Category Archives: Morning tease

The Monday Morning Teaser

June 26, 2023 – 8:39 am

I took a week off — to fly a kite, among other things — so I’ve got some catching up to do.

I don’t know about you, but “mercenary army marches on Moscow” wasn’t on my Bingo card. I totally didn’t see that coming.

It’s also been a bad couple of weeks for Republican conspiracy theories: John Durham was supposed to blow the lid off the Deep State conspiracy to smear Trump with Russia collusion, but his testimony to Congress went so badly for MAGA Republicans that Matt Gaetz accused him of being “part of the cover-up”. And a Trump-appointed prosecutor worked out a plea deal with Hunter Biden that includes none of the salacious things he’s supposed to have done — and also doesn’t include any jail time. The most reasonable interpretation is that Hunter really is accountable to the law, but he just hasn’t done that much.

But the featured posts look elsewhere. One of them is about Sam Alito, the latest conservative Supreme Court justice to be exposed living the high life on the dimes of billionaires who have business before his court. Alito defended himself by claiming that “no reasonable person” would find that suspicious.

I’m not the only person who disagrees with that judgment. The article should be out shortly.

The other featured post is somewhat longer and more detailed. I’ve been surprised to discover that some measurable fraction of Democrats believe that Biden should pardon Trump in order to “heal the country” and “reduce polarization”. So I did some thinking about the circumstances under which I’d be willing to show Trump mercy. There are some, but only if he does a few things I don’t expect him to do, like admit wrongdoing.

Anyway, I end up agreeing that we should suppress our desire to see Trump suffer if mercy works to the nation’s benefit, and I speculate about what kind of benefit we might hope for. But I question how likely those circumstances are.

I’ll try to get that out by around 10 EDT, and the weekly summary by noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

June 12, 2023 – 8:22 am

When the latest Trump indictment got unsealed Friday, I took it as a personal favor. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see it until tomorrow, when Trump makes his first court appearance. And since I’m planning not to do a Sift next week, it would be two weeks before I got a chance to comment.

So this week’s featured post is “The Mar-a-Lago Documents Indictment”. The indictment is getting plenty of coverage, so I assume you’ve already seen the pictures and heard the basics. The purpose of my article is to pull it all together, filter out the nonsensical Trump defenses and baseless speculations, and make a few personal observations based on my own experience (decades ago) of having a top-secret clearance. That should be out shortly.

The weekly summary has a few other things to cover: the smoke cloud that covered the Northeast earlier this week, the growing number of Republicans running for president, the Supreme Court’s surprising refusal to keep chipping away at the Voting Rights Act, the revolt of Kevin McCarthy’s right wing, the golf merger, and a few other things, leading up to an amusing article about where not to stop on your summer vacation. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

June 5, 2023 – 8:44 am

The big news this week is that we won’t have a self-inflicted economic disaster after all. Biden and McCarthy were able to push their debt-ceiling deal through Congress before the Treasury ran out of cash.

This makes an opportune time to point out something that’s been flying under the mainstream media’s radar: Joe Biden is actually pretty good at governing. Part of his technique is to share credit for success and not humiliate his rivals, so he doesn’t do the kind of victory dances his predecessor would do (even when he hadn’t really won). If you’re not paying attention, you may not notice the amount of skill in Biden’s performance. And if you’re watching too much Fox News, you might even think he’s senile (while being totally confused by how he keeps getting things done).

So this week’s featured post lays it out: “Joe Biden is Good at Governing”. It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary discusses the debt ceiling, the reasons to think another Trump indictment is coming soon, a federal judge tossing out Tennessee’s anti-drag law, a survey on the decline of friendship, the Sacklers escaping with billions, and a few other things. It should be out before noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 29, 2023 – 8:34 am

I got a late start this morning, so everything is likely to show up later in the day than usual.

The big news this week is the debt-ceiling deal, but it’s still too soon to say whether Congress will pass it without major changes, or at all. The weekly summary will discuss what we know and the deal’s prospects.

There’s also another Trump indictment looming. The special counsel’s investigation of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents seems to be winding up, and the possible charges are looking more serious than originally expected. Meanwhile, the leader of the Oath Keepers got sentenced to 18 years in prison for the seditious conspiracy he participated in on January 6. The open question is whether Jack Smith can trace that conspiracy all the way up to Trump.

Ron DeSantis is officially a presidential candidate now. He announced his candidacy on Twitter in an interview with Elon Musk. It’s a curious choice and the event was embarrassingly glitchy. Those two seem to me to deserve each other.

Ken Paxton got impeached. Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan got re-elected. Tina Turner died, and a bunch of other things happened that I’ll cover in the weekly summary. I hope to get that out by 1 EDT.

But the featured post isn’t about any of that. One of the head-shaking facets of our political system — which the DeSantis announcement and the debt-ceiling deal bring into focus — is that many of our most serious problems, the ones that have the biggest impact on Americans’ lives, aren’t being discussed at all.

This week’s featured post is the first of what I hope will be a series on these neglected issues. It will focus on the decline in Americans’ life expectancy over the last few years, and the decades-long trend of American life expectancy falling behind that of comparable countries. We often tell this story in terms of individual moral failure — bad diet, lack of exercise, etc. — but each of the major factors is rooted in political decisions that could be reversed, if we had the political will to do so.

I’ll try to get that out by 10.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 22, 2023 – 8:33 am

So here we are, watching closed doors while Biden and McCarthy negotiate behind those doors over how much ransom Biden will pay to avoid a global economic catastrophe. It’s the kind of news situation I hate: I obviously have to cover it, but I don’t actually know anything I can tell you.

So there’s that. There’s another round of authoritarian legislation being passed in red states. House Republicans are protecting George Santos, who is under indictment. Rudy Giuliani had a bad week. It looks like Georgia’s Trump indictment will drop in August. Ukraine will get F-16s.

But the featured posts aren’t about any of that. John Durham’s long-awaited report trying to discredit the Trump/Russia investigations came out, marking the end of one of the biggest wastes of time and money in Department of Justice history. It’s hard to know exactly what to say about the Durham investigation, because its whole point was to distract us from the reality of the Trump/Russia scandal. So doing an involved critique of Durham’s report is just taking the bait.

Instead, I went back to the original questions I wanted the Mueller investigation to answer, and notice that they’re still unanswered: Why did the 2016 Trump campaign have so many contacts with Russians? And why, when Trump’s people were asked about their Russian connections, did almost all of them lie? After all this time, we can speculate, but we still don’t know. That post “Summing Up at the End of the Trump/Russia Investigations”, is more-or-less done and should post soon.

The second featured post isn’t really about the news at all. It’s a meta post about a topic that keeps coming up for me, and probably comes up for you too: how to evaluate the sources you run across on social media.

As you might expect, I run into this question fairly often, and have developed a standard technique for answering it, which I’ve never shared in so many words. “How I evaluate sources” should post before 10 EDT.

The weekly summary has the debt ceiling and all that other stuff to cover. I’ll try to get it out by noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 15, 2023 – 8:35 am

One measure of how busy a week has been is how distant Tuesday’s news seems by the next Monday. Last Tuesday is when the E. Jean Carroll verdict was announced: The jury refused to say definitively that Trump had raped Carroll, but it did rule that he sexually assaulted her and then maliciously lied about her when she went public.

Seems like a while ago, doesn’t it?

Immediately after the verdict, this conventional wisdom seemed to be everywhere: Satisfying as it is to see that Trump’s lies don’t fly in a court of law, the verdict won’t actually mean anything politically. If anything, Trump’s personality cult will just double down on the Deep-State-persecution narrative and support him more than ever.

In this week’s first featured post, I’m going to challenge that view. The Carroll verdict might matter, even to dyed-in-the-wool Trumpists. But if you’re waiting for one of them to announce their re-evaluation of Trump on television, you’ll wait in vain. That’s not how sea changes happen on the Right. But they do happen sometimes. So in “Why the Carroll Verdict Might Matter”, I’ll describe how conservatives actually change their minds, and what you should be listening for. That’s ready to go and should be out shortly.

The second featured post concerns the Trump town hall that CNN aired Wednesday. I’ll let other people correct all the lies Trump told and lament how he mistreated the “nasty” moderator. (It’s amazing how many Trump lines sound like they could come from Gollum. Somebody needs to redub Trump clips with Gollum’s voice.) In “Normalizing Trump normalizes political violence” I’ll focus on his unapologetic embrace of January 6. Can we really debate a violent attempt to overturn an election as if it were an ordinary political issue? That should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the end of Title 42 on the southern border, the start of Ukraine’s spring offensive, Turkey’s election, Elon bending his knee to Erdogan’s demands for censorship, and a few other things. That should appear sometime around noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 8, 2023 – 8:30 am

As we rush ever closer towards a debt-ceiling disaster, I’ll continue my series on the national debt with “Does the US have a spending problem?” That should be out maybe around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will catch you up on the latest Clarence Thomas scandals, which have turned into a regular feature of a typical week’s news. The various cases against Trump have continued to advance, with the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit going to the jury this week, and eight of the fake Georgia electors from 2020 taking immunity deals from the Fulton County DA. Proud Boy leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy for January 6. There was another mass shooting and a mass homicide-by-car in Texas. A new El Nino cycle points to new global temperature records later this year. And a few other things happened. That should be out around noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 1, 2023 – 8:37 am

Most of the news that attracted my attention this week happened at the state level, where Republican majorities and supermajorities have gotten increasingly extreme. Separately, these are stories that might travel below your radar (like the Texas Senate passing a bill to eliminate tenure in the state universities), so I’ve pulled several of them together in a piece I’m calling “Laboratories of Autocracy”. Among other things, the post will explain why you need to learn the German word gleichschaltung. That should be out maybe around 10 EDT.

In another era, President Biden announcing his reelection bid would be the week’s lead story. But there are continuing scandals at the Supreme Court, everybody’s still speculating about the real reason Tucker Carlson was fired, and a civil trial just started that will hang on whether a jury believes the previous president committed rape. So Biden gets pushed well down the page. One of the things Biden promised was not to be in our face 24/7 like Trump was (and largely still is). That’s a promise he’s kept, but it must be frustrating not to be able to grab public attention when you really want it.

Oh, and there’s been another mass shooting. We still cover those, don’t we? They haven’t quite reached the dog-bites-man stage yet.

Anyway, I’ll aim to get the weekly summary out by noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

April 24, 2023 – 8:38 am

After about a month on the road, I’m back home and producing the Sift on its usual schedule.

None of the major news stories this week — the Fox/Dominion settlement, the bizarre series of people getting shot for making common mistakes, the Supreme Court’s decision to stay the lower-court ruling banning mifepristone — seemed to me to need an in-depth analysis beyond what’s available in your usual news sources, so this week’s featured post is a more general reflection on driving through the empty places of America.

I grew up in the rural Midwest, so I understand the economic story of why the area was settled in the first place: The Homestead Act, then an economy grew up around the small family farms, and then industry came.

But then industry moved to Mexico or China, and farms don’t require that many people any more. So what’s the future of this place? Why won’t it all turn into endless fields where robot combines are powered by windmill electricity?

Living in a place that you love, but which has no obvious path into the future, might make you paranoid or depressed or resentful. And it more or less has. Maybe there’s a reason the Trump base in rural America seems so insane to the rest of the country.

Anyway, those reflections should appear by 10 EDT or so. The weekly summary will cover the stories I listed above, before closing with the most charming podcast I listened to on the drive. That should post around noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

April 17, 2023 – 8:33 am

Not much happened this week: The FBI caught the guy who leaked all those documents (and Trump supporters rallied around him). The abortion-pill injunction rose through the judicial system, but is still unresolved. The Fox News trial is about to start. Clarence Thomas is even more corrupt than we realized last week. The Justins made a triumphant return to the Tennessee legislature. Idaho outlawed “abortion trafficking”, while the Missouri House tried to defund all the state’s libraries. Alan Bragg sued Jim Jordan in an attempt to stop his interference in the Trump prosecution. Something something something Bud Light. Oh, and we had another mass shooting of teen-agers.

Hardly anything, in other words.

But I decided to take a step back and look at something longer term: Why is all this happening? Yes, it almost all revolves around the Republican Party’s continuing descent into fascism. But why is that happening? Why now? What global trend opened up opportunities for the likes of Trump, Modi, Orban, Netanyahu, et al?

I found two recent essays that look at this question from different directions, but coalesce around this framing: Fascism is an eternal temptation of modern politics. The mystery isn’t why we have to deal with it now, but why we didn’t have to deal with it for so many years after World War II. How did those lessons get lost?

That post still needs work, so it probably won’t show up until 10 or 11 EDT. (I’ve made it back as far as the central time zone, but I’m trying to run on my usual east-coast schedule today.) The weekly summary will cover the other stuff, and appear by about 1 or so.

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