When President Obama was asked Friday about potentially diverging views between himself and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on a key foreign policy question, he spent two minutes and fifteen seconds defending her.

When it came to Vice President Joe Biden and his potential presidential candidacy, the president gave a tidy 14-second response.

The tale of the tape is hardly indicative of how Obama views the race to succeed him, of course. But in the continued will-he-or-won't-he guessing game over Biden's political future, Obama's answers to successive questions at an afternoon news conference offered yet another tea leaf for examination.

His take on whether Biden would run is particularly noteworthy, given the time he and Biden spend together, including in weekly one-on-one lunches.

"I love Joe Biden, and he's got his own decisions to make. I'll leave it at that," Obama said when asked if it was too late for Biden to declare his candidacy. "In the meantime, he's doing a great job as vice president, and has been really helpful on a whole bunch of issues."

Earlier, the president received political candidates' criticism over his Syria strategy and the "half-baked ideas" that some have offered as alternatives. "What I'd like to see people ask is, specifically, precisely, what exactly would you do and how would you fund it and how would you sustain it? And typically, what you get is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo," Obama said.

But just a day earlier, Clinton told a Boston television station that she advocates for a no-fly zone and "humanitarian corridors" in Syria. The White House has said it isn't considering a no-fly zone, in part because of logistical questions over how it would be enforced.

In a follow-up question, Obama was asked whether Clinton was among those making "half-baked" proposals.

"Hillary Clinton is not half-baked in terms of her approach to these problems," Obama said, essentially giving her a pass because of what he said was the "difference between running for president and being president."

Obama said he makes judgments based on far more specific information available to him as commander-in-chief.

"If and when she's president, she'll make those judgments, and she's been there enough that she knows that these are tough calls," Obama said of Clinton. "I think Hillary Clinton would be the first to say that when you're sitting in the seat I'm sitting in in the Situation Room, things look a little bit different. Because she's been right there next to me."

Biden has, too.

Democrats pounced on Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush for saying that "stuff happens" as part of his response to a question Friday that they said was about the mass shooting in Oregon, but the exchange is far from clear on the context.

During a campaign event in South Carolina, Bush was asked a somewhat meandering question about prayer in public school and the role of government.

"A long long time ago, I was listening to the radio and they were talking about how schools, you're not allowed to have prayer vigils, but ... the first thing they do after the tragedy: prayer vigil, whatever the faith-based group. And he always said, 'You do that on the front end, maybe you wouldn't have those tragedies on the back end.'"

Bush's full response:

"Yeah, it's a -- we're in a difficult time in our country, and I don't think more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It's just very sad to see. But I resist the notion, I had this challenge as governor -- look, stuff happens. There's always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something, and it's not necessarily the right thing to do."

Democrats seized on his comment as proof of callousness in the wake of the massacre at a community college in Oregon that killed 10, including the gunman, and wounded several others.

"It's heartbreaking. Americans are killed and injured, families lose their loved ones, and an individual who wants to be the president of the United States shrugs his shoulders and says 'stuff happens,'" Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was to say Friday night in an address in North Dakota, according to prepared remarks. "No. The reason this keeps happening is because we let it."

A spokeswoman for Bush said Democrats had taken his comment "shamelessly out of context."

Speaking to reporters after the event, Bush said he wasn't referring to the Oregon shooting, but more broadly to the government response to crises.

"Sometime you're imposing solutions to problems that doesn't fix the problem and takes away people's liberty and rights, and that's the point I was trying to make," he said.

How much has Jeb Bush slipped from his one-time position as front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination?

The Pew Research Center asked Republican voters to name their preferred candidate, not giving respondents a list to remind them of the candidates' names.

Bush got 4%.

The sort of open-ended question that Pew asked can't be directly compared with the standard question, using a list, that most polls ask. But it's notable that support for several GOP candidates in the Pew poll, including Donald Trump (25%), Ben Carson (16%) and Sen. Marco Rubio (8%), was nearly the same as in other recent surveys.

Bush has been getting between 7%-10% support in most recent national surveys.

Donald Trump has backed out of a Q&A with the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and it is not pleased.

The group warned that the decision by Trump, the billionaire front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, will only hurt his already dismal approval rating among Latinos.

The Chamber, which advocates for the country's more than 4.1 million Latino-owned businesses, has been hosting one-on-one interviews with all the presidential candidates. But it said Friday that Trump, who was scheduled for a sitdown Thursday, was "unwilling to abide by the terms and conditions" of the series and backed out with "concern of being 'put on trial.'"

In June, Trump launched his campaign calling Mexicans "rapists" and labeled people in the U.S. illegally as criminals, and he has maintained a hard stance against illegal immigration.

"Trump's decision to withdraw from the session only deepens our community's already negative perceptions of him," a USHCC spokesman said.

That's one way to market your dating site.

Hinge, which lists its own core principles as "Be bold. Be human. Be real," is using the presidential campaign to market a dozen men it describes as more dateable than current GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

You can sort it by industry or by city, and even though the men hail from all over, the options on the drop-down menu are just New York or San Francisco. (Sorry, Midwest!)

Each man has "Dateability Stats" including job, education and location. And each has a "Favorite Trumpism."

Angeleno Donald Tran, who attended USC, offers this one: "All of the women on 'The Apprentice' flirted with me -- consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected."

But sales and marketing executive Donald Quinn, goes a different route: "People say, 'Mr. Trump, you're not a nice person.' But actually, I am."

Ladies and gents, if you end up dating any of these Donalds, let us know .

The presidential campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders raised nearly as much money last quarter as Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, 99% of it in donations of $100 or less, the campaign said today in an email thanking supporters.

The news of Hillary Rodham Clinton's appearance on "Saturday Night Live" this coming weekend conjures memories of the show's past incarnations of the former first lady, most recently its caricature of her as overeager, awkward (think pantsuits at the beach) and destined to be in our lives and on our televisions for many moons to come.

Clinton seems to be a good sport about the send-ups. She availed herself well recently in skit form on the "Tonight Show", playing herself to Jimmy Fallon's Donald Trump. Most memorably, she promised she was writing down his terrific advice but instead quaffed white wine:

And "SNL's" Kate McKinnon as Clinton last season:

Tom Steyer's crusade to force politicians to confront climate change is well known, manifesting itself in millions of dollars of campaign funding, including the windfall he raised for Hillary Rodham Clinton recently in his San Francisco home.

Less well known is the billionaire's crusade to force farmers to confront it.

At an 1,800-acre cattle ranch that Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor, own near Half Moon Bay, they are plotting to upend agribusiness with the same precision -- and even some of the same tools -- that served Steyer well in the hedge fund business. They are also surprising some allies in the climate movement by cattle ranching at all. Many see the presence of massive numbers of cows on the planet as incompatible with efforts to contain global warming.

The couple have a different take.