At President Joe Biden's urging, the Democratic National Committee has picked a big and (in my opinion) a completely unnecessary fight with the state of New Hampshire. Last year, when the party met to decide which states would go first in the presidential primary calendar, Biden blindsided just about everyone with his own preferred schedule. Earlier, the party had announced there would be a free-for-all for states to apply for early primary slots, which was largely seen as a convenient way to demote Iowa from the early states, for multiple reasons (the largest being how incompetent they had been in 2020). This conventional wisdom held that one or perhaps even two other additional states would be elevated to the ranks of the early-voting states, again for multiple reasons. But few predicted that New Hampshire would be affected. This proved to be wrong, as Biden released his preferred schedule: South Carolina would be the "first in the nation" state, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire three days later (both voting on the same day). Yesterday, the party met again and instead of locking in Biden's new schedule, gave two states until June to comply with the new setup -- New Hampshire and Georgia (which was newly elevated into the ranks of early-voting states).

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In the midst of political divisions deeper and wider than ever before, we just got an unexpected bit of bipartisanship from an extremely unexpected source -- former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. In the same spirit, I would like to offer up my words of praise for her taking a far different tack from pretty much the entire Republican Party on the nomination of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's running mate.

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Welcome to the first 2020 installment of our quadrennial series tracking the electoral math in the presidential race. We've done this three times previously, and (like pretty much everyone else in the political prediction game) failed miserably the last time around. Hey, two out of three ain't bad, right?

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For the first time since 2004, Democrats are united in the spring of a presidential election year. The primary season is essentially over, with only one candidate left standing. All the other candidates of note have now endorsed presumptive nominee Joe Biden. This is downright remarkable when you consider where we were just a few short months ago.

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Well, the numbers are in, so it's time to take another look at the Democratic horserace, after the third debate shook things up a bit. There are new polls out at both the national level and in Iowa, the Democratic National Committee just announced the new criteria for the fifth debate (to happen in November), and the field continues to shrink as time goes by. So a lot's been going on out on the hustings.

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Labor Day is the official kickoff of the fall campaign season, when voters increasingly begin to pay attention to the presidential race. Or so the pundits claim, at any rate. Whether this week will be much different than last week is yet to be determined, but I for one am going to hang on to that lazy hazy summer glow for one more day by taking a look much farther into the future and contemplating the start of this cycle's primary calendar in a big-picture sort of fashion.

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You know things are getting bad in Trumpland when Our Dear Leader is openly attacking Fox News for not being servile enough.

In a series of angry tweets, Trump this week called Fox News "HOPELESS & CLUELESS" and ended his rant with:

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While plenty of others have plenty of other things to say today about Robert Mueller's testimony in front of two House committees, what struck me the most was a rather large unanswered question. Indeed, it was hard to actually avoid thinking about the concept, because in the first hearing most of the Democrats finished their five minutes with some form of the following declaration: "No one is above the law," sometimes adding: "...not even a president" and sometimes just leaving it implied. But does this phrase have any real-world meaning or is it just so much sanctimonious nonsense?

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Attending the breakout sessions on marijuana legal reform at Netroots Nation has only gotten better and better over the years. Each year's panel is unique, of course, but I'm speaking of a larger picture here, because over the past decade or so the question of legalizing marijuana for recreational adult use has gone from a literal pipe dream to an aspiration to a solid plan to (in state after state) a triumphant reality. And now there is an aura of inevitability about legalization for the entire country -- an concept which would have seemed wildly unrealistic just ten or twelve years ago. We're winning this battle, and we're going to win this whole war in the very near future. This lends a spirit of optimism to the discussion that just wasn't present a decade ago.

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[Program Note: While I am away this week attending Netroots Nation, I thought a blast from the past would be entertaining for my readers. In 2007, also while away on vacation, I conducted a journalistic experiment. I contacted the campaigns of all eight Democratic candidates for president and asked them for permission to reprint a transcript of the speech of their choice from their candidate. All responded, although Dennis Kucinich's campaign was unable to provide me with a transcript because he always spoke without notes (I ran one of his white papers instead).