The Daily Parker

It took several hours after the Gila River started rising for a general alert to go out. This doesn't appear to be anyone's fault so much as the way the alert system works, which is why a bill recently proposed in the Texas legislature would provide much-needed money to upgrade the system. Unfortunately for Texans who live near rivers, Republicans in the state house killed the bill in the most recent legislative session.

New York State has a similar problem. The Dept of Homeland Security just cancelled a $3 million grant to enhance "last-mile" alerts in extreme weather events, even as recovery workers found more bodies in Texas:

As the Empower website puts it, “By integrating advanced analytics, real-time localized high resolution Mesonet-based weather data, critical infrastructure ‘lifelines,’ social vulnerability data, and novel visualization capabilities, the Empower tool will provide a rapid assessment of changing weather conditions and their potential impacts on communities and critical infrastructure.”

But on Tuesday the grant recipients at State University of New York, Albany were notified by DHS in a termination form dated July 8th that the entire grant was being “terminate[d] for the convenience of the Government.” The order, signed by DHS contracting officer John Whipple, instructed researchers to immediately cease work on the project.

So while the Texas disaster last week wasn't the fault of Texas Republicans or the OAFPOTUS's hand-picked clown college, future disasters will certainly have higher tolls because of their actions.

My GOP friends: the Republican Party told you for decades it wanted to "drown the Federal government in a bathtub," and you either didn't believe them or thought that was just fine. At the moment, I don't care which. You will have some explaining to do later on, though.

Jamelle Bouie makes the point that, even though the OAFPOTUS is a narcissistic, infantile, horrible human being, his policies look exactly like those of most other Republican presidents:

As nearly every commentator under the sun has observed for the past decade, Trump is unique — and to his critics, transgressive — in ways that defy traditional categorization.

And yet, the most salient detail about Trump as an actual officeholder is that he is a Republican politician committed to the success of the Republican Party and its ideological vision. In this way, he is little more than a vehicle for the policy agenda of the most conservative Republicans, willing to sign whatever they might bring to his desk.

He spearheaded an assault on the federal administrative state, fulfilling a dream that dates back to conservative opposition to the New Deal, and has put his presidency behind large and unsustainable tax breaks for the rich as well as vicious cuts to the social insurance state.

[A]s irresponsible as [this week's tax] bill is, there is a dog-bites-man element to its existence. If we understand that Trump is, in most respects, an ordinary Republican president, then it is not news to learn that a Republican president wants to cut social services for the poor to sustain a large tax cut for the rich.

What’s striking isn’t that this is happening, but that Trump, in his 10 years on the American political scene, has successfully obscured his rigidly partisan agenda with claims of populism and ideological heterodoxy. His occasional gestures toward support for existing social programs or greater taxes on the rich — and his willingness to say anything to amass power — are enough to persuade many voters (and some professional political observers) that Trump will somehow moderate the Republican Party or turn it away from its traditional agenda. If anything, it’s been the opposite: Trump’s willingness to do everything favored by his partisan fellow travelers has only accelerated the Republican Party’s dash toward ideological and policy extremism.

Yes, you can attribute some of the worst of this administration to the specific authoritarian vision of Trump and his allies. But a good deal of what we have seen — and what we will see — is simply what happens when you elect a Republican to the White House.

When George W. Bush left office in 2009, the United States was mired in two wars and the global economy was in free fall. When Donald Trump left office after his first term, the United States was mired in a deadly pandemic and its economy was recovering from a free fall.

That’s two Republican presidencies over 20 years that ended in disaster. There is no reason to think that Trump’s second term will be the exception that breaks the rule.

I think Bouie is correct. All the insanity and deliberate incompetence (if such a thing exists) coming out of the White House distracts from the fundamental point that Republicans have wanted all of this since the parties flipped in the 1960s. Like GWB and Reagan and Nixon, the OAFPOTUS basically wants to turn the country into Mississippi.

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.

I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.

Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:

• The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
• Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
• Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has quietly killed the most onerous MAGA over-reaches from the ridiculous Republican budget proposal.
• Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
• Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
• Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
• Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
• Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
• What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?

Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.

I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.

Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:

• The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
• Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
• Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
• Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
• Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
• Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
• Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
• What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?

Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.

New York City adopted Ranked-Choice Voting before the 2019 Democratic mayoral primary, and they got Eric Adams—their least-popular mayor in decades—out of it. Since ranked-choice voting was supposed to reduce the likelihood of electing an extremist, this was a surprising result. Fortunately New Yorkers have had a few years to get the hang of ranked-choice, so in this year's Democratic primary, they won't make that mistake again, right?

Oh, bother. The extreme leftist won. With incumbent Eric Adams running for re-election as an independent, and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who lost last night, threatening to do the same, it's quite possible the Republican (Curtis Sliwa) could squeak on through. Good work, guys.

(For what it's worth, I don't know who I would have voted for if I still lived in NYC. I am fairly certain it would not have been Cuomo or Mamdani.)

In other disappointments:

• Former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken argues that the OAFPOTUS's attack on Iran "was a mistake," but he hopes it succeeds.
• Surprising absolutely no one, Illinois governor JB Pritzker (D) has announced he will run for a third term, without a hint of whether he'll run for president in 2028.
• Is US Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) the future of the Republican Party?
• The Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Scott Turner, has decided he'd like the National Science Foundation headquarters to serve as his executive mansion.
• Chase Strangio, the guy who lost the most important trans-rights case perhaps ever, blamed everyone and everything except his own extremist strategy for the loss, proving once again that narcissism knows no political party.
• A rumor going around town says the Bank of New York might buy Chicago's last locally-owned bank, Northern Trust, though the latter denies it.
• The Economist goes deep into the history and consequences of OnlyFans.
• Apparently I was one of a record number of travelers to pass through O'Hare on Sunday.

Finally, how did I not know about the Lake County Forest Preserve Districts's giant 18-hectare off leash dog area in Lake Forest? Cassie, honey, guess where we're going this weekend?

Inner Drive Technology World HQ hit 34.3°C yesterday afternoon and only cooled down to 25.7°C by 6 this morning. As we do on hot days, Cassie and I started our long walk just before 7am, doing exactly 5 km in 50 minutes while the temperature (and dewpoint) rose a full degree.

Fortunately, it looks like a much-anticipated cool front went through just after 10. I wouldn't know; I've been in meetings. So I'm about to take Cassie out again before the thunderstorms hit.

I might even have time later today to read all the horrible things going on in the world. My tl;dr: no one actually knows what will happen next in the Middle East, least of all the OAFPOTUS, which you can tell because any bad thing he says about someone else, he's really projecting about himself.

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.

I'm cleaning out some old boxes, and in one from my college years in New York, I found this gem:

I clipped it because I found it shocking at the time. Here was this buffoon demonstrating the corollary to the proverb "even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise," spending whatever it cost to get a full-page ad on page A13 of The New York Times, yearning for the halcyon days when we could just string 'em up.

When I saw the performance-art piece "Imbecile Descending on an Escalator" ten years ago, I could not imagine this encased meat product becoming president. What's left of his drug-ravaged brain still thinks it's 1975* and New York is overrun by those people. He thought so in 1989, thought so in 2015, and thinks so now.

But hey, the old guy you'd move away from if he were ranting on a barstool is reshaping the world today. History will not be kind to him. Or us.

* See this.