The Weekly Sift

So much has happened these last two weeks that this week’s Sift is entirely devoted to catching up. I’m spending my full (self-imposed) word limit on the weekly summary and don’t have any separate featured articles.

What’s been happening? Well, it’s the end of the Supreme Court’s year, so decisions have been spilling out like the term papers of procrastinating freshmen. Unfortunately, though, their last day is today, so I won’t have time to digest the most important decision: Hobby Lobby, where a trumped-up notion of Christian entitlement masquerades as religious liberty and threatens to give employers control of their employee’s health care. But the Court did rule on the privacy of cell phones (which the Founders apparently foresaw), the President’s power to make recess appointments, and buffer zones around abortion clinics.

Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran’s primary run-off victory over Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel has been good theater. Cochran won by taking advantage of Mississippi’s open-primary rules to get votes from blacks who usually vote for Democrats. McDaniel apparently thought he was in an old-fashioned white primary (which used to be a thing in the Jim Crow South), called a foul, and has refused to concede. It’s like grade school recess: If the Tea Party loses, somebody must have cheated. They’re working to identify who it was.

John Boehner announced that he’s suing President Obama for … something. He didn’t specify exactly.

The news about ObamaCare continues to be good and mostly unreported. Paul Krugman — I guess all by himself he’s the “liberal media” we hear so much about — collected some of it.

And a bunch more stuff, ending with an amazing use of perspective illusions in the new video by OK Go.

Since I’ve decided not to wait for the Court, the weekly summary should be out by 10 o’clock Eastern, or close to it. But if I get delayed and then the ruling comes out, who knows?

I spent much of this week meditating on the mysterious rage against Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the last American POW from the Afghan War. None of the supposed justifications of that anger hold water when you look at them closely, and most of the people leading the charge against Bergdahl’s release are the same people who (just a few months ago) were vehemently demanding Obama do something to get him back. The deal that got made was the same one that had been on the table for months, maybe years: trade him for those same five guys, who may have been bad dudes in the Afghan government 12 years ago, but were never terrorists, never attacked the U.S., and have been completely out of the loop for more than a decade.

I couldn’t figure it out. I could fact-check the bullshit, but that seemed to miss the point. Where was this coming from?

And then it hit me: It’s over. That amazing righteous-fury power high we got on after 9/11 — it’s over. The Bergdahl deal was Obama announcing last call at the War on Terror Bar and starting to put the chairs on top of the tables. Remember how pumped up we were during happy hour, when W was saying “Let’s roll” and promising to rid the world of evil-doers? It wasn’t supposed to be like this, was it? Way back when we were starting to invade Iraq, General Petraeus said, “Tell me how this ends.” Well, this is how it ends.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

That’s going to be this week’s featured article: “This Is How It Ends”. I’m not sure how long it will take to put the finishing touches on it. It’ll be out this morning sometime.

As for the rest of the week, we had another school shooting. The NRA tried to back away from the lunatics who think it’s a good idea to take assault rifles into fast-food restaurants, but then they realized that lunatics are their base and if they start trying to get distance from the crazy people there will be no good place to stop. People who know something are starting to tell us what the EPA’s new carbon-emission rules will mean. You can add Wisconsin to marriage equality’s 13-state winning streak. And the proposal that came out of the platform committee for the Texas GOP is so batshit crazy … I know they’re serious and that ought to be depressing, but The Onion couldn’t have made this up. You have to laugh.

And while I’m reflecting, last week was a pretty good week on the Sift. “#YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression” is closing in on 5,000 page views. It’s #9 on the Sift’s all-time-hit list.

I’m not sure how much attention it’s getting in the country at large, but the current Atlantic cover article “The Case for Reparations” hit the blogosphere like a bomb. Reparations for the systematic oppression of blacks is one of those topics that produces knee-jerk reactions from whites, even before they consider exactly what is being proposed or why. Most whites don’t know the history of white supremacy in America — it goes way beyond slavery — and a lot don’t want to know.

It’s rare for a major writer to confront this denial as directly or as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates has in this article. You can agree or disagree, but you can’t keep treating reparations as if the idea were unthinkable. What ought to be unthinkable is the absurd notion that the wealth gap between whites and blacks is some kind of accident, or that it has been caused primarily by some deficiency in black DNA or culture. That gap is the natural result of centuries of policy that prevented black families from building wealth. Any discussion of black poverty needs to recognize that fact.

So the featured article today will be “Ta-Nehisi Coates Goes There: Reparations”. I’ll summarize and elaborate on what he said, plus discuss how it applies to me personally. I still need to look up some historical quotes I only vaguely remember, which takes an amount of time that is hard to predict. So I’m not sure when I’ll post.

Later on, the weekly summary will discuss yet another mass shooting, the VA, Mark Cuban, and a bunch of other stuff.

Two featured articles this week: “New Evidence ObamaCare is Working” pulls together three new pieces of information: Gallup’s report that the percentage of the population claiming to be uninsured is dropping sharply, research demonstrating that the death rate in Massachusetts has fallen post-RomneyCare, and an encouraging bit of data suggesting that ObamaCare’s reforms are changing healthcare delivery for the better — the rate of hospital re-admissions is falling.

A second article (which I haven’t titled yet) responds to the Princeton freshman whose essay in Time says he won’t apologize for his white male privilege because he and his family have worked hard and suffered hardship to put him where he is. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say I think he misses the point about the nature of privilege.

The weekly summary links to the best summaries I could find about the kidnapped Nigerian girls and the continuing Ukraine/Russia unrest. (I don’t claim to understand either situation myself.) I’ll briefly tell you what I got out of reading the Supreme Court’s new decision on prayer at public meetings, expand on how the shifting politics of ObamaCare leads to another Republican effort to beat the dead horse of Benghazi, link you to the new National Climate Assessment, and pass along stories from Georgia and Texas about the craziness that ensues from open-carry-of-firearms laws.

The ObamaCare article should be out shortly, and the privilege article by 10 EDT. Expect the summary before noon.

Two events stood out for me this week: the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action that came out Tuesday, and then the surprising-to-some racist rant of Cliven Bundy on Wednesday. Trying to make sense of each took me back to the 19th century.

The conservative justices’ impatience with affirmative action reminded me of a paragraph from the Court’s Civil Rights Cases decision of 1883, which declared unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875:

When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.

In the white mindset of 1883, that decision sounded so reasonable that only one justice dissented. But from a 21st-century perspective, the Court was naive to assume that the Southern states were going to act in good faith to protect the rights of their black citizens, and so the Civil Rights Cases became the opening bell for the Jim Crow era.

Similarly in this week’s decision, the 6-2 majority decided that there’s no need to make non-whites or women “the special favorite of the laws”, and that the ordinary political process can be trusted to defend their rights. We’ll see how it turns out this time.

With Cliven Bundy, conservative pundits were shocked by his racist outburst while liberals had been expecting it. The difference? Conservatives had been taking each individual Bundy pronouncement at face value, while liberals had noted all the points of congruence between Bundy’s views and those of the post-Civil-War defeated Southern aristocrats who founded the KKK. Having already seen so much of that package, we were expecting the rest of it to show up sooner or later.

Other stories worthy of note this week: The FCC seems ready to kill net neutrality. Now that the Deepwater Horizon public relations disaster has been dealt with, BP wants to welch on its deal to clean up the Gulf. The owner of the L. A. Clippers went on his own racist rant, alienating his coach, most of his players, and the rest of the NBA. And the surprising popularity of Thomas Piketty’s book of economic theory has conservatives panicking and yelling “Marxist!” As the Soviet Union recedes into history’s rear-view mirror, does the Red Scare technique still work?

The Bundy article “Cliven Bundy and the Klan Komplex” should be out within the hour. I haven’t titled the article on the affirmative action decision yet, but I’m picturing it coming out in the late morning, with the weekly summary “History Lesson” following around noon, Eastern time.