This is astonishing by any standards. Mike Pence defends Donald Trump's praise of Vladimir Putin: 'Inarguable' that Putin is a stronger leader than Obama https://t.co/dmjkTvpaMA — Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) September 9, 2016 Trump’s ghostwriter: Trump reveres Putin. He wants Putin's power. He wants to be a dictator. Every American — every American — should […]

Politico recently ran an experiment in which they fact checked every statement by either campaign for a five-day period. The results were staggering: According to POLITICO’s five-day analysis Trump averaged about one falsehood every three minutes and 15 seconds over nearly five hours of remarks. In raw numbers, that’s 87 erroneous statements in five days. The message […]

With a few tweets and demeaning nicknames, Donald Trump handily dispatched some of the most powerful and well-funded Republicans in the country. So why is he struggling against Hillary Clinton in the general election despite a monumental and well-documented effort by the national media to tilt the playing field in his favor? Prof. Thomas Patterson examined […]

Humans have an uncanny ability to deny the obvious, even when the obvious is an existential threat. In the case of the 2016 election, we are looking at the potential end of the American experiment. That is a sentiment expressed by a range of scholars and public figures across the political spectrum. On May 18, […]

Garrison Keillor waxes eloquent about Hillary Clinton’s quest to break a 227-year barrier: Some day historians will get this right and look back at the steady pitter-pat of scandals that turned out to be nothing, nada, zero and ixnay and will conclude that, almost a century after women’s suffrage, almost 50 years after Richard Nixon signed […]

President Obama made a powerful case for Hillary Clinton, tearing into the double standard she faces: I sure do get frustrated with the way this campaign is covered. I’m just telling the truth. Guys in the back [reporters], I’m just telling you the truth about how I feel about this. Do you mind if I just vent for a second? […]

On Friday, Tim Kaine blasted Mike Pence for parroting Donald Trump’s offensive claim that Russian president Vladimir Putin has been a better leader than President Obama. https://youtu.be/q5uwcrbuEKs?t=6m30s Kaine: What about invading other countries is leadership? What about running your economy into the ground is leadership? What about persecuting LGBT Russians is leadership? What about setting […]

Here is a sample of what it would be like if Hillary Clinton switched places with Donald Trump: #JustImagineHillary saying our military is the gang that couldn't shoot straight. — Peter Daou (@peterdaou) September 20, 2016 #JustImagineHillary saying a woman's pregnancy is "an inconvenience for a business." — Mindy Mendelsohn (@MindyMendelsoh1) September 20, 2016 https://twitter.com/VonHammersmark7/status/778052295430987776 https://twitter.com/anne_seely/status/778056005854728192 […]

Speaking to Sean Hannity in 2015, Donald Trump said this: The problem we have right now—we have a society that sits back and says we don’t have to do anything. Eventually, the 50 percent cannot carry—and it’s unfair to them—but cannot carry the other 50 percent. Trump echoed the same sentiment in an interview with MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt: […]

An important nugget in the new ABC/Washington Post poll: President Obama’s approval rating now stands at a whopping 58 percent, the highest rating since his first year in office. Let’s put that in perspective. Obama’s approval rating as of September 2016 is almost double the approval rating of George W. Bush in September 2008, which […]

THE CLINTON RULES In July of 2015, reporter Jonathan Allen famously defined the Clinton Rules: “The Clinton rules are driven by reporters’ and editors’ desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family’s political empire.” Independent studies have reinforced Allen’s observation, concluding Clinton has received the most negative coverage […]

After a bitter legislative battle, Obamacare passed by a hair. I followed the news closely. I knew it was was a landmark day for millions without coverage.  Then Obamacare became personal to me because along with millions of others, I lost a good job during the Great Recession. I managed to pay my very expensive […]

Hillary Clinton has weathered one of the toughest periods of her campaign and Team Trump can’t be happy about his 7-point deficit in the new NBC/WSJ poll: In two-way race, Clinton leads Trump by 7pts among both likely and reg voters, per new natl NBC/WSJ poll pic.twitter.com/8fcl32a75e — Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) September 21, 2016 Notably, Trump’s unpopularity is more than […]

Over the last few days, four more names have trended; four more Black citizens who have been killed by police violence or neglect. We name them, individually, because they are not mere statistics in a grim tally of police killings, lumped together to be demonized and discarded. Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was fatally shot in […]

Although most young people oppose Donald Trump, a surprising number of them are also considering turning their backs on the major parties altogether and backing the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson. As we have noted before, there is a great deal to dislike about Johnson. He wants to eliminate the federal income tax. He keeps flip-flopping on Citizens […]

On a day when Donald Trump has again invoked the assassination of Hillary Clinton, this response, from Kierna Mayo, is stunning in its simplicity and power: Time is winding down and most of the 2016 race is in the rear view mirror. The view is ugly. https://twitter.com/Shakestweetz/status/776930224730673152 Hillary Clinton’s emails have been covered by major media […]

Clinton’s story will be familiar to many women, maybe especially (although certainly not exclusively) women of a certain age. The precise details may be different—the setting; the nature of the harassment—but the feeling, that creeping urge of guardedness as a mechanism of self-protection, reverberates through our very cells. A familiar tune, played in a different […]

Over the course of a week, the corporate media largely ignored a half dozen Trump transgressions that would have sidelined any other candidate. Among them: saying the U.S. military was a “gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” We covered the story as soon as Trump’s words were posted online, and credit to Alex Burns for picking it up and tweeting […]

The Pennsylvania Senate race is a close one, although Katie McGinty has been leading Pat Toomey by an average of 3.25 percent since August. In the final stretch, she’s focused on economic policy—a key concern of Pennsylvania voters, on which she and her opponent Pat Toomey have stark disagreements. https://twitter.com/KatieMcGintyPA/status/777897119155826688 https://twitter.com/KatieMcGintyPA/status/777924814451437569 On Friday, McGinty got […]

If there is any lesson we learned from the Bush era, it’s that the answer to terrorism isn’t to undermine our own values. When we devolve into a culture of torture, when we curtail civil liberties, we play into our enemies’ hands. With that perspective in mind, read this June 29 NBC News article: Donald Trump on Tuesday […]

Peter Daou writes: A candidate who wallows in bigotry, who incites violence, who verbally abuses his critics, who is a self-avowed threat to the free press, who trashes U.S. generals while praising Vladimir Putin, who demeans Gold Star families, gets less negative coverage than his opponent, a lifelong public servant who is one of the most accomplished and admired […]

One of the interesting aspects of Donald Trump getting the Republican nomination despite not being the favorite of the GOP establishment is that he’s had trouble finding people to work with and for him from that establishment. So he’s ended up with a running mate who endorsed Ted Cruz and a campaign manager whose past […]

"Let her release emails. I'll release my tax returns immediately" – Trump, showing "routine audit" isn't why he won't release tax returns — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) September 7, 2016 The full quote, from an interview with Bill O’Reilly, further reveals the disingenuousness of Trump’s rationale: I am under a routine audit, and when it’s completed […]

There is a fascinating and illuminating exchange between media insider (and Clinton detractor) Chris Cillizza and Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, in which Cillizza metaphorically stomps his feet and defends his profession’s unseemly obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails. Ornstein’s retort is priceless: Chris, I hate to say it, but I find your response incredibly weak. Yes, her […]

Watch: Oh really, @KellyannePolls? pic.twitter.com/sgLxeQwGmE — Bridge Project (@BridgeProject21) September 13, 2016 Except…just this morning, Kellyanne Conway did an interview with CNN in which she accused Hillary Clinton of lying about having pneumonia. “You can laugh all you want at [Trump’s] medical report,” she said, “but as far as I can see, there are two […]

Wow AC if you had that intensity on any variety of issues with DT you might be doing your job. Come on man. — jmartin (@jallnet12) September 13, 2016 There’s a reason I wrote an article titled R.I.P. Political Journalism. It’s because of corporate media spectacles like the one we were treated to by Anderson Cooper, who interviewed Hillary Clinton […]

When Hillary Clinton first selected Tim Kaine as her running mate, I noted that Kaine is actually a nice guy, while Mike Pence just pretends to be one: “I don’t personally know either of these men. All I have by which to assess them is their records. I hear that both of them are nice, […]

Below, a graphic showing the various possible paths for Democrats to reclaim the Senate majority: [media-credit id=5 align=”aligncenter” width=”1024″][/media-credit] If Hillary Clinton wins, Democrats need a minimum of five seats to control the Senate, with Vice President Tim Kaine’s vote as the tiebreaker. This includes defending Harry Reid’s Nevada seat. If Trump wins, Democrats need a […]

There isn’t a spectacle more pitiful in U.S. politics than the corporate media’s willingness to endure daily abuse from Donald Trump — and to reward him by glossing over his transgressions and focusing fire on his rival. Here are a few prime examples (one can only imagine the reaction if these insults came from Hillary Clinton): Just heard that […]

Three years ago a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin. In the pain and fury after the verdict’s announcement, the Black Lives Matter movement was born. BLM isn’t just a movement, but a voting bloc. Street protests have morphed into voter registration drives and meetings with elected officials. If you search the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, you’ll find […]