A former Nevada Assemblywoman and onetime candidate for the state's lieutenant governor, Lucy Flores, said on Friday that former Vice President Joe Biden kissed her without permission while backstage at her campaign rally in 2014.
Writing about the experience for The Cut, Flores says Biden approached her from behind, put his hands on her shoulders, and kissed the back of her head. She called the incident "demeaning and disrespectful," and said it made her feel "powerless."
"I'm not suggesting that Biden broke any laws," wrote Flores, saying she decided to come forward with the story despite concern it would be dismissed as minor or politically motivated.
Biden has faced criticism for what some call inappropriate contact with women over the years. Biden, who is reportedly on the brink of announcing a run for president, did not comment on Flores' recollection.
Read more at The Cut. Summer Meza
The second and final presidential debate was supposed to have a section devoted to national security, and perhaps that's what a few unilluminating questions about North Korea and foreign election meddling were intended to be. Or perhaps, as I first assumed given the topical order, that section was cut for time. Either way, this bare minimum of attention to foreign policy is inexcusable for an examination of the two candidates running to be commander-in-chief in a country addicted to perpetual war.
Our Constitution assigns power to initiate military conflict to Congress, and Congress, as a matter of habit, does its best to abdicate that responsibility in favor of unaccountable executive war-making. The Constitution also gives the president authority to prosecute wars already underway. As it happens, we have several.
The war in Afghanistan is our nation's longest ever, now in its 19th year and long since lost to any sort of American "victory." It was given no substantive attention tonight, nor was it discussed in the first debate.
The war in Iraq was also not addressed. That failed regime change project has cost us about $2 trillion, created the power vacuum that led to the rise of the Islamic State, and has a civilian death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Too boring for a debate, perhaps?
Yemen, where the United States is enabling the world's worst humanitarian crisis, was ignored. So too recent (and in some cases ongoing) U.S. military interventions in Syria, Libya, Somalia, and more than two dozen locations in North and Sub-Saharan Africa.
These are literally matters of war and peace, life and death. They are also matters in which one of these men soon will have considerable discretion to leave or stay the course of two decades of inhumane and counterproductive foreign policy. That discretion requires interrogation. It didn't get it tonight. Bonnie Kristian