Opinion

The just-released whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump is a document more damning than many would have believed. It details, for example, what it calls the President of the United States “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the U.S. 2020 election.”

On Tuesday afternoon the dam finally broke: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that the Democratic House majority would finally begin a yes-it's-real impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The ostensible breaking point was Trump's apparent use of military aid to Ukraine as leverage in an effort to get the Ukrainian government to manufacture incriminating evidence against former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading Democratic presidential contender. But evidence also suggests that Democratic members of Congress who had been heavily dosed with spreadsheets and PowerPoints by consultants who warned them that impeachment wasn't politically popular were educated otherwise by their constituents during the August recess.

If you like unfinished puzzles, then waking to the Congressional agenda this morning should be perfect.

President Donald Trump's dragged at least three other officials into his Ukraine scandal, and if it takes them down, it could result in Speaker Nancy Pelosi being the new president of the United States.

Well, it finally happened. After months of handwringing, the Democrats finally took the step their most committed activists have been clamoring for since November of 2018. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that Congress will launch an official impeachment investigation. As of this writing, 203 Democrats are now on the record in support of an inquiry. On Monday morning, that number stood at  134.

Donald Trump’s much-ballyhooed bromance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu is on the rocks because Netanyahu’s Likud party failed for a second time this year to win enough votes to secure his political future, throwing Israeli politics into indefinite disarray.

Yesterday, I said I could no longer defend the House Speaker’s current position with respect to impeachment. It had been prudent for her to remain officially ambivalent, I wrote, while some in her caucus investigated Donald Trump’s high crimes and while other more moderate members kept their distance. But after it was revealed Friday that the president tried to sabotage our sovereignty by asking a foreign leader to dig up dirt on a political rival, I felt Nancy Pelosi’s fence-sitting was no longer tolerable.

For a second year in a row, Fox News host Laura Ingraham has found herself embroiled in controversy after attacking a teenager on live TV — this time a 16-year-old climate activist with autism.

During normal times, Donald Trump’s attempted extortion of the Ukrainian government, aimed at forcing an investigation against one of his chief political opponents would almost immediately become the purview of the attorney general, who would — again, during normal times — appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the allegations. After all, the president attempted to use taxpayer money and the weight of the federal government to force Ukraine’s newly elected president to help Trump’s re-election campaign: This was a flagrant abuse of power, a flagrant attempt at bribery and extortion, and absolutely an indictment- or impeachment-worthy trespass.

In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir argued that women were at a disadvantage in a society where they grew up under ‘a multiplicity of incompatible myths’ about women. Instead of being encouraged to dream their own dreams and pursue meaningful projects for their lives, Beauvoir argued that the ‘myths’ proposed to women, whether in literature or history, science or psychoanalysis, encouraged them to believe that to be a woman was to be for others – and especially for men. Throughout childhood, girls were fed a steady diet of stories that led them to believe that to succeed as a woman was to succeed at love – and that to succeed at other things would make them less lovable.

After spending his early life suffering under the Nazis and then Stalin, the Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski devoted his career to studying the relationship between psychological disorders and politics. He wanted to understand why psychopaths and narcissists are so strongly attracted to power as well as the processes by which they take over governments and countries.

During all the months when the world waited with bated breath for the results of the Mueller report, the most pressing question was always whether the special prosecutor would find that President Trump and his campaign had colluded with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election. Trump had branded the investigation a "witch hunt" and repeated the words "No collusion! No obstruction!" on a loop. But legal observers made clear that there was no legal concept called "collusion." and instead Mueller would be looking at whether or not the Trump campaign had engaged in a criminal conspiracy.