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Congress may flip -- but dysfunction is here to stay

The Republican majority in the Senate -- and maybe even the House -- could be gone after this year's election.

With Donald Trump trailing in the polls, Hillary Clinton is increasingly turning her attention to down-ballot races -- particularly for the Senate, where Democrats are hoping to pick up at least the four seats they'd need to claim the majority if Clinton wins the White House.

Kaine slams FBI

Tim Kaine sharply criticized FBI Director James Comey Friday for the handling of information related to the renewed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Kaine called the announcement “cryptic” and questioning the timing, just 11 days before Election

this is very, very troubling

The FBI has announced that it is investigating newly discovered messages related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. According to The New York Times, these emails were found in the course of the agency’s investigation of the former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner and the longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin.  

It’s possible Comey was partly motivated by fear. When he chose not to prosecute Clinton for her use of a private email server, he was brought before Congress to defend his decision; a hearing at the House Judiciary Committee in September lasted nearly four hours

“Comey and the FBI are in a terrible position here, one in which they would be accused of playing politics whatever they ended up doing.”

Trump has taken positions at odds with military pronouncements

Clinton and the military differ on a no-fly zone for Syria

The Republican nominee, in particular, would enter office having backed a number of positions contrary to the Pentagon and having leveled harsh critiques of military policy and strategy

Every election is a choice,” she said, noting that Trump “doubled down” on his plans to create a deportation force to round up people in the country illegally,

We're going to end raids and round-ups. We're going to keep families together. We know we've got work to do but I think winning the election will really set that in motion, don't you?"

Clinton said she is more than three million votes and nearly 300 pledged delegates ahead of Sanders. I

If the rise of Trump has no obvious precedent, neither does an election like this. Clinton, whose buoyant favorable ratings in the State Department convinced some Democrats that she could

“In the history of polling, we’ve basically never had a candidate viewed negatively by half of the electorate,” wrote Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) in a widely shared note that asked someone, anyone, to mount a third-party run.

“Everybody likes her,” said Pamela Hatwood, 51, a nurse on disability leave who was fanning herself with an extra Clinton sign in a sweltering gym in Indianapolis last week

The Recount Road to Nowhere

This is a critical period in which the shape of Trump’s Administration will be formed, one that presents all sorts of tasks and challenges for his opponents.

Trump has three hundred and six, and Clinton has two hundred and thirty-two. This includes sixteen for Trump from Michigan, where his victory, by ten thousand votes, was certified this afternoon.

The content of the Russian-hacked emails was actually remarkably unexplosive. Probably the biggest news was that Hillary Clinton had expressed herself in favor of a hemispheric common market in speeches to Wall Street executives. Otherwise, we learned from them that some people at the Democratic National Committee favored a lifelong Democrat for their party’s nomination over a socialist interloper who had joined the party for his own convenience. We learned that many Democrats, including Chelsea Clinton, disapproved of the ethical shortcomings of some of the people in Bill Clinton’s inner circle. We learned that Hillary Clinton acknowledged differences between her “public and private” positions on some issues. None of this even remotely corroborated Donald Trump’s wild characterizations of the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-published material.

Without Trump’s own willingness to make false claims and misuse Russian-provided information, the Wikileaks material would have deflated of its own boringness. The Russian-hacked material did damage because, and only because, Russia found a willing accomplice in the person of Donald J. Trump.

Hillary Clinton supports the pursuit of the death penalty for the man accused of killing nine parishioners inside a Charleston, S.C., church last year.

she respects the Justice Department decision" to seek the highest punishment for Dylann Roof

Clinton's long-held position of support for the death penalty is one that has put her at odds with many Democrats.

Bernie Sanders, Union-Buster

While Hillary Clinton quickly secured endorsements from a slew of large labor organizations in 2015, more than a dozen local and regional union groups have broken with their national leadership and voted to support Bernie Sanders instead.

Many of the Clinton endorsements were decided by national executive boards, which are often small groups of professionals based in Washington, D.C. Sanders has largely won his support among locals, as well as at regional committees.

In 2012, President Obama lost college-educated voters by 4 points; this year, according to Public Opinion Strategies’ analysis, Clinton will win them by 29 points.

Clinton should make substantial gains among voters from households earning in excess of $100,000. While Obama lost these affluent voters in 2012 by 10 points, the NBC/WSJ survey shows Clinton carrying them by 12 points.

There are two groups among whom Trump will gain and Clinton will lose: voters making less than $30,000 and voters with high school degrees. Both less affluent groups are expected to increase their level of support for the Republican nominee over their 2012 margins, by 13 and by 17 points.

But the larger question I keep asking myself is: Does Trump want someone like me to agree with him?

Sean Hannity, the Fox News host who has become an unofficial spokesman for the White House, describes the media as “a bunch of overpaid, out of touch, lazy millionaires that have nothing but contempt for the people that do make this country great.”

3 million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Trump (who received a share of the popular vote that was lower than Mitt Romney’s, in fact lower than the share received by most of the losers of recent presidential elections)

“Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has called for an end to mass incarceration, admitting that changes in penal policy that happened largely under his watch put ‘too many people in prison and for too long’ and ‘overshot the mark.’”

“In 1994 Clinton championed a crime bill that laid down several of the foundations of the country’s current mass incarceration malaise. Vowing to be ‘tough on crime’ — a quality that had previously been more closely associated with the Republicans and which Clinton adopted under his ‘triangulation’ ploy — he created incentives to individual states to build more prisons, to put more people behind bars and to keep them there for longer. His also presided over the introduction of a federal three-strikes law that brought in long sentences for habitual offenders.”

The black community in America has been betrayed by Democrats and Republicans alike — it has been betrayed by America itself.

Bernie Sanders Narrows Fund-Raising Gap With Hillary Clinton

Mrs. Clinton, who has been able to tap into one of the most successful fund-raising networks in American politics, reported raising more than $28 million for her primary campaign since the beginning of July, while Mr. Sanders, who has largely eschewed fund-raising from large donors, reported raising about $26 million.

when she brought in a total of $47.5 million, almost all of it for the primary campaign.

In recent months, as Mrs. Clinton has prepared for a likely 2016 presidential campaign, she has often framed those White House years as a period when, like many working mothers, she juggled the demands of raising a young daughter and having a career.

She talks about championing women’s rights globally, supporting her husband during years of robust economic growth, and finding inspiration in Eleanor Roosevelt to stay resolute in the midst of personal attacks.

ow carefully controlled at 67, then she was fiery and unpredictable, lobbing sarcastic jabs in private meetings and congressional hearings. Now criticized as a centrist and challenged from the left, Mrs. Clinton then was considered the liberal whispering in her husband’s ear to resist the North American Free Trade Agreement and a welfare overhaul.

Martin O’Malley unloads on Clinton’s 9/11 comments

Martin O’Malley unleashed some of his sharpest barbs at a Democratic party event here Sunday, unloading on Hillary Clinton for invoking 9/11 in her defense of accepting political donations from Wall Street banks

Clinton is under fire from both Republicans and Democrats, as well as media analysts, for saying in the second Democratic presidential Saturday night that her ties to large financial institutions have to do with her efforts to rebuild lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday offered new details about her plan to make sure all workers can take time off, with pay, in order to care for a newborn or sick relative.

During that time, the worker would be eligible to receive replacement wages, up to two-thirds of his or her salary.

The proposal, if enacted, would patch a major gap in America’s safety net. Workers in every other developed country are entitled to paid leave, in some cases for more than a year.

Clinton raises women’s rights in Democratic debate

There were no explicit questions about women’s rights in the fourth Democratic debate Sunday night, but the candidates, particularly Hillary Clinton, did what they could to insert them into the conversation anyway. 

“we have seen women no longer paying more for our insurance than men.” 

Mike Pence scored a narrow win over Tim Kaine in the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, according to a CNN/ORC instant poll, with 48% of voters who watched the debate saying Pence did the better job while 42% think Kaine had the best night

just 14% said he did worse than they thought he would

with 43% saying he did worse than they expected and 38% saying he outperformed their expectations.