The Weekly Sift

Last week I was several hours ahead of Nancy Pelosi, claiming Monday morning that Democrats really had no choice but to impeach Trump. The Speaker didn’t publicly announce the same conclusion until late in the afternoon, and all the subsequent developments — the release of the Ukraine telephone transcript and the whistleblower complaint, the testimony of the DNI to the House Intelligence Committee, Trump’s blatant attempt to intimidate potential witnesses by calling them “spies” and hinting at their execution, new polls showing a sharp increase in the number of Americans favoring impeachment — have happened in only a week.

Now it’s on, in a way that it wasn’t on last Monday morning. The battle is joined. So this week I want to point out something about how this battle will be fought. On the surface, there will be a procedural struggle: committee hearings, subpoenas, court cases about enforcing the subpoenas, and so on. There will also be a legal/political struggle, as the House (possibly followed by the Senate) wrangles over exactly what happened and whether or not it constitutes an impeachable offense.

But underneath that struggle will be a much less visible one that happens all over the country, in conversations among friends, in arguments on social media, and so on. Because Congress will almost certainly not move without public support, and people will make up their minds one-by-one and two-by-two. So it matters how many of us go to the effort to sort things out and think clearly. It matters how many of us decide to be outspoken, and to try to shape the opinions of the people around us. And it matters how good we are at that task.

With that in mind, the featured post assembles answers to the objections being made to impeachment, whether they are arguments about the facts or about the wisdom of the process. You’re already hearing those points, and it would help the cause if you could respond clearly and sharply. That post should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The rest of the week nearly got lost. But the UN met and Greta Thunberg spoke for her generation, calling on adults to take their responsibilities to future generations seriously. Israel struggled to form a government after another close election. Boris Johnson got soundly rebuked by the UK’s Supreme Court, raising questions about whether his government will survive long enough to complete Brexit. The weekly summary will discuss all of that, and then close with an XKCD timeline of the global temperature. That should be out maybe noonish.

The big news this weekend — the drone attack on the Saudi oilfields — is still unfolding: We don’t know how convincing the administration’s attempt to pin the blame on Iran will be, or what kind of response against Iran it might carry out. We don’t know whether the disruption in the world oil market will be a blip or a longer-term shortfall in supply. We don’t know whether there will be further attacks.

As I’ve often said, a weekly one-person blog can’t compete with the major networks on breaking news, so I won’t try.  In the weekly summary I’ll set up the general situation, but leave the up-to-the-minute developments to outlets better equipped to handle them.

The featured post this week will focus on the healthcare debate among Democrats. I will argue that the differences between the candidates are overblown in two ways: All the candidates believe in two sweeping principles (that Republicans deny), and (whoever is president, and even if Democrats win both houses of Congress) the program will need the votes of the most conservative Democrats. So the program that gets passed will look very similar to a program that would be passed under a different president.

That post should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will cover the drone attacks, the rest of the Democratic debate, John Bolton, another weekly dose of corruption and deceit from the Trump administration, and a few other things. I hope to get that out by 11 EDT.

There’s no featured post this week, just a lot of short and intermediate length notes in the weekly summary. Because of the length of the summary, I’m going to try something new this week and put a table of contents at the top. I haven’t decided whether that needs to be a regular feature or not.

What stood out for me this week was the sheer number of moments when I found myself saying: “That’s just wrong.” So, for example, the EPA is proposing to roll back regulations on methane leaks. The only way that natural gas is better for the environment than coal is if methane leaks are below a certain level, and producers can easily stay well below that level if the government makes them do it. So rolling back those regulations is like saying “Screw the climate; we’re just going to keep pumping out greenhouse gases until we all choke on them.”

It went on: We’re going to throw sick immigrants out of the country so that they can go home to die. Trump is urging his underlings to break the law to get the wall built before the election. The attorney general is very publicly giving the president a $30K kickback. One thing after another.

So anyway, I’m going to talk about that, and about the latest mass shootings, and the hurricane, and Prime Minister Johnson’s maneuvering towards a no-deal Brexit, and a few other things. (I read the FBI inspector general’s report on James Comey so that you don’t have to.) It was a discouraging week in a lot of ways. So I’ll close with a heart-warming video of a diver helping a dolphin untangle itself from a hook and some fishing line.

Look for that to be out, say, by 11 EDT.

I felt like it was silly season this week. I mean, news networks spent serious amounts of time discussing whether or not Trump really thought he could buy Greenland.

It’s not that nothing important was happening, but we’ve gotten so shell-shocked — by mass shootings, impeachable offenses, attempts to take away our health insurance, putting people with serious anger issues on the Supreme Court, and so on — that this seemed like a slack week.

I decided to step back and take a longer-term look at the gun problem, which always ends up in arguments about the Second Amendment. I have a radical opinion about why these arguments are so interminable: Given how much has changed since the late 1700s, the Second Amendment doesn’t actually mean anything any more. We’re like middle-aged siblings arguing over what Dad wants, when Dad has advanced Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know where he is or who any of us are.

If the Republic were actually working, we’d leave the 1700s behind and write ourselves a new amendment protecting rights that are important to us today. Maybe we wouldn’t all agree with all of it, but at least we’d know what it meant. Interpreting it wouldn’t be like sitting around a Ouija board trying to contact the ghosts of the Founders.

So that’s what I’m doing in this week’s featured post: “How Should We Rewrite the Second Amendment?” It should be out around 9 EDT.

The weekly summary will not talk about Greenland, other than to repeat an Amy Klobuchar quip about it. Instead I’ll discuss the new anti-Statue-of-Liberty immigration rules and the two members of Congress who won’t be going to Israel. I’ll explain what an inverted yield curve is, and why it is one of several recent signs of the economic apocalypse — or at least an approaching recession. A bunch of writers made further attempts to understand Trump supporters. And I’ll mention a few other things that got drowned out by the Greenland discussion, like the fact that July was the hottest month in recorded history. I’ll try to get that out before noon.

Two more mass shootings this weekend, one of them apparently committed by someone who believed Trump’s talk about an “invasion” on our southern border. When you use war rhetoric, you shouldn’t be surprised if someone starts shooting.

And the trade war with China heated up. Trump announced more tariffs — this time on consumer goods made in China, so you’re likely to notice price increases in stores — and Beijing responded by letting its currency drop. Both moves sent global markets into a tailspin.

I found an insightful podcast on disinformation. McConnell hates his well-earned “Moscow Mitch” nickname. And I’ll close this week with a list of the best places to get ice cream in each state.

But I also wanted to talk about the second round of Democratic presidential debates, which I found so disappointing that it was hard to keep watching. There are a lot of details to criticize — the crowded stage, the format, the questions, and so on — but it took me a while to get to the bottom of what was really bothering me: A debate about policy proposals makes it seem like this is a normal election, when the country is in a very abnormal situation.

One of the mysteries of the Democratic field is Marianne Williamson, who not only has no qualifications for the job, but occasionally wigs off into invocations of the power of Love. Pundits have spilled a lot of ink trying to explain her attraction, but I wonder if it’s as simple as this: She’s the one candidate who makes it clear that this election is about something deeper than a policy disagreement. Trump has traumatized America, and the next president is going to have address that trauma somehow. A new health plan and a new immigration policy — while welcome — will not be nearly enough.

I don’t have the answer here (and I’m not recommending people vote for Williamson), but I want to raise the question in “Campaigning in a Traumatized Nation”. I’m not sure exactly when I’ll have that out, but probably not before 10 EDT. I’ll try to post the weekly summary by noon.