The Daily Parker

The OAFPOTUS today destroyed the East Wing of the White House, which he does not own. This reminded long-time observers of the time in 1980 when he destroyed historic frescoes that he promised not to destroy with the grace and maturity of a toddler. He has changed quite a bit since then, but unfortunately only through age-related dementia and probably myriad other cognitive problems we'll find out about 20 years from now.

The constant firehose of awful things coming from him and his droogs also now includes his demand that the Department of Justice compensate him $230 million for the affront of being prosecuted for the awful things he did before. (Thanks, Merrick Garland.)

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to misinterpret why Democratic voters tell pollsters they don't like the Democratic party, since Republicans only understand blind fealty to their totem while we actually want to govern competently. Criticizing one's leaders, you see, helps get better leadership. It doesn't mean that Democrats will stay home next November, or that we'll vote for MAGA fanatics because we don't like that our nominee hedged on trans extremism. Oh, no. We will not.

At least the Sun-Times had something good to say about life today. Apparently there's a stretch of Grand Avenue west of Halsted that has some of the best pizza in the world. The tavern-style pie from Pizz'Amici they showed at the top of the article made me want to leave my office and head over there. Maybe this weekend...

So many things passed through my inbox in the last day and a half:

• The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that an assistant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was observed over the weekend discussing plans over Signal with an aide to Reichsminister Stephen Miller to send the 82nd Airborne to Portland.
• Paul Krugman breaks from his usual economics beat to lambast the OAFPOTUS and his Reichskabinett der Nationalen Rettung for the horrifying ICE raid* on a Chicago apartment building last week: "What do we learn from the Chicago apartment raid plus the growing number of incidents in which ICE agents have physically attacked people who posed no conceivable threat? To me, it says that even 'alarmists' who warned about the threat a Trump administration would pose to democracy underestimated just how evil this administration would be."
• Adam Kinzinger draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS really, really not wanting anyone to read the Epstein files and the Republicans' not caring really one whit about "protecting kids."
• Jamelle Bouie suggests that if Hegseth and the OAFPOTUS want to see "the enemy within," they should glance at the nearest mirror. Jen Rubin concurs.
• In his latest column on the OAFPOTUS's bullshit, Glenn Kessler mocks the TACO King for "crying 'witch hunt' while stirring the cauldron."
• Josh Marshall applauds California governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois governor JB Pritzker for being willing to use the power they have to prevent the rending of our nation.
• Matt Yglesias wants to shake some sense into the "groups" who have clearly learned nothing from Kamala Harris's embarrassing loss last November.
• Pilot and journalist James Fallows once again reminds people that it's safe to fly during a government shutdown. Of course, since all the air-traffic control trainers were furloughed...
• The Times has yet another essay about craft breweries shutting down because there are just too darn many of them. (Since the Brews & Choos Project started in February 2020, 22 of the 146 breweries I've visited have closed—plus another 7 I didn't get to.)

Finally, Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford goes over the numbers: September was warm and very dry. October is shaping up to be as well, despite the forecast calling for rain tonight and cooler temperatures through Saturday.

* Seriously, doesn't anyone in ICE realize that people will talk about them 30 years from now the way we talk today about the Schutzstaffel?

Rosh Hashana begins in just a few hours. To celebrate, let's sing!

Corruption, corruption! Corruption!
Corruption, corruption! Corruption!

Who, day and night, has got his tiny hands out?
Reaching for a pay-out, raking in the cash?
And who keeps on whining, every day he's whining,
"I'm the real victim here!"

The POTUS, OAFPOTUS! Corruption!
The POTUS, OAFPOTUS! Corruption!

Who must know the way to break a proper law,
A needed law, a settled law?
Who must shred all precedent and end the law,
So billionaires can plunder all the dough?

The SCOTUS, the SCOTUS! Corruption!
The SCOTUS, the SCOTUS! Corruption!

I voted for the guy who said
He's gonna kick them out,
But now my soybeans and my corn are all
Moldy.

The MAGAS, the MAGAS! Corruption!
The MAGAS, the MAGAS! Corruption!

And who gets all the loot
And tax breaks and a yacht?
And who will get a pardon if
They're ever fin'ly caught?

The KLEPTOS, the KLEPTOS! Corruption!
The KLEPTOS, the KLEPTOS! Corruption!

Oy, where did that come from? I mean, other than today's news:

• Republicans on the US Supreme Court once again used the "shadow docket" to allow the OAFPOTUS to fire the last Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission, paving the way for him to gut all cryptocurrency regulations so he can continue bilking his followers and taking bribes from everyone else.
• White House "Border Czar" and cosplaying tough guy Tom Homan allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash in a sting operation last year, so of course the OAFPOTUS ordered the FBI to drop the investigation.
• The White House announced, to the surprise of literally everyone including the State Department, that henceforth H1-B visas would cost $100,000, in what looks a lot like an attempt to shake down small tech firms that need foreign experts to compete with the OAFPOTUS's billionaire tech donors.
• Adam Kinzinger, who you'll remember still considers himself a Republican, castigated the OAFPOTUS and the VPOTUS for turning right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk's funeral into a hateful event. (Kinzinger was no fan of Kirk, either.)

It's still more than 15 months until the next Congress, when at least we can put out the flames and start planning the repairs. But wow, such corruption.

I agree with most of what the British comedian says, except I would say while both the Right and Left have descended into illiberalism, the Left aren't actually shooting anyone:

Just now on Facebook the first 15 things on my feed were:

• 4 posts from friends;
• 3 posts from groups I follow; and
• 8 posts from advertisers and accounts I don't follow.

That, my friends, is enshittification.

I remember when, not long ago, 8 posts would be from friends for every 2 that weren't. It's beginning to make Facebook unusable for me. Other things on the Internet have also enshittified to near uselessness, as these three stories attest.

First, Vandenberg Coalition executive director Carrie Filipetti argues that TikTok really is the threat Congress determined it was last year, so maybe let's enforce the ban?

Imagine the following scenario. China decides to attack Taiwan, and, fearing the United States will come to Taiwan’s aid, launches preemptive strikes against American targets overseas. In the United States, Chinese operators launch drone attacks from secret bases located on more than 380,000 acres of farmland China has purchased. As the government considers its options, the 170 million American TikTok users open their feeds to thousands of bots disguised as people, rattling off anti-American propaganda; encouraging young students desperate for meaning to fight their own government; and spreading disinformation at such a rapid rate that it is impossible to discern fact from fiction.

This scenario seemed plausible enough to Congress when it weighed TikTok’s future. Lawmakers were alarmed when Osama bin Laden’s terrorist screed “Letter to America” spread on the app following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel. TikTok denies it actively pushes political content, but the company only worsened Congress’s concerns about influence operations when its app successfully urged thousands of young Americans to lobby against counter-TikTok legislation. Lawmakers reported children and teenagers flooding their phone lines, often without knowing whom they were calling or why.

Times writer Nation Taylor Pemberton digs into the infantile nihilism in the corner of the Internet that seems to have informed Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin:

The only thing that can be said conclusively about Mr. Robinson, at this moment, is that he was a chronically online, white American male.

The internet’s political communities and the open-source sleuths currently scrambling to place Mr. Robinson into a coherent ideological camp certainly won’t be content with any of this. Nor will they be satisfied with the other likelihood awaiting us: that Mr. Robinson, the son of a seemingly content Mormon family, probably possesses a mishmash of ideological stances. Some held dearly. Others not so much. They also will not be satisfied that this horrific, society-changing act of violence was most likely committed both as an ironic gesture and as a pure political statement.

If your head is spinning from the internet’s attempts to read into Mr. Robinson’s alleged choices and political identity, that’s understandable. We’ve fully stepped into a different historical moment: the age of brain-poisoning meme politics.

And finally, NNGroup's Kate Moran explains why she (and I, for that matter) continues to collect physical video discs instead of relying on ever-worsening streaming services:

What used to make analog media inconvenient now feels charming. Choosing from among a limited set of curated, favorite movies feels like a relief compared to endlessly browsing through tens of thousands of options.

With physical media, I also feel a sense of security knowing that most of my favorites are available to watch at any time. I don’t have to go hunting through multiple streaming apps to figure out which one happens to have the rights to that film this month.

But the blame for subpar streaming experiences doesn’t lie solely with streaming apps. We have to talk about “smart” TVs.

This is an example of a deceptive pattern: I purchased a display, but the manufacturer treats it as a data-collection platform without reliably delivering on its basic functionality. It’s one thing to trade my privacy for a good experience. But I should be in charge of that decision. LG has not earned its privacy invasion in this case.

So now, I have a Roku attached to my smart TV. The TV has become a dumb display like in the old days, except worse.

I'll give you a concrete example of why physical discs make more sense in many cases. A streaming service recommended that I watch Le Bureau des Légends, a taut French series about agents in the DGSE (the French equivalent of the CIA). I loved the first season, which was on the streamer that recommended it. The second season, however, was on a different streamer, and they wanted $3.99 per episode to watch it. So instead of spending $40 on each of the 4 remaining seasons, I bought a 5-disc BluRay edition for $44.99. And I can watch them any time I want.

Don't even get me started on older stuff, like the ABC series Life Goes On that has a special connection to my family and which simply doesn't exist online anywhere. Or a Joss Whedon limited series that ran 6 of its 12 episodes on HBO before vanishing entirely. HBO produced all 12, and they exist somewhere, but I may never get to see them.

I wonder, has enshittification happened before, with other technologies?

In the day since a yet-unknown sniper assassinated far-right activist Charlie Kirk, people across the political spectrum have reacted with anger and horror. Most--at least, from the center-right to the center-left--decried the violence itself, even when they found Kirk's politics reprehensible:

• Former presidents Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton soundly condemned the killing, with Obama posting, "We don't yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy."
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL): "Elected officials and public figures should set the tone by rejecting inflammatory language, by calming rather than exciting our worst instincts. Media outlets and online platforms must take seriously their power to either inflame or cool tensions. And each of us, in our conversations at home and online, has the chance to model a politics that is fierce but never violent. Democracy is not passive. It asks every citizen to participate, to stay engaged, to keep faith that peaceful change is still possible even when it feels slow or frustrating."
• David Graham in The Atlantic: "[E]employing force is actually an admission of defeat. A person who resorts to violence has concluded that he cannot change the terms of debate with words or arguments. Might may not make right, but it can end the conversation."
• Comedy writer Jeff Maurer doesn't think it was funny: "People who don’t appreciate the awfulness of this event aren’t just lacking empathy — they’re naive. They apparently don’t realize that political violence pushes us backwards on the civil society evolutionary timeline. People on the right who seem to be steeling themselves for a second civil war are making the same mistake, except that the far right hears “go backwards” and thinks “great idea”. But anyone who values the hard-earned progress that humanity has made separating political power from physical power should view this as a tragedy on a human and a societal level. This is the type of shit that we just don’t do anymore, and let’s hope that we’re not about to enter an era in which that statement is less true."
• Stephen Colbert had a similar response: "I’m old enough to personally remember the political violence of the 1960s, and I hope it is obvious to everyone in America that political violence does not solve any of our political differences. Political violence only leads to more political violence, and I pray with all my heart that this is the abhorrent action of a mad man and not a sign of things to come."

Unfortunately, the difference between centrists and the extremes has followed a predictable and depressing pattern, starting with the psychologically-damaged and demented man heading our government.

• The OAFPOTUS went with projection and vitriol: "For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now."
• Josh Marshall points out that the OAFPOTUS may have the attribution backwards: "Right-wing violence, both of an organized paramilitary sort and by radicalized loners, has become such a scourge in recent years that on the extremes you hear voices for things like armed versions of Antifa and the like as some sort of counter. ... Fascists do civil violence better than civic democrats. It’s a foundational element of their political philosophy. It’s the verdict of logic and history."
• Jen Rubin takes right-wingers to task for only expressing outrage when someone from their side of the aisle is targeted: "Sadly, [the OAFPOTUS] and the MAGA troops reserve outrage only when Republicans are targeted (compare the near-silence when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was targeted, the mockery when Paul Pelosi was nearly killed, and the snide remarks when two Minnesota Democrats were assassinated). As we saw yesterday, Democrats condemn political violence whoever is targeted, as such acts have no place in a democracy. Nor does selective outrage or scapegoating broad swaths of the country for violent attacks."
• Jonathan Chait also calls out the OAFPOTUS for failing, once again, to be the President of the United States: "Every political movement in history, including the most bloodthirsty, has condemned political violence by its opponents. The only real test is whether you also oppose political violence by your allies. This is a test Trump has repeatedly failed."
• Other far-right voices called for more violence and retribution: "We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and podcaster Matt Walsh on X. “This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country."

Kirk's assassination was reprehensible. As much as I wanted to see him discredited, ridiculed, exiled, and bankrupted, he didn't deserve to die.

Neither did the school kids shot in Colorado yesterday while all this was going on. I hope their stories don't get lost in the noise.

Kirk, who founded the far-right youth organization Turning Point USA, has died after being shot on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah:

Kirk, 31, emerged as one of the most prominent voices on the right, gaining an audience of millions of listeners between his daily talk show and social media channels. He rose to prominence in conservative circles largely by holding events on college campuses at which he debated liberal students. He developed a close relationship with Trump in recent years and was a regular presence at Mar-a-Lago in the winter during Trump’s transition to his second presidential term.

It was only about 10 minutes into the conservative activist’s appearance at the university. Kirk had just welcomed the students with remarks of gratitude for their political involvement and taken one question about religion, said [student Sarah] Heywood, 19.

Then, the second person began asking about gun violence. It was clear, Heywood said, that they were ready to have a heated conversation with Kirk. Still, she didn’t think anything of it. She just listened.

The audience member was midsentence when a bullet struck Kirk in the neck, Heywood said. She’d barely registered the “pop” of the gunfire before she saw Kirk’s head swing backward and blood spew from his neck, she said.

In an appearance in April 2023, Kirk said that gun deaths are "unfortunately worth it" to preserve an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment.

The thoughts and prayers of thousands are with Kirk's family today, who, like millions of other Americans, may not think it "worth it." For my part, I'm thinking more about the deeper meaning of Matthew 26:52.

A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely.

In other eclipses this past week:

• The OAFPOTUS has so badly damaged US foreign policy and our standing in the world that China has eclipsed us as the de facto soft power in the world.
• The OAFPOTUS's bad poll numbers released this morning have eclipsed his bad poll numbers from the previous...ever—and this is even before pollsters factored in HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr's excruciatingly horrific performance in front of the Senate on Friday.
• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik's old company, the private equity firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has offered up to $1 billion to buy tariff refund rights at 20-30c on the dollar, a level of corruption only barely eclipsed by the OAFPOTUS's cryptocurrency scams.
• The crime data from hundreds of other cities around the world totally eclipse Chicago's, despite the OAFPOTUS's bullshit.
• Jeff Maurer warns, in his own special way, that lies about the Gaza war mostly eclipse any actual journalism that could otherwise be happening about it.
• James Fallows frets that the coverage of Harvard University's defiance of the OAFPOTUS may eclipse Harvard's actions themselves.

For what it's worth, the next total lunar eclipse visible from Chicago will be on 26 June 2029, starting at sunset and reaching totality at 21:31 CDT.

Even though I put aside Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism for the moment because it was just too depressing, I do still think about the ongoing destruction of the United States from within.

Over the weekend I realized that one way the billionaire class have approached their accelerating theft of our collective wealth is to attack the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. By undermining the lowest two levels, physiological needs and safety needs, they render entire communities unable even to address the higher needs that the modern Democratic Party tends to worry about.

This makes it even more of an imperative for our party to present an actual plan for how we're going to make sure people have homes, food, health care, and physical security. This shouldn't be hard. Until we do, people won't have any space in their minds for long-term infrastructure project let alone social justice.

The Republican Party, in service of their billionaire donors, have bombed the US Government back to the 18th Century. We've go a lot of work to do before we can campaign on DEI or UBI. I don't for a second want us to stop doing those things; but FFS, we need to talk about much simpler issues until people feel secure enough to listen.

It's no accident that the most prosperous period in the most prosperous country in world history coincided with a strong middle class, highly progressive taxes, and strong labor unions. Only then did people have the mental energy to worry about civil rights for people they'd never meet. And the Republican Party has spent the last 70 years trying to prevent and then undo those gains.

Everything we're seeing is about corruption: taking money from us and giving it to billionaires instead of investing it in the country. It won't stop until we make it stop by winning back power and taxing the shit out of them.

The OAFPOTUS has moved to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force under the DC Home Rule statute that gives him a little more than a month to do so before Congress has to consent. As with many of his more dramatic trolls, this has sent everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell into varying degrees of outrage.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort warn that the "military crackdowns are only going to get worse:"

The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end with D.C. and L.A., that other military options are very much on the table. The facts, the laws, and data do not seem to matter: Trump and his team believe he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, including using the U.S. armed forces for domestic political purposes as well as intimidating his enemies. His team is privately putting together plans for him to do just that.

Trump has long yearned to unleash the military on American soil for his political agenda, and the D.C. and L.A. deployments this summer are critical stepping stones in his increasingly authoritarian government’s vision for punishing his enemies Democratic area of the country, carrying out his brutal immigration agenda, and making life hell for unhoused people. Trump said on Monday that federal forces will work to remove “homeless encampments from all over our parks,” and that the unhoused will not be “allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.”

Trump officials note that it is a priority of the president’s that these kinds of military deployments — in L.A., and now D.C., in times of relative calm — become normalized in American political culture.

(Emphasis mine.) Federal agents have already started clearing DC homeless encampments and marching the homeless off to jail in a show of performative cruelty unmatched since Jim Crow.

Josh Marshall warns us not to get distracted by the legal niceties and to look at this as the first of many steps to occupy left-leaning US cities:

My argument was that even though the unique rules governing DC make this legal it is by Trump’s own argument part of a rollout he envisions for using federal police (ICE, CBP, FBI) and the National Guard to start taking over policing in big U.S. cities, universally blue cities and in every case in blue states.

We are fundamentally in a battle over public opinion. If a decisive majority of the public opposes Trump, his rule and criminality won’t stand. What follows from that is that what might be technically legal under some obscure statute or simply unreviewable isn’t the point. That’s deep in the weeds. That’s Michael Dukakis delving into statutes and principled opposition to the death penalty when the moment calls for modulated fury and outrage.

The issue is do people want to live under martial law, in cities occupied by the military.

Radley Balko breaks down "the White House lies about DC:"

So let’s get this out of the way, first: As I wrote in my previous post, Donald Trump’s “takeover” of Washington, D.C. is authoritarian thuggery. It’s a projection of power, driven by retrograde racism. It has nothing to do with recent crimes, or actual crime, or actual crime rates. We know this because it’s been in the works for more than a year. That said, I think it’s still important to point out when they’re lying. And everything they’re claiming in justification of the deployment of National Guard troops to D.C. is a lie.

This seems like a good time to remind everyone that when he first entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump inherited the lowest murder rate of any president in 50 years. Four years later, he was the first president in 30 years to leave with a higher murder rate than when he started.

Deploying the military won’t make people safer — and it won’t make people feel safer. We’re seeing more disorder because the pandemic brought a surge in mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness, and funding for social programs hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Now that the Trump administration has taken a huge bite out of federal supplemental funding for those programs, it’s probably going to get worse.

I’m fairly comfortable predicting that, contrary to the administration’s claims, Donald Trump will not end crime in D.C. I’ll also go out on a limb and predict that the Democrats are not going to unravel civilization. To the extent that our own civilization is in jeopardy, Donald Trump is a big part of the cause.

NPR's Steve Inskeep, a DC resident, says "of course DC has crime," but c'mon, man:

[T]here is crime, and local politicos know they need to address it. But that’s not really the question raised by President Trump’s decision to seize formal control of the DC police and send in federal agents to help them.

Trump’s declaration, and all the rhetoric that accompanied it, lean into prejudice. People who do not live in big cities are conditioned to be afraid of them. I learned this as someone who did not grow up in a big city. The declaration plays on that fear, and widens the gulf between Americans.

Statistics are different from place to place. But unfortunately, crime is everywhere and anywhere; you are more likely to have a drug problem in your own family or on your own block than you are to encounter trouble in somebody else’s city.

James Fallows contrasts the OAFPOTUS's deranged ranting with "what it actually 'feels like' in DC:"

Donald Trump obviously does not know this city. According to press accounts, and to judge by his own rhetoric, Trump lurched into declaring a “public safety emergency” for DC based mainly on two pieces of evidence. One was the reported injury of the 19-year-old former Doge staffer Edward Coristine, generally known as “Big Balls,” in an alleged carjacking. The other was Trump’s alarm at seeing a homeless encampment while being driven from the White House to his own golf course in Northern Virginia.

Anyone in DC can tell you that it has big problems. My experience is that the same is true of anyone in Shanghai about their home city, anyone in LA about LA, any Londoner about London, anyone anywhere about the place they live.

But if you can find anybody who knew the area in the 1970s, the 1980s, or even the 1990s, and does not think that the DC of 2025 is vastly more pleasant, more stimulating, more beautiful, more environmentally sustainable, more cultured, better managed, and safer than it was a generation ago, then you have found someone detached from reality.

What’s the even bigger problem for DC? Taxation without representation.

Anyone paying attention to city life in the US knows the OAFPOTUS is full of shit. But that doesn't mean he can't make life difficult for everyone he hates. I'm glad DC is pushing back to the extent they're able, and I know that Illinois will push back as well if he tries that shit here. It's going to be a long 18 months until the next Congress.