party politics

CHERRY HILL, N.J. (AP) -- Garry Cobb spent more than a decade as a pro football player tackling opponents on the field. Now, the former Philadelphia Eagles linebacker-turned-radio-personality is taking on one of New Jersey's most powerful political families in an uphill battle for an open congressional seat.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A gridlocked Congress failed to do the big things: overhauling the nation's immigration system, reforming the loophole-cluttered tax code and stiffening background checks on gun buyers. Now it's time to see whether it can just do the basics.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday if she decides to run for the White House in 2016 she will have "a very specific agenda" but acknowledged in an interview that the modern role of U.S. president has "gotten even bigger and more difficult."

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Deep in the nation's Bible Belt, new signs emerged this weekend of an evolution among Republican governors on gay marriage, an explosive social issue that has divided America's families and politics for years.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Partisan divisions over immigration, education and health care are intensifying as dozens of the nation's governors meet just months before elections thick with presidential implications.

MIAMI (AP) -- When Charlie Crist went to Miami's Little Havana recently, the Democratic candidate for governor stood before a crowd and said what few politicians have in decades of scrounging for votes in the Cuban-American neighborhood: End the trade embargo against Cuba.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Their Senate majority in peril, anxious Democrats have seized the Supreme Court decision that some companies need not provide birth control to women as fresh evidence of the GOP's "war on women" - an argument they hope will energize female voters who could decide the balance of power on Capitol Hill.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama defiantly dared congressional Republicans on Tuesday to try to block his efforts to act on his own and bypass a divided Congress that has thwarted his policy initiatives.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- President Barack Obama says Republican obstructionism in Congress is keeping intact a system that is "rigged" against average people who are trying to do the right thing.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Washington's political establishment offered a sober assessment of the tea party movement Wednesday after six-term Sen. Thad Cochran's narrow win in Mississippi: The upstarts are down but not out.