The original Heartbreakers reunite with Chris Stapleton on lead vocals!

⛪ Embracing the liberty provided by our first freedom! 💥 An important national milestone – September 25, 1789. 🇺🇲 “Our Founders wholeheartedly supported the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment while passionately supporting a public day that gratefully acknowledged our trust in the Lord. It was no violation of foundational principles – in fact, just the opposite. As President Washington stated: ‘It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God.’ 🗞️ A huge thanks to @RCPolitics for publishing these thoughts. Please check out the link in the comments for the full commentary. @WhiteHouse @abwalworth @CarlCannon @TomBevanRCP @America250 @Freedom250 #firstfreedom #liberty #religiousliberty #realclearpolitics #americaturns250 #america250 #freedom250 #semiquincentennial

New @CookPolitical: GOP on track to lose House majority as 15 race ratings shift towards Dems. Full analysis by @ercovey: cookpolitical.com/analysis/h…

Me playing against Bijan and Drake London in fantasy last night.

Today's RCPod is out: Dan Osborn's basket of deplorables, Talarico's pastor problem, will NYT piece actually help Peltola in Alaska? piped.video/watch?v=xYDTqtcj…

40. STOLEN. BASES.

38.8% job approval in the RCP Average is a new 2nd-term low. The president has been under 40% approval in the RCP Average for 55 of the last 57 days.

Washington needs a good power washing top to bottom. Five things I would do today to end corruption in Washington across all three branches of government: 1. Ban all stock trading. 2. Ban all participation in prediction markets. 3. Mandatory retirement at 75 years old. 4. Mandatory blind trust for individuals with a net worth more than $1 million. 5. Ban all foreign gifts to public officials, including foreign investments in their businesses or other entities.

I absolutely love Nicolas Cage, but I just can't see him fully as John Madden. OTOH, I didn't even recognize Christian Bale was playing Al Davis until the end of the trailer. He's amazing.

Something bizarre is happening underneath the national polling, and I think it deserves a closer methodological look. Trump’s net approval ranges from RMG’s -10 to CNN’s -34 for an extraordinary 24-point spread. Yet, take a look at the generic ballot: CNN: Trump –34 | D+8 Ipsos: –30 | D+8 Echelon: –28 | D+8 Fox: –22 | D+7 NYT/Siena: –21 | D+8 Quantus: –19 | D+8 Rasmussen: –13 | D+8 RMG: –10 | D+6 Across 14 recent polls, Trump net disapproval and the Democratic generic-ballot margin are positively correlated, as we should expect, but only modestly: r ≈ .32. That deserves more attention. CNN (and Ipsos) can measure Trump 24 points worse than RMG and 10 to 15 points worse than the aggregate, while somehow arriving neatly right at the same congressional ballot average. Remarkable. Maybe there is a large and growing bloc of Trump-disapproving Republicans who are still voting the GOP ticket. Maybe differences in mode, weighting, question construction or response behavior or something else, anything, that is producing these unusually large house effects in presidential approval. But when one political measure varies by 24 points across pollsters while a closely related measure remains exactly the same, that should trigger some serious QC work. I simply can’t accept all of these outlier approval numbers at face value without understanding why the generic ballot isn’t moving with them.

Today's RCP podcast: — Trump walks China tightrope with Xi visit — @CarolinaLumetta on 'ban' of CNN, MS NOW, Politico from WH: Will Trump back down? — Joe Abraham / @angeldadjoe on reopening ICE's VOICE office ft. @CarlCannon, @abWalworth, @TomBevanRCP piped.video/watch?v=N78RAPOZ…

NEW: Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), who has said she is a “proud anchor baby”, will hold a press conference in Chicago tomorrow morning to introduce legislation that would “dismantle DHS” & “abolish ICE”. Ramirez says her “Reimagining Safety Act” would “repeal the authorities that give DHS its power, and redirect all funds from DHS to programs that working families rely on,” as well as “create a new human- and community-centered federal department that promotes collective safety.”

Al Gore's Inconvenient Lies realclearpolitics.com/articl…

The inexplicable Ossoff media boomlet continues.

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Let's bookmark this and revisit it in March, shall we?

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Today's RCP podcast: — Democrats gear up for 2028 — Is Iran waiting out the Midterms? — We got Greenland? Win or hype? — Alberta could leave Canada? — Nikole Hannah-Jones 'mugged by reality' @James_Robbins joins @CarlCannon, @abWalworth, @TomBevanRCP piped.video/watch?v=HaRAa8Cc…