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Jeb Bush says ‘anchor babies,’ Hillary Clinton responds on social media

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Welcome to Trail Guide, your daily tour along the road to the White House. It's Wednesday, Aug. 19, and this is what we're watching:

  • Jeb Bush , Chris Christie and other Republicans talked education reform and Common Core at a New Hampshire forum.
  • Hillary Rodham Clinton 's first issue-focused TV ads promise to " reshuffle" the deck for the middle class.
  • Clinton on Tuesday tried a new approach to deflecting questions on her email server: humor .
  • Scott Walker  is trying to distance himself from the establishment by aligning himself with Donald Trump .
  • What's more fun than Donald Trump in a debate? Donald Trump at a town hall. He'll fielded questions from voters in New Hampshire.
  • And the state is crowded. Bush,   John Kasich , Carly Fiorina and Christie  also held town halls.

Donald Trump sees no problem with using the term 'anchor baby'

Hillary Clinton responds to Jeb Bush's 'anchor babies' reference

As the debate over immigration continues to rise in the Republican presidential primary, Jeb Bush's comment about "anchor babies" led Hillary Rodham Clinton to weigh in on social media on Wednesday.

When talking on a conservative radio show about birthright citizenship, the former Florida governor said more needs to be done to prevent people from abusing the 14th Amendment.

“If there's abuse, if people are bringing -- pregnant women are coming in to have babies simply because they can do it, then there ought to be greater enforcement,” Bush said . “That's [the] legitimate side of this. Better enforcement so that you don't have these, you know, 'anchor babies,' as they're described, coming into the country.”

The term "anchor babies" is widely viewed as derogatory name for young people born in the United States whose parents are in the country illegally.

In response to a tweet from Politico about Bush's "anchor babies" comment, Clinton chimed in, saying "they're called babies."

Debate over the 14th Amendment has gained traction in recent days since billionaire businessman Donald Trump released his immigration plan, calling for an end to birthright citizenship.

His plan would require a constitutional amendment. Since the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, anyone born in the U.S. is considered a citizen.

Jesse Ventura on Trump border plan: 'I do not want to live with walls around my country'

Jesse Ventura says he's thrilled about the Donald Trump candidacy but objects to one thing: that immigration policy of his.

The unconventional former Minnesota governor says in a new online video that he thinks a wall across the southern border would make the U.S. too much "like a prison."

The opinions come courtesy of "Off the Grid&" and the folks at Ora.tv, who say the Ventura show features the professional wrestler-turned-governor-turned-commentator “as we like him — bold, brazen and bare-knuckled.”

Taking the knuckles in this latest episode are Trump and his proposal to make immigrants pay for a permanent wall on the southern border.

Ventura, who has said he spends half the year in Mexico, thinks that's a bad idea.

As one who “crosses that border more often than probably most people do,” he asks, “do we really want to put a wall around our country?”

“We stand for freedom, and yet we want to put up a wall that makes the U.S. look like a prison?” he says. “Always remember this, people: Walls are a two-way street. Not only will they keep people out, they will also keep you in.

“I do not want to live with walls around my country,” he says. “I do not want to live like I live inside East Berlin.”

I think we've fully strayed off topic.
Spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown, after reporters asked about Donald Trump, per Los Angeles Times' Chris Megerian

Hillary Clinton team says she'll get past the whole email flap, and voters don't care anyway

A top aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton says the campaign expects to “turn the page” on talk about the former Secretary of State's private email server in the coming weeks, as voters take the conversation back to topics they care more about.

Voters haven't been raising the subject — at least not in Clinton's campaign events, communications director Jen Palmieri said.

Clinton has done lots of town hall meetings in New Hampshire and Iowa, Palmieri told MSNBC, but “she's actually never gotten one question about it.”

The media may have a lot of questions, Palmieri told MSNBC, “but voters don't.”

“We know that we'll turn the page in September,” she said, adding that Clinton has “got big plans for talking about the economy.”

The dismissal came on the heels of the Clinton news conference on Tuesday in which she tried a little humor in an attempt to deal with the email flap.

Asked whether she had wiped her private email server clean when she deactivated the server, Clinton on Tuesday jokingly asked, “with a cloth or something?” She doesn't know how that all works, she added.

But the lighthearted answer has only raised more fuss, one more sign that the matter is probably far from over. House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office on Wednesday issued an analysis of the news conference, saying it was full of “whoppers.”

If Clinton really wanted the American people to see everything she did at the State Department, the analysis asks, “why did she turn over nothing — nada — when she left office as Secretary of State, failing to comply with official government policy?”

Friends of Clinton insist that the email matter is being badly overblown.

In an interview also on MSNBC, longtime Clinton friend and advisor James Carville belittled media coverage of the controversy as nothing more than “foolishness.”

“I'm having to come out of my vacation to deal with this kind of stupidity,” Carville said, “and Hillary's going to be just fine.”

Josh Groban sings all your Donald Trump favorites

Donald Trump's tweets speak for themselves, but artist Josh Groban makes them sing in this clip from the Jimmy Kimmel show:

As Kimmel said by way of introduction to last night's infomercial, if you want to be taken seriously, strong lyrics are a must.

In the faux-promo for the faux-album “The Best Tweets of Donald Trump,” Groban croons a selection with these highlights from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed:

“I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke,” Trump tweeted in October of 2012.

Donald Trump's tweets will "make you laugh, they'll make you cry,” Groban says in his pitch. “But mostly they'll make you cry.”

He promises an album with all the Trump controversy ( "we need global warming" ), all the self-promotion ( "My fragrance 'Success' is flying off the shelves at Macy's, the perfect Christmas gift" ) and all the contradiction ( "Macy's stores suck and they are bad for USA" ).

All are funny without being sung, but sometimes the joke is entirely in the delivery: "I am officially running for president of the United States, #MakeAmericaGreatAgain ."

Not available in stores.

Republicans to put their education plans in the spotlight

Education advocates on Wednesday will press Republicans on the details of their plans to improve K-12 education at an event that is likely to put the spotlight on the party's raucous fight over the national standards known as the Common Core.

Six GOP contenders, including Jeb Bush, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, will sit down with journalist-turned-education activist Campbell Brown at a forum hosted by her news site, The 74, and the American Federation for Children , a group that advocates for what it calls “educational choice” reforms.

Both groups say they're eager to get the candidates on the record on a full slate of issues -- including teacher tenure, unions, vouchers and reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. But it's the Common Core standards -- and GOP candidates' shifting positions on the standards -- that will likely cause sparks to fly.

The curriculum standards were developed by state and local officials and experts in an effort to create minimum achievement levels for students. But after the Obama administration offered financial incentives to states that adopted such broad standards, Common Core quickly became a stand-in for decades-long resistance to federal involvement in education.

Republican governors who had backed the standards quickly found themselves on the opposite side of an issue from key parts of their party's base, including evangelicals, tea partiers and small government advocates. That group included White House aspirants Christie, Kasich, Bush and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. In the lead up to launching their bids, Jindal and Christie have disavowed Common Core, while Bush and Kasich have held their positions.

For Bush, who considers education reforms he enacted in Florida as a core credential, the issue has become a test of his ability to win over conservatives in the ranks -- or if not to win them over, then at least contain their dissent.

Hillary Clinton unveils new ad in Iowa and New Hampshire

Hillary Rodham Clinton is launching her first issue-based advertisement of the Democratic primary campaign, vowing to "get that deck reshuffled" for the middle class.

The 30-second television ad, set to air beginning Wednesday in Iowa and New Hampshire, follows two largely biographical spots the campaign debuted this month. They described how Clinton's bid for the presidency was motivated by her mother's difficult upbringing.

The new spot, part of the same previously announced $1-million ad buy, includes another reference to Clinton's mother but focuses on the gap between the middle class and the nation's top earners:

"When you see that you've got CEOs making 300 times what the average worker's making, you know the deck is stacked in favor of those at the top," Clinton says. "I want it to be back where it was when I came of age: where my mom, who never got to go to college, could see her daughter go to law school.

"We need to have people believing that their work will be rewarded. So I'm going to be doing everything I can to try to get that deck reshuffled so being middle class means something again," the ad concludes.

In a major economic speech last month, Clinton said that boosting middle-class wages was the "defining economic issue of our time," and outlined a plan to overhaul the tax code, promote corporate profit-sharing and advance paid family leave.

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