The Daily Parker

The XPOTUS really outdid himself yesterday at the National Association of Black Journalists conference here in Chicago:

The question-and-answer session at the National Association of Black Journalists conference at the Hilton Chicago began more than an hour late — with Trump blaming audio issues — and ended early.

The shortened event was full of incendiary comments from the former president, including claims illegal immigrants are taking “Black jobs.” When asked if it was appropriate to call Harris a “DEI hire,” which many Republicans are calling her, Trump accused the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of “only promoting Indian heritage.”

Responding to backlash about his remarks, Trump’s campaign said the former president “remains defiant in the face of media bias and will continue working to make life better for all Americans regardless of how poorly he’s treated by supporters of Kamala Harris.”

The New Republic highlighted his deranged riff about "Black jobs:"

Trump initially used the phrase during the first presidential debate in June and was heavily criticized, with many people asking what a “Black job” is and what he meant. Several Black politicians posted on social media at the time highlighting their work.

Given an opportunity by Black journalists with a largely Black audience Wednesday, Trump didn’t clarify anything.

Even before he entered politics, Trump didn’t have a good record on race. He and his father were sued for housing discrimination back in the 1970s, and while he hosted NBC’s The Apprentice, he allegedly dropped the n-word and refused to hire Kwame Jackson, the Black finalist on the show’s first season. However Trump’s appearance at the NABJ’s convention Wednesday was going to go, it could never have erased his racist past.

Block Club Chicago dug into the reactions to the event within the NABJ:

Some members of the Black journalists association and those viewing the talk slammed the event organizers for platforming a politician who has frequently denigrated Black communities and Chicago. Others said the talk was a disservice to convention attendees who were there to network and develop professionally.

Black Enterprise, a platform that provides assistance to professionals, saw its CEO, Earl “Butch” Graves, withdraw from a panel titled “Black Leadership and Today’s Media Landscape” because Black-led media outlets weren’t given the opportunity to moderate Trump’s panel.

“It is indicative of the treatment Black media organizations face in today’s landscape and particularly disheartening that our own NABJ organization would make the decision to exclude Black media organizations from this important discussion,” Graves said in a statement.

Some reporters called on leadership at the National Association of Black Journalists to step down from their positions.

I think the NABJ made the right choice by inviting both major-party candidates to appear at the convention (Harris claimed to have a conflict). And the XPOTUS did exactly what he always does, which kind of makes the NABJ's point for them.

But does the XPOTUS's unconcealed racism surprise anyone anymore? Not TPM's David Kurtz, who says that's not the worst part:

Donald Trump, his campaign having lost its edge to Kamala Harris, predictably resorts to his well-used playbook of racism, white grievance, and othering. Major national news outlets fumble the coverage, unable or unwilling to call out the racism. The headlines are either too tepid or shift the focus to Harris. We should know by now that racist attacks are not about the victims of those attacks, they’re about the perpetrators. Putting the spotlight on Harris is a form of complicity.

But even well-meaning people stop at the incomplete conclusion that Trump himself is a racist. No doubt he is. But that fails to do justice to the toxicity he brings to the public square. Not since George Wallace has a national candidate exploited racism for personal political gain the way Trump has consistently now for going on a decade. It started with his embrace of Obama birtherism, continued throughout his term in the White House with, among many other things, virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, and is playing out exactly the way you would expect it to now that he’s facing a biracial opponent.

It takes a racist to exploit the kind of divisions that Trump traffics in, but focusing on his personal animosity toward people of color, his own retrograde 1950s attitudes, the darkness of his soul runs the risk of making this a psychological profile or a morality play or another in the long line of old white men stuck in the past. This isn’t your grandpa or your crazy uncle raving in the privacy of your holiday dinner.

It’s the former president of the United States turning his cult and his campaign’s hundreds of millions of dollars against people of color on a public stage in the middle of a presidential campaign.

If there's any good news here, it's that a growing majority of voters really have really gotten tired of him. And every day brings us closer to the time—one hopes just 96 days from today—when we won't have to hear his deranged weirdness anymore, and he can enjoy his lonely, sad retirement in Florida.

The XPOTUS's handlers cut short his appearance this afternoon at the National Association of Black Journalists convention just 2 km from where I'm sitting. The XPOTUS began by insulting the hosts and the panelists. Then, when one of the panelists had just brought up Project 2025 (the Republican Party's blueprint for rolling the country back to the 1850s), the moderator suddenly interrupted and said the campaign had told her to wrap it up. The 37 minutes of Harris Campaign footage the XPOTUS had already provided will have to do, I guess.

In other end-of-July news:

• Julia Ioffe wonders what Kamala Harris's foreign policy will look like.
• Army Lt William Calley, the only American service member convicted of a crime after the My Lai massacre in 1968, died in April.
• Did Coinbase just commit the largest campaign finance violation in history?
• The Exchange Club of Naperville has permanently ended its Ribfest after 35 years, citing the cost of renting the space and declining revenues since the pandemic.
• The US Navy has nearly completed swapping out crews and equipment between the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) and the USS George Washington (CVN-73) as the latter prepares to move permanently to Japan.

Finally, the Justice Dept has accused the Norfolk Southern Railroad of illegally delaying passenger trains, after Amtrak suffered an ungodly 11,500 minutes of delay in just the first three months of this year. "Freight-train interference" is the principal cause of delays for US trains because the country has almost no dedicated passenger mainlines. The freight railroads that own the tracks have a statutory obligation to prioritize passenger trains, but no other incentives to do so. It's about the dumbest way to organize passenger rail anyone could come up with, other than separating out the track from the operations. I mean, we're dumb, but we're not that dumb.

The US election is 98 days away, and August starts Thursday. Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...into the future...

And yet, the ever-present Now keeps us here:

• Both Paul Krugman and Molly White are baffled that the XPOTUS is making cryptocurrency a campaign issue, when almost none of their voters understands the first thing about it. (Hint: their biggest tech-bro donors care about it a lot.)
• James Fallows introduces us to Minnesota governor Tim Walz (D).
• Chuck Marohn shakes his head sadly at the installation of an ice machine on a lot previously occupied by a restaurant in Brainerd, Minn. It's an example of how the suburban car-oriented development pattern has made it impossible for kids to be kids.
• New research finds there are six different kinds of depression rooted in which parts of the brain are disrupted. Great.

Finally, Bruce Schneier warns that automobile companies and their suppliers have many disincentives to providing software updates for the entire lifetime of their products. Microsoft stops supporting Windows versions after just a few years, while cars live for decades.

President Biden has (finally!) proposed using the power of Article I to de-politicize Article III:

[W]e have had term limits for presidents for nearly 75 years. We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court. Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary. It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court.

He also proposed a constitutional amendment to ensure presidents can be held criminally liable for acts while in office, and extending the judicial code of conduct to the Supreme Court.

The thing is, it sure looks like Article I gives the legislature the power to enact term limits on the Court without an amendment. And doing so should command bipartisan support, because it ends the Supreme Court sweepstakes that destabilizes the rule of law.

Of course, one of our parties has strayed a bit from believing in the rule of law, which means it will probably be ours who enacts this reform. So we'll just have to win both houses of Congress and the White House in November, right?

Watch how new UK Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak (Cons.-Richmond and Northallerton) used his first Question Time with new UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (Lab.-Holborn and St Pancras) last Wednesday:

Sunak's Conservative Party suffered the worst electoral loss of any party since before World War I to Starmer's Labour Party. A month ago Sunak sat where Starmer sits today, and vice-versa. And Sunak knows that just about every policy he cares about will end under the new Labour government, while he sits there and watches.

And yet, Sunak and Starmer made it absolutely clear to the UK and its adversaries that they both respect the rule of law, the necessity of a peaceful transition of absolute power (UK prime ministers have much more power than US presidents but much less predictable terms), and that both men respect each other.

Of course, PMQs the day after tomorrow will not be so friendly. But that's OK; Sunak behaved like a defeated politician and not like a petulant infant, demonstrating to the UK and to the world that the UK is bigger than anyone sitting in that House. Exactly as it should be in all democracies.

Cassie and I spent all day outside yesterday, and today we're both pooped. We spent about 30 minutes at the dog beach before getting lunch at the Dock, the outdoor restaurant at Montrose Beach. Did Cassie enjoy the dog beach? Oh, yes she did:

From the Dock we walked 5.1 km along the lake to the new Duke of Perth:

From there, we headed home, but wouldn't you know we got distracted by the beer garden at Begyle Brewing?

By this point we'd walked over 3 hours and covered 15½ kilometers, so Cassie took a well-deserved nap:

Altogether, we walked 17.9 km (11.2 miles for the 19th-century crowd) over 3½ hours. Today we're taking it a bit easier. But Cassie was excited to take her morning walk at 7 am, so she clearly has Weimaraner-grade energy reserves.

Cassie and I have already walked 15.6 km (9.7 miles for the luddites), and have another 2 km or so to go before we get home. Tomorrow I'll have photos from our adventures, including from Montrose Dog Beach.

For now, though, we're enjoying nearly-perfect weather outside.

One of the many stories that piqued my interest this morning included a rant by the anti-Sorkin himself:

• Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, does not like how "politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." (He also implies that Liz Truss, and not Kamala Harris, most embodies the character of Selina Meyer.)
• Former President Obama has endorsed Vice President Harris.
• John Scalzi received a press release from the Harris campaign that he says demonstrates how "it's harder to stab when you're being punched in the face."
• David Frum sees President Biden's retirement as making himself "a modern Cincinnatus."
• Alex Shephard wonders if "JD Vance [is] the worst Vice Presidential pick ever?" (Vance "is not only one of the greatest frauds in American politics, he is the most obvious fraud in American politics.")
• Dana Milbank suggests (tongue in cheek) that the XPOTUS just "needs a mulligan:" "Vance, who has served 19 months in the Senate after writing a book and briefly dabbling as a venture capitalist, was picked by Trump on the merits. But Harris, who spent decades as a prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and senator, became vice president because of diversity, equity and inclusion."
• George Will, not tongue-in-cheek, warned that if Democrats re-take the Senate, we're going to get rid of the filibuster, oh dearie dearie me! Because chucking something that gives 20% of the US population a veto over the other 80% would mean Republicans would have to drum up a majority of the states to do something instead of just a coalition of the small ones.
• If you have a computer built before 2024 by one of the major manufacturers, your Secure Boot might not be secure. If you want to find out whether your system is secure, open up PowerShell and run this command: [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString((Get-SecureBootUEFI PK).bytes) -match "DO NOT TRUST|DO NOT SHIP")

Finally, Journalist Lewis H Lapham has died, aged 89. He edited Harper's during the time that I read it regularly, and no coincidence that I dropped it shortly after he did. I found his work engaging and sometimes enraging, but always smart. He will be missed.

Too bad I'm in my downtown office. It's a perfect, sunny day in Chicago. I did spend half an hour outside at lunchtime, and I might take off a little early. But at least for the next hour, I'll be looking through this sealed high-rise window at the kind of day we only get about 25 times a year here.

Elsewhere in the world:

• Former CIA lawyer James Petrila and former CIA spook John Sipher warn that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v US could undo 50 years of reforms that reined in illegal clandestine activities here and abroad.
• James Fallows reviews President Biden's "quasi-valedictory" address from last night.
• The doddering, elderly, convicted-felon Republican nominee for President seemed to have some difficulties at last night's rally. Maybe he's too old to be president and he should withdraw from the race?
• Helen Lewis, shaking her head sadly at the mess of a human being that is Republican Vice-President nominee JD Vance, hopes the XPOTUS "kept the receipt."
• Bowing to market pressure, Southwest Airlines has announced an end to its chaotic boarding process, and will now assign seats like a grown-up airline.
• London expanded its Ultra-Low-Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to encompass most of the metro area last year, which has resulted in improved air quality equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road.
• Unfortunately, this side of the pond, the Illinois Dept of Transportation seems unable to comprehend the opportunity we have to remake DuSable Lake Shore Drive for the future, and instead wants to repeat all the mistakes of the past. All the aldermen along the north lakefront oppose the plan, fortunately.
• The South Works site on the southeast side of Chicago, which used to house one of the world's largest steel mills, will soon become a quantum-computing research facility.

Finally, the various agencies charged with protecting the Democratic National Convention next month have published their plan for a 60-hectare "pedestrian restriction" zone around the United Center and a smaller zone around McCormick Place. "Only people with credentials who 'have a need to be there' – such as delegates, volunteers and other workers – will be allowed within that inner perimeter, said 2024 DNC coordinator Jeff Burnside." Presumably people who live on the Near West Side will be able to get to and from their homes as well.

The President will go on the air tonight at 8pm EDT to explain why he dropped out of the race, and presumably also to endorse Vice President Harris as his successor. This has the XPOTUS so rattled that a campaign lawyer whined to the television networks that the XPOTUS wants equal time so they can whine to everyone. OK, Boomer.

Meanwhile:

• Hillary Clinton lays out a strategy for Harris to do what she couldn't: become our first female president.
• The European Union's climate-tracking directive reported that Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history, with the average surface temperature of the planet cresting 17.09°C.
• Jennifer Rubin (and a few other writers) believe we'd all be better off with a centrist government. (I'm sure if we explain this to the Republican Party carefully and rationally, they'll tone down their extremism right away.)
• Speaking of centrism, Julia Ioffe digs into what a President Harris foreign policy might look like.
• Because of a confluence of events "that Tolstoy could not have made up," Israel has an opportunity this week to change the Middle East for the better—if only they didn't have a troglodyte for a prime minister.
• Pilot Patrick Smith explains turbulence, and why it has suddenly become so newsworthy.

Finally, the Times examines why some people continue to write negotiable orders of withdrawal (i.e., paper checks) despite their obvious inconveniences and vulnerabilities. I haven't written one in about 18 months, and the last time I used one in any capacity was (with no small irony) to set up automatic billing with my HOA.