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Physical weakness caught on camera turns health conspiracy into a legitimate campaign concern. Hillary Clinton’s health – long the obsession of conspiracy theorists – emerged Sunday as a legitimate campaign issue after Clinton nearly swooned and stumbled at a Sept. 11 commemoration, underscoring the sense that that summer’s sure-thing candidate is teetering at the worst possible moment. The incident, captured on cellphone video showing the wobbly Democratic candidate being lifted into the vehicle by her aides after leaving a memorial service at the site of the World Trade Center attack, comes after two weeks of tightening polls that have seen...

How badly will this hurt her in the polls? There’s an unwritten law in American politics that you can attack your opponent but lay off your opponent’s constituency. The people, after all, are sovereign in our republic, and it is well understood that you can’t ridicule or dismiss a sizable segment of the people without attacking the entire American system. Most politicians understand this instinctively, though lapses inevitably occur. One of the most amazing lapses occurred Friday night when Hillary Clinton’s attacked what she calculates as half of the Donald Trump constituency. At a LBGT fundraiser in New York, she...

I agree with Ed that the “basket of deplorables” comment is a dumb thing to say, even as a gloss on Clinton’s alt-right speech a few weeks ago. It’s especially dumb to quantify the critique by categorizing “half” of Trump’s supporters that way. Mock your opponent all you want, a Times reporter noted, but you mock the electorate at your peril. The fact that she said it at a fundraiser, not a public rally, also makes it smell like a screw-up. Romney was at a fundraiser in 2012 when he uttered his line about the 47 percent; Obama was at...

Federal convicts told a judge they were forced to watch Hillary Clinton’s convention speech at the federal prison where they’re being held — but said the prison imposed a blackout on Donald Trump’s speech, tuning the facility’s televisions to other channels. The felons are trying to join the federal case against President Obama’s 2014 deportation amnesty, saying that Mr. Obama is discriminating against U.S. citizens caught breaking the law by punishing them, even as he attempts to grant work permits and taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal immigrants.

This is what it’s come to. I published at my site earlier this week a post containing a video from a medical doctor who makes the case that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president and a narrow favorite, according to the polls, to win the election in November, is suffering from advanced-stage Parkinson’s Disease. The case made in the video, by Dr. Ted Noel, an anesthesiologist from Orlando with 36 years’ experience in medicine, is a strong one. The various health-related issues which have pierced the cloak laid around Clinton the “short-circuits,” the coughing fits, of which there was...

During a fundraiser in New York City Friday evening, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton described half of the Americans supporting Donald Trump as a “basket of deplorables” made up of “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” people. “You know to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” she said as the crowd laughed and applauded. “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”

U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reflected on her religious faith on Thursday during the first of a series of speeches her campaign said would focus on her values and vision rather than those of Republican opponent Donald Trump. The shift comes as opinion polls tighten between Clinton, the former secretary of state and U.S. senator, and Trump, a New York businessman, ahead of the Nov. 8 election. Clinton has focused many of her public remarks on criticism of Trump, including his provocative comments on illegal immigrants, Muslims and women. Trump has criticized Clinton's record in public office and questioned...

She’s working the refs, and, since most of them are in the bag for her, it’ll probably work, especially since the majority are already defending Coughing Hillary against any charges or “just wonderings” regarding her health. (The Hill) Hillary Clinton’s campaign is working the refs hard when it comes to reports about her health. While Clinton responded to a fit of coughing this week with humor, saying she was “allergic” to GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, her aides and surrogates played the role of bad cop. Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill took to task an NBC reporter who wrote about the...

"What is Aleppo?" It is many things, but let's hope among them that it is the turning point in a presidential campaign that has until now been dangerously dismissive of the crucial decisions the next US president will face the second they step into the Oval Office. In a campaign season where shocking moments have come all too frequently, the Aleppo question was another stunner. It happened Thursday morning, on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." It was a shocking exchange between the Libertarian presidential candidate, Gov. Gary Johnson, and one of the show's panelists, Mike Barnicle. Barnicle: "What would you do if...

NBC's "Commander in Chief Forum," held Wednesday night aboard the USS Intrepid in New York, was the closest thing to a debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton until the real thing on Sept. 26. And it showed an advantage Trump might have when the two meet face-to-face: she has a record in government to defend, while he doesn't. On that score, Trump, at 70 a newcomer to politics, seems new, while Clinton, at 68 a veteran of decades in public life, seems, well, not new. The format of the NBC forum, in which the two candidates were separated by...

Iran may have received an additional $33.6 billion in secret cash and gold payments facilitated by the Obama administration between 2014 and 2016, according to testimony provided before Congress by an expert on last summer’s nuclear agreement with Iran. Between January 2014 and July 2015, when the Obama administration was hammering out the final details of the nuclear accord, Iran was paid $700 million every month from funds that had previously been frozen by U.S. sanctions.

As Trump continues to aggressively court the black vote, I hope to see this video go viral. It may be from 2014, but it rings true. I have said it before and I will say it again, if there ever was a time for a GOP candidate to get a larger than normal share of the black vote, this is it. As more blacks support Trump (and they will), the next battle will be black Trump supporters vs. black Democrat politicians (i.e. aldermen) determined to see Clinton win.

Shades of 1968 and 2000: Facing sinking polls and a wily opponent, Clinton boosters blame the left and the media At least when Hubert Humphrey lost the 1968 presidential election, nobody tried to pretend that the Democratic Party didn’t have a problem. Humphrey’s defeat came at the end of perhaps the most disastrous campaign season experienced by any political party in the modern era. (We will have to wait a bit longer before measuring it against this year’s Republican primary campaign.) Under the circumstances, it’s remarkable that election was as close as it was: Richard Nixon beat Humphrey by barely...

Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney interviews RCP cofounder Tom Bevan about STUART VARNEY: Tom, this is the start of the fourth week of what I am calling the New Trump. He appears to be narrowing the gap. According to RCP is that accurate? TOM BEVAN: Absolutely. Clinton left her convention and recieved a bounce, and in both of our averages -- the two way and the four way -- She was ahead by over 7%. She got up to a 7.5, almost 8% lead over Trump. And that lead has now -- that lead has been whittled down to...

In what is no doubt a brilliant tactical step, the Donald goes for broke and holds out for the participation of Johnson The Donald Trump for President 2016 campaign will pull out of the scheduled September 26th debate between Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Trump, unless third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are also allowed to participate.

Or, why Clinton fans might want to invest in mattress pads. Everybody who has ever worked for Hillary Clinton, covered her, supported her with clutched rosary and gnarled innards through the darkest days — or even watched her with educated interest from afar — knew this moment would come. With two months to go before the presidential election, a major poll released this morning (CNN/ORC) revealed that the “prohibitive favorite” (Clinton) is down by two points nationally to one of the worst presidential candidates since the advent of the indoor flush toilet: Donald J. Trump. Which just goes to show:...

There is a far-right conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton is sick and on the verge of dying. Donald Trump and his surrogates have encouraged this baseless idea, which has generally gotten little coverage in the non-insane press because of its baselessness and because the ESTABLISHMENT is in the tank for Big Clinton. Or is it? On Labor Day, Hillary Clinton coughed for a little bit during a campaign appearance in Ohio, and NBC News wrote an article about it: The former secretary of state has suffered from coughing fits at times throughout the Democratic presidential primary. However the frog in...

Hillary Clinton should “cut all ties” with her foundation if she wins the election, Bernie Sanders has warned. It follows revelations suggesting that US taxpayers helped fund the foundation, and that big donors received favors from the State Department. Speaking to NBC's “Meet the Press,” Sanders said that “at the very least, she should not be involved. At the very least.” When pressed on whether the foundation should be shut down entirely, Sanders said he didn't “know enough” to answer that question. He also noted that the organization does “a lot of good things with AIDS, and so forth.”

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WVEC) -- Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Virginia Beach Tuesday. His campaign Web site said an event at the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts is closed to the public. Republican operative Gary C. Byler of Virginia Beach told 13News Now that Trump will make a major announcement about Veterans Affairs. Byler added that a roundtable discussion with family members of veterans may follow the speech.

Apparently, there is a famous woman running for president against Donald Trump who has a very good chance to win, not that there is much said about her in the media. Most days on cable TV news shows, in the political blogs and in the newspapers nearly all the discussion is about Trump’s latest weird tweet or bellicose speech or impulsive campaign stunt. Is this good for Hillary Clinton? Some opine that it is. All the focus on Trump deflects attention from the nagging questions, both fair and unfair, about her actions as secretary of State, her mishandled email and...