I’m tempted to repost last week’s weekly summary and see if anyone notices. The government is still in partial shutdown. Trump is still lying about the Wall and posturing rather than negotiating. Democrats are waiting for him to get real, while simultaneously waiting for Mitch McConnell to remember that he still has a job. If you didn’t watch the news this week, you didn’t miss much, at least not on that story.
The Trump/Russia story got a little racier. At the time of Mueller’s appointment, the FBI was investigating whether or not Trump is a Russian asset. That probe got folded into Mueller’s investigation. Also, Trump has been unusually secretive about his conversations with Putin. And Paul Manafort was sending internal Trump-campaign polling data to Putin allies. But there’s nothing to see here; it’s all a witch hunt.
Meanwhile, Democrats keep lining up to run against Trump in 2020. And the media seems to have learned nothing from the way Trump manipulated them in 2016: They’re still covering his insults as headline news, and crowding out actual substantive information about potential challengers. They’re also doing their best to rev up Democrats-are-fighting-each-other stories, which are easier to cover than Democrats-are-trying-to-govern stories.
But this week’s featured article is more personal than that. My wife is a survivor of two different cancers, and takes a very expensive drug to keep one of them from coming back. That’s given us a window into both the good and bad sides of American health care and health insurance, including an incredible (to me, at least) development this month, as she starts Medicare Part D coverage. I’ll write that up in “My Wife’s Expensive Cancer Drug”, which should come out around 11 EST.
Expect the weekly summary around noon. Or go back and read last week’s.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
I for one would notice. I look forward to your Sift posts every week.
Thank you for your helpful, thoughtful writing!
Lynne Miles-Morillo in Crawfordsville, Indiana
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I would notice too.
My point, of course, isn’t that I suspect nobody is reading very closely, but that the news this week was so similar to last week.
Re “see if anyone notices.” I understood that you were referring to the static situation in Washington, rather than anything about your readership. Nevertheless, your comment did remind me to thank you for your blog work–I read a lot of news and analysis, but nothing surpasses your reflections on events in their yield of insight. They are encouraging–as in ‘they give us courage.’ Many thanks.