The Weekly Sift

This week I’ve gotten fascinated by the winner of Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Abdul El-Sayed. I hadn’t paid attention to him until last week, when the Sift came out the day before the election. I heard the “he’s unelectable because of X, Y, and Z” arguments and looked around for something solid to hang them on. Finding very little, I started listening to what he had to say and became charmed. Democrats should be happy they have such a personable, intelligent, and articulate candidate.

The media loves to focus on the ideological nature of the progressive/centrist divide in the Democratic Party, but I’m not convinced the voters care that much about it. In the most striking cases of progressives winning primaries — El-Sayed vs. Stevens, Mamdani vs. Cuomo, all the way back to AOC vs. Crowley in 2018 — the progressive was just the better retail politician: more personable, more articulate, better at making voters feel heard and cared about. The Democratic establishment has gotten way too focused on name-recognition and fund-raising ability, with the result that their candidates are often getting outplayed on the campaign trail.

Anyway, I’ve been struck since Tuesday by the vehemence of the anti-El-Sayed voices in the media. Republicans have launched a full-scale red scare against the “communist” or “terrorist” threat. And a few Democrats have not been much better: By continuing to talk about “electability” after the primary ship has sailed, they’re giving cover to the Republican lies about El-Sayed. They’re communicating that if those lies make you feel uneasy about supporting him, maybe you should back away.

So the main message of this week’s featured post is: Listen to him. Judge him by what he says and does, not by what other people say about him or the labels they try to attach to him. If you listen to him and don’t like him so much that you’re willing to give Trump another senator, that’s your decision to make. But don’t be manipulated.

That post should be out around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary has the economy to cover, with a bad jobs report, continuing inflation, and a huge budget deficit that nobody seems to talk about. Todd Blanche got confirmed, after much public handwringing by Republican senators who ultimately caved in to Trump the way they always do. I’m losing track of the Iran War — are we claiming to have a deal this week or threatening to obliterate their civilization again? And have we run out of missiles yet? With all that going wrong for the Trump regime, it must be time for a major distraction in Congress: Cue the Anthony Fauci contempt vote.

I’ll try to get that out between noon and 1.

There’s no featured post this week. But the weekly summary will have a lot to cover: the on-again-off-again war, the wildfires in Europe, the latest pretext for Trump’s tariffs, anticipating the Musk crash, the state of the Senate midterms, and several other things, concluding with a big battery in Finland that is just rocks inside a big thermos.

I expect to get that out around noon EDT.

It has been a big week for putting things behind us. That dismal 250th birthday party is over. So is Graham Platner’s candidacy, the US men’s team’s shot at the World Cup, and (apparently) the ceasefire with Iran. A well-known Republican senator died, but (apparently) not Mitch McConnell.

This week’s featured post will focus on the Maine Senate race and what happens now. I will own up for having been excited about the Platner candidacy, and I’ll try to dig deeper into the moderate/progressive debate both nationally and in Maine as Democrats come up with a new candidate to challenge Susan Collins. That post should be out a little after 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will dig into the latest murder by ICE, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who has lived in the US for 35 years, built a small business, and sent three kids to college. Also the McConnell situation, a brief Lindsey Graham retrospective, starving Pacific gray whales, and an ordinary guy the government is harassing because he criticized ICE.

It’s hard to come up with much to say about the Iran War. Our latest attacks are as pointless as the whole war has been. Eventually Trump will realize that and go back to negotiations. Then he’ll get frustrated that the Iranians have the upper hand and go back to pointless bombing. I don’t see how this ends.

Anyway, I’ll try to get the weekly summary out between noon and 1.

We’re coming to the end of the Supreme Court’s term, so decisions are coming in fast. Thursday we got two particularly upsetting ones, both authored by Sam Alito. In one, people who came to the US legally under the temporary protected status program are going to lose that status and be deported, even though the countries they came from are not safe to return to. This violates the TPS law, but hey, it’s the Trump administration, it’s this Supreme Court, so who cares what the law says?

In the other, Alito twists the meaning of the word “in” to rubber-stamp a Trump policy that keeps refugees from being able to ask for asylum at our border. This also is against the law, but only if you believe the law has some abstract reality and is not whatever the Court claims it is. Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachments remember parsing “what the meaning of is is”. It’s like that.

So anyway, the featured post will look at both of those decisions and draw the conclusion we’re not supposed to talk about: Both of these cases are really about Making America White Again. That’s the goal of Trump’s immigration policies, and that’s what six Supreme Court justices just gave their blessing to. I’ll try to get that post out by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary is left with a lot to cover: whatever the heck is going on at the Strait of Hormuz, the progressive/moderate sniping in the Democratic Party after progressives ousted two incumbent congresspeople in the New York primaries, the Tulsi Gabbard expose, the Todd Blanche nomination, Texas’ attempt to establish Christianity in its public schools, and a number of other things.

That will probably run a little late today. I’ll try to get it out by 1.

This week I’m balancing personal pleasantness against depressing news from the outside world. Personally, I’m on a very lazy vacation, looking out the window of a house on an island in Casco Bay, an hour-long ferry ride from Portland, Maine. There is not a lot to do here, and I’ve been diligently not doing it.

When I raise my gaze to the larger world, though, I see that the first trillionaire is a man who has successfully scammed the public and is responsible for third-world deaths that may eventually run into the millions. Our president just staged a gladiator fight on the White House lawn to celebrate his 80th birthday. The US openly committed a war crime this week. The House Republican majority is gearing up to pay for Trump’s wars and tax cuts and personal excesses by cutting Social Security and Medicare. And the government is shutting down its ocean sensors, because who needs to know about the effects of global warming anyway? You don’t have to deny the evidence if you never collect it to begin with.

Yesterday the US and Iran announced a partial agreement to extend the ceasefire and open the Strait of Hormuz. That, I suppose, is good news, if it holds — which it may not. But at best, it gets us back to where we were before we launched our attack, and raises the question: What was that all about?

I can’t say that staring at the water in Maine has given me any special insight into the local politics, but I did some reading this week to figure out what I think of Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate to run against Senator Susan Collins. The corporate press has been full of stories about his personal life and aspects of his past that muddy the squeaky-clean image Democrats would like to project as we run against the most corrupt administration in American history. The press has also told us virtually nothing about Platner’s message or why it appeals to Mainers.

So I poked into that and found that a lot of insightful articles have been written elsewhere if you look for them. I feel much more positive about Platner now, and I don’t think Democrats are making the same kind of deal with the Devil that Republicans have made in supporting people like Ken Paxton and Donald Trump. That’s the topic of the featured post, which should be out shortly.

The rest of the news gets covered in the weekly summary, which runs a little long this week. I hope to get it out before noon, because I have to catch a ferry back to the mainland. But before I go work on those posts, I want to offer this observation: The beauty of the world is still out there. To the extent your circumstances allow, take some time now and then to appreciate it.