Category Archives: Morning tease

The Monday Morning Teaser

March 10, 2014 – 7:36 am

Two things happened this week that involve Paul Ryan: The Republican majority of the House Budget Committee (which he chairs) issued The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later, and possible 2016 presidential candidates auditioned for the Republican base at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Ryan didn’t do well in the CPAC straw poll and the cheers at his speech were tepid, but he did succeed in annoying liberals with a phony story about a poor kid and his government-provided lunch. Congratulations, Paul. Mission accomplished.

The poverty report is fascinating because of what it obscures: the general consensus in America about how the government should help people who need help. I’ll lay out what I think that consensus is and how Ryan’s smokescreen works in “Does Paul Ryan Care About Poverty Now?”

The weekly summary will discuss the Ukraine/Crimea situation and CPAC, and link to various other interesting things I found this week, including Edwin Lyngar’s “I Lost My Dad to Fox News”, before ending with Jimmy Kimmel’s vision of what America’s teachers would really like to say to parents.

Hard to predict when the posts will appear; I still need to look some things up.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

March 3, 2014 – 7:18 am

The first article to come out today will start with Gov. Brewer’s veto of Arizona’s anti-gay “religious liberty” law, and then pull back to the larger question: What religious liberties are people worried about, and are the more specific principles that protect those liberties in danger?

In the whole country, I could only find four cases in which businesses have faced legal action because they didn’t want to be involved in same-sex wedding celebrations, and I believe one of them hasn’t been decided yet. I read all three decisions, plus a decision concerning a religious venue for a civil-union ceremony. The judges seemed well aware of the principles of religious liberty, and I don’t see any reason to fear that their decisions are steps on a slippery slope.

I’m still working on the title, but the article should be out in an hour or so.

In the weekly summary, the most compelling issue is the way the Ukraine situation has turned into a big-power confrontation. I decided to link to the insightful stuff I’ve read rather than pull together an article of my own. The interesting sidebar on the story is the history of Crimea’s Tatar minority, which came west with Genghis Khan.

Also in the summary: the Army might get smaller, bitcoin, the Republicans (sort of) have a tax plan, and after all those loud claims that the cold winter proved global warming wasn’t happening, this January turns out to have been the fourth warmest January globally since 1880.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

February 24, 2014 – 6:15 am

It’s been a busy week on the Sift.

Last Monday’s “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean?” is close to 19,000 page views and is still running. It has moved into 4th place on the Sift’s greatest hits list, passing one of my favorites “One Word Turns the Tea Party Around” at 18K. At this rate it should run past “Why I am Not a Libertarian” at 24K. But “Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say” at 69K and “The Distress of the Privileged” at 316K are still a long way out there. (I wonder if other blogs’ hit distributions look like that, with such extreme outliers. A typical featured post gets a few hundred hits, not counting the people who subscribe.)

Anyway, I’ve spent a bunch of this week responding to comments, which is why the Link of the Day hasn’t been even close to daily.

This week I’m going to take a different angle on the race theme with a review of Daniel Sharfstein’s book The Invisible Line: a secret history of race in America. It’s a generation-by-generation look at three American families who crossed the color line from black to white, eventually forgetting their black ancestors. It is both an amazing perspective on what it has meant to be white or black at various points in American history, and a meditation on just how socially constructed the whole notion of “race” is. (Spoiler: One of the families joins the Confederate aristocracy and includes a senator who played a role in ending Reconstruction.)

I called the article “Are You Sure You’re White?”. I realize that title implicitly leaves out my non-white readers, who I hope will forgive me and read the article anyway. (I think you’ll like it.) I couldn’t think of any more inclusive titles that would be nearly so clickable.

Beyond that, the weekly summary will try to catch up with what’s going on in Ukraine and Venezuela. The 5-year anniversary of the Stimulus brought a lot of retrospective debate. A series of state legislatures are considering bills that would redefine “religious freedom” as “freedom to discriminate against gays”. And I’ll end with NBC’s Brian Williams performing “Rapper’s Delight”.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

February 17, 2014 – 7:32 am

As I channel-scanned the Sunday talk shows, they all seemed to be discussing Michael Sam and the NFL. But I didn’t scan through anybody having my reaction to the story: Didn’t we just do this? The issues — group morale, taking showers, and so on — are the same ones we just hashed through in ending don’t-ask-don’t-tell in the military. And if you look back far enough, the same arguments showed up when the issue was blacks in the military or in sports.

I think that’s why so many people-you-wouldn’t-have-expected have jumped into this argument with so much force and eloquence: It’s all still fresh in our heads. We’ve seen this movie, we already know the lines, and we know what role we’re going to wish we had played.

So the first article to come out today will be about that. There’s a longer article about the many ways to define racism that I’ve been working on for a while and might get done today. Not sure about that.

The weekly summary continues the football theme by looking at the new report on the Miami Dolphins bullying incident, and it continues the déjà vu theme by looking at the Kentucky and Virginia same-sex marriage cases: The Religious Right keeps making the same arguments, no matter how many times judges knock them down. So all these rulings look the same.

Then we get to the dog that didn’t bark this week: the completely non-dramatic extension of the debt ceiling. That’s one of many signs that the Republican Civil War is getting serious. Other news this week: the Michael Dunn verdict, the UAW’s defeat in Chattanooga, Comcast’s attempt to buy Time Warner Cable, and a bunch of other stuff.

The Michael Sam article should come out soon, and the rest may run late (as I try to figure out whether the racism article is ready).

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The Monday Morning Teaser

February 10, 2014 – 7:27 am

This week I tackle the Common Core standards, which several people have been asking about. I knew I had my work cut out for me last week when I heard Chris Hayes say that he didn’t know what to think about them. When was the last time Chris Hayes didn’t know what to think? I’ve always imagined that if you woke Chris up at 3 a.m. and picked a subject out of the encyclopedia at random, he’d say, “Funny you should ask about that.”

The gist of my conclusion is that the standards are fine, the tests are fine, but what people want to do with the test results is crazy. Along the way I’m going to end up telling you about my own bizarre educational history, my sister’s experiences as a public school teacher, and a bunch of other stuff that makes the article run way too long. (I’m blowing away my usual word limit this week.)

I’m also writing an article about that CBO report that the media mangled into saying that ObamaCare will kill jobs. Other people have covered it, but I think they’ve missed the real story: That’s not even what the report was about. The CBO thought it was explaining why the deficit is falling. The media had to ignore the report’s main subject and several other possible stories before latching onto ObamaCare-kills-jobs, which the report didn’t even say. Then after it became clear that they had misreported the story, some reporters blamed the administration for not having a better explanation ready in case they made a story out of a misrepresentation of Appendix C.

Finally, in the weekly summary: Woody Allen responded, Bill Nye debated at the Creationist Museum (and lived to tell the tale), Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death reminded people that heroin is a problem, the NFL is going to have an openly gay player next season, and Congressman Sarbanes has introduced a practical bill for lessening the influence of big money on our politicians.

The CBO article should be out soon. I can’t estimate how long it will take me to put finishing touches on the Common Core article and then do the weekly summary.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

February 3, 2014 – 7:59 am

The State of the Union and its many responses dominate the Sift this week, as they dominated the news. I find these speeches valuable even when I don’t take them at face value. They are the culmination of much polling and focus-group testing by politicians across the spectrum. So — independent of whether any of the proposals will ever become law — they tell us a lot about how the parties view the public, what part of the public they’re trying to appeal to, and what part of their own image worries them.

One nugget from the speeches taken as a whole: Everybody was talking about inequality as if it were a serious concern. That’s same-old same-old for liberals, but new for conservatives. Which means it’s showing up in their polling and focus groups, even the focus groups representing their targeted voters. Which means a chunk of the Occupy Wall Street message is becoming the new political common sense, in spite of the conventional view that OWS failed. I cover this in the first featured article, “Occupying the State of the Union”, which should be out sometime in the next hour.

There’s a lot more to observe in the SOTUs, and I’m still undecided whether I’ll break that off into a second SOTU article, or just let it dominate the weekly summary.

Other stuff that happened this week: The Bridgegate scandal keeps advancing. Right-wing media supported Tom Perkins in his claim that the rich are persecuted. The women-can’t-be-trusted dog whistle is being blown on Wendy Davis, just as it was blown on Elizabeth Warren in 2012. Woody Allen’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow went public with child-molestation charges that blew up the Allen/Farrow marriage. And Pete Seeger’s death opened the floodgates on a stream of appreciation for his long and productive life. I plan to close the weekly summary with a YouTube of a Seeger song that seems like an appropriate good-bye.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

January 27, 2014 – 7:59 am

For some reason I’ve felt unusually snarky this week, so both of this week’s featured articles will have a high snark quotient.

The first one is pretty much done, so it should appear in just a few minutes. All week, I kept running into over-the-top quotes: Mike Huckabee claiming he was fighting a “war for women” to protect them from the “insult” of insurance-covered contraception, that Shark Tank guy saying it was “fantastic news” that the world’s 85 richest individuals have as much money as the bottom 3.5 billion people do, the Family Research Council guy blaming the campus sexual assault problem on Sandra Fluke, and so on. I was despairing for my gender when I finally found evidence that women are crazy too: A Republican candidate for Congress blamed dementia and autism on same-sex marriage. (“God is angry.”)

Finally I decided you just have to laugh, so I collected it all in “One Week’s Worth of Crazy”. I use two phrases (Google says I didn’t coin them) that I hope catch on: God’s ventriloquists for people who keep putting their ridiculous words into God’s mouth, and guillotine bait for rich people displaying let-them-eat-cake cluelessness.

My second snarky piece is “The Fall of Governor Ultrasound”. I read the 14-count Bob McDonnell indictment, and now believe the federal indictment is a literary form of unappreciated potential.

As usual, I’m going to try to get the weekly summary out by noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

January 20, 2014 – 8:09 am

The Supreme Court has been relatively quiet lately. (Like freshmen, they finish most of their assignments at the end of the term in June.) But lower court judges have been issuing important rulings on net neutrality, same-sex marriage, the NSA, voting rights, drug-testing welfare recipients, and a variety of other subjects.

I’ve gotten way behind in covering them, so this week’s featured article will be: “Catching Up With the Judges: Net Neutrality and Marriage”. (I’ll try to catch up with the rest next week.)

The D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, but the majority opinion suggests that the FCC could fix the problem without new legislation. So in a weird way, the winners (Verizon) were losers and vice versa.

A month ago, if you’d asked me to guess which two states would be the last to legalize same-sex marriage, I might have picked Utah and Oklahoma. Well, just before Christmas a federal judge struck down Utah’s constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman, and this Tuesday Oklahoma’s bit the dust. The cases had nearly identical facts and the states made nearly identical arguments, which the judges destroyed in similar ways, as if the standard anti-marriage-equality arguments have become fat pitches easily hit out of the park.

Both cases will be appealed and undoubtedly the issue will wind up at the Supreme Court, maybe next year. I’m having a hard time imagining what the four conservative justices can possibly say to persuade Justice Kennedy.

The weekly summary will bring you up to date on the Bridgegate scandal and President Obama’s change of rhetoric on the NSA. Michael Mann also wrote an interesting article about how climate scientists should approach the politics of global warming. The 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty is continuing to generate good discussion about inequality. Pressure continues to build on the Washington NFL franchise to change its name. And I’ll end with a great dance video.

Expect the legal article around ten (New Hampshire time) and the weekly summary about noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

January 13, 2014 – 7:43 am

It’s been a busy week for news. The Chris Christie Bridgegate scandal broke open. The polar vortex came and went. An al-Qaeda-linked group claimed control of Fallujah, a town that was a memorable Iraq-War battlefield for American troops; in this country that news pulled the scab off arguments that had been quiet since the last American combat troops left Iraq: What did Bush’s whole Iraq excursion accomplish? Or did Obama screw up Bush’s accomplishments by pulling out too soon?

Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of another war: President Johnson’s War on Poverty. That touched off a similar debate: Was the War on Poverty an example of misguided liberal over-reach? Or was it working until conservatives managed to sabotage it? What about poverty today? And what about growing inequality, which is pushing the lower middle class towards poverty?

At least one pundit claimed that the most important news of the week was something boring that nobody was paying much attention to: Inflation in the healthcare market slipped below the overall inflation rate for the first time since … well, maybe ever. If healthcare inflation starts behaving itself, then those scary exponential-growth-in-government-spending graphs go away.

With all that to discuss, most of this week’s Sift is devoted to the weekly summary. I did split off one short article to connect two stories related to atheism: A Christian pastor announced his intention to live 2014 as if there were no God and blog about the results; he got results much faster than he expected. And an atheist blogger tried to raise funds for charity and discovered nobody wanted his money; his attempt to do a good deed got him and his readers compared to the KKK and denounced as a “hate group”. The lesson I draw is that prejudice against atheists is alive and well. Christians who imagine they’re being discriminated against really have no idea what atheists go through.

The atheist article should be out in the next hour or so, and the weekly summary before noon.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

January 6, 2014 – 8:45 am

Late start today. (Last night I stayed up to finish The Goldfinch, which is a fabulous novel.)

This week’s featured article will be a review of Michael Kimmel’s book Angry White Men. What do school shootings, talk radio, the Tea Party, the men’s-rights movement, domestic violence, and workers going postal all have in common? Angry white men. We’re not used to grouping those events together, so we hardly ever ask the question: What makes white men so angry, and what can be done about it?

Central to Kimmel’s thesis is a concept that is a close relative of my notion of privileged distress: aggrieved entitlement.

The weekly summary focuses on the NYT’s revelations about Benghazi, the debate over unemployment insurance, new laws that kicked in on January 1, Israel/Palestine, Esquire’s critical examination of the author of Proof of Heaven, and a few other things.

I expect everything to come out about an hour later than usual. I blame Donna Tartt.

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