The Daily Parker

The History Channel sends me a newsletter every morning listing a bunch of things that happened "this day in history." Today we had a bunch of anniversaries:

• 30 years ago, Pulp Fiction debuted.
• 47 years ago, Anita Bryant got a much-deserved pie in the face.
• 60 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Nobel Peace Prize, the same day Nikita Khrushchev got deposed.
• 80 years ago, German General Erwin Rommel committed suicide rather than face trial for his role in the plot to assassinate Hitler in June 1944.

And finally, today is the 958th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which is the reason this blog is written in a Celtic-Norse-Germanic-French creole, not just a Celtic-Norse-Germanic creole.

Cassie, yesterday:

Two guest essays in yesterday's New York Times caught my attention. The first, by Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter who wrote the "unintended work of fiction" The Art of the Deal, pivots off the new XPOTUS biopic to warn us, once more, about the psychopath topping the Republican ticket:

What struck me from the first day I met Mr. Trump was his unquenchable thirst to be the center of attention. No amount of external recognition ever seemed to be enough. Beneath his bluster and his bombast, he struck me as one of the most insecure people I’d ever met — and one of the least self-aware. He’d crossed the bridge from Queens to Manhattan but he remained the product — and even the prisoner — of his childhood experiences. As he told a reporter in 2015, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

I buy that.

The past is prologue and, as Mr. Trump has said, he’s essentially the same person today that he was as a child. That is the central warning “The Apprentice” poses, and it comes just weeks before the election.

Ever since Mr. Trump announced in 2015 that he was running for president, I’ve argued publicly that the only limitation on his behavior as president — then and now — is what he believes he can get away with. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he believes he can get away with a lot more today. If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination — damn the consequences — in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough.

The second comes from Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan, arguing that the legislature should take back the power that the judiciary have essentially stolen from it:

“Make no mistake about it: We have a very strong argument that Congress by statute can undo what the Supreme Court does,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said recently as he announced the introduction of the No Kings Act. The measure declares that it is Congress’s constitutional judgment that no president is immune from the criminal laws of the United States. It would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to declare the No Kings Act unconstitutional. Any criminal actions against a president would be left in the hands of the lower federal courts. And these courts would be required to adopt a presumption that the No Kings Act is constitutional.

It might seem unusual for Congress to instruct federal courts how to interpret the Constitution. But the No Kings Act follows an admirable tradition, dating back to the earliest years of the United States, in which Congress has invoked its constitutional authority to ensure that the fundamental law of our democracy is determined by the people’s elected representatives rather than a handful of lifetime appointees accountable to no one.

In recent years, however, the court has seemed particularly uninterested in forbearance, as five or six justices routinely upend Congress’s longstanding interpretations of the Constitution. For example, nearly 50 years after Congress and the president first decided that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was appropriate legislation and after several more Congresses, presidents and Supreme Court majorities agreed that the law was constitutional, five justices in 2013 invalidated a crucial provision of the law.

Congress could pass a statute declaring that when asked to apply a federal law, a judge must do so unless the judge believes the law is unconstitutional beyond honest dispute. To ensure there is no honest dispute, Congress could require the judge to enforce the law unless the Supreme Court certifies by a supermajority or unanimous vote that there are no reasonable grounds to defend it. In this way, Congress would require the justices to show, by their votes, that the incompatibility of the law with the Constitution is beyond honest dispute.

The No Kings Act is well grounded in our constitutional tradition. Rather than allow any president or justices to hold themselves above the law, Congress should force them all to live by it.

Bowie and Renan only hint at something obvious to anyone who has read our Constitution: in the document, the legislature comes first, the executive second, and the judiciary a distant third. I agree with them that Congress needs to remind the other two branches of that fact.

My day got away from me yesterday afternoon, so all this shiznit piled up:

• In the first of two gobsmacking First Amendment stories this week, the Florida Dept of Health has threatened television stations with criminal prosecution after they aired a pro-choice ad that appears to be working.
• In the second horrific First Amendment violation story, the state of Oklahoma is backpedaling after mandating that every school kid gets a Bible that just happens to look like the one the XPOTUS is hawking. (Note to international readers: the First Amendment to our Constitution not only protects free speech, but also prohibits the government from establishing an official religion. Handing Bibles to school kids is a prima facie violation of the Establishment Clause.)
• The XPOTUS has such a credibility gap that his own supporters don't believe he'll do the things he absolutely would do if re-elected.
• Mara Gay traces the downfall of New York mayor Eric Adams to his time with the police force, and says the city deserves better.
• Hurricane Milton destroyed Tropicana Field's roof, leading one to hope that they tear the monstrosity down and build something people would actually want to visit.

Finally, it turns out the principal difference between the 12-year-saga to replace the Ravenswood train station and the 15-year-saga to build the Peterson/Ridge station was that the Ravenswood station actually started construction 13 years ago. Streetsblog explains in detail why Chicago can't have nice transit things, and why I may never get to ride on a fully-electrified express train from Evanston to the Loop.

Following a coronal mass ejection on Monday, tonight's aurora forecast is epic:

Unfortunately, I have an event just outside the Loop that ends around 10. By the time I got home, loaded up the dog, and drove to a place without streetlights, it would be around 1am. So no photos; but maybe I'll see some aurorae when I get home.

We'll see. Fortunately, we have had perfectly clear skies for 4 straight days, with no significant cloud cover forecast until tomorrow afternoon.

Aurorae peak at local midnight, which tonight in Chicago will be 00:38. I'll check around 11pm.

Julia Ioffe despairs of Israel ever coexisting peacefully with its neighbors:

Unfortunately, I’ve learned that ideology, for both the left and the right, is far more important than human life. How many times have you heard the left say that there are no civilians on the Israeli side, because they are all complicit in “settler colonialism”? Or heard from the right that civilians in Gaza and southern Lebanon are all complicit in the crimes of Hamas or Hezbollah? Suddenly, in a region of millions and millions of people, there are no true civilians anywhere, not even among children.

I wonder: Will Israel, which was created as a safe haven for Jews, always be like this? Will it always be destined to fight wars or maintain a military occupation over millions of people while squinting and pretending that it is a first-world, democratic country and a delightful place to live? How many Israelis—at least those who aren’t messianic zealots and psychopaths—will want to keep having children whose destiny is manning checkpoints and protecting settlers in the West Bank, or participating in yet another “limited operation” in Lebanon, the way their fathers did, or, for that matter, dismantling Hamas—or whatever organization replaces it—for the hundredth time?

The Gaza war is 368 days old, and shows no sign of getting better.

For once, Chicago's legendary corruption isn't the biggest news story of the day.

Let's start with New York, where the Adams administration seems determined to set new standards for public corruption, going so far as to float the "we're only a little bit criminal" defense:

The indictment alleged that, for years, starting during his tenure as Brooklyn borough president, Adams had cultivated a relationship with a representative of the Turkish government who arranged for him to receive some $123,000 worth of illegal gifts, such as discounted business-class tickets on Turkish Airlines and a stay in the Bentley Suite at the St. Regis in Istanbul. When Adams ran for mayor, his Turkish supporters allegedly channeled illegal donations to his campaign through straw donors with the connivance of Adams himself. In return, prosecutors say, Adams performed a number of favors as a public official, most notably pressuring FDNY inspectors to certify that the new Turkish Consulate near the U.N. was safe without conducting the necessary inspections.

The mayor’s defenders described all this as a whole lot of nothing. His defense attorney, Alex Spiro, ridiculed the indictment, calling it the “airline-upgrade corruption case,” and filed an immediate motion to dismiss the bribery charge, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that enlarged the bounds of acceptable gift taking. (He had less to say about the foreign donations.)

At the other end of the Acela, retired US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner and Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck warn the US Supreme Court that they are losing credibility, and thus, farther down the road, the power to do their jobs:

We have both been critical of the current justices for how their behavior, both on and off the bench, has undermined public faith in the court. Too many of its most important rulings can be chalked up to nothing more than the fact that Republican presidents appointed six of the justices, and Democrats appointed only three. And then there are the alarming ethical lapses of two of the six justices in the majority — lapses that have close connections to their relationships with right-wing megadonors.

A court that loses its institutional credibility is a court that will be powerless when it matters most.

A court without legitimacy is a court unable to curb abuses of political power that its rulings may well have enabled. It is a court that will be powerless when the next Chip Roy calls for disobedience because it will have long since alienated those who would otherwise have defended it. It would become a court powerless to push back against the tyrannies of the majority that led the founders to create an independent judiciary in the first place.

Will Republican Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch heed the warnings? Probably not. At least Special Counsel Jack Smith seems to have figured out how to get around some of their illegitimacy:

Smith’s filing tries to slice through the Court’s security shield regarding the insurrection. Skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion, the filing demolishes the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity. Outwardly, Smith’s filing respects the Court’s dubious ruling about the immunity of official presidential acts. Legally, Smith had no choice but to operate within that ruling, a fact that sharply limited how far his filing could go. But even though it never challenges the conservative majority directly, the filing makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions whatsoever. It persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself.

The crucial point to which the filing unfailingly returns is that none of Trump’s actions listed in the revised indictment, even those that the Court cited as “official,” deserves immunity. As Smith makes clear, the Framers of the Constitution deliberately precluded the executive branch from having official involvement in the conduct of presidential elections. The reason was obvious: Any involvement by a president would be an open invitation to corruption. To make the case that any such involvement falls within a president’s official duties would seem, at best, extremely difficult.

It is here that Smith turns the Court’s Trump v. United States ruling to his own advantage.

Only 28 more days until what I think we can comfortably predict will be the XPOTUS's last election—one way or another. But I think we'll be stuck with corruption for a very long time, until people get fed up with it enough to demand and enforce real anti-corruption laws.

The extreme-right-wing US Supreme Court begins a new term today, which we can all expect to continue the trends they have been on for the last 30 years. All we need is a razor-thin margin in one or two swing states on the 5th, and then, as George HW Bush said once, "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah! Now it's off to the races!"

Meanwhile:

• A new book argues that the "originalism" practiced by many Republican judges, like Justices Alito and Thomas, has absolutely no basis in historical fact. But we knew that already.
• Josh Marshall wants everyone to calm down about the Harris campaign: "[Y]ou thinking she’s screwing up or stalling or whatever, if you are, is probably your angst talking more than some real analysis of what’s happening in the campaign."
• Republican-leaning columnist Matt Bai thinks Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) made a strategic error by choosing to run for the US Senate as a Republican instead of as an independent.
• Consumer DNA analysis company 23andMe doesn't seem to have a plan for what to do with my personal data if they get into trouble or shut down.
• Kate Kaplan of the Nielsen-Norman Group has some excellent advice about iconography in software.

Finally, Cloudflare announced late last week that it blocked the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in history. The attack, whose packets came mainly from Russia, peaked at 3.8 Tbps, beating the previous record of 3.47 Tbps against a Microsoft Azure customer.

I had a busy Friday and a busier Saturday, so I just got to these this morning:

• The entire Chicago Public Schools board resigned Friday in the latest salvo in the fight between Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) and CPS CEO Pedro Martinez.
• The Supreme Court rejected two emergency applications from polluters who want to continue polluting while their cases work through the system.
• Brett Stephens looks back at a year of increasing anti-Semitism disguised as "anti-Zionism." (This is exactly why I'm reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.)
• Amazon has ordered its entire workforce back to the office, fomenting a backlash and worrying people who work better remotely (like I do).
• Metra, Chicago's heavy-rail operator, got a Federal grant to investigate expanding O'Hare to downtown service on the North Central line.
• National Highway Transportation Safety Administration regulations make it nearly impossible for carmakers to offer the super-efficient mini-cars that millions of people drive in Europe and Asia.

Finally, US Senator and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance (R-OH) has a lot to say about families, but when you actually look at how he lives his own life, it makes you wonder about his sincerity. Actually, that's not entirely true: everything the man says makes you wonder about his sincerity, but in the case of family policies he's even more obtusely hypocritical than usual.

I didn't get up at 2am to drive to Mt Rainier like one of my friends, but I did spend almost all day outside yesterday. Cassie and I met friends (one human, one dog) in Elmhurst for a 9-kilometer walk down the Prairie Path in the morning. And my car flipped 30,000 km on the way back from the walk:

That 2.1 L/100 km (112 MPG) is for the entire life of the car. In fact, I used some gasoline yesterday for the first time since June 15th, so this year my car is getting closer to 1.5 L/100 km (151 MPG)—and of course infinite MPG for over three months. And of course, 30,000 km since 22 December 2018 is an average of 14.2 km per day, which is exactly how I avoid using gasoline most of the time.

Finally, yesterday evening Cassie and I went to Spiteful Brewing to enjoy the 24°C weather:

Today we're heading to the dog beach and the Dock, which closes for the season tonight.