Morning News Round-up

The founder and CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, has stepped back and now says that he regrets comparing the Affordable Health Care Act to "fascism".

Coming as a shock, no doubt, this comments provoked outrage among many of the grocery chain's customers, many of whom have called for a boycott.

"I regret using that word now because it's got so much baggage attached to it," Mackey told HuffPost Live on Thursday. "Of course, I was just using the standard dictionary definition."

Actually, I think it's pretty clear that he regrets using the word now because many of his customers have called for a boycott.  As for the baggage attached to it, like, oh, say, millions of deaths, fascism has more baggage attached to it than a Samsonite warehouse.  It was a reprehensible thing to say.  Of course, I'm just using the standard dictionary definition.

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A Public Policy Polling report shows that in head-to-head match-ups in the state of Florida against Florida politicians Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton leads both of them.  She's ahead of former-Governor Bush by 5 points and Senator Rubio by 4 points.  She also leads all other potential Democratic challengers in a mythical Florida primary.

Mythical is a good choice of words.  Forgetting for a moment that the election that the poll is referring to is four years away, anyone who looks at these results as showing Secretary of State Clinton as an invincible steamroller among Democrats is best served to recall that that is precisely how she was perceived as little as one year before the nomination for the 2008 election.  And then a first-term senator, Barack Obama, got into the race.  How did that work out for her?

Clearly she's the "front-runner favorite" right now among Democrats.  And clearly she could even win the election.  But just as clearly, nothing is that clear.

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Best quote of the day.  Speaking to the U.S. Conference of Mayors to convince them to get behind the president's gun control legislation, Vice President Joe Biden pushed the mayor to support the ban of high-capacity gun magazines.

"As one hunter told me, if you got 12 rounds, it means you already missed the deer 11 times," he said as the room broke into laughter. "You should pack the sucker in. You don't deserve a gun, period, if you're that bad."