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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell takes pride in his reputation as a great compromiser. But the Republican leader won’t concede on one point: He refuses to let conservatives fight the White House for lower spending levels. McConnell, R-Ky., outlined his political roadmap for government spending on Tuesday, sketching out the routes he sees available: an omnibus package, individual appropriations bills, or a government shutdown.

Ted Cruz’s first Senate speech since he dropped his presidential bid led to a testy exchange with an old nemesis, the GOP’s 2008 nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain. McCain called Cruz a “wacko bird” early in the Texan’s tenure. He recently swatted away as ridiculous the idea that he might welcome Cruz’s support in his own re-election campaign. And on Tuesday, McCain accused Cruz of looking for a pretext to distance himself from a bipartisan defense bill that McCain has worked on for months and of which he was proud, and said he’d be much more open to Cruz’s ideas...

‏@BillKristol Bill Kristol Retweeted David Marcus Why wait till January? Select him as Vice Presidential nominee. Clinton-Curiel 2016

LOUISVILLE — U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, will soon be filing stand-alone legislation to end the practice of registering for the Selective Service. The bill titled ‘The Muhammad Ali Voluntary Service Act’ will be presented to Congress in honor of the famed boxer who refused to serve in the Vietnam War. On April, 28 1967 the heavy weight champion was stripped of his title for refusing to be inducted in the United States Army. Ali, a Muslim and conscientious objector, was convicted of draft evasion — a conviction that would later be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. “One thing...

In a hilariously absurd post, the #nevertrump fanatic David French declined to be the nominee of Bill Kristol’s new political party. French is prone to drama so this is pretty standard stuff from him. I take some pride in having spotted him as a loony-tune a long time ago. I could just tell he was, in the mold of Glenn Beck, one of those guys who careens from one cause to the next, always overdoing it in a quest for grace. In a better age, these sorts were turned into missionaries and shipped off to Africa. That said, I’m a...

The case for an Obama third term, a.k.a. a Hillary Clinton presidency, just suffered a major blow. Indeed, Friday’s jobs report (or lack-of-jobs report) is just the thing Clinton feared most when she launched her presidential bid: namely, that Obamanomics, which boils down to the bizarre notion that higher taxes, more regulation and class warfare actually work, would begin to fully implode while she was forced into defending it on the campaign trail — or risk losing the president’s endorsement. The sickeningly weak job creation during the month of May (just 38,000 jobs when economists expected closer to 150,000) doesn’t...

Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors and Donald Trump's Virginia campaign chairman, doubled down on the billionaire Republican presidential candidate's confrontational stance on undocumented immigrants in a Facebook posting that addressed the egging of a Trump supporter at a rally last week in San Jose, Calif. "Time to put our foot down," Stewart wrote in a posting to his Facebook page at 6:41 a.m. Friday that was accompanied by a picture of a woman who had been hit by an egg in a confrontation outside a Trump rally at the San Jose Convention Center. "These...

Asked about the violent protests at Donald Trump rallies, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders gave a clear answer. "Violence is absolutely and totally unacceptable," he said. He added that if anyone was considering becoming violent, "please do not tell anybody you are a Bernie Sanders supporter, because those are not the supporters that I want." Of course, he couldn't help but also bash Trump, adding that he found the New York business mogul's positions "reprehensible and disgraceful," before launching into a lengthy diatribe about Trump's insults toward women and minorities. Still, Sanders told his audience that defeating Trump would not...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-03/democrats-hope-jobs-report-is-a-blip-and-not-trump-s-bombshell

Never mind the doubters, Hillary Clinton has two weapons to attack Donald Trump with. 1) Barack Obama. 2) Her ability to surgically dissect his lack of foreign policy credentials. Bruce Wolpe writes. Many - if not most - Democrats have been very worried, even as Hillary Clinton steadily closes on the nomination, that she was not withstanding the headwinds that have been hitting her campaign. There's been lethargy among her supporters; young voters going overwhelmingly to Sanders; women unenthusiastic; Sanders with a bigger lead over Trump in head-to-head polls than Clinton; and the prospect she could lose the last big...

As a political scientist, I feel I owe you an apology. To say my discipline has been behind the curve this electoral season would be putting it too charitably. We haven’t missed one curve yet. We’re speeding through all of them—backwards. At the beginning of this year’s U.S. presidential campaign, we confidently assured you that the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t last, that the Republican base was just having a little summer fling. We told you we knew how presidential primaries worked. We’d studied them for years, knew the incentives, the structural dynamics, the statistical patterns. Been there, analysed that.

Americans admire protest movements and civil disobedience, but they draw the line at violence, so harassing and beating up Trump supporters could do him a lot of good. My central supposition about this election is that Donald Trump will lose because most regular middle Americans just won’t vote to make that man their president. This has nothing to do with ideology. It’s just about Trump. Not everyone out there adores Hillary Clinton by a long shot, and I understand well that for a lot of people this is a choice between beef liver and lumpfish, but I just think at...

PBS: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the week in politics, including the continued violence at Donald Trump’s rallies, how the Obama administration could have approached the recession differently, House Speaker Paul Ryan’s conflicted presidential endorsement and Hillary Clinton’s new line of attack against Trump. Brooks said the violence at the anti-Trump protests will "solidify his support," and for people who are pre-convinced to support Trump it "vindicates their world view." Brooks also commented if Trump loses, it would be nice if the Republican party would distance itself from him....

Are you really shocked? Don’t be. Everytown is actually the last of the major gun-control groups to endorse Hillary Clinton in this cycle; the Brady Campaign and Gabby Giffords’ Americans for Responsible Solutions endorsed Hillary way back in January, as The Hill’s Tim Devaney points out. What took them so long? Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. Everytown for Gun Safety said Friday it is backing Clinton, just days before her California primary challenge with Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.). “Hillary Clinton is the only candidate who is willing to take on the gun lobby,” said...

A majority of voters think Donald Trump would be better at handling the economy than Hillary Clinton, a new poll finds. A Gallup poll released Thursday shows 53 percent of voters think Trump would be the best presidential candidate for the economy, compared to the 43 percent who prefer Clinton...

o, for the umpteenth time in the last several weeks, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is attempting to explain to Americans how she will take on wild card Donald Trump in the general election. And for the umpteenth time, she’s failing. A woman with all the charm of a 1980s-era withered plastic sofa cover will try to outplay a man who got famous being likeable on television. And she’ll do it with policy! POLICY, I TELL YOU! According to The New York Times today, Hillary’s speech today in San Diego will target Trump over his foreign policy incoherence: The argument will include...

Democrats hope to Romneyize The Donald, but doing so may be harder than they think. Four years ago this month, Priorities USA Action, the Democratic super PAC created by former staffers of President Barack Obama, dropped the first in a series of television commercials created to brand Mitt Romney as a heartless corporatist whose business deals enriched him at the expense of struggling Americans. The initial negative advertising blitz, in tandem with Obama's presidential campaign, is now widely credited with decisively defining Romney to the electorate early on and damaging his reputation to a point of no return Fast-forward a...

On Thursday, Hillary Clinton gave her first all-out attack on Donald Trump’s foreign policy. While the media cheered her on, proclaiming it a brilliant foreign policy exposition, in reality it just exposed her to Trump’s counterattacks. This, in a nutshell is the problem with Hillary’s campaign: she’s so dirty, so incompetent, so unspeakably contemptible that she makes Donald Trump look like a viable presidential candidate. The theme of her speech was clear: Donald Trump is unqualified to be commander-in-chief. Of course, the same could be said of Hillary Clinton ten times over, but she spent all of her Goldman Sachs...

Donald Trump has a big problem with women. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee lags 23 points behind Hillary Clinton with women, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken in April. It's become conventional wisdom that the combination of Clinton's gender and Trump's spotty record with women will lead to him getting crushed with female voters in November. But that's not necessarily the case. First of all, Clinton isn't as strong with women as she looks. Bernie Sanders beat Clinton by seven points among women in New Hampshire. A full 82 percent of women under 30 supported the male Sanders...

Even on Wall Street, a powerful Sanders contingent so hates what Clinton stands for—the status quo—they’ll pull the lever for almost anyone else. Why do progressives reject Hillary Clinton? The highly educated, high-income, finance-literate readers of my website, Naked Capitalism, don’t just overwhelmingly favor Bernie Sanders. They also say “Hell no!” to Hillary Clinton to the degree that many say they would even vote for Donald Trump over her. And they don’t come by these views casually. Their conclusions are the result of careful study of her record and her policy proposals. They believe the country can no longer endure...