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
- a report Democracy Corps wrote after doing focus-groups of like-minded Republicans. It’s fascinating inside-the-locker-room talk that most liberals never hear.
- reviewing the facts about the growth of government under Obama: spending is flat, the deficit is shrinking, and the number of government employees is down sharply. This comes as a surprise to most people, which tells you something about media bias: If the media were biased in one direction, you’d expect them to create popular misconceptions that slanted that way. So the popular misconceptions about the growth of government point to a conservative media bias.
- the hilarious story of the Ride for the Constitution, a protest where ten thousand truckers were going to shut down the D.C. beltway all last weekend, demanding the arrest of liberal politicians who have violated their oath of office. It was going to be America’s “Egypt moment”, and millions of people around the country were going to join the protest in all sorts of ways. In reality, about 30 trucks showed up and rode around the beltway for a while, disturbing no one. Conservatives saw the lack of coverage (except for Fox, or course) as more evidence of liberal media bias; I guess because they think Anderson Cooper shows up whenever 30 liberals get together to protest something.
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.
The Weekly Sift 