The Daily Parker

Just queuing a few things up to read at lunchtime:

• From tavern-style communion pizza and Malört to the horrific discovery that the Pope is a White Sox fan, Chicagoans have gone nuts for Leo XIV. Catholics everywhere are finally safe from ketchup with their Eucharist.
• Former US Supreme Court Justice David Souter has died, aged 85. He "pulled a Brennan" by drifting left during his term on the court, much to the annoyance of the Republicans who elevated him.
• Political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Zilbatt warn that a descent into competitive authoritarianism—the ruling style of autocrats like India's Modi and Türkiye's Erdoğan—shows up most clearly as an increasing cost of opposing the government.
• Josh Marshall reports on how the OAFPOTUS's droogs are cutting off medical research grant payments without explicitly (if illegally) cancelling the grants, hoping they won't get caught until it's too late.
• Molly White and Paul Krugman provide their regular reminders that crypto is a scam, now with added corruption.
• James Fallows, who usually tries to get people to calm down about aviation mishaps, wants the press to be more alarmed about the air traffic control blackouts in Newark. (Another one happened just this morning, in fact.)
• Yascha Mounk looks at the Democratic Party and shrugs that, for good or ill, "the resistance is gonna be woke," even if it costs us the next two elections.
• ProPublica's David Armstrong dug into why his cancer drugs cost more than an iPhone for each dose.
• Charles Marohn points out the lie in a recent Times op-ed by reminding anyone who can do math that sprawl is a Ponzi scheme, not a solution to our housing problem.

Finally, Chicago's ubiquitous summer street fairs have found it much more difficult to sustain their funding in the years since the pandemic. The city prohibits charging an entry fee for walking down a street, so the fairs have to rely on gate donations. But even with increasing expenses, people attending festivals have stopped donating at the gate, putting the fairs in jeopardy.

When I go to Ribfest in four weeks, I will pay the donation every day, because I want my ribs. This will be the festival's 25th year. I will do my part to get them another 25.

As a devout atheist, I'm not especially concerned with the election this afternoon of Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, though I am tickled he's a South Sider from Chicago. (Next up: Malort for communion!)

I'm less tickled that about the "deal" that the US and UK have reached on trade as it appears to be nothing more than "concepts of a plan" that leaves in place a 10% tax on UK goods. As Krugman explains,

Nobody knows what will eventually come out of it, but we can be sure of one thing: It won’t lead to any significant opening of the British market to U.S. goods. Why? Because that market was already wide open before Trump stomped in.

So should we celebrate the trade deal that will be announced today? No. It won’t solve any of the problems Trump has created. It will, if anything, offer Trump the temporary illusion of success, encouraging him to create even more problems.

For all that we know now about President Biden's decline in the last two years of his term, shouldn't we be more alarmed by the OAFPOTUS's divorce from reality?

Cincinnati mayor Aftab Pureval (I) will face Republican Cory Bowman in the November election after the two won 83% and 13%, respectively, of yesterday's primary vote. Bowman is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance, whose endorsement of Bowman appears to have led to Pureval's enormous vote total. When you're the least-popular vice president in history, no one wants your endorsement, dude.

Also, today is the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender to the Allies in Reims, France. What that has to do with Vice President Vance is left as an exercise for the reader.

Meanwhile:

• No, the OAFPOTUS can't simply reopen Alcatraz as a prison.
• George Will scoffs at the "art" of the OAFPOTUS's dealings with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
• Greg Sargent digs into how many jobs making Barbie dolls would actually add to the US economy, and how crappy those jobs would be.
• The OAFPOTUS has pressured the Postal Board into making a FedEx board member the next Postmaster General. What could possibly go wrong?
• Jennifer Rubin is relieved that judges the OAFPOTUS himself appointed have no tolerance for his authoritarian power-grab. (Except for Aileen Cannon and Matthew Kacsmaryk, of course.)
• Robert Wright finds it fascinating that Open AI plays up China as a threat while simultaneously begging for government money.
• Jeff Maurer wonders if DNC Vice Chair David Hogg ("a contemptable little twerp," according to James Carville) might actually have one good idea.

Finally, United Airlines has pledged to buy up to 200 JetZero Z4 airplanes, which employ a blended-wing design that has never been used in civil air transport before. It's really cool-looking, and offers some interesting interior possibilities. I might miss the windows, though. JetZero expects a first flight in 2027.

The Economist is kidding only a little bit by pointing out that creativity and moderate drinking correlate strongly:

Today the world sees fewer breakthroughs. Hollywood sustains itself on remakes or sequels, not originals. A recent blog by Peter Ruppert, a consultant, finds the same trend for music: “the pace of genuine sonic innovation has slowed dramatically”. A paper published in 2020 by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and colleagues concludes that new ideas are “harder to find”. Productivity growth across the world is weak. Something has gone terribly wrong in the way that Western societies generate new ideas.

For centuries creative folk, from Aeschylus to Coleridge to Dickens, have relied on alcohol for inspiration. In the 1960s, when productivity was soaring, everyone was drunk all the time. No other drug has played such a consistent role in human innovation. Being intoxicated opens up the possibility of accidents of insight. Purely rational, linear minds have fewer of the flashes of brilliance that can turn an art form or an industry upside-down. It allows brains to disconnect. A study of American painters in 1946 by Ann Roe of Yale University noted that “a nightly cocktail before dinner may contribute to the avoidance of a state of chronic tension, especially...when creative activity is at its height.”

The best approach, as with most things in life, is moderation: not Ernest Hemingway-levels of drinking, but not abstention either. What leads to successful human relationships and breakthrough innovations remains poorly understood. So, even if you are a Silicon Valley whizzkid who wants to change the world, it is best not to mess around with traditions too much. Gin from the freezer, good vermouth, and a twist.

Chin chin! And let the good (creative) times be gin!

Happy May Day! In both the calendar and crashing-airplane senses!

We start with two reports about how the Clown Prince of X has taken control over so much government data that the concepts of "privacy" and "compartmentalization" seem quaint. First, from the Times:

Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.

President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).

What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.

And from The Atlantic:

But what can an American authoritarian, or his private-sector accomplices, do with all the government’s data, both alone and combined with data from the private sector? To answer this question, we spoke with former government officials who have spent time in these systems and who know what information these agencies collect and how it is stored.

To a person, these experts are alarmed about the possibilities for harm, graft, and abuse. Today, they argued, Trump is targeting law firms, but DOGE data could allow him to target individual Americans at scale. For instance, they described how the government, aside from providing benefits, is also a debt collector on all kinds of federal loans. Those who struggle to repay, they said, could be punished beyond what’s possible now, by having professional licenses revoked or having their wages or bank accounts frozen.

These data could also allow the government or, should they be shared, its private-sector allies to target big swaths of the population based on a supposed attribute or trait. Maybe you have information from background checks or health studies that allows you to punish people who have seen a therapist for mental illness. Or to terminate certain public benefits to anybody who has ever shown income above a particular threshold, claiming that they obviously don’t need public benefits because they once made a high salary. A pool of government data is especially powerful when combined with private-sector data, such as extremely comprehensive mobile-phone geolocation data. These actors could make inferences about actions, activities, or associates of almost anybody perceived as a government critic or dissident. These instances are hypothetical, but the government’s current use of combined data in service of deportations—and its refusal to offer credible evidence of wrongdoing for some of those deported—suggests that the administration is willing to use these data for its political aims.

This is what the Republican Party has bequeathed us. Because they never wanted to govern; they have always wanted to rule.

• With reports of a major scandal in which it appears Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) and his wife took money from Medicaid through a series of fronts, Josh Marshall sees how not investigating them could also corruptly benefit the OAFPOTUS.
• The Center for American Progress has a nice tool to see how many tens of thousands of people will lose health-care coverage in each Congressional district if the House passes its swingeing $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid.
• Krugman highlights a few stories that place the responsibility for the economy's imminent collapse squarely on the OAFPOTUS.
• Timothy Noah warns it's already happening in Seattle.
• A 120-year-old pavilion in Chicago's Jackson Park may finally get some TLC.

Finally, American Airlines plans to add flights to seven new destinations this fall, including (whee!) Sint Maarten. I haven't been to the island in 11 years and I've wanted to go back, but the frustrating schedule involving an early-morning flight from JFK or Miami made it inconvenient. But a non-stop from O'Hare? Oh, yeah.

We start this morning with news that US Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), for whom I voted all 5 times he ran for Senate, will not run for re-election in 2026. He turns 82 just after the election and would be 88 at the end of the term. I am very glad he has decided to step aside: we don't need another Feinstein or Thurmond haunting the Senate again.

In other news:

• Vice President JD Vance outlined a proposal to reward Russia for its aggression by giving it all the land it currently holds in the sovereign nation of Ukraine, despite the crashing illegality of the war.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), rocking a 7% approval rating and having long ago made me regret voting for him, has gone into meltdown-panic mode now that it looks like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel might challenge him in 2027.
• Chicago landlords have moved away from taking refundable security deposits, which come with some strict-liability regulations, and into nonrefundable, unregulated "move-in fees." (I love Block Club Chicago, but I think they might not have quite enough balance in this report. See if you can spot what I mean.)
• Peter Hamby analyzes how the popularity of US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) within the Democratic Party contrasts with her unpopularity with everyone else.
• Greenland, for some reason no one could have predicted, has started looking for allies other than the United States.
• Radley Balko emphasizes the importance of remaining decent to each other during the long, difficult resistance to authoritarianism we've only just started.

Finally, I will say that despite all of the crap going on in Washington, the planet doesn't care (at least as long as the nuclear bombs stay in their silos and submarines). We had lovely spring weather yesterday and might have some tomorrow, while today we're getting rain showers and light jacket weather. I mean, Friday is the perfect date, after all.

The American Revolutionary War began 250 years ago today when Capt John Parker's Minutemen engaged a force of 700 British soldiers on the town green in Lexington, Mass. Just over a year later, England's North American colonies declared their independence from King George III with a document that you really ought to read again with particular focus on the King's acts that drove the colonists to break away. It was almost as if they believed having a temperamental monarch with worsening mental-health problems was a sub-optimal political situation.

Today is also the 30th anniversary of Timothy McVeigh's mass killing of Federal employees and their children in Oklahoma City. Any similarities between McVeigh's and the OAFPOTUS's politics are, I'm sure, coincidental.

• Dana Milbank staggers at the self-inflicted failures that have made this the most destructive first 100 days in presidential history—with 11 days to go, yet!
• Andrew Sullivan takes us through the history of El Salvador dictator Nayib Bukele's rise to power, which of course the OAFPOTUS wants to emulate.
• Molly White outlines how blatant self-dealing combined with firing all the regulators has launched a staggering cryptocurrency grift to enrich the OAFPOTUS and his family. Former SEC Office of Internet Enforcement chief John Reed Stark concurs.
• Administration officials now claim that their letter demanding Harvard University install party cadres in every department was "unauthorized," and reminded everyone not to pay attention to the little man behind the curtain. Regardless, Jennifer Rubin cheers Harvard on.
• Jeff Maurer struggles with getting to the appropriate level of vitriol against the extremists in our party who don't seem to get that we have to win elections before they can get anything close to what they want.

As for me, and the gap in posting yesterday: I have a cold which seems entirely contained in my eyes and sinuses, so I didn't really feel creative. (Not that today's post is creative either, of course.) Somehow I got 9½ hours of sleep last night, according to my Garmin device, though I distinctly remember getting up to close windows when the temperature plummeted from 16°C to 9°C in less than an hour. And when the thunderstorms came through. And when Cassie poked me in the head. Both times.

It feels like the cold has mostly gone away, though. And with tomorrow's rainy forecast, it looks like I might get some writing done this weekend.

The era between the end of World War II and now is an aberration in world history. At no other time have so many people enjoyed a middle-class existence, with most—at least in the OECD and adjacent countries—able to afford all of life's necessities, like a house, decent health care, adequate nutrition, and leisure time. This general prosperity is what people like the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X want to end, and for no other reason than they want more for themselves.

The unprecedented attack on the rule of law in the United States is, really, in service of the super-rich at everyone else's expense. The average effective tax rate in the US is about 14.5%, with the people earning below-50% incomes paying about $63 billion, or 3%, of that amount. This low percentage reflects tax credits and deductions designed to ensure a decent life for below-average income earners.

But the unlawful cuts to the Federal government the OAFPOTUS and CPOX have pushed through have done the most damage to the agencies that specifically target corruption and tax cheating:

Trump’s Treasury Department announced last month that it would no longer enforce the Corporate Transparency Act, hampering recent congressional efforts to end money laundering, tax dodging, and other lawbreaking by anonymous investors. In an executive order, Trump suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American and foreign companies from paying bribes to do business. The Department of Justice is also disbanding a task force set up to administer sanctions on Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Oversight will be removed from many domestic financial and government institutions too. Trump ordered a full work stoppage at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been created to protect consumers from manipulation by banks and other financial institutions He has fired top officials overseeing ethics, whistleblower protections, and labor rights, including the heads of the Office of Government Ethics, the Office of Special Counsel, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials are drafting plans to reduce investigations of fraud and public corruption, which means that prosecuting crooked officials will be more difficult. Cuts to the IRS mean that tax fraud will also be harder to identify and prosecute. Just last week, the Justice Department announced that it would curtail investigations of cryptocurrency fraud and disband its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.

Musk slashed jobs at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that oversees auto safety and crash investigations, including those involving his own electric-vehicle company, Tesla. Musk oversaw mass firings at other regulatory agencies that had launched more than 30 investigations into his companies, which include SpaceX and Neuralink.

But these are only the conflicts of interest we know about. How many people benefited last week from advance knowledge that Trump would reverse his position on tariffs? How many others are making other stock-market bets based on their access to government information? We don’t know the answers, and Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to want to find out. We are living in the dark, just as people do in other kleptocracies, and this changes everything.

To understand Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine, for example, one should ask not merely How will they end the war? and How will they shape America’s relationship to Europe? but Who in Trump’s immediate circle will benefit from the lifting of sanctions? and Have the Russians made explicit financial offers already, and to whom? The rare-minerals deal now being negotiated with Ukraine deserves especially close scrutiny. We need to establish which Americans, exactly, will benefit, and how.

And, of course, the CPOX has stolen your data for his own purposes, with no oversight and no privacy controls:

It’s worth underlining the caveat that no one quite knows where the data allegedly pilfered from the NLRB is going—if indeed it has left the agency at all. But the information allegedly leaving the NLRB would be extraordinarily valuable to corporate titans like Musk looking for a leg up on rivals, as well as a window into the inner workings of the labor unions they despise. It would also explain why Musk is involved with DOGE to begin with. As a number of his companies, especially Tesla, struggle, the government systems DOGE now controls could provide invaluable information.

The theft of personal information also points to another more nefarious motivation for Musk and DOGE. It’s already abundantly clear that the group will not reduce the deficit. It likely will not even decrease federal spending, which is already $100 billion higher under Trump than it was under Biden at this point in his term. Instead, the group’s slashing of regulations and bureaucracy is aimed not at reducing “waste” but at cutting the many governmental layers that exist to fight risk—and fraud.

[U]naccountable coders with close ties to the world’s richest man have their mitts on the personal information of millions of Americans—that’s bad no matter what they’re doing with it. 

Remember, authoritarianism is, at its core, all about theft. Authoritarians use the government to advance their own business interests, taking your taxes to enrich themselves. All the culture war bullshit the Republican Party has stirred up over the past 40 years is meant only to distract you from that reality.

Before I go through the stories from the last day about how we live in the stupidest timeline, here's a photo of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station I snapped heading to my return train on Friday:

Elsewhere in the stupidest timeline, where maximizing corruption is the defining goal of the Republican Party:

• James Fallows takes us through Harvard's big "fuck you" to the OAFPOTUS's demands that the university install minders in its HR and academic departments, as does Josh Marshall.
• Jennifer Rubin reminds everyone that a functioning center-left party opposing a rogue authoritarian party does not constitute "polarization."
• A memo from the Office of Management and Budget outlines the OAFPOTUS's plans to gut climate and weather research, bringing a fresh new anti-intellectual, anti-science mission to NOAA.
• Paul Krugman outlines how cuts to the IRS will enable the rich to steal even more from everyone else.
• A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board says the DOGE children have enabled Russian hackers to gain access to NLRB data.
• Coders using large language models to write code have given attackers an enormous opportunity to introduce malicious code into your favorite apps through supply-chain attacks.

Finally, take a few minutes to read Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns series on how municipalities in the US and Canada routinely hide (or simply don't know) their long-term obligations so as to make building new infrastructure look like a better financial strategy than repairing existing infrastructure. I can tell you that you get no better view of the shitty state of American roads than riding a Divvy down almost any Chicago street, because Americans seem allergic to maintenance spending.

I know we need to put the fire out in Washington before we can fix anything else. But the long-term damage the OAFPOTUS continues to inflict on us will include more failing roads, bridges, and trains. So if you voted for him, you voted for the US becoming a third-world country in our lifetime.

I may have dodged a virus this week, though I'm not 100% sure yet. I have a lot more confidence in my health than the world has in the OAFPOTUS, however. And the news today doesn't change that at all:

• Radley Balko, tongue firmly in cheek, satirizes the Republican Party in a way I will not spoil for you. (His takedown of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, made me guffaw.)
• Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's irrational and malignantly stupid attack on the very things that made America great in service of his demented ego make it likely he'll do other malignantly stupid things in future.
• Anne Applebaum warns that "this is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like."
• Jennifer Rubin counters with a view of "when autocrats screw up."
• The Dispatch editorial board warns that the MAGA crowd's "foreign policy was ancient when Charlemagne was on the throne, and their economic philosophy was hatched in the 15th century."
• Conservative University of Chicago Law professor Aziz Huq offers up the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause as a possible avenue for defeating the OAFPOTUS's personal vendettas.

Tomorrow I'm taking advantage of a ridiculously full PTO bank and cheap train tickets to finally extend the Brews & Choos Project into Wisconsin, so you'll want to watch this space over the weekend for those posts.