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A big looming question in the presidential race is this: Will Republican and independent voters who backed Nikki Haley in the GOP primaries support Donald Trump and the numbers he needs to prevail? This week, new data suggested that the answer to this may be ‘No’. The Bulwark reports that a new poll taken by a Democratic-leaning firm finds that a surprisingly large percentage of voters who backed Haley say they will defect to Kamala Harris. A New York Times national poll finds her making new inroads among GOP voters. How real is all this? Today, we’re talking to The...

The House speaker’s comments wrecked one of the far right’s most ridiculous, reprehensible tropes.It was a remarkable moment: After introducing a package of bills that includes military aid to Ukraine, Mike Johnson flatly told reporters on Wednesday that enabling Ukraine to defend itself is in the best interests of America and the world. This surprised a lot of people who had wrongly assumed the House speaker was effectively functioning as a stooge for Vladimir Putin—and Donald Trump—and would thus slow-walk Ukraine aid to death before ever allowing a vote on it.Johnson’s new stance has attracted a good deal of positive...

In an interview with the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, Ryan Busse, who served for 25 years as vice president of sales for weapons manufacturer Kimber, claimed that, unless Congress does something about the manufacture of easily-obtainable high-powered AR15's the U.S. is poised for an "absolute catastrophe." Reverse Mortgage Calculator Ad Reverse Mortgages Guides Reverse Mortgage Calculator Speaking with the columnist in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas mass shooting that claimed the lives of 19 elementary school children and two teachers by an 18-year-old gunman armed with an assault weapon purchased online from Georgia-based Daniels Defense, Busse lamented that there...

The Washington Post must immediately institute mandatory substance testing for its employees. The imperative arises in light of a column today by one of its opinion writers that would seemingly be the result of the author ingesting some seriously mind-bending stuff. The columnist is Greg Sargent, and the headline is "Glenn Youngkin’s repulsive final push reveals a dark truth for Democrats." And just what is that "dark truth," according to Sargent? It's that Terry McAuliffe might lose his Virginia governor's race because Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin has benefited from: "a right-wing media network that has no rival on the Democratic...

Headline only. I will not pay to see their fake news.

As protests against police brutality spread across the country, President Trump looked impotent, unable to offer anything reassuring and tweeting angrily from inside a White House under siege. But Trump has hit on a solution: designate “antifa” a terrorist organization, to make it look as if the protests have been taken over by radical terrorists, and to create the impression that he’s getting fearsomely tough in response. In an interview with us, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told us that the designation itself, which has no legal basis, appears to be a “characteristically political act." Schiff, the chair of the House...

. . . That possibility is underscored by the Times report, a chronology of Trump’s decision to withhold aid to a vulnerable ally under assault while he and his henchmen extorted Ukraine into carrying out his corrupt designs. The report demonstrates in striking detail that inside the administration, the consternation over the legality and propriety of the aid freeze — and confusion over Trump’s true motives — ran much deeper than previously known, implicating top Cabinet officials more deeply than we thought. Among the story’s key points: As early as June, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney worked...

"NOTHING HAPPENED!" When you spend a couple of years and millions of dollars investigating the President and find no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion is it any surprise that "nothing happened" in terms of impeachment?Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent is promoting the latest video by serial impeachment ad-maker Tom Steyer under the headline "Democrats are badly blowing it against Trump. A brutal new TV ad shows how."

The latest revelations in the Russia saga should refocus our attention on a critical period during the 2016 presidential campaign. I’m talking about the seven weeks or so that began in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr. planned the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians, and ended in late July, with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. What we now know is this. During much of that period, the Trump Organization was secretly pursuing a business deal in Russia that required Kremlin approval — even though the most senior members of Trump’s...

The closing campaign strategy of President Donald Trump and Republicans is often depicted as mainly an effort to galvanize the GOP's blue-collar white base through fear-mongering about immigrants and incitement of racial-cultural tensions around imagery of angry Democratic mobs and protesting African American athletes. But there's a second piece to the strategy that's also crucial: Trump and Republicans want college-educated white voters, particularly suburban women, to ignore all that unpleasant racial and cultural demagoguery entirely - and focus only on the economy. It is widely observed that Democrats are favored to take back the House because of a backlash against...

One of the most infuriating aspects of this whole Kavanaugh saga is the degree to which we are flying blind about some of the most fundamental points of disagreement at its core. Making this even worse, it doesn’t have to be this way. On the Senate floor late Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a new and tantalizing claim about what’s in the FBI documents on Brett M. Kavanaugh that all senators have now reviewed. Senators are severely limited in what they can say about these documents, which are summaries of the interviews that the FBI conducted as part of their...

CNN is reporting that top congressional Democrats are planning to take an unexpectedly soft line on new and potentially very damning information that has emerged about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Russia probe. Why? Because Democrats understand full well that Sessions, of all people, could end up being pivotal to preventing President Trump from covering up the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. It’s a complicated and interesting situation — and it’s unclear where it’s going to end up. A few days ago, the news broke that in a recent court filing, former Trump campaign adviser...

<p>Prepare to be shocked: One of the Trumpiest candidates in the country repeatedly spoke at a conference whose organizer believes that the “only serious race war” in this country right now is the one targeting white people.</p> <p>Horowitz himself has said that “American blacks are richer, more privileged, freer than blacks anywhere in the world, including all black run countries.” He responded to the news that a man was arrested after vowing to kill “all white police” at the White House by saying: “Meanwhile, the country’s only serious race war — against whites — continues.”</p>

The Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent calls GOP frontrunner Donald Trump a “nightmare nominee,” arguing that “not even white men” like Trump.

Donald Trump Will (Almost Certainly) Never Be Elected President. Here’s Why. By Greg Sargent March 21 With Donald Trump steamrolling towards the GOP nomination, the political chatter is increasingly focused on whether Trump could win a general election by making surprise inroads into states in the industrial Midwest. Many Democrats and nonpartisan observers see this as probably the only plausible (if that’s even the right word for it) path for Trump, who might do this mainly by running up huge numbers among white voters — particularly blue collar whites. But a new examination of the demographics and projected voting patterns...

If Republicans are going to have any hope of stopping the runaway train otherwise known as Donald Trump, it may rest on their ability to limit the breadth of his appeal. A single alternative to Trump — most likely Marco Rubio — could conceivably coalesce enough support among well educated, relatively affluent, more moderate Republicans

At last week's GOP presidential debate, in a line that has gotten too little attention, Donald Trump boasted: "We've opened up a very big discussion that needed to be opened up." What Trump meant is that, by calling for things like mass deportations and Muslim registries and temporarily banning non-citizen Muslims from entering the U.S., and claiming thousands of American Muslims celebrated 9/11, Trump has forced a discussion about the true causes of American decline that had previously been precluded or suppressed by politically correct niceties. New polling suggests that Trump may be justified in this boast: It shows that...

WASHINGTON — President Obama called out climate change deniers in Congress for being weak on defense, saying it would be "dereliction of duty" for the United States to ignore the national security implications of rising global temperatures. Obama's convocation speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy Wednesday was his most forceful argument yet that climate change ranks alongside terrorism as a grave threat to America's future. "I know there are some folks back in Washington who refuse to admit that climate change is real," he told graduating cadets in New London, Conn. "Denying it or refusing to deal with it...

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama greet John Aravosis, AMERICAblog, and Anthony Katsivalis during the Christmas holiday Press Reception #1 in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, Dec. 11, 2014.I was invited to the White House Christmas Party this year (there are 12 or so such parties in fact — ours was the print press party), and invited my nephew Anthony Katsivalis as my guest. Anthony has worked in politics (most recently on the Giannoulias Senate campaign), and now is an Internet marketing specialist in Chicago. I’ve noted this before, and had the same reaction this...

Greg Sargent is a Washington Post blogger and compromised JournoList hack whose “Plum Line” entries are decidedly left of center. Greg was overwhelmed with enthusiasm last Friday when, for a brief but shining moment, it appeared President Obama was supporting the construction of the ground zero mosque. He gushed that it would “go down as one of the finest moments of his presidency.” Sargent contrasted Obama’s bold stance with the “clever little dodge” which some Republicans were using. Here’s his description of the conservative stance, “The group has the right to build the center, runs this argument, but they are...