For the last few days, the U.S. media has been all twitter-pated about the new candidates for President. Most especially Hillary and her Scooby Van Iowa tour, complete with stops at Chipotle, staged meetings with “voters,” and parking poor ole Scooby in a handicapped parking spot so she could trek through the airport to show us that HEY! She’s one of us because she flies commercial! Or something.

Meanwhile Obama’s JV team keeps adding to their win column. Yemen, last fall spotlighted by Obama as a HUGE GINORMOUS foreign policy success continues to implode, and the JV team has taken advantage of that implosion in spades. Yemen is on the verge of civil war and ISIS good buddies Al Qaeda just made things worse.

Al Qaeda seized control of a major airport, a sea port and an oil terminal in southern Yemen on Thursday, consolidating its hold on the country’s largest province amid wider chaos pitting Shiite rebels against forces loyal to the exiled president and a Saudi-led air campaign.

Here we have ISIS and Al Qaeda making huge gains in Yemen, and ISIS in particular is doing the same in Iraq. As reported by The Guardian’s Kaamil Ahmed in Beirut, Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington and Spencer Ackerman in New York, Ramadi is in crisis:

Islamic State fighters have launched an offensive aimed at seizing the capital of the Iraq’s central Anbar province, as the country’s prime minister warned that if unchecked, the militants could become unstoppable.

The advance on the city of Ramadi is the most serious Isis campaign since Iraqi forces recaptured the city of Tikrit, and has displaced thousands of civilians.
Speaking in Washington on Thursday, the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, said the offensive underscored the growing threat posed by Isis militants – whom he referred to using the group’s Arabic acronym “Daesh”.
Abadi said the group was “recruiting young people not only in Iraq but across the world – I stress across the world.
“It’s not only transnational, they’re trying to establish an entity on the ground. And if Daesh has developed this capability, no uniformed army can stop them. And they must be stopped,” he said.