The Weekly Sift

Having taken a week off from the Sift, you’d think I’d have a bunch of great stuff ready to go. Well, not exactly: Since I last posted, I’ve spoken in two churches 1200 miles apart — here’s what I said — and spent the week in between driving across the country and nursing a cold that is still not completely gone. So stuff will come out slowly this morning.

The big things I want to cover are sexual harassment and abuse (because that’s what everybody has been talking about) and the looming end of net neutrality (because more people should be talking about it). In each case, I want us to have a larger focus: Sexual misbehavior in politics isn’t just Roy Moore and Al Franken; it’s probably hundreds of people we don’t know about yet. We need to think this through in general, not just respond based on the way we feel about those currently in the spotlight.

And net neutrality isn’t just some nerdish issue about the internet. It’s part of the major economic trend of the last forty years, which has played a big role in increasing economic inequality: Under the guise of “freedom”, the United States has chopped down regulations that limit the power of middlemen to insert themselves between producers and consumers. The result is an economy whose fruits go not to the productive, but to those who own choke-points where tolls can be charged.

Until now, government regulations have forced your internet service provider to be a relatively passive participant in all your online adventures. But if net neutrality goes away, your ISP will be “free” to fence you in, and to charge tolls to any online service that wants access to you. That set-up will be immensely profitable, but not at all productive.

Anyway, probably one of those topics will be in a separate post and the other will get incorporated into the weekly summary; I still haven’t decided which is which. When any of it will actually appear is anybody’s guess.

One side note: My previous experience of blogging while slightly feverish is that the number of typos goes way up. If you point them out in the comments I’ll fix them.

Just another week in Trump’s America: the New York City bikepath killing got shoved off the front pages by the Texas church shooting; the Republican tax reform bill came out, or at least a Republican tax-reform bill came out (this one doesn’t look like the bill the eventually intend to pass); we all tried to absorb the implications of the Manafort/Gates indictment and what Papadopoulos’ guilty plea told us about the Trump-Russia courtship and its cover-up; Donna Brazile yanked the band-aid off the wound of the 2016 Democratic primary campaign; and John Kelly gave us his theory of the Civil War.

And then this morning, the International Consortium of International Journalists unveiled the Paradise Papers, a huge leak of documents about how the rich and powerful hide their wealth, their deals, and their relationships by running them through tiny island nations. Just for starters, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has some explaining to do.

Whatever will I find to talk about?

What I plan to do is a featured post on the Donna Brazile story, which will appear around 10 EST, I think, and then cover the rest of it in an unusually long weekly summary, which I’ll target for noon.

Lately, Republican refugees like Bob Corker, John McCain, and even former President George W. Bush have begun arriving — a year late and few billion dollars short — in the camp of Trump critics. For the most part their warnings are oblique and their recommendations don’t include any actions that would make a material difference, but at least they’re positioned to unleash a strong I-told-you-so if we eventually wind up in World War III or the Fourth Reich. Good for them.

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are still making nice with Trump, even though they surely know what he is by now. Eventually they too will probably defect, after it’s too late to make any difference. I predict that their authorized biographies will be full of angst and trepidation and dire predictions made privately to nobody in particular. Like Flat Nose Curry after Butch Cassidy wins the knife fight, they’ll come up to whoever does finally manage to end the Trump regime and say, “I was really rooting for you.”

Thanks Paul. Thanks Mitch. That is what sustains us in our time of trouble.

This week I express the Republican dilemma — how to avoid blame for the looming disaster without taking a stand that will actually mean anything — in a musical parody. I start with a song about a denial no one believes: Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. (Don’t you think the kid really is his son?) Picture it sung by some unspecified congressional Republican, backed by a chorus of corporate donors. “All I wanted was lower tax, regulation lax …”

That should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The second featured post is less fun and more scholarly: “Niger, the Condolence Controversy, and Why the Founders Feared a Professional Military”. Historically, militarism and democracy haven’t played well together. Professional soldiers can be sent places where a voting majority would not tolerate risking their sons and daughters. Leaders of a professional army can come to think of themselves as an elite class, and develop the arrogance of a John Kelly. This week we’ve seen lots of signs that would not have surprised the people who wrote our Constitution and Bill of Rights. I’ll predict that for 10 or 11.

That doesn’t leave much space for the weekly summary, which still has a number of things to cover: Congress’ budget outline, what Bush and McCain actually said, the bipartisan (but probably doomed) effort to keep the health insurance market from collapsing, some reflections on the Values Voters summit, and a few other things. I’m hoping to have that done by noon.

This week I attended the wedding of my college roommate’s son, and frequently shook my head in amazement that my memories of him go back further than his memories of himself. It was a reminder that most Americans are getting on with their lives, independent of the circus — or maybe adult day-care center — that our government has become.

As always these days, there is more to write about than I (or you) have time to cover. The featured post is another installment in my Misunderstandings series. This time I’ll discuss popular misunderstandings of gun-death statistics and tax simplification. That post should appear by 9 EDT.

The weekly summary will talk about guns, undoing the Iran nuclear deal (and Trump’s dysfunctional negotiating style in general), Trump’s visit to Puerto Rico (which has me reminiscing about how U.S. presidents used to act), new rules giving special rights to Christians, recent Trump/Russia developments, and a few other things, before closing with a video that challenges us to walk like Charlemagne. That should appear 11ish.

This week’s leading NFL highlights weren’t about game-winning passes or violent sacks, but about what the players did during the national anthem, and how Trump incited or responded to them. Bit by bit, the national argument for and against Trump is taking over the entire culture. There are fewer and fewer places where you can escape from it.

Even if you did manage to ignore the various fronts in the war between Trump and black athletes, there was a lot to pay attention to this week. The last-last-ditch, we-really-mean-it-this-time attempt to repeal ObamaCare looked briefly like it might pull together 50 senators, but now appears to be as doomed as the previous attempts. Trump made a disturbing speech to the UN, and increased both the rhetorical and economic pressure on North Korea, which showed no signs of cracking. A few more examples of Trump-administration corruption popped up, and the Russia investigation had its usual drip-drip-drip of revelations.

But I decided to take a step back to get a wider view. After the election I suggested that we need to start discussing issues we used to think were settled, and explaining things that we thought everybody already understood by now. My first shot at that was “Should I Have White Pride?“. This week’s featured post comes back to this theme. I use Trump’s UN speech and Steve Bannon’s 60 Minutes interview as a jumping-off point for discussing nationalism: why so many people are attracted to it again, and why I’m not one of them. That should be out maybe 10ish.

The weekly summary covers the things I listed above, plus a few others, before closing with an amusing commercial for a truly natural health remedy. I’m aiming to get that out by noon.