Category Archives: Morning tease

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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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 30, 2013 – 7:36 am

It’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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 16, 2013 – 7:35 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 9, 2013 – 8:02 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 2, 2013 – 7:46 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

November 25, 2013 – 8:49 am

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.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

November 18, 2013 – 8:09 am

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.

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