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Two former Republican lawmakers wrote an op-ed on Friday explaining why they are supporting Democrat Joe Biden instead of President Trump in November, arguing Trump is "an ill-formed man who lacks basic self-control and shows no semblance of inner character." Former Reps. Charles Djou (R-Hawaii) and Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.) in an opinion for Roll Call condemned Trump's "childish name-calling, crude behavior and immature narcissism.".... Djou and Edwards said the Democratic presidential candidate is "not a perfect man, but he is a man of humble decency."

A door-to-door COVID-19 testing survey has been halted due to multiple incidents in greater Minnesota of residents intimidating and shouting racial and ethnic slurs at state and federal public health survey teams. The CDC pulled its federal surveyors out of Minnesota this week following reports of verbal abuse and intimidation, including an incident in the Iowa border town of Eitzen, Minn., in which a survey team walking to a house was blocked by two cars and threatened by three men, according to state health officials. One man had his hand on a holstered gun. Frustration with the state's pandemic response...

Officials at Zion National Park are grappling with unprecedented amounts of graffiti throughout the park as visitors continue to flock to the canyon. Fagergren said that rangers are dealing with a twofold problem as they try to manage the graffiti. First, the park is seeing a new type of visitor, one who may have never visited a national park before and may only be venturing out as a result of being cooped up due to the pandemic. They are different visitors than we normally get,” Fagergren said, adding that many of them don’t have the same affinity for public lands...

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials. After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said. Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip...

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Tuesday night fired back at President Trump, who went after her at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Trump on Tuesday said Omar, a refugee from Somalia who came to the U.S. as a child, is “telling us how to run our country” and taunted her, asking, “How is your country doing?” Omar was quick to respond on Twitter. “Firstly, this is my country & I am a member of the House that impeached you,” Omar shot back. “Secondly, I fled civil war when I was 8. An 8-year-old doesn’t run a country even though you...

Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his team have raised more than $16 million to pay the court fines and fees of nearly 32,000 Black and Hispanic Florida voters with felony convictions, an effort aimed at boosting turnout for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The money will go to fund a program organized by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition to pay the fines, fees and restitution costs for former prisoners who are already registered to vote in Florida but barred by law from participating in the election because of those outstanding debts. Bloomberg, who has committed at least $100...

Left-wing Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner is declaring war on Republicans over who will replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. He has also accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of disrespecting Ginsburg by vowing to give President Trump’s nominee a floor vote in the Senate. The Princess Bride director made the fiery comments in a tweet on Saturday morning. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s body isn’t even cold and Mitch McConnell is dancing on her grave,” he said. “This is war. Dems have powerful weapons. Now is the time to use them.”

A majority of likely U.S. voters believes the country is experiencing a war on police and that politicians should enact policy classifying attacks on cops as hate crimes, according to a new poll. Released on Thursday, Rasmussen’s polling came amid a wave of calls to defund police and a swell in anti-police sentiment. Since 2018, the percentage of likely voters who believes there’s a war on cops has increased from 43% to 59%. The latest data represented a slight uptick from the 58% high reported in 2015. Meanwhile, 29% disagreed with that view and 12% reported as undecided. The poll...

Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider took to social media to condemn anti-maskers who went into a Florida Target store blaring the group’s hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It" while ripping off their masks. In a tweet Wednesday, Snider called the stunt “moronic," and shared a viral video that was recorded by an upset customer inside the Target at Coral Ridge Mall in Fort Lauderdale. The video had more than 30 million views. Snider said the group doesn't have his “permission or blessing to use my song for their moronic cause."

he George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum opened seven years ago and anchors the southeastern corner of campus at Southern Methodist University, where I teach history. In late November 2016, I took a tour of the facility with five college friends who were visiting from the East Coast. The recent presidential election was much on our minds as we wandered through the building, contemplating various artifacts from Bush’s two terms in office. Although we were hardly fans of his presidency, one of my pals—fearful, like everyone in our group, of a Trump administration—got misty-eyed when reflecting upon Bush’s obvious...

[Barf Alert] Pro-LGBT US cardinal: Catholics in ‘good conscience’ can vote for radical pro-abortion Biden Cardinal Tobin’s de facto endorsement of Biden contradicts the country’s top pro-life priests who have warned that 'no Catholic can vote for Joe Biden' BOSTON, Massachusetts, September 16, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Cardinal Joseph Tobin, who supports homosexuality, stated that Catholics in “good conscience” could vote for pro-abortion Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Tobin’s de facto endorsement, where he mentioned Biden by name, contradicts the country’s top pro-life priests who have warned that “no Catholic can vote for Joe Biden” because of his radical abortion advocasy. ...

All happy families are alike; some unhappy families are unhappy because of Fox News. You might have come across the articles (“I Lost My Dad to Fox News” / “Lost Someone to Fox News?” / “‘Fox News Brain’: Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News”), or the Reddit threads, or support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don’t have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it’s like to find yourself...

On Saturday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill SB-145 into law. This law “exempts from mandatory registration under the act a person convicted of certain offenses involving minors if the person is not more than 10 years older than the minor and if that offense is the only one requiring the person to register.” The bill was introduced by State Senator Scott Wiener (D), who applauded Newsom’s legislative endorsement, saying “Newsom’s signing of the bill ended “blatant discrimination” against LGBTQ youth in California by treating them “the exact same way that straight young people have been treated since 1944.””The...

Thousands of absentee ballots get rejected in every presidential election. This year, that problem could be much worse and potentially pivotal in hotly contested battleground states. With the coronavirus creating a surge in mail-in balloting and postal delays reported across the country, the number of rejected ballots in November is projected to be significantly higher than previous elections. If ballots are rejected at the same rate as during this year’s primaries, up to three times as many voters in November could be disenfranchised in key battleground states when compared to the last presidential election, according to an Associated Press analysis...

The allure of small-town living has catalyzed mass migration from places like New York and California to states like Texas and Florida as Americans grapple with daily life during the coronavirus pandemic. Since March, city-dwellers shopped for more affordable, spacious living arrangements in suburbs and small cities. Migration is starting to slow down, a recent Yahoo Finance-Harris Poll survey showed, but the shift to small-town living has already radically changed real estate values in the U.S., say experts. “I actually think we're not appreciating it as big and profound as it actually is. Our joke has been that New York...

We wanted to know: What’s the worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential election? President Trump has broken countless norms and ignored countless laws during his time in office, and while my colleagues and I at the Transition Integrity Project didn’t want to lie awake at night contemplating the ways the American experiment could fail, we realized that identifying the most serious risks to our democracy might be the best way to avert a November disaster. So we built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media...

Former Gov. Rick Snyder in an op-ed published by USA Today on Thursday endorsed Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, making waves as a Republican who isn’t backing incumbent President Donald Trump. He’s one of a number of Republicans who are speaking out against Trump’s reelection, according to Jeff Timmer, a senior advisor with The Lincoln Project, a group of disillusioned Republicans working to defeat Trump and his supporters in Congress. “There’s never been a time like this when so many members of an incumbent president’s party have said ’vote for the other guy,’” Timmer said on a taping of WKAR’s...

Representatives from Fox News, C-SPAN and NBC will moderate the upcoming debates between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden. According to the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, the moderators will be: Chris Wallace of Fox News for the debate Sept. 29 in Cleveland.Steve Scully of C-SPAN for the “town meeting” debate Oct. 15 in Miami.NBC’s Kristen Welker for the debate Oct. 22 in Nashville, Tennessee.The commission also announced Wednesday that USA Today’s Susan Page will moderate the vice presidential debate on Oct. 7 in Salt Lake City with Vice President Mike Pence and Democrat Kamala Harris. …

Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) is promoting a new book that justifies violent rioting. In "In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action," Vicky Osterweil argues that things like looting and arson are nothing more than pragmatic strategies for obtaining wealth redistribution and improving life for the working class.

One of the most successful elements of the government’s response to the coronavirus recession — protecting people on the margins from falling into poverty — is faltering as the safety net shrinks and federal benefits expire. Major recessions are especially fraught for low-income earners, whose finances can veer from tenuous to dire with one missed paycheck. But as the economy cratered this spring, economists and poverty experts were mildly surprised to discover that the torrent of government support that followed — particularly the $600 a week in expanded unemployment benefits and one-time $1,200 stimulus checks — likely lowered the overall...