The Daily Parker

I had a burst of tasks at the end of the workday, so I didn't get a chance to read all of these:

• Associate Justice Sam Alito (R) drafted such loony-right-wing opinions in two major cases this term that he lost crucial support from other Republican justices, reversing the Court's initial vote.
• Russia released journalist Evan Gershkovich and other hostages in exchange for a convicted KGB hit-man.
• Tom Nichols argues that, however good it is to get our hostages back from Russia, they were still hostages.
• Banker Rebecca Patterson argues that the XPOTUS's treasury policy proposals threaten the world's banking system.
• The Internet Engineering Task Force published a new standard (RFC-9557) for date and time formats back in April.

Not to mention, this week we've had some of the stickiest weather I can remember, with dewpoints above 20°C for the past several days. And this sort of thing will only get worse:

Climate change is accumulating humidity in the region — between 1895 and 2019, average precipitation in Illinois increased by 15%. A moist atmosphere ramps up heat indexes, meaning the weather feels worse to the human body than it would during drier conditions.

In Chicago, overall summer average temperatures have warmed by 1.5 degrees between 1970 and 2022, but that’s not the whole story: Average lows on summer nights have increased by 2.2 degrees in that same time.

Warmer nights occur when the atmosphere is waterlogged. Clouds form and reflect incoming heat from the sun back into space during the day, but after the sun sets, clouds absorb heat from the surface and emit it back toward the ground.

Just like greenhouse gases trap heat, moisture holds onto heat in the atmosphere for longer and into the night. Rising temperatures, in turn, lead to rising humidity: For every 1°C increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7% more water. It’s a never-ending loop.

Yeah, even walking Cassie from day care (less than 1.6 km) sucks in this weather. At least I got home before the thunderstorms hit.

The XPOTUS really outdid himself yesterday at the National Association of Black Journalists conference here in Chicago:

The question-and-answer session at the National Association of Black Journalists conference at the Hilton Chicago began more than an hour late — with Trump blaming audio issues — and ended early.

The shortened event was full of incendiary comments from the former president, including claims illegal immigrants are taking “Black jobs.” When asked if it was appropriate to call Harris a “DEI hire,” which many Republicans are calling her, Trump accused the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of “only promoting Indian heritage.”

Responding to backlash about his remarks, Trump’s campaign said the former president “remains defiant in the face of media bias and will continue working to make life better for all Americans regardless of how poorly he’s treated by supporters of Kamala Harris.”

The New Republic highlighted his deranged riff about "Black jobs:"

Trump initially used the phrase during the first presidential debate in June and was heavily criticized, with many people asking what a “Black job” is and what he meant. Several Black politicians posted on social media at the time highlighting their work.

Given an opportunity by Black journalists with a largely Black audience Wednesday, Trump didn’t clarify anything.

Even before he entered politics, Trump didn’t have a good record on race. He and his father were sued for housing discrimination back in the 1970s, and while he hosted NBC’s The Apprentice, he allegedly dropped the n-word and refused to hire Kwame Jackson, the Black finalist on the show’s first season. However Trump’s appearance at the NABJ’s convention Wednesday was going to go, it could never have erased his racist past.

Block Club Chicago dug into the reactions to the event within the NABJ:

Some members of the Black journalists association and those viewing the talk slammed the event organizers for platforming a politician who has frequently denigrated Black communities and Chicago. Others said the talk was a disservice to convention attendees who were there to network and develop professionally.

Black Enterprise, a platform that provides assistance to professionals, saw its CEO, Earl “Butch” Graves, withdraw from a panel titled “Black Leadership and Today’s Media Landscape” because Black-led media outlets weren’t given the opportunity to moderate Trump’s panel.

“It is indicative of the treatment Black media organizations face in today’s landscape and particularly disheartening that our own NABJ organization would make the decision to exclude Black media organizations from this important discussion,” Graves said in a statement.

Some reporters called on leadership at the National Association of Black Journalists to step down from their positions.

I think the NABJ made the right choice by inviting both major-party candidates to appear at the convention (Harris claimed to have a conflict). And the XPOTUS did exactly what he always does, which kind of makes the NABJ's point for them.

But does the XPOTUS's unconcealed racism surprise anyone anymore? Not TPM's David Kurtz, who says that's not the worst part:

Donald Trump, his campaign having lost its edge to Kamala Harris, predictably resorts to his well-used playbook of racism, white grievance, and othering. Major national news outlets fumble the coverage, unable or unwilling to call out the racism. The headlines are either too tepid or shift the focus to Harris. We should know by now that racist attacks are not about the victims of those attacks, they’re about the perpetrators. Putting the spotlight on Harris is a form of complicity.

But even well-meaning people stop at the incomplete conclusion that Trump himself is a racist. No doubt he is. But that fails to do justice to the toxicity he brings to the public square. Not since George Wallace has a national candidate exploited racism for personal political gain the way Trump has consistently now for going on a decade. It started with his embrace of Obama birtherism, continued throughout his term in the White House with, among many other things, virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, and is playing out exactly the way you would expect it to now that he’s facing a biracial opponent.

It takes a racist to exploit the kind of divisions that Trump traffics in, but focusing on his personal animosity toward people of color, his own retrograde 1950s attitudes, the darkness of his soul runs the risk of making this a psychological profile or a morality play or another in the long line of old white men stuck in the past. This isn’t your grandpa or your crazy uncle raving in the privacy of your holiday dinner.

It’s the former president of the United States turning his cult and his campaign’s hundreds of millions of dollars against people of color on a public stage in the middle of a presidential campaign.

If there's any good news here, it's that a growing majority of voters really have really gotten tired of him. And every day brings us closer to the time—one hopes just 96 days from today—when we won't have to hear his deranged weirdness anymore, and he can enjoy his lonely, sad retirement in Florida.

The XPOTUS's handlers cut short his appearance this afternoon at the National Association of Black Journalists convention just 2 km from where I'm sitting. The XPOTUS began by insulting the hosts and the panelists. Then, when one of the panelists had just brought up Project 2025 (the Republican Party's blueprint for rolling the country back to the 1850s), the moderator suddenly interrupted and said the campaign had told her to wrap it up. The 37 minutes of Harris Campaign footage the XPOTUS had already provided will have to do, I guess.

In other end-of-July news:

• Julia Ioffe wonders what Kamala Harris's foreign policy will look like.
• Army Lt William Calley, the only American service member convicted of a crime after the My Lai massacre in 1968, died in April.
• Did Coinbase just commit the largest campaign finance violation in history?
• The Exchange Club of Naperville has permanently ended its Ribfest after 35 years, citing the cost of renting the space and declining revenues since the pandemic.
• The US Navy has nearly completed swapping out crews and equipment between the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) and the USS George Washington (CVN-73) as the latter prepares to move permanently to Japan.

Finally, the Justice Dept has accused the Norfolk Southern Railroad of illegally delaying passenger trains, after Amtrak suffered an ungodly 11,500 minutes of delay in just the first three months of this year. "Freight-train interference" is the principal cause of delays for US trains because the country has almost no dedicated passenger mainlines. The freight railroads that own the tracks have a statutory obligation to prioritize passenger trains, but no other incentives to do so. It's about the dumbest way to organize passenger rail anyone could come up with, other than separating out the track from the operations. I mean, we're dumb, but we're not that dumb.

One of the many stories that piqued my interest this morning included a rant by the anti-Sorkin himself:

• Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, does not like how "politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." (He also implies that Liz Truss, and not Kamala Harris, most embodies the character of Selina Meyer.)
• Former President Obama has endorsed Vice President Harris.
• John Scalzi received a press release from the Harris campaign that he says demonstrates how "it's harder to stab when you're being punched in the face."
• David Frum sees President Biden's retirement as making himself "a modern Cincinnatus."
• Alex Shephard wonders if "JD Vance [is] the worst Vice Presidential pick ever?" (Vance "is not only one of the greatest frauds in American politics, he is the most obvious fraud in American politics.")
• Dana Milbank suggests (tongue in cheek) that the XPOTUS just "needs a mulligan:" "Vance, who has served 19 months in the Senate after writing a book and briefly dabbling as a venture capitalist, was picked by Trump on the merits. But Harris, who spent decades as a prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and senator, became vice president because of diversity, equity and inclusion."
• George Will, not tongue-in-cheek, warned that if Democrats re-take the Senate, we're going to get rid of the filibuster, oh dearie dearie me! Because chucking something that gives 20% of the US population a veto over the other 80% would mean Republicans would have to drum up a majority of the states to do something instead of just a coalition of the small ones.
• If you have a computer built before 2024 by one of the major manufacturers, your Secure Boot might not be secure. If you want to find out whether your system is secure, open up PowerShell and run this command: [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString((Get-SecureBootUEFI PK).bytes) -match "DO NOT TRUST|DO NOT SHIP")

Finally, Journalist Lewis H Lapham has died, aged 89. He edited Harper's during the time that I read it regularly, and no coincidence that I dropped it shortly after he did. I found his work engaging and sometimes enraging, but always smart. He will be missed.

Too bad I'm in my downtown office. It's a perfect, sunny day in Chicago. I did spend half an hour outside at lunchtime, and I might take off a little early. But at least for the next hour, I'll be looking through this sealed high-rise window at the kind of day we only get about 25 times a year here.

Elsewhere in the world:

• Former CIA lawyer James Petrila and former CIA spook John Sipher warn that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v US could undo 50 years of reforms that reined in illegal clandestine activities here and abroad.
• James Fallows reviews President Biden's "quasi-valedictory" address from last night.
• The doddering, elderly, convicted-felon Republican nominee for President seemed to have some difficulties at last night's rally. Maybe he's too old to be president and he should withdraw from the race?
• Helen Lewis, shaking her head sadly at the mess of a human being that is Republican Vice-President nominee JD Vance, hopes the XPOTUS "kept the receipt."
• Bowing to market pressure, Southwest Airlines has announced an end to its chaotic boarding process, and will now assign seats like a grown-up airline.
• London expanded its Ultra-Low-Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to encompass most of the metro area last year, which has resulted in improved air quality equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road.
• Unfortunately, this side of the pond, the Illinois Dept of Transportation seems unable to comprehend the opportunity we have to remake DuSable Lake Shore Drive for the future, and instead wants to repeat all the mistakes of the past. All the aldermen along the north lakefront oppose the plan, fortunately.
• The South Works site on the southeast side of Chicago, which used to house one of the world's largest steel mills, will soon become a quantum-computing research facility.

Finally, the various agencies charged with protecting the Democratic National Convention next month have published their plan for a 60-hectare "pedestrian restriction" zone around the United Center and a smaller zone around McCormick Place. "Only people with credentials who 'have a need to be there' – such as delegates, volunteers and other workers – will be allowed within that inner perimeter, said 2024 DNC coordinator Jeff Burnside." Presumably people who live on the Near West Side will be able to get to and from their homes as well.

The President will go on the air tonight at 8pm EDT to explain why he dropped out of the race, and presumably also to endorse Vice President Harris as his successor. This has the XPOTUS so rattled that a campaign lawyer whined to the television networks that the XPOTUS wants equal time so they can whine to everyone. OK, Boomer.

Meanwhile:

• Hillary Clinton lays out a strategy for Harris to do what she couldn't: become our first female president.
• The European Union's climate-tracking directive reported that Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history, with the average surface temperature of the planet cresting 17.09°C.
• Jennifer Rubin (and a few other writers) believe we'd all be better off with a centrist government. (I'm sure if we explain this to the Republican Party carefully and rationally, they'll tone down their extremism right away.)
• Speaking of centrism, Julia Ioffe digs into what a President Harris foreign policy might look like.
• Because of a confluence of events "that Tolstoy could not have made up," Israel has an opportunity this week to change the Middle East for the better—if only they didn't have a troglodyte for a prime minister.
• Pilot Patrick Smith explains turbulence, and why it has suddenly become so newsworthy.

Finally, the Times examines why some people continue to write negotiable orders of withdrawal (i.e., paper checks) despite their obvious inconveniences and vulnerabilities. I haven't written one in about 18 months, and the last time I used one in any capacity was (with no small irony) to set up automatic billing with my HOA.

The last 48 hours have no precedent in US politics. People have only just started to absorb what it means for President Biden to drop out of the election and Vice President Harris to take his place (which she has almost certainly done, based on delegate counts--and the endorsements of both the House Minority Leader and Senate Majority Leader). No polling data released before Thursday will have captured any of that.

I will say, however, that I feel so much better about the election than I did Sunday morning, I believe we will win it. Clearly, I'm not alone.

The election is 15 weeks from today. That's 13 weeks longer than most people pay attention. And given how much has happened in just the last 4 weeks, a lot more can happen before November.

But for the first time in a while, I feel great about our chances.

What a consequential 24 hours we've had.

After President Biden's historical withdrawal from the 2024 election, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. So far, dozens of other elected Democrats have followed, including Illinois governor JB Pritzker just this morning.

And because the Vice President is already on the campaign, according to Federal election rules, she can use the entire $96 million campaign fund—and in fact she's already filed with the Federal Election Commission to do so.

In other words, Harris is, without question, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, which means next month's Democratic National Convention in Chicago will be the election kickoff we hoped for and not a repeat of 1968.

Some reactions from the usual suspects:

• Tim Alberta: "This is exactly what the Trump team feared."
• Frank Bruni: "What Joe Biden just did is utterly extraordinary."
• Jonathan Chait: "The cop against the criminal."
• James Fallows: "Joe Biden passes the torch."
• Tom Nichols: "A candidate, not a cult leader."
• Jennifer Rubin: "Biden and his team reach the right decision."
• Author John Scalzi: "Here we go."
• Alex Shephard: "Donald Trump is now the weaker candidate."
• Simon Tisdall, The Guardian UK: "The post-Biden era may be uncertain for the Democrats, but for Trump it will be utterly dismaying."

I should also add Aaron Sorkin's piece from yesterday's Times, published before President Biden's announcement: "How I would script this moment for Biden and the Democrats." But no, we aren't going to nominate Mitt Romney (R-UT).

Meanwhile, the news has put the Republican party in complete disarray as their entire election strategy just evaporated. Over the next few days we will see the convicted-felon rapist XPOTUS back in form as the racist, misogynist wanna-be thug that he is. But the best news of all from yesterday is: the chances we need to care about him for longer than 106 more days just got a lot smaller.

One or two other things happened yesterday, including the last-surviving piping plover chick on Montrose Beach getting a name. I'll have more later today.

The New York Times reports that President Biden has withdrawn from the 2024 election:

After three weeks of often angry refusals to step aside, Mr. Biden finally yielded to a torrent of devastating polls, urgent pleas from Democratic lawmakers and clear signs that donors were no longer willing to pay for him to continue.

Mr. Biden said he will not resign the presidency, and intends to finish out his term even as he leaves it to others to try and defeat Mr. Trump. Over the next several months, the president faces the ongoing war in Ukraine and the increasingly desperate efforts to reach a negotiated deal to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

No sitting American president has dropped out of a race so late in the election cycle. The Democratic National Convention, where Mr. Biden was to have been formally nominated by 3,939 delegates, is scheduled to begin Aug. 19 in Chicago. That leaves less than a month for Democrats to decide who should replace Mr. Biden on the ticket and just under four months for that person to mount a campaign against Mr. Trump.

And now the race is between a demented 78-year-old who has a proven track record of chaos and corruption against a brilliant 59-year-old who has a proven track record of accomplishment and fighting for our rights.

The XPOTUS's campaign must be shitting bricks right now.

Here's the President's statement:

Lots of stories in the last day:

• Are we about to see a historic change at the top of the Democratic ticket?
• What's the connection between vice-president nominee JD Vance (R-OH) and Hulk Hogan?
• Or between JD Vance and Faust?
• Or between JD Vance and your menstruation cycle?
• The City of Chicago has approved tearing down the Eamus Catuli building on Waveland.
• We actually had 25 tornados on Monday. Twenty five.

Finally, comic genius and Chicago native Bob Newhart has died at age 94. He was a national treasure.