The Weekly SiftIt’s time for the Yearly Sift, where I look back on the year’s hundred-or-so posts, find the larger themes that escaped my week-by-week focus, link to the year’s most popular articles, and discuss what the blog’s statistics say about how this whole project is going.
Since I only do this once a year, I don’t have a good estimate of how long it will take.
I try not to write about the same hot-button issues everyone else does, but this week I couldn’t help myself. The whole Santa-and-Jesus-are-white thing was … well, I just couldn’t lay off of it. This week’s first featured article “White Santa, White Jesus, White Christmas” should be out shortly. I’ll try to cover the issue a little better than everyone else has.
The second featured article will be “Mandela’s Memorial Service Was All About Us”. American news outlets just couldn’t face a whole day of talking about some dead guy from the other side of the world, so instead they obsessed over the Obama-Castro handshake and a manufactured mini-drama in which the Obamas’ marriage was threatened by the prime minister of Denmark. That story would have been funny in The Onion, but not on the front page of The New York Post.
The rest of the week left the weekly summary a lot to talk about. I was debating how the Sift should mark the anniversary of Sandy Hook when somebody else made the decision for me: Let’s have another school shooting! A novelist couldn’t have written a more appropriate conclusion to a year that started with the country determined to do something about guns, and ended with more laws loosened than tightened.
The other stories of the week: The debate over whether Pope Francis or Edward Snowden should have been Time’s Person of the Year; the House came to a bipartisan budget deal that is not doomed in the Senate (with Republicans saying lots of juicy, nasty things about each other); Oklahoma learned the downside of allowing religious monuments at the state capitol; and NBC News bemoaned an international study that ranked American teens “21th” in science. (If not for the fact that we were also 26th in math, somebody at NBC might have known how ordinal numbers work.)
And we’ll end with a video you may have seen already, in which WestJet made a Christmas miracle for the passengers of one lucky flight.
This week’s Sift will have two featured articles. The first one, “The Procrustean Sainthood of Nelson Mandela”, should be ready to post within the next hour or so. In that article, I use Mandela as an example of a phenomenon you can also see in Martin Luther King: We talk about great leaders “ascending” to a kind of secular sainthood. But often what happens is that the Saint archetype descends and wipes out any part of the a person’s reputation that doesn’t fit. In the public mind, the new saint becomes a generic wise man and nice guy, whose mantle can be claimed by anyone, including the people who fought against him in life. I argue instead for admiring Mandela as the person he was, rather than using his name to cover whatever each of us happens to think is good.
The second I hope to post around 10 or 11 Eastern time. It will be called “Rooting for Your Country to Fail is Unpatriotic”. In it, I call out the unpatriotic tactics conservatives are using to sabotage ObamaCare. There’s nothing wrong with opposing something the president and his party wants to do, and even trying to get it repealed via the usual legislative process. (I, for example, opposed the Iraq War and consistently voted for candidates who promised to end it.) But it’s a different thing entirely to work against a project that your country has taken on and try to make it fail. (I did not help the Iraqi resistance, interfere with the American war effort, or crow over the corpses of our troops. That would have been unpatriotic.)
The efforts Republicans are making to prevent Americans from learning about their rights under the law and to actively confuse Americans that the law could help have crossed that line. They aren’t just partisan, they’re unpatriotic. That needs to be said.
In the weekly summary, I’ll also discuss the improvements in HealthCare.gov, President Obama’s inequality speech, Christmas’ war of aggression against our other holidays, and a few other things, ending with the most minimal nativity scene ever.
The Sift comes to you this week from Santa Fe rather than New Hampshire, which means everything will appear around two hours later than usual.
The featured article this week is about Pope Francis. I’ve been curious about Francis ever since his election, when he was saying all the right things about poverty and making symbolic gestures of humility. I am, in general, skeptical of such first impressions; I well remember the 1980s, when each new leader of the Soviet Union was rumored to have been a secret liberal for many years, and then turned out to be just another Brezhnev. But eventually Gorbachev really was different than the others, so maybe Francis could be different too.
On November 24, the Vatican published Francis’ first major work, Evangelii Gaudium, which caused Rush Limbaugh to denounce the “pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope.” So I decided to see what the fuss was about.
In this week’s summary post, the neocons are lamenting how President Obama is screwing up their marvelous plans for a war with Iran; everybody else is talking about whether HealthCare.gov is finally fixed; John Derbyshire manages to create a furor by explaining why slavery wasn’t really that bad; and a Quaker explains the difference between conscientious objection to the draft and the “conscience exemption” Hobby Lobby wants from ObamaCare.
The blog seems to be under a spam attack, so I’ve been deleting comments by the shovelful. I apologize if any legitimate comments get deleted by mistake. [Hint: Make sure there are no mis-spellings in your first sentence. That’s a spam trait.]
The featured article this week will be “6 American Problems Republicans Aren’t Trying to Solve”. It points out the fundamental flaw in the pox-on-both-your-houses columns that big-name pundits keep writing: Whatever you’re working on, you can usually compromise with people who want to solve the problem by other means, but you can’t compromise with people who aren’t interested in solving the problem at all. Increasingly — on healthcare, climate change, and a host of other issues — that’s what Democrats are up against.
The weekly summary will note the anniversaries of the Gettysburg Address and the JFK assassination, point to the interim deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program (it’s too soon to tell whether it will work), and also examine the invocation of the nuclear option in the Senate, the further adventures of George Zimmerman, Will Hunting’s victory in the chess championships, and my shame as a New Hampshirite about Medicaid expansion, ending with a moving musical flash mob in Spain.
This was a depressing week to be a liberal, because the party that is supposed to represent us went completely AWOL. I’m talking about Democrats from my own Senator Jean Shaheen to President Obama himself getting panicked by the barrage of largely bogus ObamaCare-killed-my-dog stories and putting forward “fixes” that undermine the overall policy. In the House, 39 Democrats even voted for a Republican plan to sabotage the risk pool.
In this week’s featured article, “The ObamaCare Panic”, I’ll draw the parallel to other times when Democrats have run for cover rather than defend their ground (or even just wait to see if the media hype is true): authorizing the Iraq invasion, firing Shirley Sherrod, piling on to the “IRS scandal”, defunding ACORN, and so on. Nobody looks back on those moments proudly, and they won’t this time either.
The weekly summary will cover the CBS-Benghazi and Richard Cohen gag-at-mixed-race-families controversies, the speculation about Elizabeth Warren as a challenger to Hillary Clinton, an up-close look at what makes white supremacism attractive (and who it attracts), The Daily Show‘s racist-or-not-racist panel, and a few other things.
I’m hoping to get the ObamaCare article out by 10.
Lots of news this week: off-year elections, one of the biggest storms ever, a breakdown in the talks with Iran, more Rand Paul plagiarism coming to light, CBS admitted the 60 Minutes Benghazi story was bogus, the NFL’s bullying scandal, and a bunch of other stuff.
The featured article this week, “Nobody’s a Moderate in the Republican Civil War”, will focus on the confusion some liberals may feel about the Tea Party vs. Republican establishment battle that played out in the elections and their aftermath: Yes, it will be better for the country if the establishment wins that war, but not because the establishment is “moderate” or shares any progressive goals. The goals of establishment Republicans like Chris Christie and Mitch McConnell are just as extreme as the Tea Party’s; they just seek those goals pragmatically rather than self-destructively. Left to its own devices, the establishment would go to the same place as the Tea Party, but with less collateral damage.
So for the sake of the country, I root for the GOP establishment in primaries — in spite of my belief that Tea Party candidates are easier to beat. But don’t make the mistake of thinking “he’s not so bad” about Christie or McConnell just because they don’t play chicken with things like a debt default.
That article should be out shortly, and everything else by about noon.
The featured article this week, “The Filibuster and the War on Women”, will connect the dots between the blockade Senate Republicans have put around D. C. Court of Appeals (pledging to filibuster anybody President Obama might nominate to fill its three vacancies) and the effects of the radically conservative decisions that court produces (an injunction upholding a employer’s right to impose his moral code on his employees’ health insurance).
This week’s two most important legal decisions (the injunction I just mentioned, and removing an injunction that blocked Texas’ new anti-abortion bill, instantly closing 1/3 of the state’s abortion clinics) both were written by Bush-appointed judges that Democrats tried to block, but let through when Republicans threatened the “nuclear option” to end filibusters altogether. Will Harry Reid go there?
The weekly summary has a lot to cover: What’s up with all those policies canceled under ObamaCare? The LAX shooting. The food stamp cuts that took effect Thursday, and the ones looming in Congress’ budget negotiations. NSA spying hits home for the Germans. Science studies the political impact of believing in the Devil. The copyright wars restart. Syria keeps chugging along towards destroying its chemical weapons. Middle class neighborhoods are shrinking. And the Miley Cyrus/Robin Thicke video is much more amusing with a David Attenborough soundtrack.
No predictions about timing this morning. I’ll get stuff posted as soon as I can.
OK, I’m back now. I had a wonderful trip back to my hometown, where I gave this talk. Sorry I neglected to announce in advance that I was canceling the October 21 Sift.
This week, there’s still a lot of shutdown-aftermath to sift through. In particular, since everything played out so precisely as the Tea Party’s critics said it would, we’re left with the question: Why did they do it? As events were unfolding, you could imagine that Cruz & Company were planning some master-stroke that the rest of us just didn’t see coming. But they turned out to have nothing. So what were they thinking?
That’s one of this week’s articles. (I still haven’t titled it.) The other is “A State-by-State Update on Voter Suppression”. In one Republican-controlled state after another, voting is getting harder and harder. And then The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi got a North Carolina Republican to explain why.
The weekly summary also covers the uproar about HealthCare.gov, the future-of-journalism dialog between Glenn Greenwald and the NYT’s Bill Keller, the strange case of a Wisconsin woman imprisoned for the sake of her fetus, plus a few other things.
The voter suppression article will come out first, then the Tea Party article, then the weekly summary.
I don’t think you need me to tell you that the government is still shut down and we’re getting scarily close to the debt ceiling. Nonetheless, I think there’s some value in trying to sort out where the situation stands. I’ll do that in the weekly summary.
When things do start to happen, they’ll probably happen fast. And those last-second flurries of activity are when bad ideas are most likely to find their way into law. So for one particularly bad idea I’ve decided to get my protest in now, before it’s a done deal. The featured article this week will be: “Don’t Means-Test Medicare”. It should come out shortly. The thesis is simple: If you want to destroy a government service, the first thing you do is get the rich people out of it.
The rest of the weekly summary (called “Apocalyptic Methods” after a lead-in quote from Apocalypse Now) will include
The Weekly Sift 