I’ve mentioned in several posts over recent weeks and months that we’re going to be experimenting with some new ways to cover the news, provide guidance in following the news and breaking down what I’ve called the ‘fourth wall’ of news.  We’re going to start with what we’re calling ‘Editor’s Briefs’. 

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Yesterday I wrote about what I called President Trump’s ‘weaponization of military sacrifice,’ how he transmutes the guilt, admiration and vicarious horror of loss into rage at dissenters. I focused on a tweet Trump RT’d with a photograph of a Marine veteran who’d lost his legs in combat. Allegra Kirkland found retired Marine Staff Sgt. John Jones, the man in the photograph, and asked his reactions to being pulled into President Trump’s attacks on the NFL and players who protest.

Jon Chait has a new article about the definition of ‘white supremacy’. It caught my attention when I saw Chait and Adam Serwer of The Atlantic debating Chait’s argument on Twitter.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on the question.

The German election, like the earlier election in the United Kingdom, leaves the country without a clear direction or mandate. Most of the post-election stories have highlighted the showing of the Alternative fur Deutschland, the rightwing populist party that by winning 13 percent has become Germany’s third largest party. That’s certainly worrisome, but I’d give equal billing to the revival of the Free Democrats (FDP), which could doom any prospect for economic reform in Europe.

Courtesy of the White House, here’s a photo (below) of a dinner President Trump held yesterday at the White House with what the White House press office called “grassroots leaders.”

Even from the best of politicians, ‘grassroots’ is the most abused of words. But these are the the most establishment leaders in the professional right in DC.

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Maine senator confirms she will vote no on Graham-Cassidy bill.

I strongly recommend reading this whole oped by Eric Reid, Colin Kaepernick’s 49ers teammate who joined him kneeling during the national anthem. But I wanted to quote these two paragraphs …

Listening just now to Sarah Sanders press briefing, I think she just said that the anthem protests were no longer about police abuses or police brutality and had changed into something else over the last few weeks (rush transcript).

QUESTION: The president said that kneeling has nothing to do with race. Colin Kaepernick took to his knees in these games, many of these games, speifically because he said black people in this country were not being treated fairly by police. How is that not an issue of race?

SANDERS: I think the focus has long since changed and certainly the message in a lot of what has been communicated over these last several weeks through this process, through these protests by these players.

As longtime readers know, I’ve long been interested in crime rates and particularly murder rates in the United States – regional breakdown, causes, explanations of why they’ve risen and fallen over the decades and centuries.

For more than 150 years, the United States resisted the creation of a large standing army. To a great degree, technology and especially geography made it unnecessary. The United States maintained a significant, though relatively small Navy and a small professional army which served as a nucleus around which a large force could be assembled during national emergencies. This happened during the Civil War, World War I and again in World War II. The World War II army was never fully demobilized and a large standing army (all four services) has been the new normal for three-quarters of a century. Most of us take this as a given. But it is worth remembering why early Americans thought standing armies were at least in tension with democracy if not outright inimical to it.