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Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has airily dismissed U.S. President Donald Trump’s leadership during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, instead harking back to his work alongside Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as examples of how global inter-governmental cooperation can win the day. His remarks in an interview with NBC News last Friday followed an earlier intervention in the crisis when his own globalist think tank claimed it is “embedded in governments around the world,” as Breitbart News reported. In his most recent observations, he told NBC News he was worried about the lack of global coordination in tackling the crisis.

Glenn Fine, the Pentagon's principal deputy inspector general, submitted his resignation on Tuesday. Why it matters: President Trump removed Fine as the Pentagon's acting inspector general in April 7 after a group of independent federal watchdogs selected him to lead the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which was set up to oversee the rollout of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill. The move effectively sidelined Fine from serving as chair of the panel, since the law only allows sitting inspectors general to fill the role. The big picture: His ouster as the Defense Department's acting inspector general came amid Trump's continuing...

He blamed issues at The North Star on over-ambition, but seven former employees of the site King launched with great fanfare painted a darker picture. When Shaun King and progressive journalist Benjamin Dixon launched an ambitious multimedia reboot of Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, last February, it was celebrated across social media by prominent voices including Susan Sarandon, Michael Eric Dyson and Megan Mullally. A month later, the company boasted on Twitter that it already had “multiple angel investors” and more than 30,000 subscribers contributing $5 per month for students and $10 a month and up for the...

A GOP Illinois Representative has demanded that Donald Trump stop pushing a conspiracy theory that MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough had something to do with the death of his intern while he was in Congress. Trump renewed theories about Morning Joe anchor Scarborough on Sunday morning by questioning how a marathon runner could fall, hit her head and die. It led to the family of Lori Klausutis revealing they are living in fear of retaliation from conspiracy theorists if they comment, but Republican Adam Kinzinger has called for the president to cease mentioning it. 'A lot of interest in this story...

One of the most durable political assets that Republicans have enjoyed throughout the 21st century is their edge among Americans 65 and older, who tend to turn out at the polls more reliably any other group. But with President Trump’s inept and erratic handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic, he is rapidly losing support among the age group most vulnerable to its ravages - which is a big warning sign to Republicans as they look to the fall. Trump has also been showing slippage in support among the next-oldest cohort, those 55 and older. The shift has been showing up...

So many mysteries surround Donald Trump: the contents of his tax returns, the apparent miracle of his graduation from college. Some of them are merely curiosities; others are of national importance, such as whether he understood the nuclear-weapons briefing given to every president. I prefer not to dwell on this question. But since his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question...

Any belief that Rachel Maddow is a journalist was set to rest in a San Diego federal courtroom on Friday, with a federal judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought against Maddow. The judge concluded that Maddow was far too silly to be taken as a credible news source. The lawsuit against Maddow was brought by OANN, a news network that Maddow falsely accused on her show as being controlled by the Kremlin. For the lawsuit to go forward, OANN would had to have shown that Maddow’s show stated facts rather than opinions. In court Maddow’s lawyer argued that her show...

New York Times economist Paul Krugman continues to unleash liberal bile just to take disgusting shots at President Donald Trump, Republicans and ordinary Americans for wanting to reopen the economy. Krugman penned an absurd May 14 op-ed headlined, “Covid-19 Reality Has a Liberal Bias.” In that article, Krugman encouraged readers to speculate about the potential “blowback — especially, by the way, among senior citizens — if an attempt to restart the economy leads to a new wave of infections.” He used that speculation about senior citizens to question: “[W]hy are Trump and company going down this route?” He then answered...

It was the politics of pandemic that took over Real Time with Bill Maher tonight with Michael Moore as the marquee guest. “The only way they are going to pull it off is if he’s able to cancel the election or postpone it,” the Fahrenheit 9/11 director said of Donald Trump’s chances at the ballot box in November against Joe Biden after this COVID-19 spring that has seen almost 100,000 deaths so far from the respiratory ailment. “I’m certain that’s what’s going on in his head right now,” Moore worried as he has before, pledging that people will need to...

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel continued her criticism of President Trump on Friday, claiming he had “risked the health, safety and welfare” of all Michiganders by removing his mask during a tour of a Ford Motor Co. factory in the state Tuesday. “I will not remain silent and just twiddle my thumbs as I see him do that," Nessel told NPR's "All Things Considered." Nessel said she believes Trump has been at odds with the state’s top three leaders recently, in part because they’re all women.

Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign has hired MSNBC political analyst and MoveOn chief public affairs officer Karine Jean-Pierre as a senior adviser. "I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining the Biden campaign as a Senior Adviser. This is the most important general election in generations and I just could not sit this election out. I look forward to doing this work with @JoeBiden and the team!," Jean-Pierre wrote on Twitter announcing the move. SNIP

Stacey Abrams is running a less-than-subtle campaign to be Joe Biden’s vice-presidential running mate. Republicans should hope she succeeds. If selected, she would displace Sarah Palin as the least-qualified person ever to serve on a major-party ticket. Biden should understand this, because he saw firsthand how much damage Palin’s selection did to then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the Republican presidential nominee in 2008. Preelection polls showed that 6 out of 10 Americans said Palin was not qualified for the job, and a Stanford University study found that she cost McCain more than 2 million votes.

Comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan has signed a multiyear licensing deal with music streaming service Spotify reported to be worth more than $100 million to move his podcast exclusively to Spotify’s platform. Variety reports that Joe Rogan, popular comedian and host of the Joe Rogan Experience, has signed a deal with Spotify to move his podcast exclusively to the Spotify platform. The podcast will debut on Spotify on September 1 on a non-exclusive basis but will become exclusive to the Spotify platform later in the year under the multiyear licensing deal. Rogan’s podcast currently ranks as the second most...

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Wednesday she’s “very disappointed” in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for fanning the flames of fear about the spread of the coronavirus in the United States. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, is warning Americans to start preparing now for “the expectation that this might be bad,” triggering a severe disruption in their daily lives. That may require what she called, “social distancing measures” that include smaller classes or closing schools, canceling meetings and conferences and allowing employees to work from home. Lightfoot essentially accused the federal...

The economy has gone from President Donald Trump's greatest political asset to perhaps his biggest weakness. Unemployment is spiking at an unprecedented rate. Consumer spending is vanishing. And GDP is collapsing. History shows that dreadful economic trends like these spell doom for sitting presidents seeking reelection. The coronavirus recession will cause Trump to suffer a "historic defeat" in November, a national election model released Wednesday by Oxford Economics predicted. The model, which uses unemployment, disposable income and inflation to forecast election results, predicts that Trump will lose in a landslide, capturing just 35% of the popular vote. That's a sharp...

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., pushed mail-in voting as a way to counter alleged Republican attempts to suppress minority votes. “It's really a great system," Merkley said, referring to mail-in voting. "One of those valuable things, which will become more and more important is it stops so many forms of voter suppression and voter intimidation. The Republicans are trying to stop poor people from voting, they’re trying to stop college students from voting, people of color from voting, Indian tribes from voting." He made those comments during a Tuesday interview with Sirius XM host Dean Obeidallah. Merkley added that mail-in balloting...

"The View" co-host Joy Behar panned the idea that the media should "believe all women" who allege sexual misconduct and denied applying a different standard to Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. "To me, if you say I believe any woman who makes any accusation -- if you say that, I think it minimizes our credibility as women, and then nobody's going to believe anybody at some point," Behar said. The co-hosts were discussing former NBC host Matt Lauer's full-throated attack on Ronan Farrow's reporting, which cited a woman accusing the former "Today" star of rape. That prompted Behar to...

Barack Obama would beat Donald Trump if he could run for president again by more than 10 per cent if an election were held today, a poll revealed Wednesday, as tensions between the former president and successor spiked this month. The survey, taken May 18-19, shows that there is still significant public support for the former president over the current White House resident by a margin of 54 per cent to 43 per cent. Progressive public relations consultant, Eric Schmeltzer, took $4,500 out of his own pocket to personally commission the poll with Public Policy Polling to see who would...

The firehose of falsehood campaigns against Flynn, Gorka, and King have a number of things in common. First they came for General Mike Flynn, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a truth-telling military officer who contradicted the worldview of Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin and David Ignatius and others on the Washington Post payroll. Then they came for Sebastian Gorka, and I did not speak out— Because I was not the son of an anti-Nazi Hungarian freedom fighter tortured by the Communists, nor was I someone who had the slightest semblance of the wits to challenge...

A Senate committee voted along party lines Wednesday to issue a subpoena as part of the Republican-led investigation into the Ukrainian energy firm that hired former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden. The subpoena is one of several steps Senate Republicans are taking to ramp up probes related to the Obama administration and Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee who will likely challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-6 to authorize the subpoena Chairman Ron Johnson requested for Blue Star Strategies, a US public affairs firm that worked...