A new, incendiary ingredient has been added to the explosive political atmosphere as Election Day looms.
The death on Friday of 87-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sparks an instant and ferocious fight over the Supreme Court.
Ginsburg was the de facto leader of the court’s four-member liberal bloc and an icon to progressives. Her death clears the way for President Trump to nominate a successor in the final days of his first term. Continue reading.
President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic showed a “flat-out disregard for human life” because his “main concern was the economy and his reelection,” according to a senior adviser on the White House coronavirus task force who left the White House in August.
Olivia Troye, who worked as homeland security, counterterrorism and coronavirus adviser to Vice President Pence for two years, said that the administration’s response cost lives and that she will vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden this fall because of her experience in the Trump White House.
“The president’s rhetoric and his own attacks against people in his administration trying to do the work, as well as the promulgation of false narratives and incorrect information of the virus have made this ongoing response a failure,” she said in an interview. Continue reading.
The upcoming debates offer President Trump his best chance to shift momentum in an election campaign he appears to be losing — but some signs don’t augur well.
Past incumbent presidents have struggled, especially in their first debate, yet Team Trump has insisted the president does not need specific preparations for his clashes with Democratic opponent Joe Biden.
“He is preparing for debates by running the country as president,” campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said on a recent call with reporters. “I don’t know that any actual debate prep has occurred to this point, and I don’t know of what plans are to begin that.” Continue reading.
Senate Republicans are signaling they are open to cutting deals with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden if he wins the White House in November.
GOP senators — adding the caveat that they are supportive of President Trump — say there is room for agreement with a Biden administration, particularly on areas like trade or immigration, if they hold on to the Senate majority in November.
Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, noted that typically new administrations get a honeymoon period and a divided government could force compromises. Continue reading.
Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted on Wednesday to greenlight subpoenas and depositions as part of an investigation into the FBI’s Russia probe and the Obama administration.
The 8-6 vote along party lines authorizes Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the committee, to issue a combination of subpoenas and set up closed-door depositions with approximately 40 individuals.
The vote comes less than two months before the November elections, injecting fresh acrimony into the Wednesday committee meeting where Johnson accused Democrats of a “coordinated smear” against his probes. Sen. Gary Peters (Mich.), the top Democrat on the panel, accused Republicans of a “partisan fishing expedition.” Continue reading.
Third-party candidates played a major role in Donald Trump’s election in 2016, siphoning off voters from Hillary Clinton and helping Trump eke out wins by the narrowest of margins in enough swing states to hand him a victory — even as he lost the popular vote by three million ballots.
Four years later, with Trump down in the polls and facing the possibility of defeat, Republican operatives are making a last-ditch effort to try to recreate that same third-party effect, and are playing a behind-the-scenes role in numerous states to get Kanye West and Green Party presidential nominee Howie Hawkins onto state ballots.
Report after report shows that Republicans are helping West and Hawkins navigate the process of getting on the ballot. And they’re fighting legal battles to make sure they stay on the ballot. Continue reading.
President Donald Trump will also be in the state Friday, in Bemidji.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will visit a union training center in Duluth on Friday, his campaign said Wednesday.
Following the tour, the former vice president will give public remarks. The visit coincides with the first day of early voting in the state.
President Donald Trump will also be coming to northern Minnesota on Friday, hosting an event at Bemidji Aviation Services. Continue reading.
Scientific American was first published in New York on Aug. 28, 1845. Articles included one on the properties of zinc, another on improving railroad cars to make them both safer and more comfortable, and one was on a horse that navigated to the city to find its own way to a blacksmith. That was in the early days of the James Polk administration. Since then, the publishers of Scientific American have not felt compelled to make an endorsement in any election, including those involving a candidate named “Lincoln.” But after 175 years, the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States has decided that there’s an existential threat to both parts of its title; a threat to “America” and “science” great enough to take a step into politics.
For the just released October issue, Scientific American has endorsed Joe Biden for president of the United States, and they don’t hold back on explaining why.
The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September.
Trump’s handling of the pandemic is spectacularly bad. How bad? If Trump had achieved the same rate of infections and deaths as Justin Trudeau in Canada, the death toll in the United States would be 80,000 instead of 200,000. Had Trump tackled things as well as Angela Merkel did, with overrun France and Italy on her borders, the U.S. toll would have been 37,000. And had Trump genuinely taken to heart the lessons that South Korea learned when fighting COVID-19 weeks earlier and done things as well as Moon Jae-in, the number of dead would have been just 2,300. Nothing was going to stop COVID-19 from entering the United States, but Trump really could have prevented it from being a national disaster. He didn’t. On purpose. Continue reading.
“Ronna’s right, it’s time to vote President Biden out of office and elect Trump to fix the mess of the last four years,” one critic cracked.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel faced ridicule on Sunday after she attacked Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for what she called his “disastrous record responding to the coronavirus.”
Unlike the leader of McDaniels’ party, the former vice president has not been in office during the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 190,000 people and infected more than 6.5 million in the U.S.
“Joe Biden can’t run from his disastrous record responding to the coronavirus,” McDaniel tweeted. “The truth hurts, Joe!” Continue reading.
Joe Biden is seeking to force President Trump to play defense on the one issue where he’s had a consistent polling advantage: the economy.
The Biden campaign is increasingly using the coronavirus pandemic to make the case that Trump has failed voters on economic issues.
In recent days, it has sought to connect COVID-19’s economic fallout, from record-high unemployment to the closures of businesses and schools, directly to Trump. Continue reading.
