The Weekly Sift

For the second week in a row, I didn’t get into any single issue deeply enough to write a featured post. So I’m doing something different this week in a post I’m calling “More Questions than Answers”.

In my mind, a featured post is an expression of confidence: I’ve researched something well enough that I believe I have something to tell you that you may not see elsewhere. Also, I see this blog in part as a protest against the repetitive nature of the news media. So while regular readers will (over time) see me hit certain themes over and over, this week’s post should be substantially different from last week’s.

The recent run of news is defeating that vision. There are major events (like the war in Gaza) whose details are mostly hidden from us, and whose stories tend to repeat. (Israeli families are still worried about their relatives held hostage by Hamas. Civilians in Gaza are still suffering from a combination of privation and bombardment from Israel.) Here at home, there’s the looming Trump/Biden rematch, and the increasing need to sound the alarm about what a second Trump presidency would entail. In related news: the legal system keeps closing in on Trump little by little.

So I feel an enormous temptation either to write the same stories every week, or to speculate beyond my knowledge about what’s going on in Gaza or Ukraine — or inside the minds of people I don’t understand, like Trump supporters and Evangelical Christians.

So anyway, “More Questions than Answers” represents me backing off some of my usual standards: Its segments are covered in less detail than a typical featured post, and I give myself more room than usual to discuss what I think is happening, even if I don’t know. I’ll talk about whether Trump will ever be held accountable, what I think is going on with Ukraine aid, how I feel about Liz Cheney, how seriously to take the Hunter Biden situation, and a few other things. It should be out around 11 EST.

The weekly summary is relatively normal by comparison. It will talk about Gaza, Trump’s “dictator” remark, Taylor Swift, how crime gets covered, the importance of Norman Lear, and a few other things. I’ll aim to have that out before 1.

I’m blaming the holidays for how little advance preparation I got done on this week’s Sift. So everything will probably run a little late today.

Everyone’s fretting about the polls showing Trump slightly ahead of Biden, but to me the important information from those polls is where Democrats are losing messaging battles they ought to win: in particular on the economy. That’s the subject of this week’s featured post, “The Remarkable Biden Economy”, which should be out around 10 EST or so.

The weekly summary will link to articles about the Israel/Hamas prisoner exchange and the possibilities for a longer ceasefire, which seem to change hourly. Also, a right-wing party had a surprising victory in Holland, sparking discussion about the momentum of right-wing politics in Europe. I’ll discuss a few other things, like the mainstream media’s failure to cover Trump accurately, the origin of the wall between church and state, and a few other things, before closing with some music to play if the onslaught of Christmas songs starts getting to you. I’ll try to get that out before one.

For about a month I’ve been watching a tendency both in myself and in just about everyone I know: We’d rather not think about the war in Gaza. Yes, it’s news. Yes, we see ourselves as citizens of a democracy who have a duty to stay well informed. But this is just too depressing. Maybe there’s something amusing we can stream on Netflix.

The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t help. Every time I look at CNN, it seems like they’re interviewing either a relative of a Hamas hostage, someone who managed to hide or run from the October 7 attack, or a Gaza nurse who has no supplies — as if the tenth such interview will communicate something the first nine failed to capture.

In some sense, though, this kind of situation is the Weekly Sift’s whole purpose: Beyond the endless repetition, somebody out there must be saying things we need to think about. I’ve tried to pick a few out in this week’s featured post, “Can we talk about Israel and Palestine?” That should be out around 9 or so EST.

The weekly summary will cover the new Speaker’s attempt to play politics with Israel/Palestine aid, the ongoing Trump trials, the polls a year out from the election, the actual elections happening tomorrow, and an old man’s rant about the World Series, before doing something I try to never do: repeat a closing. I used this 2Cellos video as a closing nine years ago, but it’s still great. That should appear before noon.

This week’s big stories are mostly just continuations of last week’s stories: the war in Gaza, the House of Representatives frozen by the Republican majority’s inability to choose a speaker, and the Trump trials.

The featured post last week focused on Gaza; this week it focuses on the House. In addition to the play-by-play of Jim Jordan’s failure to become speaker, I found a couple of insightful articles about why the Republican majority is the way it is. “The House, still divided” should appear around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will include a few odds and ends about the House that would have cluttered the featured post, a quick rundown of developments in Gaza (including Biden’s speech to the nation Thursday night), the significance of Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell pleading guilty (and promising to testify against other defendants) in the Georgia RICO trial, and a few other things, before closing with a barbershop quartet’s amusing medley of 90s pop-music hits. I’m aiming to get that out around noon.

A few days ago, it seemed obvious what the week’s big news story was: the leadership vacuum in the House of Representatives. Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted Tuesday, and the Republican caucus seems to be back where it was in January: holding a narrow majority on paper, but unable to unite that majority behind any single leader or agenda. McCarthy managed to become speaker by making impossible promises to the party’s MAGA fringe and giving them the power to throw him out if he didn’t deliver. He didn’t deliver, and they threw him out.

While the GOP figures out what to do next, the House is frozen and the clock is ticking on the temporary funding that averted a government shutdown last week. New money needs to get appropriated by November 17 or the government shuts down. Averting that shutdown is what got McCarthy booted, so even if a new speaker gets chosen in time, it’s hard to imagine what he will do to resolve the situation. Anyway, that’s the subject of this week’s featured post, which should be out by 10 EDT.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news the last few days, though, the dysfunction in the House is barely a sidebar: Saturday Hamas launched a shocking attack on Israel. Hundreds or even thousands of people, mostly civilians, have already been killed, and no one knows how the situation will resolve. This isn’t the kind of topic I’m equipped to cover, so I’m not planning to write much about it. You’ll need to follow developments through some other news source.

A much slower-breaking news story got some significant coverage this week: the decline of life expectancy in the US. The WaPo had two enlightening articles on it, and Vox had something interesting to say as well.

And we’ve all got numb to the continuing outrages from Donald Trump. Thursday we found out that he had discussed nuclear secrets with a Mar-a-Lago member from a foreign country. Also, his rhetoric went full Nazi in an interview last week: Migrants crossing our southern border are “poisoning the blood of our country”. And there were the usual batch of developments in his criminal cases and the civil fraud trial currently happening in New York.

That’s all in the weekly summary, which should be out around noon or so.