Politics & Government

Former House Speaker John Boehner has parlayed one of his favorite pastimes into a lucrative new gig. The avid smoker is joining the board of tobacco giant, Reynolds American Inc.

The Ohio Republican was the nation's highest-ranking smoker before he left office last October. Boehner currently smokes Camel brand cigarettes and has never indicated a desire to quit the cancer-causing habit.

That's good news for Reynolds, where Boehner will now serve as a Class 2 director and serve on the board's corporate governance committee.

The campaign trail this week has been dominated not by poll numbers, but by a different set of statistics: cholesterol, triglycerides and the blood pressure levels laid out by the medical records of both major party candidates.

That discussion culminated Thursday with Trump's appearance on The Dr. Oz Show for an interview with the controversial Mehmet Oz.

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump offered a bold prediction Thursday that his economic plan will deliver up to 25 million new jobs over the next decade. He described the blueprint as "the most pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-family plan put forth perhaps in the history of our country."

A deal struck late Wednesday postponed what could have been a politically tricky vote Thursday on the House floor: a resolution calling for the impeachment of Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus, a faction of the House's most conservative members, are driving the effort to oust Koskinen, who has served at the helm of the embattled agency since late 2013. His term expires in November 2017.

A letter from Donald Trump's personal physician says he is in "excellent physical health" and received normal results after a physical examination last week.

Donald Trump is lashing out against an African-American pastor who interrupted him Wednesday to chide him for campaigning in her Flint, Mich., church.

"Something was up," Trump told Fox and Friends on Thursday morning, calling the Rev. Faith Green Timmons a "nervous mess."

"I noticed she was so nervous when she introduced me," he said. "When she got up to introduce me she was so nervous, she was shaking. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. Then she came up. So she had that in mind, there's no question."

David Axelrod, a top Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to President Obama, believes Hillary Clinton made the controversy surrounding her health worse by not disclosing her pneumonia diagnosis earlier.

"Obviously her penchant for privacy is what led her to have a separate email system, and there have been other occasions in her public career in which she's tried to create a zone of privacy," Axelrod told NPR's Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition. He tweeted a similar sentiment on Monday:

Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remark has echoed through the political interwebs and produced many rounds of cable TV analysis.

Sure, conservatives pounced. And some liberals laughed in agreement. But does it matter in the real world?