I’m still running a little behind from the time change yesterday.
The big news this week was Biden’s State of the Union address, which I saw as a major victory for the President. His oratory will never be studied and copied like Obama’s, but it was an extremely effective speech that (in addition to its content) belied all the claims that Biden’s age won’t let him to do the job. Far from the addled old man of Republican imagination, Biden was master of the situation. He didn’t just read somebody else’s words from a teleprompter, but bantered with Republican hecklers and largely got the better of them for more than an hour.
What’s more, the speech demonstrated Biden’s major advantage going into the general election campaign: He has a good story to tell, full of clear accomplishments, and a better vision for the future than Trump can offer.
So the featured post will discuss that speech, as well as the embarrassing and dishonest response from Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama. That post should appear between 10 and 11 EDT.
The weekly summary will talk about the beginning of the Biden/Trump campaign, the state of the Trump trials, the growing Democratic disgust with the NYT’s campaign coverage, an appeals court’s slap at DeSantis’ STOP-woke law, anti-Semitism in America, the crazy guy Republicans nominated to be North Carolina’s governor, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
I’m restraining myself from writing a post about the Supreme Court’s decision to delay Trump’s January 6 trial for another few months. I’m sufficiently angry at them that I doubt my comments would add much to my readers’ understanding of the situation. I’m also annoyed at myself for underestimating the extent to which the Court has been corrupted by partisanship. Plenty of other people are ranting about this, and I’ll link to some of them.
At the same time, focusing on something else this week seemed silly, so I won’t have a featured post.
I will cover the Court’s decision in the weekly summary, because it’s news. I’ll do my best to stick to the facts, acknowledging my personal opinion, but not belaboring it. I’ll also review where Trump’s other criminal cases stand. Short version: The least significant one is the only one that’s on track. (It’s weird to think that there’s a “least significant” criminal case against an apparent major-party nominee, or that people can (unfairly) dismiss the Stormy Daniels case as “just about sex”, but that’s the world we live in now.) Also, I continue to wonder where Trump will get the money to cover his NY civil judgments.
Another confession: I have to force myself to look at Gaza. I really don’t want to believe what’s happening there. That’s why my comments on the situation tend to be terse.
Other stuff the summary covers: Mitch McConnell is retiring so that somebody worse can get that job. People are still reacting to the Alabama IVF decision. The NYT decided that a favorable poll for Trump was the most important thing happening in the world that day. “Migrant crime” is the latest conservative bogus issue, replacing voter fraud and critical race theory.
I almost used Utah tumbleweed inundation as a closing, but I eventually decided that — as funny as it may seem when you’re 2000 miles away — it’s actually news. So instead the closing will introduce you to an amazing set of explanatory science videos.
I should get the summary out before noon.
This week we got an example of just how far things can go once religious zealots get power in a state: The Alabama Supreme Court found that frozen embryos in an IVF clinic count as children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
If you’re a generous-minded sort, you may have seen all the headlines and suspected that the media was piling on: Probably, you think, the actual decision is not quite as bad as all that.
I have some bad news for you: I read the full 131-page decision, and it’s worse than the headlines make it sound. One highlight is the state’s Chief Justice invoking “the wrath of a holy God” — a phrase I never thought I’d see in a legal opinion. I’ll summarize what I found in this week’s featured post, “Sweet Home, Gilead”. That should appear between 9 and 10 EST.
That leaves a lot for the weekly summary to cover: The Biden impeachment case now looks like a phenomenally successful Russian disinformation operation. Where is Trump going to get the half-billion dollars he needs in order to file his appeals? There’s a weird anti-Biden bias in the mainstream media, reminiscent of the “Hillary’s emails” delusion of 2016. Speaker Johnson is still blocking Ukraine aid on the second anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion. And the week’s major good news: Wisconsin is about to become a democracy again.
I’ll try to get that out by noon, but I’m feeling slow today.
I’m trying to write less about Trump and his trials, but this week that really was the news. Trump and his companies got fined hundreds of millions of dollars for fraud. Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis testified to defend herself against salacious claims that she should be disqualified from the Georgia RICO case against Trump. The New York case stemming from Trump trying to hide his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels will be the first of Trump’s criminal cases to go to trial (on March 25). Trump’s lawyers and Jack Smith traded filings to the Supreme Court on presidential immunity. And we’re still waiting for the Court to rule on whether the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from running for office again.
You can be forgiven for seeing a Trump-trial headline and thinking, “Wait. Which case is this again?”
Most weeks I try to keep all this in the weekly summaries, but this week sheer length made that infeasible. So the featured post is “A Big Week in the Trump Trials”. That should appear shortly. BTW, I think the mainstream media has done a bad job explaining how Judge Engoron came up with his $355 million figure, which he didn’t just pull out of the air, so I think most people will learn something from this post.
It’s not like nothing else happened this week. Putin critic Alexei Nevalny died in a Siberian prison, and Russian forces captured a Ukrainian city, calling extra attention to the Putin sympathizers in the House and their continuing blockade against resupplying the Ukrainian forces resisting Russian conquest. The Democrats flipped George Santos’ House seat, shrinking the Republican House majority by one, and raising questions about what this means for the November elections. The guy whose testimony was the lynchpin of James Comer’s effort to impeach President Biden was indicted for making the whole thing up. The group behind the whole 2000 Mules election-fraud conspiracy theory admitted in court that they have no evidence. There was a mass shooting at the Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas City. Ezra Klein posted the first Biden-shouldn’t-run argument that has made sense to me. And a few other things.
That will all be in the weekly summary, which I’ll try to get out by noon EST. I’m planning to do something a little different with the closing this week: I want to start a conversation about dealing with fear and finding courage as we move towards the November elections. I hope a lot of readers will comment.
In a week in which the DC Appeals Court ruled against former President Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity”, the biggest headline ended up being about Biden: Special Counsel Hur’s report found no crime worth indicting in his retention of classified documents, but threw the Trump campaign a bunch of red meat anyway by gratuitously opining on Biden’s age and memory. That produced a firestorm of speculation about Biden’s mental competence, which he exacerbated in a press conference by saying “Mexico” when he meant “Egypt”.
It’s been weird watching how Biden’s mistakes are covered differently from Trump’s. After all, how can you fault Trump for saying the wrong word (which he does all the time), when the words he intends to say are so evil, like calling immigrants “vermin”, or encouraging Russia to attack our NATO allies.
Anyway, it turns out I know something about people who use the wrong words as they get older. Aside from doing it occasionally myself (as most people of all ages do), I dealt with my Dad in his final years, when he had an extreme case of aphasia. Aphasia (inability to find the right words) can look like dementia (inability to think clearly), but it’s completely different, and anybody who has dealt with aphasic people can easily distinguish between the two. To sum up today’s featured post: Biden’s problems with words do not bother me. I think Democrats should let this wave of pundit hysteria pass and get on with the task of saving democracy from fascism.
That post should appear shortly.
That leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: the appeals court ruling and what it means for Jack Smith’s DC indictment, Israel pushing its attacks into the last refuge of most Gazans and the Biden administration’s slow separation from the Netanyahu government, Trump outdoing himself with outrageous comments about NATO and Haley’s husband’s military deployment, Tucker Carlson’s Putin interview, the Jesus ads in Super Bowl, and a few other things.
That has to be out by noon, because I’ve got stuff to do today.
As far as I know, nothing happened in Gaza this week that hasn’t been happening for months. But for some reason, this week it all became too much for me. I can’t watch it any more. It has to stop.
Of course, I have no power to make it stop, but at a minimum I can say something about it. But what? The temptation was to over-extend myself and lay out some six-point this-is-what-everybody-should-do plan. As if I know. I’ve done my best to resist that temptation.
Instead, the featured post this week is “Gazan Lives Matter”. It’s a simple cry of empathic pain. Tens of thousands of Gazans are dead from this war, and two million more are in the path of two other Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine and Pestilence. Too much of the discussion of this war continues as if their lives do not matter. That has to stop.
That article is almost done, and should appear around 9 or so EST.
The weekly summary is full of topics that events have forced on me: I didn’t really want to write about Taylor Swift again, or speculate about why court decisions on Trump are taking so long, or catalog the ways that the US is getting drawn into a wider war in the Middle East. The South Carolina primary established pretty firmly that Democrats have no appetite for replacing Joe Biden, so maybe we can stop talking about that. I added a section of articles worth thinking about; I think I’d like to make that a regular feature. I’ll try to get that out around noon or so.
I had an unusually busy week for purely local reasons, so there won’t be a featured post this week. (Among other activities, I had a cooking article published on the online local news site. This fact should be hilarious to anybody who knows me. I mention only in passing the incident where I accidentally set fire to an oven mitt.)
The weekly summary will discuss the $83 million jury award to E. Jean Carroll, which mostly consists of punitive damages to get Donald Trump to stop defaming her. I’ll also mention the other cases we’re currently waiting on, including the NY civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization, whose verdict is expected sometime this week.
There were a number of developments in the Gaza War this week. The House looks ready to junk a Senate deal on the border, which is simultaneously an immediate crisis and not worth doing anything about until the next Trump administration. Nikki Haley soldiers on, and may be more fun to listen to now that she no longer has any real chance to win. The economic news continues to be good, and Democrats seem more optimistic about Biden. And Texas is reviving the nullification issue South Carolina raised against Andy Jackson. The week’s best suggestion: If we simultaneously let Texas secede and admit Puerto Rico, we don’t have to change the flag.
I’ll try to get that out before noon.
So the Iowa caucuses happened, and the New Hampshire primary is tomorrow. Ordinarily, this is one of the hottest periods of the political calendar, but this year it’s kind of a sideshow, because Biden and Trump each seem to be steaming towards an inevitable rematch. There are tea leaves to be read about how much enthusiasm Democrats have for Biden and what segments of the GOP might turn against Trump in the general election, but it doesn’t look like the results are going to say anything about the two parties’ nominations. Even if Haley pulls an upset tomorrow, the most interesting question will be Trump’s response: Will he have such an extreme temper tantrum (at a moment when everybody is watching) that it will raise doubts about his fitness for office in some of his previously unshakeable supporters ?
The Gaza War continues, with enormous suffering for the people of Gaza and with rising frustration from Israelis whose main goal is to get the hostages back. Cracks are starting to form in the unity government, as well as cracks in US support for Israel.
The thing I’m going to focus on this week, though, is far less sexy than elections or wars: The Supreme Court seems to be on the verge of reversing a long-standing legal principle called the Chevron Doctrine. Discussions of Chevron quickly turn into arcane legalese and people tune out, so the challenge is to explain not just what’s happening, but why you should care enough to learn the details. At the risk of sounding alarmist, this is the two-line explanation I’ve come up with: You know how government regulations keep corporations from making more money by killing people like you? Well, the Court is about to screw that up.
That screwing-up is part of a decades-long program that involves a couple of other arcane bits of legalese: the nondelegation principle and the major questions doctrine. I’ll unpack all that in “Monkey-wrenching the Regulations that Protect Our Lives”, which should appear around 10 EST.
The weekly summary will look at Iowa and New Hampshire, all the stuff we’re waiting for in the Trump trials, and the Gaza War, then give you a hopeful quote about climate change from the editor of Heatmap News, before closing with a very convincing photo of a place that doesn’t actually exist, but should. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
A lot happened this week. US forces attacked rebels in Yemen, a country I doubt many Americans could find on a map or distinguish from a list of made-up countries. It all has something to do with the Gaza War, our regional rivalry with Iran, and shipping in the Red Sea, so it’s not a situation Biden can easily explain to the American people.
A partial government shutdown is scheduled for Friday, unless Congress passes another continuing resolution. It doesn’t look like anyone learned anything from the last two brushes with a shutdown in September and November. Speaker Johnson is in more-or-less the same position Speaker McCarthy was in September, and is doing more-or-less the same things that caused MAGA extremists to kick him out.
The Gaza War continues, but there’s a new wrinkle in the politics: South Africa has gone to the International Court of Justice and accused Israel of anti-Palestinian genocide. If that Court would happen to rule against Israel, it has few mechanisms for enforcing its judgment. But it would be a huge propaganda blow against both Israel and its supporters in the Biden administration.
The Trump trials continue. The civil fraud trial in New York wrapped up, and we await a decision from the judge. (It’s a bench trial, so there’s no jury.) The second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial starts tomorrow. The first trial (at which Carroll was awarded $5 million in a judgment Trump is appealing) was about statements he made about her after leaving office. This is about statements he made while he was president; the case was slowed down by his claims of presidential immunity. Meanwhile, we await a federal appeals court’s decision on whether Trump’s presidential immunity will derail the federal case against him for his January 6 conspiracy.
But the featured post this week is my review of Tim Alberta’s new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, which critiques the Trump take-over of the Evangelical movement from the inside. That should be out before 9 EST. The weekly summary will cover everything else, and I’ll try to get it out by noon.
I’m back, after my first real two-week vacation in a long time. I didn’t give a talk or preach a sermon somewhere. I just drove down the east coast to spend Christmas with friends in Florida, and then drove back to New England for New Years. I’ve been watching alligators, reading novels, and working on my Chinese cooking. My greatest accomplishment has been a wokful of dan-dan noodles.
But now I’m back, and the world has generated three weeks of news. My plan is to spend this week’s articles catching up, and to wait (mostly) until next week to implement any new plans or insights. (My main resolution is to devote more time to hopeful things people are doing, particularly with regard to the climate.) Because the main news of the last three weeks has centered on the topics that were wearing me down when I left: Donald Trump and the Gaza War. (The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to take Trump off the ballot was literally the day after the last Weekly Sift.)
So this is a clean-out-the-backlog week. The first featured post “Catching Up on Donald Trump” will look at the 14th-Amendment disqualification issue, the House Democrats’ report partially accounting for the millions Trump took from foreign governments while he was president, and a few other odds and ends. I’m hoping to get it out around 9 EST.
The second featured post will be “Catching Up on the Gaza War”. Here, I’ll be trying to make up for two months of closing my eyes and hoping for the best. (In retrospect, I really needed that vacation.) Obviously, the best isn’t happening, so it’s time to back up and reframe — starting with a post I wrote for Daily Kos before the Sift existed, “Terrorist Strategy 101”. I’ll try to get something out by 11 — either the whole thing or a Part One that I’ll continue next week.
The weekly summary will include some 2023-becomes-2024 links, a look at Governor DeWine’s surprising veto of Ohio’s anti-trans law, continuing good news on the economy, and few other things. I’ll try to get that out between noon and one.
The Weekly Sift 