Thursday was the final 1-6 Committee hearing of the summer. The weekly summary will link to a complete video and transcript, plus summarizing the main points.
I thought this was a good time to take a step back and reflect on the larger picture. In particular, I wanted to answer the objection that the hearings are “one-sided”, because no one on the committee is representing Trump. I summarize that objection’s flaw in the featured post “Trump doesn’t have a side of the 1-6 story”, which should be out shortly.
From the very beginning, the effort of Trump and his allies hasn’t been to tell his side of the 1-6 story, but to prevent any discussion of the incident at all. Mitch McConnell blocked the proposal for a bipartisan commission, and Kevin McCarthy pulled his nominees off the House committee in an attempt to discredit it. Fox News has been refusing to air the hearings. Many of Trump’s closest allies have refused to testify, and Steven Bannon seems ready to go to jail rather than tell his “side” of the story.
People who complain about not hearing Trump’s “side” during the hearings should instead be asking Trump what his side is.
The weekly summary will also discuss the further response to the Dobbs decision, the bizarre speeches at the Young Fascists Turning Point USA conference this weekend, the House’s attempt to codify rights before the Supreme Court takes them away, the European heat wave, and a few other things. It should be out a little before noon EDT.
This week we were all talking about a girl whose name none of us know: the pregnant 10-year-old who was denied an abortion in Ohio and had to go to Indiana. Maybe years from now she’ll decide to tell her story, but until then I hope we never know her name.
She was significant because she became a symbol of the fact that abortion decisions are not as simple as the Mike Pences and Kristi Noems would have you believe. Each story of a woman or girl who is pregnant but doesn’t want to become a mother is unique. Any one-size-fits-all decision made by a legislature is going to lead to outcomes we can all recognize as wrong — like forcing a 10-year-old to carry her rapist’s baby.
The aspect of the story most interesting to me, though, was watching how right-wing media handled the story, because the girl’s existence called into question one of the false assumptions central to the right-wing narrative: Right and Wrong are simple concepts, and it’s easy to draw the line between them.
For that reason, the story had to be short-circuited somehow: swept under the rug, denied, or diverted into some other story. That’s what I examine in the featured post “No Victims Allowed”, which should be out shortly.
The weekly summary will cover new developments in the 1-6 hearings and related investigations, the new Covid surge, the Uvalde shooting report, the continuing aftershocks of the Court’s reversal of Roe, and a few other things, before closing with some of the most spectacular photos ever, courtesy of the James Webb space telescope. That should be out noonish, EDT.
It’s been another week with too much news: the Highland Park shooting; the Abe assassination; Boris Johnson resigning, sort of; wondering what Pat Cipollone told the 1-6 Committee; Georgia handing out subpoenas to Trump’s people; states racing to take away women’s rights, now that they’re allowed to; a surprisingly good June jobs report; and probably a bunch of stuff I’ve forgotten.
I’ll do my best to cover it in the weekly summary. This week’s featured post is short: I use the Highland Park shooting as an example of how our inability to enforce sensible rules makes us less free. Yes, you can easily walk into a store and buy an AR-15. But what you can’t do is take your kids to a Fourth of July parade without regularly glancing up at the rooftops and planning your escape route in case all hell breaks loose. That’s not freedom.
The featured post should be out shortly. The weekly summary should take until noon or so EDT.
It’s the Fourth of July, and I don’t think I have ever been less excited to be an American.
Anyway, it was an eventful week. Tuesday was Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the 1-6 Committee, which was really our first view inside the Trump White House. Her testimony damaged both Trump’s legal defenses and his public image. I’ll describe that in the featured post, which should be out shortly.
Last week I covered three major Supreme Court decisions: the reversal of Roe, tossing out New York’s gun law, and forcing Maine to subsidize religious schools. All of them were major steps backwards for America, and are a big part of why this Independence Day feels so dismal. This week the march towards Gilead continued: a public school football coach can lead students in public prayer during a school event, and the EPA has lost a tool for fighting climate change. I’ve decided not to go into as much detail about these, and to cover them in the weekly summary.
Also in the summary: Both sides continue to react and respond to the Court’s Roe reversal. Russia is slowly advancing in eastern Ukraine. Most of the worst candidates in Tuesday’s primary elections lost. And Covid looks set to take off again after the holiday weekend.
I have an unexpected meeting this morning, so I don’t know when I’ll get the summary out. I’ll aim for noon, but who knows?
It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court dropped its Dodds decision reversing Roe v Wade on Friday, because it understandably eclipsed a week that was already heavy with important developments.
Two of those developments were other radical Supreme Court decisions: one blowing a hole in the wall between Church and State, and the other tossing out a century-old New York gun law, while casting doubt on just about any other gun regulation. I’ve grouped those three decisions together in “Three Supreme Court decisions with long-term consequences”, which should be out shortly.
Two other news stories would have dominated most weeks. Congress passed (and Biden signed) the first significant new gun-control legislation since the Clinton years. It’s far from what Biden wanted or the country needs, but it is something in an era when we’re used to getting nothing.
And then there were two more January 6 hearings, one detailing the ways Trump pressured everyone from local election officials to state legislatures and secretaries of state to help him stay in power after he lost the election, and one focusing on his attempt to corrupt the Justice Department, and how close it came to succeeding. Both included dramatic testimony (like Georgia election worker Shaye Moss describing how her life was ruined after Trump targeted her by name with false accusations of election fraud) and stunning revelations (like the six Republican congressmen who asked Trump for pardons).
I’ll cover most of that in the weekly summary, but there is one short thing I decided to pull out into a second featured post: I’ve been hearing a lot of pessimism about what the 1-6 hearings are accomplishing, with the assumption that they’re having no effect because Trump’s cultists aren’t watching them. I think that’s backwards, and shows a misperception of how conservatives change their minds. I’ll try to get that out around 10 or 11 EDT. The weekly summary should be out by 1.
This morning’s featured post will shift away from national politics and look at an environmental problem: the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake, which is expected to break records this summer and endanger a larger ecosystem. Longer-term, Salt Lake City could face arsenic storms as the wind picks up poisonous dust from the exposed lake bed.
That’s worth attention in its own right, but even more alarming is what it says about America’s unwillingness to deal with looming climate disasters: So far, state and local governments are barely doing anything to curb development or discourage water use. Unlike global climate change, the shrinking lake is immediate, local, and amenable to simple policy changes, if only the public could muster the will to tackle the problem. “if we can’t save the Great Salt Lake,” Paul Krugman asks, “what chance do we have of saving the planet?”
That post should appear before 10 EDT. The weekly summary has two more 1-6 committee hearings to cover, as well as Juneteenth, the faltering Senate gun compromise, and the right-wing media’s new both-sides-do-it distraction: Jane’s Revenge, a pro-choice “terrorist” group that so far is mostly imaginary. It’s the new antifa, and you can expect to hear it blamed for almost anything in the next few months.
We’ll all need something to laugh at after that, so I’ll close with a completely over-the-top Danish commercial for the bus service. The summary should post noonish.
It’s pretty obvious what this week’s Sift is going to be about: The January 6 hearings. The 1-6 Committee’s public hearings kicked off Thursday in prime time, and it’s clear the Committee is bringing the goods: They have a case to make, and they’re making it clearly and persuasively. I’ll review what they said, how Republicans countered, and where things go from here in this week’s featured post, which should be out by 10 EDT.
That’s also when the second public hearing starts. I’m going to be putting the weekly summary together then, so I’ll stream the hearing this afternoon rather than try to cover it in real time. (As I’ve often said, this isn’t a breaking-news blog.)
The weekly summary will pick up 1-6 odds and ends that didn’t fit into the featured post, cover the continuing Russian push into eastern Ukraine, discuss the ambiguous recent Covid numbers, and poke fun at the Republican outrage-of-the-week. (Kids are going to drag shows! They’ll see men in dresses! How will the Republic survive?) That should be out around noon.
After last week, when I reviewed the Sift’s past articles about guns, I thought I might go some long while without discussing the topic again. But the news hasn’t slowed down. This last week has included multi-death shootings in Tulsa, Philadelphia, Saginaw, and Chattanooga. The news cycles have begun to overlap: I hear someone talking about a mass shooting and think they’re still talking about the previous one, not the one that just happened and I haven’t noticed yet.
The reason last week’s article was a review rather than a fresh take on the subject was that I thought I had long ago said everything I have to say about guns and gun control. This week I heard an argument against gun control that made me realize that’s not quite true: The problem can’t be the guns, the argument goes, because lots of Americans have always owned guns. The cause of our mass-shooting problem, then, must be something that changed more recently. That, presumably, is how they come to blame video games or abortion or the decline of Christianity rather than guns.
What this argument overlooks, though, is that America’s guns have changed a lot in recent decades. I grew up in one of those gun-owning households of the mid-20th century. But the weapons I had access to didn’t have anything like the destructive capabilities of an AR-15.
So this week’s featured post discusses my personal history with guns. I’m calling it “America’s guns have changed in my lifetime.” It should appear shortly.
The weekly summary summarizes the news reports about the shootings I listed above. It also sets up the 1-6 Committee public hearings, which start Thursday evening. And of course there continues to be pandemic and Ukraine news. That should be out between noon and one EDT.
Some weeks I get to choose what I write about, and some weeks events choose for me. This week it seems impossible to focus on anything but the Uvalde school shooting and the issues it raises.
But that leads to a challenge: Over the years I’ve written about guns and mass shootings several times. Has the situation changed since then? Have I decided I was wrong? Am I finding new ideas that I hadn’t considered? I went back and read my posts about guns from the last seven years, and decided the answers are no, no, and no.
So should I just rehash it all? Find some clever new spin to put a fresh face on the same ideas I told you several years ago? What about new readers who didn’t see those posts?
What I came up with begins a confession: I have no new ideas here. But I stand by the things I’ve written in the past, which I’m sure a lot of you either missed or have lost track of. (A peculiar kind of egotism is common among writers: We imagine that our readers have total recall of everything we’ve ever posted, including the pieces we’ve forgotten ourselves.) So the featured post links to and summarizes what I’ve written about guns in the past. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary includes commentary on other people’s responses to the Uvalde shooting, and then covers last week’s primary elections, the apparent turn-around in the Covid surge, updates on the Ukraine War, and a few other things. It should be out around noon EDT.
This week I have to do something distasteful: defend the integrity of the information system by standing up for somebody I don’t like. In this case it’s Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who took a lot of heat this week for apparently saying that Black women shouldn’t count when you total up maternal deaths.
Except he didn’t actually say anything like that. I am constantly pointing out instances where Democrats are being attacked for things they didn’t really say, but I firmly believe the answer to this problem isn’t to launch similarly false attacks on Republicans. So in this morning’s featured post I’m defending Cassidy. I sincerely doubt that he’ll ever return the favor by defending some unfairly attacked politician I like, but that’s not the point. I want the public debate to be about true things, so I have to discipline my own side, not just the other side.
Anyway, “A reluctant defense of Bill Cassidy” should post before much longer.
The weekly summary will talk about last week’s Pennsylvania primary and tomorrow’s Georgia primary, the abortion laws states are cuing up in anticipation of the Supreme Court overturning Roe, the crypto crash, Ukraine, monkey pox, and a few other things. It should be out before noon EDT.
The Weekly Sift 