The Weekly Sift

This week has two featured articles, and they’re both more-or-less done, so they should come out fairly soon. The first, “Who Do Representatives Represent?” looks at a fascinating discovery by political scientists: liberal and conservative politicians alike think their districts are more conservative than they really are. Following David Sirota’s lead and bringing in an important research result from 2005, I raise this possibility: Maybe those politicians are accurately estimating the views of the constituents they actually represent — the rich.

The second featured article “What Bubbles Look Like From the Inside” asks how you could tell if you were living in a propaganda bubble. Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf has the right test: Are the people you listen to preparing you for what really happens? Or are you constantly adjusting to big surprises — like Obama’s re-election? Now that ten years have passed, let’s take a look back at the Iraq invasion.

None the supposedly “big” stories this week caught my imagination, probably because I never really cared one way or the other about Hugo Chavez. But the week produced its fair share of shorter notes and interesting human-interest stories.

This week’s featured article will be a look at William Baumol’s recent book The Cost Disease, which presents a unique point of view on the country’s long-term fiscal problem: It may not be a problem.

In other words, what if the exponential growth in medical expenses that drives the long-term exponential growth in government spending is just the ordinary course of affairs in an economy with growing productivity? What if medical spending isn’t squeezing out other consumption, but instead our ability to make everything else with less labor is leaving more space in our economy for health care?

Also worth attention this week: The resemblance between Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy might be more than just a trick of the camera angle. Why there’s no White History Month. Fascinating new stuff about dolphin communication. The NRA thinks it has found a wedge issue. And you have no idea just how far out there the discussions on right-wing talk radio are getting.

The John Brennan confirmation hearings have shamed me into recognizing that a lot of the stuff I hated in the Bush administration has continued under Obama. Not that I didn’t know that, and I even wrote about it from time to time, but I had lost my sense of urgency about it.

It’s the same problem Republicans had during the Bush years: Yes, these powers invite abuse, but I trust Obama not to do the worst possible things with them. So I’m against the powers, but I’ve had a hard time maintaining my outrage. During the campaign, no Democrat challenged Obama, and no Republican  — other than Ron Paul, who I don’t trust and can’t accept for a lot of other reasons — recognized these issues at all. So what was the point of bringing it all up?

That’s the wrong way to think about it. This is supposed a government of laws, not of men. Whatever powers we allow Obama to wield will still be there for the next president, and the one after that. Eventually something really bad is going to happen. So the featured article this week will be “Secret Law II: It’s just as bad when Obama does it”. It still needs work, so it may not appear until almost noon.

The weekly summary will be worth looking at just for the opening quotes. There’s also a great snow photo from Nemo, a few more links on guns, an infectious British bar song that both Occupiers and Tea Partiers should be able to dance to, one more reason not to trust Ron Paul, Bill Maher’s hilarious reprisal in an argument Donald Trump really should have left alone, great responses to that Super Bowl ad about farmers, and more.

Barack Obama gave the best speech of his presidency last Monday at the Inauguration. He put the Tea Party on notice that they don’t own the Founders or the story of America.

In today’s lead article, I’ll spell out the two main ways to turn history into a motivating myth. The Tea Party tells a fundamentalist myth about the founding of America, full of larger-than-life heroes and prophets whose achievement we have corrupted and degraded. Their program then revolves around repentance for our socialist sins in hopes of returning to the Founders’ Eden.

In the Second Inaugural, Obama told a progressive myth of American history: The Founders left us not a perfect Republic, but a vision that neither they nor anyone since has fully achieved. We are on a centuries-long journey towards that Promised Land, and our journey will not be complete until everyone has the liberty that the Founders managed to guarantee to straight white male Christian property owners.

In the weekly summary, I’ll also describe how the Senate wimped out on filibuster reform, and why that might have very immediate consequences. (That piece is still growing and may turn into its own article.) Also: a strange new legal argument against same-sex marriage, Kerry’s bold testimony on climate change, Republicans might fail to gerrymander the Electoral College, and Bad Lip Reading takes on the NFL.

It looks like we’re going to be talking about guns for a while. Last week I presented a bunch of my own thoughts, so this week I’m mainly collecting what other people are saying — including a hilarious Onion article about how gorilla sales always spike following a major gorilla attack.

The other thing everybody has been talking about this week is the trillion-dollar coin. I’m not sure how these things happen. Two weeks ago this was a fringy topic, the banker-and-economist version of science fiction. In the last few days, though, it has turned into something every pundit needs to have an opinion about. The White House has even had to deny its intention to mint the coin. Now if only House Republicans would deny their intention to prevent the nation from paying its bills by failing to raise the debt ceiling. The two ideas are both nutty, but at least the coin is harmlessly nutty.

I was going to use the coin/ceiling as an example of a larger point I somehow never express convincingly: the difference between rules and norms in a democracy, and how our norms are dangerously eroding. Fortunately, Chris Hayes did this for me on his show Saturday morning, so I can quote him instead.

In the short notes: the Greek economic problem isn’t overspending; Obama refuses to build a Death Star; Jon Stewart destroys the 67 Republican congressmen who voted against Hurricane Sandy relief; and a new report spells out just how bad American health is compared to other rich countries.