I’m in a weird position this week. Normally, I think of the Weekly Sift as a balance to the hype of the TV news networks: They fixate on one story at a time and tell you the same five details over and over with breathless anxiety; my role is to remind you that there’s a lot more going on in the world, and to calm you down on the One Big Story they’re overblowing.
But I can’t play that role on the shutdown/debt-ceiling story, because I’m probably more obsessed with it than you are. And I keep wondering why people aren’t more freaked out about this than they are. So if you are coming to the Sift today looking for a steadying, calming voice and a reminder that we’ve been here before and it worked out fine — I have to warn you that you’ve come to wrong place.
I’ll be posting two featured articles this week: One that I haven’t named yet (actually I have; it’s “N Points About the Shutdown”, but I still haven’t determined the value of N) about the specifics of the current debate, and “Countdown to Augustus” discussing how this confrontation fits into the long-term story of the decline of the Republic. Those two articles give the weekly summary a shutdown theme also, so it’s called “Burning Down the House”.
I don’t know what to predict about when those articles will appear, because I’ll also have one eye on the breaking news. (The Dow futures point to the market opening sharply downward. Is this the crash I was talking about last week, or just another step in an orderly retreat?)
There’s been a glut of news this week: the looming government shutdown, a renewed blast of disinformation about ObamaCare, progress with Syria and Iran, the mall shooting in Kenya, the new IPCC report on climate change, still more NSA revelations, and on and on. Plus, various pundits have written some fascinating stuff interpreting these events and projecting what they might imply about the future.
As a result, today’s Sift is in a chaotic state similar to Congress. Way too many half-written pieces are lying around like appropriation bills waiting to be finished and posted. Can they be amalgamated into one omnibus weekly summary, or (like the House’s farm bill) should each become its own post? Can I even agree with myself about what needs to be said? Does the weekly word limit need to be raised, or does that set a bad precedent and create a larger problem for future weeks?
Unlike Congress, I will have this sorted out by the end of the day. The Weekly Sift will not shut down and will not default on its obligations. Beyond that, I make no promises.
The Sift is going to run a little long this week, because there are two featured articles, plus a lot of news to discuss.
The first article “Who’s Right About Food Stamps?” should be out shortly. It arises from my general frustration over the quality of the public conversation about the House’s attempt to cut $39 billion from the SNAP program in the next decade. Fox News anointed a California surfer bum “the new face of Food Stamps” and talked about lottery winners, while liberal commentators focused on starving kids. I realize details are boring, but couldn’t we talk just a little about what the House bill actually changes and where that $39 billion comes from?
The second article follows up on a short note from last week. I linked to Amanda Marcotte’s article on AlterNet about how the media and the general public should pay more attention to the crazy things right-wingers say, because often it’s not just one guy spouting off. There’s a whole subterranean layer of crazy over there, and we shouldn’t let pundits and politicians play to that craziness without paying a price.
My interpretation was not that the Sift should cover more right-wing trolling like Rush Limbaugh or Ted Cruz; frequently they’re just looking for attention and glorying in the left-wing outrage they provoke. But ten days ago a professor at Patrick Henry College (an institution you should know more about) gave the annual Faith and Reason lecture. A few other bloggers have covered the outrageous sound bites from that speech, but I think the speech-as-a-whole gives a lot of insight into the psychology of the Religious Right, particularly how their lack of self-awareness reveals itself in criticisms of others that apply better to themselves. That article “Pots, Kettles, and the Projections of the Religious Right” will be out later this morning.
And finally, the weekly summary: The battle over ObamaCare is heading towards a government shutdown. We had another mass shooting that raises all the gun issues again. And the Syria peace process keeps moving forward in spite of the near-universal opposition of the pundit class. How will they survive without a war to cover?
After getting crowded out by more urgent questions (like whether we should attack Syria) for several weeks, my Lessons From the Summer of Snowden series starts today. The first installment, “The Language of Denial”, explains the bizarre but consistent ways the NSA defines the words it uses, and how that usage allows the Agency’s denials that sound comforting when the facts are not comforting.
Depending on how the word counts go, I might also do a brief post on the cultural exploitation issues raised by the Miley Cyrus controversy. It took a while to find an analogy that works for me, so if there’s space I’ll share it.
As for the weekly summary, of course everybody is talking about the possibility of getting rid of Syria’s chemical weapons without war. As I laid it out last week, the American political problem around Syria was that we have multiple motives and no way forward addresses them all. So if you wanted Assad overthrown, you’re disappointed in a result that looks like an inexpensive victory to the people who were mainly worried about chemical weapons. And if your main goal is just to oppose and denigrate whatever Obama does, that’s the path you’ll take.
Meanwhile, the 1% continue to run away from the rest of us, and there’s still no clear path to keep the government running past October 1.
Syria. Syria. Syria.
I’m sorry if you’re sick of hearing about Syria, but I believe this is one of those rare moments when ordinary people really might make a difference. Syria stands outside the standard Republican/Democrat polarization, so a lot of Congresspeople in both parties seem honestly undecided. And it’s possible (though not certain) that President Obama won’t attack if Congress says no.
So the featured article this week “Congress is Listening. What Should You Say?” is how I thought through the Syria issue, starting from the position of someone with conflicting pro-Obama and anti-war inclinations. It should go up about 10 Eastern time, and the weekly summary before noon.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Dream speech, today I’ll do a longer version of the comment I usually make around MLK Day: Over the years, Martin Luther King’s image has been dumbed down beyond recognition. These days, the only thing most people know about Dr. King is the content-of-their-character quote, and everybody this side of the KKK claims to speak for him. So I’m going to use quotes from a variety of King speeches and interviews to recapture what was considered dangerous and edgy about him in his lifetime.
In a second article, I’ll begin a series looking back on the Summer of Snowden and what we’ve learned about the NSA. This week’s topic: the checks and balances in Congress and the courts aren’t working.
The weekly summary will discuss (obviously) the prospect of attacking Syria, the Miley Cyrus thing — I can’t believe I just went straight from Syria to Cyrus — and a mind-blowing article where SF author Charles Stross explores the incompatibility between the culture of the NSA and the 21st-century kids they’re going to have to hire.
I’m back. I know I just missed one week, but it seems like I haven’t done a Sift in forever.
In an hour or so I’ll post this week’s featured article “How Republican Congressmen Spent Their Summer Vacation”, which is more-or-less a follow-up to “Chaos in Congress” from three weeks ago. The conservative base wants to see their representatives do a Charge of the Light Brigade against ObamaCare, and the politicians are (understandably) reluctant. That led to some bizarre townhall meetings, where the congressmen tried to distract the base by talking crazy about impeachment, Obama’s birth certificate, and other stuff that doesn’t lead to an immediate on-the-record vote.
I want to do a long article that summarizes what we now know about the NSA’s domestic spying, but instead I’ll link to somebody else’s summary and push my own off to next week. My word limit got taken up by more timely stories that each needed 3-5 paragraphs in the weekly summary: the “I Have a Dream” anniversary, Egypt and Syria, Russia’s anti-gay laws, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, and the New Mexico Supreme Court outraging the religious right by refusing to overlook the words “sexual orientation” in the New Mexico Human Rights Act. (It’s still up in the air whether that will break off into a second featured article.)
The schedule is a little unpredictable today because I’m squeezing in a doctor’s appointment before going on vacation tomorrow. I think the Sift will also be shorter than average this week, because I’ve been dumping time into a different project.
This week’s featured article “Acting white isn’t really a racial issue” just needs a final read-through, so it should come out shortly. I’ll be using Barbara Jensen’s observations of working-class white kids to show that the “acting white” phenomenon among black kids in school (i.e., accusing successful students of being disloyal to the group) isn’t a unique flaw of black culture.
The weekly summary will come out after my doctor’s appointment, so the timing depends on how long I spend in the waiting room. (You know how unpredictable that is.) It will discuss the sale of the Washington Post, a new showdown in the Senate over the filibuster, President Obama’s NSA proposals, all the strange goings-on as Republicans meet their base during the August recess, why 2014 doesn’t look like a replay of 2010, and a few other things. I haven’t picked a lead quote or a title yet.
No Sift next week. See you on the 26th.
Two featured articles this week: One about the chaos currently reigning in Congress (mainly that the House Republican majority seems unable to turn their Ryan budget into any actual appropriations, raising the possibility that the government might shut down in October not by intentional obstruction, but by simple inability to pull anything together) and the other a one-month-later look at voting rights since the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the Voting Right Act. (The voting-rights issue produces this week’s lead quote, from dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “I didn’t want to be right, but sadly I am.”)
The weekly summary collects some video continuing the national conversation on race, including a great TED talk by Peggy McIntosh and Jay Smooth’s reply to Don Lemon. In the “you may also be interested” section, a wonderful candidacy-rollout by the Democrat challenging Mitch McConnell (complete with grandmothers); Fox’s awful Reza Aslan interview; and a graph showing just how Republican-slanted the coverage of the IRS pseudo-scandal has been.
And we close with the cutest video ever — a clan of bears each trying to scratch itself on the same tree.
The voting-rights article will come out first, then Congress, then the weekly summary.
This week’s Sift is dominated by my attempt to meet white conservatives where they are on racial issues, “Sadly, the national conversation on race has to start here”.
I read the in-your-face conservative responses to President Obama’s call for a conversation, ignored the barbs and insults and slanted facts, pieced together the worldview that seems to lie behind most of them, and answered as if I were talking to a misguided-but-well-intentioned cousin or uncle or friend from the old neighborhood.
It’s a long piece — largely because I think it’s necessary to establish that I really get the conservative view I’m responding to before I respond — but I think it’s worth it. I hope it gets forwarded to a lot of people’s cousins and uncles and friends from the old neighborhood.
That doesn’t leave much space in the Weekly Summary for talking about the cracks forming in Republican solidarity as they plan a last-ditch defense against the looming success of ObamaCare. And no space at all for the week’s biggest story — the royal baby. Not that I’d have given it space anyway.
The Weekly Sift 