The Weekly Sift

It’s another week where my word-limit target is laughing at me.

Last week I had only a couple sentences about the Isla Vista murders. This week the #YesAllWomen hashtag exploded on Twitter, and blogging world seems divided between those who comment on it and those who don’t dare. For the last few days I’ve been pulling together the best ideas I’ve seen on the topic and trying to add a little of my own.

Simultaneously, I’ve been trying to answer a reader’s question: If you have only a limited amount of energy/money/attention to spend on the 2014 elections, would races should you focus on? That’s not a quickly covered topic either.

So both articles will post today, and the idea of keeping the Sift down to 3500 words a week will have to just stand aside. “#YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression” will come out first, probably before too long, and “How the Fall Elections Are Shaping Up for Democrats” will follow later this morning. In general, I try to get the weekly summary out by noon (NH time). We’ll see if that happens this week.

Climate change was hard to ignore this week. Not only did we learn that a big chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf is doomed, but Marco Rubio picked a bad moment to come out publicly as a climate-change denier. Every day or two he found a new way to stumble over follow-up questions that weren’t much more complicated than “Seriously?”

By coincidence, this week I found myself looking at a research report from an investment firm that gives most of its political cash to Republicans. It said in no uncertain terms that climate change is happening, and suggested ways to invest accordingly. And that got me wondering: How many conservatives cheer when a candidate denounces all this climate-change nonsense, and then apply a completely different worldview when they’re making decisions about something they take seriously, like money?

There’s an obvious parallel to religion, where a man might yell “Amen!” during a Sunday-morning sermon about young-Earth creationism, then Monday go to work as a geologist and look for oil in rock formations that he knows are many millions of years old. In religion, such things are called “Sunday truths”, and scientifically educated believers handle them by “checking your brain at the door”. And that led to this week’s featured article: “Climate Denial is a Sunday Truth”. It should be out in an hour or so.

Later this morning, the weekly summary will say more about that Antarctic ice, the scandal at the VA, the strange apparent outcome of the Republican Civil War (the establishment is winning at the ballot box by surrendering to the Tea Party on policy), and a number of other short notes, closing with a couple who have a big dream: paving the roads with solar panels.

I’m really appreciating the increased comment traffic lately (even after I delete the spam from readers like How To Get a Bigger Dick and Treatment for Arthritis in Dogs). “Enjoying” would be too strong a word, considering how many comments are critical, but I’ve always wanted the Sift to become a blog with a strong commenting community. As I see it, there are three kinds of blogs: ones where the author is writing mainly for self-expression and rarely gets comments; ones that are a conversation between the author and the readers; and ones where the author’s posts set off a conversation in the commenting community. The Sift is getting into the second category and it would be cool if someday it made it to the third. So if you haven’t been reading the comments, I suggest that you do.

In general I have a loose policy on comments. I delete the obvious spam, and I intend to delete any comments that abuse other commenters (though amazingly that hasn’t come up yet). I usually argue if I think I’m being misread or if the comment promotes what I see as a factual error, but if you just disagree with me and state your case fairly, I’ll often let it stand unanswered. I try not to get drawn into endless debates, so often my final comment will be that we’ve both had our say and the readers can judge for themselves. I don’t closely review the thousands of comments that the spam filter catches, so occasionally a legitimate comment may fail to post; I apologize for that.

This week: I’ve got two featured posts queued up. The Donald Sterling thing is getting way too much coverage, but there’s a part of the story I can’t let go by: the people who want to make Sterling the victim. (Why oh why should he lose his team because of comments he made in a private conversation?) Fox News’ Megan Kelly is far from the only one to frame the conversation this way, but I focus on her in “No, Donald Sterling is Not the Victim”. That article is almost finished and should be out shortly.

A theme I’ve been building lately is conservative judicial activism. The “judicial activism” meme started as a conservative attack on liberal judges during the Warren Court in the 60s, but these days it’s really conservative judges who are ignoring the Constitution and the precedents to legislate from the bench. Even so, the out-of-date rhetoric about “liberal activist judges” and conservatives “restoring the Constitution” are still with us.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to compare two recent books suggesting lists of constitutional amendments: liberal retired Justice John Paul Stevens’ Six Amendments and conservative talk-radio host Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments. Stevens’ amendments are focused on trying to undo recent Supreme Court misinterpretations, while Levin’s amendments (in spite of his rhetoric about the Founders’ original vision) are almost entirely ideas that the Founders rejected. I’ll flesh that out in “Restoring the Constitution is Now a Liberal Issue”. That still needs some work, so it probably won’t be out until around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the return of Benghazi, the botched Oklahoma execution, the changing politics of ObamaCare, Kerry’s “apartheid” comment, and maybe a few other things.

Last week I wrote about the Supreme Court’s ongoing destruction of campaign finance laws. This week’s most striking story concerned why such laws are necessary and should be expanded rather than struck down: A research paper by two political scientists examined 1,779 separate political disputes between 1981 and 2002 (before John Roberts began his defense of rich people’s right to buy influence), compared them to measures of public opinion broken down by income, and concluded that ordinary voters get their way only when they happen to agree with either the rich or with organized interest groups (especially business interest groups). “Clearly, when one holds constant net interest group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public thinks.” The paper described the American political system with a particularly telling phrase that gives this week’s first featured article its title: “Democracy by Coincidence”.

The other story that struck me this week was the armed mob that successfully defended the cattle of freeloader and public-land-abuser Cliven Bundy from government seizure. Bundy and his defenders put forward many ideas that sound like high-minded principles, but it is hard to imagine a situation where those principles would apply to anyone other than People Like Us. (Didn’t Occupy Wall Street claim a right to use public land? Did the militia movement rush to their defense?) And mainstream conservative pundits are somehow unable to separate themselves from this radical, violent fringe of the conservative movement. I’ll have a second featured article about that, but I haven’t titled it yet.

The weekly summary will discuss the marathon-bombing anniversary, developments in Ukraine, Kansas parents trying to stop the First Lady from speaking at their kids’ graduation, and a few other short notes, before closing with video of two amazing new vehicles that don’t need a lot of fossil fuel.

As a wild guess, expect “Democracy By Coincidence” between 9 and 10 (Eastern), and the Bundy article before noon, with the weekly summary coming a little bit later.

This week’s main article will be a review of Douglas Blackmon’s book Slavery By Another Name, which tells the story of how involuntary servitude was re-established in the South after Reconstruction and lasted until World War II.

I’m kind of amazed that I didn’t hear about this book when it came out in 2008, or when it won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 2009, or even when PBS made a documentary from it in 2012. (As I tell my friends about it, I’ve been waiting for somebody to say, “Where have you been? Everybody knows about that.” So far nobody has.) I think it’s an important piece of American history to understand, and it throws a whole new light on the story of race in America. We’re used to thinking about the blacks who marched with Martin Luther King as the grandchildren of slaves. But probably some of them had been slaves themselves, except that it wasn’t called “slavery” by then.

Another article will talk about recent labor developments in sports, especially the surprising ruling that Northwestern’s football players are employees who have the right to form a union. Also worth knowing about: the lawsuit the Raiderette cheerleaders have filed against the Oakland Raiders, and why there’s likely to be another baseball strike in 2016. (Due to a screw-up on my part — I thought I posted the teaser hours ago — this is already up.)

In the weekly summary, today is the ObamaCare deadline (sort of), which has inspired a variety of how-is-it-working stories. The Supreme Court heard arguments about ObamaCare’s contraception mandate and how it conflicts with corporations’ freedom of religion. The Christie administration’s Bridgegate investigation concluded that Gov. Christie has done nothing wrong. An appeals court found Texas’ new abortion restrictions constitutional, contradicting another appeals court and setting up a Supreme Court case. The Religious Right has decided Disney’s Frozen is gay propaganda. And a bunch of other stuff.

The sports-labor article will be first, within the hour. The book review still needs some work, so I’m not putting a time on that. And then the weekly summary.