The Weekly Sift

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.