The Weekly Sift

My worry is that this gets filed away as a freak event, when the same small river flooded 14 months earlier and nobody moved a gauge onto it.

Bullies seem to have a finely tuned awareness of where the margins of permission lie as regards abuses, and choose their targets based on whose suffering will be most broadly acceptable to others. - A.

Here is the thing.

There’s a maddening tendency among elected officials and the political press to equate “far left” and “far right” candidates as occupying equally extreme, dangerous ends of the political spectrum, though those in the former camp mostly want universal heal…

Tyranny is the handmaiden of the moneyed interests. - Robert Reich "The real meaning of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan" This week's featured post is "Why the freak-out over El-Sayed?"

So, how did we get here?

People [are] calling us the “far left” and we are literally just out here talking about funding public schools and keeping hospitals open and paving roads. - Jess Piper There is no featured post this week.

You may think the camps are for someone else.

Arms are of little value in the field unless there is wise counsel at home. - Cicero This week's featured post is "Graham Platner's exit, and the debate it leads to".

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. - the Declaration of Independence This week's featured post is "Capitalism vs.

If you don’t want to be prosecuted for crimes, don’t do crimes. - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, responding to Republican fears of investigations by a future Democratic Congress This week's featured post is "Immigration is about Race".

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values.

guy has a trillion dollars, 0 friends, and has never landed a joke.

A man does what’s right when no one is watching.

The president is suing himself and compensating other people for legal claims that have not been identified from people that we don’t know.

We are deeply concerned that what is really being rededicated is a nation to a very narrow and ideological part of the Christian faith that betrays our nation’s fundamental commitment to religious freedom. - Rev.

Good people, people who go to church, people who love their families, people who believe they’re good have, throughout the history of this country, done deeply, profoundly wrong things to Black Americans, and they told themselves it was about something el…

Our difficulty with the Court today rises not from the Court as an institution but from human beings within it.

The best way to achieve what is now the central war aim — opening the Strait — would have been simply not to start the war in the first place. - Josh Marshall This week's featured posts are "Where the Gerrymandering Battle Stands After Virginia" and "Fixi…

Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth. - Pope Leo XIV This week's featured post is "Can Democrats gain from MAGA discontent?"

The war has accelerated or made evident a trend that was already there, which is that the whole Trump administration is about a kind of rebalancing of power, so that we are less powerful and our rivals are more powerful. - Timothy Snyder There is no featu…

No sifts for two weeks.

The transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure.

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim.

Boil it all down and what do we have?