We all know how much President Donald Trump loves superlatives, most especially when they are used in reference to himself or his presidency. This week added yet another one of these superlatives, since Trump is now at the center of the fastest-progressing political scandal ever. Think about it: a mere two weeks ago, nobody knew anything about it; and now we've seen the public release of a president-to-president phone call's semi-transcript, the public release of the whistleblower's slightly-redacted complaint, testimony on the scandal before both houses of Congress, and the start of impeachment proceedings. To say the past week has been a whirlwind doesn't even begin to accurately describe the blinding pace of the growing scandal.

Of course, a lot of in-depth research would have to be done to prove the accuracy of the "fastest scandal ever" title, but because things are moving so fast there simply isn't time to do such digging. Perhaps the Teapot Dome scandal moved faster, or perhaps the speed of the unveiling of the XYZ Affair was quicker. But it's doubtful. What can accurately be said is that this is the fastest-moving scandal in living memory -- mine, at any rate. Normally there is a drip-drip-drip of revealed facts that builds over time (usually many months of time), but this one has been an absolute firehose rather than slow drips. As with all things connected to Trump, the narrative changes so fast that taking the time to type an article such as this one leaves me wondering what I'm missing in the meantime -- things that might make what I write obsolete before I even publish it.

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One of Donald Trump's presidential heroes is Andrew Jackson. Jackson rose to the presidency in 1828 after his first attempt failed. The centerpiece of his second campaign was to shine a bright light on the "Corrupt Bargain" in the House of Representatives, which named John Quincy Adams president in 1824 even though he had fewer Electoral College votes than Jackson (it was a four-candidate race and none of them got an outright Electoral College majority, which threw the election's decision into the House). I was reminded today of a central quote from Jackson's second campaign where he spoke about what had happened in the 1824 election, because it seems downright appropriate when discussing our current president: "There was cheating, and corruption, and bribery too." At this point, that seems to accurately sum up Trump's 2020 campaign as well.

Of course, Jackson's problems were all domestic, involving Speaker of the House Henry Clay, and Jackson's political rival John Quincy Adams. Jackson had a point, after all, since the legislature of Clay's home state of Kentucky had specifically told him to vote for Jackson in the House vote, but Clay went ahead and threw his state's vote (and his significant political weight) behind Adams -- even though not a single person in the state of Kentucky had voted for Adams in the popular election. Two days after the House elected Adams, Clay was nominated by Adams to become the new secretary of State. Hence the label "Corrupt Bargain." But even Jackson likely never would have dreamed of such election corruption stretching beyond America's shores.

Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry, before the semi-transcript of the Trump call with the leader of the Ukraine was released. Doing so was a gamble, because neither she nor any other Democrat had seen the content of the document. Today, Pelosi looks prescient, since the semi-transcript is so damning. There was indeed corruption, and bribery too. All to provide Trump with the means of cheating in the upcoming election.

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Up until today, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been the person riding the brakes on the growing calls to impeach President Donald Trump. This is no longer true. Pelosi has now begun the process of Congress attempting to remove a sitting president from office. By waiting this long, though, Pelosi is now absolutely immune from any accusation that she's in any sort of rush to judgment.

Impeachment is a momentous action, since it represents the most severe check and balance on the power of the presidency written into the U.S. Constitution. Impeachment against a sitting president has only happened three times in all of American history: Andrew Johnson's impeachment and acquittal by the Senate, Richard Nixon's articles of impeachment which forced his resignation, and Bill Clinton's impeachment and acquittal by the Senate. Ironically, the two times impeachment was followed by a Senate trial the president remained in office, while the one time it didn't reach a conclusion was because the president resigned before it could. We will now add a fourth instance of an impeachment inquiry, that of Donald Trump.

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Well, the numbers are in, so it's time to take another look at the Democratic horserace, after the third debate shook things up a bit. There are new polls out at both the national level and in Iowa, the Democratic National Committee just announced the new criteria for the fifth debate (to happen in November), and the field continues to shrink as time goes by. So a lot's been going on out on the hustings.

Campaign News

We'll begin with the departure from the race of Bill de Blasio, who really had no business running for president in the first place. He has slunk back to New York City, where he's supposed to be in charge of running the city. This still leaves a whopping 19 candidates in the running, but at least that number is now in the teens instead of the twenties.

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We're in the midst of a brand-new breaking scandal -- one that's so new it hasn't even been assigned a "-gate" label yet. Ukraine-gate? Kiev-gate? MassiveTrumpCollusion-gate? As was entirely appropriate, Hillary Clinton had the pithiest tweet of the week: "The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election. Again."

What Trump did, apparently, was to pressure the leader of Ukraine to reopen an investigation into Joe Biden's son. Trump reportedly used the threat of stopping military aid to the country to extort his desired outcome. Then when a whistleblower complained about it, the White House and the Department of Justice conspired to cover it up by withholding the official complaint from Congress. That's the crime and the coverup in a nutshell.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reversed course today and allowed a bill with $250 million in new election security spending to advance. It looks like the "#MoscowMitch" campaign worked, in other words. We got to him, and he finally caved!

It's important to put this issue into some context. While $250 million may sound like a lot of money, in Washington it is absolute peanuts. In terms of the whole federal budget, this is the equivalent of some loose change found in the couch cushions. And not even that much loose change, at that. As the old saying about federal spending goes (a saying so old it was mythically first uttered by a senator who died in 1969): "A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Given that bar -- again, set in the 1960s when Dr. Evil thought "one mil-li-on dollars" was a lot of dough -- $250 million only adds up to one-eighth of what was considered "real money" over a half-century ago. Like I said, peanuts. This is what Mitch McConnell was fighting so hard to avoid ponying up.

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This was supposed to be the week when President Donald Trump unveiled his preferred plan for gun safety reform. He still might do so tomorrow. But so far, the entire process on the Republican side of the aisle has appeared rudderless and leaderless, due to Trump's ever-increasing vacillations on what he'd be prepared to support. Mitch McConnell has doubled down on this leaderlessness by insisting that he will not move on any bill until Trump expressly signals his support for it. The buck gets passed back and forth like the political hot potato it is. No Republican wants to be the one with his name associated with an anti-gun law, because they all live in terror of the political power of the National Rifle Association -- which isn't going to support any new gun laws at all. Congressional Republicans are looking for Trump to lead the way out of this conundrum, but Trump seems increasingly incapable of doing so.

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It was little noticed, but last week the U.S. government admitted that this year's budget deficit has already topped the trillion-dollar mark. And the fiscal year won't be over for another month. This will be only the fifth time in American history that the annual deficit has been over a trillion dollars, and the other four years were all in the depths of the Great Recession. We're supposed to have a good economy right now, but we're running a deficit as if we're in some pretty bad times. Of course, all of this proves how both Donald Trump and the Republicans have been lying to the American public all along, and how Democrats can continue to make the rather easy argument that the only time the nation gets its fiscal house in anything resembling good order is when there's a Democrat in the White House.

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It seems like Elizabeth Warren is getting more electable by the day. The more voters see of her, the more they seem to like her, and the more they are tending to support her candidacy. This already has supporters of Joe Biden concerned, although it's not quite a two-person race yet. Bernie Sanders still has virtually the same level of support as Warren, as the two have been locked in a race for second place for months now. But Sanders may not have the ability to broaden his base as much as Warren, who is increasingly seen as somewhat of a compromise between the Democratic Socialism Sanders champions and the incrementalism of Biden.

Statistically, according to FiveThirtyEight.com, Warren won last week's debate. She entered the debate in a strong position, and then improved the most, according to the people polled immediately after watching the debate. On metric after metric, Warren came out in a better position than she had going in, while Biden and Sanders either didn't budge or slipped back a bit. The biggest loser of the debate, according to this polling, was Julián Castro, which isn't all that surprising. Direct attacks on Biden have a way of backfiring, and in Castro's case this backlash was immediate.

Warren is improving on likeability, which is why she seems also to be getting more electable. Of course, "electable" is kind of a fuzzy term, usually meant to indicate how much voters think other voters would support each candidate. Biden's been at the top of the electability heap for a while, but Warren seems to be gaining on him the more voters hear from her.

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We have to begin today with an apology. Five years ago, without knowing any better, we erroneously reported in this space that there would not be another Friday the 13th which coincided with a full moon until 2049. So it was much to our surprise that we heard that this week we all were going to see another one, only five short years after we feverishly coined the word "selenofriggatriskaidekaphobia" to describe those with the very specific neurotic fear (-phobia) of both full moons (seleno-) and Fridays (-frigga-) the 13th (-triskaideka-).

In short, we were lied to. Back in 2014, we read in HuffPost (full disclosure: this was when we were still blogging for them) that there was going to be a Friday the 13th full moon, which is what inspired us to write that earlier bit with the word coinage. In the article, HuffPost reported that another such confluence of events wouldn't happen "for 35 years." We naïvely believed them.

But then this week, we read in HuffPost about tonight's "micromoon," and the article stated that such an event hadn't happened "since 2000." We've since gotten them to revise their article with more-correct information, but now we wonder about their prediction that it won't happen again until 2049. In fact, if it happened next year, it wouldn't surprise us a bit. Hey, then we'd get to use the word selenofriggatriskaidekaphobia again, right? Heh.

Enough looniness, though, let's get on with the show. For once (maybe it's the full moon or something?), we are inclined to just totally ignore President Trump and the continuing saga of his endless buffoonery. Trump was fairly quiet this week, as Sharpiegate moved on to the multiple-investigations stage.

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