Four leading GOP presidential candidates – Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker – are traveling to a Southern California luxury hotel in coming days to make their cases directly to the Koch brothers and hundreds of other wealthy conservatives planning to spend close to $1 billion in the run-up to the 2016 election.

The gathering – which also will include former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, but notably not Sen. Rand Paul — is hosted by Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the umbrella group in the Kochs’ increasingly influential network of political and public policy outfits. It represents a major opportunity for the candidates at a pivotal moment in the presidential primary.

President Barack Obama’s patience grew short during a relatively rare press conference on Wednesday, telling CBS News’ correspondent Major Garrett “you should know better” after he asked a question relating to the four Americans being held in Iran.

Obama bristled when Garrett said the president should have to answer for the celebration around the deal, when the detained Americans remain in Iran.

The Supreme Court dealt President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda a major setback on Monday, ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency had erred in writing its 2012 limits on mercury pollution from power plants.

When President Barack Obama first began negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, he was encouraged by the existence of an obscure religious ruling from the country’s supreme leader: In a fatwa, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that developing or using nuclear weapons is against Islam.

“For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble,” said Nikki Haley. “At the same time for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past."

Unmarried Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham says that if he becomes president, he will have a “rotating first lady.”

“Well, I’ve got a sister. She could play that role if necessary,” the 59-year-old South Carolinian presidential hopeful told Daily Mail Online in an interview published Tuesday. “I’ve got a lot of friends. We’ll have a rotating first lady,” he added.

If Lindsey Graham has to change cell phone numbers, he has Donald Trump to thank.

On Tuesday, Trump ramped up his attacks on the South Carolina senator — who made headlines Monday for calling the Donald a “jackass” — and even gave out Graham’s private phone number.

Trump began his rambling diatribe by calling Graham a “lightweight” and an “idiot.”

Sen. Ted Cruz writes in POLITICO Magazine: I was standing behind the chief justice of the United States and sitting right next to him was the court’s first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. We were in front of a large computer screen gazing at explicit, hard-core pornography. As we examined the screen before us, I remember very distinctly what the 65-year-old O’Connor said.

Nathan Smith, who styles himself the “foreign minister” for the Texas Nationalist Movement, appeared last Spring at a far-right confab in St. Petersburg, Russia. Despite roaming around in his cowboy hat, Smith managed to keep a low-key presence at the conference, which was dominated by fascists and neo-Nazis railing against Western decadence. But at least one Russian newspaper, Vzglyad, caught up with the American, noted that TNM is “hardly a marginal group,”and quoted Smith liberally on the excellent prospects for a partial breakup of the United States. Smith declared that the Texas National Movement has 250,000 supporters—including all the Texans currently serving in the U.S. Army—and they all “identify themselves first and foremost as Texans” but are being forced to remain Americans.  The United States, he added, “is not a democracy, but a dictatorship.”  The Kremlin’s famed troll farms took the interview and ran with it, with dozens of bots instantly tweeting about a “Free Texas.”

For Russians, this was delicious payback. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union two decades ago, many Russians have come to blame the United States for their plight; a seething resentment over U.S. culpability in the loss of Russian national power is one of the reasons Vladimir Putin is so popular. It has only worsened since the United States has led an international effort to isolate and sanction Moscow over its annexation of Crimea and incursions into eastern Ukraine. Thus, over the past 15 months there has been a sudden, bizarro uptick of Russian interest in and around the American Southwest, most notably Texas, where secessionist sentiment never seems to entirely die out (TNM’s predecessor group, the “Republic of Texas,” disbanded after secessionist militants took hostages in 1997). In a rehash of the Soviet Union’s fate, numerous Russian voices have taken to envisioning an American break-up, E Pluribus Unum in inverse—out of one, many.

President Barack Obama will deliver a eulogy on Friday for the pastor gunned down last week along with eight of his parishioners in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, the White House said Monday.

After weeks of silence, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi spoke on the House floor Friday against legislation to give President Barack Obama fast-track trade authority and a related bill to provide aid to workers displaced by trade.

“We have an opportunity to slow down,” the California Democrat said. “Whatever the deal is with other countries, we want a better deal for America’s workers.”

Track-and-field Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner can add another medal to her mantel: fastest to 1 million Twitter followers.

Jenner, publicly known as Bruce until Monday, broke President Barack Obama’s world record for the fastest time getting to 1 million followers on Monday, reaching the mark just four hours after sharing her first tweet. It took @POTUS a little less than five hours to get to a million.