As Americans prepare to celebrate Presidents’ Day, they rate John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan the best of recent chief executives, according to a new poll conducted by Ipsos in conjunction with the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

The Center for Politics and Ipsos collaborated to survey Americans’ views of modern presidents and asked them to rate the dozen presidents who have served since the early 1950s. The strong showings by Kennedy and Reagan reaffirm a previous Reuters-Ipsos/Center for Politics* survey from May 2017 that found them both with similarly high marks.

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, the two most recent Democratic presidents, round out the top four, while the current president, Donald Trump, finds himself near the bottom of the ratings.

Obama, Reagan, and Kennedy received the most support from respondents when asked which recent president they wish was serving in the White House right now.....

LOS ANGELES — Amanda Renteria, a former top campaign aide to Hillary Clinton, has filed paperwork to run for governor of California.

The unexpected filing, which came without any announcement, puzzled many Democrats in a state where a large field of higher profile Democrats have been running — and raising millions of dollars — for more than a year.


Renteria, who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. House seat in California’s Central Valley in 2014, has worked most recently as an aide to California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. She did not respond to a request for comment, and following news of her filing Wednesday, she wrote on Twitter, “For questions coming in right now: I am still serving as the Chief of Operations at the California Department of Justice."

But within hours Becerra told the Los Angeles Times that Renteria was stepping down from her post to run for governor.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren directly addressed her Native American heritage in a speech to the National Congress of American Indians on Wednesday in Washington — dealing head-on with claims that have frequently been ridiculed by President Trump and his supporters.

In her speech, the Massachusetts Democrat rebuked Trump’s persistent mockery of her as “Pocahontas” and spoke in greater detail about her family’s history.

“I’ve noticed that every time my name comes up, President Trump likes to talk about Pocahontas,” she told the crowd, according to prepared text of her speech. “So I figured, let’s talk about Pocahontas.”

Warren spoke first, at length, about the real Pocahontas, and how the Native American woman’s life story — particularly her marriage to a Jamestown settler — was twisted into a “fable . . . used to bleach away the stain of genocide.”

Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose claims about Donald Trump’s ties with Russia hold center stage in Washington right now, drives Republicans crazy. They have recommended that the Department of Justice open a criminal investigation into his work. They released a formerly classified memo by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) that vilifies him — and now they are holding back a Democratic brief that tries to correct the record. Their Fox News minions have promised damning new revelations about Steele’s perfidy on a near-weekly basis. (Sebastian Gorka called the Nunes memo “one hundred times bigger” than the causes of the American Revolution — hyperbole that seems to have embarrassed even his friends.)

Yet, try as they might, Steele continues to haunt them. You sense it in the tone of frustration and anxiety. “There’s nothing to see here,” they keep insisting. And insisting. And insisting.

What is it about Steele that possesses them so? Could it be that his findings from the summer of 2016 — when the world was still wondering why Trump kept saying such nice things about Russia’s Vladimir Putin — proved so extraordinarily prescient?

Long before the U.S. intelligence community arrived at its conclusion that the Russians were trying to influence the presidential election, Steele had already sussed out the basic ingredients of the campaign. In June 2016, he already knew about ties between the Kremlin and Trump aides (specifically Carter Page and Paul Manafort), and he knew that Russian hackers had stolen documents from the Democratic National Committee that they planned to use against Hillary Clinton. Former CIA agent John Sipher has noted that several of Steele’s early assertions “turned out to be stunningly accurate.”

Last Friday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) rebuked her Republican colleagues for recommending the criminal probe of Steele. She accused them of trying to undermine the FBI and the investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and of attacking Steele as a way of “deflecting attention from collusion and obstruction of justice investigations.” And then she added, almost as an afterthought: “Not a single revelation in the Steele dossier has been refuted.” Ouch!

As climate-change lawsuits against the oil industry mount, Exxon Mobil Corp. is taking a bare-knuckle approach rarely seen in legal disputes: It’s going after the lawyers who are suing it.

The company has targeted at least 30 people and organizations, including the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, hitting them with suits, threats of suits or demands for sworn depositions. The company claims the lawyers, public officials and environmental activists are “conspiring” against it in a coordinated legal and public relations campaign.

Exxon has even given that campaign a vaguely sinister-sounding name: “The La Jolla playbook.” According to the company, about two dozen people hatched a strategy against it at a meeting six years ago in an oceanfront cottage in La Jolla, Calif.

"It’s an aggressive move,” said Howard Erichson, an expert in complex litigation and a professor at Fordham University School of Law in New York. “Does Exxon really need these depositions or is Exxon seeking the depositions to harass mayors and city attorneys into dropping their lawsuits?”

The efforts by President Trump to keep America white are getting increasingly dark.

Make no mistake: What’s happening on Capitol Hill this week, at Trump’s behest, is nothing other than an attempt by Republicans to slow the inexorable march toward that point at midcentury when the United States becomes a majority-minority nation.

In the long run, they are merely putting a finger in the dike. But in the short term, the Trump-backed immigration proposal, combined with other recent moves by the administration and its allies — support for voter suppression, gerrymandering and various other schemes to disenfranchise minority voters — could extend the white hegemony that brought Trump to power and sustains Republicans.

For ages, Republicans said that their beef was with illegal immigrants and that legal immigrants should be embraced and welcomed. No longer. In the immigration fight on the Hill, there is broad bipartisan consensus to legalize the “dreamers” — illegal immigrants brought here as children — and to fortify border security. The dispute is really about the Trump proposal to rein in legal immigration by undoing the family-based approach, in which immigrants petition to bring over immediate family, that has always been at the heart of U.S. immigration.

Though details aren’t yet known, estimates are that the legislation would cut legal immigration, currently 1.1 million per year, by 300,000 to 500,000 annually. A previous version of the “chain migration” proposal by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) would have cut legal immigration by half a million a year, by their own account.