The Daily Parker

I believe the precipitating event that led to the OAFPOTUS winning re-election was President Biden's decision to run for re-election—something he promised, in 2020, he would not do.

This evening the news comes that he has pardoned his son Hunter for the crimes he went to jail for, crimes that we can state with some certainty he would not have committed or been charged with had his dad not been president.

[President] Biden said that he came to the decision this weekend, which coincided with the family being together in Nantucket, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving. Hunter Biden’s attorneys this weekend also mounted a vigorous public defense, releasing a 52-page paper on Saturday titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden.”

“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” Biden said in his statement. “… I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”

There's a lot to untangle here, but bottom line, I think this was a bad move on principle. Yes, Hunter Biden was only prosecuted (by an OAFPOTUS-appointed US Attorney) because his dad was president. And yes, the actual offenses he was convicted of were not even in the same league as the offenses the OAFPOTUS pardoned Charles Kushner for in 2020.

But we're going to spend the next four years opposing an unprincipled horse's ass. We have to be better than that. It's literally what we are fighting for.

Welcome to stop #118 on the Brews and Choos project, which announced it's fucking closure just three days after I visited.

Brewery: Ravinia Brewing, 2601 W Diversey Ave., Chicago
Train line: CTA Blue Line, Logan Square
Time from Chicago: 16 minutes
Distance from station: 1.4 km

I reviewed the original Ravinia Brewing location in the historic Ravinia neighborhood of Highland Park so early in the Brews & Choos Project that Covid-19 had only just started entering most people's awareness. Almost by accident two of the beers my Brews Buddy and I tried were the same as the first Ravinia beers I tried in February 2020.

The Steep Ravine IPA (7.2%, 22 IBU) and the Baldwin barrel-aged porter (6.5%, 35 IBU) tasted just as good as they did 4½ years ago. We liked the new ones, too, with a big caveat. The Ludwig barrel-aged Oktoberfest (6.9%) "taste[d] like an Oktoberfest, but more so: more intense, syrupy flavor," she said, with which I completely agree. The Diversey Station juicy session pale ale (4.0%) had a good fruit-hop balance and will come up again next time I visit.

We differed a bit on two other tastes. Of the Infusion of the Week (see above, bottom right), she said "It's growing on me. Once I got accustomed to the rosemary, I could adjust my palate, and it just works." I said, "this beer is not for me." And of the Casa de Guava Berliner Weißbier, with its cloying, sweet, overwhelming guava flavor, she said it was "clean and refreshing, tart but not too tart, nice finish." I gagged involuntarily and, after recovering, said "no, oh no, oh no no no." (This is why we make a good team.)

Since we had just completely failed to finish the outsized pretzel at Pilot Project, and despite the 2 km walk between the two, we simply had no appetite for tacos. But the tacos at their Highland Park taproom are excellent, and we've had them several times before Ravinia Festival concerts.

Finally, in a couple of months, Ravinia Brewing will rebrand as Steep Ravine Brewing because of the SLAPP suit brought by Ravinia Festival. No one wanted this, except probably Ravinia Festival's legal department. And if Illinois' anti-SLAPP law had broader protections that included trademark disputes, Ravinia Brewing probably would have won a countersuit. Alas. I'll update the Brews & Choos reviews once the re-brand becomes official.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Many, difficult to avoid
Serves food? Yes
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

I've got a couple of minutes before I descend into the depths of a very old codebase that has had dozens of engineers mucking about in it. Time enough to read through these:

• Michelle Goldberg sticks her tongue firmly in her cheek, declaring Matt Gaetz (R-FL) "the perfect man for the job" of running the Justice Dept.
• Annie Lowry explains the economics behind keeping minimum wages so low no one can possibly live on them.
• The Sun-Times published two stories today about how ComEd, the Illinois power utility, is one of the shittiest companies in the state.
• Andrew Price explains how places and non-places shape our cities.
• Via Schneier, computer scientist Stuart Schechter traces how the conceptual mistake made by two men (including a Turing Prize winner) 45 years ago gave us decades of crappy password policies.

Finally, everyone take six minutes and listen Robert Wright as he reminds us not to get distracted by the OAFPOTUS's trolling:

I had a completely different post in my head this afternoon, but the OAFPOTUS just nominated Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to run the Justice Department and I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.

I expect he'll nominate high-school dropout Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to run the Education Department next.

These kinds of moves explain why I haven't worried so much about fascism as a government that couldn't find sand at a beach. As the OAFPOTUS has no competence himself, it follows that he would neither recognize nor care about competence in others. The next four years will suck, all right, but not in the ways that some of my more hysterical friends fear they will.

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.

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.

The History Channel sends me a newsletter every morning listing a bunch of things that happened "this day in history." Today we had a bunch of anniversaries:

• 30 years ago, Pulp Fiction debuted.
• 47 years ago, Anita Bryant got a much-deserved pie in the face.
• 60 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Nobel Peace Prize, the same day Nikita Khrushchev got deposed.
• 80 years ago, German General Erwin Rommel committed suicide rather than face trial for his role in the plot to assassinate Hitler in June 1944.

And finally, today is the 958th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which is the reason this blog is written in a Celtic-Norse-Germanic-French creole, not just a Celtic-Norse-Germanic creole.

Two guest essays in yesterday's New York Times caught my attention. The first, by Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter who wrote the "unintended work of fiction" The Art of the Deal, pivots off the new XPOTUS biopic to warn us, once more, about the psychopath topping the Republican ticket:

What struck me from the first day I met Mr. Trump was his unquenchable thirst to be the center of attention. No amount of external recognition ever seemed to be enough. Beneath his bluster and his bombast, he struck me as one of the most insecure people I’d ever met — and one of the least self-aware. He’d crossed the bridge from Queens to Manhattan but he remained the product — and even the prisoner — of his childhood experiences. As he told a reporter in 2015, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

I buy that.

The past is prologue and, as Mr. Trump has said, he’s essentially the same person today that he was as a child. That is the central warning “The Apprentice” poses, and it comes just weeks before the election.

Ever since Mr. Trump announced in 2015 that he was running for president, I’ve argued publicly that the only limitation on his behavior as president — then and now — is what he believes he can get away with. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he believes he can get away with a lot more today. If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination — damn the consequences — in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough.

The second comes from Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan, arguing that the legislature should take back the power that the judiciary have essentially stolen from it:

“Make no mistake about it: We have a very strong argument that Congress by statute can undo what the Supreme Court does,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said recently as he announced the introduction of the No Kings Act. The measure declares that it is Congress’s constitutional judgment that no president is immune from the criminal laws of the United States. It would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to declare the No Kings Act unconstitutional. Any criminal actions against a president would be left in the hands of the lower federal courts. And these courts would be required to adopt a presumption that the No Kings Act is constitutional.

It might seem unusual for Congress to instruct federal courts how to interpret the Constitution. But the No Kings Act follows an admirable tradition, dating back to the earliest years of the United States, in which Congress has invoked its constitutional authority to ensure that the fundamental law of our democracy is determined by the people’s elected representatives rather than a handful of lifetime appointees accountable to no one.

In recent years, however, the court has seemed particularly uninterested in forbearance, as five or six justices routinely upend Congress’s longstanding interpretations of the Constitution. For example, nearly 50 years after Congress and the president first decided that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was appropriate legislation and after several more Congresses, presidents and Supreme Court majorities agreed that the law was constitutional, five justices in 2013 invalidated a crucial provision of the law.

Congress could pass a statute declaring that when asked to apply a federal law, a judge must do so unless the judge believes the law is unconstitutional beyond honest dispute. To ensure there is no honest dispute, Congress could require the judge to enforce the law unless the Supreme Court certifies by a supermajority or unanimous vote that there are no reasonable grounds to defend it. In this way, Congress would require the justices to show, by their votes, that the incompatibility of the law with the Constitution is beyond honest dispute.

The No Kings Act is well grounded in our constitutional tradition. Rather than allow any president or justices to hold themselves above the law, Congress should force them all to live by it.

Bowie and Renan only hint at something obvious to anyone who has read our Constitution: in the document, the legislature comes first, the executive second, and the judiciary a distant third. I agree with them that Congress needs to remind the other two branches of that fact.

My day got away from me yesterday afternoon, so all this shiznit piled up:

• In the first of two gobsmacking First Amendment stories this week, the Florida Dept of Health has threatened television stations with criminal prosecution after they aired a pro-choice ad that appears to be working.
• In the second horrific First Amendment violation story, the state of Oklahoma is backpedaling after mandating that every school kid gets a Bible that just happens to look like the one the XPOTUS is hawking. (Note to international readers: the First Amendment to our Constitution not only protects free speech, but also prohibits the government from establishing an official religion. Handing Bibles to school kids is a prima facie violation of the Establishment Clause.)
• The XPOTUS has such a credibility gap that his own supporters don't believe he'll do the things he absolutely would do if re-elected.
• Mara Gay traces the downfall of New York mayor Eric Adams to his time with the police force, and says the city deserves better.
• Hurricane Milton destroyed Tropicana Field's roof, leading one to hope that they tear the monstrosity down and build something people would actually want to visit.

Finally, it turns out the principal difference between the 12-year-saga to replace the Ravenswood train station and the 15-year-saga to build the Peterson/Ridge station was that the Ravenswood station actually started construction 13 years ago. Streetsblog explains in detail why Chicago can't have nice transit things, and why I may never get to ride on a fully-electrified express train from Evanston to the Loop.

For once, Chicago's legendary corruption isn't the biggest news story of the day.

Let's start with New York, where the Adams administration seems determined to set new standards for public corruption, going so far as to float the "we're only a little bit criminal" defense:

The indictment alleged that, for years, starting during his tenure as Brooklyn borough president, Adams had cultivated a relationship with a representative of the Turkish government who arranged for him to receive some $123,000 worth of illegal gifts, such as discounted business-class tickets on Turkish Airlines and a stay in the Bentley Suite at the St. Regis in Istanbul. When Adams ran for mayor, his Turkish supporters allegedly channeled illegal donations to his campaign through straw donors with the connivance of Adams himself. In return, prosecutors say, Adams performed a number of favors as a public official, most notably pressuring FDNY inspectors to certify that the new Turkish Consulate near the U.N. was safe without conducting the necessary inspections.

The mayor’s defenders described all this as a whole lot of nothing. His defense attorney, Alex Spiro, ridiculed the indictment, calling it the “airline-upgrade corruption case,” and filed an immediate motion to dismiss the bribery charge, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that enlarged the bounds of acceptable gift taking. (He had less to say about the foreign donations.)

At the other end of the Acela, retired US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner and Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck warn the US Supreme Court that they are losing credibility, and thus, farther down the road, the power to do their jobs:

We have both been critical of the current justices for how their behavior, both on and off the bench, has undermined public faith in the court. Too many of its most important rulings can be chalked up to nothing more than the fact that Republican presidents appointed six of the justices, and Democrats appointed only three. And then there are the alarming ethical lapses of two of the six justices in the majority — lapses that have close connections to their relationships with right-wing megadonors.

A court that loses its institutional credibility is a court that will be powerless when it matters most.

A court without legitimacy is a court unable to curb abuses of political power that its rulings may well have enabled. It is a court that will be powerless when the next Chip Roy calls for disobedience because it will have long since alienated those who would otherwise have defended it. It would become a court powerless to push back against the tyrannies of the majority that led the founders to create an independent judiciary in the first place.

Will Republican Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch heed the warnings? Probably not. At least Special Counsel Jack Smith seems to have figured out how to get around some of their illegitimacy:

Smith’s filing tries to slice through the Court’s security shield regarding the insurrection. Skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion, the filing demolishes the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity. Outwardly, Smith’s filing respects the Court’s dubious ruling about the immunity of official presidential acts. Legally, Smith had no choice but to operate within that ruling, a fact that sharply limited how far his filing could go. But even though it never challenges the conservative majority directly, the filing makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions whatsoever. It persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself.

The crucial point to which the filing unfailingly returns is that none of Trump’s actions listed in the revised indictment, even those that the Court cited as “official,” deserves immunity. As Smith makes clear, the Framers of the Constitution deliberately precluded the executive branch from having official involvement in the conduct of presidential elections. The reason was obvious: Any involvement by a president would be an open invitation to corruption. To make the case that any such involvement falls within a president’s official duties would seem, at best, extremely difficult.

It is here that Smith turns the Court’s Trump v. United States ruling to his own advantage.

Only 28 more days until what I think we can comfortably predict will be the XPOTUS's last election—one way or another. But I think we'll be stuck with corruption for a very long time, until people get fed up with it enough to demand and enforce real anti-corruption laws.