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By Dan Merica, CNN

updated 3:08 PM EDT, Wed September 24, 2014

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is considering a 2016 presidential bid.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

New York (CNN) -- Hillary Clinton publicly backed President Barack Obama's authorization of Syrian airstrikes during a panel discussion in New York Wednesday and attempted to dismiss previous disagreements she had with the Obama administration on Syria.

Clinton, Obama's former secretary of state, said the President gave a "very clear explanation and robust defense of the action he has ordered" regarding airstrikes against the terrorist group ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

"The situation now is demanding a response and we are seeing a very robust response," Clinton said. "It is something that I think the President is right to bring the world attention to."

The United States and a coalition of member countries conducted their second day of airstrikes in Syria and Iraq on Tuesday, targeting terrorist cells and organizations in the region.

The Clinton Global Initiative panel on developing children's brains was hosted by CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who started the panel with a series of questions for Clinton on Syria.

Clinton has not always agreed with Obama on his policies in Syria. As America's top diplomat, Clinton urged the President to arm Syrian rebels and made clear that she disagreed with Obama's decision not to arm them in her much-talked-about memoir.

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Hillary Clinton stands with Obama on strikes, arming rebels

Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, along with the Brookings Institution, are spearheading an almost $600 million effort to help disadvantaged girls, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southwest Asia, attend secondary school.

Hillary Clinton announced the effort today at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, which with the Center for Universal Education at Brookings helped draw participation. More than 30 groups have committed to the project.

We know when girls have access to quality education in both primary and secondary schools, cycles of poverty are broken, economies grow, glass ceilings crack and potential is unleashed, Clinton said.

The money is expected to aid about 14 million girls in the next five years. It will establish programs to help them enter secondary schools in a safe environment, improve the quality of learning, complete secondary education and support them through universities and into the workforce. Each group -- including nonprofit organizations like UNICEF, the country of Nepal and corporations such as Pearson Plc (PSON) and MasterCard Inc. -- will decide how its own money is spent to achieve the efforts goals.

Weve made progress at the primary level, said Rachel Vogelstein, director of women and girls programs at the Clinton Foundation. This initiative addresses the unfinished business in girls education, which is progress at the secondary level.

The idea for the project came from Julia Gillard, the former Australian prime minister, in her role as a fellow with Brookings, said Jennifer Klein, senior adviser for the Foundations women and girls programs. Gillard, the first woman to lead Australia, was defeated in a leadership vote last year.

Gillard, who is also board chair of Washington-based nonprofit group Global Partnership for Education, approached former U.S. Secretary of State Clinton more than a year ago with the idea to work on second-generation girls education issues, Klein said.

The result is called Collective Harnessing Ambition & Resources for Girls Education, or CHARGE. For groups to participate, they must have already raised 75 percent of the money they plan to commit, Klein said.

Each partner will determine the needs of the country where they are working, Klein said.

For example, a group called BRAC, founded in 1972 as Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, will work in eight countries to teach life skills, financial literacy and microfinance, among other initiatives. The government of Nepal will provide bicycles for girls to get to school.

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Hillary Clinton Leads $600 Million Effort to Educate Girls

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Clinton with Seth Meyers at the Clinton Global Citizen Awards on Sept. 21 in New York

This story first appeared in the Oct. 3 issue ofThe Hollywood Reportermagazine.

It's back to the future for Hollywood's Democratic activists, many of whom are convinced that former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will run again for president and are lining up to show support.

As Clinton, 66, was in New York on Sept. 21 for the annual Clinton Global Initiative gathering, the leading pro-Clinton super PAC held an event for more than 70 supporters at the Pacific Palisades home of producer Howard Gordon and wife Cambria. The event was organized by the Ready for Hillary super PAC, which bills itself as a group "encouraging" Clinton to run while laying the financial "groundwork" for a campaign. Several of those at the gathering, co-hosted by producer Ryan Murphy and husband David Miller, told THR that they believe Clinton likely will declare her candidacy soon after the November midterm elections.

See moreTeam Hillary Clinton: Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen and Her 2016 Supporters

Murphy, a key Barack Obama fundraiser, says he wasn't hesitant to join "Team Hillary" this time. "It's very important to get a woman in the White House," he says. "That's why I'm supporting her. I've been inspired by her tenacity. I've been inspired by her grace under pressure."

Clinton was blindsided in the 2008 race when prominent Hollywood Democrats including David Geffen, who had backed her husband, Bill sided with Obama. Gordon, who supported Hillary in 2008, says he believed showbiz would rally around Hillary this time but was surprised by the strong turnout for the super PAC event. "People have been very 'Let's wait and see' until now," says Gordon. "People are starting to get excited."

See more 20 Biggest Political Players in Hollywood

The event, which featured a concert by Gordon's neighbor Burt Bacharach and an appearance by Sen. Barbara Boxer, was Ready for Hillary's largest West Coast fundraiser so far. (Tickets were priced from $1,000 to $2,500.) Among those in attendance were Fox's Dana Walden, screenwriter Billy Ray and former Fox president Gail Berman. Michael Douglas, who was out of town, sent a contribution.

Originally posted here:
Hillary Clinton's Hollywood Backers Mobilize for Expected Presidential Run

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Wednesday voiced support for President Obama's decision to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria and sought to downplay past differences with the president over strategy in the region.

Clinton made the comments during a discussion moderated by CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in New York.

"The situation now is demanding a response, and we are seeing a very robust response," Clinton said, according to CNN. "It is something that I think the president is right to bring the world attention to."

As secretary of state, Clinton encouraged Obama to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels, but he rejected her advice."No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the President's call and I respected his deliberations and decision," Clinton wrote in her book, "Hard Choices."

With the threat from the Islamic State rising in Syria and across the border in Iraq, Obama has embraceda strategy of training and equipping moderate rebels, in addition to airstrikes.

In her remarks Wednesday, Clinton seemed to brush aside past policy disagreements with Obama.

"Whatever the debates might have been before, this is a threat to the region and beyond," she said, CNN reported. "I can't sit here today and tell you that if we had done what I had recommended we would be in a very different position. I just can't. You can't go and prove a negative."

As Clinton weighs a run for president in 2016, any comments on national security and foreign policy have been in the spotlight. She received widespread attention when she told the Atlantic in a summer interview that "Great nations need organizing principles -- and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle." At the time, the remark was seen as a dig at Obama, since that phrase had reportedly been used inside the White House as shorthand for the president's foreign policy doctrine.

Sean Sullivan has covered national politics for The Washington Post since 2012.

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Hillary Clinton supports Obama on Syria airstrikes

Hillary Clinton says that the gender gap wont close unless we significantly change the culture that pervades the American workplace.

There are a lot of women who think they had to make a choice, Clinton said on Wednesday morning at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. For a lot of them its a choice that was in effect forced on them: I can either pursue my career in the time that itd be most likely I could have a child or not. Theres a growing awareness in our own society that we cant just give lip service to the idea that mothers are important. We have to provide the support systems that enable women to make the choices that are right for them.

The numbers around women in the workforce are disheartening at best. Theres the fact that for every dollar men earn, women earn 78 cents. Theres the fact that in the tech industry, working mothers make $11,247 less than women without children and men. And of course, there are all those hideously imbalanced diversity reports being released by companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple.

But while many of these companies and other organizations are trying to correct this imbalance by supporting coding courses and STEM education, former secretary of state Clinton believes we must do more than just fill the pipeline with talent. When she talks about providing support systems, she means benefits like affordable childcare, free preschool programs, and paid family and maternity leave. Those are not just nice luxuries for women, Clinton said. They would fundamentally free up women to be in the workforce if they had the skills and desire to do so.

As she explained, the absence of such programs, which are readily available in many other countries around the world, sends a strong signal to women that society and our economy dont value mothers.

Clintons stance on these benefits has drawn a fair bit of criticism lately by those who see this feminist approach as a presidential campaign strategy. And Clinton concedes that these programs are not wholesale solutions, just temporary fixes to a very complex and enduring problem. What we need just as urgently, she said, is more data on why, exactly, this gap exists, which is one reason why she has teamed up with her daughter Chelsea Clinton, as well as Melinda Gates, to launch No Ceilings, a massive data mining project aimed at understanding why women continue to be underpaid and underrepresented in the workplace.

Im not sure we have the best data we need in our own country. Whats really behind the stagnation in wages and in workforce participation? We have some very educated guesses, but Im not sure we really know, Clinton said. We need to do much more to understand. But we could, in the meantime, use some fixes that could give more people more opportunity.

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Hillary Clinton on How to Close the Business Gender Gap