Category Archives: Morning tease

The Monday Morning Teaser

April 10, 2023 – 8:14 am

Some weeks history seems to be moving faster than usual. A week ago, all anyone could talk about was the Trump indictment, which existed but was still under seal. The drama of his arraignment was still in the future, and it was all the news networks could talk about. In the Sift, I reiterated my usual warning against speculation: We’ll know soon enough what the indictment says; wait for it.

Well, the arraignment and the unsealing of the indictment happened on Tuesday, which seems like a very long time ago. In the meantime,

  • An injunction banning one of the two drugs used in medication abortions is set to take effect Friday, unless appellate courts intervene, or a contradictory injunction from a different judge holds in most of the blue states.
  • The Tennessee legislature responded to popular protests against its inaction on gun violence by ejecting two young Black legislators who took that protest to the floor of the General Assembly — essentially telling the Black voters of Nashville and Memphis that they don’t get their choice of representative. They need to pick again until they settle on someone acceptable to the White Republican supermajority.
  • Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, it turns out, has been taking high-luxury gift vacations from a major Republican donor for decades, and not reporting them as the law demands.
  • And (I almost forgot; it was Tuesday), Wisconsin voters tipped its Supreme Court liberal in a stunning landslide for the usually-closely divided state.

Plus, there’s been some kind of intelligence breach I haven’t even thought about yet, DeSantis is escalating his war against Disney, and Texas Governor Abbott is offering to pardon a guy just convicted of murdering a protester during the George Floyd demonstrations. (I mean, murdering somebody Abbott doesn’t like can’t really be a crime, can it?)

Wait, wasn’t I supposed to talk about Trump? It was just Tuesday.

Anyway, the Trump indictment does get a featured post, which should come out by 9 or 10 EDT (which is 7 or 8 to me, on vacation in Santa Fe). The weekly summary (with lengthy sections on Tennessee and abortion that maybe should have been split off into their own posts) should have everything else, and come out around noon EDT, 10 MDT.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

April 3, 2023 – 7:33 am

There are two things to know about this week’s Sift.

  • It’s not all about Trump.
  • It’s going to run a little later than usual.

I’m not going to talk a lot about the Trump indictment, because there’s not much to know yet. Reportedly, Trump will be arraigned tomorrow, and then the indictment will be unsealed. Until then, nobody really knows what the charges are or why DA Alvin Bragg thinks he can convince a jury to convict. He might have everything nailed down tight, or the case might be shaky. I could speculate, but tomorrow we’ll know. So my inclination is to wait. I’ll analyze the indictment next week.

My head is still stuck in the Nashville school shooting a week ago. And in particular, I’ve been struck by the public anger that is beginning to swell against the pro-NRA politicians who see these massacres and just shrug, like Rep. Tim Burchett from Tennessee, who went viral saying “We’re not going to fix it”, as if mass shootings were a plague from God that defies human intervention.

A few years ago, a mass shooting produced horror and sadness, but also some hope. “Maybe now everyone will see that we need to do something about guns.” But shootings keep happening, so often you’ve probably missed a bunch of them, and we now know that some people will never see. And that has produced a kind of anger I didn’t used to feel in myself or see in others.

So the featured post will be “I’m radicalizing against guns”. It will close with this point: If it really is true that the Second Amendment won’t let us do anything about our gun problem, then the Second Amendment has to be repealed.

That may seem like an impossible dream at this point. But if it’s the only way, then it will eventually happen. I don’t believe America will watch its children be massacred forever.

Anyway, that post will come out late, probably not until nearly noon EDT. The reason is that I’m in Arizona, which is on Mountain Standard Time, which matches Pacific Daylight.

Easterners may not see the weekly summary (which will mention the Trump indictment and chastise people who are taking radical positions based on almost no knowledge) until around 2.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

March 20, 2023 – 8:20 am

After a long wait, it looks like Trump is about to be indicted for something. It’s not for the worst things he’s done yet, but any indictment, if it happens, would be the beginning of accountability for a long record of lawlessness. Even so, that’s not the main thing I’m writing about this week, because months of speculation means that there’s not much more to be said about a thing that hasn’t happened yet. Give me an indictment to read, and maybe I’ll decide to examine it in more depth.

So what am I writing about this week? Two things:

  • The bizarre federal court in Amarillo that is wired for outrageous conservative lawsuits, and how it might soon issue an injunction banning one of the two main abortion drugs nationwide.
  • How a viral interview started a discussion about the meaning of “woke”.

The first featured post is ready to go and should be out by 9 EST. The second still needs a lot of work, but I predict it gets out by 11.

The weekly summary will discuss the looming Trump indictment, the perils Ron DeSantis faces as his candidacy stops being an idea and starts to become real, the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin, Texas taking over Houston’s schools, and a few other things. Let’s guess it shows up a little after noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

March 13, 2023 – 8:51 am

As I write this, a banking crisis might be forming. Silicon Valley Bank went under Friday, and Signature Bank over the weekend. Last night, Treasury, the Fed, and the FDIC announced their plan to deal with the two banks. Maybe it will be enough, and maybe it won’t. We should know in the next few days.

The question to be answered is how unique the problems at the two banks are. And the answer is: sort of unique. Each had individual problems that made them vulnerable, but they couldn’t recover due to problems that exist in just about all banks right now. I’ll talk that through in the featured post, which should come out around 10 EST.

The weekly summary covers Tucker Carlson’s attempt to whitewash January 6, Biden’s budget proposal and the lack of any coherent Republican response, the political crisis in Israel, debates about how Covid started and whether masks slowed it down, and the latest reasons to think Donald Trump might be indicted soon. That should be out before 1.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

March 6, 2023 – 8:05 am

The state laws are coming at us so fast I’m having trouble keeping up. Banning drag shows and gender-affirming medical care, taking over state universities, creating official state ideologies, making bloggers register and report to the state, and even (in one case) proposing to de-certify the Florida Democratic Party. It’s hard to know what to protest, what to pay attention to, and what to write off as a distraction.

In this week’s featured post, I’ll try to sort things out and give some explanation of why it’s all happening now. (After all, drag shows weren’t invented yesterday.) That needs a lot of work yet, so I don’t expect to post it before 11 EST.

The weekly summary will cover the revelations that continue to spill out of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, other recent examples of right-wing propaganda, the continuing farce that Jim Jordan’s committee has become, and a few other things. That might not show up until around 1.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

February 27, 2023 – 8:48 am

The big topics to cover from the last two weeks are: the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine war, what lessons to learn from the East Palestine derailment, and what the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit has revealed about Fox News, plus a bunch of culture-war issues like Scott Adams arranging his own cancellation, the Right’s ability to manipulate the allegedly liberal media, Tennessee’s ban on drag performances, and the publisher’s editing of Roald Dahl books.

But I spent my week off preparing and delivering a sermon about democracy, which closed with the idea that those of us who want to save democracy need to keep reaching out to folks on the other side of the partisan divide. (Sadly, the other side doesn’t need to reach out. Polarization serves the authoritarian cause well.)

That was Sunday, a week ago yesterday. The next day, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted her now-famous call for a “national divorce”, and then followed that up with a more detailed walk-back that calls for an Articles-of-Confederation-style government with a weak and tiny national government and fifty sovereign states.

Now, I don’t usually respond to MTG, because I think she’s another Trump-style grifter. When she says something, I have no idea whether she’s serious, she’s conning her marks, or she’s just trying to troll people like me. But whether she’s making her proposal in good faith or not — and I suspect not — I think a lot of Americans read her tweetstorm and honestly thought that her vision sounded pretty good.

So if I’m going to practice what I’ve (quite literally) been preaching, I need to offer those people a response. That’s this week’s featured post. It should be out between 9 and 10 EST. The other stuff will be in the weekly summary, which should appear noonish.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

February 13, 2023 – 8:43 am

Politically, the big event that happened this week was the State of the Union address. It was a uniquely Biden performance. Obama’s speeches were nearly always works of art: soaring oratory, full of idealism and inspiration, delivered with perfect timing and phrasing. Trump’s speeches were snake-oil pitches, designed to exhaust the fact-checkers to the point that many falsehoods went unanswered. And he always spoke only to his half of the country while doing his best to troll the other half.

Biden doesn’t have the skill to take either approach. His lifelong struggle not to stutter means that a long speech is something to get through rather than an opportunity to shine. His brand is bipartisan unity, not demonization of the Other, so he can’t rabble-rouse. And yet, Tuesday’s speech arguably accomplished more than any SOTU in my lifetime. It was not brilliantly delivered, but it was brilliantly conceived. Biden pulled off a masterful bit of strategy (which is why this week’s quote is from Sun Tzu).

The featured post examines the speech in detail. It should post maybe around 10 EST.

The weekly summary also covers the first hearings of Kevin McCarthy’s House, which did not go as planned. It turns out that (unlike when Republicans appear on Fox News) House hearings also include Democrats, some of whom are quite clever — and do enough homework to notice when the facts are on their side. In contrast to my usual summaries, this one will include a detailed example of the kind of headline you should not pay attention to. Then there are the UFOs the Air Force keeps shooting down, Mike Pence getting a subpoena from the special counsel, and a few other things. That should be out a little after noon

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The Monday Morning Teaser

February 6, 2023 – 8:50 am

In the same way that a short note sometimes turns into a long post, this week’s plan for a featured post has turned into the first of a series. Or actually the second: Now that I see the series, I recognize “The Debt Ceiling: a (p)review” as the first.

My motive is that I’m tired and depressed by the low quality of public discussion about deficits and the debt. We throw back and forth talking points about “maxxing out the national credit card” and “refusing to pay our bills” without ever thinking deeply about why we owe $32 trillion, whether a (still growing) debt that size will eventually cause any problems, and (if we decide that it is a problem) what options we have for doing something about it.

I suspect that (pending research I haven’t done yet), I’m not far from where Joe Biden is: He wants to come to some long-term agreement about fiscal policy, rather than keep governing through a series of continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills. But he knows he can’t have that conversation while Kevin McCarthy’s finger hovers over the economy’s self-destruct button.

Anyway, today’s featured post was originally supposed to be a few paragraphs about how we accumulated this debt. But the history of the national debt turns out to be an interesting topic in its own right, providing insight into how fiscal policy has intersected with the rest of American history. (I’ll bet you didn’t know the role the San Francisco Earthquake played in the creation of the Federal Reserve.) “How did we get $32 trillion in debt?” still needs some work, so I’ll predict it shows up about 11 EST.

The weekly summary includes a discussion of police reform following Tyre Nichols’ murder (that also threatened to turn into a featured post), the House vote to kick Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee, the ridiculous panic over the Chinese spy balloon, January’s surprisingly strong jobs report, and a few other things. It should show up a little after noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

January 30, 2023 – 8:31 am

It’s been three weeks since the last weekly summary, so today I’ll be going a bit wild. I guess that’s a good sign: Time off is supposed to be rejuvenating.

There are two featured posts this week (and two other ideas that I pushed off to next week, not to mention a couple fairly long notes in the summary). One is about the Biden-is-coming-for-your-gas-stove panic on the right, which I’m using as an example of a larger phenomenon: When your legislative agenda flies in the face of public opinion, you need phony issues to keep people distracted.

And if gas stoves don’t grab you, what about Microsoft’s new X-box software “recruiting” your child into climate awareness? Or the sinister implications of the personalities chosen for M&M’s spokescandies (who have now been shelved)? That’s all much more important than protecting Social Security or the credit rating of the United States, not to mention issues like voting rights, abortion rights, or climate change.

The article should post a little after 9 EST.

The second featured post looks at Democrats’ problems in rural and small-town America, spinning off of an article about rural rage by Thomas Edsell, and incorporating some subsequent comments by Paul Krugman. It boils down to: What do you do when people have genuine problems, but the way they frame those problems is based in myths? Debunking those myths seems essential to addressing the real problems, but in the meantime you frame yourself as an enemy.

Let’s predict that for around 11.

Then there’s the summary, which has three weeks of backlogged news. There’s all the craziness of the new House majority, all the disturbing video we’ve been exposed to lately (Tyre Nichols’ murder, the Paul Pelosi attack, …), waiting for the Georgia grand jury report and/or indictments of Trump and his henchmen, Pence joining the classified-documents bru-ha-ha, China’s population decline, Ukraine getting tanks, a Trump-connected Russian oligarch paying off a key FBI agent, gender identity in public schools, the DeSantis regime’s propaganda efforts, and a bunch more stuff.

I apologize for the length — I’m stretching the idea of “summary” this week — and remind you that you are free to skip around.

But don’t forget to vote for your favorite Minnesota snowplow names.

The summary should appear maybe 1ish.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

January 23, 2023 – 8:57 am

I wasn’t going to do a Sift today, but I was jotting down some notes about the Biden document controversy and realized they had turned into a more-or-less complete set of thoughts. So I’ll be posting that soon rather than saving it for next week.

But there won’t be a weekly summary this week.

Another thing I think I’ll put out there is a link to what I did with my time off: I gave a Zoom talk in the lecture series at Pennswood Village, a Quaker-inspired retirement home in Newtown, PA.

The talk is called “Whatever Happened to the Citizen Journalist? the mixed results of the internet news revolution“. It’s about how the Cronkite Era of news turned into the current era, the role played by amateur journalists like me, and how things didn’t always turn out the way we intended.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, the talk provides a certain amount of Weekly Sift philosophy and history that doesn’t come up week-to-week, including the fact that in April I’ll mark the 20th anniversary of the first political article I posted online.

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