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resident Joe Biden struggled in practice debates ahead of his disastrous showing against Donald Trump last year — leaving his advisers with little option but to cross their fingers and hope he would be a “game-day performer,” a new book about the collapse of the Democratic administration reveals. Biden’s advisers “blocked out substantial time to prep over several days” at the presidential retreat at Camp David in rural Maryland in June 2024. When the president turned up after a trip to Europe to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day and attend a G7 summit, he was “rusty and exhausted,” according...

One of former President Joe Biden’s senior aides admitted in a new book that the 82-year-old couldn’t grasp the back and forth of debate and would fall asleep by the pool while they prepped for his showdown with Trump, according to a book excerpt. Top Biden aide Ron Klain, who helped the former president with debate prep, was “half-seriously” wondering if Biden believed he was the president of NATO rather than the president of the United States, according to the excerpt of Chris Whipple’s new book published by The Guardian. While they prepped, Klain reportedly told Whipple that the then...

President Joe Biden reportedly wanted the Department of Justice to target then-former President Donald Trump for prosecution far sooner and more aggressively than it did, and regrets naming Merrick Garland as Attorney General. The report, published in the Washington Post on Saturday, echoes reporting nearly three years ago by the New York Times, which suggested in 2022 that Biden was frustrated with the slow pace of Garland, a “ponderous judge.” The Post noted: << In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland...

Democrats are readying a rapid-fire response to flood social media and the airwaves with calls for calm and patience with vote-counting should Donald Trump try to prematurely claim election victory, as he did in 2020, Harris campaign and party officials told Reuters. The Republican candidate told reporters this week that he hoped to be able to declare victory on Election Day, although election experts have cautioned that it could take several days for the final result to be known, especially if there are demands for vote recounts in some key areas. Trump is locked in a razor-thin race with Democratic...

Around the country, Republicans are seeking to rewrite voting registration laws and file lawsuits over noncitizen voting. In Wisconsin, it’s coming down to a fight over the state constitution.MILWAUKEE — Panic took hold of Roselia Navarro when Donald Trump first campaigned for president on a promise to ramp up deportations. She had been in the United States without legal status since she was 13, and when he won, she worried he could send her to Mexico, separating her from her 3-year-old daughter. Navarro, who is married to a U.S. citizen, secured U.S. citizenship herself last year. She is excited to...

GOP veep pick JD Vance on Sunday went head to head with CNN host Jake Tapper over former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the fact that some former top aides have called him a “fascist.” “State of the Union’s” Tapper came out of the gate grilling Vance on Trump’s remarks about an “enemy from within” and retired Gen. John Kelly’s suggestion that his onetime boss fits “into the general definition of fascist.” Vance, 40, in turn belittled Trump turncoats such as Kelly and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as warmongers, which led to Tapper, 55, to drill down on the...

Unions and their affiliates think they can still break through with the Democrats’ worst demographic, white working-class voters, by hustling on the ground. But it has been a slog.Vice President Kamala Harris’s allies in organized labor have begun a late drive to help her with white working-class voters, her weakest demographic, in the face of great skepticism over inflation, old grudges about free trade, new ones about student-loan forgiveness, and a profound blue-collar affinity for Donald J. Trump. Working America, a political affiliate of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. built to reach nonunion workers, has around 1,600 paid canvassers knocking on doors in...

A new national poll has Kamala Harris 16 points ahead of Donald Trump among Independents, a key demographic to deciding the next president. The poll was conducted by TIPP Insights for Issue & Insights between October 2 and October 4. It surveyed 997 voters and had a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percent. Of respondents, 49 percent said they would vote for Harris and 46 percent said they would vote for Trump. But among Independents, Democratic presidential candidate Harris received 52 percent of the vote, Republican candidate Trump received 36 percent, 10 percent were not sure, and 2 percent...

On Saturday night in Hershey, Pa., JD Vance will participate in one of the more unusual political events of this presidential campaign. Several thousand people — almost all of whom have paid for the privilege, some as much as $1,600 — will pack into a hockey arena to watch the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interview Mr. Vance, the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee.The money made from the event will not go to the Trump campaign but to Mr. Carlson’s new media company, which made headlines earlier this month when Mr. Carlson aired — and praised — the views of...

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in an interview published Monday said he believes Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will be remembered “poorly,” while noting he could save some of his reputation by getting “the old Republican Party back.” Schumer told Punchbowl News that he has recently been “more friendly” with McConnell in light of the Republican’s efforts to shore up GOP votes for bipartisan legislation under President Biden, including the most recent aid package for Ukraine. This, however, may not have been enough to change McConnell’s legacy, Schumer added.

Attitudes on abortion are deeply entrenched and have motivated voters across the American political landscape for decades. But in a post-Roe world, with abortion access sharply limited or at stake in several states, voters who want to protect abortion rights are increasingly energized. Although the economy remains the No. 1 issue for voters, a growing share of voters in swing states now say abortion is central to their decision this fall, according to New York Times/Siena College polls earlier this month. This represents an increase since May, when President Joe Biden was still the Democratic presidential nominee. And by a...

President Joe Biden's former chief of staff Ron Klain acknowledged in an interview with the New York Times that "we were all united behind the idea she should be successful. But it just didn't happen. Basically, she failed as vice-president." Jeffrey Zients, Biden's current chief if staff, who was co-chair of the Biden-Harris transition team, said "when I started running the transition, the president's first directive to me was the vice president must be involved in every decision that hits his desk, from start to finish. So, she was in the loop, but had nothing helpful to offer on any...

It’s not until you're somewhat deep into yet another mainstream media puff piece of Kamala Harris that you come across a rather startling admission by Joe Biden’s former chief of staff, Ron Klain. He basically admits that the Democrats’ nominee for president failed in her VP gig. div> The New York Times headline Sunday certainly might make you think that Harris had mastered the intricacies of the job: “A Vice Presidential Learning Curve: How Kamala Harris Picked Her Shots,” it reads. But after first describing how Harris was “deliberate and disciplined” despite the many pitfalls she faced as the first...

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's revenge tour is sputtering to an end this week, with just one primary win to show for it. Why it matters: McCarthy's former colleagues complain he's effectively lit millions of dollars on fire and made it harder for new leaders to do their jobs. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is expected to win easily on Tuesday despite a McCarthy-linked PAC spending more than $3 million against him. "McCarthy thinks about me a lot more than I think about him," Gaetz told us. Between the lines: Multiple House Republicans and senior staff took issue with McCarthy's public...

JOY! IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE SOARS TO NEW LEVEL. The polls suggest that many Democratic voters feel better about the new and untested candidacy of Kamala Harris than they did about the old and enfeebled candidacy of Joe Biden. But the polls cannot measure the off-the-scale enthusiasm for Harris and new running mate Tim Walz that is appearing every day in some of the nation’s biggest media outlets. Sometimes videos are more effective than lists. Look at this compilation of media figures marveling at what a “happy warrior” they believe Walz to be. He’s America’s coach or he’s America’s dad or both....

Somebody might want to run an AI analysis of Eugene Robinson's current Washington Post column: "No, really, Republicans are getting weirder." It'd be interesting to see if it were written in the style of Kamala Harris speechwriters or some other member of her campaign. In both his column and his appearance on today's Morning Joe, Robinson repeatedly used the official Harris campaign attack word on the Trump-Vance ticket: "weird." Eight times in his column, and another six times in one shortish Morning Joe segment, Robinson deployed the w-word against the Republican ticket. Could a columnist possibly be a more faithful...

Three recent papers authored by Ted Schuur, Regents' professor of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University, and other researchers around the world, organized through the Permafrost Carbon Network, investigate the biological processes taking place in the warming Arctic tundra and provide insight into what we can expect from that region as the climate continues to change. The world's most northern ecosystems, including the northern circumpolar permafrost region, are an important storage reservoir of organic carbon. Although this region, which includes the tundra and much of the boreal forest, contains only 15% of Earth's soil area, it stores around one-third of...

On Friday, leftwing professor Allan Lichtman, who frequently appears as a guest on CNN and MSNBC to hype his "13 Keys" to the presidency shtick was in an excited joyous mood. He had just heard from from former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain that Joe Biden would remain in the presidential race thus preserving Lichtman's all important "incumbency key."Here is the jubilant Lichtman in an upbeat mood due to the preservation of his sacred incumbency key which he believed helped ensure Biden's victory in November.

Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said Thursday in her first interview that he was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine. Wilson, 20, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, responded to comments Musk made Monday about her and her transgender identity. On social media and in an interview posted online, Musk said she was “not a girl” and was figuratively “dead,” and he alleged that he had been “tricked” into authorizing trans-related medical treatment for her when she was 16. Wilson said that Musk hadn’t been...

The U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.8 percent in the second quarter of 2024, according to new Commerce Department data released Thursday. Economists had expected gross domestic product (GDP) to grow by 1.9 percent in the three-month period between April and June, closer to the 1.4 percent growth posted in the first quarter of the year. The strong report comes as the Federal Reserve is set to meet next week to consider changing interest rates, which it has held steady since last July. The central bank has kept rates at a two-decade high, as inflation has remained...