ArchiveOctober 2018

Republican candidates are aggressively employing hate rhetoric this campaign season, and leading the way are ugly attacks on Muslims. But a new study shows the tactic doesn’t work: Candidates who adopt an overtly Islamophobic message are losing at the ballot box. “In its ‘Running on Hate’ report released Monday, Muslim Advocates, a national legal advocacy organization...

Donald Trump told reporters this weekend that the United States will “terminate” the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a landmark arms control agreement with Russia that has helped keep global peace since the Cold War. The U.S.-Russia treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, forced both countries to scrap all of their nuclear missiles that had a...

Trump is already mapping out how he’s going to blame D.C. Republicans if they lose the House in two weeks. Trump plans on blaming Congressional Republicans, and specifically Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, if things go sideways for the GOP on Election Day. This would mark a departure from the precedent set by at least the last two presidents, who shouldered the blame for midterm losses...

Trump’s latest incitement of violence against the press — even as his administration gives the Saudi government cover for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — was so appalling, even his fans at Fox News are having trouble defending it. At a rally on Thursday night, Trump praised Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-MT) for having physically assaulted a reporter just prior to the special election...

The Trump administration literally wants to define transgender people out of existence when it comes to anti-discrimination law, according to an explosive report by the New York Times. The Department of Health and Human Services “is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort...

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s determined strategy to kick people off the state’s voter rolls included making sure 107,000 voters are ineligible simply because they opted not to participate in elections recently. The news comes as Republican Kemp, running for governor in the state, is under intense scrutiny following an Associated Press report documenting how Kemp’s office...

At a rally Thursday night, Trump gleefully praised Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte for assaulting a reporter last year, the night before his election. It was vicious and ugly and par for the course for Trump, who makes no secret of his disdain for journalists and his approval of violence against them. But now one of Trump’s top enablers in Congress, Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise — who aspires...

Registered Republicans in Kentucky are waging a coordinated smear campaign in an effort to derail a Democratic House candidate. Using right-wing talk radio, they’re falsely accusing Amy McGrath of misrepresenting her stellar military record. It’s another instance of desperate Republicans trying to launch last-minute attack while Democrats like McGrath make inroads in traditionally...

In a sick new form of victim-blaming, Republicans and right-wing pundits are mounting a smear campaign against murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in what appears to be a twisted effort to shield Trump from criticism of his poor handling of the scandal. Citing four anonymous GOP officials, the Washington Post reports that “a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been...

In his annual public address before the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed that America’s global influence has come to end — a development he attributed in large part to Trump’s presidency. Speaking about the position of the U.S. on the global stage, Putin celebrated the waning influence of what he described as America’s “monopoly” on power, saying...