Episode #75: Teflon for Clinton, Velcro for Christie

Another day, another presidential candidate. Actually, make that two days, and three candidates. The Republican field of White House hopefuls doubled to six this week, as Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard executive; Ben Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon; and Mike Huckabee, the ex-governor of Arkansas, all made their bids official. One Republican who has yet to declare, Chris Christie, got some bad news last week when two of his former aides were indicted on charges they deliberately blocked traffic lanes approaching the George Washington Bridge. Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University, says that the charges don't bode well for the governor. There are tons of allegations swirling around Hillary Clinton. That's a sentence that has been written over and over for the past two-plus decades. Ron Fournier of the National Journal lays out the ethics case against the former First Lady. Matt Crenson, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, surveys his beloved city of Baltimore and talks about the political winners and losers in the aftermath of Freddie Gray's death. He also offers analysis of how the eight years Martin O'Malley served as mayor of Baltimore might play in his expected bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. It's been 45 years since Ohio National Guard soldiers opened fire on student demonstrators on the campus of Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. The demonstrations, a reaction to President Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia in 1970, remain a vivid memory in the nation's long war in Vietnam. A bizarre tale out of Texas -- that the activities of federal troops training in the Lone Star State grew so suspicious to some residents -- are they planning to install Martial Law? -- that Governor Greg Abbott actually had his own Texas Guard monitor what the federal troops were doing. Patrick Svitek of the Texas Tribune walks us through the land of the paranoid. And with Mother's Day coming up on Sunday, we celebrate Yvonne Brathwaite Burke. A California Democrat elected to Congress in 1972, she gave birth to a daughter in 1973 -- the first member of Congress ever to do so. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Photo via flickr user Michael Vadon / CC BY-SA 2.0