The Weekly Sift

If AG Barr has been telling the truth, his redacted version of the Mueller Report should be out this week. There’s little point in speculating about what it will say or how much of it we’ll get to see, but all the same it was odd how little of the week the news shows spent discussing it. What we saw instead was Trump’s ability to control the narrative by doing and saying outrageous things.

One piece of news he didn’t control was the back-and-forth between Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg and Vice President Pence, which I’m going to focus on in the featured post. It started eight days ago with Buttigieg’s speech to the LGBTQ Victory fund, in which he pointed out the main theological weakness in the religious right’s anti-gay position: God’s creation includes people born to be gay. If you are one of those people, accepting yourself as gay can be a big piece of making your peace with God.

It has been fascinating to watch Pence (who was mentioned by name in Buttigieg’s speech) and the rest of the religious right wriggle and distort to avoid meeting Buttigieg’s challenge. This is really not a conversation they want to have. My post on this, which includes video of the full 19-minute speech, should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will say very little about the Mueller Report, because we still don’t know anything about it. But there’s a lot else to discuss: whether the administration will obey the law on a number of fronts (including the border and Trump’s taxes), Netanyahu’s re-election, Julian Assange, the new Brexit deadline, and a few other things. It should be out between noon and 1.