Category Archives: Morning tease

The Monday Morning Teaser

July 4, 2022 – 8:32 am

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?

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The Monday Morning Teaser

June 27, 2022 – 8:36 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

June 20, 2022 – 8:30 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

June 13, 2022 – 8:28 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

June 6, 2022 – 8:36 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 30, 2022 – 8:33 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 23, 2022 – 8:27 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 16, 2022 – 8:52 am

Saturday we had yet another race massacre, this one in Buffalo. We don’t have to debate about the killer’s motives, because posting a manifesto about “white replacement” or “white genocide” has become a standard part of such killing sprees.

The mainstream media tends not to point out this trend, instead focusing on “troubled” young men with “mental health” issues. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the real issue is much simpler: The killers believe what Republicans are telling them.

I started putting this together after the El Paso shooting in 2019. I can’t say whether or not Robert Crusius was mentally ill when he targeted Hispanics at a WalMart, because his actions made perfect sense if you took seriously what Trump had been saying over and over: Mexicans are invading our country. If your country is being invaded, isn’t the most obvious response to take military gear to the border and kill the invaders? What’s mentally ill about that?

Same thing here. Payton Gendron has been told time and again that there’s a plot to take America away from the white race, and that this plot will eventually result in racial extinction. If he believes that, what’s the logical response?

High-profile people like Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Elise Stefanik may not explicitly tell people to go out and kill Blacks or Hispanics or Jews, but how does anything less deal with the problem they describe?

This would be a perfect time for Republicans to purge their ranks, to openly reject white replacement theory and the people who promote it. But they won’t, because WRT is the underground root system that connects all their issues. Without white replacement, the MAGA playbook is an incoherent mess.

Today’s featured post will flesh out that argument. I’m still working on it, so it’s hard to predict when it will appear.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary to cover: America has had its one-millionth Covid death. Russia had a very bad week, both in Ukraine and diplomatically. Women (and the men who care about them) continued to react to the prospect of the Supreme Court taking their rights away. There’s an important primary in Pennsylvania tomorrow. John Durham’s endless political witch hunt is finally bringing someone to court this week. Texas got hot this weekend — who could have imagined? — and the electrical grid strained to cope.

The schedule is out the window today. Things will post when I get them done.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 9, 2022 – 8:29 am

This week’s Sift is going to center on the Supreme Court and abortion.

If you haven’t been on Mars or under a rock, you know that a draft of a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade and eliminating constitutional protection for abortion rights came out Monday night. This is a big deal, both in itself and in what it presages about future decisions. We can expect red states to pass not only laws banning abortion (which are already on the books in many of them), but also challenges to birth control, same-sex marriage, and other previously accepted constitutional rights. This decision may not immediately validate such laws, but the logic it uses could be repurposed to overturn other Supreme Court precedents.

I’ve written two featured posts that consider this issue from different angles. The first, which should be out shortly, is a legal analysis of what Justice Alito’s draft says, assuming that it becomes the opinion of the Court next month. The second asks how we got here, and more specifically “Who’s to blame for overturning Roe?” That should appear around 10 EDT.

Even that doesn’t finish covering the issue, though, so the weekly summary will take up the political implications going forward.

Also in the summary: Today is Victory Day in Russia, and yet the new offensive in Ukraine continues to go badly. Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper has a book giving new reasons to believe Trump is/was unfit to be president, and that we dodged a bullet by getting him out of office without even greater damage to the Republic. The pandemic continues to heat up again. The debate about what to do about student loans continues. And a few other things are going on.

I’ll try to get that out by noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 2, 2022 – 8:30 am

The most important thing I read this week was an article in Vox: “How Ron DeSantis is following a trail blazed by a Hungarian authoritarian“. The reason it’s so hard to make sense out of what DeSantis is doing is that he’s not imitating Trump or following any other American model; he’s translating a Hungarian model of fascism into an American context. This article fits well with a series that the New York Times is doing on another American Orbánist, Tucker Carlson. This week’s featured post ties the two together in “MAGA 2.0”. It should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: the Russian offensive in Eastern Ukraine continues, the pandemic is now clearly on the upswing, Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter appears to be succeeding, the Supreme Court appears ready to knock a few more bricks out of the wall separating Church and State, and GDP shrank in the first quarter. Plus, a lot of insightful things were written about the future of American democracy, and I’ll link to the talk I gave during my week off.

The summary should appear by 1.

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