Category Archives: Morning tease

The Monday Morning Teaser

January 2, 2023 – 8:56 am

Happy New Year, everybody. This week, news outlets of all kinds focused on what kind of year 2022 was and what we might expect for 2023.

As you know, I am skeptical about the value of pundit speculation. I believe our political discussions spend way too much time predicting what might happen next, and most of us are not all that good at it. So my comments on the future are usually of the open-ended variety: More things can happen than we currently imagine.

But I do have an opinion on what kind of year 2022 was, or at least, how we might eventually look back on it. 2022 was a year that invited us to imagine horrible outcomes, and then to rejoice that the worst of them didn’t happen: Putin didn’t conquer Ukraine, NATO didn’t fracture, Congress didn’t logjam, Republicans didn’t sweep the midterms, January 6 wasn’t forgotten, Trump’s election-deniers won’t be overseeing the 2024 elections, and Trump himself is going to have a hard time getting nominated in 2024, much less elected.

In short, 2022 was a year of dodged bullets. If 2022 was a good year, it wasn’t an I-won-a-pony kind of good. It was more like finding out that you don’t have cancer.

But here’s the thing about dodged-bullet years: If the next few years are good, someday everyone will look back on the dodged bullets as the moments when it all turned around.

One case in point is 1942. I suspect 1942 was kind of a grim year to live through. 1940-41 had been terrible years for the Allies in World War II, and 1942 presented all kinds of possibilities for everything to go down the drain. But all year, the worst kept not happening. The Great Defeat was always looming, but it never arrived. By the end of the year, the Axis advances had been checked on all fronts, setting up the sweeping rollbacks of 1943-45.

So in retrospect, to historians who know how it all came out, 1942 was a very good year indeed, the year when it all turned around.

2022 could be like that, eventually. We just need to make some good things happen in 2023 and 2024.

I’ll spell that out in more detail in the featured post, “Partying Like It’s 1942”, which should be out shortly. That will be followed by the weekly summary, which will link to other people’s 2022 assessments (and pay little attention to their predictions). I’ll also discuss the Title 42 mess at the border and in the Supreme Court, notable recent deaths, the barrage of information from the 1-6 Committee, Trump’s taxes, and a few other things, closing with the most popular articles of the year from the humor magazine McSweeney’s. Some of those notes are still kind of rough, so the summary probably won’t get out before noon.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

The Monday Morning Teaser

December 26, 2022 – 8:45 am

I tested negative for Covid on Christmas Eve, and have recovered enough energy to do a Sift this week.

The big event this week was the release of the January 6 Committee’s final report, which I admit I have not read completely. It appears to be a fleshing out of the basic narrative they’ve been building since their first public hearings this summer: January 6 was not a one-day event, but the unsuccessful culmination of Trump’s months-long plot to hold onto power in spite of losing the 2020 election.

This week’s featured post revisits a point I focused on after the Committee’s early public hearings, which I think hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention: Trump doesn’t have a story to tell. His entire effort has been to block the Committee from assembling evidence to support its story, not to build a narrative of his own.

In the summer he claimed to have “sooo many witnesses” that would end “this Witch Hunt” “quickly” if only the Committee would talk to them. But that’s the last we heard of those witnesses. Instead, Trump’s people have defied subpoenas, claimed executive privilege, and invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions. Those who have answered questions — willingly or unwillingly — have provided evidence that supported the Committee’s narrative.

Anyway, that post will be out soon. The weekly summary has a few other important events to cover: President Zelenskyy spoke to Congress. Congress’ waning Democratic majority (with Mitch McConnell’s connivance) got the government funded through September, when the new Republican House majority will undoubtedly force some kind of crisis. Kevin McCarthy still hasn’t corralled the last few votes he needs to become speaker. And a few other things.

That will probably be out between noon and one EST.

By weeklysift | Comments (2)

The Monday Morning Teaser

December 12, 2022 – 8:25 am

I’m continuing to plead illness as I allow myself another week without a featured post. This week a Covid test came back positive, so who knows whether that’s a new development, this is a false positive, or previous tests were false negatives. I don’t have a fever and my energy is good, so I’ll put out a weekly summary.

It was another newsy week: Warnock beat Walker. (Was that really this week? It already seems like a long time ago.) Krysten Sinema declared her independence. Kevin McCarthy kept trying to corral enough votes from the GOP’s fascist wing to become speaker. Germany and Peru broke up right-wing coup plots. Brittney Griner came home, but as a Black lesbian who wants to protest during the national anthem, she’s not American enough for conservatives to be happy she’s free. The Respect for Marriage Act passed. The Trump Organization was convicted of tax fraud. President Zelenskyy (who else?) is Time’s Person of the Year. The Supreme Court heard arguments in two major cases. Elon Musk kept releasing “Twitter Files”, which are supposed to prove something but mostly don’t.

Expect the summary to appear between 10 and 11 EST, at which time I’ll drink another cup of tea with honey and probably go back to bed.

By weeklysift | Comments (9)

The Monday Morning Teaser

December 5, 2022 – 8:15 am

I’ve been sick this week — I’m almost recovered now — so I didn’t have the attention span to do a featured post. The weekly summary has a lot to cover: the Warnock/Walker runoff, why you should pay no attention to the manufactured story about talks with Russia, the long list of defeats Trump and his allies had in court, Elon Musk going full MAGA and using Hunter Biden to distract from his own failures, Iran and China giving ground to protesters, the Respect for Marriage Act getting through the Senate, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out between 10 and 11 EST.

By weeklysift | Comments (4)

The Monday Morning Teaser

November 28, 2022 – 8:50 am

Last Monday, the Club Q shooting was recent enough that I hadn’t thought it through yet. Quick reactions to disturbing events often turn out to be misguided, and I didn’t want to muddy the waters any further. But the more I think about it, the more I reaffirm my original sense that this represents something even worse than the typical mass shooting. I write that while realizing that it’s crazy to diminish any mass shooting by calling it “typical”. What could possibly be worse?

That’s what I’ll try to flesh out this morning in “Is Club Q just the beginning?” What’s particularly disturbing about the Club Q massacre is that the far-right end of our political spectrum didn’t react with the horror that mass shootings usually require, at least in public. Usually, people whose rhetoric has attacked the targeted group may not take responsibility for their malign influence, but they usually at least go silent for a while. This time they didn’t. Anti-trans rhetoric in particular continued apace. The people pushing it had to recognize the they-had-it-coming interpretation of their words, but they didn’t seem to care.

Of course there will be more mass shootings in general. That seems to go without saying in our gun-saturated country. But going forward, it seems increasingly likely that there will be more mass shootings like this one. To me, that’s disturbing in a new way.

That post will be out late, maybe not until noon EST. Before that, I’ll post a review of two recent books: Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment about diverse democracy, and Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest about a bizarre change in the fantasies of the very rich. That should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will cover guns, Twitter, protests in Iran and China, Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, and a few other things, before closing with an extremely condensed version of Dickens. That should be out by 1 or so.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

The Monday Morning Teaser

November 21, 2022 – 8:39 am

I’m getting really tired of writing about Donald Trump, but this week I feel like I don’t have a choice. In quick succession, he announced his 2024 candidacy, a lot of high-profile Republicans and conservative pundits refused to endorse that candidacy, Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate and possibly prosecute Trump, and Elon Musk reactivated Trump’s Twitter account.

So here we are, I’m writing about him again. That article should be out around 10 EST or so.

In other news, the new Congress is finally taking shape. Democrats retain control of the Senate while Republicans claim the House by a surprisingly narrow (and still undetermined) margin. The new House leadership wasted no time announcing its extensive legislative agenda, which centers on … wait for it … Hunter Biden. I can hardly wait, and I can already feel America’s greatness returning.

Meanwhile, House Democrats are turning over their leadership, as Nancy Pelosi promised four years ago.

The collapse of Twitter continues apace. I’ll be interested to see if Trump starts posting again. Can two sinking ships hold each other up?

The missile that crossed the Polish border caused a lot of angst, but after investigation it looks like a Ukrainian misfire rather than a Russian provocation. So we’re not heading into World War III in the near future. And the climate conference in Egypt closed to mixed reviews.

I’ll try to get the weekly summary out by noon.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

The Monday Morning Teaser

November 14, 2022 – 8:20 am

Last week, I told you I was planning not to watch the election returns Tuesday night. I thought it would be hard, that I’d be jumpy like an addict needing a fix, and that every couple hours I would lose my resolve and check how things were going.

It wasn’t like that at all. I felt oddly serene in my news-free bubble, and went to bed with no idea what was happening. In the morning, I puttered for an hour or two to extend the sense of peace. But I knew that eventually I’d have to distort my life to avoid finding out how things were going, so I checked. Surprise! No red wave.

After nearly a week, we still don’t know which party will control the House or who the governor of Arizona will be. But we’ve learned a few things, and I’ll cherry-pick the most obvious in the featured post, which I’m calling “Notes on the midterm elections”. That should be out shortly.

The weekly summary also covers the unfolding disaster at Twitter, the Ukrainians recapturing Kherson, where the Trump investigations might go now that the pre-election pause is over, and a few other things before closing with an introduction to Minnesota’s new snowplows. I’ll aim to get that out before noon EST.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

The Monday Morning Teaser

November 7, 2022 – 8:44 am

Ordinarily, on the Monday before a Tuesday election, I write a viewing guide for people who are planning to watch the returns come in. Here’s when polls close in various states. Here are the bellwether races that might be decided early and tell you which way the night is going. Stuff like that.

I’m not doing that this time, for a reason that I hate to admit: I’m probably not going to watch the returns come in. I just can’t picture that experience being good for me. I haven’t given up on the idea that Democrats might do better than the polls suggest, but I’ve gotten so annoyed with this whole cycle that I can’t imagine any plausible outcome that really feels satisfying.

I mean, let’s just take the Georgia senate race as an example. (It’s one of those bellwether races whose early returns might tell you how the night is going.) What if Raphael Warnock outperforms Nate Silver’s expectations and pulls out a 51%-49% win? That will mean that 49% of Georgians want Herschel Walker to represent them in the Senate. Seriously? I’m still disgusted, even with the victory. (And if Warnock loses, I keep remembering the words of the 20th-century chess grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch, who famously lamented, “Why must I lose to this idiot?” We’ve all been there, Aron.)

I don’t think this is a healthy state of mind to be in. But here I am, so I can’t picture a returns-watching evening being good for me. If it’s not going to be good for you either, don’t watch. That’s my advice. Read the headlines Wednesday morning. Maybe you’ll get a pleasant surprise.

So what am I writing about this week? Well, a little over a week ago Bret Stephens (who lives in the NYT’s conservative-columnist ghetto) wrote a piece about his trip to Greenland and what he learned about the climate. The essay bucks and kicks like a wild bronco, but eventually settles down to the conclusion that climate change is real and conservatives need to have a plan to fight it.

How should we read that? Cynically, expecting that what Stephens can support is yet another baby step that will waste time the planet doesn’t have? Or hopefully, recognizing that climate-change activism still needs converts, so we need to welcome anybody who looks like he might be thinking about coming in the door? With some trepidation, I’m going to take the second path in this week’s featured post, which should appear maybe 10 EST or so.

The weekly summary, of course, has to say something about tomorrow’s elections. I’ll describe the current state of the polling, and the various reasons to think it might be wrong in either direction. Then there’s the Paul Pelosi attack, and what the Republican response says about their willingness to tolerate (or even encourage) violence. In other news, Elon Musk made his first moves as Twitter’s “chief twit”, Netanyahu is returning to power in Israel, and Masha Gessen thinks we need to take Putin’s nuclear threats seriously. (It really wasn’t a good two weeks.)

Oh, but there is one bright light: Bolsonaro lost in Brazil, and it looks like he’s really going to leave office. Fascists can be beaten.

Anyway, I’ll aim to get that out by noon.

Take care of yourself tomorrow.

By weeklysift | Comments (4)

The Monday Morning Teaser

October 24, 2022 – 8:50 am

I’ll be taking next week off, so the next Sift after today won’t be until the day before the midterm elections. That’s too late to try to persuade anybody, so today’s Sift will focus on the closing arguments I think Democrats should be making.

My original vision was of a series of short, punchy posts on single issues, with an umbrella post to list and link to them. And I’ve mostly done that, but the short-and-punchy resolution has been hard to keep. So instead I have a series of not-incredibly-verbose posts lined up. I hope you will find them useful in convincing friends who are undecided about who to vote for or about voting at all. There actually is a lot on the line in this election.

Anyway, the closing arguments are broken into Democracy, Abortion, and Biden’s Achievements posts. They should come out in that order between now and about 11 EDT. I’m still deciding whether the umbrella post is necessary.

I had hoped that moving so much material into those posts would shrink the weekly summary, but then the week happened. The UK government fell; the week’s developments in the various Trump legal battles is a story in itself; John Durham lost his final case, capping a long, expensive, and unproductive investigation into the allegedly nefarious origins of the Russia “hoax”; and I just couldn’t resist telling the story of the would-be conservative movie-maker who lost his investors’ money to a grifter. (Conservatives have a hard time spotting grifters, don’t they? It’s almost like the movement seeks out gullible people and grooms them to be conned.)

So the summary may not show up until 1 or so.

See you in two weeks.

By weeklysift | Comments (4)

The Monday Morning Teaser

October 17, 2022 – 8:40 am

Lately I’ve felt surrounded by pessimism. Partly it’s the upcoming elections — not just the belief that the Republicans will reclaim the House, but that all the other close elections will go their way as well: Georgia will elect a man who has no business anywhere near the Senate, Wisconsin will re-elect one of the worst MAGA senators, Jon Fetterman will lose to a literal snake-oil salesman because his stroke recovery isn’t going fast enough, and so on.

Polls say all those elections are in doubt, but in the minds of many of the people I talk to they’re already chalked up as losses.

But not just the elections. This week someone disgustedly told me (as if it were already a fact) that Trump is going to get away with it all. Others say that inflation can’t be tamed, a recession is inevitable, and the stock market will never turn back up. And who can predict what mischief the Supreme Court will get up to this year?

In foreign countries, Putin is going to use nuclear weapons and we’ll have to back down to him to avoid armageddon. Bolsonaro may lose his run-off, but it won’t matter because he’ll launch a coup. Xi is strengthening his hold on China. And so on.

I’ve started to wonder if maybe we’re being a little irrational about all this. Maybe there’s more reason to be hopeful than we think.

With that in mind, this week’s featured post is “American Democracy has been in trouble before”. I’m relying on two sources to look at two periods of American history: Rachel Maddow’s “Ultra” podcasts about the fascist plots of the 1940s, and Jon Grinspan’s new book The Age of Acrimony about the corrupt and violent politics of the Gilded Age.

We tend to tell American history as a story of continuous progress. That’s not only false, it serves us badly in times like these, when we really need to know that previous generations have faced similar challenges and survived them.

So that post will be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the latest January 6 hearing, developments in the election campaigns, some thoughts about nuclear power, the latest in the Ukraine War, and a few other things. It should post a little after noon.

By weeklysift | Comments (2)