The Weekly Sift

Maybe more important than what I’m writing about today is what I’m not writing about: I’m not analyzing polls and trying to predict who will win the election.

One thing I often warn against on this blog is speculation: It can eat up all your time and drive you nuts. And since no one actually knows what’s going to happen, speculating about it usually serves no purpose beyond entertainment. So if you enjoy trying to forecast things in a who’s-going-to-win-the-World-Series way, feel free. It’s harmless. But it’s also unproductive. One way or another, the election will happen and we’ll find out then who wins.

Personally, I find that I’m not enjoying whatever time I spend on speculation. Predictions, good and bad alike, just raise my anxiety. So I’m trying to avoid them.

Speculation also has an addictive quality. Anxiety about the future just leads to looking for more speculation to find reassurance, which usually just raises more anxiety. A better way to assuage your anxiety is to do something. Vote early. Write a check. Encourage your apathetic friends to vote. Volunteer.

So anyway, what am I covering this week. First, because the election isn’t the only thing happening in the world, I read the 199-page lawsuit three red states filed to roll back the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. I know, you thought that lawsuit got dismissed. But that was on a technicality, which this lawsuit tries to fix. And it mostly does fix the technical problem, but it also introduces some truly creepy arguments that aren’t getting nearly enough attention. Like this: Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho are complaining that their teen pregnancy rates aren’t high enough.

So anyway, that reading led to the article “Mifepristone, round 2”, which is done and should post shortly.

My second featured post this week looks at how Trump seems to be coming apart the closer the election gets. That’s “Trump’s Weird Week”, and it should appear between 10 and 11 EDT. The weekly summary ten has a lot of odds and ends, and should post around noon.

This week Kamala Harris sat for an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and released an 82-page report on her economic proposals. Neither of these moves satisfied the Harris-needs-to-answer-questions chorus in the media, which routinely lets Trump get away with “answers” that consist mostly of insults, lies, and long rambles about sharks.

This week I decided to stop just complaining about mainstream coverage of this campaign and offer something constructive. My proposal is that if you think Harris needs to answer more questions, you should tell us what those questions are, rather than save them for some “hard-hitting interview” you imagine doing someday. Let Harris decide for herself how she wants to provide that information to voters.

I demonstrate that approach in this week’s featured post by listing questions I think Donald Trump still needs to answer — a topic the NYT et al generally ignore. I have done my best to ask questions I think voters might actually be curious about, and to frame my questions as fairly as possible. For example, here’s a question about Trump’s plan for mass deportations: “If we deport millions of workers, how will the US economy replace them? In particular, won’t deporting low-wage workers increase inflation?”

This topic — questions not yet answered by presidential candidates — is the one big exception to the NYT’s tendency to frame every issue in a both-sides way. Only Harris, not Trump, needs to answer more questions.

That article is just about done and should appear shortly. The weekly summary covers the hurricane, Mayor Adams’ indictment, Israel’s attack on Lebanon, Trump’s race to squeeze as much money as he can out of his sheep before the election, and a few other things, before closing with a collection of memorable lines the late Maggie Smith delivered as Downton Abbey’s dowager countess. That should be out around noon.

One of these weeks, I’m going to make a plan for what I’m going to talk about and then carry it out. Ever since the conventions ended, I’ve been planning to write a state-of-the-race article. But something else always comes up: Trump desecrates Arlington National Cemetery, or Georgia election officials lay the groundwork for another January 6, or something.

This week, an apparent Trump assassination attempt broke too late for me to say anything substantive about it, but the eating-dogs-and-cats thing was just impossible to ignore. So I’ll just have to double up: the state-of-the-race post will come out later this morning, maybe around 11 EDT.

But I also found an interesting slant on the Springfield dogs-and-cats story: The Bug-Eyed and Shameless blog draws a parallel to the Irish Fright of 1688, when tens of thousands of Englishmen became convinced that rogue Irish troops from the British army were marauding through England, destroying everything in their path. Spontaneous militias barricaded bridges and crossroads, waiting for rampaging Irishmen who only existed in their imaginations.

It turns out that disinformation can spread and start a panic even without the internet.

Anyway, I think there’s a lot to be learned from Americans’ propensity to believe bizarre and scary things about non-White immigrants. I’ll collect some in “Lessons from the Haitian Fright”. I’ll try to get it out soon. The state-of-the-race article will follow, and then the weekly summary, which will review the Harris-Trump debate, what little we know about the shots fired in Trump’s vicinity, the Laura Loomer thing, and a few other notes. I’m aiming to have that out by noon, but it may run later.

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that both featured posts this week have “Trump” in the title.

I only meant to write one: “Can Trump Steal Georgia?” There’s a been a lot of talk these last two weeks about changes Trumpists on the Georgia State Election Board have made in the rules governing local election boards, and whether these changes might allow a 2020-on-steroids election crisis should Harris get more votes than Trump in Georgia. Short version: That’s clearly what Trump has in mind, but it’s probably not going to work. Either the courts or Governor Kemp should take care of it.

But then as the week went on and I compiled notes for the weekly summary, I noticed something: There was an outrageous new Trump story every single day, starting with bringing his campaign team to Arlington National Cemetery on Monday. This wasn’t some unified scandal that kept building through the week (though the Arlington thing did that), it was some totally new batshit crazy thing each day.

By Saturday, my single Trump-did-some-crazy-stuff entry in the weekly summary had broken through its levees and was threatening to wipe out the flood plain. So I turned it into a separate article “A Week in Trump’s Declining Spiral”. It should post before 9 EDT, with the Georgia article appearing by 10.

With the flood of Trump news diverted into the featured posts, the weekly summary should be short this week, and come out around noon.

The news media hasn’t been covering itself in glory lately. Reporters have been letting the Trump campaign use them as props in “press conferences”, where the candidate rambles and lies without pushback. The news networks have been treating these shows as newsworthy events and covering them live, while simultaneously complaining that Kamala Harris is too busy campaigning to answer their questions — as if anything Trump said in his news conferences constituted answers to the questions he was asked. And as if they have asked Harris anything of substance in the few openings she has given them.

That’s the topic of this week’s featured article: “Harris, Trump, and Our Broken News Media”. It should be out sometime before 10 EDT.

That leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: Ukraine’s surprising counter-invasion of Russia, the ongoing horror in Gaza, the Democratic Convention that begins today, and a number of other things. I’m running behind today, but I’ll try to get that out by 1.