The Daily Parker

Starting today's link round-up is a report that Deerfield, Ill.—based Walgreens Boots (the pharmacists/chemists, not footwear) shareholders have voted to sell out to a private-equity firm, which no doubt will destroy the company to extract every morsel of short-term value from it. Oh, well, the local CVS is closer than the local Walgreens.

In other fun news:

• Josh Barro hypothesizes that Democrats will actually have trouble running on the recently-passed Republican tax bill because of the timing and nature of the harms that the bill will cause.
• Similarly, Dan Rather frets that Republicans passed "the least popular piece of legislation in the history of modern polling" in part because they believe voters will never figure out what's in it: "The biggest political divide in this country is no longer between Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives. It is between the informed and the uninformed or misinformed."
• The Post fact-checks claims about the bill.
• Adam Kinzinger shakes his head at US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and how delusional theories now drive the Republican party.
• Nathan Taylor Pemberton examines the sadistic memes Republicans post with reckless glee these days portend even worse behavior from young right-wingers in the future.
• Jack Shafer distinguishes between the OAFPOTUS's "honest graft" and other forms of corruption.
• Julia Ioffe wonders what happened to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Finally, satirist Jeff Maurer asks, "Could a drug-fueled maniac be the right person to lead a common-sense political movement?" As he puts it, "If a House or Senate race was Goebbels McIncel versus Moonbeam J. Polycule, a third party could win." But this will probably not happen in 2026 or 2028, as Nate Silver explains less satirically.

As promised, here's a roundup of some reactions to the tax bill with the infantile name that the Senate passed yesterday with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.

The Economist: "Despite Mr Trump’s talk of helping the least well-off, the bill’s biggest beneficiaries would be the rich. Analysis of the House version by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that Americans earning less than $16,999 would lose about $820 a year—a 5.7% reduction in median income for that group. The richest 0.1%, earning more than $4.3m, would gain $390,000, a 2.8% increase."

Elaine Godfrey (The Atlantic): "The bill’s passage is part of an abortion one-two punch: Last week, the Supreme Court made it easier for states to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. “This is tremendous progress on achieving a decades-long goal that has proved elusive in the past,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in a statement about the SCOTUS decision and the GOP bill."

Adam Kinzinger: "Trump and many Republicans remain ideologically committed to tax cuts—especially for high earners and large donors. It’s a religion. Second, with defense, Medicare, and Social Security considered untouchable, social programs are the only place left to slash spending in order to offset revenue losses. And finally, there’s raw political fear: members of Congress worry that if they oppose the plan, Trump will back primary challengers against them. Just ask Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina—after Trump threatened to support a challenger, Tillis announced his retirement."

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias: "I think you could see there’s a mismatch in the way Mike Johnson characterizes this. He talks about: We’ve got all these able-bodied young men who are sitting on the couch all day playing video games, collecting Medicaid benefits. But you don’t collect Medicaid benefits. Able-bodied young men are not racking up incredible medical bills, almost by definition. So for the bill to save money, it has to be cutting off care to people who are in fact sick and in need of medical care. That’s how the savings work. The only way to offset the cost of tax cuts is to deny medical care to people who need treatments."

Paul Krugman: "I don’t know how many of the right-wingers clamoring for drastic Medicaid cuts believe the stories they tell about waste and lazy Americans who won’t get a job. My guess, though, is that they don’t care whether these stories are true. They’re going after Medicaid because they see it as a soft target — a program that helps lower-income Americans, and who cares about them? Medicaid’s beneficiaries, they imagine, are the new welfare queens driving Cadillacs. But a funny thing has happened to public opinion about Medicaid. The share of Americans covered by the program has increased a lot over the past 15 years."

Satirist Jeff Maurer: "Though the details are still being hammered out, Congress is most of the way to a bill that addresses this country’s woes with surgical precision. Kudos, sirs and madams! You have proven yourself equal to the moment. Because — in my humble opinion — we sorely need three things: 1) A less-accessible health care system; 2) Commitment to 19th-century fuel sources, and 3) A debt crisis so severe that it could give rise to a pre-civilizational economy in which power is held by warlords and exemplary prostitutes. ... As sure as John Travolta’s career revived, we will see a revival of industrial smokestacks churning out greenhouses gases and particulate matter that will shroud out great cities."

Dan Rather: "One example of a barbaric and nonsensical funding cut that will have real-world consequences is a grant for the University of Texas’s World Reference Center. The WRC has been collecting and housing viruses since the 1950s. Scientists are able to study old viruses to help them combat new ones like Zika, West Nile, and Covid. ... Yes, the WRC was used to research and fight the COVID-19 virus, but the grant existed long before 2019."

Jennifer Rubin: "Republicans refuse to admit that they are hurting ordinary, hard-working Americans trying to provide for themselves and their families. To do otherwise would be a confession of their inhumanity. Instead, using well-worn authoritarian techniques (e.g., demonization, dehumanization, and marginalization), MAGA politicians convince themselves that those who rely on vital benefits are unfit and undeserving. Republicans dub them 'rats' or 'vermin' or 'murderers.'"

It's going to be a long 18 months until we get a new Congress.

I'll get to the ABBA—sorry, OBBBA—reactions after lunch. Right now, with apologies, here is a boring link dump:

• The Clown Prince of X is in the "finding out" phase, learning what happens to oligarchs who cross autocrats.
• Adam Kinzinger calls out the bribe that Shari Redstone's Paramount/CBS agreed to pay the OAFPOTUS to settle a bogus libel lawsuit stemming from a 2020 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
• After the US and Israeli attacks on Iran temporarily shut down Internet connectivity in the country, hundreds of pro-Scottish independence social media accounts went dark in what I'm sure the Iranian Government will call a bizarre coincidence.
• The UK Royal Family have decided to decommission the Royal Train, a version of which has carried the UK Head of State around the country since 1869.
• Cook County will open the first of 120 planned modular houses in Chicago to kick off a $12 million push for more affordable housing in the county.
• The Chicago Board of Education refused to hand over $175 million that it owed for pensions last year, leaving the city with an unexpected $161 million general-fund deficit.
• Richard Day tells Chicago Streets Blog what everyone has been saying since the pandemic: the Chicago Transit Authority needs to resume enforcing its own rules of passenger conduct again.
• Yesterday was the 90th birthday of the first Grant Park summer concert.
• Josh Marshall remembers Bill Moyers.

Finally, does a healthy adult really need to drink 4 liters of water per day? Well, it depends on a lot of things. National Geographic debunks this and five other myths about hydration.

And just because she's so pretty, here is a gratuitous photo of Cassie:

Note: I started this post at 8:30 am but got interrupted by work and HOA stuff.

What a day for right-wing Republicans! Early this morning they managed to pass the OAFPOTUS's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" through the Senate, with every Democrat and three Republicans (Rand Paul, KY; Thom Tillis, NC; Susan Collins, ME) voting against it, forcing Vice President Vance to get out of bed before 6am:

Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote for the measure, which would extend trillions of dollars in tax cuts from Trump’s first term and implement new campaign promises — such as eliminating income taxes on tips and overtime wages — while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on immigration enforcement and defense.

To offset the cost, the legislation would cut about $1 trillion from Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income individuals and people with disabilities, and other health care programs. It would also cut SNAP, the anti-hunger Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. Nearly 12 million people will lose health care coverage if the bill becomes law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

[T]he measure is starkly regressive. The 10 percent of households with the lowest incomes would stand to be worse off by $1,600 on average because of benefits cuts, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the House version of the bill. The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes would be better off by $12,000 on average.

Combined with the impact of Trump’s tariffs — which the White House has argued will help pay for the bill’s tax cuts and new spending — the bottom 80 percent of households would see their take-home incomes fall, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

I'll have more reactions later, all of which I expect will use some variation on the phrase "most regressive Federal budget ever." The bill has to go back to the House of Representatives again because the Senate changed a few things, but it does look like it will pass—narrowly.

I'm sure it was a coincidence that televangelist con-man Jimmy Swaggart died almost immediately afterward:

Mr. Swaggart’s voice and passion carried him to fame and riches that he could scarcely have dreamed of in his small-town boyhood. At its peak in the mid-1980s, Jimmy Swaggart Worldwide Ministries had a television presence in more than 140 countries and, along with its Bible college, took in up to half a million dollars a day from donations and sales of Bible courses, gospel music and merchandise.

In October 1987, Mr. Swaggart was photographed entering a hot-sheet New Orleans motel with a woman. In a later television interview, the woman said that she and Mr. Swaggart had several encounters, describing them as “pornographic” but as not involving intercourse.

Mr. Swaggart responded in February 1988 with an extraordinary, tear-gushing mea culpa to some 7,000 followers at his World Faith Center in Baton Rouge. Turning first to his wife, Frances, he said, “Oh, I have sinned against you, and I beg your forgiveness.”

Some in the audience were so moved by the confession that they fell to their knees, praying in tongues, an indication to Pentecostals of possession by the Holy Spirit.

...or an indication to Psychologists of possession by intense cognitive dissonance, of the type that people experience when they realize they've wrapped their identity and worldview around a charlatan.

I guess the Lord giveth and He taketh away, right? Though if I were a religious person, I would see less of the Lord's work in both of these stories and more of the Adversary's.

Too bad Christopher Hitchens has left us. Given his obituary of Jerry Falwell, I can only imagine what he'd have to say about Swaggart.

Somehow, tomorrow is July 1st. As far as I can tell, this is because today is June 30th, and yesterday was June 7th, and last week was sometime in 2018.

And yet, I have more stuff to read at lunchtime from just the last day or so:

• Josh Marshall distinguishes between the energy and engagement of the Democratic Party (i.e., the actual voters) and the torpor of the Party's leadership: "[It's] not a nightmare. Certainly not for the party. It may be a nightmare for some incumbents."
• The Washington Post digs into the data to figure out why restaurants inside airports converge on mediocre even while they have wildly different qualities in the real world.
• The Nielsen-Norman Group suggests a new rubric for assessing how different kinds of users work with a complex application.
• I have wanted to visit Fairbanks, Alaska, for a long time, but I never considered going there for a midnight sun baseball game.

And now, despite an uncomfortable 34°C heat index, I must walk Cassie.

On my flight yesterday, I finally read Nicholas Confessore's explanation of how US v Skrmetti got to the Supreme Court, and...wow. I am actually shocked at how illiberal and extremist the ACLU's leadership has become, and how far the transgender rights movement has moved to the left:

For Chase Strangio, the stakes were both personal and political. He joined the A.C.L.U. in 2013, a few years after undergoing top surgery, or a mastectomy, a procedure that “saved my life,” as he later wrote. “When you spend your life hiding from yourself, experiencing embodiment is nourishing, exhilarating,” Strangio wrote. “It is survival.” He vowed to work “to create social, political and legal conditions so that others could experience the same possibility.”

Like Strangio, the younger people going to work at L.G.B.T.Q. groups leaned further left than their older colleagues. Often identifying as queer — a label that could connote radical politics as much as any sexual or gender identity — they resented the incremental, assimilationist politics that had won the right to same-sex marriage. They sought to deconstruct assumptions about what was normal — to dismantle bourgeois institutions, not seek inclusion in them.

When the journalist Abigail Shrier published her 2020 book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” — casting the rise in dysphoria among teenage girls as a form of social contagion — Strangio tweeted that “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

An ACLU lawyer arguing in favor of book banning? What the actual? Confessore also elucidates Strangio's views on biology which don't, perhaps, conform with what actual biologists think:

Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be “born with a male body” or “born male”; in his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a “male body,” Strangio told his colleagues: “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

In interviews and on social media, he has described himself as “a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who felt his movement was overly devoted to gay white men with “social power and capital and political power” and to the “fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage.” The turn to trans rights would ultimately reopen an old fissure in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement: whether to seek civic equality — or liberation.

It's all of a piece with young people throughout history wanting to change the world and not wanting to wait around for inconvenient things like democracy, I suppose.

Andrew Sullivan has fought Strangio's way of thinking for years, frustrated that the LGBTQ+ movement has shortchanged the Ls and the Gs especially. He has a lot to say about the Skrmetti decision in genral and Strangio in particular:

This disdain for the greatest gay rights victory made him a Grand Marshal in the New York pride parade that year (that’s how far left the gay elite has now gone). His view of his critics was: “I think they genuinely want to take away rights for trans people and kill trans people.” Yeah, I’m not worried about safeguards for children and good scientific evidence; I just want to kill trans people.

Strangio, in line with the deep illiberalism of his movement, refuses to debate anyone who is not fully in agreement with him; won’t provide evidence to back up wild claims; and wouldn’t even agree to be interviewed in person on the record by the trans-friendly NYT! He opposed any journalistic coverage of the debate on child sex changes, and supported targeting the Times: “The NYT’s horrible coverage of and fixation on trans people has been central to the progression of anti-trans bills and policies nationally.”

In front of the Supreme Court, the gist of Strangio’s argument was, well, absurd. It was about puberty blockers that are used medically to stop a condition called “central precocious puberty” — where kids younger than 8 go into puberty because the hypothalamus triggers the pituitary gland prematurely. It can be caused by an endocrine disorder, tumors, rare genetic mutations, or appear without apparent cause in girls. Strangio actually tried to argue that because the drug is used for cis kids for this reason, it cannot be denied much older “trans” children with no precocious puberty who want to change sex before puberty for psychological reasons. Apart from the age and the diagnosis, exactly the same!

Strangio and his fellow nutters have also pushed the gay and lesbian rights movement onto thin political ice — and it’s now cracking beneath our feet. The queer radicals have lost an election, debates in 27 state legislatures, the Biden DOJ, public opinion, the Supreme Court, and now — with this definitive piece and a solid podcast series, The Protocol — the New York Times. And next month, the most famous clinic in the US transing kids, run by Johanna Olson-Kennedy, will shutter. She was a key promoter of the suicide lie. The lawsuits are going to be brutal.

Maybe there’s a chance for what’s left of the former gay groups to recover their liberal principles, support free speech, engage opponents, respect religious dissent, use plain English, and trust rigorous, evidence-based science again. If we can do that, and help kids in gender distress without irreversibly and prematurely medicalizing them, we can begin to regain the broader public trust we have recently lost.

I have personally experienced the results of this radicalization of the left, and I don't just mean the spanking our party received last November. I've been an ally all my life, as gay friends going all the way back to high school will attest (in the '80s, when being openly gay was dangerous), and even I have gotten pushback for not being in line with the Movement.

I really hope the Democratic Party can get back to the center in the next year or we're going to get smacked around again. There's no hope for the Republicans as long as the OAFPOTUS leads them; but we can--and absolutely should--peel off the 25% of their voters who think they've gone off the deep end to the right. Getting people like Strangio off the stage will help. They don't represent the majority of the Party and they certainly don't come close to representing a majority of Americans.

The music legend has died at 82. Barenaked Ladies popped into my mind when I read the story.

Meanwhile, I've got a meeting in 10 minutes, so let me also add just small note how the OAFPOTUS has affected Chicago. A friend of mine works for Northwestern University, and she is pissed off:

In a message to the Northwestern community, the school’s leadership said the new measures would include a faculty and staff hiring freeze, reductions in academic budgets, and a “0% merit pool with no bonuses in lieu of merit increases,” among other actions.

“Like a number of our peer universities, we have now reached a moment when the University must take a series of cost-cutting measures designed to ensure our institution’s fiscal stability now and into an uncertain future. These are not decisions we come to lightly. The challenges we face are many, some of which have been building for some time and some of which are new,” the message said.

Other cost-cutting measures include modifications to the health insurance program and additional non-personnel budget reductions. The school said more information on each of the actions would be coming in the days and weeks ahead.

I'd also point out my agreement with Josh Marshall on how states like Illinois and California, by being net contributors to the Federal budget, are essentially funding the war on themselves.

We've got 19 more months of this shit, folks.

Really, this post is just a list of links, but I'm going to start with Dan Rather's latest Stack:

• US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) started her 2026 re-election campaign last week by telling constituents not to worry about the proposed $880 billion cuts to Medicaid because "we are all going to die."
• Writer Andy Craig takes a look at the destruction the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have caused, and tries to find a path back to a constitutional republic. "Whatever eventually replaces this crisis-ridden government will result in a new constitutional settlement, not a simple revival of what came before. We will find ourselves engaged in a kind of constitution-making arguably not seen since Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War."
• Paul Krugman looks at what professional money people are doing, and thus what they're predicting, and warns that the TACO trade is misguided, because the OAFPOTUS really has no off-ramp for his tariff obsession: "[T]he nonsensical nature of the whole enterprise is why I don’t think he’ll find an off-ramp. After all, it’s obvious that the increased steel tariff wasn’t a considered policy, it was a temper tantrum after the Court of International Trade ruled against his other tariffs. ... If you want to know where this is going, keep your eyes on the bond and currency markets, where cool-headed traders realize that U.S. policy is still being dictated by the whims of a mad king."
• Evan Osnos smacks his forehead at the unprecedented scale and reach of said mad king's plundering of the United States.
• Max Boot points to the OAFPOTUS's assault on science and education as "the suicide of a superpower."
• Jen Rubin believes the Republican Party has "no good options on the budget," thanks to a Democratic Party in array.
• The Clown Prince of X likes to excuse his sociopathy, cruelty, immaturity, and incompetence by claiming he's "Aspie." (He isn't. He's just a rich asshole.)
• Josh Marshall relays the story about the mess (literal and figurative) that the United States Institute of Peace faced when they got back into their offices after its illegal DOGE takeover in March.

Finally, Streetsblog Chicago's Harjas Sandhu shakes his fist at the seeming inability of the Chicago Transit Authority to find competent leadership. At least it's not currently run by a not-too-bright reality TV star. (And I don't mean the OAFPOTUS.)

I have had no more than 15 consecutive minutes free at any point today. The rest of the week I have 3½-hour blocks on my calendar, but all the other meetings had to go somewhere, so they went to Monday.

So just jotting down stories that caught my eye:

• Ukraine's masterful and crippling strike against the Russian Air Force over the weekend has changed warfare forever, writes Max Boot.
• Jen Rubin wants to end the creeping normalization of the OAFPOTUS and his droogs because, as she says, they're all nuts.
• Because they want to nominate obviously unqualified people to the Federal judiciary, the Justice Dept will no longer ask the American Bar Association to vet them.
• Michael Tomasky explains why the Republican Party runs up massive deficits while complaining about massive deficits.
• Why does the MAGA right hate New York City, wonders Paul Krugman?
• Writer Anne Lamott cautions against "putting Biden's head on a spike."
• The oldest company in North America, the Hudson's Bay Co. founded 355 years ago, will permanently close its doors this summer.

Finally, the Illinois House failed to pass a budget bill that included funding the Regional Transportation Authority. Despite regional transport agencies facing a $770 million funding shortfall later this summer, the House couldn't agree on how to pay for it, in part because downstate Republicans don't want to pay for it at all. The Legislature could return in special session this summer, but because of our hippy-dippy 1970 state constitution, they need a 3/5 vote to pass a budget after June 1st. If they can't pass the budget soon, the RTA may have to cut 40% of its services, decimating public transport for the 7 million people in the area.

My party wants to govern, and understands that government needs to provide a service that millions of people who depend on even if people who don't use the service have to contribute. I mean, some of my taxes go to Republican farm subsidy programs, and I accept that's part of the deal. Republicans no longer think our needs matter. They need to be careful what they wish for.

Today's theme—in fact, almost every day's theme on the Daily Parker lately—is a group doing one thing that freaks everyone out to distract from the other thing that they really want to do. For instance:

• In the middle of passing the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history, Republicans are lying about the plight of the working class being all Obama's fault. Because of course they are, and of course it isn't.
• Even though the OAFPOTUS is attacking Harvard to take attention away from the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history, the assault on the country's oldest university is "an astonishing act of national self-sabotage," writes Yascha Mounk.
• Michelle Singletary explains how the "no tax on tips" provision in the bill proposing the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history will function to make the lives of lower-wage employees worse, while enriching gig companies like Uber at their expense. For example, if it becomes law, Uber will immediately move their workers to a tip-only structure and lower ride costs, simultaneously taking a bigger chunk of the ride revenue for the company while lowering the amount that riders tip. Sucks to be an Uber driver if that happens. (Even more than it does already.)
• ProPublica explains the nonsense coming out of the administration about "invasion," and why Stephen Miller is spending so much energy on this fringe legal theory, even as Congress is passing the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history.

Did I mention that the House voted at 1am yesterday to impoverish more Americans and create more billionaires with their money than has ever happened in the United States?

Keep this in mind when you vote in 18 months and for the rest of your lives: The unprecedented—and I'm including Harding and Reagan here—corruption and outright theft of your money that the Republican Party are perpetrating on the United States is the culmination of a 60-year program that started when Ronald Reagan was Governor of California. They have been working on this since 1964. I am not exaggerating. So the next time a Republican tells you they have a plan to help the working class or to bring "good jobs" back or whatever lie they're telling you, remember how they have used the power voters have given them.

And if you're a MAGA Republican, take a good hard look at what they're doing to you, even while you're cheering the cruelty they're inflicting on everyone you hate.