Category Archives: Republicans

Republican senator Susan Collins says she will not vote for Trump

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Moderate conservative from Maine says she wanted Nikki Haley to win and will write her name on November ballot

US senator Susan Collins didn’t vote for her fellow Republican Donald Trump for president in 2016 or 2020 – and the third time will not be the charm.

The longtime moderate conservative from Maine told reporters on Friday that she intended to write in former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s name on the ballot in November. The move recalls 2016, when Collins said she wrote in then-US House speaker Paul Ryan for president over Trump, who won the White House before losing to Democratic rival Joe Biden in 2020.

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Teamsters boss faces backlash over ‘unconscionable’ GOP convention speech

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Sean O’Brien accused of bolstering ‘most anti-union party and president’ by senior members of his own union

Teamsters International president Sean O’Brien has been accused by senior members of the union of disgracing it by agreeing to an unprecedented appearance at next week’s Republican national convention.

O’Brien’s decision was branded “unconscionable” by John Palmer, vice-president at large at Teamsters, who accused him of lending support to the “most anti-union party and President” in a generation.

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Democratic billboards stress Trump link to rightwing Project 2025 manifesto

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Billboards will go up in seven swing states as campaign seeks to publicize manifesto and tie it to ex-president

Democrats will put up billboards in swing states that show Donald Trump and tie him to Project 2025, a conservative manifesto that could become reality if he wins in November.

The Democratic National Committee’s paid media campaign escalates liberal efforts to publicize Project 2025 and tie it to the former president after he sought to distance himself from the plan. The blueprint for a second Trump administration is led by the rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation and counts support from more than 100 other conservative groups.

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How Georgia state election board’s proposed rules make it easier to challenge results

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A new rule would require Fulton county to hand count paper ballots and investigate discrepancies on the spot, possible delaying tabulation

Georgia’s state board of elections has proposed changes to election policy and monitoring requirements that put Fulton county elections officials in their crosshairs and could delay and allow for partisan actors to challenge election results. .

As part of the state board’s reprimand for Fulton county double-counting some ballots in a 2020 recount – an error that did not affect the outcome of the election – Fulton county is required to hire a team of election monitors for the 2024 presidential election. The board also began a process of rule-making this week that will require county elections workers to count the paper ballots cast at each polling place by hand before turning those ballots in to be tabulated after each day of voting, and to investigate discrepancies on the spot.

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New York Times editorial board declares Trump ‘unfit to lead’

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Board calls Trump ‘a chilling choice against this national moment’ days before Republican national convention

The editorial board of the New York Times has declared that “Donald Trump is unfit to lead” in an urgently worded article published just ahead of the Republican convention, where Trump will once again be formally named the party’s choice for president.

Noting that the former president and convicted felon has now become the Republican nominee three times in eight years, the board said: “A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much of what has made this country great.”

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Biden under renewed pressure to step aside as top Democrats make agonized appeals

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Senator Michael Bennet said Trump may win ‘by a landslide’ while two more senators echoed his concerns

Joe Biden came under renewed moral pressure on Wednesday to abandon his presidential candidacy amid agonised appeals by a succession of senior Democrats for him to consider the broader picture.

Those calls came as the US president dug in his heels to make it hard to supplant him as the nominee.

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US House to vote on bill that will require proof of citizenship for casting ballot

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Republicans to push Safeguard American Voter Eligibility bill in effort to quell unproved fraud of non-citizens voting

Congressional Republicans will vote this week on a bill to require people to show proof of citizenship to register to vote, a move that comes as they lay the groundwork for undermining election results in November.

The House will vote on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility bill, or Save bill, which would make states require, in person, documents that prove a person is a US citizen when registering to vote. This can include a Real ID, passport or other kinds of identification that show a person’s place of birth. It wouldn’t include a standard drivers license as a sole form of identification and calls for a secondary proof of place of birth alongside it, like a birth certificate.

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Trump airs list of false grievances at Florida rally: ‘We don’t eat bacon any more’

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Ex-president returns to campaign trail in Doral and makes baseless accusations but doesn’t name running mate

Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail in Florida on Tuesday night, hurling insults at Joe Biden and airing a litany of familiar grievances, but declining to name a running mate for November’s general election.

The former president and presumptive Republican nominee was speaking to a crowd of several hundred supporters at his golf club in Doral, a western suburb of Miami, keeping them waiting in 90F heat for a freewheeling monologue that began more than an hour later than scheduled.

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James Inhofe, former Republican senator who called climate change a ‘hoax’, dies aged 89

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The Oklahoman brought a snowball to the Senate floor in 2015 to prove humans couldn’t change the climate

Republican former senator James Inhofe, a climate denier who once brought a snowball to the chamber floor in a stunt attempting to disprove global warming, died on Tuesday at the age of 89.

Inhofe resigned as senator for Oklahoma in January 2023, suffering long-term effects of Covid-19. Elected in 1994, his time as the state’s longest-serving senator was notable for his ultra-conservative positions on numerous issues, including calling the climate emergency “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”.

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Official Kristi Noem social media accounts appear to have been deleted

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Error messages displayed on Facebook and X pages for South Dakota governor plagued by dog-killing admission

Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota who has been dogged by controversy since recounting how she chose to shoot dead a puppy and a goat, attracted new questions when it was noted that some of her official social media accounts appeared to have been deleted.

On Monday, a link from Noem’s official website led to an error message on Facebook, which said: “This content isn’t available right now. When this happens, it’s usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it’s been deleted.”

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Peter Navarro defends himself in new book while still in prison

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The New Maga Deal full of errors and omissions from former Trump adviser convicted of contempt of Congress

In a book due to be published a day before his release from prison this month, the former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro praises Donald Trump’s Maga movement – and claims to list errors and omissions that led to his four-month sentence for criminal contempt of Congress, for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee.

But Navarro makes striking errors and omissions of his own, including jarringly misidentifying Ashli Babbitt – the Trump supporter shot dead at the US Capitol who became a martyr to many on the far right – as a US marine corps veteran.

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What would a Harris candidacy mean for the elusive independent woman voter?

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Polling shows critical group unenthused about Biden and Trump – and moved by economy over abortion

The independent voter is the elusive prize in any election. This year, Democrats are hoping that widespread support for abortion rights will draw in women who might have previously shied away from the party.

But polling shows that independent female voters, a critical group for any candidate, are particularly unenthused about the prospect of choosing between the same two guys who ran for election last time. Now, with some Democrats publicly mulling replacing Joe Biden in the wake of his catastrophic debate performance and Kamala Harris emerging as a possible heir apparent, a key question is whether a Harris-topped ticket would provide them with some much-needed excitement.

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Biden says he’s best qualified to beat Trump, brushes off low polling and denies cognitive issues – as it happened

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Joe Biden has cancelled his upcoming Sunday address to the National Education Association Staff Union after the country’s largest union announced a strike over unfair labor practice complaints including overtime nonpayments.

A statement released by Biden’s campaign team said:

President Biden is a fierce supporter of unions and he won’t cross a picket line. The president is still planning to travel to Pennsylvania this weekend, and we will have more details to share at a later point.

I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.

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Intra-Maga row for Missouri’s attorney general seat reveals exaggerated résumé

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Trump lawyer Will Scharf’s claims of prosecuting violent criminals conflicts with his record of mundane actions

A lawyer on the legal team that argued in favor of a US supreme court ruling granting Donald Trump broad criminal immunity has inflated his credentials as a violent crime prosecutor in a political beauty contest aimed at wooing the former president’s Maga supporters and becoming Missouri’s attorney general.

Will Scharf, who sat on the former’s president’s appellate team fighting charges of subversion brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith, has burnished his crime-fighting credentials on his campaign literature as he seeks to unseat Missouri’s sitting attorney general, Andrew Bailey, in a GOP primary next month.

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Biden wins crucial support of Democratic governors to continue campaign: ‘We’re going to have his back’ – as it happened

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House Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington said that Joe Biden “is going to lose to Trump” following the president’s poor debate performance last week.

In a new interview with KATU News, Gluesenkamp Perez said: “About 50 million Americans tuned in and watched that debate. I was one of them for about five very painful minutes. We all saw what we saw, you can’t undo that, and the truth, I think, is that Biden is going to lose to Trump.”

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Lindsey Graham warns ‘accountability coming to Biden’ if Trump wins

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Republican senator warns of retribution: ‘Pandora’s box opened by the Democrats is going to be applied’

South Carolina’s Republican senator Lindsey Graham warned of retribution against Democrats amid Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal cases.

In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, Graham, a staunch Trump ally, said without evidence, “The Democrats keep calling president Trump a felon. Well, be careful what you wish for. I expect there will be an investigation of Biden’s criminality at the border.”

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Trump loyalists plan to name and shame ‘blacklist’ of federal workers

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AAF to publish dossiers of employees they consider hostile to ex-president, with goal of ultimately replacing them

Armed with rhetoric about the “deep state”, a conservative-backed group is planning to publicly name and shame career government employees that they consider hostile to Donald Trump.

This “blacklist” of civil servants, which will be published online, is intended to advance Trump’s broader goals, which, if elected, include weeding out government employees and replacing them with loyalists.

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Ron DeSantis strips more than $32m in Florida arts funding

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Political allies are also surprised at move, which cancels nearly entirety of state’s funding and will affect economy

Ron DeSantis stripped more than $32m in arts and culture funding from Florida’s state budget over his hatred of a popular fringe festival that he accused of being “a sexual event”, critics of the rightwing governor say.

DeSantis justified his unprecedented, wide-ranging veto of grants to almost 700 groups and organizations by saying it was “inappropriate” for $7,369 of state money to be allocated to Tampa fringe, a 10-day festival that took place earlier this month with a strong message of inclusivity, and its sister event in Orlando.

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Biden comes out swinging in first speech after presidential debate with Trump

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Attendees note ‘night and day’ difference between campaign stop in North Carolina and ‘lackluster’ debate showing

In what several supporters described as a “night and day” difference from his performance in last night’s debate, President Joe Biden on Friday vowed to keep fighting against what he framed as an existential threat to America.

In his first campaign stop following the debate, Biden showed off a louder and more dynamic voice at the North Carolina state fairgrounds in Raleigh.

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RFK Jr claims Republicans, Democrats and CNN conspired to exclude him from debate

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Independent candidate is polling at about 8%, but could be a spoiler in November contest between Trump and Biden

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the independent US presidential candidate polling at about 8%, won’t be at tonight’s Biden-Trump TV smackdown in Atlanta. But he’s not taking the diss quietly, and has accused debate host CNN of colluding with the major party campaigns to exclude him.

In an email statement on Wednesday, the Kennedy campaign claimed that 71% of Americans want to see him on the debate stage, and in an act of counter-programming he plans an alternative “real” debate on Elon’s Musk’s Twitter/X platform at the same time.

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