The Weekly Sift

I moved to Massachusetts this week. (Sorry, Annie Kuster. I really wanted to vote for you.) So I spent a lot more time carrying boxes up stairs than scanning news sites and blogs. But there were two stories it was impossible to miss: the Anonymous article in the New York Times and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

In the long run, the prospect of Kavanaugh pushing the Supreme Court much further to the right in the coming decades, threatening not just abortion rights, but worker rights, consumer rights, and the rights of anybody conservative Christians disapprove of, is the much bigger deal. But at the same time, the Kavanaugh hearings are themselves of little consequence, because the fix is in: Democrats get a chance to explain to the country why he shouldn’t be on the Court, but Republicans are going to approve him no matter what. You can hope the hearings convince a lot of voters that we need a Democratic Congress, but that’s about it.

With that in mind, this week’s featured article is about Anonymous, the so-called “resistance” within the Trump administration, and what its official announcement in the NYT might mean for the future. The Kavanaugh nomination takes up a big chunk of the weekly summary, along with the reaction to Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad, Obama’s pro-democracy (and consequently anti-Trump) speech, and a few other things.

The featured post should be out by 9 EDT, and the summary by noon.