So now we have the unprecedented situation of a Supreme Court nominee that the Senate is ignoring. That’s one more tick in the “Countdown to Augustus” I’ve been talking about since 2013: the slow degradation of the norms and traditions that make the Republic work, leading up to the moment when our system of government becomes so dysfunctional that large numbers of people will be happy to see a strongman sweep it all away.
This year the significance of the countdown is highlighted, because one of our presidential candidates seems to be auditioning for the role of Caesar, and doing quite well with it so far.
I’ll pull all those threads together in this week’s featured post “Tick, Tick, Tick … the Augustus Countdown Continues”. That should be out around 9 EST.
In the weekly summary, I’ll discuss the Garland nomination and the state of the presidential race in both parties, touch base with a series of ongoing stories I’ve sifted before, and link to a video of Tim Wise very concisely describing how the rich have used race to divide the working classes since the 1600s, before closing with a viral video of Obama hosting Hamilton.
I stopped myself from writing a Trump-centered featured article for the third straight week. I know the buzz was all about the cancelled Chicago rally and the potential for violence whenever he speaks, but I’m trying to resist being trolled. I think it’s completely within Trump’s power to generate a new reason to talk about him every week, and I refuse to do that from now to November.
So this week’s featured article is a step back from the news cycle, or maybe a tangent off of it. I start with a debate question Don Lemon asked Bernie and Hillary, and rather than argue that one of them answered better than the other, I try to answer it myself: What are my racial blind spots?
The weekly summary starts with a meditation on the tendency for my attention to get captured by bright shiny objects like Trump or speculating about polls, and the need to occasionally take a step back to make sure this is really ME thinking, rather than the news cycle thinking through me. Having done that, I still have to discuss violence at Trump rallies and what’s going on in the primaries, but I hope I’m doing it with more perspective.
I also have another guns-make-safer link, a comment on President Obama’s rising job approval, and a conversation I had with a low-information voter, before closing with an amusing take on what our election process must look like from, say, Finland.
This week I’m going out on a limb and announcing “Peak Drumpf”, the moment when the threat of President Donald Trump looks scariest, and then begins to fade. The reason I expect things to start turning against the Donald is not that Mitt Romney finally marched into battle against him, and certainly not that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio has finally started to catch fire. I think it’s still possible that the GOP will stumble its way into nominating Trump.
But what makes me optimistic about the Donald’s ultimate fall is that the right message to use against him has finally emerged and started to spread: He’s a con-man.
Here’s why that’s important: The victims of Trump’s past cons (like Trump U or the condo projects that took people’s deposits and never built any condos) aren’t Mexicans or Muslims or anybody else his followers resent or fear; the victims are people just like them, and the kinds of things he said to con them sound just like what he’s telling his supporters now.
“Peak Drumpf” still needs a little bit of work, so let’s say it gets posted around 9 EST.
We’re in that three-week period where the nominations are going to be wrapped up, so the weekly summary is also going to be full of presidential politics: the least presidential debate in America history, where the nomination races stand, a better notion of why black voters aren’t backing Bernie, and Trump’s healthcare plan.
Non-race-for-the-White-House stuff includes a fun book about (believe it or not) behavioral economics, more good news about unemployment, and the simple change that would have made Straight Outta Compton an Oscar-winner.
This week, big victories by Trump in Nevada and Clinton in South Carolina set the stage for tomorrow’s Super Tuesday primaries, and have pundits speculating about whether the nomination races are over or not.
But while those sound like similar situations, the possibility that it may be too late to stop Trump is causing far more anguish among Republicans than anything Democrats might be feeling (or would be feeling if Sanders were threatening to sew up the nomination).
All sorts of metaphors are floating around about what Trump represents to the Republican Party. (“hostile takeover” seems to be one of the most popular.) In this week’s featured post I suggest one I find more accurate: “Trump is an opportunistic infection”, the kind that only people with compromised immune systems are vulnerable to. Mainstream Republican candidates can’t get any traction against Trump because over the last few decades the Party has systematically de-legitimized all the fact-checking and expert opinion and separation-of-reality-from-fantasy necessary to take him down. So the GOP’s problem is not just one guy: Unless and until they figure out a way to restore the immune system of their base, they’ll be vulnerable to Trump-like infections in all future elections as well. That post is pretty much done, so it should appear shortly.
In the weekly summary, I’ll examine whether the shift in pundit opinion is justified: Is it all over but the shouting? Is it likely to be over tomorrow? (Probably not, I think, though Trump and Clinton are on the verge of building significant leads.) I’ll also discuss an interesting poll demonstrating the variability of people’s opinions about single-payer health care, and what that means for the viability of Sanders’ signature proposal. Also, Nate Silver’s crew discusses the polls showing disturbing levels of racism among Trump supporters, Obama floats a strange Supreme Court trial balloon, and we’ll close with a Game of Thrones mash-up. Expect that around 11 EST or so.
This week it became clear that President Obama will nominate a Supreme Court justice to replace the late Anton Scalia, but we don’t yet know who. Meanwhile on the Republican side, a number of reasons/excuses for not considering that nomination were raised. I’ll discuss them, along with the history of election-year Court nominations, in the first featured post “Replacing Scalia (or not)”. It should be out by 8 EST.
Another topic of discussion this week was Apple’s decision to fight a court order instructing it to help the FBI crack the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists. To some, Apple is siding with terrorists over public safety, leading Donald Trump to call for a boycott of Apple products. To others, Apple is championing the individual right to privacy against a snooping government. My intuition puts me on Apple’s side of this question, but the deeper I looked, the more I realized that neither position is as clear-cut as a first glance makes it appear. I’ll sum up what I found in “The Apple/FBI question is harder than it looks”. That should be out by 9.
In the weekly summary, there are election results to consider: the Democratic Nevada caucuses and the Republican South Carolina primary. Digging into the entrance/exit polls reveals stuff with implications beyond the simple vote totals. The falling price of oil has led to speculation about the long-term stability of oil-dependent dictatorships like Russia and Saudi Arabia. Right-wing groups are experimenting to see which burn-Bernie attacks work, just in case. And we’ll close with a pitch for making Canada the next president of the United States.
So Judge Scalia is dead. I’m titling this week’s summary “Bells” in honor of my two conflicting impulses: John Donne’s “it tolls for thee” and the Munchkins’ “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.”
The featured article this week is “Back to Ferguson”, discussing the inability of Ferguson and the Justice Department to reach an agreement about police reforms, which caused Justice to take the case to court this week. That may sound like a local issue, but the larger implications of herding poor people into financially shaky municipalities — and then cutting corners to try to make it work — apply to Flint and lots of other American communities.
My discussion of Scalia’s death and its political implications is long enough that I probably ought to break it out into a separate article, but it has the chatty this-and-that style more typical of the summaries, so I’m leaving it there. Also in the summary: the Malheur occupation is finally over, with a complete government victory; Darwin’s birthday has me doing my annual look at the Creation/Evolution argument; Billy Graham’s son is touring the country to motivate evangelical political engagement — apparently he thinks the “great sin” of same-sex marriage threatens America’s place in God’s favor, while slavery and genocide didn’t; and I’ll close with an apparently serious discussion of the role of the Illuminati in past Super Bowl halftime shows. How did I miss the Luciferian implications of Katy Perry?
OK, the primary’s tomorrow, so I really have to decide who I’m voting for. In spite of all the trepidation I’ve been expressing the last two weeks, it’s Bernie, for reasons I’ll explain in the weekly summary.
This week’s featured post is another one of those long history-and-theory rambles that I’m sure any blogging coach would tell me to stop writing — if not for the fact that Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party and The Distress of the Privileged are my two most popular articles. It’s called “Say — you want a revolution?”, and it’s about what’s really involved in the kind of “political revolution” Bernie keeps calling for. I think it’s a bigger job than a lot of Sanders supporters imagine. The problem isn’t just getting people out to vote once — Obama did that — but creating a reliable new voting majority that will keep coming back election after election. And that means understanding a lot more about why people do or don’t vote.
Even the parts of the summary that aren’t about my own decision are largely going to be about the campaign. Living in New Hampshire right now, it’s hard to think about much else. But I’ll also mention my cup of coffee with Rep. John Sarbanes of Maryland, who is leading the fight in Congress against money in politics. (A lot more about that in coming weeks. If Sarbanes isn’t a future presidential candidate, I’ve never seen one.) I’ll try to keep a sense of humor, even about tomorrow’s primary, and I’ll look for a much less serious closing.
At long last, somebody is finally going to vote. The Iowa Caucuses are tonight, and the New Hampshire Primary is a week from tomorrow.
And I still don’t know who I’m voting for. In this week’s featured post, I’ll take you through my thinking — and make a plea for mutual understanding. It’s amazing how much hostility both Sanders and Clinton supporters are tossing at people who are slow to join them.
That should be out soon.
The weekly summary will cover other odds and ends from the presidential race (including the Republican side, which the featured post doesn’t deal with at all), note that switching back to the original water source hasn’t ended the Flint crisis, express gratitude that the authorities finally made a move against the Oregon occupation, and link to some other interesting stuff.
We’re coming down to the wire on the early primaries: Next Monday the Iowa caucuses happen, and eight days later I have to vote here in New Hampshire. As the Democratic race tightens up, I find myself wondering: So far all the Republicans have been running against Hillary, talking about Benghazi and emails and Bill’s escapades. If they started running against Bernie, what would that sound like?
Well, it turns out The New York Post jumped the gun on the anti-Bernie campaign, warning America that he’s a “diehard Communist”, and listing all sorts of “evidence” that has just about as much factual basis as … well, as the Benghazi stand-down order and all the other crap they’ve been throwing at Hillary.
But just because it’s crap doesn’t mean that it won’t work, or at least work well enough to distract the electorate from looking at the issues Bernie is trying to run on. Going back to Dukakis and the Pledge of Allegiance issue in 1988, all Democratic nominees spend a big chunk of their campaign wading through crap: swift-boating against Kerry, birtherism and “paling around with terrorists” against Obama, and so forth. Some nominees have had the political skill to cut through the noise and get the public to pay attention to their issues, and some haven’t. That has a lot to do with which ones won.
So what about Bernie and his “history” of diehard Communism? If he’s nominated, how will the Republicans use that against him and will he have the skills to deal with it? I’ll meditate on that in this week’s featured post “Smearing Bernie, a preview”. That should be out soon.
The weekly summary also has a lot of election coverage in it: Trump/Cruz is getting nasty. Hillary has been overstating the problems with Bernie’s healthcare plan, but Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman point out that there are some legitimate issues there. The Vanilla ISIS folks are still scaring the birds away in Oregon. Winter Storm Jonas clobbered the NY-Washington corridor, but left New England alone. Then there’s Flint, and verification that 2015 was the hottest year ever. And of course, a couple guns-make-us-safer stories. That should be out by 10:30.
I’m back after a week on the west coast.
I expected to do a State of the Union post. But oddly, what struck me was a stretch of Nikki Haley’s SOTU response — and not the one that got all the attention. The part of her speech that everyone covered was the anti-Trump part, where she said the GOP shouldn’t “follow the angriest voices”. More interesting to me, though, was that she went on to give a positive message about what the country could expect from a Republican president. I’m not hearing that kind of thing anywhere else, so I thought I’d call it to your attention.
Naturally, though, my reaction to that litany of future accomplishments wasn’t a simple “Gee, that’ll be great.” Instead, I went through it line-by-line and asked whether the policies Republicans are proposing could actually lead to these results. The result is “The Positive Republican Message, Annotated”. It should be out shortly.
I’ve also been paying attention to the militia that has taken over that wildlife refuge in Oregon. At first I thought I’d write an in-depth article about it, but then I decided I’d never get all the background reading done in time. So instead I started summarizing all the good articles other people have been writing. Then that got out of hand and turned into its own article after all. It still needs an introduction and a title, so that probably won’t be out until 10 or 11.
The weekly summary will cover the Iran negotiations, Obama’s SOTU and gun townhall, the Episcopal/Anglican kerfuffle, the Cruz birther thing, and a few other topics before closing with the War and Peace trailer — I’m not entirely sure what it has to do with War and Peace, but wow.
The Weekly Sift 