The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Link round-up

We had nearly-perfect weather this past weekend, so I'm just dumping a bunch of links right now while I catch up with work:

Back to the mines.

One...two..(cough)..three..four...

Fifty years ago today, the Beatles released Revolver:

[I]n their spare time, the Beatles make the greatest rock album ever, Revolver, released on August 5th, 1966 – an album so far ahead of its time, the world is still catching up with it 50 years later. This is where the Beatles jumped into a whole new future – where they truly became the tomorrow that never knows.

Revolver is all about the pleasure of being Beatles, from the period when they still thrived on each other's company. Given the acrimony that took over the band at the end, it's easy to overlook how much all four of them loved being Beatles at this point and still saw their prime perk as hanging with the other Beatles.

There's an endearing hubris all through the music – captured perfectly in the eight-second guitar break that cuts in at the end of "Got to Get You Into My Life," flipping it into a whole new song, or the dizzying guitar frills in "And Your Bird Can Sing." You can hear that in the band's press conferences from their summer tour, as when a reporter in L.A says, "In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. They referred to 'Day Tripper' as being about a prostitute and 'Norwegian Wood' as being about a lesbian. And I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it, and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is being written today." Paul replies with a straight face. "We're just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that's all."

This was one of the first CDs I ever bought—it's #36, from September 1988—and it's still one of my favorites. I think I should listen to it today, in fact.

Cracks in the wall

Voters in Kansas yesterday called borderline-crazy Tea Partier Tim Huelskamp home from the U.S. House:

Frustrated voters in a sprawling Kansas congressional district sent a blunt message on Tuesday that might yet break through the din of this election: At some point the government needs to do something for them.

That sentiment was delivered in the harshest possible terms to Representative Tim Huelskamp, a firebrand Tea Party conservative who lost in a primary landslide after spending most of his six years in Washington feuding with his own leaders. He was so difficult to work with and troublesome that he was kicked off the Agriculture Committee.

The loss of that crucial legislative post, and his vote against a long-term farm bill, did not endear him to the powerful farming interests in a state that likes its federal agricultural aid.

Farm groups joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and another deep-pocketed advocacy group to get behind Roger Marshall, a political novice who promised to work on behalf of Kansas rather than rabble rouse.

In other words, he got fired for lack of job performance. Good riddance. And a dozen other races in Kansas went to moderates, smacking ideologue governor Sam Brownback over the nose with a newspaper.

Could this be the beginning of the end of the crazy?

Later this afternoon, I'll have time to read...

Fallows agrees: Obama's denunciation of Trump was unprecedented

I thought earlier today that this was unique. James Fallows, who knows more about the presidency than most living journalists, agrees:

To the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before.

Presidents of one party call nominees from the other party “bad choices” or “wrong for America” or “risky bets” or in some other way second-best options to their own preferred candidate.

As far as I am aware, none of them has previously declared a major-party nominee categorically unfit.

Again we have two possibilities. Either Barack Obama, with a career’s worth of hyper-deliberate careful phrasing behind him, has suddenly made a lurch toward hyperbole. Or Donald Trump does in fact merit classification in an unfit category of his own.

Obviously I believe the latter is the truth. We’ll get to the pushback and ramifications in subsequent installments, including President Obama’s question to the Republican leaders who “rebuke” Trump but still support him: “What does it say about your party, that this is your standard bearer?”

For now, this is one more for-the-record note of how Campaign 2016 has crossed one more previously unexplored frontier.

It's really that bad.

When was the last time this happened?

President Obama yesterday called Donald Trump "woefully unprepared" and "unfit" to be president:

During a press conference at the White House with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Obama posed the question to the Republican Party: "If you are repeatedly having to say what Trump says is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?"

"The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn't appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, the Middle East, Asia means that he is woefully unprepared to do this job," Obama said.

[He] continued that while there have been Republican presidents he has disagreed with, Trump's actions put him in a different category.

"What does this say about your party that this is your standard bearer? This isn't a situation where you have an episodic gaffe," Obama said. "There has to be a point in which you say 'This is not somebody I can support for president of the United States."

That's an extraordinary statement from a sitting president, and may be unprecedented. I know up until the late 19th century it was common for one side to call the other side unfit—just take a look at some of the things Adams and Jefferson said about each other in the election of 1796—but a sitting president? I don't think this has happened since 1920, and even then, Wilson's slams against Cox came during his own party's nominating process.

Also consider that this president, specifically, doesn't usually get into it like that.

Very interesting.

Drifting evidence

Attention flat-earthers: you can't simultaneously believe in GPS and that the earth is a disk covered by the dome of Heaven. Maps of Australia are the latest casualty in the war between evidence and...well, flat-earthers:

The Australian Plate is moving about 7 centimeters (2.8 inches) northwards every single year. This motion has accumulated over the decades to produce a significant discrepancy between local coordinates on maps and global coordinates in digital navigation systems used by satellites.

At present, this difference amounts to an error of 1.5 meters (4.9 feet). This is enough to cause a problem to anything in Australia that uses GPS-like systems, including smartphones and vehicles.

"If you want to start using driverless cars, accurate map information is fundamental," Dan Jaksa, a member of Geoscience Australia, told BBC News. “We have tractors in Australia starting to go around farms without a driver, and if the information about the farm doesn't line up with the coordinates coming out of the navigation system there will be problems.”

This is yet another instance where, for whatever reason, people whose religious beliefs encounter their direct economic interests seem to make allowances for science.

Next thing you know, insurance companies will start charging more to cover property close to sea level. Oh wait...

The lede says it all

This evening's Times:

Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J. Trump seemed the picture of health.

He stood 188 cm with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10.

But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels.

The diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service as the United States was undertaking huge troop deployments to Southeast Asia, inducting about 300,000 men into the military that year.

The deferment was one of five Mr. Trump received during Vietnam.

And he has the chutzpah to call out John McCain?

Now, I disagree with almost all of McCain's policies, but I have to say, it would make me happy to stick Trump in Viet Cong prison camp for four years and see how he turns out.

All the political norms Trump has broken, all the taboos he's crapped on, all the damage he's inflicted on the American body politic...even if Hillary Clinton wins, is she just the finger in the dam? What happens in 2020? Are we going to go through all this again?

Another first-time-ever Trump loss

This year's Republican National Convention is the first one in modern times after which the nominee polled lower than before it:

Gallup has surveyed on this question since 1984, and the 2016 GOP convention was the first time where a candidate ended up in negative territory.

The voters who felt less likely to vote Trump after the convention outnumbered those who felt even more motivated for the GOP nominee, 51-36, according to a Gallup poll.

The closest a convention came to such unfavorable closing percentages was the 2012 RNC, when 40 percent of adults felt more likely to vote for Mitt Romney and 38 percent felt more wary after the convention, according to Gallup.

Meanwhile, Fallows' 66th Trump Time Capsule post has so many things in it I just can't list them all right now.