Indeed, during Watergate, the articles of impeachment against Nixon included the charge that he obstructed justice by “interfering or endeavouring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees.” At any time and for any reason. The context was Comey, but the implications are chilling: that Trump asserts the right to terminate the Russia probe altogether. Or the investigation into his lawyer Michael Cohen. This is a scary vision of the power entrusted to any president, but especially this one.

Trump is waging a war against Mueller. When he charges that he is being victimized by a “Criminal Deep State” conspiracy, he is waging war against the Justice Department and the FBI. When he virtually stalks and hounds Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he is waging war against Sessions. When he berates and insults Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, he is waging war against him. Among the vast number of voters who have made Trump extraordinarily unpopular, these vicious attacks against bastions of American justice that Trump treats as enemies create anger, alarm and outrage.

Where some see the president acting to obstruct or derail the investigation, others see the Justice Department as acting to obstruct or derail the president. Moreover, even if the president is wrong about his deep-state conspiracy theories, he can claim that his motivation was not just clear but expressly stated… The conspicuous omission of a denial from Giuliani could reflect a decision that Trump’s defense is quickly being reduced to a fight over motivations rather than means. To convict Trump of obstruction of justice, Mueller must prove that the demand for “unrecusal” was not just unseemly but unlawful.

Gaza needs a Marshall Plan to rehabilitate and rejuvenate it, and to allow its residents some chance of a reasonable life. Nothing more. Without this, bitterness and frustration will continue to fester and find an outlet in acts of terrorism, in one form or another. People who have something to lose are in no rush to endanger their lives in violent confrontations with an army or to become terrorists. They want to live. If they have nothing to lose, history teaches us, they turn to the path of violence.

Israelis who can neither learn nor forget are once again coming up with reconstruction plans that even if carried out won’t achieve their goal… Few people are willing to understand what the Palestinians have been conveying to us all these years: What you see as the essence of good, we see as the essence of evil. If we leave the refugee camps, the Palestinian struggle will die. To advance the national cause – a full return to our land – the more we preserve the bad the better.

…there are those who argue that any military operation should be accompanied [by some new form of economic assistance], which could include rebuilding Gaza or constructing a port somewhere for Gaza’s population. But this policy is dangerous. Hamas is not about to abandon its strategy of popular warfare aimed at Israel’s destruction… The second option is to embark on a large-scale operation to conquer Gaza and eradicate Hamas. We know that despite the [poisonous] media coverage of IDF operations, this is feasible from an operational perspective. But ever since the 1967 Six-Day War, experience has shown that [the ability to achieve] deterrence is limited, and a decisive victory on the battlefield can have unforeseeable results and possibly even backfire. . .

So feminists, and the left more broadly, now have a chance to prove that they really have learned a lesson from the Bill Clinton debacle. They have a chance to stand as forthrightly and rightly against an offense committed by one of their own as they do against attacks on them. Or they can slink away, muttering about Trump and the patriarchy, and wait for the next generation of feminists to get old enough, and mad enough, to repair the damage they’ve done.

Cable channel TBS has no choice: It must keep Samantha Bee. Stand by her. Loudly support her. Because when the president of the United States calls for anyone who is not a public official to lose their job, it changes things. At this point, Bee could have done something much worse than call the president’s daughter a feckless C-word in her otherwise on-point excoriation of Ivanka Trump’ total indifference to her father’s destructive immigration policies — and it wouldn’t matter. Demanding that private citizens lose their jobs for personally offending our dear leader is what authoritarians do, and we don’t live in an autocracy. Yet.

It’s apples and oranges… Barr equated Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser to Barack Obama and an African American, to an ape… By sharp contrast, Bee ended a segment on Trump’s immigration policies — and, specifically, the reports of 1,500 migrant children who have gone missing after they were separated from their parents at the border — by imploring Ivanka Trump to do something… It was a profane clarion call, “from one mother to another.” This wasn’t sexism. It was tough love.

When you’re headed to death without a miracle, you have every right to try an experimental treatment. We’re glad to see Congress recognize that fact by passing the Right to Try Act. If the new law “saves one person, it’s worth it,” said Christina Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute, a prime force in pushing the reform. And it clearly gives thousands more terminally ill people “a last chance — and the right to hope.” Amen.

…it’s unclear if the law will save a single life, especially when weighed against how many lives it could shorten. There’s no way to know, and that is exactly the point. The law allows pharmaceutical companies to provide medications to patients that have not been tested for effectiveness, and with only minimal evidence of safety. On the long list of ways the United States could improve access to quality health care—including affordable, safe, effective medication—nowhere does “right to try” appear.

…the law is inherently redundant. The FDA already had a process that would allow people to acquire untested, experimental medications if they had no other option. Under the FDA’s existing “compassionate use” protocol, people with serious and life-threatening conditions could apply to take an experimental medication that could potentially help if they and their doctor found that no other treatments were available or effective. So the Right to Try Act doesn’t mean people will suddenly receive treatments that could help. It just cuts the FDA out of the picture.

…a good layover is actually a healthful, restorative bore. Layovers are enforced ellipses in life — temporary tenures in air-conditioned limbo. Once you’ve made it to your gate, there is, for the moment, nothing substantial left to achieve. You are free. (You might still have to send email, sometimes, but if you’re the kind of person who absolutely has to send email when at the airport, I wish you the best and cannot help you.) Airport terminals offer nothing to solve and nothing much to explore.

Any human settlement on Mars will be initially populated by crews from Earth. But at some point, if we truly want to have a large long-term Martian colony with a sustainable population, kids are going to need to be born there. Whether or not it’s possible to have children in the Martian environment is still unknown… We don’t know how these changes would affect reproductive cells, fertilization, embryonic development, the developing fetus, or growing children. It’s possible that children born and raised on Mars might have an easier time adapting to the requirements of life there, since it would be the world they would grow up in. But what those adaptations would look like are anyone’s guess.

…roughly three-quarters of kids who have two parents of the same party will fall on the same end of the political spectrum as their parents. As kids are growing up, their parents have an enormous amount of power in shaping their views. “Things that happen early in life are really important for things that happen later,” Lyons said. And once someone adopts a party affiliation, it becomes far less likely for them to change their beliefs. “So if parents set kids down [a partisan] path early in life, it becomes more difficult to deviate,” Lyons said. “Once you tell yourself that you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you’re going to interpret information in a way that would reinforce those beliefs.”