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MSNBC's Joy Reid explained why she believes the Republican party has become 'Putinite' in a panel discussion Wednesday afternoon on Russia. Reid tied U.S. support of apartheid South Africa -- part of an attempt to stop the expansion of Soviet influence -- to the current Republican party that she said is "pro-Putin." Reid said alt-right Republicans look at Putin as a figure who is advancing "white Christianity."

MSNBC's Joy Reid said on Thursday that President Donald Trump can make Republicans "literally accept anything." Appearing as a guest on "All In With Chris Hayes," Reid explained that Trump saw trends in the GOP and took advantage of it. "This is a Republican Party that's been built on resentment and a sense of victimhood, a sense of persecution - almost a persecution complex - for more than 40 years, almost 50 years, going back to the dawn of the civil rights movement when they felt persecuted by the world," Reid said. She said that Trump "gets that" and "gets...

As NewsBuster Geoffrey Dickens has noted, Ben Affleck appeared on yesterday evening's edition of Hardball. And while it's true that the actor/director/Dem activist offered a generally innocuous analysis, he did manage to engage in a bit of religious bigotry. Affleck's foul foray arose in the course of his discussion of the way the various Republican candidates have dealt with the issue of evolution and creationism. Talk turned to the former governor of Arkansas. BEN AFFLECK: I think Huckabee actually framed his position in a much less dramatic way than had been made out. Which was he said it could...

PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. - The Florida Department of Health confirms the first Zika-related microcephaly birth in Florida. The birth mother is a Haitian national who came to Florida to give birth. She was infected with Zika in Haiti. Gov. Rick Scott and Florida Surgeon General Celeste Philip are participating in a Zika roundtable discussion in Palm Beach County Tuesday morning to discuss the issue. There have previously been two other Zika-related microcephaly births in the United States, one in Hawaii and one in New Jersey, according to a DOH representative. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the...

Orlando terror attack: Shooter ID’d as US citizen Omar Mateen

The death certificate for the father of the controversial Mexican judge confirms that Curiel’s parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born. Death records from Indiana records confirm that Salvador Curiel died a Mexican citizen in 1964… not as the New York Times’s Alan Rappeport reported in an anti-Donald Trump article. But Rappeport claimed that the elder Curiel had died a U.S. citizen. He didn’t. Here’s what Rappeport wrote: Judge Curiel, 62, was born in East Chicago, Ind., to parents who had emigrated from Mexico. Raul Curiel said their father, Salvador, arrived in Arizona as a laborer in the...

Snce the fall of 2012, U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel has quietly presided over hundreds of cases from a spacious wood-paneled courtroom on the second floor of the federal courthouse in downtown San Diego, drawing little attention outside the tightknit federal legal community. It’s a building that Curiel is familiar with, from his 13-year-long tenure as a narcotics prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego, eventually rising to chief of the unit. There, from 1989 to 2002, he built a reputation as a tough, effective lawyer in charge of a special task force charged with dismantling the...

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump should use a more civil tone while campaigning, warning that divisive rhetoric could ultimately lead to violence on par with the 2015 Charleston church massacre. “I know what that rhetoric can do,” the Republican governor told The Associated Press on Thursday. “I saw it happen.” Haley spoke to the news agency just weeks before the first anniversary of the June 17, 2015 killing spree in which a white man murdered nine black churchgoers, reportedly because he wanted to ignite a race war. In the new interview with AP, Haley...

<p>Doctors at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey confirmed Tuesday the birth of a child suffering from Zika-linked microcephaly, a condition wherein the child's brain and head are partially developed.</p> <p>The mother, who is 31 but whose name was not disclosed, contracted the Zika virus while in Honduras and was admitted to the emergency room at Hackensack on Friday while vacationing in the United States. Tuesday, doctors delivered her baby girl, who was born also with intestinal and visual issues. Reports indicate she is the first child born with Zika-linked complications in the New York tri-state area.</p>

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas urged college graduates who seek to "preserve liberty" to do so by fulfilling the duties of their daily vocations rather than attempting to achieve sweeping political goals. "At the risk of understating what is necessary to preserve liberty in our form of government, I think more and more that it depends on good citizens, discharging their daily duties in their daily obligations," Thomas said Saturday during a commencement address at Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts college in Michigan.

Marco Rubio is moving to lock down his delegates until the Republican convention so no one else can claim them just yet, in an unconventional move that represents the latest bid to stall Donald Trump’s front-running campaign – and perhaps give the Florida senator and ex-candidate a bigger role to play in July. A Rubio spokesman confirmed the push Wednesday, while suggesting it’s more an effort to thwart Trump by denying him the necessary delegates than to somehow get Rubio back in the game in the event of a contested convention. "Of course, he's no longer a candidate and wants...

HOUSTON, Texas -- Presidential candidate Ted Cruz today released the following statement in response to the announcement that Marco Rubio has suspended his campaign for President: "Marco Rubio is a friend and a colleague who ran an optimistic campaign focused on the future of our party, conservative principles, and uplifting the American people. The Republican primary was stronger because of the ideas he brought forth. Marco's story embodies the promise of our great nation. I know he will continue to be a champion for limitless opportunity in America, and I wish Marco, Jeanette, and their four kids the very best."

GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio says he must win his home state of Florida in Tuesday’s primary to keep the conservative movement from getting “hijacked” by front-runner Donald Trump. Using a bullhorn, Rubio said, “We must send a message to the country that we are not going to allow the conservative movement and the Republican Party to get hijacked by someone who is neither a Republican nor a conservative.” He invoked the memory of the late President Ronald Reagan, saying he acknowledged the country’s fears and frustration in 1980 but “didn’t exploit them.” Rubio is trailing Trump in Florida polling.

"I'm more than happy to tell you about my record," Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told "Fox News Sunday." "And I mean it's -- it's -- number one, I've worked in the Senate where for four out of the last five years nothing happened because of Harry Reid. And yet, despite that, I actually worked with Bernie Sanders, who I don't agree (with) on anything, but we were able to work together to bring V.A. accountability. You can now fire senior executives at the V.A. because of my work." [...] Host Chris Wallace noted that Rubio did not mention the piece...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) continued to ridicule his opponent for the presidency Donald Trump in front of a raucous rally of, according to the Rubio campaign, 7,000 people in Georgia this afternoon. Rubio told the crowd that Trump had been flying aboard “Hair Force One” tweeting mean things at him on Twitter. “[It’s] amazing to me that the guy with the worst spray tan in America is attacking me for putting on makeup,” Marco Rubio shot back with a grin. “Donald Trump likes to sue people, he should sue whoever did that to his face.”

Thursday on MSNBC following the Republican presidential debate hosted by CNN, “Hardball” host Chris Matthews suggested the campaign for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) had planted a “squealer” to react positively on Rubio’s behalf whenever the Florida senator offered a response.

Bill O'Reilly grilled Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio on what his policy will be on illegal immigration and immigration in general. The candidate appeared on Monday's broadcast of FOX News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor. Rubio said his immigration plan, once the U.S.-Mexico border is secure, "depends on what the American people will support." Rubio says once "we prove to the American people" that illegal immigration is under control, he believes Americans will respond in a "very rational, reasonable and responsible way."

Demonstrating the broad appeal of his in-depth immigration plan released Sunday, Trump’s proposal has won the accolades of one of the nation’s leading experts on the H-1B visas program. The H-1B is a visa designed to provided corporations with cheaper and less experienced guest workers to fill technology jobs. Norm Matloff, a professor at UC Davis, has written extensively about H-1B visa abuses, and his work is widely cited in the H-1B reform community. Matloff, a self-described Democrat and “longtime admirer of Sen. Bernie Sanders, gave Donald Trump’s H-1B policy “an A+” and was pleased that the Republican frontrunner was...

If you had told us when Donald Trump entered the race that he would take second place in Iowa, win New Hampshire easily, and then triumph in South Carolina, you’d have needed smelling salts to revive us. But he’s done it, and no one else has really been able to shake the intense hold he has on about a third of the Republican Party. The old question becomes THE question: Can Trump expand his ceiling to 40% and above, as the number of opponents dwindles?

And so it begins (again)... When Ben Carson got a little to close to him in the polls, Donald Trump compared him to a child molester, and when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) began to get close to him before the Iowa caucuses, Trump, the GOP leader in the presidential race, started suggesting that Cruz was not a natural born citizen. And, now that Marco Rubio seems to have picked up some momentum with a second place finish in South Carolina, Donald Trump has started to direct his ad hominem venom at the Florida senator. It started with a tweet the...