The Weekly Sift

We get the worst quarterly GDP report ever, Trump continues to trail Biden in the polls, and suddenly he wants to delay the election. Or move it up. Or something. Whenever the election is, it won’t be legitimate, because he’ll be defeated by fraud — the only conceivable way Trump could ever lose, or admit losing.

Anyway, this gives me a current event to hang the featured post on, even though it’s one I’ve been thinking about for a while. When the polls first turned decisively towards Biden, Democrats — who are absolutely terrified of feeling confident — kept telling each other “It’s too early to pay attention to polls.” It’s still a little early, but it’s getting later, and Trump’s attempts to find an issue to capitalize on keep falling flat. The storm troopers in Portland didn’t do it. Demonizing China or Fauci isn’t doing it. Insisting that people worried about a plague send their kids back to school didn’t do it. What’s going to do it?

But instead of expressions of Democratic confidence, I’m seeing articles about all the bad things that could still happen: The polls could just be totally wrong, maybe Trump will refuse to leave the White House, and stuff like that. And while those things are definitely worth thinking about — I don’t expect everything to go smoothly and Trump to suddenly become a gracious loser — it’s more like we’re trying to justify our own inner panic than that we’re checking democracy’s doors and windows.

So I decided to do a doors-and-windows check myself, to see where the bad things might get in. (If we’re going to worry, let’s at least worry about the right things.) The result is “The Election: Worry or Don’t Worry?” That should be out maybe 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has that horrible GDP report to cover, along with Senate Republicans’ failure to come to grips with the continuing economic distress being felt around the country. The time-lag between Covid-19 cases and deaths is continuing to play out; now cases are topping out, but deaths are increasing, reflecting the upward slope of the case numbers three weeks ago. Herman Cain died, causing me to reflect on how hard-hearted this whole crisis is making me. (Maybe I was never really as compassionate a person as I thought I was.) Basketball has restarted more-or-less successfully, while baseball is still wondering if it will have to pull the plug. And I’ll close with that wonderful bit of photo-editing Nike has put together. That should be out maybe noon or 1.