Another week, another quarter’s worth of news. This week we had the Parkland high school shooting, yet another story of one of the President’s allies paying off a woman he had an extra-marital affair with, and some major developments in the Mueller investigation: an indictment of some of the Russians who interfered in the the 2016 election (with a lot of the details of how they did it), and Paul Manafort’s right-hand man (Rick Gates) made a plea deal. In addition, the White House’s story about how Rob Porter kept his job fell apart, and Israeli police announced that they had sufficient evidence to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for corruption, though no actual indictment has been issued yet.
So of course this week’s featured post is about none of that. For several weeks now I’ve been looking at the political change going on in Alaska, which is no longer the dead-red state you probably think it is. A few years ago, Democrats were in danger of falling below the major-party threshold in the House, which could have left them without seats on major committees. But now, both the governorship and the House are controlled by a Democrat/Independent/moderate-Republican coalition, and voters have passed a number of liberal referenda. So how did any of that happen? And what can the rest of the country learn from it? I’ll cover that in “Alaska As a Red-to-Blue(ish) Model”. That should post around 9 EST.
The weekly summary will talk about the stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph, plus a few other interesting things I’ve run across this week. I still have a lot of work to do on that, so it might not show up until noon or so.
The Weekly Sift 