The Weekly Sift

Normally, I’m pretty well armored against the news. I watch bad things happen week after week and do my best to summarize them without letting them ruin my mood. This week was tougher. I had been softened up a little last week by the attack on Venezuela and the Trump administration’s complete disregard for Congress and its laws. And then on Wednesday, an ICE agent murdered a woman who had the audacity not to obey his commands. Our government’s instant response, without waiting for evidence to emerge, was to smear the victim as a “domestic terrorist” who bore full responsibility for her own death.

The right-wing media machine played its assigned role perfectly, repeating Noem, Trump, and Vance’s baseless claims that this video or that one backed up their self-justifying narrative. (They didn’t.) Better angles that showed what really happened were ignored.

And here’s the crushing fact: For some significant portion of the population, it worked. They’re out there repeating the regime’s narrative as if it were established fact.

So anyway, other people have covered the basic facts of the shooting reasonably well. But I feel like I have to comment on our nation’s epistemological crisis: The regime can deny things that are clearly shown on video, and make its sheep see what they are told to see. I find that deeply disturbing.

That’s the gist of the featured post: “Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis” should be out shortly.

That still leaves a lot for the weekly summary: Venezuela, Iran, the exaggerated “scandal” of Minnesota fraud, Grok, and a few other things. That may take me until 1 or so EST.

So Friday was the deadline that the Epstein Files Transparency Act set for DoJ to release everything it had on the Jeffrey Epstein case, except for material that would identify his victims. Guess what? It didn’t. None of the files that mention Trump were released, and Deputy AG (and former Trump personal lawyer) Todd Blanche kicked the can a bit further down the road by promising the rest of the files in “a couple of weeks”.

I mean, the EFTA is just a law, and when has the Trump DoJ cared about the law? Expect Blanche’s couple of weeks to become a month or more. And when that excuse runs thin, DoJ can start exploiting apparent loopholes in the EFTA and litigating its interpretations up through the courts. Whatever Trump is hiding can stay hidden for quite a while yet.

But that’s not the main thing I’m writing about this week, because from Tuesday to Thursday we saw a remarkable display of pathos by the President of the United States. His sick sad response to the Rob Reiner murder came on Tuesday. Wednesday we learned about the ridiculous “walk of fame” he has installed on the White House collonade: cast-in-brass plaques about Trump and all his predecessors, interpreting American presidential history through the lens of Trump’s ego. (Ronald Reagan was a fan of Trump. Andrew Jackson was treated unfairly by the press of his day, but not as badly as Trump has been.)

Wednesday night he demanded (and got) free air time from the major networks to make the most trivial national address in American history: Thanks to him, the economy is doing great, and the fact that it’s not doing great is Joe Biden’s fault. Thursday, his puppet board put his name on the Kennedy Center.

Once, this kind of nonsense would have angered me. But now I just feel sad for him, and embarrassed for my country. Every time he tries to aggrandize himself, he gets a little smaller. As soon as he’s gone, we’re all going to forget him as quickly as we can. That realization is driving him to ever more extreme aggrandizement, which shrinks him all the more.

So this week’s featured post calls out the theme: “Three days in the life of a pathetic man”. It should be out shortly.

The Epstein files will be covered in the weekly summary. Also the moves towards war against Venezuela, the Bondi Beach shooting, the Brown/MIT murders, Susan Wiles’ unfortunate Vanity Fair interviews, Bari Weiss’ continuing efforts to turn CBS into Fox News, and a few other things, closing with a new Randy Rainbow song. I’ll try to get it out by noon.

It’s easy to get worn down by the lawlessness of the Trump regime. You hear that they’ve ignored some established legal principle and think, “Oh yeah. That’s what they do.”

But this week has been special and deserves your attention. Yesterday, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem admitted on ABC that she authorized the plane that flew detainees to El Salvador after a federal judge had ordered it turned around. Her justification: James Boasberg is an “activist judge”, and Noem will decide for herself whether her orders are “lawful and binding”. This single incident is contempt of court on its own, but it points something far broader and more threatening: The regime refuses to recognize that it can be bound by the courts.

Friday, The Washington Post reported that Defense (not War) Secretary Hegseth ordered the Navy to “kill everybody” in its September 2 attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the open ocean. After the first attack, two survivors were clinging to the wreckage. So a second attack was sent to blow them to bits.

In the featured article “Crime in the Cabinet”, I’ll look at these two incidents and put them in the context of US history: Crimes committed by members of the cabinet are very rare. That we learn of two in one week is completely unique. That should be out around 10 EST or so.

The weekly summary is left to cover the confusing back-and-forth of Ukraine peace proposals; the shooting of two National Guard members near the White House, and Trump’s disproportionate response to halt the processing of all asylum applications; the end of the James Comey and Tish James prosecutions; and a few other things, before closing with a piano-playing octopus. I’ll try to get that out by noon or so.

The two big stories of this week are difficult to reconcile: Democrats won handily in nearly all of Tuesday’s elections, and so Senate Democrats surrendered Sunday night in the shutdown battle.

One thing the 40-something-day shutdown did accomplish was to frame healthcare as the major difference between the parties. Democrats either want to keep patching up ObamaCare or push for a more complete national healthcare system, while Republicans want to junk ObamaCare in favor of some “cheaper, better” care system that somehow never quite comes together into a proposal that could be voted on and implemented.

This week’s featured post takes seriously Speaker Johnson’s claim the Republicans have “pages and pages” of healthcare ideas, which were contained in a 2019 report by the Republican Study Committee in the House. I read that report and I’ll be abstracting what I see as the underlying principles: (1) You can save money on healthcare if you gamble with people’s lives, and (2) that gamble is OK if you incentivize people to place the bets themselves.

In order to make sense of the RSC report’s proposals, I’ll have to summarize a lot of context, including the pre-ObamaCare problems and how ObamaCare tried to solve them. It’s going to be a long read, but I hope you’ll find in illuminating. That post should be out between 10 and 11 EST.

The weekly summary will of course cover the elections and the shutdown. I’ll also look at what’s been happening in Chicago, the Supreme Court’s discussion of Trump’s tariffs, and a few other things. It should be out before 1.

This weekend was an encouraging one for Americans who want Trump’s bid for absolute power to fail. Something like 5 or 10 million of us turned out for No Kings rallies on Saturday, but that wasn’t the whole story. Democrats in Congress held firm, refusing to be railroaded into giving Trump what he wants with no negotiations or compromises. More universities turned down his demands for concessions in exchange for federal funding. Pentagon reporters turned in their credentials rather than consent to be mouthpieces for Pete Hegseth. An appeals court refused to let Trump deploy troops in Chicago.

All in all, the narrative that Trump can’t be resisted got interrupted this week. That doesn’t mean everything turns around from here, but it is a good sign. I’ll summarize in a featured post “The Resistance Stiffens”, which should post between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the failing ceasefire in Gaza, Trump backtracking once again on helping Ukraine, the Supreme Court looking ready to kill of the Voting Rights Act once and for all, a big leap in CO2, and a plan to get corporate money out of politics without a constitutional amendment. That should post a little after noon.