Category Archives: Morning tease

The Monday Morning Teaser

September 21, 2020 – 6:25 am

Just when you think you’ve seen the worst of 2020, it hits us with something else. Friday, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, sparking yet another Supreme Court nomination battle and threatening to cement Trump’s legal legacy with a 6-3 conservative majority.

At moments like this, it’s tempting to indulge in speculation: What will Trump and McConnell do? What tactics can the Democrats use? How will the battle affect the presidential election or the various Senate races? I can’t totally resist that urge myself, but I recognize it as mostly a waste of effort: We’ll know soon enough, and whether we have speculated right or wrong probably won’t help us respond.

What I want to do instead this morning is use the Court as an example of a larger point: We are living under a system of minority rule. Because of the Electoral College, we elected a president with only 46% of the vote, in spite of another candidate getting 48%. The institutional structure of the Senate, meanwhile, inflates the value of rural conservative votes, so that Mitch McConnell can be “majority” leader, in spite of the fact that his senators represent a minority of the nation’s population.

Because the House plays no role in choosing federal judges, McConnell and Trump are able to pack the judicial branch with conservatives who not only are out of step with a majority of the country, but who in turn reinforce minority rule by refusing to protect voting rights.

I’ll flesh that argument out, with a little quantitative help from Nate Silver, in this week’s featured post “The Illegitimacy of a Conservative Supreme Court”. That should be out around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will mourn Justice Ginsburg, indulge in some speculation about what happens next, and try to at least touch the bases on the week’s other major stories. That should be out by 1.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

September 14, 2020 – 8:28 am

Nothing jumped out at me this week as a topic I have to cover myself rather than quote other people. (I also spent a bunch of the week carrying boxes up and down stairs, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t distracted by a writing project.) So there won’t be a featured post this week.

That doesn’t mean we had a light week for news: apocalyptic wildfires in the West, the Bob Woodward book, more political interference in the Justice Department, a lull in the pandemic while we wait to see the effects of Labor Day and school openings, TikTok, Q-Anon, polls, Rudy’s pal is a Russian agent, and new Trump superspreader events.

I’m still looking for a lead quote and a closing. I’m hoping to get the summary out by noon EDT.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

September 7, 2020 – 8:54 am

This will be the first Sift posted from our new apartment. My wife and I are still eating off a card table while we wait for furniture to arrive from storage, but I have my desk and computer, and the internet is hooked up, so I’m ready to go.

I don’t usually give much attention to Trump-said-a-bad-thing stories, because he’s always saying bad things. His fans love him for it, so publicizing his over-the-top insults just builds his brand. That’s why my first instinct was to ignore Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article about him calling American soldiers who died in battle “suckers” and “losers”. I figured the story would be another two-day wonder that soaked up a lot of liberal energy without changing anything. If you loved him, you’d just love him more.

But for some reason the story isn’t going away. The article came out Thursday, and some of the claims broke before that. And it’s still in the headlines. It’s hitting a nerve in a way that Mexican rapists, mocking the disabled, shithole countries, and the other Trump outrages never did. I had to stop and think about why that might be.

The featured article is my attempt to answer that question, and the gist of my answer is that veterans — particularly white veterans from families with a military tradition in the South and in rural areas, the kind of guys who visit the graves of their Greatest Generation fathers who either died on D-Day or nearly did — are part of Trump’s base. So he can’t get out of this with tribalism; it’s his own tribe that he has insulted.

All along, Trump has been like the stereotypic Mean Girl from high school dramas. If you’re part of his in-group, you love how he insults “pencil-neck” Adam Schiff and Crooked Hillary and Pocahontas.  But like everybody in the court of the Mean Girl, you always have to wonder what he says about you when you’re not around. That’s the fear this story pokes at: If you’re Joe Sixpack, charter member of the MAGA-hatters, you may tell yourself that Trump is the champion of men like you. But is he really? When he’s with his real buddies, the other billionaires, does he laugh at what a sucker you are, and how you repeat every stupid thing he tells you?

Deep down, you know he does.

So “Trump Despises His Supporters Too” is the featured post this week. It should be out before 11 EDT. The weekly summary also talks about the role of riots in creating change, the mainstreaming of right-wing violence, what the polls are saying, and a few other things. It should be out by 1.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

August 31, 2020 – 8:38 am

This week the US witnessed its first Fascist Party convention. Laws didn’t matter. Norms didn’t matter. Truth didn’t matter. Public health didn’t even matter. Just a lot of flags and pageantry and praise for our Great Leader. They didn’t even have a party platform — just whatever the Leader wants.

Going into the convention, I warned you not to get caught up in the small lies — the single false statements that fact-checkers love to focus on. Instead, I encouraged you to look for the big lies in the background. They are a forest that can easily get lost behind the trees.

So of course I have to take my own advice. The first featured post is “The Four Big Lies of the Republican Convention”. It should be out before 11 EDT, though it’s hard to say how much before. I’d also like to write something about the unexpected general strike we saw in the sports world this week, and what it says about the general strike as a tool if Trump manages to steal the election. But time and effort are in short supply today — I’m in the middle of moving — so I may not get to it.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: the Kenosha shootings, both by police and by a Trump-inspired vigilante; the Portland shooting of a right-wing protester; the hurricane and wildfires; the US has its 6 millionth virus case, as the administration corrupts the CDC and FDA; and Jerry Falwell Jr. is in the middle of a sex scandal that would dominate the news if this weren’t 2020. Maybe I’ll look for a cute animal video to close on, just for the sake of sanity. I’ll predict the summary to be out by around 1.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

August 24, 2020 – 8:34 am

Today we are at the odd and fleeting vantage point between the two conventions.

Conventions are how a party tells the country what it is all about. We’ve just seen what the Democrats are about, and we’re about to see the Republicans. (If you don’t have time to watch: The GOP is about Trump. They didn’t even write a platform this year, they just said they support Trump.)

To me, this is a good moment to contemplate the more vague attitudes and identities that form the cultural difference between the parties. It’s easy to list issues where they have different positions — immigration, guns, abortion, racism, healthcare, climate change, and so on. But if we’ve learned anything from the Trump era, it’s that positions on issues can be ephemeral. The Republican Party has changed its mind about free trade and deficits and NATO and the importance of character and a long list of other things. And yet, the party’s base consists of the same people who were there a decade ago.

So what defines the real boundary line between a liberal and a conservative? I’ll look at that in the featured post, which should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary also has a lot to cover: A Senate report verifies that the Trump campaign really did collude with Russia. Steve Bannon got arrested for fraud. The Manhattan District Attorney is one step closer to seeing Trump’s tax returns. And the all-virtual Democratic Convention seems to have worked pretty well. That post should appear between noon and one.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

August 17, 2020 – 8:38 am

Two big pieces of news happened this week. The first was expected: Joe Biden announced his vice presidential choice. We didn’t know for sure that it would be Kamala Harris, but she had been the leading candidate since speculation on the topic began. Her selection was met with a wave of racist and sexist comments from Republicans high and low, which shouldn’t have been a surprise either. If you had ever imagined that Republicans look back at their racist attacks against Obama with shame or regret, clearly you were wrong. They’re doing it all again, up to and including Birtherism.

The second big story was more shocking: Trump admitted in so many words that he was disrupting the Post Office in order to influence the election. It had already become clear that the newly installed Trump crony running the postal service was slowing down the mail, and that his actions made voting by mail more precarious. But Trump himself connected the dots.

That admission puts us in entirely new territory. Presidents have long used the powers of the presidency to help their re-election chances in indirect ways: The ribbon-cutting on your town’s new bridge might happen to coincide with your state’s primary, for example; a diplomatic tour might happen precisely when a president needs to point out his opponent’s lack of foreign-policy experience; and so on. But this is arguably the first time since the Bad Old Days of the spoils system that the everyday machinery of government has been tied to a president’s re-election campaign. That something as historically apolitical as the Post Office could be harnessed to pull the election one way or another — and that the President takes this to be a legitimate use of his power — is completely new.

At least it’s new in the United States. But it’s business as usual in autocratic countries, which we are more and more coming to resemble. And that’s the subject of this week’s featured post “What Makes Trump an Autocrat?”. That still needs work, so I’ll predict it to appear around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover Harris and the attacks against her, the continuing angst about the looming school year (including the loss of Big 10 and Pac 12 football), the inland hurricane that hit Iowa without the rest of the country noticing, an appeals court’s startling gun-control decision, the government letting methane leaks run wild, and a partial Middle East peace deal that leaves the Palestinians out in the cold. I’m still looking for a closing, but let’s say that appears around 1.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

August 10, 2020 – 6:45 am

At the beginning of 2019, Trump asserted emergency powers that let him keep building his border wall even though Congress had explicitly rejected appropriating money for that purpose. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the legality of his maneuver, but has let it continue in the meantime. This week we saw the next step in that march towards dictatorship: executive orders claiming to do a variety of things that would seem to require new money, like continuing a slimmed-down version of the enhanced unemployment benefits Congress passed in March. What will happen next is anybody’s guess.

I’ll talk about that in the weekly summary, but the featured post arises from a different news story: The New York and D.C. attorneys general are suing the National Rifle Association’s executives for diverting $62 million dollars to inappropriate uses — mostly their own luxury. They want to reorganize the NRA Foundation and dissolve the NRA itself. That story is interesting on its own, but it also points to the larger pattern of scams inside the conservative bubble, which Rick Perlstein was drawing attention to back in 2012. What makes the conservative rank-and-file such easy marks, and why do they close ranks around the grifters who take advantage of them?

That post is currently titled “The NRA, Trump University, Hydroxycholaquine, and the Long Con”. It should be out between 10 and 11 EDT. The weekly summary will discuss the executive orders, the back-to-school debate, TikTok, Isabel Wilkerson, Thighland, and a few other things. I’ll predict it to appear between noon and 1.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

August 3, 2020 – 6:49 am

We get the worst quarterly GDP report ever, Trump continues to trail Biden in the polls, and suddenly he wants to delay the election. Or move it up. Or something. Whenever the election is, it won’t be legitimate, because he’ll be defeated by fraud — the only conceivable way Trump could ever lose, or admit losing.

Anyway, this gives me a current event to hang the featured post on, even though it’s one I’ve been thinking about for a while. When the polls first turned decisively towards Biden, Democrats — who are absolutely terrified of feeling confident — kept telling each other “It’s too early to pay attention to polls.” It’s still a little early, but it’s getting later, and Trump’s attempts to find an issue to capitalize on keep falling flat. The storm troopers in Portland didn’t do it. Demonizing China or Fauci isn’t doing it. Insisting that people worried about a plague send their kids back to school didn’t do it. What’s going to do it?

But instead of expressions of Democratic confidence, I’m seeing articles about all the bad things that could still happen: The polls could just be totally wrong, maybe Trump will refuse to leave the White House, and stuff like that. And while those things are definitely worth thinking about — I don’t expect everything to go smoothly and Trump to suddenly become a gracious loser — it’s more like we’re trying to justify our own inner panic than that we’re checking democracy’s doors and windows.

So I decided to do a doors-and-windows check myself, to see where the bad things might get in. (If we’re going to worry, let’s at least worry about the right things.) The result is “The Election: Worry or Don’t Worry?” That should be out maybe 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has that horrible GDP report to cover, along with Senate Republicans’ failure to come to grips with the continuing economic distress being felt around the country. The time-lag between Covid-19 cases and deaths is continuing to play out; now cases are topping out, but deaths are increasing, reflecting the upward slope of the case numbers three weeks ago. Herman Cain died, causing me to reflect on how hard-hearted this whole crisis is making me. (Maybe I was never really as compassionate a person as I thought I was.) Basketball has restarted more-or-less successfully, while baseball is still wondering if it will have to pull the plug. And I’ll close with that wonderful bit of photo-editing Nike has put together. That should be out maybe noon or 1.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

July 27, 2020 – 7:01 am

Weeks like this raise a difficult question for anybody trying to summarize the news: Is Trump’s fascism supposed to distract us from his incompetence and corruption, or is it the other way around? Whatever I lead with, I wonder if I’ve taken the bait and missed the more important story.

The most eye-catching thing this week has been Portland’s resistance to the tear-gassing, stick-wielding secret police Trump has sent to crush dissent. The protests continue to grow, as Moms, Dads, veterans, nurses, and even grandmothers flip the script on our would-be strongman: It is the protesters who now look like America, and Trump’s goons who look like the violent America-haters.

But as the number of Americans dead from coronavirus closes in on 150,000 and Trump’s insistence that the schools have to open collides with his lack of any plan for opening them safely, it’s hard to ignore the incompetence theme. All of the countries we usually compare ourselves to are handling this pandemic, and we’re not.

And it’s hard to go a week without a major corruption story. This week we found out that Trump pushed our ambassador to the United Kingdom to try to get the British Open moved to a golf course Trump owns in Scotland. Supposedly there’s an inspector general’s report on this incident, which is conveniently classified.

But instead, the featured post is something more broadly cultural: After raising the subject of “cancel culture” in the weekly summary two weeks ago — and getting a lot of thoughtful objections from my commenters — I’m back with a longer article, which I haven’t titled yet. That should be out around 11 EDT. This week’s summary will address the fascism/incompetence/corruption trifecta, as well as Senate Republicans’ inability to put together a new stimulus package, the rising Covid-19 death rate, and a few other things, like AOC’s epic evisceration of Ted Yoho on the floor of the House. That should be out around 1.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

July 20, 2020 – 8:55 am

There will be a Sift this morning. (My wife’s surgery did happen on Thursday. It went well, and her recovery has been faster than we expected. As a result, the physical and psychological demands the situation places on me have been manageable without cancelling the Sift. Thanks to everyone who has expressed concern and wished us well.)

I think there’s even a pretty good Sift this morning. Like most of you (or at least the “you” I imagine), I’ve been wondering what the heck is going on in Portland. Unidentified feds in camo pulling US citizens into unmarked vans and driving off with them — what’s that about? How can they do that? What happens next?

There’s a story to tell here, and I think I’ve pieced it together. It starts with the military’s reluctance to suppress the protests in DC in early June, and the “success” (from Trump’s point of view) of deploying a motley assortment of armed federal agents with no insignia or other ID. At the time, many legal observers thought DC was special; the same thing couldn’t be done in a state without the consent of its governor. But now it is being done.

Based on Trump’s subsequent executive order protecting federal statues and monuments, DHS has put together the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT), an inter-agency umbrella for assembling motley assortments of armed federal agents who operate under no particular rules. That’s who’s in Portland. If this works — where “works” means getting away with actions in a blue state that Fox News can make look good to Trump’s base in swing states — we can expect to see PACT’s little green men in the major cities of blue states all over the country. (Chicago or San Francisco, maybe.) And if Trump ultimately does respond to a lost or contested election with force, it won’t be the Army he calls in, because they won’t come. It will be some motley assortment of armed federal agents operating under no particular rules. (There are, believe it or not, 132,000 of them.)

Telling that story has turned into a long article, which I haven’t quite finished yet. But I think it’s worth your time. I should have it out around 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary hasn’t commanded nearly so much of my effort. The virus continues to spread and Trump continues to ignore it. John Lewis died. And a few other things happened, none of which grabbed my attention like video of federal secret police abducting people off the street. The summary should be out by 1.

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