The Weekly Sift

With the March for Our Lives behind us and the post-Parkland gun-control moment showing no signs of ending, attacks on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivors ratcheted up again. But the kids seem to be up to the challenge, as Laura Ingraham is finding out.

In the featured post this week, I take a step back and connect this set of attacks to previous revictimizations, like Ann Coulter going after the 9-11 widows, the smearing of Trayvon Martin, and the conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook. “Why does the Right hate victims?” should be out by 10 EDT or so.

In the weekly summary, I can’t take my eyes away from the continuing chaos in the White House. I know that’s what they want us paying attention to, rather than the gutting of environmental laws, ICE’s cruel deportations, or a hundred other things of real consequence, but it’s hard not to watch the dumpster fire. I do manage to leave a little space for the attempt to manipulate the census, anti-Semitism in Europe, the police shootings in Sacramento and elsewhere, musings on Easter/April Fools’ Day, and a few other things, before closing with a Food Network article that answers an important question: I’m stuck in the back of Beyond and I’m hungry; what is the quintessential chip-and-dip combo of this region and where can I find it?  I’ll try to get the summary out by noon.

The Sift is going to run a little late this week. There are two featured posts. The first one is fairly short and could almost be a segment of the weekly summary, but I thought I’d put it out on its own so commenters could have a more focused discussion. It will be called “The Conor Lamb Victory: lessons for Democrats”. That should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The second will be “Who Are Those Guys?” which is a guide to the new faces in the Trump administration. That should be out … maybe 11. The weekly summary has all the obstruction-of-justice stuff to cover: The House Intelligence Committee getting ready to put out a sham report on a sham investigation, Trump sending a message to investigators by firing the FBI’s Andy McCabe 26 hours before he was retiring with pension, the increasingly direct attacks against Mueller and his investigation, and so on. And then there’s the student anti-gun protests, Russia’s increasingly provocative behavior, and a few other things, before closing with a video dramatizing the physiological effects of alcohol. That will be really late, maybe after 1 p.m.

More than two weeks after the Parkland shooting, gun control is still a major topic of conversation. That says to me that something is different this time. It may not be different enough to get anything of substance done in the near future, but the tide seems to be turning.

Just to play my part, I thought I’d focus on guns this week. The featured post is another in my Misunderstandings series: “Three Misunderstandings about Guns and the Constitution”. That should be out sometime around 9 EST.

The weekly summary will cover the current chaos and infighting at the White House, the debate about arming teachers, and Trump’s announcement of a trade war. But I also have to tell you about the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which I managed to visit in D.C. as part of my drive back from Florida. (It’s amazing, even for the Smithsonian.) And then I’ll close with a video of an octopus.

There’s an outrage-of-the-week, and there’s stuff happening of long-term significance. Which to focus on?

The outrage of this week is genuinely outrageous: A guy held one of the most sensitive jobs in the White House with only an interim security clearance, because the FBI wouldn’t clear him after learning that he was violent with his two previous wives and a subsequent girl friend. It looks like Don McGahn and John Kelly knew for months, did nothing, and watched Hope Hicks start going out with him. After the news broke, they defended him until the press got hold of a photo of his first wife with a black eye. Jennifer Rubin connects this with a long series of abuses and says, “The core mission of the GOP is now to defend abusers.”

The longer-term issue is the spending deal that ended another government shutdown. (It happened for a few hours in the middle of the night, so you might have missed it.) The deal is that Republicans get the defense-spending increases they want, Democrats get the domestic-spending increases they want, and the Dreamers are still left hanging. So we’ve cut taxes, raised spending, and now for the first time in history we face trillion-dollar deficits at a time when the economy is supposed to be humming nicely.

The deficit is one of those issues that the country (especially the Republican half) is bipolar about. Sometimes it’s a threat to the survival of our nation, and then other times it’s not worth serious concern. As a Democrat, it’s tempting to just flip the Republican script: be apocalyptic when they’re sanguine and sanguine when they’re apocalyptic. I’m trying to resist that temptation, so I won’t repeat the ridiculous stuff about the country going bankrupt that we heard so often when Obama was president. Still, though, there must be some reason not to run up a big national debt; otherwise the government could just make us all millionaires. What is it?

I’ll address that question — and provide ample evidence of Republican hypocrisy — in the featured post “Does the Exploding Federal Deficit Matter?” That should be out around 9 EST.

The weekly summary will take on the wife-beating outrage, and wonder what on Earth the Democrats are thinking about immigration and the Dreamers. I’ll also tell a few deportation stories that you should bookmark and share whenever some Trumpist starts talking about protecting the country from the “bad hombres”. I’ll also point to a fascinating study of how porn influences teen attitudes towards sex, mention a Scott Pruitt interview that would have been the outrage-of-the-week in saner times, say some calming words about the stock market plunge, and link to a few other things, before closing with an upbeat music video from New Zealand about people who build their own coffins. That should be up around 11.

The big story this week was the end of the government shutdown and the negotiations on DACA and other issues to keep another shutdown from happening in early February. I’ll cover that in an article called “The Shutdown, DACA, and Immigration: Where We Are”. Unlike a lot of folks, I’m OK with how the Democrats have been handling this.

But before that comes out, I’m going to post a longer article on something less urgent, but possibly more important in the long run. The real story of the Stormy Daniels incident turns out not to be Trump. (Sure, he allegedly had an affair with a porn star and paid her off to keep it quiet before the election. That would be a huge scandal for any other president, but does it really change your opinion of Trump?) It’s all the self-styled defenders of family values who came forward to make excuses for him, sometimes not just debasing themselves, but prostituting the words of Jesus to defend their own King Herod. For many Christian writers and bloggers, that has brought to a head a complaint that has been brewing for some while. I’ll discuss that in “Trump’s Evangelical Toadies are Destroying the Christian Brand”.

That post is just about done, so it should be out between 8 and 9 EST. I’ll peg the shutdown article for 10 or 11, and the weekly summary — Larry Nassar, a predictable charter school disaster in Ohio, the Pentagon’s role in climate change policy, Taco Bell’s poke at conspiracy theorists, a disturbingly timely War Department video from 1947, and some other stuff, before closing with an amazing video about scientists making water do tricks — for noon or so.