The Daily Parker

Between meetings and getting into the zone while fixing a bug, I worked straight through lunch and only got Cassie out around 4. So before my next meeting at 8pm, I've got a few minutes to catch up on all...this:

• Josh Marshall reflects on the 8 Democratic Senators (including one of mine, who is also the minority whip) making a deal with the Republicans, and says the next Congress must eliminate the paper filibuster and reform the Supreme Court.
• David Graham takes a more nuanced view. Krugman wants Democrats to hammer the Republicans on their unnecessary cruelty to Americans in need. Rubin says the word "moderate" lets people weasel out of being a "fighter" or a "defeatist."
• Adam Kinzinger is outraged that the OAFPOTUS has openly sold pardons, in contravention of literally everything the founders (and everyone since) stood for.
• Dan Williams lays out a strategy for confronting "highbrow misinformation."
• Calculated Risk, the blog that predicted the 2008 financial meltdown three years ahead of time, is starting to warn about the next financial meltdown from the inevitable cryptocurrency collapse.
• Matt Yglesias takes a break from the news to speculate about what would have happened had Italy joined the Central Powers in 1914.

And yesterday, as most people know, was the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior.

I posted too soon. Obviously, I tempted the wrath of the whatever high atop the thing, and it noticed:

Here's the ironic part: the government shutdown has (almost) nothing to do with this delay. The plane is broken. And because of the capacity controls today, the airline can't simply swap in another 737-800.

Fortunately, I live in Chicago, so I'll just go home for a few hours. Updates as the situation develops.

Despite the FAA reducing flights at O'Hare and Midway today because of the Republican-caused government shutdown (longest in history!), I got from my house to O'Hare and through security in just over an hour. Red-state friends: I took the #81 bus to the Blue Line, so the whole 45-minute trip cost $3.00. I even had time to get coffee.

So far my flight is on time, and--unusually for the heavily-traveled ORD-SFO route--I got upgraded. Sometimes I think about cancelling my club membership because I only fly 8 to 10 segments a year these days, and then a day like this happens, where I mentally prepared for delays and disruptions but nothing happened.

We'll see if my good luck holds up for my 6am flight Sunday morning...

I'm heading to the Bay Area tomorrow, and I know I will get there, but thanks to the Republican Party I'm not sure whether I'll arrive when I'd planned to:

The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it would cut 10 percent of air traffic at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports, in a move that analysts said would force airlines to cancel thousands of flights while the administration tries to push Democrats to end the government shutdown.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the reductions were an attempt to “alleviate the pressure” on air traffic controllers, who have been working without compensation since the start of the shutdown and have not received a paycheck since mid-October. He said the administration would announce the affected markets on Thursday, as the year’s busiest travel season approaches.

The cuts would start taking effect on Friday, potentially forcing hundreds of thousands of travelers to change plans on short notice, as airlines are pressured to slash capacity across their routes. Representatives of several major airlines and Airlines for America, a trade association, said they were working with the Federal Aviation Administration to understand the details of the new requirements, but had yet to make changes.

O'Hare is, of course, one of the airports expected to have cuts.

I have traveled a lot over the years, and I've experienced flight delays, so I'm not particularly worried. Sometimes weather interferes; sometimes planes need maintenance. Worst case, they'll re-route me through Phoenix or Dallas.

It took me 28 hours to get to Dubai in 2009, and it took me 21 hours to get to Shanghai the next year. But this is the first time I've had a delay threatened because of the longest government shutdown in history.

They really love their incompetence, those Republicans.

Voters across the US told the OAFPOTUS to pound sand in the clearest electoral rebuke to a major political party since 1984, and the hardest slap to an incumbent president probably since 1868. Democrats won crushing victories in Virginia, New Jersey, California, and even Mississippi. Almost every county in Virginia shifted toward Democrats, and no amount of money could unseat three Democratic Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania. Plus, Zohran Mamdani beat the OAFPOTUS-endorsed candidates to win the New York City mayoral election, which doubles as a bitch-slap to the establishment pundits who can't wait for him to fail.

The Republicans, in short, got spanked hard.

I don't have time to summarize all the reactions, so I'll just list a few:

• Brian Beutler: 25 thoughts on the 2025 elections.
• David Graham: The anti-MAGA majority re-emerges.
• Adam Kinzinger: More Mikie Sherrills, please. (Sherrill won the New Jersey gubernatorial race.)
• Paul Krugman: Which party is in trouble, again?
• Josh Marshall: DC conventional wisdom goes down to defeat in state after state.
• Jeff Maurer's hot take is that we probably didn't learn very much.
• Lauren Pope: Here's how [the Democrats] can win.
• Jennifer Rubin: Democrats in array.
• Michael Tomasky: America has big-time buyer's remorse about the OAFPOTUS.
• Matthew Yglesias: 13 takeaways from last night and now here comes the interesting part.
• Even John Scalzi had some thoughts.

While voters were handing the OAFPOTUS and his droogs their political asses during the longest government shutdown in history (second only to the one in their first term), armed thugs from the Dept of Homeland Security burst into a fucking day-care just a couple kilometers from my house to arrest a woman that the day care says is legally authorized to work for them. But little kids screaming in terror while one of their caregivers gets thrown to the floor and handcuffed is the point for these assholes, and is just one of the many malfeasances of this administration that led to yesterday's decisive losses for their party.

Yesterday showed that Americans learned the correct lessons from Venezuela and Hungary, and the Republicans didn't. Know hope.

I come to bury Cheney, not to praise him:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who extolled the power of the presidency, died Monday at the age of 84, his family said in a statement.

The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, the statement said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney advocated an aggressive new foreign policy in which potential threats would be met with swift, pre-emptive action. No longer would the U.S. wait for an enemy to strike first. He helped sell the Iraq War by issuing dire warnings to the American people. At the same time, he famously predicted that the mission itself would be relatively easy.

On Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who then hosted the show, asked Cheney if the American people were ready for a long, bloody battle.

"I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Cheney said.

There were other controversies that dogged Cheney as the Bush administration's popularity plummeted in its second term. In 2007, his chief of staff and top adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury in an investigation into the leaking of the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cheney was not implicated in the case legally, but he was tainted by the scandal nonetheless.

Then, in what was one of the more bizarre incidents involving someone as high ranking in the government as Cheney, he accidentally shot and wounded a friend, attorney Harry Whittington, in the face and chest with birdshot pellets during a 2006 weekend quail-hunting trip at a Texas ranch.

Cheney advocated for a stronger executive, rejecting the framers' ordering of the branches of government.

The analysts will have a lot to say today about Cheney's "complicated" life story. But he made the OAFPOTUS's power grab possible, by supporting Federal candidates and judicial nominees who agreed that Congress should take a back seat to the President, regardless of the actual text of the Constitution. He even admitted that, in a way, when he supported Democratic candidates in 2022 and 2024 simply because they weren't insane.

One pundit, I forget who, said recently that Republicans and Democrats like me used to disagree on how to drive but we agreed on the destination, while people like the OAFPOTUS want to crash the car. Cheney may have been one of the former type of Republicans, and he may have agreed broadly on where we were going, but he yanked the wheel pretty hard to the right.

With the unusually late colors we have this autumn against the much earlier sunsets that started yesterday (before 4:30 pm from November 15th to December 31st, ugh!), things have remained tolerable. It will snow eventually; we'll have a freeze eventually; but for now, I'll just enjoy it.

I didn't enjoy these things, though:

• Humans formed governments in the first place to feed people; the OAFPOTUS and his village of idiots have failed at that basic task.
• Architects who have looked at the paltry plans and Goebbels-inspired model of the White House Ballroom cannot fathom why it's the size of a convention center.
• It's not that Nick Fuentes is a Nazi sympathizer, racist, sexist, misogynist asshole—he's probably all of those things—but he's also a nihilist bullshit artist.
• My party really has to stop nominating old faux-centrist dickheads for public office and get behind the people who can actually win.
• Global warming may not make your city warmer on a specific January day, but it might make your city get 20 centimeters of rain in one day.

In one bit of good news, the Illinois legislature restored $1.5 billion to state transit agencies, which means the CTA and Metra will live to fight another day. Included in the legislation was an end to parking minimums within 800 meters of public transportation hubs or corridors. I hope this encourages developers to build density where it's needed.

Economist Paul Krugman shakes his head at the GOP's own goal, bringing misery to millions of Americans way ahead of their original schedule:

Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer.

But the consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections.

Why the backloading? Presumably Republicans believed that by the time Americans woke up to what was happening, the G.O.P. would have effectively consolidated one-party rule, making future elections irrelevant.

Instead, however, the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule.

So what went wrong? I’d attribute it to a combination of policy ignorance, visceral hatred of doing anything that helps people in need, and the Epstein files. (Seriously.)

But remember, the modern Republican Party has "a visceral dislike for doing anything that helps people in need" which makes them unlikely to take the simple steps necessary to solve the problem they created. Like, for example, doing what their fearless leader has asked: end the filibuster and pass a clean resolution reopening the government. (Of course, that would be a gift for my party that could only be enhanced by candy and a stripper.)

Fortunately for the 42 million people who were about to starve next month, a Federal judge in Rhode Island has ordered the Dept of Agriculture to distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to the people entitled to them "as soon as possible."

We'll see how this plays out over the weekend.

Even though I have a cute beagle hanging around my office this week, and even though I've had a lot to do at work (including a very exciting deployment today), the world keeps turning:

• The OAFPOTUS pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for the crime of running a massive money-laundering website, because of course Zhao bribed him.
• Brian Beutler thinks the OAFPOTUS's corruption has gotten too obvious for even his supporters to ignore, leading to "the things Democrats like to talk about and the things I wish they’d talked about [beginning] to converge."
• Speaking of corruption, not to mention things that are so prima facie bad that it takes a special kind of felon to even suggest it, privately funding the US military is an obviously illegal and demonstrably dangerous idea. Just ask the Roman Senate.
• Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to reconvene the House, and the Republican majority in the Senate refuse to waive the filibuster on funding SNAP, which are the two biggest things the Republican majority has chosen to do instead of making sure 40 million Americans don't go hungry next week.
• Michael Tomasky makes a point that I've made to one of my Republican trolls acquaintances: it really doesn't matter to the national Democratic Party if Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday: It's NYC, not Maine.

Finally, if you're looking to pick up a little lakeside real estate, this house in Kenilworth, Ill., is on the market for the first time ever. It's a steal at $7 million.

As I mentioned yesterday, the OAFPOTUS has illegally destroyed the East Wing of the White House, including the portico and everything right up to the original east entrance. This is part of his plan to build a ridiculous and unnecessary ballroom, funded by big-tech billionaires. The Post's architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, cannot hold back his revulsion:

The leader as builder is an ancient idea, older than the Egyptian pyramids, older than the great public monuments of Rome, older than Emperor Constantine’s clumsy effort to eradicate memories of his predecessors by repurposing and rebranding their works as his own.

But there are subtle differences between the images of authoritarians and elected leaders, in body language and other details. Is the leader acting as a quality-control agent, asking questions, studying details? Or surveying his domain in miniature? Is he simply toying with the world?

Trump made speedy demolition his priority, and speedy construction of the new ballroom is essential to his symbolic purpose, to offer a stark contrast to the dysfunction of Congress and, by extension, the torpid rhythms of democratic self-governance. He is the master builder, the developer who can cut through red tape. That image, whether deserved or not, is why many people voted for him. But to shred precedent is simply to set new precedents. And the precedent he is setting is that history doesn’t matter; laws, procedures and customs are irrelevant; and there is no role for collaboration, transparency and review in the construction of new buildings. Buildings are gifts to the people from leaders who are infallible, not the organic expression of civic values and ideals.

Krugman posits that a lack of good taste is a feature, not a bug, of the OAFPOTUS's style:

Why, you might ask, at a moment of national crisis am I writing about Trump’s bad taste?

[B]ecause tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.

So is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North?

So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.

I now find myself frequently thinking of how the Roman Republic degenerated into a dictatorship. For, in essence, Roman emperors were dictators, regardless of the fancy trimmings.

What happened? Modern historians of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire mostly agree upon one explanation for the Republic’s collapse – namely that the enormous loot from Rome’s conquests created a class of incredibly wealthy oligarchs who were too wealthy and powerful to be constrained by republican norms, institutions and laws.

Meanwhile, a man is suing the administration for being unlawfully detained by members of the Ohio National Guard, who he followed and videoed while playing the "Imperial March" from Star Wars. It's funny, but it also underscores how the military simply do not know how to enforce domestic law, nor should they be used that way. Fun times, fun times.