The Weekly Sift

I just checked CNN, and the Ukraine invasion seems not to have started yet. That seems to be where we’ve gotten to.

A standing principle of the Sift is that a weekly blog can’t do breaking news, so I don’t try. I wish I had something deeply insightful to tell you about this situation, but I really don’t.

Instead, this week I’m taking a step back to try for a wider view of the Critical Race Theory, Don’t Say Gay, and book-banning controversies. Following a hint I gleaned from one of those helpful-conservative articles about what Democrats should do next, this week’s featured article takes a speculative leap: What if the long-term goal is to abolish the public schools?

That post should appear between 9 and 10 EST.

The weekly summary does indeed say a few things about Ukraine, but I don’t try to give the topic the coverage it deserves. In addition I cover Trump’s really bad week, the phony Hillary-spying story, the decline of political comedy, the end of the Olympics, and a few other things, before closing with a video of some guy who watched way too much curling. That should be out around noon.

Probably there was more important news than football this week, but to me the Brian Flores lawsuit against the NFL was a shiny object I couldn’t put down. It’s been common knowledge for years that Black coaching candidates face an uphill struggle in the NFL, a league where 69% of the players are Black. But an “oops” text message from Bill Belichick provided Flores with a smoking gun, and now he has a viable discrimination case.

I decided to give the story what I think of as “the Rachel Maddow treatment”. (It might also be called “the Heather Cox Richardson treatment”.) In other words, I’m going to take a long historical perspective and talk about the role of sports in America’s racial debate, going back to Jack Johnson’s heavyweight boxing championship in 1908.

Short version: NFL coaching isn’t just the usual hard-to-break-into-management problem. When Black athletes like Jesse Owens and Joe Louis started proving that Whites aren’t a superior race, racism retreated into a fallback position: Some Blacks might be gifted with awesome animal physicality, but Whites compensate with superior intellect and character.

In the NFL, this created the Blacks-can’t-be-quarterbacks myth that persisted into the 1980s. The continuing prejudice against Black coaches is the current battle line.

Anyway, I’ll try to get that article out by 10 EST.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary: censorship, more 1-6 revelations (and pushback from Trump and the GOP), the retreat of the Omicron surge, more good economic news, Ukraine, and so forth. That should appear a little after noon.

I should have waited a week to sum up what we know about the Trump coup plot. Last week was the one-year anniversary of his mob invading the Capitol, but two significant new chunks of the story came out this week: An indictment describing the Oath Keepers’ plans to hold the Capitol after the mob seized control, and the fraudulent documents by which Trump’s defeated electors attempted to certify themselves to Congress.

Michigan’s attorney general has referred the Electoral-College-fraud case to the Justice Department, and we don’t know what they’ll do with it. But the Oath Keeper plan came out in the first DoJ indictment that puts January 6 in its political context: The charge is seditious conspiracy, not trespassing, assaulting an officer, or some other offense that could have been committed by an impulsive mob.

I’ll describe all that in “Merrick Garland Starts Getting Serious”, which I’m hoping to post by 11 EST.

Before that, though, I’ll cover the Supreme Court’s pair of vaccine-mandate decisions, which are no less bizarre because they were expected. Roberts and Kavanaugh switched sides between the two cases, and so were in the majority both times as Biden’s OSHA mandate was struck down, but his HHS mandate upheld. The issues were virtually the same in the two cases, and only minor editing could have turned the majority opinion in the HHS case into a dissent in the OSHA case.

That will be the subject of “The Court and the Vaccine Mandates”, which should be out around 9.

The weekly summary still has the Senate’s failure to protect voting rights to cover, as well as the apparent top of the Omicron surge, Matt Gaetz’ legal woes, Novak Djokovic, Prince Andrew, and a few other things, before closing with a mash-up showing that six country-and-western hits are really the same song. That should appear between noon and 1.

Having gotten the pessimism out of my system last week, I’ll start 2022 with an upbeat featured post: “Democracy Returns to Michigan”.

Since the 2011 redistricting, Michigan’s legislature has been so blatantly gerrymandered that the state has arguably not had the “Republican form of government” that Article IV of the Constitution guarantees to every member of the Union. But in 2018 the voters rose up and passed a ballot initiative establishing a non-partisan redistricting commission. In some states, gerrymandered Republican legislatures have managed to circumvent anti-gerrymandering ballot initiatives, but this one seems to have worked. So in November, the voters of Michigan should finally get to decide which party controls their legislature.

That post should be out by 9 EST.

The weekly summary will look at the Omicron surge, the upcoming anniversary of the January 6 coup attempt, the New Year, Betty White, and a few other things, before closing with an ethical dilemma that not even gingerbread people can escape. It should be out before noon.

An eventful week: Build Back Better looks dead. The Mark Meadows text messages show that major conservative voices were panicking in private on January 6 while they publicly said something very different. Omicron is spreading. Central banks are starting to respond to inflation. The NYT exposes what the Pentagon knew about the civilian casualties from its bombing raids. And the War on Christmas enters its 17th grim year.

The featured post isn’t about any of that. A conservative article in Atlantic got under my skin, and I tried to figure out why. That led to “The Emotional Roots of Political Polarization”, which should be out between 9 and 10 EST.

The weekly summary does cover the stuff I mentioned above, and also promotes an article calling for “platform socialism” as a solution to the problem of Big Tech monopolies. I haven’t decided whether I agree, but I do want to widen the range of debate on this issue. Then the summary closes with Stephen Colbert’s Lord of the Rings rap. That should appear before noon.