The Weekly Sift

Mornings like this remind me why I do this blog weekly: Two weeks is a lot to face all at once.

If you’re curious about where I was last week, I went down to Florida to give a talk I call “The Spirit of Democracy”. You can find an earlier version of it here. The Florida version had to be updated for recent developments, so I’ll probably post the text of that talk later this week on my Free and Responsible Search blog.

Anyway, the drift towards autocracy that we’ve been worrying about since Trump got elected has accelerated since the Republican Senate majority assured him that nothing he could possibly do would be impeachable. You can’t really call it a “drift” any more. It’s more of a direct movement. So: the purge of “disloyal” officials — i.e., people more loyal to America than to Trump — has continued. It started with the witnesses who testified in the House impeachment hearings, has extended to the top people at National Intelligence, and is threatening to spread through the whole administration. (As Admiral McRaven commented, “In this administration, good men and women don’t last long.”) We found out more of the ways that Bill Barr has corrupted the Justice Department. A report that Russia is again interfering in our politics in Trump’s favor raised the President’s anger — at the people reporting it, not at the Russians.

That will be discussed in one featured post, which I haven’t titled yet.

The other featured post will discuss the possibility of a “brokered” Democratic convention — a pejorative term I dislike, since it conjures up images of smoke-filled rooms where anonymous power brokers cook up dirty deals. I think we need to get comfortable with conventions that make decisions rather than just anoint a nominee, because the processes that make things more democratic are also making it harder for a candidate to assemble a majority of the elected delegates. If there isn’t a “brokered” convention this year, there will be in some future cycle. So I raise the question “What’s Wrong With a Decision-Making Convention?”

The weekly summary also covers the nomination process, where Joe Biden has faded and Bernie Sanders has emerged as the new front-runner. I need to make my own voting decision by Super Tuesday, and I’m not there yet, but I’ll muse about it a little. The coronavirus has only gotten scarier in the last two weeks. The Trump regime admitted that its assassination of Qassim Soleimani didn’t really have anything to do with an “imminent threat”. And a few other things happened, which I’ll try to get to.

Here’s my schedule. The convention article will post first, between 8 and 9 EST. Then the article about the recent moves towards autocracy around 11, and then the weekly summary by (I hope) 1.