The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

First reactions from the pros

Some of these may be correct, but not all of them are:

  • Rafael Baer: "The whole apparatus of voting for a candidate who might not satisfy your exact needs, and probably doesn’t embody all the values you hold sacred, but might at least make some half-decent decisions for the country as a whole over the coming years, feels oddly antiquated. It is alien to the click-and-collect spirit of digital commerce."
  • The Economist: "Mr Trump’s victory has changed America, and the world will need to grasp what that means. America remains the pre-eminent power. However, without American enlightened self-interest as an organising principle, it will be open season for bullies. Countries will be more able to browbeat their neighbours, economically and militarily, without fear of consequences. Their victims, unable to turn to America for relief, will be more likely to compromise or capitulate. Global initiatives, from tackling climate change to arms control, have just got harder. For a time—possibly for years—America may do fine. Eventually, the world will catch up with it."
  • James Fallows: "By the standards of any presidential race in modern times, Kamala Harris ran a very “good” campaign. By those same standards, Trump ran a very bad campaign. And none of it mattered. The Republican presidential candidate had won the popular vote only once in the past 32 years. Eight years ago, Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by three million votes. Four years ago, he lost to Joe Biden by seven million. Yesterday, our fellow Americans appear to have given him an absolute majority—as I type, over 51% of the total vote, and a margin of several million."
  • David Frum: "Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too."
  • Carlos Lozada: "Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad. The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it."
  • Josh Marshall: "[E]xhaustion is the greatest threat to continued opposition to Donald Trump. There’s no one election that saves democracy. That whole construct is wrong. It’s the enduring question of what kind of society we want to live in and what we’re going to do about it."
  • Daniel McCarthy: "Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. Mr. Trump has shown that the nation’s political orthodoxies are bankrupt, and the leaders in all our institutions — private as well as public — who stake their claim to authority on their fealty to such orthodoxies are now vulnerable."
  • Robert Reich: "If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do. All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty. We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny."
  • Michael Tomasky: "If you go carefully through the exit polls and compare them to 2020, you actually see a fair amount of stability. Only one group of voters really stands out. Biden had won Latinos 65–32. Harris won them by only 53–45. And the biggest change of all is among Latino men: Biden won them 59–36, and this time, Trump beat Harris outright, 54–44. I kept wishing that I would see an ad by one of the prominent Black or Latino men who endorsed her that didn’t focus on praising Harris or even denouncing Trump in the normal, he’s-a-threat-to-democracy way. I wanted to see, say, LeBron James talking directly to young men of color about why Trump was not a tough guy at all; why he was a weakling and a bully, and explaining that a real man doesn’t lie or make excuses or disrespect women."
  • George Will: "Enough has been said about the Republican Party’s eight years of self-degradation. More needs to be said about the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president. Before claiming to sniff Nazism on the other party (and its supporters), Harris’s party should deal with the stench of its antisemitic faction that is pro-Hamas and therefore pro-genocide."

Meanwhile, here in Chicago, voters elected only a couple of the Chicago Teachers Union candidates in our school board vote, as well as a couple of school-choice (read: taking public money for private schools) folks. I really disliked most of the candidates, including the one who won in my district. So that will be fun. Even though I don't have a kid in school, I do pay property tax, and I'm really tired of so much of it going to pay settlements for people beaten up or killed by cops and for a totally dysfunctional school district.

Update: Jonathan Pie has the acerbic British comedian view:

Our first duty

I'm not going to lie; this one stings:

We have a lot more data to gather to learn why we lost and why slightly more than half the electorate felt comfortable returning one of the least competent and most corrupt men back to the White House. Given this ridiculous person as our opponent, we have to acknowledge that we simply failed. I'll have a lot more to say about why over the next days and weeks, but the President's decision to run for a second term is probably the precipitating cause.

This sucks. Harris failed to win over enough voters to overcome a clownish demagogue. Her job from today until November 2028 will be to help the Democratic Party find someone else who can.

Right now, though, our first duty in protecting democracy in the United States is simply to accept that we lost and start preparing for at least two years in the minority. Being in opposition sucks; but notice, Republicans, how we're not storming the Capitol.

We can wallow in self-pity for the next 57 days, but come January 3rd, we need to be a disciplined, focused opposition party until we win the Senate back in two years and the White House two years after that. Resist the temptation to blame or point fingers; we Democrats have a long history of circular firing squads that we need to put behind us. We need to look at the data figure out what worked and what didn't, learn from our mistakes, and win the next election. We're not going to be in the desert for long unless we choose not to look at a map.

Election 2024 live blogging

It's early, and nothing shocking has yet occurred, I'm actually watching The Bear. But some returns have come in. The Post has called West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky for the XPOTUS and Vermont for Harris. Again, no surprises. Early (<25%) returns in several states have the XPOTUS ahead, but as we've seen many times, Republican precincts report early, on average.

But let's see the 8pm ET returns...and, in a shock, the Post calls Mississippi for the 1850s.

To be continued...

19:04 CST: Nothing surprising. Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma turn red, and Maryland and southern New England turns blue.

20:10 CST: Still no surprises. We knew we'd lose Joe Manchin's US Senate seat, and we figured we'd pick up the North Carolina governor's mansion. And, of course, everyone has called Illinois for Harris. All of the swing states are still swinging, with Harris leading Michigan and Pennsylvania, but the XPOTUS leading Georgia and N.C. The bigs have called Ohio for the XPOTUS.

In what I am sure will turn out to be a mirage, Harris leads in Kansas and Missouri, and the XPOTUS in Virginia.

And it looks like the Florida referendum legalizing abortion through the 24th week will fail.

Nothing yet in local races, except the Democratic candidate for Illinois Attorney General, Eileen O'Neill Burke, looks like she'll win.

21:09 CST: The map still looks a lot like it did at this time in 2020. By "a lot" I mean identical. We picked up Colorado and lost Utah, for example. All the swing states show the XPOTUS in the lead but, then again, so does Minnesota. So, no one knows nothing. I guess I'll post again in an hour, at which point we should have the West Coast states.

But the three that will decide the election—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—won't be called for days. The one thing that I have seen in the drill-down, though, is an even starker urban/rural divide, which is not good for the country in the long term.

22:02 CST: Wow, The Bear is fantastic. I see why it got all those Emmys. Oh, and we won California while they took Idaho. Still looking almost exactly like 2020.

22:07 CST: Just a reminder that four years ago, the AP didn't call Wisconsin until 3pm Central on Wednesday. And no one called Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Michigan for many hours after that. This clearly isn't 1980, 1992, or 2004. It's, well, 2020 again. So everyone just try to sleep and check back tomorrow.

23:01 CST: Welp, we lost the Senate, with Sherrod Brown losing to yet another ultra-right kook in Ohio. Whatever else happens this week, we really have to figure out why people prefer the ultra-right kooks to sensible moderates. I'm afraid I won't like the answer.

Still too close to call the big three. But I'm not going to wait up for it. I'm disappointed in my country, but not entirely surprised.

Remember, he's going to lie about the results

Only 27 hours remain until polls close in parts of Indiana and Kentucky. Which means we're less than 27 hours away from the XPOTUS claiming he won, because that's how he operates. Even if he loses by 10 million votes, he'll still claim he won all the way until January 20th, and possibly even longer.

Of course, no one will know anything interesting until at least 7pm Eastern when polls close in Georgia and 7:30pm Eastern when they close in North Carolina. Arizona's polls close at 7pm Mountain, which is 8pm here in Chicago. And even though we know who will win California's 54 electoral votes—a fifth of the required 270 to win—no one can call the state officially until 8pm Pacific (10pm here in Chicago).

Other things to keep in mind:

  • If the election is close, it will take longer to know the results than if it's a blowout for either candidate.
  • Rural areas, which tend to vote Republican, have orders of magnitude fewer voters than urban areas, which tend to vote Democratic. This means that early returns always look better for Republicans than later returns. Expect the XPOTUS to harp on early returns and discount later ones for this reason.
  • Pennsylvania can't even begin tabulating absentee ballots until tomorrow, and it will take them days to get through all of them.
  • Arizona has super-long ballots this year, especially in Maricopa County (Phoenix), so counting will take a lot longer than usual.
  • Georgia plans to release official numbers as early as 8pm Eastern tomorrow night, but Fulton County, which contains Atlanta, will take a lot longer.
  • Milwaukee hopes to have provisional results around midnight, but again, counting could take days. And absentee ballots can continue arriving for a week.

Bottom line: until Wednesday lunchtime at the earliest, no one will really know anything if the election is close. So let's hope for a repeat (and a reversal) of 1980 and get a huge Harris victory tomorrow.

Who could have predicted this?, non-endorsement edition

In a decision that literally no one liked (except the XPOTUS's re-election campaign), Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos killed the Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris last week. As of today, the Post has lost 200,000 subscribers—about 10% of them—and Bezos has responded to his critics:

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.

When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

Josh Marshall calls bullshit:

In Bezos’ case he has multiple companies that do extensive government contracting. When Trump was President, Amazon very credibly sued the Trump administration for choosing Microsoft’s cloud hosting service over Amazon’s for a major Pentagon contract. He also owns the Blue Origin space delivery company. Needless to say, Amazon is a walking, talking advertisement for anti-trust enforcement. You may want the DOJ to crack down on Amazon’s practices. But that’s not the point. It’s a massive cudgel hanging over Bezos’ company and wealth.

Bezos addressed many of these issues in the op-ed he published late yesterday in the Post. I found the piece uncomfortable to read. He was refreshingly candid on certain points and he made some good points. Everything I’ve heard about his decade as owner backs up his claim that he’s given the paper complete freedom to report on his various companies. The whole thing was pretty good except for the rather central fact that his explanation for why he made the decision he did was entirely unconvincing. Not even close.

[A] lawless authoritarian government can up the ante way beyond contracts and regulatory enforcement. But a future Trump administration likely doesn’t need to. With someone like Jeff Bezos, it can do all sorts of damage under the general cloak of discretionary authority. There’s no right to a government contract and proving political interference must be quite difficult. Indeed, the way the Supreme Court now interprets the law, it’s not entirely clear to me why the President wouldn’t be at liberty just to overrule a contracting decision because he doesn’t like the owner of the company.

Or, as New Republic writer Timothy Noah pointed out, "the Post, along with other institutions and people that allow themselves to get intimidated into silence, invite a second Trump administration to intimidate them further. That’s how bullying works."

We have seven days to kick the XPOTUS to the curb. Let's see the back of him, once and for all.

PS: As a bonus, Anita Hill has an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times worth reading.

A week from tomorrow

"Nice democracy you've got there. Be a shame if something happened to it..."—XPOTUS (paraphrased).

The man whose presidency did more damage to our country than any since James Buchanan's and wants another ride on the pony spent yesterday rallying the brownshirts at Madison Square Garden in an event his own supporters equated with the infamous Nazi rally there in 1939.

But I have to agree with Michael Tomasky this morning, when he says we "may as well spend this last week feeling confident:"

To put it simply, liberals tend toward fatalism and panic; the label often employed is “bedwetters.” Did you see those new anti-trans ads? She’s doomed. Oh my God, did you see what Nate Silver just said? It’s over. Yikes, the polls in Pennsylvania just shifted seven-tenths of a point in Trump’s favor, this is a nightmare. Oh dear, the Nevada early vote totals are a disaster. And on and on and on and on: Liberals look for things to panic about.

I think it starts with the fact that liberals worry more about the world; carry more psychic weight around with them. Conservatives worry about the world too, but they do so in a very different way. Liberals love complexity, while conservatives prefer simplicity.

[M]any liberals have, whether consciously or not, absorbed the lesson from the media that they don’t really represent or speak for America, while conservatives are serenely confident that they do represent and speak for America.

The Republican Party has become so extreme that it no longer represents middle America at all. Middle America wants women to own their reproductive freedom. Middle America wants sensible gun laws. Middle America wants the superrich to pay more taxes. Middle America wants a higher minimum wage, more housing, and more investments made in the middle class.

[F]reaking out and panicking just contributes to an overall atmosphere that helps the other side. Don’t do it. Fatalism is the opium of the people.

Josh Marshall points out that while the polls appear to say the election will be close, they're actually saying the election is actually uncertain:

I think there’s more uncertainty than usual because of 1) rapid changes in the polling industry in response to evolving technology, 2) methodological changes in response to polls twice underestimating Donald Trump’s electoral strength, and 3) the steep and inherent difficulties of separating what about the 2020 election was embedded electoral trends and what was the COVID pandemic. So yes, I really do think there are more question marks, more debatable assumptions packaged into the analyses than usual.

Of course, if the polls said that either candidate was 15 points ahead this would all mostly be moot. We know that the race is at least fairly close. That’s why all these factors are in play. And that’s a good way to conclude on the expectations setting — that I’m not saying some sort of blow out in either direction is likely. Just that it might not actually be that close. And we should be careful to distinguish between these two things — close and uncertain.

But just to remind everyone what's on the line here, even if the XPOTUS won't do all the anti-democratic and anti-American things he has threatened to do, the people coming with him will try to remake the country in ways that almost no one outside their Christian Nationalist bubble wants. To that end, I give you: Stop Project 2025, the web comic. That's right: if you're at all confused about what the extreme right will do should they get into power, this series of comics will explain it.

Happy Monday.

T minus 10 days

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.

Sinclair's Law

"It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on his not understanding it."—Upton Sinclair.

We lead our news roundup today with the biggest Chicago transit story of the year, with the major players acting just as Sinclair would predict:

Finally, Mike Post is sad that most television shows no longer have theme songs. So am I. But now I have the Quincy ME theme song in my head...

Thiel and Musk

Jim Fallows points out that XPOTUS backers and really horrible people Peter Thiel and Elon Musk surely know that the XPOTUS is losing it, so we need to think about what that means should JD Vance become VPOTUS:

Here is a chain-of-being that doesn’t get enough attention:

  • Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were two of the co-founders of PayPal. They are the duo you see above, nearly 25 years ago.
  • Peter Thiel created JD Vance as a political figure. Vance met Thiel when Vance was a student at Yale Law; he went to work for Thiel’s venture-capital firm in San Francisco and made his money there (before more money, from his book); and Thiel was the crucial donor in Vance’s 2022 campaign for the Senate. Recall that Vance’s success in Ohio two years ago was the rare big GOP victory in the purported “red wave” of that year. Vance is also an isolated success among the political proteges Thiel has funded, whose prominent failures include the right-wing extremist Arizona candidate Blake Masters.
  • Musk, Thiel, and Vance himself are all savvy enough to recognize that Donald Trump is falling apart mentally, and perhaps physically, as the world watches. Should he and Vance be elected, the odds are overwhelming that Vance would sooner or later end up in control—through the 25th Amendment or by natural means.

About that last bit: the XPOTUS outdid himself the past couple of days, including uttering an obscenity at the Al Smith dinner (with the Catholic archbishop of New York sitting right there), and going on an extensive riff about the size of Arnold Palmer's penis before calling Vice President Harris "a shit vice president." And take a look at the transcript from his Univision town hall yesterday. Not to mention, of course, that he sounds a lot like our three favorite dictators from World War II. This is who half the country want as their leader.

While you ponder that, you can enjoy The New Republic's list of "the 100 worst things Trump has done since descending that escalator." And then you can bloody well vote for Harris in 15 days.

First Monday in October 2024

The extreme-right-wing US Supreme Court begins a new term today, which we can all expect to continue the trends they have been on for the last 30 years. All we need is a razor-thin margin in one or two swing states on the 5th, and then, as George HW Bush said once, "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah! Now it's off to the races!"

Meanwhile:

Finally, Cloudflare announced late last week that it blocked the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in history. The attack, whose packets came mainly from Russia, peaked at 3.8 Tbps, beating the previous record of 3.47 Tbps against a Microsoft Azure customer.