The Weekly Sift

This week’s Sift was assembled against a headwind. All week I’ve been battling a fairly heavy cold, which I kept falsely promising myself would be gone by Monday. As a result, the amount of quality brain-power available to sift the news has been limited this week, and what I produce today will undoubtedly suffer from that lack. It was not a week for subtle contemplation of whether I’ve been asking the right questions.

But I can testify to this: the “fever dream” is a real phenomenon. My slightly overheated brain, whose stamina was questionable all day long, devoted its nights to constructing Byzantine plots on elaborate sets involving characters ranging from Snoop Dogg to Loki to Doc Adams from “Gunsmoke”. My normal-temperature brain wouldn’t know how to do this.

Anyway, the news: The ridiculous case against the abortion drug mifepristone had oral arguments at the Supreme Court Tuesday. The conservative majority would love to give the anti-abortion movement what it wants here, but this particular case is too badly constructed to allow that outcome. Instead, I expect to see a ruling in June that dismisses the case, but provides the movement with a road map for constructing the next one: “Here, guys. This is what we need to see.” That’s going to be the topic of the featured post.

The summary has some Trump-trial news to plow through, beginning with the NY appeals court reducing Trump’s bond and giving him ten more days to come up with it. (Until Thursday, if I count right.) That happened just before I pushed the “Post” button last Monday, and we still have no explanation of what the court was thinking.

Meanwhile, Trump misbehaved in another case, the NY state Stormy Daniels case that starts jury selection in two weeks. The judge left himself and his family out of the gag order against Trump, so he proceeded to attack the judge’s adult daughter numerous times. I wish I spoke better simian, because this appears to be some kind of primitive assertion of dominance. But I can’t decide whether the right response is to dominate back, say by revoking Trump’s bail for some period of time, or if that’s exactly what the Orange One is trying to provoke. I could go on, but let’s leave that to the summary post.

In the physical world, the big event was the collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore. If this were happening in a red state full of “real” Americans, the next move would be obvious: Congress would quickly pass a bipartisan bill providing money to rebuild. But Baltimore is one of those nasty cities full of Black and Brown Democrats, so things can’t be that simple.

Easter happened, so of course we were treated to a round of accusations of how the Biden administration was insulting Christians, who are the most coddled people in America. But at least they have the new Trump Bible to seek comfort in. Ronna McDaniel was quickly hired and fired by NBC. Israelis demonstrated against the Netanyahu government. And a few other things happened, some of which I even noticed.

Everything will appear at its own pace this morning. I’m vaguely intending to get the featured post out by 9 EDT and the summary by noon, but don’t count on that.

This week lacked one single dominating story. So in the featured post I’ll take a step back and explain “The Other Reason I’m Optimistic” about the fall elections. Short version: Trump has gotten rid of anybody (including Ivanka) who can tell him he’s had a bad idea. That’s a recipe for disaster, and we’re already starting to see it play out. That post should appear shortly.

The weekly summary has a few things to choose from. Fani Willis got reprimanded and her ex-lover had to leave the prosecution team, but the case will go forward. Ron DeSantis suffered some major defeats in his war on woke. The House passed a TikTok ban. And Russia had what it called an election. There was a big flap over Trump’s “bloodbath” prediction, which I’ll unravel as best I can.

One other thing: One of my favorite observers of the tech scene, Cory Doctorow, has both a novel and a nonfiction book out. They’re worth a look.

I’ll try to get the weekly summary posted by noon EDT.

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.

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.

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.