The Daily Parker

With tomorrow night having the earliest sunset of the year, it got dark at 4:20 pm—two hours ago. One loses time, you see. Especially with a demo tomorrow. So I'll just read these while devops pipelines run:

• Reversing their First Amendment argument from only 18 months ago, the Chicago Tribune editorial board finally agrees with most Chicagoans that the big sign facing down Wabash Street from the tower named after the XPOTUS has to go.
• After reporting on elections for 22 years, Josh Marshall finally realizes that watching election returns on TV harms one's health.
• Megan Stack takes a sympathetic view of Reality Winner, who leaked information about Russian interference in the 2016 election (and the XPOTUS's cover-up) and spent years in jail because of it.
• Tom Nichols laments that, loss or not, Herschel Walker represents the future of Republican candidates. David Von Drehle just calls Walker "a tragic figure."
• James Fallows breaks down what looks to me like journalistic malfeasance from Pro Publica.
• Twelve years ago, Salon ran a series of shorts on "how America will collapse (by 2025)" that don't seem far-fetched in 2022.
• One of Illinois' oldest movie theaters, the Pickwick in Park Ridge, will close at the end of January.
• In his third excerpt from his update to 2010's Walkable City, Jeff Speck points to the data showing that rideshare companies won't save your city.

Finally, John Seabrook takes a few pages to explain how to become a TikTok star. Hint: do it before you turn 22.

Clearly, I have to get my priorities in order. I've spent the afternoon in the zone with my real job, so I have neglected to real all of this:

• Lawyers who don't subscribe to the radical right-wing theory of constitutional originalism shouldn't argue it to the Supreme Court.
• If Republican US Senate candidate Herschel Walker really got into law school, I'll eat my own JD diploma.
• British architecture protects against cold, damp weather, but not the heat that global warming will bring to the island.
• I have no problem with Sam Bankman-Fried continuing to run his mouth (and his Twitter feed) because I like it when the Justice Department has an easy case.
• In the US, we need to bring back mixed-use developments.

Finally, because only one guy writes about half of the songs on top-40 radio, modulations have all but disappeared from popular songs.

It's 14°C right now, going down to -3°C tonight. Then it's back up to 8°C on Friday. Because why wouldn't the beginning of winter feel like April?

While you ponder that, read this:

• Tom Nichols warns that the authoritarian right may have lost the plot recently, but not for long.
• Patty Davis thinks that ignoring the XPOTUS will make him go away. That's cute.
• The Republicans have asked loser Blake Masters to explain why they lost.
• United Airlines and American Airlines have moved away from small regional jets to 737s and A320s, freeing up landing slots at O'Hare.
• Want to help the environment? Wash your clothes in cold water, and only when they're dirty.
• Jill Lepore wants me to read Mick Herron's spy novels. Good thing he was already on my list.
• A French historian worked with a cryptography team to crack the diplomatic code Charles V used in the 16th century.

Finally, Whisky Advocate has a good explainer taking the water of life from barrels in Scotland to the glass in your American kitchen.

Cassie and I took a 33-minute walk at lunchtime and we'll take another half-hour or so before dinner as the temperature grazes 14°C this afternoon. Tomorrow and each day following will cool off a bit until Wednesday, the first official day of winter, which will return to normal.

Meanwhile...

• As every lawyer who paid attention predicted, Justice Clarence Thomas's (R) opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen last summer articulated a Republican policy platform while providing absolutely no useful guidance.
• Jamelle Bouie points to that particular justice, along with his brother-in-arms Samuel Alito (R), as great reasons to institute term limits on the Supreme Court.
• Looks like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), plans to take his 5-seat majority out for a spin come January. Can't wait. (Remember, the Republican Party wants you to think the US Government is a joke. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!)
• Robert Wright reminds everyone that Ukraine's interests differ from those of the EU, NATO, and the US, which puts Ukrainian president Zelensky's behavior regarding the accidental missile detonation in Poland in context.
• Julia Ioffe reminds everyone that the Pentagon's and White House's strategies also differ from one another.
• Now that I've moved, I need to update my drivers license, which means finally getting a Real ID. I mean, other than my passport or passport card. (Oooo, maybe I can get a CAC?)
• Toronto gave up a few dozen parking spaces to make room for sidewalk cafes, only to discover that the restaurants made 49 times more money than the parking spaces.
• The US faces a critical shortage of bomb-sniffing dogs.
• Thousands of cranes have migrated through Chicago in the last few days, and wow, are they loud.

Finally, Amazon's ads really have gotten to the point where it's "a tacky strip mall filled with neon signs pointing you in all the wrong directions."

And in just a few hours, I will tuck into this:

I may run out of mason jars though...

I'm just finishing up a very large push to our dev/test environment, with 38 commits (including 2 commits fixing unrelated bugs) going back to last Tuesday. I do not like large pushes like this, because they tend to be exciting. So, to mitigate that, I'm running all 546 unit tests locally before the CI service does the same. This happens when you change the basic architecture of an entire feature set. (And I just marked 6 tests with "Ignore: broken by story X, to be rewritten in story Y." Not the best solution but story Y won't work if I don't push this code up.)

So while I'm waiting for all these unit tests to run, I've queued all this up:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced today that she will step down from her party leadership role when the 118th Congress meets on January 3rd.
• This came on the heels of a loser Florida retiree trying to get his old job back. Tina Nguyen looks at who might challenge the loser retiree for the same job. One thing I know: this won't end well for the Republican Party.
• Maybe that's why 12 Republicans in the US Senate crossed party lines to vote on moving the Same-Sex Marriage bill forward?
• Aaron Gordon investigates why American transit projects cost so much more than any other country's (hint: they have stronger anti-corruption laws).
• And yet, Washington got a Metro line to Dulles after waiting only 60 years, just slightly longer than we in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood have waited for the inbound Metra platform to open.
• Speaking of corruption, Kelsey Piper got a phone call from Sam Bankman-Fried, the guy who made a couple billion in crypto go *poof* last week, so he could clear the air. On the record. With pending litigation. (Seriously, who's his dealer?)
• For no reason anyone can determine, certainly not the recent dismissal of half its workforce including the only engineers who know where the bolts go, Twitter has experienced some intermittent problems with its multifactor authentication setup. Even better, "a researcher contacted Information Security Media Group on condition of anonymity to reveal that texting 'STOP' to the Twitter verification service results in the service turning off SMS two-factor authentication." Oh my!
• Speaking of that dying company, Elon Musk has done his utmost to hasten the exodus of engineering talent by giving everyone until (checks watch) two hours from now to choose a lifetime of misery or a three-month severance. Because we software engineers do our best work for narcissists with whips. (There simply isn't enough popcorn in San Francisco for this shit show.)
• Sadly, Republican speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson has died at 58. I didn't agree with him much, but he remained one of the sane ones till the end.

Finally, one of Chicago's last vinyl record stores, Dave's in Lincoln Park, will close at the end of this month. The building's owner wants to tear it down, no doubt to build more condos, so Dave has decided to "go out in a blaze of glory."

All right...all my tests passed locally. Here we go...

Between my actual full-time job and the full-time job I've got this week preparing for King Roger, Cassie hasn't gotten nearly the time outdoors that she wants. The snow, rain, and 2°C we have today didn't help. (She doesn't mind the weather as much as I do.)

Words cannot describe how less disappointed I am that I will have to miss the XPOTUS announcing his third attempt to grift the American People, coming as it does just a few hours after US Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) announced his bid for Senate Minority Leader. Sad dog, sad turtle, sad party.

Now to walk the dog, pack the bag, and head to the Sitzprobe. But man, my sitz already feels probed.

The Democratic Party got another governor yesterday when Katie Hobbs beat election-denier and former news anchor Kari Lake 51%-49%.

Someday this won't make any sense at all, but this was the perfect meme for Hobbs' win:

Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Lake also had a delicious spat on Twitter. Cheney's response gets a chef's kiss from The Daily Parker.

I recognize that links to Twitter will just be lint by this time next year, but for now, enjoy.

US Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) held her seat, as did Mark Kelly (D-AZ), meaning the Democratic Party has held the Senate:

[W]ith Ms. Cortez Masto’s victory in Nevada, Democrats have nailed down the 50 seats they need to retain control of the upper chamber, a major feat considering that voters typically punish the president’s party during the midterms.

The Democratic victory will bolster Mr. Biden’s political capital as he moves toward a possible bid for a second term. Even if Republicans do take the House, he will be able to stock the judiciary with his nominees and will be insulated from politically freighted G.O.P. legislation. And Democrats will be free to mount their own investigations to counter the threatened onslaught from a Republican-controlled lower chamber.

A Democratic Senate will be invaluable to Mr. Biden, even if Republicans narrowly secure control of the House. In addition to having two more years to confirm judges, the president will have more control over personnel in his government with the confirmation of nominees under the guidance of Mr. Schumer.

There was fist-pumping at my table last night at Rachael Yamagata's concert. I don't know if Yamagata knew the result during her set, but I'd like to think I saw an extra bit of optimism in her eyes.

It does look like we will lose the House, but I do love these two bits:

• Democrats picked up a seat in the 3rd congressional district in Washington state, a district that had been held by a Republican, Jamie Herrera Beutler. But she voted for former President Trump's impeachment and was ousted by the right in the primary. There's an irony in the fact that she was ousted because she voted to impeach Trump and, now, a Democrat has taken over that seat. It's indicative of the broader message in this election.
• One of the other races with a razor-thin margin is Rep. Lauren Boebert's seat. The conservative lightning rod had been trailing in this right-leaning district on Election Night, but is now up by just over 1,000 votes. The race appears to be trending in her direction. But it's a result that is far closer than what was expected.

On Boebert's race, keep in mind she beat a sitting Republican 55-45 in the June 2020 primary and went on to win 52-45 in the general by running as a MAGA extremist. Will she feel any contrition? Probably not. But she hasn't said anything since Tuesday, so we know she's rattled.

Democrats picked up a US Senate seat in Pennsylvania with Lt Governor John Fetterman defeating charlatan carpetbagger Oz Mehmet handily. And at least one far-right troll, US Rep Lauren Boebert (R-CO), may lose her seat to a challenger.  So far, though, control of the House remains unknown, even as Democrats look likely to hold the Senate.

One of the night's biggest losers was the XPOTUS, whose hand-picked candidates—not one of them qualified for office—did worse than expected.

Even better, states resoundingly defeated anti-abortion measures and supported pro-choice ones, including in Kentucky, Michigan, California, and Vermont.

Plus, it looks like Republicans failed to win a veto-proof majority in their heavily-Gerrymandered legislature, even though Republican Ted Budd won the open US Senate seat.

Finally, in an historic win, Democrat Wes Moore beat his Republican challenger to become the first African-American governor of Maryland.

So we ended the night very close to where we started, albeit with hundreds of thousands of votes yet to be counted. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) may well become House Speaker on January 3rd, but with a 2- or 3-vote majority—which still means endless hearings, but also means he'll have to hold his caucus together with spit and baling wire.

Even with Chicago's 1,642 judges on the ballot ("Shall NERDLY McSNOOD be retained as a circuit court judge in Cook County?"), I still got in and out of my polling place in about 15 minutes. It helped that the various bar associations only gave "not recommended" marks to two of them, which still left 1,640 little "yes" ovals to fill in.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world...

• Republican pollster Rick Wilson, one of the co-founders of the Lincoln Project, has a head-shaking Twitter thread warning everyone that You Know Who will probably announce his 2024 run before polls close tonight just to keep his narcissistic needs met.
• Author Stacy Schiff argues that the arguments John Hancock and Samuel Adams had in the 1770s define our politics today. (Would that make them the Isaac and Ishmael of American politics?)
• College Football and politics really, really shouldn't mix.
• Josh Marshall looks back wistfully on the stories TPM ran about alleged voter fraud in 2002 and finds nothing has changed except how much Republicans are lying about it. (Hint: they're lying more now.)
• National Geographic describes some archaeological finds that elucidate why the Western Roman Empire fell.
• The historic Belden-Stratford in Lincoln Park, which Parker and I passed every morning on his dawn relief trip to the park, is getting a multi-million-dollar rehab so the new landlord can offer $3,000-a-month studios and $8,000 three-bedrooms.
• Cranky Flier analyzes all 9,999 flight numbers for four major airlines to figure out some things about how their business models differ.
• Why is Maine building a $106 million highway that nobody wants? (The omnibus explanation seems on point.)
• John Scalzi lays out how Twitter's policy change around the "blue check" will make the notation worse than useless going forward.

Finally, Chicago gets a new brewery taproom on Thursday when Hop Butcher to the World opens in Half Acre's former Lincoln Avenue space, just over 2 km from my house. Cassie and I might find out on Saturday whether they let dogs in, assuming the forecast holds. (And there it is: a post that literally checks all the boxes for Daily Parker categories!)