The Daily Parker

Happy Wednesday! Here's what I'm reading before my 8pm meeting, now that my 6:30pm meeting just ended:

• Alexandra Petri finds exactly the right analogy for the Republican complaints that an investigation into the January 6th insurrection would be "more partisan unfairness."
• Former election official Jennifer Morrell observed the unofficial Maricopa County, Ariz., recount, and found it even worse than you might have expected.
• University of Baltimore Law Professor Kimberly Wehle looks at the implications of the likely first-ever indictment and trial of a former president.
• Bitcoin's wild swings in value have nothing to do with its complete lack of real value, according to its partisans.
• Chicago will once again block off entire streets for outdoor dining this summer.

And finally, the New Yorker's Tom Papa introduces you to "asshole cat behaviors."

The New York Attorney General's office has tightened the screws on the Trump Organization:

"We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time," Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement.

James' years-long probe into Trump's charitable foundation led to its dissolution in 2018. More recently, her investigation into whether Trump's business had inflated the value of its assets for the purposes of tax breaks and loans came to a head in October when Eric Trump, the president's son and an executive at his business, sat for a pre-election deposition.

Aaron Blake speculates on what this could mean:

Perhaps the most significant consensus among former New York state prosecutors I reached out to is that it makes some kind of criminal charges appear more likely than previously known. That doesn’t mean those charges will definitely come or implicate the former president personally. But it’s the kind of statement that James’s office would have known full well would land with some force — and potentially create an expectation about where all this will lead.

Tax fraud would seem to potentially come into play here, given the extensive New York Times investigation into tax schemes Trump engaged in as far back as the 1990s — schemes the Times went as far as to say included “instances of outright fraud.” But the report also noted that much of what it described happened too long ago for criminal charges to be brought.

It’s also fair to ask why this statement was made public. Prosecutors generally don’t disclose such things and will wait for actual charges to be brought before publicly commenting. But in a high-profile case such as this, the former prosecutors say, it was potentially only a matter of time before such a phase of the investigation would be known publicly. The attorney general’s office notified the Trump Organization of the new phase last month, The Washington Post’s Shayna Jacobs and David A. Fahrenthold report.

I've consistently said I don't expect to see the XPOTUS behind bars, nor do I want that outcome. I think it sets a scary precedent for any democracy to jail a former head of government for anything short of violent crime. Don Junior, Jared, and Melania, however, should spend some time in Danbury. The New York AG and New York County DA may well send them to Queensboro instead.

A supporter of the XPOTUS has organized, with the help of the Arizona State Senate, a private hand-recount of Maricopa County's ballots. Apparently they're looking for bamboo fibers? Yeah, it's just as crazy as it sounds:

On the floor of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where Sir Charles Barkley once dunked basketballs and Hulk Hogan wrestled King Kong Bundy, 46 tables are arrayed in neat rows, each with a Lazy Susan in the middle.

Seated at the tables are several dozen people, mostly Republicans, who spend hours watching ballots spin by, photographing them or inspecting them closely. They are counting them and checking to see if there is any sign they were flown in surreptitiously from South Korea. A few weeks ago they were holding them up to ultraviolet lights, looking for a watermark rumored to be a sign of fraud.

The 2.1 million ballots were already counted by Maricopa County election officials in November, validated in a partial hand recount and certified by Gov. Doug Ducey. Two extra audits confirmed no issues. No evidence of fraud sufficient to invalidate Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Arizona and Maricopa County has been found.

Still, counters are being paid $15 an hour to scrutinize each ballot, examining folds and taking close-up photos looking for machine-marked ballots and bamboo fibers in the paper. The reason appears to be to test a conspiracy theory that a plane from South Korea delivered counterfeit ballots to the Phoenix airport shortly after the election.

When the recount started, the ballots were viewed under ultraviolet light to check for watermarks. A theory popular with QAnon followers has it that Trump secretly watermarked mail ballots to catch cheating.

Meanwhile, our named adversary, Russia, continues to disrupt our economy with impunity because people don't know how to do security.

Spring has gone on spring break this week, so while I find the weather pleasant and enjoyable, it still feels like mid-March. That makes it more palatable to remain indoors for lunch and catch up on these stories:

• Josh Marshall reminds us why, given today's anemic jobs report, listening to Larry Summers never ends well.
• David Brooks asks, "Could today’s version of America have been able to win World War II?" Tl;dr: Nope.
• George Conway III outlines Rudy Giuliani's legal troubles.
• Ted Koppel takes a look at "cancel culture" in the context of the past 40 years. Tl;dr: old practice, new name.
• Thanks to inside dealing, bad drafting, and the usual bullshit neighbors give each other, a 6-unit condo building in Wicker Park with 5 parking spaces has triggered a 3-year lawsuit over who can park in one of the spaces.

And finally, via Bruce Schneier, Australia has proposed starting cyber-security training in Kindergartens.

May 5th has some history, and not just about a relatively minor battle in Mexico that most Mexicans don't even remember.

For example, two hundred years ago today, Napoleon died and The Guardian was born. I never knew about that coincidence. TIL.

And this morning, Facebook's Oversight Board upheld the social-media company's ban on the XPOTUS, at least for the next six months.

Also TIL that my main programming language, C#, commands 7% of the Internet's mind-share, making it the 4th most-popular programming language. Python, at 30%, is the most popular, because its ease of use (and ease of writing the most godawful spaghetti code imaginable) makes it the preferred language of non-programmers.

I'm glad to see that one of my most-hated languages, Scala, continues its plummet, now even less popular than Visual Basic and and VBA, two languages that should have died during the GWB presidency.

The BBC Fact Checker corrects the record on things the President has said since he took office:

"An increase in border migration 'happens every year... in the winter months'"

The number fluctuates widely - but there is not always a significant increase during the winter months.

At a press conference in March, he said: "There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year."

Of the seven statements the BBC checked, only this and his claim about when polls close in Georgia was inaccurate.

The Washington Post found that President Biden made 78 false or misleading claims during his first 100 days in office, only two of which earned 4 Pinocchios. In contrast, the XPOTUS made 511 such statements in 100 days, including a few dozen whoppers. The Post also noted that the President "generally does not repeat his false claims if they have been fact-checked as false."

Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an op-ed this morning from Matthew Walther, a contributing editor at The American Conservative. Walther claims the President is governing the same as his predecessor:

After announcing his intention to “get tough on China,” the president has kept Mr. Trump’s tariffs largely in place and supplemented them with a wide-ranging “Buy American” order. Perhaps even more worthy of Mr. Trump was the new administration’s refusal in March to export unused supplies of the coronavirus vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca on the grounds that the United States needed to be “oversupplied and overprepared.” Mr. Biden’s sudden about-face on this issue a few weeks later was also fittingly Trumpian.

There is also the matter of immigration policy. Despite his formal reinstatement of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and other, mostly symbolic actions, such as proposing that the word “alien” be replaced with “noncitizen” in American law, Mr. Biden has presided over the sorts of barbarous spectacles at our southern border that were all too familiar during the past four years.

Even in the area of economics, where it might have been supposed by both supporters and critics during the presidential campaign that Mr. Biden would adopt a more progressive agenda, he has differed from the bipartisan center-right economic consensus along curiously familiar lines. In addition to keeping Mr. Trump’s moratorium on evictions in place, for example, he has continued with the suspension of interest on student loan debt and the collection of monthly payments.

So, I'm not entirely sure what Walther's criticisms are, really. I agree that the administration has taken more time than one would hope to correct the abuses at the border, but that seems more like bureaucratic inertia than policy—not to mention the philosophical bent of many of our border agents.

What Walther and other critics from the right get totally wrong is how the President corrects himself, and how the tone of the administration matters both at home and abroad. Not all of the previous administration's policies were awful. Not all of President Biden's are wonderful. But on balance, the world has become a better place now that we've seen the back of the last guy.

Illinois issued its pandemic-related closure orders on Friday 20 March 2020, exactly 400 days ago. Yesterday the New York Times reported that the US had its highest-ever-above-normal annual death rate in 2020:

A surge in deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic created the largest gap between the actual and expected death rate in 2020 — what epidemiologists call “excess deaths,” or deaths above normal.

Aside from fatalities directly attributed to Covid-19, some excess deaths last year were most likely undercounts of the virus or misdiagnoses, or indirectly related to the pandemic otherwise. Preliminary federal data show that overdose deaths have also surged during the pandemic.

In the first half of the 20th century, deaths were mainly dominated by infectious diseases. As medical advancements increased life expectancy, death rates also started to smooth out in the 1950s, and the mortality rate in recent decades — driven largely by chronic diseases — had continued to decline.

In 2020, however, the United States saw the largest single-year surge in the death rate since federal statistics became available. The rate increased 16 percent from 2019, even more than the 12 percent jump during the 1918 flu pandemic.

In 2020, a record 3.4 million people died in the United States. Over the last century, the total number of deaths naturally rose as the population grew. Even amid this continual rise, however, the sharp uptick last year stands out.

And lest we forget who made the pandemic far, far worse than it needed to be, yesterday was also the anniversary of the now-XPOTUS making this extraordinary claim:

Just think of how many thousands of people he could have saved by following his own advice.

I'm sure I must have read this when it came out, but I have just (re-?)read Andrew Sullivan's 2019 essay "Our Caesar," just to refresh my sadness at the parallels between early-21st-century America and early-2nd-century-BCE Rome:

It’s impossible to review the demise of the Roman Republic and not be struck by the parallel dynamics in America in 2019. We now live, as the Romans did, in an economy of massive wealth increasingly monopolized by the very rich, in which the whole notion of principled public service has been eclipsed by the pursuit of private wealth and reality-show fame. Cynicism about the system is endemic, as in Rome. The concept of public service has evaporated as swiftly as trust in government had collapsed. When the republican virtues of a Robert Mueller collided this year with the populist pathologies of Donald Trump, we saw how easily a culture that gave us Cicero could turn into a culture that gave us Caesar.

Some argue that although the president has obviously attempted to break the law many times and lies with pathological abandon, he still hasn’t openly defied a court order, suspended an election, or authorized something as lawless as torture. He talks and walks like a dictator, but in practice, his incompetence and inability to focus or plan or even read saves us. That, it seems to me, misses three things. The first is the president’s rhetoric. What happened to the Roman republic was a slow slide into public illegitimacy, intensified by the way in which elites played by the rules only when it suited them and broke precedents and norms when it came to defending their own interests, complaining loudly when others did the same.

If republican virtues and liberal democratic values are a forest of traditions and norms, Trump has created a vast and expanding clearing. What Rome’s experience definitively shows is that once this space is cleared, even if it is not immediately filled, some day it will be. Someone shrewder, more ruthless, focused, and competent, can easily exploit the wider vista for authoritarianism. Or Trump himself, more liberated than ever in a second term, huffing the fumes of his own power, could cross a Rubicon for which he has prepared us all.

It took about 200 years and unending civil war for the Roman Republic to become the Roman Empire. How much time have we got?

Some stories in the news this week:

• The Muldrow Glacier in Denali National Park began to surge a few months ago and has accelerated to almost 30 meters per day.
• Chicago-area transit agencies believe that about 20% of former transit riders won't come back after Covid, leading them to re-think their long-range planning.
• The IRS will begin sending parents a monthly payment that replaces the annual child tax credit starting in the beginning of July.
• Guess what? Whether intentionally or not, the XPOTUS's 2016 campaign really did share data with Russian intelligence services.

Finally, the House Oversight and Reform Committee advanced DC statehood legislation. The full house may even pass the DC Admission Act next week.

Chicago got up to 21°C yesterday, tying the record for March 9th set in 1974. It's already 20°C right now, close to the record 22°C set in 1955.

In other news:

• One chart shows the difference between the XPOTUS's 2017 tax cut for rich people and President Biden's pandemic-relief bill, which he will sign into law tomorrow.
• Lou Ottens, who invented the audio cassette tape, died at the age of 94.
• A survey of Windows computers found that 26% of them have not applied the WannaCry patch after four years of knowing about it.
• Nicholas Weaver explains the "Great Email Robbery" that will probably happen later this week. Great.

And now that I've finally gotten a .NET 5 application to deploy onto a Microsoft Azure Functions App, I will take a well-earned walk.