International Women’s Day Properly Observed, Thanks To Clinton, Obama
Thanks to the efforts of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, International Women’s Day, which marks the 100th anniversary this year, finally gets a credible, proper observation from the United States.
Today, governments and non-profit organizations around the world, mark the 100th anniversary of  International Women’s Day, begun in 1911, inspired by the work of German socialist and  feminist Clara Zeitkin, a former member of the German Reichstag, who died in exile in Moscow in 1933. It was discrimination against women that brought out over one million women–and men–from the socialist movement onto the streets of Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on March 19, 1911 that began this observation.
Many Russian women activists and feminists, who participated in the Russian revolution in 1917 played a key role in establishing observation of International Women’s Day in the Soviet Bloc countries that eventually spread to countries outside the Eastern Bloc. In 1975, during the UN Year of Women, International Women’s Day was designated to be observed on March 8.
As an American woman feminist, who has worked in a dozen countries and traveled to at least 40 countries during my lifetime, I have spent many International Womens’ Days abroad in former communist countries that celebrate this day to great fanfare as a tribute to the political and economic advances sought and achieved by women around the world. But most Americans know very little about International Women’s Day and our government has rarely taken a considerable moment to recognize the achievements of women in America and around the world on this day, but that has changed dramatically with the election of President Barack Obama.
To his credit, President Obama declared March to be National Women’s History Month and recognized the significance of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day in his proclamation, but more importantly he spelled out that empowering women and girls is a policy priority:
My Administration has elevated the rights of women and girls abroad as a critical aspect of our foreign and national security policy. Empowering women across the globe is not simply the right thing to do, it is also smart foreign policy. This knowledge is reflected in the National Security Strategy of the United States, which recognizes that countries are more peaceful and prosperous when their female citizens enjoy equal rights, equal voices, and equal opportunities.
His astute nomination of Hillary Clinton to be the nation’s top diplomat has been the driving force behind the Administration’s elevated priority of supporting women and girls, especially abroad. Clinton, who declared in Beijing in 1995 as then-First Lady of the U.S. that “Human Rights are Women’s Rights, and Women’s Rights are Human Rights”–galvanized women across the globe and has enabled Clinton to become argubly the foremost powerful advocate on behalf of women and girls in the world today.
I happened to be working in Haiti and later in The Gambia when Clinton made THE speech in Beijing and I will never forget how enthralled and enthusiastic women’s reactions were to it around the world. It was an electrifying moment.
This week, Clinton, as Secretary of State, is leveraging her position and power to the maximum by putting substance to this paradigm-shifting three-pronged agenda.
(Compare this year’s observation to one just seven years ago, as then-president George W. Bush’s actions amid his $1.5 billion “Healthy Marriage Initiative” were protested on International Women’s Day.)
Yesterday, at the State Department she  announced a new program entitled  “100 Years, 100 Women, Empowering Women and Girls Through International Exchanges” that brought together 92 women from six different continents to the State Department, a first of 26 similar events that will take place over the coming year. These women will travel the U.S. sharing their experiences, while learning about America. Today, she and First Lady Michelle Obama, presided over the 2011 International Women of Courage Awards ceremony  recognizing the courage and work of 10 significant women, including Roza Otunbayeva, the first woman President of the Kyrgyz Republic and of a Central Asian state.
The third leg of this comprehensive policy includes a public-private partnership with Goldman Sachs called “10,000 Women” which aims to train 10,000 underserved women around the world with business and management education through a five-year investment. Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman, announced at the State Department ceremony today that its program would achieve education of 5,000 women by summer.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2XIineVXCAc%3Ffs%3D1%26hl%3Den_US
Clinton, who has said publicly on many occasions that she will leave government service at the end of Obama’s first term to work on advancing the rights and interests of women and girls, spells out her vision and goals in comments made yesterday:
So for me, investing in women and girls is smart. It pays off. It’s not only the right thing to do – and I see some heads nodding – because you’ve seen the differences in the lives around you, in your own life as to what it means for someone to believe in a girl or a woman and to give her the tools to make the most out of her own life. But it’s also true that this is important if you want to alleviate hunger – you teach women, who are most of the farmers in the world how to get more harvest out of their hard work. If you want to alleviate poverty, you give women access to credit and opportunities to actually start to generate income for themselves and their families. And you have been working in these and so many areas. You are established and emerging leaders from 92 countries. You are leaders from the academic world, from business, from civil society, from the media. You are pioneers and you are fearless supporters of those who need a champion.
Obama and Clinton’s leadership is critical to adopting policies and programs that will effectively empower women and girls–advancing their human rights–will stabilize transitional democracies and by providing education and job opportunities to women, will help lift families and communities out of poverty. Across the board today in international development funding agencies, the professionals know that by prioritizing the empowerment of women and girls, the investment will pay off exponential dividends in creating more stable societies and dynamic economies. Countries can not achieve a good standard of living, by leaving more than 50 percent of their population behind. Much work remains to be done.
Former President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, said today that there has been “remarkable progress” since International Women’s Day was first celebrated a century ago. Bachelet, the new director of UN Women, the UN’s agency for gender equality and empowerment of women, which was officially launched in January this year, adds that gender equality remains a distant goal because women still suffer widespread discrimination and lack political and economic clout.
According to Clinton, today, 850 million women and girls are alive between the ages of 10 and 24 years old, the largest generation of women in the history of our civilization. Hillary Clinton, who declared women’s rights are human rights 16 years ago in Beijing, has miles to go before she leaves this important work to others.
Happy International Women’s Day!
Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, who teaches about human rights in Eurasia and is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi worked internationally for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.
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One thousand employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation sifting through thousands of pages of the Epstein files were instructed to flag any mentions of President Donald Trump, according to Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee.
“According to information my office received,” Senator Durbin wrote in a letter (below) to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday, “you…pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel…on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”
“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” Durbin charged.
The files are from the criminal investigation into the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of child sex offenses.
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In his letter, Senator Durbin also posed a series of more than a dozen questions to Bondi. Among them:
“Have you personally reviewed all files in DOJ’s possession related to Jeffrey Epstein?”
“The records DOJ released on February 27 did not include a client list. Why did you
publicly claim on February 21 that the client list was ‘sitting on my desk right now to review’?”
“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?”
“Please list all political appointees and senior DOJ officials involved in the decision to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned.”
“What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”
CNBC reported that “Durbin asked the Justice Department and FBI to explain what his office called ‘apparent discrepancies’ regarding handling of the Epstein files and findings from a Justice Department memo.”
In his four-page letter, Durbin also wrote, “in 2002, Mr. Trump said of Mr. Epstein, ‘I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.’ Just yesterday, it was reported that the Department previously reviewed a ‘leather-bound album’ comprised of dozens of letters from Mr. Epstein’s friends in celebration of his 50th birthday in 2003.”
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“The letters were collected by Mr. Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell and included one from President Trump that allegedly ‘contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker … and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist.'”
“Despite tens of thousands of personnel hours reviewing and re-reviewing these Epstein- related records over the course of two weeks in March, it took DOJ more than three additional months to officially find there is ‘no incriminating ‘client list,’ and the memorandum with this finding includes no mention of the whistleblower or additional documents, the existence of which you publicly claimed on February 27.”
Read a copy of Senator Durbin’s letter below or at this link.
Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino have made a mess of the Epstein files.
It’s time to clear it up once and for all for the American people. pic.twitter.com/WQw13gmf1F
— Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryDems) July 18, 2025
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Image via Reuters
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after cutting 1,300 employees last week, is now ordering diplomats to not comment on foreign elections and internal affairs—limiting official communications to congratulating the declared winner.
“Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats not to comment on the legitimacy or fairness of foreign elections, breaking with decades of American diplomatic practice,” The Daily Beast reports. In a memo, the Secretary stated that U.S. missions will no longer issue election-related statements unless there is a “clear and compelling” foreign policy reason for doing so.
“Diplomatic personnel writing official messages are instead instructed to ask themselves: ‘Would the President say this?'”
The memo, seen by Reuters, says the messages “should be brief, focused on congratulating the winning candidate and, when appropriate, noting shared foreign policy interests.”
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The memo makes clear, based on President Trump’s remarks, that the U.S. will “pursue partnerships with countries wherever our strategic interests align,” regardless of democratic values.
U.S. promotion of human rights, democracy, and press freedoms has traditionally been a “core foreign policy objective,” Reuters reported.
“Under Trump, the administration has increasingly moved away from the promotion of democracy and human rights, largely seeing it as interference in another country’s affairs.”
The Washington Post adds that for “decades, the United States has offered judgments on whether elections were conducted in a free or fair matter [sic], a judgment that can have significant impact in countries.”
“Scholars have accused the United States of democratic backsliding since Trump, who refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, returned to office this year.
President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended right-wing and far-right political groups, including Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which reportedly has ties to right-wing extremists.
Secretary Rubio in May ignited a “spat” with Germany’s foreign ministry when it “hit back…after he criticized the decision to classify the Alternative for Germany party as a ‘right-wing extremist’ organization,” the Associated Press reported at the time.
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Image via Reuters
After weeks of mounting scrutiny and days of growing scandal surrounding President Donald Trump—culminating Thursday night with a bombshell Wall Street Journal exposé revealing a “bawdy,” innuendo-laced letter he reportedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday—the White House appears to be circling the wagons, as allies hit the airwaves in his defense.
On Friday, Republican former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy appeared on Fox News, where he twice defended Donald Trump as “the most transparent president.” But it was his successor’s remarks that drew the most attention.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson made a rare appearance on CNBC Friday morning (video below), defending Donald Trump and telling viewers he had just spoken with the President, whom he said denied the Wall Street Journal’s report.
“The President and I talked about that ridiculous allegation this morning,” Johnson told “Squawk Box” host Joe Kernen. “He said, it’s patently absurd. He’s never drawn such a picture. He’s never thought of drawing such a picture.”
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Johnson relayed that Trump told him, “Did you see the language of this bogus supposed communication or card or something I supposedly sent to Epstein?”
“I don’t talk like that, I don’t think like that,” Trump told him.
“They’re literally making things up,” Johnson insisted, despite the Journal reporting that Trump had threatened to sue if it published the damning missive—a threat he has now made public.
“And he’s so frustrated by it, and he’s gonna wind up, I think, suing some of the media outlets that, uh, that have put all this out there because they informed them that it was totally contrived,” Johnson continued.
He called Trump “the most maligned and attacked political figure in the history of American politics,” before adding, “he’s also the most resilient.”
Then Johnson slipped in a startling claim.
“And you see at the same time, his approval ratings are skyrocketing — CNN had a story, I think, a day or two ago. He was at 90% approval rating. There’s never been a president that high,” Johnson said.
Only one president has ever received an overall approval rating of 90%: George W. Bush, just after the 9/11 terror attacks. Johnson may have been claiming 90% among the GOP base, but if so, he did not say that.
According to CNN, the outlet Johnson cited, Trump’s approval rating is less than half the number he quoted.
“In the CNN poll, Trump’s approval rating was largely unchanged from the spring, at 42%. But less than a year after an election that turned in part on frustration about the cost of groceries and housing, only 37% of those polled say Trump is concentrating on the right issues — down 6 points from March.”
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CNN added that Trump “seems to be doing the opposite of what most voters want. His biggest-ever domestic triumph — the just-passed ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act,’ which contains much of his second-term domestic agenda — is opposed by 61% of Americans. And his approval among independents is an anemic 32%.”
Critics blasted Johnson.
Author James Surowiecki, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, responded to Johnson’s “90%” remark:
“The ease with which Johnson lies is staggering. The 90% is Trump’s approval rating with Republicans, not with voters as a whole. (And no, 90% is not even an all-time high approval rating for a president with his own party – Obama hit 95% with Dems.)”
Michael A. Cohen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies (CSS), also responded to Johnson’s “90%” claim, writing that Johnson is “telling obvious lies to soothe the ego of our child-like President …. The lack of self-respect with these guys never ceases to amaze.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
Mike Johnson: “The president and I talked about that ridiculous allegation this morning. He said it’s patently absurd. He’s never drawn such a picture. He’s never thought of drawing such a picture. And he said, ‘Did you see the language of this bogus supposed communication?’ He… pic.twitter.com/pLdh8Kpjah
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 18, 2025
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‘War Is Peace’: White House’s Navarro Mocked Over Claim Tariffs Are ‘Tax Cuts’
‘He’s So Frustrated’: Johnson Defends Trump Over Explosive Epstein Birthday Letter
‘Would the President Say This?’: Rubio Demands Diplomats Echo Trump
FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Says in Scathing Letter to Bondi
FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Says in Scathing Letter to Bondi
‘Would the President Say This?’: Rubio Demands Diplomats Echo Trump
‘He’s So Frustrated’: Johnson Defends Trump Over Explosive Epstein Birthday Letter
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