Events

President Trump has told Congress that he doesn't believe they have any right to investigate him or any other part of the executive branch. This, ah, innovative view of the Constitution has garnered some criticism from just about everyone: Legal experts have already torpedoed the absurd idea that the White House gets to declare the House’s impeachment inquiry illegitimate. The Constitution grants the House “sole power of impeachment,” and the chambers set their own rules. The White House claims the...

My task this afternoon is to parse a pile of random text that has, shall we say, inconsistencies. Before I return to that task, I'm setting aside some stuff to read later on: The Chicago-area transit agency Metra plans to spend $2.6 bn over the next five years on fixing things. It can do this because Republican Bruce Rauner, who basically froze the state budget for his entire term, got booted out of office a year ago. The Trump Administration continues its assault on evidence-based research, for example...

How did I miss this? Monty Python's Flying Circus turned 50 on Friday: The Pythons included a prolific diarist – Palin has published three hefty volumes already – but, dismayingly, the months around the start of the first Python show are one of the longest gaps. Palin attributes this to the busy-ness of filming, and having a young child and ailing elderly father. Although comic weirdness had been introduced to the BBC by The Goon Show, Monty Python went even further. BBC production teams may have sensed...

Hard to believe that I visited Ukraine more than 10 years ago, but not hard to believe that it keeps coming up in US politics. Julia Ioffe explains why: Whenever Ukraine appears in our news cycle, it is talked about as if it’s a simpler place than it is. The political dynamic gets reduced to neat binaries—the forces there are either pro-Russia or pro-West; leaders are either corrupt actors or laudable reformers; the good guys versus the bad guys. But that framework belies the moral complexity of the...

John Judis thinks she might: At the risk of appearing foolhardy several months hence, I want to say that in the last week, it has become very likely that Elizabeth Warren will win the Democratic nomination. A two-tier race, with Warren, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders in the top tier, has become a race largely of Warren against herself. Sanders – justifiably in my opinion, and I am of the same rough age – always faced questions about his age.  These questions have been answered in the negative, sadly, by...

Author Peter Pomerantsev says that the behavior of the Trump Administration, especially around its false accusations of illegal behavior by Hunter Biden, could not have better demonstrated how much Vladimir Putin has taught the West: The message of much of Kremlin propaganda is not to showcase Russia as a beacon of progress, but to prove that Western politics is just as rotten as President Vladimir Putin’s. We may have corruption, the argument goes, but so does the West; our democracy is rigged, but so...

What I did on my autumn vacation: About once a year the Apollo Chorus does a day-trip to somewhere nearby. Yesterday we went to the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Champaign, Ill., on the University of Illinois campus. Fun but exhausting.

I wanted to call special attention to an article in Mother Jones I linked to earlier this evening. In it, Tim Murphy shows that the historical precedent for President Trump's impeachment isn't Richard Nixon, it's Andrew Johnson. Key paragraph: The real tragedy of the trial wasn’t poor, pathetic Edmund Ross losing his seat. When the vote fails, Wineapple takes us to places that Kennedy never ventured in his book—churches in Charleston and Memphis where African Americans mourned what they knew they’d...

I was busy today, and apparently so was everyone else: Umair Haque deplores the "age of the idiot" in which we now live. The Washington Post reports that President Trump has spoken with Russian president Vladimir Putin 16 times, more than with any other world leader. Tim Murphy thinks Trump is more Andrew Johnson than Richard Nixon. Andrew Sullivan says, since Trump wants to be impeached, let's do it now. Elizabeth Warren deftly smacked down a right-wing troll. Irish writer Susan McKay asks Boris...

Apparently the impeachment inquiry now underway in the House has gotten to the president, as yet another world leader had to witness involuntarily: An awkward handshake is really the least of their worries. As President Trump continues to rage against impeachment — and the Democrats and whistle-blower he holds responsible for bringing it about — visiting world leaders are encountering a different kind of diplomatic mission. It includes a welcome ceremony, a meeting with Mr. Trump and an invitation to...