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 national conversation this week was still being dominated by the reaction to the Zimmerman verdict that came out a week ago Saturday. On Friday, President Obama made a surprise appearance at the daily White House press briefing to comment about what the Trayvon Martin case means to the black community and to him personally. So then we had another round of commentary on what the President had said.
I still haven’t decided whether some part of the Zimmerman/Martin commentary comes together into a theme that belongs in a separate article, or if I just have a lot of short notes for the weekly summary.
Race is one of those issues that is always present in America but is seldom news, so everybody has a lot of pent-up things to say about it. Those things came out this week. Some are very insightful and others amazingly clueless. I’ll link to examples of both. Stand Your Ground laws and racial profiling also got a lot of discussion.
Some other important things were also happening. Detroit tried to go bankrupt and a court stopped it. The Senate reached a compromise that maintained the filibuster but broke the logjam on presidential appointments.
And a particularly clumsy bit of marketing by Fox pundit Erick Erickson gave me a hook to look at a continuing issue: the porous boundary between right-wing advocacy and money-making cons. There’s nothing like it on the left, and it’s interesting to consider why.
Probably posts will come out a little later than usual today, but I’ll try to have everything up by noon.
Welcome to any new readers who are checking out the Sift because they liked last week’s featured post “Religious Freedom” means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination, which is now the sixth most popular post since the blog moved to weeklysift.com two years ago. Posts appear on this blog every Monday between mid-morning and early afternoon (New Hampshire time).
This week will have two featured posts: “If You Want to Succeed, Start Failing” begins with the women’s-rights protests in Texas and Moral Monday protests in North Carolina — neither of which can prevail in the short term over Republican majorities in the legislature — and explains why this kind of spitting-into-the-prevailing-wind is the only way the wind ever changes. I’ll close by listing some doomed proposals that progressives should put more energy into.
“The Myth of the Zombie Voter” is one to email to your conservative friends who are sure dead people are voting, because they’ve heard reputable-sounding state officials tell them so on Fox News. Eighteen months ago, the South Carolina attorney general was making the tour of conservative media outlets with a claim that he had found 953 zombie voters in his state. But Columbia, S.C.’s Free Times did the follow-up Fox never does, and got hold of the state police investigation of that list. Let’s just say it returned the zombies to their graves.
This week’s summary post will discuss the Zimmerman verdict and the riots-that-didn’t-happen in response, that strange Iowa case where the state supreme court affirmed an employer’s right to fire a woman for being too attractive, the increasing dysfunction of the House Republican majority and the renewed effort for filibuster reform in the Senate, and yet another push by the Religious Right to use “religious freedom” as an offensive weapon.
“Zombie Voters” is almost ready to go and should be out shortly.
The Sift’s featured article this week will be a look at the Religious Right’s fallback position as it loses its ability to dictate the law on issues like same-sex marriage: redefining “religious freedom” to mean that their values should continue to dominate. By cultivating a passive-aggressive hyper-sensitivity to anything they disapprove of, the traditional-values crowd can claim persecution whenever they are forced to recognize that other people have rights.
In the weekly summary, I punt on the Egyptian revolution/coup/civil war because I have no idea what’s really going on. (Wouldn’t you love to hear Wolf Blitzer admit that sometime?) I also punt on the SFO plane crash, because other sources cover breaking news much better than I do. And I’m still ignoring Zimmerman and Snowden for reasons I explained last week.
So what’s left? Well, the NYT’s Pulitzer-winning Eric Lichtblau pulled back the FISA Court’s curtain of secrecy, and what he found should worry you. Also, the National Journal told us about the ransom demands the House Republicans plan to make in the fall, when they take the debt ceiling hostage again. I found both of those stories far more consequential than the Zimmerman trial.
The best patriotic 4th of July clip I found was still a 2002 recitation of the Declaration of Independence led by Morgan Freeman. And there’s some fun stuff going around. I really enjoyed the world map that takes all the place-names back to their roots, so that Panama becomes “Abundance of Fish” and Australia “Land of the South Wind”.
The Sift returns today after taking last week off.
It’s been an eventful two weeks: The Supreme Court term ended its term with some major decisions and President Obama announced his climate-change plan. But as I drove thousands of miles and listened to the satellite-radio audio of the TV news networks, I was struck by how hard it was sometimes to get any real news at all. Instead, coverage was often dominated by stories that were basically soap opera or gossip: Paula Deen, the search for Edward Snowden, or the painfully slow drip-drip-drip of information from the George Zimmerman trial. I had to listen to Obama’s climate speech on C-SPAN, because the other networks thought they had better things to cover.
My original motive to do something like the Weekly Sift comes from a period in the 90s when I suffered from what I came to call “CNN addiction”. I got obsessed with whatever the hyped “news” story of the day was — O. J. Simpson, Elian Gonzalez, and so on — to the point that I had trouble focusing on the things that I actually needed to think about.
That’s why the Sift filters that stuff out and tries to present just the news that actually does deserve your attention. Normally it’s enough just to ignore the other stuff, but there’s so much of it around right now that I feel the need to do an intervention. So this week’s first article — it should appear within the next hour — is “Are you a ‘news’ addict?”.
The other featured article will be a sober, dispassionate analysis of the Supreme Court’s DOMA and Voting Rights Act decisions called “This Court Sucks”. Reading those two poorly justified decisions on consecutive days — one that I agreed with and one that I didn’t — convinced me that it’s not just my liberal bias talking: The Roberts Court really does suck. Both Roberts and Kennedy wrote political mush that has no business calling itself a legal decision. Scalia’s DOMA dissent was a temper tantrum that should embarrass our entire judiciary. The only opinion in the batch that sounded like a judge writing about the law was Ginsburg’s dissent on the VRA decision.
The weekly summary will look at the impact of those decisions, Obama’s climate announcement, the immigration bill, Obama “scandals” that continue to fizzle out, the best radio station for passing the time on a long drive, and some other stuff I thought was fun.
An afternoon appointment is going to force me to get the Sift out promptly today; the first two articles will go out as fast as I can proof-read them.
And then tomorrow I head to Louisville for the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, which will keep me too busy to put out a Sift next Monday.
Today’s first article will have the unlikely title “Apocalyptic Optimism”. Two recent books have something interesting in common: Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do? and David Graeber’s The Democracy Project are upbeat books based on the premise that America-as-we-know-it is falling apart. I’m classifying them as “apocalyptic” using the royalist/prophetic/apocalyptic framework that journalist Robert Jensen borrowed from theologian Walter Brueggermann. What makes them upbeat? Well, as Graeber says in his last paragraph, “The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die.”
The second article “Herd Immunity Against Online Spying” is more of a how-to. The recent revelations about the NSA have re-awakened my interest in ways to be more anonymous online. I’ll ignore things that require you to become a hacker or convince your friends to use encryption, and focus instead on changes you can make simply on your own: the Tor browser, Tormail, and a neat little program the Air Force uses called Lightweight Portable Security. Maybe you have nothing to hide, but the more people who use these kinds of tools, the harder the NSA’s job gets.
Third, I’ll summarize a bunch of what we learned about the NSA this week and warn you not to get distracted by the hero-or-traitor debate in “Edward Snowden Is Not the Issue”.
The weekly summary is called “Dissidents” after a Thomas Dolby song. Syria, Turkey, DNA patents, the unlikely Brewer-Obama alliance, and why taping your mouth shut is more speech than Wisconsin can tolerate.
This week there’s no avoiding the surveillance issue and the revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. There are three parts to this story: First, just getting the facts straight. Then, how do we think about this? And then, what can we do? I’ll take my first shot at those questions in “PRISM and Privacy”. (Short version: I’m normally a use-the-ordinary-political-process guy, but this issue might call for monkey-wrenching if we can figure out how.)
Another newsy story is the report the College Republicans put out last Monday about how the GOP can appeal to voters born since 1980 — because eventually all voters will have been born since 1980. I’m not a big fan of the College Republicans, but the insight-to-propaganda ratio in this report is pretty high. (I doubt, though, that they will be able to influence their headstrong elders. And I can’t decide whether I think that’s good or bad.) I’ll summarize in an article called “Smart Kids”.
Those two topical stories have crowded out an article I promised last week: a review of Gar Alperovitz’s new book What They Must We Do? That will have to wait until next week, and I’ll probably also be ready to comment on David Graeber’s The Democracy Project by then.
In the short-notes part of the weekly summary, some articles worth staring into space about. Notably, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls what a bad high school student he was and tries to imagine a message that would have moved him, and college professor Ben Warner writes about the complex emotions that arose when one of his students emerged as a notorious white supremacist — there’s no hope for converting the intolerant without exposing them to human kindness, but sometimes that feels wrong too.
The College Republican article will appear in the next hour or so, and I hope to have the PRISM article posted by noon (EDT).
The Weekly Sift 