She’s Georgia’s great blue hope – but can Stacey Abrams win a crucial race?

Georgia in focus: Despite being hailed as architect of Georgia’s political transformation, Abrams is still an underdog in her rematch with Brian Kemp

Stacey Abrams was a high school senior the first time she was invited to the Georgia governor’s mansion. It was for a ceremony honoring the state’s class valedictorians, and Abrams was her school’s top academic achiever. At the time, her family did not own a car, so Abrams and her parents rode the bus from their working-class suburb to the stately mansion in downtown Atlanta.

When they arrived, Abrams recalls a guard emerging from the security booth. Eyeing the bus, he told them: “This is a private event. You don’t belong here.” Never mind that her invitation was tucked into her mother’s handbag or that her name was second on the list of invitees.

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Uvalde families stand with Beto O’Rourke amid Republican silence on gun reform

Families of those killed in May school shooting support Democrat in race against Texas governor Greg Abbott

A small photo of Jacklyn Casarez, one of the children killed during the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in May, graced the front of a greeting card held by Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, who visited a Rio Grande Valley park Friday morning before the one and only staged debate with incumbent governor Greg Abbott.

“Maybe you don’t consider yourself a political person,” Kimberly Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter Lexi was also killed in the 24 May shooting at Robb elementary, said Friday during a pre-debate news conference.

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Pelosi reportedly resisted Democrats’ effort to impeach Trump on January 6 – as it happened

For all the supreme court’s pomp and ceremony, a new poll finds Americans increasingly are holding it in low regard.

According to Monmouth University, a majority of Americans find it out of touch with their beliefs:

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Senate passes short-term deal to avoid government shutdown – as it happened

Top Democrat says he hopes to finalize deal to fund government until mid-December by the end of today

With a speech on the Capitol steps, top House Republican Kevin McCarthy was stumping again today for his party’s Commitment to America platform and plans for “firing Nancy Pelosi”.

McCarthy last week debuted the plan, which offered a broad if vague outline of what the party would do should they take Congress’s lower chamber in the 8 November midterms:

Kevin McCarthy’s pitiful display this morning is only further proof that the MAGA cult in his conference has him in a chokehold. House Republican Leaders spent their morning detached from reality: bragging about their dangerous, extreme, unpopular agenda to ban abortion in all fifty states, send prescription drug costs soaring and steal your right to choose your leaders. Truthfully, a desperate press conference is about par for the course for an uninspiring and incoherent politician like the Minority Leader, whose only real accomplishment to date is typing up a radical right-wing wish list that sends a clear message to the American people that House Republicans have gone off the deep end.

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Biden takes aim at food insecurity with first hunger conference in 50 years – as it happened

Biden releases national hunger and nutrition strategy, which includes a slate of goals to help end food insecurity

Biden is going into the main pillars of the national hunger and nutrition strategy released on Tuesday, which includes a slew of goals to help end food insecurity, give people more information and options to eat more healthily, and help folks take up regular physical activity.

Unfortunately, the goals are more a call to action, as Congress has ended Covid-era policies like the universal free school meals program and the expanded child tax credits which had massively reduced food insecurity and child poverty in the US.

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January 6 committee postpones Wednesday hearing over hurricane – as it happened

Panel cites threat of Hurricane Ian bearing down on parts of Florida, and says the ‘investigation goes forward’

As the January 6 committee enters what is likely to be the home stretch of its investigation, a new poll has found it hasn’t meaningfully shifted beliefs about what happened that day.

Monmouth University finds that around four in 10 Americans hold Donald Trump responsible for the insurrection at the Capitol, slightly less than in late June, while three in 10 believe the election was stolen from him, a figure that’s moved little since November 2020.

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Senate advances funding bill to avert shutdown after Manchin measure scrapped

Both parties opposed the measure on energy permits, which critics said would gut environmental protections

The US Senate has voted to advance a funding bill to avert a federal government shutdown, after a tense standoff over a controversial energy-permitting provision proposed by the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin ended with its withdrawal.

A procedural vote on Tuesday to move forward with the funding bill succeeded easily, 72-23, after Democrats announced that the West Virginia senator’s proposal, which faced opposition from both parties, would be stripped from the final legislation. It was clear that, with Manchin’s plan included, Democrats were falling far short of the 60 votes needed to proceed, as most Republicans objected to it.

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Former January 6 committee staffer says texts show evidence of ‘attempted coup’ – live

Denver Riggleman tells 60 Minutes that texts from Mark Meadows amounted to a ‘roadmap to an attempted coup’

The supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade allowed states to curtail abortion rights completely, potentially transformed the midterms and, as Maya Yang reports, complicated access to other medicines in unexpected ways:

A few weeks after the supreme court’s 24 June decision to overturn the nationwide abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, the pharmacy chain Walgreens sent Annie England Noblin a message, informing her that her monthly prescription of methotrexate was held up.

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US intelligence resumes national security review of Mar-a-Lago documents – as it happened

Joe Biden says attacks Republicans’ midterms agenda, saying real goal is to ban abortion nationwide

The Trump-appointed World Bank president David Malpass is under fire for deflecting on the question of humans causing climate change, and Axios reports the Biden administration is mulling an effort to remove him.

Appointed in 2019, Malpass, a Republican, worked in the Treasury under Trump and also at global financial crisis-casualty Bear Stearns. While Axios reports Biden officials have long been suspicious of him, the uproar began when Malpass replied, “I don’t even know -- I’m not a scientist and that is not a question,” when asked at an event on Tuesday if he believed climate change is manmade.

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Republicans unveil 90s-throwback midterm election agenda

The House minority leader introduced the Republicans’ ‘Commitment to America’, focusing on Biden and not on Trump

Republicans have unveiled a midterm election agenda heavy on critiques of Joe Biden but light on specific policies – and with a throwback theme to the mid-1990s.

After a primary season dominated by extremist “Make America great again” (Maga) candidates and deniers of the 2020 election result, Friday’s launch also represented an effort to tone down rhetoric and win back independent voters.

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Special master asks Trump team for proof of claims that FBI planted evidence – as it happened

Special master also gives series of deadlines after judges overturn ruling that temporarily blocked DoJ from the material

The judge who had initially blocked the justice department from reviewing the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago and ordered a special master to weed out privileged materials has revised her ruling, Politico reports.

Federal judge Aileen Cannon’s changes come after an appeals court overturned the part of her opinion that had halted the government’s review of the documents taken from Donald Trump’s resort, hampering the investigation into whether the former president took government secrets with him when he left the White House.

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White House rejects ‘sham referendums’ in occupied Ukraine – as it happened

National security adviser makes remark while Biden will ‘rebuke Russia’ at UN summit

Joined by his fellow New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, majority leader Chuck Schumer is continuing to call for aid to Puerto Rico at a press conference outside the Capitol.

Here’s the latest from Nexstar media:

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Judge blocks justice department from Trump documents as legal fight continues – live

Judge appoints special master to weed out documents under legal privilege rules but DoJ is expected to appeal the decision

Speaking of conservative media, Ramon Antonio Vargas tuned into conservative stalwart Fox News to see what their political coverage looks like ahead of the midterms:

With most US voters indicating that the preservation of abortion rights is their chief focus as midterm elections loom, the face of Fox News and Republican politicians appear to be trying to shift attention to crime, a progressive media watchdog has warned.

As a kid, he always knew he wanted to be a doctor (“Fisher Price play kit,” he muses). But it wasn’t until he was an undergraduate at Columbia University that he experienced an epiphany.

He was working on a big display of the AIDS memorial quilt, he says, and was tasked with flying to San Francisco to bring back a “roll of carpet that looked like a body in a shroud.” On the day the exhibit opened for the finished quilt, he watched as men his age — people who should have been enjoying their 20s — walked in, coughing and raging with a disease very likely to kill them.

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Biden touts efforts to boost electric vehicles at Detroit auto show – as it happened

President is in Detroit to promote the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes incentives for buying electric cars

A presidential run may be Mike Pence’s best hope of getting back into the White House. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that Donald Trump has thoroughly disavowed his former vice president:

Donald Trump will not pick Mike Pence as his running mate if he runs for the presidency again, according to an interview with the authors of a new book on his time in the White House.

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Republicans help Democratic minority block near-total abortion ban in South Carolina

Opposition by quintet means Republicans lack votes in upper chamber to end filibuster, with bill heading back to state house

Five Republicans in South Carolina’s state senate have joined the Democratic minority to reject a near-total abortion ban, thwarting the controlling party’s intention to capitalize on the supreme court’s decision to overturn federal protections for the procedure.

Their opposition at a special session called on Thursday to approve a restrictive bill passed earlier in the South Carolina House meant Republicans lacked enough votes in the upper chamber, which they control 30-16, to end a filibuster.

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‘You have to run’: Romney urged Biden to take down Trump, book says

Gabriel Debenedetti, author of book on Biden’s relationship with Obama, reports call on night of 2018 midterms

On the night of the 2018 midterm elections, as a wave of anti-Trump sentiment swept Democrats to take control of the House, top Republican Mitt Romney urged Joe Biden to run for president.

“You have to run,” said Romney, the Republican presidential nominee Biden and Barack Obama defeated in 2012, speaking to the former vice-president by phone.

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Steve Bannon ‘stole millions of dollars to line his own pocket,’ New York attorney general says – as it happened

Steve Bannon has now been formally indicted, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports.

Bannon was charged with money laundering and conspiracy in connection with his role in a fundraising effort to privately underwrite the construction of the US-Mexico border wall, according to the indictment unsealed on Thursday.

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Nuclear secrets reportedly found at Mar-a-Lago are ‘gamechanger’, experts say – as it happened

Report appears to confirm security officials’ worst fears about the nature of the material Trump refused to hand back

Former Trump administration defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper have joined a group of retired military officers who have written an open letter warning of an “extremely adverse environment” for the military – a thinly-veiled attack on the former president’s efforts to use servicemen and women to advance his political goals.

“Military officers swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not an oath of fealty to an individual or to an office,” the letter, published by the online security analysis website War on the Rocks, states.

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Trump’s Mar-a-Lago legal victory starts search for special master – live updates

US midterms campaigns kick into high gear after Labor Day as Senate returns from month-long break

Legal pressure on Jeffrey Clark, the former justice department lawyer who schemed with Donald Trump and others to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and other states, is expected to rise with the cooperation of another ex-DoJ lawyer who worked with him, say former prosecutors.

The cooperation from the ex-lawyer, in tandem with other evidence obtained by prosecutors, could help spur charges against Clark – a close ally of then president Trump – and benefit prosecutors as they go after bigger targets.

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‘Tired of trickle-down economics’: Biden calls for expansion of unions in Labor Day speech

President again pledges to be ‘most pro-union president’ in history during speech in Milwaukee

Joe Biden used a Labor Day speech in the battleground state of Wisconsin to endorse the expansion of unions, reiterating his election promises to be the “most pro-union president” in American history.

The US president argued in Milwaukee that a skilled, unionised workforce would help the US regain its place as a world leader in infrastructure and manufacturing.

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