Democratic women in the Senate lead the way in calling for Al Franken to resign. And as Tina Dupuy writes in The Atlantic, it finally dawned on Democrats that they should stand with the women who were harassed and not with the men who did the harassing. Dupuy wrote that she believes the women who accused Franken of groping because, she said, he had groped her.
Why Al Franken is apparently done for — and why Roy Moore apparently isn’t. It’s as easy as reading as reading poll numbers. Via The Washington Post.
Donald Trump’s announcement that he would move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem — eventually, but no time soon — had nothing to do with diplomacy and everything to do with politics. Via The New York Times.
Trump won’t take credit for this, but Robin Wright writes in The New Yorker, that Trump has sabotaged his own Mideast peace process, not that there was much hope for it in any case.
The winds are back, there hasn’t been any measurable rain since March and there’s plenty of brush for fuel. And so the fires reach the heart of Los Angeles. A video presentation showing why the California fire season has been so bad this year. Via The New York Times.
Don Jr. invokes attorney-client privilege in refusing to disclose details to a House panel of a conversation he had with his father, the president. Neither Don Jr. or Don Sr. are lawyers, of course, but Don Jr. said there was a lawyer in the room when they spoke. So there’s that. Via Politico.
Are congressional Republicans and their allies starting to panic about the progress of Robert Mueller’s Russia probe? One way to answer the question is by looking at the efforts to undermine Mueller and the FBI. Via The Washington Post.
Doyle McManus: When it comes to investigations, what we know about Trump is that no one has ever used whataboutism to more effect than this current president, who never seems to ask what about how the great presidents before him would have acted. Via The Los Angeles Times.
From The National Review, George Will writes that Republicans don’t really know how the tax plan will work out, but, given what they can guess, it’s worth the gamble.
How Ryan Zinke came to be Trump’s attack dog on environmentalist. For Zinke, his political career didn’t start that way. Via Outside magazine.
Photo by Veni, via Flickr: Creative Commons
