vol. III, Issue 31-
Boehner lame-duck: Conservatives mostly celebrated the announcement from Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, that he was retiring as Speaker of the House (and from Congress) at the end of October. More on what that means in a moment.
But if conservatives are going to be expressing emotion at the moment, it should probably instead be concern — especially about what Boehner could do before his term is over.
There is much talk now about who will succeed Boehner. But at this moment, there is no announced or likely candidate for Speaker who supports reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank. Even Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Boehner’s next-in-line and the putative establishment candidate for speaker, has already come out against it, and any prospective conservative challenger will surely oppose it as well.
Conservatives have complained a lot about Boehner’s speakership, often about things that he had little or no control over. But they should be positively alarmed to hear of Boehner’s aspirations to move Ex-Im reauthorization as part of his swan song. The other things Boehner hopes to move include a transportation bill and a budget deal that changes the current budget cap arrangements.
Ideology aside, it stands to reason that the guy who’s quitting next month should not be setting the agenda for years to come. But the spending caps and the expiration of Ex-Im are also among the biggest accomplishments conservatives can claim from the Boehner era.
paul ryancandidacy for Speaker. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has ruled himself out. So has House Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., who has said he will run for Majority Leader if Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., becomes Speaker. McCarthy will probably seek the position (he hasn’t announced yet), and there will probably be others as well — perhaps Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, or Pete Sessions, R-Texas.
Party members are expected, on the House floor, to back whomever the party chooses in advance in a closed-door vote. In that closed-door vote, as many ballots will be held as is necessary to produce a majority winner.
It’s too early to say how that battle will turn out, but it’s never too early to point out that it probably doesn’t matter as much as you think who replaces Boehner. What really matters is not who leads, but what the caucus will tolerate from him. The caucus is not going to change overnight, and so Boehner’s exit probably won’t have the effects that some conservatives seem to expect.
All other things being equal, it’s probably better to have someone in the slot who is ideologically reliable. But a more conservative Speaker or majority leader does not necessarily make for a more conservative House agenda.
Changes in party leadership matter mostly from a technical perspective rather than an ideological one. New leaders may be stronger or worse fundraisers — an important thing to remember, since that’s a huge part of the party leader’s job. They might be more or less competent at specific things, such as whipping votes or outmaneuvering the opposition. They may have broader visions (think Newt Gingrich) or narrower ones (think Dennis Hastert).
But party leaders cannot be counted on to change the people who elect them., i.e. the members of their caucus. The idea that a stronger, more conservative Speaker gets you a whole new House Republican caucus is widespread, but incorrect. All it really guarantees is a new set of House leaders that conservatives can be disappointed by later on.
A great leader can change the political character of a nation and its population. Presidents Reagan and Clinton can both be viewed in hindsight as leaders who successfully persuaded millions of people to change their politics. But the electors of a party leader are all seasoned politicians and members of a legislative body. They are less susceptible to a leader’s transformative charms and more precise about their own self-interest. Unlike the broader electorate, they can also dump their leader at any moment they wish — there’s no fixed term.
Parties adopted the caucus system and selected legislative leaders for purposes of efficiency. A group of 240 congressmen, left to act independently, will accomplish far less and find itself thwarted more often if its members do not mutually agree to entrust major decisions about tactics and legislative agenda to a smaller group. Members’ opinions will always vary and often clash, but when they move to the floor, everyone has to be on the same page. This is why members of both parties are always expected to vote with their party leadership on floor rules, even if they sometimes vote against them on legislation and amendments.
This all means that a legislative leader’s personal ideology matters less than one might expect. A more conservative Speaker or Majority Leader does not necessarily mean a more conservative House. In fact, a relatively moderate leader could steer his caucus in a far less moderate direction (take Harry Reid as an example of this for the Democrats). A relatively conservative leader can defang his party’s conservatives (take Tom DeLay as an example of this).
The methods and results of leadership are effects, not causes, of a caucus’s ideology. There is only one way to make leaders think and behave differently, and that is to elect more members who will prompt them to think differently.
To understand why this is so, consider it from the leaders’ perspective: They spend their every waking hour raising money for their members, and listening to complaints from each one that their priorities are being neglected or that their seats are in danger if they follow the party’s plan to vote for this or that. A leader who fails in keeping his constituents (his members) happy and getting them re-elected will not last long, and so he is always looking for ways to accommodate everyone as he can, and then demanding from them from when he has to.
Conservatives want one of their own as speaker now, but that is not a sufficient condition to bring about change in the House. Whoever becomes Speaker will have to face the same challenges and lead the same group of congressmen as Boehner, and as a result, his (or her) decisions will probably look a lot like the ones Boehner has been making.
This implies that most of Boehner’s decisions as Speaker since 2011 have been predetermined for him in the House. The great danger at this moment, as noted above, is what Boehner could try to do now that he has nothing to lose.
The bottom line: If you want a more conservative leader, it won’t do to choose a different guy with a better voting record or even a more confrontational disposition. Rather, you need to elect a larger and more conservative crop of congressmen, or otherwise change the calculation for everyone (for example, by electing a Republican president or a Senate supermajority).
This is the work of multiple consecutive elections — something Democrats accomplished when the elections of 2006 and 2008 empowered their liberal wing. Republicans, for all of the success they enjoyed in the Obama era, never managed to pull off two in a row, and so the desire for change remains pent-up and frustrated.
Ideally, the next Speaker will be a conservative who is eventually willing at times to do what Speaker Dennis Hastert never would — to work against a Republican president. Part of the reason public approval of Congress has been so low for so long is that congressional leaders have been institutional failures. Instead of working for what their voters believe in, they tend to play goalkeeper and protect a president of their own party from any embarrassment. This cost Harry Reid dearly in 2014 — it cost Republicans dearly in 2006.
Which is to say, the Republican congressional leadership is probably despised for all the wrong reasons. The problem has never been a failure to symbolically defy President Obama. The great crime against conservatism in the Bush era, and the movement’s greatest modern obstacle, was a Republican Congress content to play a subservient role to a Republican president’s agenda.
More than merely finding a conservative replacement for Boehner, conservatives need to think about the long term. The real goal is one that’s much more difficult than simply replacing a Speaker or even ousting one. The focus must be on finding and electing dozens of new Republican candidates to Congress who will back up any Speaker who is willing to defy a straying President Bush, Fiorina or Rubio.
Scott Walker: He was once the on-paper frontrunner. But at the end of last week — amid all the other news — Walker was already an afterthought.
He was probably wise to drop out of the race before it became absolutely necessary, because that was where things were headed. But the big question is how everything went so terribly wrong for him.
The immediate cause of Walker’s demise was his decision to spend big on staff and run a campaign that wasn’t sufficiently focused on Iowa. But the reason this strategy could never work was his decision to pull out the weather vane on a number of key issues. Walker might have been able to overcome his relatively poor grasp of foreign policy or his weakness in dealing with the press, but his truly fatal decision was the one he made when he began pandering on issues like ethanol (he went from against to for) and immigration reform (for to against).
Walker’s advantage as a candidate had been that he had the record to prove his bonafides. No one could credibly claim he wasn’t a conservative, because he had walked the walk. He had done the hard part already. Republican primary voters would respect him for the battles he’d fought, even if they didn’t agree with him on every issue.
But that sort of respect evaporates when a candidate shows that he will say almost anything to get more people to like him. As Yogi Berra might have put it, people don’t always want to be told what they want to hear. The Walker who held off Wisconsin’s unions — the one who stuck to his guns and bravely suffered the consequences until achieving victory — just never showed up in the 2016 presidential race.
HillaryClintonHillary Clinton: Clinton is now at the point where she performs worse in a general election among female voters than Joe Biden would against any of the leading GOP candidates. And women, of course, are the great hope of her campaign — they are supposed to provide that extra oomph next November, her replacement for Obama’s unprecedented (and probably unrepeatable) support among black voters.
Democratic voters are beginning to worry, and accordingly Clinton’s nationwide primary lead has sagged to just seven points in what essentially looks like a three-way contest between her, Biden, and Bernie Sanders.
Biden will probably have the money he needs, having locked down many Obama donors. But he has to make up his mind soon. As we have noted previously, Bill Clinton was the last successful Democratic candidate to wait until October of the off-year to announce. Biden faces much more formidable obstacles this year than Clinton did in 1991 — to be precise, Biden faces Team Clinton. Perhaps Obama overcame her, but can this old white man do it?
Biden also needs to make sure that when he enters the race, he does so at Clinton’s expense. It’s no good for him just to split an anti-Clinton vote with Sanders — he has to erode her support and tough it out as Sanders wins the first few primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, as he might well do in a three-way race.
Clinton continues to look like a general election loser, at least assuming Donald Trump doesn’t win the GOP nomination. But don’t underestimate Team Clinton’s willingness to draw Biden blood in a fight to the bitter end. This is probably her last shot.
Speaking of the Pope, what a 6 day span of time it was with him visiting the United States and Washington DC, New York City and Philadelphia.
That Ground Zero event was amazing on Friday. He then went up to Harlem and through Central Park before doing his sermon at the Madison Square Garden Friday night.
Saturday, he came down to Philly for a thing he did at Independence Mall and then there was a concert with the likes of Aretha Franklin in Center City and then on Sunday he did a huge mass at the Ben Franklin Parkway to over 800,000 attendees.
Pope Francis Ends Visit With Mass After Meeting Bishops and Inmates.
Pope Francis turned penitent and pastor Sunday on the final day of his visit to the United States, declaring himself “overwhelmed by shame” at the sexual violation of children by his clergy, embracing inmates at a local jail, urging young people to leave the loneliness of social media and bidding farewell with a huge downtown Mass.
Since arriving in the United States from Cuba on Tuesday during his 10-day tour, Francis, 78, had been met by large crowds — tens of thousands during a drive through Central Park in New York, in Madison Square Garden, at a canonization in Washington; perhaps several hundred thousand on Saturday night for a potpourri of prayer, musical performances and testimonials at a festival for the Vatican-sponsored World Meeting of Families.
The pope departed the United States at just after 7:30 p.m. local time, aboard an American Airlines charter jet.
After a week of big public statements — about fighting climate change, abolishing the death penalty, preserving religious liberty, welcoming immigrants — Francis turned his gaze on the Catholic Church with a forceful appeal for tolerance of different views. Some conservative prelates and commentators have not warmed to Francis, considering him inattentive to the church’s traditions and rules.
“The temptation to be scandalized by the freedom of God threatens the authenticity of faith,” the pope said, adding that it should be “vigorously rejected.”
Excluding people not considered “like us” is wrong, he said. “Not only does it block conversion to the faith; it is a perversion of the faith!”
Francis seemed to be suggesting that intolerance is a greater threat to the church than doctrinal impurity. “Our common house can no longer tolerate sterile divisions,” he said.
The security stranglehold on central Philadelphia cast doubt on whether the crowd would pass the million mark. Yet before the Mass, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims packed the long boulevard leading to the makeshift sanctuary. Waving Mexican, Argentine, Vatican and other flags from around the world, people cheered as the pope, standing in his open-sided popemobile, took a spin around the boulevard, blessed babies and, as the choir struck up with a “Hallelujah” chorus, climbed out to meet the throng pressed against the gates.
Before the Mass, Francis, a member of the Jesuit religious order, made an unscheduled stop at St. Joseph’s Univerity, a Jesuit school. Francis has made it a practice to visit with his Jesuit brothers on trips abroad. He blessed a newly-installed statue dedicated to ties between Catholics and Jews.
Sunday began somberly, with Francis meeting privately with a small group of victims of clergy sexual abuse.
“I am profoundly sorry that your innocence was violated by those who you trusted,” he told them, according to a transcript of his remarks released by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
He blamed some bishops for failing to protect the abuse victims, or even worse, violating them. He echoed such comments publicly before a group of bishops at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, pledging that all responsible would be “held accountable.”
Highlights of Pope Francis’ Remarks in the U.S.
“God weeps,” he said.
Advocates for the victims had deplored his previous comments on the trip, which seemed mainly to provide moral support for the clergy who suffered through the scandal. The advocates said on Sunday that the pope’s comments were merely a public relations move.
In his prepared remarks, Francis went on to note the modern world’s challenges to the church’s traditional idea of family — without mentioning gay unions, contraception or other difficult issues for the church.
The bishops there were taking part in the World Meeting of Families. As he has for much of the weekend here in Philadelphia, the pope delved into related matters — marriage, young people, friendship, relationships. Here, he wrestled with how “unprecedented changes” in society have affected family ties, telling the bishops that the church must live in “this concrete world.”
Francis adapted his critique of a consumer society, one of the themes he most forcefully pushes and that draws some of the sharpest criticism from free-marketers, to modern concepts of family. “We have turned our society into a huge multicultural showcase tied only to the taste of certain ‘consumers,’” he said.
Moments of Strength and Vulnerability
Francis also lamented how young people are delaying marriage. Departing from the text, the Argentine pope drew chuckles when he recounted exchanges he has had back home.
In Buenos Aires, he said, many women tell him, “ ‘My son is 30 or 34 years old and my son isn’t getting married, What do I do?’ And I say, ‘Don’t iron his shirts anymore.’ ”
And then he seemed to take on Facebook. Or at least social media.
He said society also resembled a “huge multicultural showcase” based on consumer tastes. “Running after the latest fad, accumulating ‘friends’ on one of the social networks, we get caught up in what contemporary society has to offer,” said Francis, who posts on Twitter as @pontifex.
Francis urged the bishops not to lament the good old days and dismiss young people as “hopelessly timid, weak, inconsistent.”
In a brief interview, Anthony Fisher, the archbishop of Sydney, Australia, responded to the pope’s speech to bishops on Sunday morning.
“I think it’s interesting that he was insisting that we had to rebuild or renew our covenant with families, suggesting that we maybe weren’t as close to families as we should be as bishops.”
Francis later went to the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, mainly an intake jail, which has roughly 2,800 inmates and is one of six jails in Philadelphia’s system. Some of the inmates had made Francis a hand-carved chair, which he thanked them for. Prison ministry has long been a special mission of Francis’. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he frequently visited jails. As pope, he also made visits to prisons in Italy and abroad, washing the feet of inmates at the Rebibbia prison in Rome in a Holy Thursday ritual in April.
“I am here as a pastor, but above all as a brother, to share your situation and to make it my own,” he told the roughly 100 men and women detainees, drawn at random, at Curran-Fromhold. “Jesus doesn’t ask us where we’ve been and he doesn’t ask us what we’ve done,” Francis said.
He said the Gospel story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples reflected the need in ancient times to soothe dusty, cut up feet, and used it to signal the possibility of redemption. “All of us need to be cleansed,” he said, adding, “It is painful when we see prison systems, which are not concerned to care for wounds, to soothe pain, to offer new possibilities,” he said.
As he spoke, burly inmates, some with shaved heads and dreadlocks and one with a tattoo crawling up his neck, watched intently. After the speech, Francis walked along the rows of inmates sitting in chairs, shaking hands, chatting, laying his hand on their foreheads and hugging a few. Ron Cianci, 55, who said he would be inside for about six months, said afterward that he had asked and had received a blessing. “Right now I feel elated, kind of a little bit high on life,” he said. Laurie Goodstein and Todd Heisler reported from Philadelphia, and Daniel J. Wakin from New York.
Pope Francis Holds Final Mass on Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
After meeting today with bishops, prisoners and victims of clerical sex abuse, Pope Francis is ending his final day in the U.S. with Mass on Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
As many as 1 million people were expected to attend, according to ABC station WPVI-TV in Philadelphia.
A woman cries as she listens to the papal Mass during the World Meeting of Families on Sept. 27, 2015 in Philadelphia.
This Mass concludes the World Meeting of Families Festival as well as Francis' historic U.S. trip. Francis arrived in Philadelphia on Saturday. He celebrated Mass at Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, addressed a group of immigrants at Independence Mall, and later attended the World Meeting of Families Festival.
During his final homily in the U.S. this afternoon, Francis said, "Love is shown by little things, by attention to small daily signs which make us feel at home."
"Faith grows when it is lived and shaped by love," he said. "That is why our families, our homes, are true domestic churches. They are the right place for faith to become life, and life to become faith."
Spectators pray as they listen to the papal Mass during the World Meeting of Families on Sept. 27, 2015 in Philadelphia.
Here is the full text of Francis' homily this afternoon as translated by the Holy See:
Today the word of God surprises us with powerful and thought-provoking images. Images which challenge us, but also stir our enthusiasm.
In the first reading, Joshua tells Moses that two members of the people are prophesying, speaking God’s word, without a mandate. In the Gospel, John tells Jesus that the disciples had stopped someone from casting out evil spirits in the name of Jesus. Here is the surprise: Moses and Jesus both rebuke those closest to them for being so narrow! Would that all could be prophets of God’s word! Would that everyone could work miracles in the Lord’s name!
Jesus encountered hostility from people who did not accept what he said and did. For them, his openness to the honest and sincere faith of many men and women who were not part of God’s chosen people seemed intolerable. The disciples, for their part, acted in good faith. But the temptation to be scandalized by the freedom of God, who sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike (Mt 5:45), bypassing bureaucracy, officialdom and inner circles, threatens the authenticity of faith. Hence it must be vigorously rejected.
Once we realize this, we can understand why Jesus’ words about causing “scandal” are so harsh. For Jesus, the truly “intolerable” scandal consists in everything that breaks down and destroys our trust in the working of the Spirit!
Our Father will not be outdone in generosity and he continues to scatter seeds. He scatters the seeds of his presence in our world, for “love consists in this, not that we have loved God but that he loved us” first (1 Jn 4:10). That love gives us a profound certainty: we are sought by God; he waits for us. It is this confidence which makes disciples encourage, support and nurture the good things happening all around them. God wants all his children to take part in the feast of the Gospel. Jesus says, “Do not hold back anything that is good, instead help it to grow!” To raise doubts about the working of the Spirit, to give the impression that it cannot take place in those who are not “part of our group”, who are not “like us”, is a dangerous temptation. Not only does it block conversion to the faith; it is a perversion of faith!
Faith opens a “window” to the presence and working of the Spirit. It shows us that, like happiness, holiness is always tied to little gestures. “Whoever gives you a cup of water in my name will not go unrewarded”, says Jesus (cf. Mk 9:41). These little gestures are those we learn at home, in the family; they get lost amid all the other things we do, yet they do make each day different. They are the quiet things done by mothers and grandmothers, by fathers and grandfathers, by children.
They are little signs of tenderness, affection and compassion. Like the warm supper we look forward to at night, the early lunch awaiting someone who gets up early to go to work. Homely gestures. Like a blessing before we go to bed, or a hug after we return from a hard day’s work. Love is shown by little things, by attention to small daily signs which make us feel at home. Faith grows when it is lived and shaped by love. That is why our families, our homes, are true domestic churches. They are the right place for faith to become life, and life to become faith.
Jesus tells us not to hold back these little miracles. Instead, he wants us to encourage them, to spread them. He asks us to go through life, our everyday life, encouraging all these little signs of love as signs of his own living and active presence in our world.
So we might ask ourselves: How are we trying to live this way in our homes, in our societies? What kind of world do we want to leave to our children (cf. Laudato Si’, 160)? We cannot answer these questions alone, by ourselves. It is the Spirit who challenges us to respond as part of the great human family. Our common house can no longer tolerate sterile divisions. The urgent challenge of protecting our home includes the effort to bring the entire human family together in the pursuit of a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change (cf. ibid., 13). May our children find in us models and incentives to communion! May our children find in us men and women capable of joining others in bringing to full flower all the good seeds which the Father has sown!
Pointedly, yet affectionately, Jesus tells us: “If you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Lk 11:13). How much wisdom there is in these few words! It is true that, as far as goodness and purity of heart are concerned, we human beings don’t have much to show! But Jesus knows that, where children are concerned, we are capable of boundless generosity. So he reassures us: if only we have faith, the Father will give us his Spirit.
We Christians, the Lord’s disciples, ask the families of the world to help us! How many of us are here at this celebration! This is itself something prophetic, a kind of miracle in today’s world. Would that we could all be prophets! Would that all of us could be open to miracles of love for the sake of all the families of the world, and thus overcome the scandal of a narrow, petty love, closed in on itself, impatient of others!
And how beautiful it would be if everywhere, even beyond our borders, we could appreciate and encourage this prophecy and this miracle! We renew our faith in the word of the Lord which invites faithful families to this openness. It invites all those who want to share the prophecy of the covenant of man and woman, which generates life and reveals God!
People begin to fill up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway for a Papal Mass in Philadelphia, Sept. 27, 2015.
Anyone who wants to bring into this world a family which teaches children to be excited by every gesture aimed at overcoming evil – a family which shows that the Spirit is alive and at work – will encounter our gratitude and our appreciation. Whatever the family, people, region, or religion to which they belong!
May God grant to all of us, as the Lord’s disciples, the grace to be worthy of this purity of heart which is not scandalized by the Gospel!
And, last, Royal Dutch Shell will cease exploration in Arctic waters off Alaska's coast following disappointing results from an exploratory well backed by billions in investment and years of work. The announcement was a huge blow to Shell, which was counting on offshore drilling in Alaska to help it drive future revenue. Environmentalists had tried repeatedly to block the project and welcomed the news. Shell has spent upward of $7 billion on Arctic offshore exploration including $2.1 billion in 2008 for leases in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast where an exploratory well about 80 miles off shore drilled to 6,800 feet but yielded disappointing results
Wow. What a Morning So Far. It Looks like we will get rain this week. Maybe by Wednesday in new York and in New Jersey but regardless of it, Please stay in touch.
