The Weekly Sift

A very important aspect of cult is the idea that if you leave the cult, horrible things will happen to you. This is important, and it’s important to realize. That people outside of a cult are potential members, so they’re not looked upon as negatively as people inside the cult who then leave the cult.

– Steve Eichel, quoted in “How to Identify a Cult“

This week’s featured post is “Governing Party vs. Personality Cult“.

This week everybody was talking about the Mar-a-Lago search

I cover the details in the personality-cult portion of the featured post. (Look at the quote above in light of how Liz Cheney has been treated.)

Something that didn’t make it into that article: It would be easier to believe Trump’s “witch hunt” rhetoric if his people didn’t keep pleading guilty to multiple felonies, as his CFO Allen Weisselberg did this week.

and the tide shifting for the fall elections

Once or twice a year, I actually sympathize with Mitch McConnell. Like this week, when he lamented how “candidate quality” might keep Republicans from taking the Senate. (For what it’s worth at this stage of the campaign, Nate Silver agrees. His Senate forecast gives Democrats a 63% chance of holding the Senate compared to a 21% chance of holding the House — though even that number has been going up lately.)

“Candidate quality” is an oblique way of saying that Trump and his personality cult have pushed a lot of bozos through the Republican primaries, leaving McConnell little to work with.

In Georgia, an anti-Trump Republican group is airing an ad in which Herschel Walker’s ex-wife describes him holding a gun to her temple and threatening to blow her brains out. But no, the GOP isn’t anti-woman.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic senate candidate John Fetterman has mastered a technique that Republicans have been using since the first President Bush weaponized the Pledge of Allegiance against Mike Dukakis in 1988: latching onto some symbolic issue that works against your opponent and refusing to let up. His opponent, Mehmet (Dr.) Oz, has ten houses, and mostly lives in the one in New Jersey, where People magazine found him in 2020.

Fetterman keeps finding new ways to poke this issue, like getting a Jersey Shore TV star to weigh in on it, or hiring a plane to pull a banner welcoming Oz “home” to New Jersey, or tweeting a photo of Boardwalk with ten houses on it.

---

On abortion, Republican candidates keep digging deeper and deeper holes for themselves. Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Nixon justifies forcing a 14-year-old rape victim to bear a child because of the bonds some girls have formed with their babies. “Out of that tragedy, there was healing through that baby.”

I shouldn’t have to point out that we don’t buy this logic in any other situation. Stories of heroism and community bonding come out of every natural disaster, but we try to avoid disasters all the same. We want fire departments to put out blazes before they spread, even though the great fires of Chicago and London allowed those cities to rebuild themselves better. The archetypal World War II movie is about a tentative young man who grows up quickly and finds inner strength through his combat experiences, but those accounts shouldn’t inspire us to go out and start more wars.

Similarly, some 14-year-olds (or even younger girls) may rise to the occasion and make something positive out of bearing a rapist’s child. (More often, I suspect, a young woman looks back on a hellish period of her life and constructs an upbeat narrative to make peace with it.) But that’s no excuse for the government to force girls down that path.

---

Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano (a 2020 election denier who organized busloads of Pennsylvanians to go to Trump’s January 6 rally) associates with self-styled “prophet” Julie Green. She was invited to give the opening prayer at a Mastriano rally, where his campaign aide introduced her as “a representative of God”. Mastriano has posted one of Green’s 20-minute videos (where she made a series of vague National-Enquirer-style predictions that will be easy to verify after something-or-other happens, but also predicted a scandal for that “treasonous snake” Mitt Romney), and also a picture of himself with Green.

Green has said a lot of interesting stuff: Nancy Pelosi drinks children’s blood. Joe Biden actually died and has been replaced by an actor. Adam Schiff will face God’s judgment because “all will see the proof of your disgusting acts against My son, the true President”. In the same post, God speaks to Chuck Schumer: “Chuck Schumer, your story is similar to that of Nancy, Adam, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and Obama. … you will reap your Harvest though not before you see your nightmares come to pass. My son will return and will be put back in his rightful seat. You will all pay with your lives, and your plans will not succeed.”

Maybe I’m over-interpreting, but it sure sounds like she’s saying that when Trump gets back in power, he will have all his enemies killed. And that’s supposed to be a good thing.

The GOP isn’t the party of Romney and John McCain any more. If you’re still a Republican today, you’re in bed with a bunch of lunatics like Julie Green and Doug Mastriano.

and the pandemic

Reported new cases (for what those numbers are worth in these days of home testing) seem to have leveled off at 130K per day in mid-July and then started downward in August, going under 100K this week.

The theory that something turned in August is supported by the lagging (but more solid) statistics: hospitalizations (down 7% in the last two weeks) and deaths (down 7%).

Now we wait to see whether the start of the school year triggers a new surge.

As an aside: Much of the country is acting like Covid is over, as if 460 deaths per day (which, if it held, would work out to 168K deaths per year) isn’t worth our attention.

---

By now we all know people who have had Covid and appear to have recovered completely. But you can’t count on that, especially if you’re older.

The study found that 4.5 percent of older people developed dementia in the two years after infection, compared with 3.3 percent of the control group. That 1.2-point increase in a diagnosis as damaging as dementia is particularly worrisome, the researchers said.

and the Republican war on public education

Who didn’t see this coming? If your daughter loses an athletic competition in a state that bans transgender women from sports, you can accuse the winner of not being female.

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

In that case, the UHSAA was satisfied with school records, which listed the young woman as female every year back to kindergarten. So it wasn’t necessary to pull down her pants. An out-of-state-transfer or homeschooled-until-recently student might not have been so lucky.

The UHSAA says it takes all such complaints seriously, even if it’s just “that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”

---

Meanwhile, in Florida …

---

This Onion headline was just realistic enough to make me do a double-take: “Texas Schools Require Clear Bags To Prevent Students From Bringing In Books“. It’s satire. For now, at least.

But a real news story is only slightly less disturbing: A new state law requires every Texas public school to prominently display a poster stating “In God We Trust”. So it doesn’t matter if you’re raising your child in an atheist or a polytheist home; the government of Texas has decided that monotheism is best, and wants to make sure your child knows that.

The law’s defenders point out that “In God We Trust” is the national motto of the United States. But, like the “under God” addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, that motto wasn’t adopted until the 1950s. The Founders could have left us a religious motto, but chose not to, just as they chose not to include the word “God” in the Constitution.

It’s easy to debate the specific religious beliefs of the Founders, who were sometimes vague, sometimes changed their minds, and often disagreed with each other. But one thing they universally didn’t want was to repeat what England went through in the 1600s, when rival sects competed for control of the government, often violently. The Founders wanted religious competition to happen outside of government. Using government power to champion one group’s theology over another’s violates their vision.

This is just one more piece of evidence that originalism is a facade masking Christian privilege. When Christians want privileges that would have horrified the Founders, originalism goes out the window.

---

A good piece of journalism from the NYT. They talked to history teachers in different parts of the country about what they actually teach. So much of the “critical race theory” or “wokeness” debate is based on people’s fears and fantasies. It’s good to get some actual information.

and you also might be interested in …

A week from tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of President Biden pulling American troops out of Afghanistan.

CNN’s security analyst Peter Bergen makes the this-was-a-huge-mistake case, which basically boils down to the fact that the Taliban is bad: It has destroyed women’s rights, has no interest in democracy, has mismanaged the country into a famine, and appears to be sheltering Al Qaeda again.

That’s all true. But what Bergen doesn’t offer is any plausible alternative plan other than to keep losing American troops there forever. Yes, the Afghan government we supported folded immediately after we began pulling out, without even waiting for us to finish withdrawing. The army that we had spent so much money equipping and training turned out to have no interest in fighting. So the withdrawal was an ugly scene.

To me, that collapse just underlined how badly we needed to get out. Twenty years of nation-building ended up building nothing that could stand on its own for even a week. Tell me: What could we have accomplished by staying another six months? Two years? Fifty years? Why would our exit be any less ugly then, after we had spent another few trillion dollars and gotten several thousand more of our soldiers killed?

Yes, Afghanistan was a huge American mistake, but the mistake was staying for 20 years when we weren’t accomplishing anything. Biden was the president who stopped living in denial, and I thank him for that.

---

On appeal, the NFL increased DeShaun Watson’s suspension from six games to 11 and added a $5 million fine. The league, Watson, and the players’ union have agreed to this, so my worst nightmare won’t happen: I was afraid the case would get into the federal courts, and that Watson would be allowed to play until a decision came down.

But I’m conflicted about this outcome. It wouldn’t be fair to suspend Watson forever, because (1) he was never indicted or convicted of anything, and (2) I disapprove of situations where a corporate monopoly gets to dictate terms to its workers.

Going in, I thought that anything less than half a season (8.5 games) would be a slap on the wrist. So I feel like I ought to be happy with 11 games.

But through this process, Watson has done nothing to earn my sympathy or empathy. He insists he did nothing wrong.

I’ve always stood on my innocence and always said I’ve never assaulted anyone or disrespected anyone, and I’m continuing to stand on that.

So I suppose he wants us to believe that those two dozen massage therapists (who tell strikingly similar stories about him) must be making it all up. It sure looks like Watson has learned no lesson (other than possibly “don’t get caught”), so I’ll be surprised if he isn’t in trouble again before long.

In the meantime, I’m just grateful that I was never a Cleveland Browns fan. By trading for Watson and giving him a rich contract, the franchise has stained itself for years to come.

and let’s close with something artificial

People are having way too much fun with those AI algorithms that turn phrases into artistic images. Here, the opening lines of famous novels get the AI treatment. Like Gravity’s Rainbow‘s “A screaming comes across the sky.”

Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.

– James Holden,
a character in the novel Babylon’s Ashes by James Corey

This week’s featured post is “What’s the point of punishing Trump?“.

This week everybody was talking about Kansas

In a deep red state, the Republican-dominated legislature hoped voters would approve a constitutional-amendment referendum that would let it ban abortion. So it scheduled the vote to coincide with a low-turnout primary where Republicans had interesting races and Democrats mostly didn’t. Result: the amendment failed by a wide margin, 59%-41%.

The result raises an obvious question: If an anti-abortion referendum can’t pass in Kansas, where could it pass? The NYT tried to answer. This kind of speculation is always sketchy, but here’s what they came up with: A similar national referendum (if such a thing existed) would be opposed by 65%. Seven states would clearly pass the anti-abortion referendum, and the question would be a toss-up in several more.

One thing the Kansas referendum proved is that people will come out to vote on this issue. During the Roe era, that was always the question: People might tell pollsters they supported abortion rights, but would they cast a vote on that issue, or just count on the Supreme Court to protect them?

The next question, which won’t be answered until November, is whether voters will choose candidates based on abortion rights. For years, suburban Republican women in particular may have thought of themselves as feminists, but have cast their votes with other priorities in mind, like taxes or national security.

The clearest test of this question is the Michigan governor’s race, where Gretchen Whitmer faces Republican challenger Tudor Nixon, who would ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

---

Indiana banned abortion Friday, except in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality, or serious health risk to the pregnant woman. Along the way, a Democratic representative unsuccessfully offered an amendment also banning erectile dysfunction drugs.

If an unwanted pregnancy is an act of God, then impotency must be an act of God.

---

Here’s how the abortion issue is being used in Texas by Mothers Against Greg Abbott (the other MAGA).

Texas has virtually banned abortion, but that doesn’t mean it values fetuses. Bloomberg has a long article about how bad maternity care is in rural areas near the Mexican border. Presidio (a town of 4500 or so residents) has no full-time doctor. The nearest hospital is 90 minutes away: Big Bend in Alpine (population 5900). But that hospital has had trouble staffing its labor and delivery unit.

Some months it’s been open only three days a week. … If [visiting Dr. Adrian] Billings’s patient goes into labor when the maternity ward is closed, she’ll have to make a difficult choice. She can drive to the next nearest hospital, in Fort Stockton, yet another hour away. Or, if her labor is too far along and she’s unlikely to make it, she can deliver in Big Bend’s emergency room. But the ER doesn’t have a fetal heart monitor or nurses who know how to use one. It also doesn’t keep patients overnight. When a woman gives birth there, she’s either transferred to Fort Stockton—enduring the long drive after having just had a baby—or discharged and sent home.

Why can’t Big Bend staff its maternity unit? Covid, of course, but also a more basic problem:

As quaint as Alpine is, it has some drawbacks. It’s three and a half hours from El Paso and more than five from San Antonio. There’s one grocery store, and the closest Walmart is an hour away. There’s no day care, which makes it hard for businesses to recruit families with two working parents.

“We’ll hire a nurse who’ll say, ‘Great, I can start work in two weeks. Just let me get day care set up.’ We tell them, ‘Well, we don’t have day care in Alpine.’ They’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’ They can’t accept the job,” says Roane McLaughlin, Alpine’s only obstetrician and gynecologist. Before she moved to the area in 2014, Alpine didn’t have an OB-GYN at all.

In short, rural Texas is a bad place to be pregnant, whether you want to be or not. The state is anti-abortion because it’s anti-woman, not pro-fetus.

---

Thinking about related rights, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby defends Rep. Glenn Thompson against charges of hypocrisy. Thompson is the GOP congressman who voted against a bill to codify same-sex marriage rights, and then delivered an upbeat toast at his son’s same-sex wedding. So: yes, a hypocrite.

Jacoby defends the vote because the Respect For Marriage Act is a “political gimmick” that is unnecessary because same-sex marriage rights aren’t in danger. We know this because “the court’s majority opinion [in Dobbs] repeatedly emphasizes that the overruling of Roe v. Wade does not cast doubt on prior rulings involving marriage or gay rights”.

And Supreme Court justices would never mislead us about something like that, would they? Also, if the bill accomplishes nothing, why not pass it? What harm would it do?

For those of you who don’t follow the Boston papers, before I read a Jacoby column I always ask myself “What would Pope Benedict have said about this issue?” That’s usually a good predictor.

BTW: the religious Right doesn’t think protecting same-sex marriage rights is a phony issue. They’re solidly against it, and are pressuring Republican senators.

and the Inflation Reduction Act

The Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act Sunday, 51-50 on a straight party-line vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie. (Remember this the next time someone tells you there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats.)

The IRA is primarily a climate bill that over-funds itself by cracking down on corporations that pay no taxes, leaving $300 billion to offset the deficit over the next ten years. It also protects ObamaCare subsidies, cuts drug costs for seniors, and does a few other things. According to the environmentalist website Grist:

Independent analyses estimate that the IRA would slash approximately 6.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s emissions ledger over the course of the next decade, prevent up to 3,894 premature deaths per year by 2030, and get the U.S. two-thirds of the way to Biden’s goal of reducing total emissions 50 percent compared to 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

It now goes to the House, where it is expected to pass quickly.

This is a big deal. It’s much smaller than the $4 trillion plan Biden originally proposed, and smaller yet than the $6 trillion plan Bernie Sanders wanted. But getting it through the Senate with only 50 Democratic senators was a major accomplishment.

---

In other legislative news, Tuesday Mitch McConnell’s Republicans relented and passed the Honoring our PACT Act to help veterans suffering from the effects of toxic fumes from burn pits. It was the exact same bill they blocked last week.

The history of this bill is a lesson in Republican disinformation. In June, a version of the bill passed the Senate with 84 votes, which means at least 34 Republicans voted for it. (The 14 No votes were all Republicans.) The House passed the same bill, minus one line deleted technical reasons that had little impact on what the bill would do. So it went back to the Senate, where it was expected to pass without incident.

But then Senator Manchin announced that he had found a version of Biden’s Build Back Better plan he could support, now relabeled the Inflation Reduction Act (see above). McConnell decided to throw a tantrum by scrapping whatever bipartisan bill he could find, which turned out to be PACT.

Suddenly, 41 Republican senators — the exact number needed to sustain a filibuster — had grave reservations about PACT. In particular, Ted Cruz (who had voted for the nearly identical bill in June) now denounced it as a “budgetary trick” that would lead to $400 billion in pork-barrel spending.

Over the weekend, the GOP realized just how unpopular it is to play games with the health care of veterans who may be dying from something we did to them. So they came back and passed the same bill that was so terrible last week. Cruz voted for it, and put out a statement applauding its passage. All the features Cruz complained about when he blocked the bill had been in it when he voted for it in June, and when he voted for it again Tuesday.

Bear this history in mind as you hear Cruz and other Republicans tell you terrible things about the Inflation Reduction Act.

and the economy

The late-pandemic economy is breaking all the usual patterns. By some definitions, we’re already in a recession, but job growth is still booming and unemployment is the lowest it’s been since the 1960s. Year-over-year inflation is the highest since 1981, but gas and food prices have been dropping this last month or two.

In short, just about anything anybody says about the economy these days, good or bad, deserves a yes-but response.

and the pandemic

Case-numbers are nearly meaningless in this era of home tests whose results are never reported. But hospitalization and death statistics continue to creep upwards. Deaths per day are running just under 500, up from under 300 in early June.

and Alex Jones

A jury ruled that he has to pay nearly $50 million to two parents of a child killed at Sandy Hook. I discuss this in the featured post. I didn’t get around to mentioning that his lawyers’ blunder has exposed him to a possible perjury charge. That’s what happens when you should have called Saul.

and you also might be interested in …

Even the “courageous” Republicans are lining up to support election-denying anti-democracy Trumpists once the primaries are over. Peter Meijer endorsed the guy he lost to. After seeing anti-democracy Republicans win the primaries in his state, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey tweeted:

This is going to be an important election given the issues our state is facing and it’s important for Arizona Republicans to unite behind our slate of candidates.

It’s party-over-country, all the way.

---

I wish all the Biden’s-low-approval-rating articles would break out WHY voters disapprove: How many conservatives think he’s too liberal? How many liberals think he hasn’t done enough? How many people of all sorts don’t know what he’s done or believe he’s done something he hasn’t?

I remember similar polls about how unpopular ObamaCare was at first: They never broke out how many people wanted the status quo versus how many wanted universal health care. Those polls fooled Republicans into thinking a repeal would be popular.

---

Jamestown, Michigan just voted to defund its public library.

The controversy in Jamestown began with a complaint about a memoir by a nonbinary writer, but it soon spiraled into a campaign against Patmos Library itself. After a parent complained about Gender Queer: a Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel about the author’s experience coming out as nonbinary, dozens showed up at library board meetings, demanding the institution drop the book. (The book, which includes depictions of sex, was in the adult section of the library.) Complaints began to target other books with LGBTQ+ themes.

One library director resigned, telling Bridge she’d been harassed and accused of indoctrinating kids; her successor also left the job. Though the library put Kobabe’s book behind the counter rather than on the shelves, the volumes remained available.

“We, the board, will not ban the books,” Walton told Associated Press on Thursday.

The library’s refusal to submit to the demands led to a campaign urging residents to vote against renewed funding for the library.

I emphasize: This is a town library, not a school library. “Jamestown Conservatives” are trying to control what their fellow citizens are allowed to read.

---

Christianity Today looks at White Southern Protestants who have mostly stopped going to church. (About 45% of White Southerners report going to church once or less in the past year.) When Northeastern Catholics left their church, they tended to become more liberal, particularly on social issues. But WSP’s aren’t doing that. Instead, they’re just losing their trust in other people.

When asked, “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance or would they try to be fair?” 54 percent of white Protestant southerners who attended church no more than once a year said that most people would try to take advantage of them.

In response to the question “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” 58 percent said the latter.

The responses from white Southern Protestants who attended church every week were almost the direct opposite. Sixty-two percent said that most people would “try to be fair” rather than take advantage of them, and 57 percent said that most of the time people “try to be helpful.”

---

This isn’t news, but it’s such a good line I have to repeat it. In the preface to the 10th anniversary edition of his spy novel Slow Horses (now an Apple TV+ series) Mick Herron confessed that he actually doesn’t know that much about spies.

A writer spends the first part of his or her career hoping to be discovered; the rest hoping not to be found out.

and let’s close with something sporty

Legendary sports announcer Vin Scully died Tuesday night at the age of 94. He called the Brooklyn/LA Dodger games for 67 seasons (1950-2016), but also covered a wide variety of other sports events. If you’re a sports fan, you probably know his voice from historic moments like Hank Aaron’s 715th home run.

But if you don’t remember Vin or his voice, here’s some amusing proof that he could make anything sound engaging: A guy who did the sports report for a San Diego rock station (and met Scully in the press box during a Padres/Dodgers game) once asked Scully to read his grocery list.