<....Murray condemned Muir and fellow moderator Linsey Davis for failing to contradict Harris when she claimed that Project 2025 is “a detailed and dangerous plan … that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again.”

“They must have known that the big Democratic boogey man ‘Project 2025’ has nothing to do with Donald Trump or his campaign,” Murray wrote, presumably with a straight face.

This is such bald-faced lie that I would be remiss if I did not fact-check Murray myself.

Project 2025 is a 900-page blueprint for a second Trump administration by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. At least 140 former members of Trump’s first administration are involved, CNN has reported, including six former Cabinet secretaries. It calls for, among other things, abolishing the Department of Education and Head Start, ending efforts to combat climate change, undermining the independence of the Justice Department, effectively enacting a nationwide abortion ban, and dismantling what MAGA Republicans call “the deep state,” known to those in the reality-based community as “government.”

A recent analysis by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution said that parts of Project 2025 “are more closely aligned with a white Christian nationalist worldview than a traditional, conservative education policy agenda.”

Once Project 2025’s radical plan to overhaul the executive branch became widely known and the public reacted negatively, Trump pretended as if he’d never heard of it. And the conservative, Trump-promoting New York Post would very much like you to believe that untruth.

As it happens, most Americans think debate moderators should fact-check. According to a June survey by Boston University’s College of Communication (my graduate school alma mater), more than two of every three Americans surveyed said “moderators should point out factual inaccuracies” in candidates' statements during debates.

The survey did find a partisan discrepancy: While 81% of Democrats supported fact-checking in real time, 67% of Republicans did.

Gee, why do you suppose that is?>

<Kamala Harris is punching back at Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders for suggesting that she isn’t humble because she doesn’t have biological children.

In an interview aired Sunday on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, the vice president suggested the Arkansas governor’s views on family were outdated — and spoke warmly about her own “modern family," which includes her husband, Doug Emhoff, and his two children from his first marriage, Cole and Ella.

“This is not the 1950s anymore,” Harris said. “Families come in all kinds of forms.”

Harris’ remarks came in response to a question from the podcast’s host, Alex Cooper, about comments Huckabee Sanders made last month during a town hall in Flint, Michigan. The Arkansas governor said that her three kids keep her “humble,” while “Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”

“I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble,” Harris said. “Two, a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life.”

And, in what appeared to be a dig at Huckabee Sanders, Harris added: “I think it’s really important for women to lift each other up.”

One of Trump’s senior campaign advisers, Bryan Lanza, also condemned Huckabee Sanders’ comments at the time she made them, calling them “offensive” and describing being a stepmom as a “tough job.” And a Sanders spokesperson later said the comments over Harris’ humility were referring to the vice president’s policy positions.

In a written statement Sunday, Huckabee Sanders said, “I would never criticize a woman for not having children, the point I was making and that Kamala Harris confirmed by her own admission is that she doesn’t believe our leaders should be humble, which explains her arrogant claim that she alone can fix our nation’s problems after spending the last four years making them worse.”

The comments come amid a broader election-year debate over families and the role of people in society who do not have children. They also underscore Donald Trump’s shaky relationship with women voters, particularly as Democrats continue to hammer the former president for his role in appointing three conservative Supreme Court justices key to overturning Roe v. Wade.

Trump’s own running made, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has faced criticism for his past critiques of Harris and other women in leadership positions, who he described in a 2021 Fox News interview as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Harris, in the podcast interview, called those comments “mean and mean-spirited.”

Trump, for his part, has sought to both defend Vance as well as those who do not have children, telling reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists in July that some “people without the family are far better — they’re superior in many cases.” He’s also tried to soften his position on abortion by declaring that the issue is now in the hands of states and pledging that he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have embraced the “childless cat lady” label. When she endorsed Harris last month, Taylor Swift signed her post, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady,” and included a photo of her and her cat.>

<Donald Trump is now facing condemnation from the editorial board of North Carolina’s second-largest newspaper as he continues to take criticism for politicizing the response to Hurricane Helene across the US southeast.

Trump was in Georgia last week to survey hurricane damage alongside the state’s governor, Brian Kemp — a one-time foe who has returned to the Trumpworld fold, like many Republicans, seeking political cover.

On Monday, he attacked Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration in a Truth Social post for supposedly “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas”, a false charge. A Republican lawmaker representing three counties in hard-hit western North Carolina — which is largely rural, and politically trends conservative — has called it a “junk” conspiracy.

He’d go further in an interview with Kellyanne Conway, one of his most ardent truth-twisters on cable TV before she was largely exiled from the networks, accusing Harris of trying to “hurt” western North Carolina residents.

On Saturday, Trump’s claims provoked a response from one of the state’s most widely-read newspapers, the Charlotte Observer. The Observer’s editorial board slammed the ex-president for his lies about the federal response to Helene, which is believed to have killed more than 100 across the state.

“This is not a situation to capitalize on for political gain. But former President Donald Trump has politicized the situation at every turn, spreading falsehoods and conspiracies that fracture the community instead of bringing it together,” read the newspaper’s editorial.

“There’s no evidence to support any of those ridiculous claims. And by every indication, state and federal agencies have been working to help people in need,” it continued.

Adding that the hurricane-ravaged areas of the state were not a “political football” for the Trump campaign, the Observer also swiped at the state’s Trump-endorsed lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, for spreading the conspiracies. Robinson’s reasoning for doing so is clear: he’s at the center of the complete implosion of his campaign over a shocking CNN investigation which found that a screen name and email address linked to the sitting lieutenant governor was linked to a wide array of disgusting and vile comments on a porn site.

Harris herself was in the state on Saturday and visited Asheville — a city hit by substantial flooding during the storm.

“We're here for the long haul,” she told a volunteer leader.

Robinson also received special mention in the piece for his failure to show up for a key vote to declare a state of emergency, part of his role as lieutenant governor, while he continued to campaign for the governorship. The vote still passed without his participation.

Hundreds are believed dead after Helene caused massive flooding and triggered landslides that wiped out bridges and homes. It’s now the second-deadliest hurricane to strike the US in more than a half-century.

Federal aid approved for Helene survivors has already passed $45m, and that number may continue to rise. FEMA’s website indicates that the disaster relief agency has already distributed more than 1.5m meals and more than 12.6m liters of drinking water as part of aid efforts. President Joe Biden further announced the deployment of 500 National Guard members equipped with “advanced technological assets” to western North Carolina.

The agency has even been forced to put out a separate webpage to counter misinformation and conspiracies surrounding Hurricane Helene relief, including charges from right-wing social media accounts claiming that aid is being distributed on the basis of ethnicity.

Thom Tillis, the state’s senior member in the US Senate, addressed the ex-president’s fake claims on Sunday.

"We can have a discussion about the failure of this administration's border policies and the billions of dollars it's costing, but right now — not yet — is it affecting the flow of resources to western North Carolina,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation.>

<[Event "Strumica"]
[Site "Strumica MKD"]
[Date "1995.??.??"]
[EventDate "1995"]
[Round "13"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Kurajica, Bojan"]
[Black "Kutirov, Rolando"]
[ECO "D14"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<There are two theories that allies of Donald Trump promote to assert that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate.

The first is that rampant fraud — maybe with mail-in ballots, maybe from voting machines, maybe both, maybe something else — resulted in Joe Biden earning more votes nationally and in the states he flipped from 2016. This theory suffers from the minor flaw that there is no evidence in favor of it and lots of evidence against it. It also suffers from the secondary flaw that the lack of evidence means that those who most loudly adhere to it are often those with whom reputable people are the least interested in associating.

So the second theory gained traction. It holds that the election was illegitimate because a number of ancillary things shifted the results: late changes to election rules, including some that let more people vote early (meaning, the argument goes, more Democrats); big donors helping fund election administration; social media companies putting their thumb on the scales, including by (briefly) limiting the sharing of a New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter. In short, the election was “rigged” for Biden not by direct cheating but by indirect influence, and that made all the difference.

There are a few benefits here. One is that it’s essentially unfalsifiable; you can’t flatly disprove vague claims about influence. Another is that it separates the presenter from the disreputable characters alleging fraud and from being tied to the already false claims about illegal voting. It also allows you, a Republican and/or Trump supporter, to lament how The System weighed in on behalf of Biden in an unacceptable way.

Such voices are noticeably quiet now that it’s Republicans who are doing the rigging.

In Georgia, for example, the State Election Board passed a new rule last month mandating hand counts of submitted ballots — a rule driven by false claims about election fraud and enacted on the strength of the board’s pro-Trump majority. As ProPublica has noted, the new rule empowers local officials to potentially shift the outcome of the election by excluding pockets of votes offered in favor of Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

One of the ways in which the Georgia results were suspect, according to a January 2021 memo written by Trump attorney John Eastman, was a change in rules resulting from a settlement agreement reached in March 2020, seven months before the election.

The right has also grown much more comfortable with social media executives weighing in on politics — one in particular.

In 2020, a contribution made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s private foundation to an organization that planned to provide grants to elections officials was cast as a devious effort to turn out more Democrats. Zuckerberg was broadly pilloried on the right despite the lack of evidence that the donations aided Democrats or even were meant to aid Democrats. Yet there’s no outcry for X owner Elon Musk’s explicit effort to use his platform (known four years ago as Twitter) on Trump’s behalf.

Musk has received only praise from Trump allies for explicitly endorsing the former president and for his support of a political action committee, America PAC, that aims to turn out Republican voters by paying people to help identify targets. Musk’s activity on behalf of Trump goes far, far further than anything Zuckerberg did, including massive (quiet) funding of right-wing efforts in 2022 and (loud) pledges to do more in 2024. X took over the platform’s handle @America and handed it to the PAC to explicitly promote Trump’s candidacy....>

<....Nor did Republicans express outrage at Musk shutting down the account of reporter Ken Klippenstein. Klippenstein obtained and published a report that was allegedly part of the vetting process for Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). Soon after, his account on X was shut down for sharing private information — “doxing” Vance, in the vernacular.

The information was allegedly stolen from a Trump aide by hackers in Iran. The reason that the story about Biden’s son Hunter was limited for several hours in October 2020 was concern that the information in the article was a function of Russian hacking, as information made public shortly before the 2016 election had been. The muffling of the Hunter Biden story (which, despite slanted polling, almost certainly had no effect on the election) became a central element of the right’s insistence that social media companies were censoring their politics. The response to Klippenstein’s ongoing ban has been silence.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter was in part a reflection of his sharing a widespread belief on the right, one that predated the 2020 election, that the company specifically and social media companies broadly were intentionally censoring conservative users. The companies argued that they were, instead, reducing abuse and misinformation, with some prominent conservative users affected.

That argument was clearly robust from the outset, but it has been bolstered by recent research demonstrating that right-wing users were more likely to share false claims on social media. If the social media company implements limits on sharing false claims, those users would be more likely to be affected — which, the research suggests, they were. Once Musk bought Twitter, those limits were largely abandoned, allowing false information to spread. Information that still often emanates from the right and that is still often offered in service to Trump’s political goals.

To use the parlance of the right, X has now been “rigged” in favor of Trump, just as voting in Georgia has been. If Trump wins next month’s election, Harris supporters will have a ready-made excuse for why that election was illegitimate. Except, of course, that Harris is very unlikely to be promoting the idea that it was. And except that there’s no evidence that such “rigging” would have much effect this year any more than it did four years ago.>

<Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk warned that millions of born-again and mainline Christians choosing not to vote in the upcoming election could pose a serious threat to Donald Trump's reelection efforts.

Citing survey data from pollster George Barna, Kirk described the situation as a "five-alarm fire" for Trump, noting that 41 million born-again Christians and 32 million mainline Christians are not planning to vote.

"The local church must be activated to explain why voting is critical," Kirk wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, urging Christian leaders to rally their congregations to the polls.

"We cannot expect President Trump to have a more Christian ethos if the Church refuses to vote. We cannot expect President Trump to be more pro-life if our own people don't back him up at the ballot box. The local church MUST be activated," Kirk said.

Trump has heavily courted white conservative evangelicals since entering politics nearly a decade ago. He is now selling Trump-themed Bibles, touting the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and encouraging Christians to vote for him.

According to AP VoteCast, a broad survey of voters, about 8 in 10 white evangelical voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2020.

However, the potential voter shortfall comes at a time when Trump is facing challenges in maintaining support among Christian pastors.

A recent Lifeway Research poll revealed a shift in his support among evangelical pastors since 2020. In the new poll, 61 percent of evangelical pastors said they plan to vote for Trump, down from 68 percent in September 2020.

In the broader race, Trump held a 32-point lead over President Joe Biden in 2020 (53 percent to 21 percent), while the current poll shows him with a 26-point lead over Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris (50 percent to 24 percent).

The decline in Trump's support among Christian and evangelical groups comes as the former president faces widespread criticism from these movements for his wavering stance on abortion during this campaign. Trump has repeatedly downplayed the importance of abortion, stating that it is no longer a "big factor" in elections and predicting it will become "a very small issue" in this year's vote.

Moreover, Trump recently criticized Florida's six-week abortion ban, calling it "too short" and suggesting more time should be allowed before restricting abortion access, igniting backlash from anti-abortion advocates.

Although Trump later reversed his stance, the damage to his reputation among staunch anti-abortion supporters, such as Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler, had already been done. Mohler, a prominent figure in conservative Christian politics, warned that Trump's inconsistent positions might lead conservative Christian voters to either stay home or reconsider their choices in November.

Meanwhile, grassroots efforts like Evangelicals for Harris are working to persuade disillusioned evangelical voters to support Harris or sit out the election altogether. Reverand [sic] Jim Ball, the group's president, said its focus is on mobilizing evangelical voters in swing states who may no longer feel comfortable supporting Trump but are hesitant to back a Democrat.>

<rom the moment he was confirmed in 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts made it his mission to differentiate the Supreme Court from the political branches. Yet, the court is ensnared in politics perhaps more than ever – and by the chief’s own hand.

The former star appellate lawyer who allies once cast as the smartest person in the room remains confounded by the realities of Donald Trump.

Roberts was shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision affording Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. His protestations that the case concerned the presidency, not Trump, held little currency.

Unlike most of the justices, he made no public speeches over the summer. Colleagues and friends who saw him said he looked especially weary, as if carrying greater weight on his shoulders. On Monday, after he ascended the bench to formally open a new session, Roberts hewed to a familiar script and kept any emotion in check.

This is a fraught time for America’s highest court, as divisive rulings mount and controversy persists over the justices’ lack of an enforceable ethics code.

Roberts, who will turn 70 in January, faces a new slate of major cases to be heard in the coming months, including disputes over transgender rights, gun control, the death penalty and a possible return of Trump litigation. But perhaps the more significant immediate test of Roberts’ leadership will be litigation around the November 5 presidential election and the counting of votes.

The Roberts Court has been in sync with the GOP political agenda largely because of decisions the chief justice has authored: For Trump and other Republicans. Against voting rights and racial affirmative action. Against federal regulations over environmental, public health and consumer affairs.

Roberts’ pattern of favoring GOP interests has been entrenched by his decisions in such cases as the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder (gutting part of the Voting Rights Act) and the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause (preventing US courts from stopping political parties from gerrymandering voting districts to their advantage).

But the politically charged valence deepened in the justices’ resolution of the case against former President Trump on election-interference charges from 2020. The court’s protracted action, even before its July 1 decision, ensured that Trump’s trial would not occur before his renewed bid for the White House, now against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Supreme Court’s stature has shrunk, according to multiple polls. In July, for example, after the Trump immunity decision was released and the annual session ended, fewer than half of Americans (47%) expressed a favorable opinion of the court, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

That favorable rating was 23 percentage points lower than in August 2020, when the conservative supermajority on the nine-member bench took hold. Part of the drop no doubt tracks the court’s 2022 decision overturning abortion rights, a decision to which Roberts partially dissented.

Responses predictably differed based on people’s politics. Republicans held a far more favorable view of the Supreme Court than Democrats did, Pew reported.

Now, as a new term begins and a new round of election litigation looms, the question is whether Roberts will reinforce his conservatism or whether he will recalibrate as he has at other times. In 2020, for instance, he hedged on his opposition to abortion rights and retreated from prior sentiment against Obama-era protections for certain familial immigrants without documentation.

He is plainly mindful of his legacy.

“You wonder if you’re going to be John Marshall or you’re going to be Roger Taney,” Roberts told a law school audience in 2010, referring to the great 19th century chief justice and the latter chief who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring that slaves were not citizens. “The answer is, of course, you are certainly not going to be John Marshall. But you want to avoid the danger of being Roger Taney.”

Roberts declined a CNN request for an interview.

Trump, whose pending criminal prosecution arises from his 2020 effort to overturn the valid results giving Joe Biden the White House, has already engaged in a series of lies about state ballot rules and other election procedures this cycle. In one of his especially audacious falsehoods, he has proclaimed that Harris will beat him only if she cheats.

Dozens of Republican-generated lawsuits against state election practices are making their way through lower courts. Any litigation that is truly consequential in the Trump-Harris battle is likely to force the justices into rapid decision-making against tight deadlines....>

<....The possibility of another Bush v. Gore hangs over the court. In that 2000 case testing which candidate could claim Florida’s crucial electoral votes, the court ruled for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush over then-Vice President Al Gore. The 5-4 decision fell along the justices’ ideological, if not political, lines.

Roberts, who had served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and was in private practice at the time, assisted George W. Bush’s legal team. After Bush took the White House, he appointed Roberts to a US appellate court. In 2005, he elevated Roberts to the Supreme Court to succeed William Rehnquist, for whom Roberts had once worked.

In one early interview, Roberts told C-SPAN: “The most important thing for the public to understand is that we are not a political branch of government. They don’t elect us. If they don’t like what we’re doing, it’s more or less just too bad.”

In 2018, when Roberts tried to counter disparaging statements by Trump against federal judges, the chief justice proclaimed that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges,” rather “dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

“Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts,” Trump shot back that same day, “but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”

That November 2018 clash, sparked by controversy over federal asylum policy, showed Trump’s readiness to one-up any perceived adversary. Roberts said nothing more against Trump at the time, and he has since avoided any similar public reproach.

In an era of increased polarization and rising public distrust of government, Roberts does not inhabit the world he apparently envisioned when he first took his seat.

As he was seizing the majority at the court for the most important decisions last session, his power to persuade the public was dissolving, evidenced by reaction to the Trump immunity case.

Special counsel Jack Smith has accused Trump of engaging in multiple crimes to stay in office, including lying to state officials to ignore true vote counts, trying to organize fake slates of state electors and directing a mob to march toward the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, where election results were to be certified.

Roberts, joined by his five fellow conservatives, found that the former president was entitled to presumptive, if not absolute, immunity for actions related to his official acts. Roberts’ view of official acts, as opposed to private ones, was vast.

But the chief justice said such sweep was important to protect the office of the presidency: “(U)nlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies. … Our perspective must be more farsighted.”....>

<....Dissenting justices said the majority’s reasoning flew in the face of established precedent that would hold a president accountable.

“Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the liberal dissenters.

Law professors excoriated the majority’s reasoning, and Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz, writing in the New York Review of Books, went so far as to compare the decision to the Dred Scott case. He declared Trump v. United States “the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history.”

Roberts’ former law clerks have defended him to varying degrees. “I think a lot of reaction to the decision is somewhat overblown,” said lawyer Erin Murphy, now in private practice.

At a recent Georgetown University Law Center session, she said, “the Trump immunity case is less about Trump and more about not opening the door to” successive administrations “coming after previous presidents.”

Roman Martinez, also a former Roberts clerk in private appellate practice, said the decision was more open-ended than has been widely construed.

“There’s ambiguity as to the scope of the immunity,” he said. “There’s sorta question marks across different aspects of the opinion on what it means. … We haven’t seen the ending yet.”

Smith has recast the indictment, highlighting the nonofficial nature of Trump’s campaign efforts from the last election, as he now argues before US District Judge Tanya Chutkan that the case can proceed. Chutkan will decide which parts of the Smith indictment can go to trial, without breaching the court’s decision that declared the former president immune from prosecution for official, as opposed to private, conduct.

Last week, Chutkan released Smith’s 165-page motion for immunity determinations on Trump’s actions attempting to reverse the 2020 election results. Smith has argued that Trump’s challenge of the results stemmed from his private actions as a candidate desperate to keep the White House.

Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, a longtime friend of Roberts, spent time with him in July immediately after the Trump decision was issued. They taught together in Galway, Ireland, as part of a New England Law Boston program.

In an August essay for The Washington Post, Lazarus said the Roberts opinion “offers a surprisingly clear road map for the successful prosecution of Trump.”

“The bottom line is clear,” Lazarus wrote. “Whether you are outraged by or sympathetic to the surprising sweep of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, it nevertheless leaves the former president very much open to a successful felony prosecution.”

Whether that happens is beyond the hands of Roberts and the Supreme Court at the moment as Chutkan considers new filings. And it may be that Trump’s case is more truly in the hands of the voters.>

<Hurricane Milton is expected to sweep past Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and hit the south-west coast of Florida by Wednesday evening local time, bringing sustained winds of nearly 155mph (250km/h) to an area already reeling from Hurricane Helene’s devastation 12 days ago. Almost all of Florida’s west coast was under a hurricane warning and more than a million people were told to evacuate.

As Florida prepared for Milton and recovery efforts continued in five other states hit hard by Helene, Kamala Harris urged politicians to stop “playing games” with lives at stake, as the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, reportedly refused her calls and Donald Trump and his supporters spread misinformation that there was no money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

How has the Fema chief responded to Trump’s falsehoods? Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have accused the Biden administration of “abandoning” people and, baselessly, of being short of disaster relief funds due to money spent on undocumented migrants. (Fema’s housing program, which offers shelter to migrants leaving detention, is separate from its disaster relief program.) Deanne Criswell, the Fema administrator, said these falsehoods were “creating an impedance to our ability to actually get people the help they need”.

The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been criticised for spreading false conspiracy theories that “they can control the weather”. Though she never specified who she meant by “they”, she has a history of promoting untrue conspiracy theories around the federal government, her political opponents and Jews.

Experts say that under the controversial rightwing Project 2025 manifesto, which was authored by numerous former Trump officials, federal forecasting of severe storms and aid given to shattered towns and cities would be drastically scaled back.

In an interview with CBS’s Bill Whitaker, Kamala Harris refused to call Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu a close ally and said she would not meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin for peace talks if Ukraine was not also represented. This interview was the latest in the vice-president’s unusually robust media blitz as she strikes to gain a lead in the neck-and-neck presidential race against Donald Trump.

She vowed to raise taxes on billionaires and the biggest corporations in order to fund her economic proposals, which include plans to build millions of new housing units, tax breaks for new parents and $25,000 down-payment assistance for new homebuyers.

The CBS correspondent Scott Pelley told the audience that Trump cancelled an interview last week, with the Trump campaign providing “shifting explanations” for why the Republican nominee had declined to participate, including that he did not want to be factchecked.

What do the polls say? Harris has a narrow lead over Trump in national polls, though the race is in effect neck and neck in the swing states that will decide the election....>

<Republicans believe the 2024 race is already over and that former President Donald Trump will be elected back to the White House, according to political analyst Mark Halperin.

A significant number of Republicans have declared the presidential race "effectively over," agreeing with Halperin that Trump will "checkmate" Vice President Kamala Harris with a combination of four to five swing states, the analyst said Tuesday on independent streaming platform 2Way.

"Trump is going to lock up the Sun Belt states, probably all four, but at least three. And then he's going to win Pennsylvania, and that checkmates [Harris]," Halperin told the platform. "They may be wrong. But there's a not insignificant number of them who are quite confident of that. And the data they've seen on the absentees and the early votes and the voter registration ... makes them more confident."

He added that he doesn't know "a single Democrat" who has that same feeling about the Electoral College, saying that some believe Harris can win certain battleground states, but have not expressed confidence that she can win on a national level.

Newsweek on Tuesday reached out to the Harris campaign and Democratic National Committee via email and text for comment.

"That doesn't mean Harris is going to lose, but it is an asymmetry in my reporting that comes from a variety of people connected to the campaigns and not connected to the campaigns," Halperin said.

Halperin is a veteran political journalist who was among the first to report that President Joe Biden would drop out of the 2024 race, days before he announced his decision. He now runs a popular newsletter and political analysis streaming show on the 2Way platform.

On July 18, Halperin said that his sources had told him that Biden had agreed to step aside and that a speech had already been drafted for the president to deliver as early as that weekend. Biden would officially announce that he was no longer seeking reelection on July 21. He would also immediately endorse Harris as his replacement, a move that contradicted Halperin's reporting.

"This decision was reached, I'm told, all of a sudden because of the high-level pressure from [former House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi, [former President] Barack Obama and others, as well as the decision of many of Biden's top aides, that there was no path forward for him, that he would not be able to win this election, win the general election, and therefore he's stepping aside again as early as this weekend," Halperin told Newsmax in July.

Halperin's comments Tuesday come amid new polling numbers from The New York Times/Siena College. The results of the national survey showed Harris with a slim lead over Trump, with 49 percent support to his 46 percent. The figures mark the first time that Harris has held the advantage over Trump in the survey since she became the Democratic nominee. The poll's margin of error is ± 2.4 percentage points. The survey was conducted from September 29 to October 6 among 3,385 likely voters.

Other analysts challenged Halperin's reading of the data, arguing that confidence is not enough to win an election. Journalist Jonathan Alter responded to Halperin in a post on X, formerly Twitter, writing, "Mark, all intel from your reporting is welcome. The problem is that many Republican strategists have a history of working the refs, with sketchy polls, premature 'dozens of paths to 270' (a familiar refrain in Milwaukee) and old-fashioned spin. It ain't worth much."

Political commentator Russell Drew also tweeted, "Mitt Romney was so confident he was going to win that he didn't even write a concession speech. Hillary Clinton too.">

<Republican Rep. French Hill shut down Fox News host Maria Bartiromo’s false on-air claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is “out of money” to handle crises in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and with the looming threat of Hurricane Milton.

During Hill’s Tuesday appearance on Fox Business, Bartiromo slammed President Joe Biden, saying that FEMA “running out of money” was “the biggest failure of this administration.”

“How is it possible that FEMA is out of money?” Bartiromo asked the representative from Arkansas.

Hill’s response was blunt.

“FEMA is not out of money,” he said, adding that “Congress is ready to replenish the funding as soon as we get back to Washington. They have the money to take care of Florida, take care of North Carolina, and take care of Georgia. They need to get about delivering it and listening to what their governors are asking and meeting those governors’ requests.”

Bartiromo had seemed to be referencing comments made last week by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, in which he said, “We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting. … FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”

The White House said Monday that FEMA “has sufficient funding to both support the response to Hurricane Milton and continue to support the response to Hurricane Helene — including funding to support first responders and provide immediate assistance to disaster survivors.”

Mayorkas also told MSNBC host Jen Psaki Monday, “Everybody should rest confident that FEMA has the resources” to deal with Hurricane Milton, adding that the organization has around 900 personnel deployed to Florida in advance of the storm’s arrival.

In his appearance Tuesday, Hill called out the secretary’s seemingly contradictory statements.

“I don’t think anyone in Congress has any confidence in Mayorkas or what Mayorkas says,” Hill said.

Bartiromo, however, went on to offer another dubious claim—pushed by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump—that FEMA money was being “used for illegal immigrants” instead of hurricane relief.

Hill immediately undercut this argument as well, correctly pointing out that the money Bartiromo was referencing was “out of a completely different account … not connected to the hurricane relief.”

FEMA’s website specifically responds to the false claim on its dedicated fact-checking page.

“No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. FEMA’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts,” it reads. “Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”>

<Four years of Donald Trump's false claims about a stolen 2020 election have kindled growing suspicion of voting machines among conspiracy theorists. One of their solutions is to replace the tabulators that count every vote with people who will do that by hand.

Controversies over the issue have flared periodically in pockets of the country before the 2024 presidential election even though research has shown that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results.

The few counties that have attempted the massive task have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.

In Texas’ Gillespie County, a hand-count of Republican primary election ballots this year stretched into the early morning hours, taking almost 24 consecutive hours with 200 people counting ballots, the Texas Tribune and VoteBeat reported. The hand-count cost taxpayers about double the wage costs of the 2020 Republican primary and involved fixing a series of errors, the news nonprofits reported.

In rural Nye County in Nevada, where volunteers in 2022 embarked on an unprecedented full hand-count of midterm votes, mismatched tallies led to recount after recount. After the first day of counting, the county clerk, Mark Kampf, estimated a discrepancy of nearly 25% between the hand and machine count, attributing it to human counting error. The painstakingly slow process was halted by the state’s Supreme Court over concerns that early vote tallies could be leaked publicly.

Shasta County, a conservative rural county in northern California, last year abandoned plans to hand-count ballots after the plan was estimated to cost $1.6 million and require more than 1,200 additional employees.

Still, some jurisdictions continue to call for hand-counting.

Most recently, Georgia’s State Election Board voted to require poll workers to count the number of paper ballots, but not the votes, by hand after voting is completed. The counting would have to be done by three separate poll workers until all three counts are the same.

The new rule went against the advice of the state attorney general, the secretary of state and an association of county election officials.

Efforts to replace modern voting machines with more laborious, error-prone hand-counting are rooted in a set of conspiracy theories about voting machines that have been spread by Trump and his allies. Some Republicans, inspired by election lies claiming that widespread fraud cost Trump reelection in 2020, have pushed for hand-counting ballots and banning the electronic tabulators used to scan ballots and record votes, despite no evidence of widespread fraud or major irregularities.

“This movement could have died if it had just been a flash in the pan from the 2020 election,” said Charles Stewart, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But conspiracy theorists such as election denier and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell have traveled the country working “to create a grassroots social movement around this skepticism,” Stewart said.

While these conspiracy theories are not common nationwide, they have found a stubborn hold in pockets of the country, “primarily in the deepest red parts of the deepest red states,” Stewart said....>

<....The hand-counting of ballots threatens to delay results by days, weeks or even months, depending on jurisdiction and staffing. Swapping machines with hand-counts would not only be slower but also increase the chances for mistakes and fraud, research has shown.

In a New Hampshire study, poll workers who counted ballots by hand were off by 8%, compared with a 0.5% error rate for machine counting.

“Human beings are really bad at tedious things, and counting ballots is among the most tedious things we could do,” Stewart said. “Computers are very good at tedious things. They can count very quickly and very accurately.”

Trump and other Republicans have called for the use of paper ballots in this year's election. In fact, paper ballots or paper records of every vote already are produced in nearly every state.

The Brennan Center at New York University estimates that 98% of all votes nationwide will be cast on paper in this year's presidential election.

Paper ballots also are used in postelection, hand-count audits to identify any irregularities with ballot scanning and counting and to ensure the machine results are accurate. Election officials also conduct accuracy testing on the machines before every election.

Susannah Goodman, director of election security at Common Cause, said informing voters of the checks already in place can help reduce the fear and distrust at the center of calls for hand-counting ballots.

“If you show voters the process and all of the steps that are taken to ensure the outcome is correct – not just tell, show – they gain confidence,” she said.>

Don't like the content, <jussie wuckfad>? <bestiality lover of oz>? Then stay away, <dumbass and dumbasser>!!!

<Two nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit Monday against the Virginia Department of Elections, accusing the agency of violating federal voting rights law.

The big picture: The National Voter Registration Act has become a flashpoint ahead of the 2024 general election, with states like Alabama, Georgia, and now Virginia, facing allegations of purging voters from rolls.

The law prevents states from removing voters from the active rolls less than 90 days before an election, during a so-called Quiet Period in order to prevent last-minute mistakes.

The Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the League of Women Voters of Virginia filed a suit in federal court Monday, "to challenge the state's policy of illegally and systematically removing voters from the rolls only one month before the upcoming election," the nonprofits said in a news release.

They allege that an executive order signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) in August requiring daily updates to state voter lists to remove ineligible voters violates the Quiet Period required by the National Voter Registration Act.

The order requires state and local election officials to remove individuals from the lists if Department of Motor Vehicles records don't indicate they're a U.S. citizen. But the lawsuit argues the DMV data can often be outdated and therefore inaccurate.

"Defendants' Purge Program ... is an illegal, discriminatory, and error-ridden program that has directed the cancelation of voter registrations of naturalized U.S. citizens and jeopardizes the rights of countless others," the lawsuit states.

Christian Martinez, spokesperson for Youngkin, said Virginia fully complies with all federal and state election laws.

"Every step in the established list maintenance process is mandated by Virginia law and begins after an individual indicates they are not a citizen," Martinez said. "The DMV is mandated by law to send information about individuals who indicate they are a noncitizen in DMV transactions to [the state's elections office]."

Martinez called the accusations "baseless," adding: "Anyone spreading misinformation about it is either ignoring Virginia law or is trying to undermine it because they want noncitizens to vote."

Attorney General Jason Miyares's (R) office, too, said they're "confident in the position the Department of Elections has taken and stand ready to defend," per spokesperson Shaun Kenney.

The Justice Department filed a similar lawsuit last month over an Alabama program announced in August to remove potentially ineligible voters from its rolls, arguing it came too close to the upcoming election.

The DOJ asked a federal court to reinstate eligible voters and require the state to inform anyone impacted that their ability to vote has been restored.>

<Vermin are mostly from Vermont. They live the next town over from the shooting. So full of hatred they wouldn't think twice about shooting someone.>

The Midwest obviously has its share, just as one of our neighbours does, and a certain land in the Southern Hemisphere can claim a piece of the action.

#massverminowned
#ozscumowned
#heartlandscumowned

<Several disputes over voter rights in Ohio were unresolved Tuesday as the state began accepting early ballots in this fall’s election for president, a key U.S. Senate race and a redistricting measure.

Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose had not yet responded to Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, which notified him last week that voters were being systematically removed from the rolls in several counties as a result of third-party challenges. The advocacy groups alleged the actions violate provisions of the National Voting Registration Act.

LaRose’s office said he had cast a tie vote keeping most of the challenged voters in one of the counties, Delaware, on the rolls. He is reviewing claims in three additional counties.

National groups allied with former President Donald Trump have been facilitating these citizen-powered efforts to systematically challenge the legitimacy of large numbers of voter registrations. LaRose praised their efforts and believes accurate voter rolls are a core tenet of any well-run election, said spokesman Dan Lusheck.

“Ohio runs some of the most transparent elections in the nation, and we are proud of that,” Lusheck said.

Meanwhile, minority Democrats at the Ohio Statehouse carried on questioning LaRose's removal of 155,000 voter registration records in August. He has said the legally required actions targeted registration records of inactive, noncitizen, deceased or otherwise ineligible voters.

On Monday, state Rep. Elliot Forhan, a Cleveland-area Democrat, filed a formal challenge asking the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections to restore 741 voters in the county — a Democratic stronghold potentially pivotal in U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown's tight reelection bid against Cleveland businessman Bernie Moreno.

State Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, another Democrat from the Cleveland area, sent a letter to LaRose on Tuesday reiterating her earlier request for additional records involving the office's removal processes. Her office uncovered more than 1,000 wrongfully removed voters in Cuyahoga County alone with the help of previously released records, she said, and requested a third-party audit.

“If Frank LaRose isn’t going to ensure all eligible voters have the right to vote in Ohio, the least he can do is give me the public records, so I can do it for him,” Sweeney said in a statement.

Lusheck said LaRose's office produced records responsive to Sweeney's request back in June. “She did not follow up requesting additional records that I’m aware of until she decided to pull her own political stunt,” he said.

Also yet to be resolved is the Ohio Democratic Party's September lawsuit challenging a LaRose directive that prevents people who are helping voters with disabilities drop off their ballots from using drop boxes.

The secretary issued his order after a federal judge struck down portions of Ohio’s sweeping 2023 election law in July, allowing more classes of people to help voters with disabilities deliver their ballots. It affirmed the helpers could do so, but added requirements that they drop the ballots inside board of elections offices and sign a form vouching for their identities.

LaRose called the move a precaution against ballot harvesting. Democrats said that it is illegal.

Three of the Ohio Supreme Court's seven justices — two Democrats and a Republican, all seeking office this fall — have recused themselves in the case. A fourth was asked to, but refused.

The Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party said Tuesday they have moved to intervene in the case.

“Secretary LaRose has taken critical steps to safeguard Ohio’s elections, but once again Democrats are trying to dismantle commonsense protections that make it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” national committee Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement. "This is yet another poorly veiled attempt to eliminate ballot safeguards and interfere right before the election — and we will stop them.”>

Will Chickens*** face the challenge or not?

<CNN won’t let Donald Trump’s will-he-or-won’t-he game over a second presidential debate last much longer. The network on Tuesday gave both presidential campaigns until noon on Thursday to decide whether they will participate in its planned Oct. 23 debate. “CNN sent invitations on September 21 to both Vice President Harris and former President Trump’s campaigns to participate in a CNN debate this fall as we believe the American people would benefit from a second debate between the two candidates for President of the United States,” the network said in a statement. “With less than 30 days to Election Day, we are placing a deadline for a formal response from both campaigns.” The deadline provides the network with the logistical runway to produce the debate, which it proposed hosting at the same Atlanta studio where Trump and President Joe Biden squared off in June. Kamala Harris’ campaign reaffirmed its commitment to the Oct. 23 debate, which it agreed to last month, in a tweet on Tuesday. Trump has said it was too late in the presidential cycle to debate, though he has still expressed an openness to it.>