The Weekly Sift

What to cover: sex or war?

This week I went with war, or at least the increased prospects for it now that John Bolton is replacing H.R. McMaster as National Security Advisor. The featured post “Return of the Chicken Hawks” discusses the dangers of war-promoting officials who don’t really know what war is. Those are the kinds of people who got us into Iraq. Like Bolton. He apparently has learned nothing from that disaster, is back in power, and seems hot to strike Iran, or maybe North Korea if it steps out of line. That post should come out around 9 EDT or so.

But there’s still the sex to talk about. I’m burying it as deeply as I can in the weekly summary, but if you missed the Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal interviews, I’ve got links.

Ranking above them in the summary are: yesterday’s March for Our Lives, Cambridge Analytica, more White House reshuffling, the $1.3 trillion spending bill that passed, and Trump’s continued submissiveness towards Putin. Oh, and the prospect of new tariffs drove the stock market down by 1100 points in two days. (That seems sort of important too.) If you make it through all that, you deserve the opportunity to think about sex for a while.

You’d think I’d get tired of pointing out how unusual this all is, but here I go again: Can you imagine a week in the Obama administration when Congress would spend $1.3 trillion and trade-war talk would take a thousand points off the Dow, and we’d all be like “Oh yeah, that happened too.”?

The weekly summary should be out noonish.

This week the pace of the Trump Era defeated me. Keeping up with the day-to-day was about all I could manage, if that. Taking a step back to think more deeply about some particular development was all but impossible. (As Tony Kornheiser says at the end of every episode of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, “We’ll try to do better next time.”)

So there’s no featured article this week. Instead, the weekly summary has swallowed up the whole week’s word count with short-to-medium length notes on North Korea, tariffs, Florida’s small step toward gun control, sanctuary cities, Stormy Daniels (and Evangelical leaders’ continued betrayal of the truth-to-power tradition of the Biblical prophets), tomorrow’s special election in Pennsylvania (and differing theories on the voters Democrats should be aiming to convert), and a few other things. How did all that happen in a week that ran an hour short?

I’ll be trying to get the summary out by 10 EST.

Another week, another quarter’s worth of news. This week we had the Parkland high school shooting, yet another story of one of the President’s allies paying off a woman he had an extra-marital affair with, and some major developments in the Mueller investigation: an indictment of some of the Russians who interfered in the the 2016 election (with a lot of the details of how they did it), and Paul Manafort’s right-hand man (Rick Gates) made a plea deal. In addition, the White House’s story about how Rob Porter kept his job fell apart, and Israeli police announced that they had sufficient evidence to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for corruption, though no actual indictment has been issued yet.

So of course this week’s featured post is about none of that. For several weeks now I’ve been looking at the political change going on in Alaska, which is no longer the dead-red state you probably think it is. A few years ago, Democrats were in danger of falling below the major-party threshold in the House, which could have left them without seats on major committees. But now, both the governorship and the House are controlled by a Democrat/Independent/moderate-Republican coalition, and voters have passed a number of liberal referenda. So how did any of that happen? And what can the rest of the country learn from it? I’ll cover that in “Alaska As a Red-to-Blue(ish) Model”. That should post around 9 EST.

The weekly summary will talk about the stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph, plus a few other interesting things I’ve run across this week. I still have a lot of work to do on that, so it might not show up until noon or so.

Sometimes you have to reach for the bright shiny object, even though you know you’re being manipulated into doing it. Good job, manipulators; you win this round.

So this week I’m writing about the Nunes memo, the attempt by Trump’s supporters in Congress to muddy the waters of the Mueller investigation and cast doubt on the integrity of the FBI. There is very little new information in the memo, it doesn’t prove its own claims, and the larger claims being made about it by Trump and his court pundits are completely unsupported. Worse, it damages the long-term relationship between Congress and the intelligence services, which has worked pretty well since it was set up in the post-Watergate era.

In a better world, everyone would ignore this memo. It’s an obvious political stunt that does nothing to help us get to the bottom of the Trump/Russia mystery. Nothing in it deserves your attention.

Still you need to know about it, the way you need to know that the Brooklyn Bridge is actually not for sale and Nigerian princes actually don’t need your help. Claims are going to be made, quite possibly in your presence by people you know, and it would be good if you understood what they’re about.

With that in mind, the featured post this week is “The Nunes Memo: It’s ridiculous and it damages the country, but it might work.” That should be out around 10 EST. It will be followed around noon by the weekly summary, which discusses the State of the Union address (yes, that was this week), immigration, voter suppression, the Super Bowl and its commercials, and a few other things, before closing with a video of a backyard obstacle course.

So the government shutdown is official now: It’s Monday morning and a bunch of people aren’t going to work.

As I always say, a weekly blog can’t do breaking news very well. If you want the absolute latest on what deal is being negotiated or how likely it is to pass, check CNN or the Washington Post.

Immigration is at the heart of the shutdown battle, especially whether Trump will start deporting the Dreamers in March. He has said he doesn’t want to do that, but he also hasn’t gotten behind any agreement to let them stay. As Democrats insist on making them part of a budget deal, Trump’s rhetoric has shifted to lumping them in with all “illegal immigrants”, which he has been blaming for crime and terrorism since he started running for president.

The featured post is an answer to one recent piece of that: a recent Homeland Security/Justice Department report that supposedly backs up Trump’s claim that “the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country”. But the claim is a lie, and so the report can only back it up by doing some truly egregious manipulation of statistics, as I’ll explain in “Lies, Damned Lies, and Trump Administration Terrorism Statistics”. That’s pretty much done and should be out soon.

There may or may not be a second featured post, which is my way of saying that I had an idea, but may not get it together in time. The idea was to mark Trump’s first year by looking back at the post “The Trump Administration: What I’m Watching For“, which I wrote two weeks after the election, and see whether the things I was worried about came to pass. (In general, yes.) A shorter version of that may get folded into the weekly summary, or I might push it off until next week.

The weekly summary will have the nuts-and-bolts of the failure to avoid a shutdown — no, I have no clue how long it will last — together with a bunch of other stuff that isn’t getting much attention. (Can you believe how fast everybody stopped talking about Trump’s lawyer paying off a porn star not to talk about their affair? If that story had been about Obama, it would have been THE big scandal of his administration. We’d still be talking about it years later.)

In particular, I want to call your attention to an interview with Jay Rosen, one of the best observers of the news media; he points to the difference between Troubles (what people worry about in their lives) and Issues (what the political debate is about) and observes that “when Issues don’t speak to Troubles, and Troubles don’t connect to Issues, you have a crisis in democracy”. If you want to sum up the background situation that made Trump’s election possible and allows his administration to be such a threat to America-as-we-have-known-it, you really can’t do much better.

The uncertainty about the second featured post means that I don’t know when anything will appear, other than the terrorism-statistics post, which will be out soon.