The Weekly Sift

The big story this week was the end of the government shutdown and the negotiations on DACA and other issues to keep another shutdown from happening in early February. I’ll cover that in an article called “The Shutdown, DACA, and Immigration: Where We Are”. Unlike a lot of folks, I’m OK with how the Democrats have been handling this.

But before that comes out, I’m going to post a longer article on something less urgent, but possibly more important in the long run. The real story of the Stormy Daniels incident turns out not to be Trump. (Sure, he allegedly had an affair with a porn star and paid her off to keep it quiet before the election. That would be a huge scandal for any other president, but does it really change your opinion of Trump?) It’s all the self-styled defenders of family values who came forward to make excuses for him, sometimes not just debasing themselves, but prostituting the words of Jesus to defend their own King Herod. For many Christian writers and bloggers, that has brought to a head a complaint that has been brewing for some while. I’ll discuss that in “Trump’s Evangelical Toadies are Destroying the Christian Brand”.

That post is just about done, so it should be out between 8 and 9 EST. I’ll peg the shutdown article for 10 or 11, and the weekly summary — Larry Nassar, a predictable charter school disaster in Ohio, the Pentagon’s role in climate change policy, Taco Bell’s poke at conspiracy theorists, a disturbingly timely War Department video from 1947, and some other stuff, before closing with an amazing video about scientists making water do tricks — for noon or so.