The Weekly Sift

I wish I had something important and meaningful and comforting to say about the Orlando shooting. It would be a fine thing to write some words that inspire hope and courage, and if I had those words I would gladly give them to you.

However, the kind of thing I think I do well is slow rumination, not instant response to events whose details are still coming out. I am still digesting the horror in Orlando. I don’t want to use it as an excuse to reprise a canned rant about guns or terrorism or bigotry, so today I will not say much at all about it. That’s not because I want to trivialize or ignore it.

So today’s articles will be the ones I have been working on all week. The first to come out — probably within an hour — will be “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean? Part II.” This week you probably heard more than you wanted about Donald Trump’s diatribes against the “Mexican” judge, and the responses of leading Republican like Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney. But I was struck by a detail that didn’t get that much attention: a poll saying that 2/3rds of Republicans disagree with Ryan and Romney; they say Trump’s comments were not racist.

That took me back to the theme of my “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean?” article from 2014. It’s not unreasonable to want to restrict usage of the word racism to extreme cases like the Nazis or the KKK. But if you do that, how do you describe things like Trump’s comments about Judge Curiel? To me, it seems like the Right has taken a lesson from George Orwell: If you restrict words to narrow meanings and don’t provide new terminology to fill the gaps, you can restrict discussion, and ultimately restrict thought. Those poll results, I believe, stem from that restricted thinking.

The second featured article was inspired by a critical comment on last week’s Sift: that I am ignoring or trivializing the Clinton email issue, particularly the new information that has come out in the last few weeks. So I read the State Department Inspector General’s report and The Wall Street Journal‘s latest leak of information about the alleged top secret information on Clinton’s server. My summary will be in “About Those Emails”, which will be out later this morning.

The weekly summary will briefly link to accounts of the Orlando shooting, before going on to political news in each party, the Stanford rape case, Samantha Bee’s summary of the presidential primaries, and a few other things, before closing with a speaker who has reduced TED talks to their generic essence. That should come out around noon.

I spent a chunk of the weekend meditating on why I’m finding the political news shows — even the ones I usually like — so excruciatingly painful these days. That took me back to the reasons I started blogging to begin with: the media’s distorted definition of news, which so often makes it lose perspective — and encourages us to lose our perspective as well.

By definition, news has to be new: It’s all about what just happened that is different from what was happening yesterday, or five minutes ago. Political campaigns seldom change at that pace, so the news about them is almost always ephemeral: Somebody insulted somebody, who insulted them back. A poll came out. That poll indicates that some candidate’s strategy will have to change in ways that we can now speculate about. (Tomorrow, a new poll will show that yesterday’s poll was a statistical anomaly. Never mind, then.)

If you get in the habit of focusing on such stuff, all the important questions vanish: What serious challenges is the country facing, or likely to face in the near future? In what ways does our government’s approach to those challenges need to change or stay the same? How does that match up with what the various candidates want to do, or seem capable of doing?

This week, you could easily have watched entire hour-long political shows without learning anything about those questions. You might come away from such a show all wrought up about whether or not it’s appropriate for Bernie Sanders to debate Donald Trump, when it should have been obvious from the beginning that the Sanders/Trump debate was never going to happen. And if it did, so what?

It’s been that way for some while. The political news is the soap opera of candidates, not the education that citizens need to make their decisions, or even (if you know who you support already) to learn how to educate other citizens. It’s not about the country, it’s about the candidates.

So I decided to refocus. The weekly summary will, as usual, contain a lot of candidates news, because that’s what everybody is talking about. But the featured post is “The Election Is About the Country, Not the Candidates”. In it, I try to get back to the challenges the country faces, and then look at the candidates through that lens.

That post still needs work, so you should expect it around 10 EDT. The summary should be out around noon.

Like much of the country, I’ve had a cold this week. So I didn’t get as much done in advance as usual. That will mainly show it in the weekly summary, which will probably go out later than usual.

This week the news cycle was dominated by two different kind of Trump stories: ones where he met with Republican leaders and tried to unite the Party, and ones where the news media started digging into his past. I’ll link to those in the summary, but in the featured post I thought I’d go in a slightly different direction, looking at core pieces of his identity and appeal that aren’t based in reality: “Four False Things You Might Believe About Donald Trump”. For example, he’s not one of America’s top businessmen.

Some polls came out, indicating that the fall election might be closer than we’d been expecting. But those polls had some odd internals, which I’ll explain. The debate over transgender rights and bathrooms went national, after the Obama administration sent out a letter warning school districts that it believes trans rights are part of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Many of the people who are freaking out about this probably don’t realize that the states they live in already recognize these rights, and the horrors they are predicting aren’t happening. And we’ll close with a video of a life-sized Foosball game.

The Trump article should be out by 8, with the weekly summary appearing by noon.

Hillary Clinton’s big victory in New York on Tuesday didn’t just stop Bernie Sanders’ momentum, it closed off the last plausible scenario for his nomination — the one where a big finish to the primary campaign diminished Clinton’s pledged-delegate lead to such insignificance that it motivated super delegates to jump on the Bernie bandwagon.

But the Sanders campaign has always been about more than just personal ambition: It started at a time when his nomination seemed hopeless, and his supporters seem to be in no mood to go home just because it seems hopeless again. So what’s the next step? What continuing goal makes this more than just a campaign that came up short, like Martin O’Malley’s or Marco Rubio’s?

So: Bernie or bust? Jill Stein? Leading his followers back to Hillary for a stop-Trump campaign in the fall? Setting up the progressive movement to take over the Democratic Party in some future election cycle? Or something else? I’ll discuss the possibilities in “Beyond Bernie 2016”, which should post sometime between 9 and 10 EDT.

The other big thing that happened this week was that Gov. McAuliffe restored voting rights to Virginia’s 200,000 ex-cons. Giving convicted felons more political power may sound iffy on the surface, but in an era of mass incarceration and a racially biased judicial system, a lifetime ban on felon voting rights is actually a major factor in voter suppression, which I’ll review in a second featured post “Why You Should Care About Felon Voting Rights”. It should appear in the 10-11 range.

The weekly summary will discuss Trump’s attempt to pivot towards the general election, a call to end the blasphemy of Saturday Night Live (with links to said blasphemy, of course), Prince, and a few other topics, before closing with a massive flow chart guiding you through NPR’s list of the 100 top fantasy and science fiction novels (in case you were running out of things to read).

This week I mostly look away from the presidential race and turn to the Senate and the courts. The huge Republican Senate class of 2010 is up for re-election, so there are lots of opportunities for Democrats to flip the four (if they keep the White House) or five (if they don’t) seats they need to gain control.

For me personally, the one to focus on is obvious, since my local race in New Hampshire is considered a toss-up, the Democratic candidate (Maggie Hassan) has been a good governor, and the Republican incumbent (Kelly Ayotte) is supporting Mitch McConnell’s refusal to grant Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland the fair hearing every other nominee has gotten.

But what if you’re not in one of the five toss-up states where Senate control is likely to be decided? Or you are, but your local candidate doesn’t give you the kind of feeling you want from a politician that you go all-out for?

Well, the Koch brothers aren’t sitting out the Senate races just because their guy in Kansas looks safe, and you shouldn’t either. You may not have millions to sprinkle all over the country, but your money travels as well as theirs does, and in this era of cheap long-distance, you can phone bank for anybody.

One of this week’s featured articles “What Can You Do About the Senate?” takes you through the races that will decide whether Mitch McConnell keeps his veto power over the next Supreme Court justice, and makes suggestions for who you might help, depending on what you want to accomplish.

That link between the legislative and judicial branches is the theme of this week’s other featured post, “The Broken Senate is Breaking the Courts”. Merrick Garland is not a unique example. The Republican Senate is refusing to process the Democratic president’s nominees at all judicial levels, creating a long-term threat to the rule of law. That problem sounds abstract, but it could easily show up in your life.

The broken Senate article is pretty much done and should be out momentarily. The what-to-do article still needs some work, so let’s picture it coming out around 10 EDT. The weekly summary — where I will end up saying a few things about the presidential race, as well as Mississippi’s new entry in the very competitive most-bigoted-state contest — should follow by noon.