The Daily Parker

I'm setting this to post overnight so I can read these things tomorrow morning:

• President Biden published an op-ed in Saturday's Washington Post, laying out the necessary steps for ending the Gaza war, with the nuance, sensitivity, and command of the facts we should expect from any President.
• Robert Wright lays out the history of Hamas, with particular emphasis on how American and Israeli meddling shaped it into the awful group of people it has become.
• Josh Marshall points out that "the day after" the Gaza war looks pretty bleak, because (a) Netanyahu has no reason to plan for something he doesn't want in the first place; (b) none of the Palestinians' "allies" want to get involved in Gaza; (c) the US and the UK, which could potentially occupy the strip until it can stand on its own, really can't for lots of obvious reasons; and (d) Hamas has every reason to prolong the war as long as it can.
• Former first lady Rosalynn Carter died at 99. James Fallows, who worked for her husband in the White House, has a remembrance.
• Bloomberg City Lab explains the design and social history of London's Mansion Block apartment buildings.

Finally, if you come across a mostly-empty parking lot this coming Friday, post a photo of it with the tag #BlackFridayParking to raise awareness that we have way too much parking in the US. Maybe it can nudge policymakers towards necessary zoning and parking minimums changes to help us get out of the urban planning disaster of the 20th Century?

We've switched around our RTO/WFH schedule recently, so I'm now in the office Tuesday through Thursday. That's exactly the opposite of my preferred schedule, it turns out. So now Tuesdays feel like Mondays. And I still can't get the hang of Thursdays.

We did get our bi-weekly build out today, which was boring, as it should be. Alas, the rest of the world wasn't:

• The XPOTUS has vowed revenge on everyone who has wronged him, pledging to use the US government to smite his enemies, as if we needed any more confirmation that he should never get elected to any public office ever again.
• Meanwhile, the XPOTUS looked positively deranged in his fraud trial yesterday, as the judge continued to question him about things that cut right to his fraudulent self-image.
• Walter Shapiro thinks comparing President Biden to Jimmy Carter miss the mark; Harry Truman might be a better analogy.
• Lawyers for former Chicago Alderperson Ed Burke have asked that a display in the Dirksen Federal Building celebrating the US Attorney's successes securing public-corruption convictions be covered during Burke's public-corruption trial.
• Adams County, Illinois, judge Robert Adrian faces discipline from the state Judicial Inquiry Board after reversing the conviction of a man who sexually assaulted his girlfriend because the teenaged assailant's 148 days in jail was "plenty of punishment."
• In a move that surprised no one, WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday, after failing to "elevate the world's consciousness" through "the energy of We."
• Josh Marshall relays some of his thoughts about the Gaza War, with one in particular I want to call out: "Nothing that has happened in the last month constitutes genocide, either in actual actions or the intent behind those actions. Not a single thing." Worth repeating. But also: "there is a media and propaganda war about this conflict on TikTok and it is one Israel is losing."
• Kevin Dugan relishes the exposure of Sam Bankman-Fried as a common criminal, and not a very original one at that.
• Via Schneier, eminence gris Gene Spafford reflects on the Morris Worm, which chewed its way through most of the 100,000 machines connected to the Internet 35 years ago last week.

Finally, let's all tip our hats to George Hollywood, a parakeet who lived off the land in my part of Chicago for the better part of summer. He didn't exactly blend in with the pigeons, but as the photos in the news story show, he sure tried.

IDTWHQ almost made it to 22°C this afternoon, with a low dewpoint, sunny skies, and a lake breeze. In other words, perfect. Of course, the sun sets just after 7pm tonight, fully an hour earlier than it did five weeks ago...but that's autumn for you.

Not everything in the world went perfectly today, of course:

• House Speaker and noted invertebrate Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) continues to survive as third in line to the Presidency even though his unhinged back bench keeps forcing him to do stupid things, like start an impeachment inquiry on literally zero evidence.
• Alex Shephard actually sees this as a good thing for Democrats, as the "clown show" comes just as the House needs to pass a spending bill or the government will, once again, shut down.
• Meanwhile, satirist Andy Borowitz jokes that House Republicans "demand Biden tell them why they are impeaching him."
• Back in Chicago, it turns out only 9.6% of the city's waste got recycled in 2022, compared with 20% in New York and 80% in San Francisco.
• On Monday, Illinois becomes the first state in the union to eliminate cash bail.

Finally, our moderate drought continues in Illinois, but so far most agriculture seems unaffected. A dry autumn usually means a colorful one, so maybe we'll stay just under normal rainfall long enough to repeat last autumn's amazing display?

Former college football coach Tommy Tuberville, now a United States Senator grâce a the wisdom and good sense of the fine people of Alabama, continues to degrade the United States military by preventing the US Senate from confirming 301 (and counting) general and flag officers from formally taking the jobs they're already doing. Earlier this month, the commanders of the Naval Air Forces and Naval Sea Systems Command retired, passing their responsibilities—but, crucially, not their policy-setting powers—to their putative successors. US Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired US Navy Captain and 4-time Space Shuttle astronaut, stopped just short of calling Tuberville an idiot on today's NPR Morning Edition.

In other news:

• One of the last sane Republican office holders, US Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), announced he won't seek re-election in 2024.
• One of the least-sane Republican office holders, US Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), got thrown out of a performance of the Beetlejuice musical in Denver for, among other things, being a Karen when told to stop all the other things she was doing to disrupt the show.
• Contra David Ignatius' column in the Post yesterday advocating for President Biden to step aside in 2024, Josh Marshall has a simple message for my party: "Biden’s age is a real challenge. But the whole question is locked up. It’s locked in. So everyone who wants to beat Trump needs to absorb that, stop whining and buck up."
• ProPublica takes us through the chronology of the Navy's failed $100 billion Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program, that tried to support three entirely different mission profiles and, consequently, does none of them well. (This is why we're building a bunch more Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and reintroducing frigates after a 35-year construction hiatus.)
• After a 13-year construction hiatus, the Hudson River tunnel connecting New Jersey Transit to Penn Station will resume in 2025, with a projected opening in 2035. (NB: A British-French consortium dug the 50-kilometer Chunnel in six years for the 2023 equivalent of £14 billion. If it finishes by 2035, the 3-kilometer Gateway Tunnel will have taken 25 years and cost over $16 billion.)
• Transport for London (TfL) announced that most of London inside the M-25 is now an ultra-low-emissions zone (ULEZ) with motorist fees of £12.50 ($15.61) per day for cars that don't meet the current emissions standards. The government has also pledged £163 million ($204 million) to scrap old cars that don't qualify for the ULEZ.
• A NIMBY group in Minneapolis has temporarily halted implementation of the city's environmentally-necessary zoning changes that would allow more housing density by—get this—using Minnesota's 1970s-era environmental laws.
• By the way, cars aren't just giving us asthma and killing more people than any other cause in the United States and Canada, they're also bankrupting us.
• Here's what you need to know about the latest Covid booster. I'm getting mine Tuesday.

Finally, John Scalzi's blog turned 25 today, making the Hugo-winning author a relative new arrival to the blogging scene, at least when compared with The Daily Parker.

The XPOTUS continuing to get indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election wasn't the only bit of authoritarian fuckery this week:

• Constitutional law professor Deborah Pearlstein wonders, as do many other people, why so many of the XPOTUS's mooks are lawyers.
• Nicholas Grossman can't figure out why the media spend so much time trying to understand the populist right when Biden got millions more votes than the other guy.
• The Marion, Kan., police department raided the town newspaper and seized its computers and phones in a spectacular authoritarian over-reach that will almost certainly result in a devastating Federal first-amendment lawsuit.
• David Brooks essays in the Atlantic about "how America got mean."
• Paul Krugman notes that the Republican war on a diverse military echoes the bad decisions of the losing side in World War II (subscribers only).
• All the media reports about how people keep moving to the Sunbelt elide (a) that people are also moving away from it and (b) every January has its July.
• How has WeWork not died yet? Kim Velsey explains.

Finally, Michael Oher, the subject of the book and film The Blind Side, says the white family that he lived with not lied to him about adopting him, but also used their positions as his conservators to screw him out of compensation from the story of his own life. Which, if you remember, put the white folks up as the heroes. I wish I'd been more surprised and shocked, but no, it tracks.

I'm still working on the feature I described in my last post. So some articles have stacked up for me to read:

• The US Senate has the second-highest average age in its 234-year history, with 34 members over 70. The House is the third-oldest, with 72 members over 70.
• Josh Marshall (and The Daily Parker) don't extend that worry to the presidency, however: we're just fine with four more years of President Biden being the oldest president ever.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has cut over the CTA Red and Purple Lines to the brand-spanking-new tracks they laid this year and opened the new (temporary) stations at Argyle and Bryn Mawr, only two years after starting the $2.1 billion project. Meanwhile, the 12-year-long Ravenswood Metra Station saga drags on.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has proposed a surtax on residential real-estate sales over $1 million. I'm for it.
• Where does the term "Chicagoland" come from? WBEZ found out.
• People around the country are finally getting decent examples of cracker-crust, square-cut, tavern-style pizza—the real Chicago-style pie.
• A family that wanted to live "off the grid" in rural Colorado died shortly after discovering that humans built "the grid" to prevent exactly those kinds of deaths.

And while I read these articles and write this code, outside my window the dewpoint has hit 25°C, making the 28°C air feel like it's 41°C. And poor Cassie only has sweat glands between her toes. We're going to delay her dinnertime walk a bit.

James Fallows contrasts the behavior of octogenarians US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and President Joe Biden:

It boils down to this:

—Sometimes what helps an individual hurts a larger cause. Things have come to that point for Senator Dianne Feinstein.

—Sometimes it works the other way, and an individual’s interests are aligned with a cause. I believe that applies to Joe Biden’s announcement that he is running for a second term.

Feinstein staying on, at age 89, increases problems for her party. Biden staying on, at age 80, reduces them. Here’s why.

Roger Federer stepped away, because of injury, at a point when our mental images are still of his grace. We are fortunate that Joan Baez and Paul McCartney are performing into their 80s, that Bonnie Raitt is sweeping the Grammys in her 70s, that Robert Caro is at work on his LBJ saga as he nears age 90.

The key difference between most of the people listed above, and these two senior Democratic leaders, is being in someone else’s way. Joan Baez can keep singing, and that doesn’t hurt Billie Eilish. The next novel by Joyce Carol Oates, in her 80s, will not stop writers in their 20s or 30s from making their mark.

But political figures like Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein are unavoidably in other people’s way.

Fallows has an upcoming post on the US Supreme Court, where reports about the corruption of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (R-$$) just keeps getting worse.

I've had a bunch of tasks and a mid-afternoon meeting, so I didn't get a chance to read all of these yet:

• Fifty years ago today, United States combat troops left South Vietnam.
• The DC foreign policy elite have grown impatient for President Biden to articulate a clearer policy on Ukraine.
• The Post has a fascinating story of a Russian spy who posed as a Brazilian student to get into Johns Hopkins, but got arrested when he tried to take a new job at the International Criminal Court using his fake identity.
• James Fallows points to the Washington Post article on the damage that 5.56mm ammunition does to a child's body by once again imploring Congress to keep the AR-15 out of civilian hands.
• The US Dept of Transportation pledged $1 billion to remove useless highways that cut cities into unwalkable pieces, just as they dismissed an action to stop a useless $9 billion extension of a Houston highway no one but the Texas DOT wants. CityLab has more about the highway removal program.
• The Niles, Ill., public library board has spent $137,000 on legal fees even as they have cut staff by 37%—including thousands in fees when one board member sued to get another board member removed.
• You can see all five major planets just after sunset this week, so go look.
• IFL Science explains how modern fitness trackers work.

Finally, close to me, after the lovely Grafton Pub closed last August, the Old Town School of Folk Music stepped in to buy the space. But that plan has hit a snag after a higher bidder emerged.

In honor of thus august holiday, Aimee Mann has painted portraits of our worst presidents:

And Ezra Klein argues in favor of the current president's re-election:

There is no end of commentary gently — and not so gently — urging President Biden to act his age and step aside. And all else being equal, I share that sentiment. I don’t think we want a president ending his second term closer to 90 than he is to 80. But all else is never equal. And the commentaries that focus solely on Biden’s central weakness — his age — are missing his mounting strengths.

Biden’s age has carried some quiet benefits. One is that he has deftly bridged Democrats’ generational and demographic gaps. The Democratic Party has in recent years become younger, more liberal, more educated and more online. Biden’s politics were formed in a past era, when blue-collar workers were still a core constituency and liberal was often an epithet.

Then there is what Biden will have in 2024 that he did not have in 2020: a record of his own. He has passed the largest infrastructure, climate, science and technology investments in a generation. Unemployment is 3.4 percent — its lowest level since 1969. Inflation is coming down. (I think Biden’s 2024 chances will revolve around whether the labor market remains tight as inflation ebbs more than they will revolve around his age.) He has rallied a steady coalition against Russia and helped Ukraine keep its resistance alive. He has turned Trump’s inchoate anger toward China into a suite of policies to make America and its allies less dependent on Chinese manufacturing and to actively slow China’s technological progress. Biden hasn’t gotten any younger, but he has a purchase on the present and an argument about the future that he didn’t have in 2020, and one which no other Democrat (or Republican) has now.

Of course, time and chance happeneth to us all...

Yeah, I know President Biden gave the State of the Union address on Tuesday night (while I had a rehearsal, it turns out). But I didn't get to hear it until yesterday afternoon, and I didn't get to read it until today. I'm sorry; it was a great Biden speech.

Some reactions. First, from one of President Carter's speechwriters, James Fallows:

Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night was effective—for him, for his policies, for his party, and I think for the country.

Biden’s whole presentation last night seemed rushed, as if hurrying through the speech. It led to several mis-reads from the prompter, and some hard-to-understand slurred-together words.

I think that in context this was fine rather than a problem. Anyone open-minded knows that Biden has had a life-long stutter. Maybe this was one of his ways of coping. Everyone knows these addresses are long, and would not want him to draw it out. I think he gained more in “getting to the point” than he lost in “pausing for dramatic emphasis.” I note some of those moments below.

He has the entire speech, annotated. He notes the key moment for those who enjoy watching children finally get scolded by their parents, but he left the exegesis of that moment to others. Charlie Pierce summarizes how the President let the foamy-mouthers heckle themselves into a trap:

President Joe Biden freight-trained his whackadoo Republican opposition in his State of the Union address. He also flipped the very idea of the State of the Union address on its head by turning it into an American equivalent of the prime minister's Question Time in the British Parliament. He wrapped them in a bear hug so warm that they didn't realize they were being smothered. He took on hecklers like a veteran of a Catskills resort. He smiled, he laughed, he bellowed when it was called for. He had the only microphone in the room, and he used it like a hammer.

The real party piece came when he dared to mention that the Republicans want to gut Social Security and Medicare—which in the case of Social Security has been a Republican goal since “The Shadow” was on the radio. He baited them and baited them, and they went for it like starving carp.

Then, right on cue, the Republicans launched into a tantrum. The president has not been in politics since god was a boy to miss an opportunity like that one.

The Post fact-checked the speech (mostly favorably), while columnist Eugene Robinson praised the President's "vigor, humor, and command:"

The president took advantage of the national television audience the speech always draws to make the case that his worldview has been proved correct: Even at a time of extreme polarization, bipartisanship is not only possible but also necessary. He said there is “no reason we can’t work together and find consensus in this Congress.”

The president’s point was that despite all the hyperpartisan, apocalyptic rhetoric, the federal government has been functioning. Progress is messy, halting and incremental, but it does happen — inch by inch, step by step, mile by mile.

There have been times the past two years when Biden looked and acted his age — moments in which he seemed tired, lost his place in a speech or went off on some obscure tangent. But not on Tuesday night. Biden is 80, and it is legitimate to ask whether he is too old to seek another term. With this speech, he gave an answer. He sure sounded like a man who’s running.

You know, if he continues like this, he might stay President until he's 88.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare for a polar vortex.