Stakes are high in GOP leadership fight  —  If Las Vegas posted odds on what Washington politics will look like after November 2016, the betting line would be ike this:  —  1-3 a Democrat wins the White House — simply because Democrats have won 5 of the last 6 popular votes for the White House …

Hillary Clinton Believes It's Time to Act on Gun Violence  —  America simply cannot accept as “normal” 30,000 gun deaths every year.  The vast majority of the American people - including law abiding gun owners - believe we can and must do better.  Hillary Clinton lived in Arkansas …

Carly Fiorina's first political campaign had a surprising problem: Money … Famed California pollster Joe Shumate was found dead in his home one month before Election Day 2010, surrounded by sheets of polling data he labored over for the flailing Senate bid of Carly Fiorina.

Exclusive: Biden eyes weekend decision  —  He's finally close.  Confidants of Vice President Joe Biden expect him to make a decision next weekend, or shortly thereafter, on whether to launch an epic battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Enemies of the Sun  —  Does anyone remember the Cheney energy task force?  Early in the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney released a report that was widely derided as a document written by and for Big Energy — because it was.  The administration fought tooth and nail …

Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal Is Reached  —  ATLANTA — The United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations on Monday agreed to the largest regional trade accord in history, a potentially precedent-setting model for global commerce and worker standards that would tie together 40 percent …

Carly Fiorina's Mystery Foundation  —  The Fiorina Foundation is run by an organization that has distributed funds to Planned Parenthood.  Oh, and the Fiorina Foundation doesn't appear to exist.  —  Carly Fiorina is so opposed to Planned Parenthood, which she believes is …

Hillary: I'm the Most Transparent Person in American History  —  Hillary Clinton believes she's the most transparent person in American history.  The Democratic presidential candidate made the claim in a town hall this morning, hosted by NBC's Today Show:  —  “I have gone further than anybody …

Ben Bernanke: More execs should have gone to jail for causing Great Recession  —  WASHINGTON — This season, Ben Bernanke was able to sit through an entire Nationals game.  —  During the financial meltdown in 2008, the then-chairman of the Federal Reserve would buy a lemonade and head …

The Breakdown of the Black Family  —  With the publication of “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” Ta-Nehisi Coates has added an elegant and forceful voice to the growing frustration with the inefficacy and injustice of America's criminal-justice system.

A Conundrum for Jeb Bush: How to Use George W.  —  GREENVILLE, S.C. — With Jeb Bush struggling to connect with some Republican activists, his campaign has begun exploring whether to bring in the person it thinks may be best equipped to give him a boost with skeptical conservatives: his brother George W. Bush.

American Apparel Files for Bankruptcy  —  American Apparel, the one-time arbiter of edgy made-in-America cool, filed for bankruptcy protection early Monday, its business crippled by huge debts, a precipitous fall in sales, employee strife and a drawn-out legal battle with the retailer's ousted founder, Dov Charney.

Budget talks: The Harry and Mitch show  —  <p>Delicate negotiations to avoid a budget disaster this fall stumbled out of the gate as two long-time adversaries — Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid — are once again butting heads.</p><p>Reid and House Minority Nancy Pelosi thought they had an agreement …

Pollsters: Don't trust us to winnow GOP field  —  <p>Pollsters surveyed by POLITICO have a unanimous warning for the Republican National Committee and the TV networks who are using public-opinion surveys to exclude presidential candidates from debates: Don't trust polls to detect often-tiny grades …

The conservative evasion on guns  —  President Obama spoke some of the most important words of his tenure last week in response to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. “This is something we should politicize,” the president said.  “It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.”

Syria is Obama's Watergate  —  What did he know and when did he know it?  The immortal question about Richard Nixon and Water­gate should be posed to Barack Obama about Syria.  What and when did he know about Vladimir Putin's axis-of-evil coalition?  —  The significance is not limited to Syria.