The Daily Parker

I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write.

Meanwhile:

• The OAFPOTUS has picked South Dakota governor Kristi Noem (R) as his Homeland Security secretary and Mike Huckabee to represent the US in Israel, which have me straining not to tell the left wing of my party that I told them so.
• Timothy Noah points to a pair of US Supreme Court decisions the Republican justices wrote that all but guarantee people will bribe the OAFPOTUS, if they haven't already.
• Michael Bender pours over election data to figure out why Democrats stayed away from the polls in droves (though it has gotten better as late returns from California have come in).

Finally, the South Shore Line lost 40% of its rail cars to wheel damage over the past two weeks, and suffered 30-60 minute delays as a result, because of leaves on the tracks.

This morning, Winnemac Park, Chicago:

I'm still getting through everything I ignored for the past three days. Stay tuned for a couple of Brews & Choos reviews from San Francisco, and on Tuesday, some thoughts on the election.

I'm visiting family in the Bay Area today, staying in California for about 38 hours. I leave tomorrow morning early, so I'm back at the charming Dylan Hotel in Millbrae, right by the BART and CalTrain. If you held a gun to my head (or put $10 million in my bank account) and forced me to move to Silicon Valley, I might choose here. It's 40 minutes to my family in San Jose and 25 minutes to downtown San Francisco, for starters. And the Brews & Choos Project works just as well around the Bay as it does in Chicago—with another SF brewery review coming Sunday or Monday.

And I will actually spend time in both places today, taking the just-launched all-electric CalTrain between them.

Tomorrow my flight leaves so early I will have to take a cab to the airport, because the BART doesn't start running until after my plane boards. But as the airport is only 3 km away, I expect that won't cause any problems.

Finally, I'm still cogitating about the election, and getting closer to some coherent thoughts. Harris ran a great campaign with a losing message; we need to think about that. We also need to prepare for at least two years of kakistocracy, perhaps longer. But I'll write more about that when I get back to Chicago.

Today, though, it'll be 22°C and sunny from the Embarcadero to the garlic fields of Gilroy. No time to stay inside a hotel room and blog.

Revolution Brewpub, which opened its Logan Square brewpub in 2010 and featured in the (really bad) film Drinking Buddies, announced it will close on December 14th:

Almost 15 years ago, we threw open the doors of our Milwaukee Avenue brewpub and launched Revolution Brewing to the world. The brewpub is where the first Revolution beers were served and where we first brewed beers like Anti-Hero IPA which would change the shape of craft beer in Chicagoland. Today that chapter of our story starts to wind down as we announce that we are permanently closing the doors of the Logan Square brewpub, with our last day of service on December 14th.

You could count the number of other breweries in the city on one hand back in the day. Our experience definitely inspired others to take their shot and now there are close to a hundred different places brewing beer in the city.⁠

Our Kedzie Avenue production brewery and tap room opened just two years after the pub and that’s where our business thrives now and where we will remain fully operational and open to the public.

Sad news, but totally understandable. Since I started the Brews & Choos Project in February 2020, fully 24 breweries have closed, most of them because of the after-effects of the pandemic. I'm sad to lose Revolution on Milwaukee, but glad they'll stay open on Kedzie.

The sky above Chicago has nothing but sun this morning. It won't last—the forecast for tomorrow night points to July-like atmospheric moisture and epic rainfall—but Cassie and I will enjoy it as much as we can.

Maybe I should stay away from these news stories until the rain starts for real:

• Michelle Goldberg reminds all you Hannah Arendt fans that fascism takes time to establish itself, so we have perhaps a couple of years to emigrate if the XPOTUS takes power in January: "The transition from democracy to autocracy is a process, not an on-off switch."
• Jay Willis shakes his head that "Jeff Bezos doesn't understand that he is the problem:" "[T]he possibility that Americans might also not care for a rich guy leveraging his power to compromise political coverage in the middle of an up-or-down vote on fascism seems not to have occurred to him."
• Dylan Byers takes to Puck to muse about Bezos's side of the argument: "Ultimately, Bezos wants to own, and Lewis wants to manage, a paper staffed by a team that supports their vision for semi-nonpartisan, future-proofed profitability."
• Jeff Jarvis explains in the Columbia Journalism Review why liberals are infuriated with the media: "Journalists like to say they write the first draft of history. Too often that means they ignore history. Today I urge journalists to reread Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism so as to understand her historical antecedents."
• Inae Oh expands on why people not already in the bag for the XPOTUS might hate election coverage right now: "Trump’s menacing language—a constant for almost a decade—rarely draws the notice that Garbage-gate has received. To call this imbalance typical both-sidesism fails to adequately convey the failures of the media in 2024."
• Robert Wright congratulates Elon Musk on becoming America's first true oligarch: "Musk is far and away the most dramatic example of concentrated power. By virtue of his undeniable intelligence, creativity, and drive, he has wound up with an impressively diverse portfolio of influence."
• Micky Horstman, writing an op-ed in Crain's, wants public transit in Chicago that people actually want to use: "Other cities have figured out how to run a transit agency post-pandemic. Chicago can, too."

But after all of this, yesterday Jennifer Rubin made "the case for election optimism." So I'll end this post with her argument:

Americans need to retain perspective, muster up patience, let the vote counting proceed, avoid bestowing MAGA legal challenges credibility they do not deserve and insist on bipartisan recognition of the winner. We can do this, America.

Yes, we can.

Mayor Johnson's newly-appointed Chicago Public Schools Board president The Rev Mitchell Ikenna Johnson has resigned:

Amid a wave of backlash over troubling social media posts that were criticized as antisemitic, misogynistic and conspiratorial, Chicago’s new Board of Education president is resigning at the request of Mayor Brandon Johnson just seven days after he was sworn into office. It’s the latest stunning development in the ongoing leadership struggle atop Chicago Public Schools.

His resignation came after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday called for him to step down, according to NBC5, following similar calls by 40 alderpersons and many Jewish leaders.

The mayor said he asked for the resignation.

There also have been questions about whether Johnson lives in Chicago and about his past. He was disbarred in Ohio nearly 30 years ago and at one point was so delinquent on his child support that he had a lien on his house.

Given all the problems, many have questioned the vetting process for the new school board members. On Wednesday, Rev. Johnson said he was “pretty confident that the things that are relevant to my experience were vetted.”

As one of my friends said, "Our mayor is an imbecile. That's not fair; I should give him the benefit of the doubt. It's entirely possibly he's not an imbecile, and he actually agrees with the positions of his former school board president."

I don't usually regret voting for someone this much so soon after they take office, but wow.

Recently-elected Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson has made a couple of moves this week all but guaranteed to make him a one-term mayor. First, despite "no property tax increases" being the cornerstone of his campaign, he proposed a budget today that—wait for it—would increase property taxes:

“I’m not going to raise property taxes. I’m the only person running in this race who made a commitment to that,” he said during a Block Club interview in March 2023. “For my first term, we’re not raising property taxes.”

But facing a series of tough decisions over how to close a nearly $1 billion spending gap in 2025, now-Mayor Brandon Johnson is going back on that promise.

In his budget address Wednesday, Johnson will propose increasing the city’s property tax levy to bring in an additional $300 million per year, according to the mayor’s office.

The proposal would increase most people's taxes by 4% a year. But that may not have been his worst sin this week, compared with his appointment of The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson (no relation) to head the Chicago Public Schools Board. The Rev. Johnson, it turns out, has quite the social media history:

A majority of the City Council is calling for the newly appointed president of the Chicago Board of Education to resign in the aftermath of “antisemitic and pro-Hamas” comments, calling his appointment a vetting failure by Mayor Brandon Johnson.

The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson made comments containing tropes of antisemitism following Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year, Jewish Insider reports. The publication cited screenshots from various accounts linked to Mitchell Johnson, which included posts comparing “Zionist Jews” to Nazi Germany.

“My Jewish colleagues appear drunk with the Israeli power and will live to see their payment. It will not be nice and I care not how and what you call me,” he wrote in December.

The council is urging Mitchell Johnson to apologize and resign immediately, according to a joint statement signed by 26 council members. They singled out Brandon Johnson's vetting process when appointing new board members.

“Calling Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack an ‘absolute right’ and justifying it as resistance against oppression, as Rev. Johnson did in March of this year and on other occasions, is abhorrent, inexcusable and disqualifying from public service,” the statement said. “His continued role on the school board is non-negotiable, both he and Mayor Johnson must act now to correct this terrible mistake.”

Mayor Johnson's first choice for the post, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, was apparently unavailable.

"Vetting failure" my ass. Johnson has gone out of his way to piss off the moderates who decided to give him a chance over the right-of-center Paul Vallas, and boy has he succeeded. But we're stuck with him until 2027.

We officially set new record high and high-minimum temperatures yesterday, getting to 28°C (82°F) around 4pm and not dipping below 20°C for 24 hours. More autumnal weather seems likely tomorrow, but today we're still having more of a June-like day—except for the 5 fewer hours of daylight.

As for the coyotes, apparently around this time of year, coyote parents kick their pups out of the nest, so we should see more juvenile canis latrans in the area until the young-uns establish their own territories or, ah, fail to do so. We have some in the park 400 meters from my house, and they regularly use the UPRR embankment as a highway, so I'm looking forward to seeing a few.

Forecasters predict a high temperature of 27.2°C (81°F) in Chicago today, 1.6°C (3°F) warmer than the previous record of 25.6° set in 1999. Moreover, the temperature last night only got down to 19°C, just a smidge warmer than the high-minimum temperature record set in 1946, which will likely stand as tonight's low will probably stay above 20°C.

Those are normal temperatures for mid-June.

Even better: those are 1991-2020 normals for mid-June, which are slightly warmer than the normals in use when I was a kid.

On the other hand, we've had a really lovely, warm autumn this year. If we continue to have slightly-warmer summers followed by much-warmer autumns and mild winters, as we've had for a couple years now, I think we might be OK. But wow does it suck for Arizona.

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:

• Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
• Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
• Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
• James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
• Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
• Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
• Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
• American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
• SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.

Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.