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The official launch of former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign has been marked by a series of very bad new cycles, briefly interrupted by some quite positive ones. After disappearing for weeks on some sort of Simon and Garfunkle vision quest to explore his own feelings and find the Real America, O’Rourke decided that he was “born to run” for the presidency. And that’s when the oppo research started dropping. Some of it involved things we’d already learned during his Senate campaign, but those were mixed in with brand new and disturbing revelations.But that’s all behind him now....

If ever a single day of fundraising could make or break a candidate’s campaign, it’s this guy this year against this field.Team Beto knew it too. On Thursday morning, when he formally announced his candidacy, his campaign sent an email to supporters declaring, “What we raise in the first 24 hours will set the tone in the national conversation about the viability of our campaign.” That’s correct. If anything could instantly erase doubts about O’Rourke’s viability, a bombshell first-day number could. “The Senate campaign wasn’t a fluke,” people would say. “Those donors didn’t shower him with cash because they...

Beto O’Rourke apologized Friday night for writings the former Texas representative made as a teenager describing fantasies about running over children with a vehicle. “I’m mortified to read it now, incredibly embarrassed, but I have to take ownership of my words,” the Democratic presidential candidate said during a taping of the “Political Party Live” podcast in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Whatever my intention was as a teenager doesn’t matter, I have to look long and hard at my actions, at the language I have used, and I have to constantly try to do better.” His comments come after a report Friday...

MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa — Beto O’Rourke said Friday that America’s capitalist economy is “racist,” while he praised a proposal to give infants so-called baby bonds to address systemic inequalities. Responding to a question at a meet-and-greet in Iowa about whether he is a socialist, O’Rourke reiterated that “I consider myself a capitalist” and said capitalism is necessary to meet myriad “historic challenges” facing the country. “It won’t be government intervention or policy alone that makes it possible,” he said. However, O’Rourke added at a coffee shop here, “Having said that, it is clearly an imperfect, unfair, unjust and racist capitalist...

Beto O’Rourke, the youthful Texan who gained a national following with his long-shot election battle against U.S. Senator Ted Cruz last year, on Thursday launched a bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.The 46-year-old O’Rourke, a former three-term U.S. congressman and a punk rocker in his youth, pledged to tackle “the interconnected crises in our economy, our democracy and our climate.” “This moment of peril produces, perhaps, the greatest moment of promise for this country,” he said in an online video.

Beto O'Rourke all but announced his 2020 presidential candidacy in a wide-ranging interview published Wednesday in Vanity Fair magazine, confidently saying he was "just born to do this" -- a move that would contradict his multiple previous assurances that he would not seek the White House, and further crowd a Democratic primary field already chock-full of progressive candidates. The move seemed inevitable Wednesday night. KTSM reported it received a text message from O'Rourke earlier in the day saying he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination, writing: "I'm really proud of what El Paso did and what El Paso represents. It's...

Could Politico have already reached peak Beto and is now on the downward slope from the zenith? Despite their own senior media Jack Shafer back in October begging "Stop the Press Before It Profiles Beto O’Rourke Again," the paeans to failed senate candidate Beto O'Rourke have continued unabated at Politico. However, that might have changed on Saturday when Politico writer David Siders expressed how irked he was with their beloved Beto appearing to be playing games as to whether he would announce his candidacy for president that he wrote that he "is now manufacturing suspense."

In a way, O'Rourke has all the problems Biden doesn't - and few of the deficits that Biden must address. O'Rourke, 46, can raise gobs of money online - and likely will when he enters the race. His Senate race showed he can generate wild enthusiasm among nonwhite voters and young people. He has a vision - healing America, listening to one another, embracing diversity. However, he will be in the spotlight from the get-go, and will have to answer three questions. First, is he going to run a national, professional campaign or try to wing it with a handful...

After a period of self-imposed exile, the former Democratic congressman returned to center stage Saturday as he ramps up for a potential 2020 presidential bid, appearing at South by Southwest for the premiere of a new documentary about his failed Senate campaign against Ted Cruz. It's been 10 days since O'Rourke said publicly that he's made a decision about his political future, but he told reporters on Saturday that he wanted to reveal "it the right way and tell everyone at the same time." [snip] Meanwhile, O'Rourke has lost some shine after taking fire from allies of Bernie Sanders on...

Beto O’Rourke and his advisers are sending strong signals that he’s on the brink of announcing a run for president, a move that would conclude a months-long period of public and private introspection and alter the complexion of the crowded 2020 Democratic primary field. O’Rourke’s possible candidacy has been one of the most widely anticipated, following the enthusiasm he generated in a failed run for U.S. Senate from Texas, to the frustration of other hopefuls in a formidable field who note that he’s a former three-term congressman who lost his only attempt to win statewide office. By design or accident,...

Former Texas Democratic Rep. Beto O'Rourke said Thursday that he would "absolutely" support tearing down existing barriers along the southern border with Mexico, in a full-throated embrace of open-borders rhetoric that has left conservatives wondering where other potential 2020 Democratic White House hopefuls stand on the issue. O'Rourke's comments came as the House and Senate passed a compromise spending bill that would partially fund President Trump's proposed border wall, to the tune of $1.4 billion. Trump, who had been pressing for billions more, has vowed to declare a national state of emergency to fund the remainder of the project. Amid...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the nation’s “weird American Dream mythology” needs to change — particularly in the minds of “cisgendered” and poor white citizens. The rising Democratic Party lawmaker from New York told the Intercept’s “Deconstructed” podcast this week that poor white people need to accept that they “benefit” from their skin color, and more so if they identify as their birth sex. “I find the solutions for white communities to be very painful because it’s very painful for a community to understand and have to go through this — like, you can be — the idea that you can...

Imagine this: A 46-year-old former congresswoman and mother of three, who just lost a Senate bid to one of the most despised incumbents, sets off on a road trip adventure to clear her head.

Imagine this: A 46-year-old former congresswoman and mother of three, who just lost a Senate bid to one of the most despised incumbents, sets off on a road trip adventure to clear her head. She instagrams part of her trip to the dentist. She gives a two-hour interview to The Washington Post where she shows no real knowledge of policy. Like a first-year college student, she pontificates on whether the Constitution is still a thing that matters after all these many years.

Isn’t this guy supposed to be the “centrist” in the race, the fake progressive trying to muscle in on Bernie’s turf?Or is that the point of this answer, to yank the left’s nobs by showing that his zeal for upending the American order is such that he’s willing to go full reboot to do it?I thought the worst we’d have to fear from these tools is 70 percent tax rates. Throughout the two-hour interview — which was often interrupted by bystanders urging him to run for president — O’Rourke boomeranged between a bright-eyed hope that the United States will...

Beto O’Rourke went to the dentist, and in the style of social media stars all over, he turned on his camera to broadcast the seemingly personal moment. The former Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, whose unsuccessful 2018 campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz drew support and attention from across the country, has become known for the unscripted chats and live streams broadcast on his social media channels. But the dentist videos, with a shot of his teeth getting worked on, represented perhaps a new level of intimacy. The story began with an image of his face stuffed with dental...

BREAKING: Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren launches exploratory committee for 2020 presidential race

Mueller's involvement in one of the FBI's most embarrassing cases resident Donald Trump directed angry tweets at Special Counsel Robert Mueller over the weekend. The tweets were prompted by the Department of Justice’s decision to fire Deputy Director Andrew McCabe Friday as recommended by the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility took action on McCabe after the DOJ’s Inspector General handed over evidence that the former FBI agent lied under oath and leaked information to the media. Trump’s Tweets on Mueller appeared to some Republicans and Democrats to be a veiled threat to fire Mueller. Those lawmakers warned the president that...

Facial recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph. When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time. But the darker the skin, the more errors arise — up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker skinned women, according to a new study that breaks fresh ground by measuring how the technology works on people of different races and gender. These disparate results, calculated by Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab, show...

AN AMERICAN university has kicked out a school group for wearing “Make America Great Again” hats after a student complained about “whitey girls tryna be problematic”. Twitter user Essence Dalton posted a photo of a group of high school girls visiting Howard University on Sunday, one of whom was wearing a distinctive red Donald Trump hat. “Who told these lil yt girls they could come to THE HU like it was about to be some joke,” she wrote, adding that “they don’t even go here they’re just locals posted up in the annex tryna be problematic”. Howard University is a...