The Daily Parker

I put on a long-sleeved shirt to walk Parker this morning, and I'm about to change into a polo. It's a lovely early-autumn day here in Chicago. Elsewhere...

• In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, former NSC adviser Alex Vindman calls the president "a useful idiot" and warns against complacency.
• Jonathan Chait argues that the president is a crook, and needs to be tried for his crimes. Jeff Wise points out the criminal case has already started.
• Steve Coll adds his voice to the chorus wishing an end to the electoral college.
• Osita Nwanevu wants to see an end to war-gaming the 2020 election.
• James Fallows calls for an end to the press treating this president like he's normal, lest they repeat the same mistakes they made in 2016.

Finally, the city received over 600 submissions from 13 countries on how to have outdoor dining in a Chicago winter.

Just a few of the things that crossed my desktop this morning:

• Astronomers have detected phosphine gas in the clouds on Venus, which is a strong indicator of life.
• Astronomers have also detected a ping-pong-ball-sized black hole orbiting the sun, getting as close as 133 kAUs in its orbit.
• An aircraft made a precautionary landing on an Interstate in Tennessee, and got a full police escort on take-off. No one was hurt.
• Car manufacturers are teaming up with insurance companies to share data on almost every aspect of how you drive.
• The Democratic governor of Nevada slammed the president for holding a "reckless and selfish" rally inside a Las Vegas arena over the weekend.
• Disappointed would-be marijuana retailers have sued to get some of the remaining Illinois licenses, saying the process as run has created an oligopoly that harms consumers.
• Via pro photographer Scott Kelly, Iain Stanley explains why your camera equipment matters less than you think.
• There are currently 8 active tropical systems in the Western hemisphere today, including the 21st storm of the Atlantic season.

And last night, Cubs pitcher Alec Mills threw the club's 16th no-hitter against the Milwaukee Brewers. In the history of Major League Baseball, there have only been 315 no-hitters. The last time the Cubs won a no-hitter was 51 years ago.

Here we go:

• A wildfire currently burning north of Sacramento has become the largest in California history.
• National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr Anthony Fauci doesn't expect us to get back to normal until "well into 2021."
• Law professor Rosa Brooks reviews Bob Woodward's Rage and finds nothing surprising.
• The Kissimmee Star Motel outside Orlando, Florida, is a case study in the state's abrogation of its basic duties to its citizens, or the apotheosis of the Calvinist ethics governing a large section American politics.
• NPR follows up on the "instant" hospitals China built in Wuhan last winter.
• The BBC's Reality Check column asks if the president "kept his promises on the military."

Finally, for only $875,000, you can own this contemporary, 2-story house...on top of an 8-story building.

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany blamed the Obama Administration for promising a Covid-19 vaccine and not delivering. Since Covid-19, named in part for its discovery in 2019, didn't exist when either Obama or Biden last held office, the proper response to such an assertion is to laugh in her face.

In the past, a White House spokesperson making up crap as she went along that could not possibly be true would have ended her career, for the simple reason she'd have no credibility and would therefore be worthless as a spokesperson.

In 8 weeks, we need to throw these people out of office, if for no other reason than how exhausting it is to listen to the babble of 4-year-old children on matters of deadly import.

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for the Washington Post and former New York Times public editor, warns news agencies against adding to what will most likely be a chaotic election night:

This time, with the stakes of the election so high, news organizations need to get it right. They need to do two things, primarily, and do them extraordinarily well.

First, in every way possible, they must prepare the public for uncertainty, and start doing this now. Granted, the audience doesn’t really show up in force until election night itself, but news reports, pundit panels and special programming can help plow the ground for public understanding of the unpredictability — or even chaos — to come.

Second, on election night and in the days (weeks? months?) to follow, news organizations will need to do the near-impossible: reject their ingrained instincts to find a clear narrative — including the answer to the question “who won?” — and stay with the uncertainty, if that’s indeed what’s happening.

I believe Biden will win decisively, but we may not know that he's done so until Thanksgiving. Or, rather, we may not have all the evidence in place to make that determination until then. Because, let's face it, 2020 will still have 57 days to run after the election.

With 58 days until the election, the noise keeps increasing. Here's some of it:

• Jeffrey Goldberg reports from multiple sources that the president referred to wounded soldiers as "losers" and "suckers" for serving the country. The administration moved quickly to lie about this.
• Andrew Sullivan calls the president a "metastasizing cancer."
• Catherine Rampell suggests ways to talk to right-wingers about the president's failures.
• Nick Martin asks, "how did 'if I die, I die' become this country's mantra?"
• Ross Douthat wonders "how many lives would a more normal president have saved?"
• A pro-president boat parade on Lake Travis, Texas, caused so much wake that several of the boats sank.
• Ken Griffin, the richest man in Illinois and therefore the one most likely to lose some money that he can never possibly spend, has donated $20 million to defeating the graduated income tax proposal in the state.
• Los Angeles has selected a new streetlight design, which is pretty cool.
• A bunch of 12-year-olds have discovered that the Edgenuity learning platform has easily-defeated grading algorithms.
• David Benioff and DB Weiss will adapt Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem for Netflix.

Finally, The Smithsonian describes how Greg Priore managed to steal priceless documents from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, because he was in charge of security for those items.

Today is the last day of meteorological summer, and by my math we really have had the warmest summer ever in Chicago. (More on that tomorrow, when it's official.) So I, for one, am happy to see it go.

And yet, so many things of note happened just in the last 24 hours:

• Greg Sargent says the president's "vile tweetstorm" yesterday "reveals the ugly core of his 'law and order' campaign."
• On that point, lawyer Nick Carmody suggests that the civil unrest the president has fomented "is one of the greatest sources of narcissistic supply."
• Pediatrician Rhea Boyd warns that when police commit violence, children are watching.
• United Airlines has ditched its change fees for domestic tickets, but as Cranky Flier explains, another policy change may actually hurt customers who change flights.
• Hurricane Laura destroyed the Lake Charles, La., NWS doppler radar, around the time the weather station there recorded a 221 km/h gust.
• Wells Fargo has filed one of the largest foreclosure suits in Chicago history, to try recovering a $338 million debt that the owner of the Palmer House Hilton has not serviced since April.

Finally, Josh Marshall reminds everyone that Democrats are nervous about the upcoming election because we're Democrats. It's kind of in our blood.

I'm glad I took a long walk yesterday and not today, because of this:

In other news:

• State health officials warn that suburban Cook County (the immediate suburbs surrounding Chicago) has experienced a resurgence in Covid-19 cases, and placed it and 29 other counties on warning that social restrictions could resume next week.
• Moreover, Covid-19 leads in a massive wave of excess deaths reported by the Cook County Medical Examiner this week. Suicides, homicides, and overdoses are also at near-record levels.
• Jonathan Russo, writing in TPM Cafe, lays out the case that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin got what he wanted with his meddling in the 2016 US elections, and stands to gain even more if the president wins (or somehow achieves) re-election.
• The nationalist, right-wing disease has started to infect Canada as well, as their new Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole has adopted a "Canada First" platform.
• Graceland Cemetery, which doubles as an arboretum, will be closed for the longest period in its 160-year history because of damage from the August 10th derecho.
• Mother Jones obtained video from a 10 December 2015 deposition showing Donald Trump boasting about his lack of ethics and ignorance of the law.

Finally, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has called for an end to Daylight Saving Time—not just the twice-annual time changes associated with the practice.

All autocratic regimes suffer from endemic incompetence. It's easy to see why: if you can't contradict the autocrat, the government is only as competent as he is. When the autocrat is a pathological narcissist, you get another level of stupid on top. People work in governments like this for one reason only: to get rich. And they get rich by stealing from the public. Competence only gets in the way of the grift.

So here we find ourselves 65 days from an election in which the incumbent claims to have the ability to put out a fire that he started, who leads a party that has given up any pretense of governing in favor of supporting this circus clown no matter what he says.

And the president is a clown, a kind of malicious Zaphod Beeblebrox, whose only role as president of the galaxy was to distract from the people who really ran things.

I'm venting some frustration given two things that have come up in the last 24 hours. First, from the New York Times, an admission (of sorts) from the administration that demeaning the office of President of the United States by having a gauche campaign event on the lawn of the White House was all about owning the libs:

[The president's] aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him, said the aides, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal conversations.

Of course he did. The show is all that matters. Which, presumably, why he plans to visit Kenosha, Wis., on Tuesday (the second thing) so he can personally add gasoline to the fire burning there—a fire he started:

White House spokesman Judd Deere told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday that Trump will be meeting with law enforcement officers and “surveying” some of the damage from recent protests that turned destructive.

Joe Biden, and his running mate, Kamala Harris, have accused Trump of rooting for violence amid unrest in Wisconsin.

“He views this as a political benefit,” Biden said in an interview on MSNBC. “He’s rooting for more violence, not less. And it’s clear about that.”

Of course he is. The show is all that matters. All of this destruction and death is fun to a man like the president.

Meanwhile, 183,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 and another 1,000 die every day, while Europe gets to enjoy a normal autumn, because our incompetent, nihilistic, narcissistic president cares about nothing other than enriching himself by any means available.

I'm sitting at my desk waiting for my work laptop to finish updating, a process now in its 24th minute, with "Working on updates 25%" on the screen for the past 5. Very frustrating; I have things to do today; and if I'd known how long it would take (I'm looking at you, help desk), I would have started the update when I left this evening.

So, all right, I'll read a few things:

• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has resigned "for health reasons" merely four days after becoming the longest-serving PM.
• Playwright Aurin Squire describes his time as a Black Republican, how he got there, and why he ultimately grew out of it.
• New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie points out that the violence in Kenosha, and not the Republican National Convention, "tell us more about where the right is headed:" "the extent to which Carlson and Coulter and Turning Point are representative of conservative thought on violence against protesters is the extent to which we may have to prepare for further Kenoshas."
• Author John Scalzi muses on works the public domain, and how copyright status has nothing to do with an author's popularity. He also discusses the discomfort we feel today with the "Golden Age" sci-fi works: "a lot of [it] currently lies in a sort of cultural uncanny valley, existing in a simultaneous state of being too distant from contemporary readers, and also not nearly distant enough."
• Chicago Tribune food critic Nick Kindelsperger finds the 9 best grab-and-go pizza slices in Chicago, which I should not have read this close to lunchtime. Or when I can't just hop on a plane for New York.

My laptop has rebooted three times now and appears to have gotten up to 83% complete. I may in fact get something done today.