The Daily Parker

As the right featherweights of the right wing of the Republican House delegation play chicken with the world economy, a Federal Court in Boston weighs a lawsuit demanding the President's chicken starts driving a snowblower*:

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns set a May 31 hearing on a lawsuit filed by a federal workers union contending that the 14th Amendment empowers Biden and other officials to sidestep the standoff with Congress that has threatened a potential default.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the so-called X-date for a default could come as soon as June 1, just one day after the scheduled arguments on the National Association of Government Employees’ request for a preliminary injunction requiring Yellen to keep paying bills — and salaries — as usual.

[Justice Department lawyer Alexander] Ely said he was not authorized to stake out a position on that question and he suggested that the department would argue that the union’s suit is not a proper vehicle to force DOJ to come to a legal conclusion.

“This requires high-level coordination among the U.S. government,” said Ely.

But an attorney for the union, Thomas Geoghegan, pointed out that the claims of an imminent cataclysm from a possible default originate with the very officials named as defendants in the suit.

Josh Marshall says the veritable excrement is inbound at high speed to the ventilation device:

There’s a really stunning report out from the Journal last night. Corporate bonds at some of America’s top-rated companies are now trading at a yield discount to Treasuries. This isn’t quite the same as investors thinking U.S. corporate debt is safer over time. It’s focused on the what happens over the next few months rather than where you put money over time. But it’s still a stunning development, cutting at the very architecture of the world financial system and the United States’ position as its gravitational center.

To put it in layman’s terms, if you need a place to put money over the course of this summer and you need it to be as safe as possible, investors are deciding Microsoft’s corporate bonds are more attractive than bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury.

It’s a clarifying perspective on the impact of GOP extremism and nihilism on the nation’s finances and global power.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) continues to pretend he has any actual sway over the arsonists in his caucus.

I'm going to be out of the country on June 1st. I sure hope the Government continues to pay air-traffic controllers and Customs officials until I get home...

* The metaphor works if you think about it, but yeah, it's gruesome.

She won't, though, despite worrying facts about her 3-month absence that have started to come out:

Ms. Feinstein’s frail appearance was a result of several complications after she was hospitalized for shingles in February, some of which she has not publicly disclosed. The shingles spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome. The virus also brought on a previously unreported case of encephalitis, a rare but potentially debilitating complication of shingles that a spokesman confirmed on Thursday after The New York Times first revealed it, saying that the condition had “resolved itself” in March.

The grim tableau of her re-emergence on Capitol Hill laid bare a bleak reality known to virtually everyone who has come into contact with her in recent days: She was far from ready to return to work when she did, and she is now struggling to function in a job that demands long days, near-constant engagement on an array of crucial policy issues and high-stakes decision-making.

People close to her joke privately that perhaps when Ms. Feinstein is dead, she will start to consider resigning. Over the years, she and many Democrats have bristled at the calls for her to relinquish her post, noting that such questions were rarely raised about aging male senators who remained in office through physical and cognitive struggles, even after they were plainly unable to function on their own.

Alexandra Petri doesn't hold back:

Worried about finding a reliable senior community for your loved ones — or even yourself? A place where you can focus on things you love, discover new hobbies, make friends and keep leading a vibrant life in your golden years? Do you long for a beautiful facility where trusted staff will take you from activity to activity yet you can retain your independence — even sporting a little “I” after your name to let everyone know just how independent you are?

Consider ... retiring to the United States Senate.

[I]n the Senate, there is no such thing as too old! Strom Thurmond stayed nearly until he died, at age 100. You, too, can stay that long — or even longer.

No worries, either, about overstaying your welcome. Jane Mayer of the New Yorker wrote that, “Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, and Robert Byrd, of West Virginia, were widely known by the end of their careers to be non-compos mentis.” Your constituents might mind, but the Senate will gladly accommodate you.

Some fine print: Yes, you are technically representing a state full of people and making policy decisions for the country as a whole. The ramifications of these policy decisions will last for years, maybe generations. If you enter with strong principles and a clear sense of mission, it is still possible that simply by remaining in the Senate you can jeopardize everything you’ve worked so hard to build.

But don’t let these details stand in the way of a wonderful Senate retirement. Be like Strom Thurmond! That’s a sentence everybody loves to hear.

Diane Feinstein spent 40 years as a formidable political force, representing the people of San Francisco and then the entire state of California. Yet she's spent the last 5 years undermining everything she ever worked for by holding on to her seat well past time. She needs to go.

Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) took the oath of office this morning, along with the 50-member Chicago City Council:

Thousands of spectators watched as Johnson was sworn in by Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans at the Credit Union 1 Arena at the University of Illinois at Chicago on the city’s Near West Side. He was sworn in alongside the new City Council — which includes 13 freshman members, many of whom campaigned on pushing the body further to the left, and who also will increase the racial and LGBTQ+ diversity of the council.

“People of Chicago are counting on us to work together,” Johnson said, after turning around to applaud the new council. That gesture was in stark contrast to former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who in 2019 sarcastically turned to the council when speaking about her intentions to root out corruption in Chicago politics during her inaugural speech.

Lightfoot welcomed the crowd “to a peaceful transfer of power” as she called the inauguration ceremony, which doubles as a formal City Council meeting, to order. She watched as Johnson took the oath of office, as is customary for inaugural ceremonies. Over the weekend former Mayor Rahm Emanuel sent Johnson well wishes from his outpost in Tokyo, where he serves as U.S. ambassador to Japan.

The Tribune charted his rise to power:

To get here, Johnson took an unconventional route compared with previous mayors. Having cut his teeth politically as a top Chicago Teachers Union organizer a decade ago, Johnson brings with him a labor-friendly resume that has galvanized the city’s political left. That coalition of progressive unions and grassroots organizations propelled Johnson to victory after their chosen candidates suffered mayoral runoff losses in 2015 and 2019.

When Johnson first announced his run, his candidacy was often dismissed. He polled in the single digits while rivals such as the CTU’s former endorsed candidate in the 2015 mayor’s race, U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, jockeyed for the progressive vote.

Johnson’s campaign themes of racial justice and taxing the rich ultimately caught fire, however. Buoyed by cash from CTU and like-minded unions, he surged months later to knock out incumbent Lightfoot in the initial round of voting — the first time a sitting Chicago mayor had lost reelection since Harold Washington beat Jane Byrne to become the city’s first Black mayor in 1983. Johnson will be the fourth.

As a CTU organizer, Johnson had been an instrumental force in crafting the union’s reputation as a progressive powerhouse, but election opponents countered that Chicago doesn’t need a mayor beholden to the teachers union. He also faced frequent fire for his past support of the “defund the police” movement, or the activist-backed calls to reallocate law enforcement budgets and send the funds to other social services in the wake of the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

In his inaugural address, Johnson pledged to reopen Chicago's closed mental-health clinics and to tackle the crisis caused by Southern Republican governors shipping asylum-seekers to the city:

“I want to make sure that no one ever has to suffer because they do not have access to mental health services,” Johnson said in his speech. 

Johnson repeatedly mentioned the migrant crisis unfolding across Chicago. Thousands of people have arrived in the city in recent weeks from the southern border, overwhelming the city’s shelters and forcing hundreds of migrants, including children, to sleep on the floors of police stations. 

“We don’t want the story to be told that we were unable to house the unhoused or provide safe harbor for those who are seeking refuge here, because there is enough room for everyone in the city of Chicago,” Johnson said.

The new mayor also emphasized the need to revitalize neighborhoods that have lost people and resources by “rerouting the rivers of prosperity to the banks of disinvestment.” He rejected the “zero-sum game” of pitting the needs of migrant families against the needs of longtime residents to live in “a fully funded neighborhood.”

Johnson narrowly beat former Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas (D?) in the runoff election on April 4th.

I did not watch the CNN town hall with the XPOTUS on Wednesday night. I do feel bad for the journalists who had to, starting with the Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler:

For more than an hour, former president Donald Trump sent forth a torrent of false and misleading claims during a CNN town hall. Here’s a roundup of some of the more notable ones, arranged by subject matter.

“I took in hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes from China.”

Through the end of his presidency, Trump-imposed tariffs garnered about $75 billion on products from China. But tariffs — essentially a tax — are generally paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, who in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers who use Chinese materials in their products. So, ultimately, Americans footed the bill for Trump’s tariffs, not the Chinese. Moreover, the China tariff revenue was reduced by $28 billion in payments the government made to farmers who lost business because China stopped buying U.S. soybeans, hogs, cotton and other products in response.

“I had every right to under the Presidential Records Act. You have the Presidential Records Act. I was there and I took what I took and it gets declassified … it says you talk, you negotiate, you make a deal. It’s not criminal, by the way.”

As Collins noted, this is not what the PRA says. Under the PRA, a president has a lot of leeway to deem something a presidential paper while he is president. But the possibility of such give-and-take ended when the clock struck noon on Jan. 20, 2021. “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President,” the law says.

Pages and pages of this follow. That poor reporter. Tom Nichols sees a silver lining:

Watching Trump for any extended period of time is enervating and deeply uncomfortable. The man is a quivering bag of weird verbal and physical tics. And when he gets rolling, listening to a Trump speech is like standing nearby while someone throws a match into a box of cheap bottle rockets: When the fusillade of annoying noise, misfires, duds, and smoke is over, all that’s left is a general stink in the air.

This discomfort is exactly my point: If you want to stop Donald Trump from returning to power, putting him on TV is the way to go. But doing so requires either that you hand him a microphone and let him immolate himself, or that you sit him down with a reporter who will not let up on calling out his lies and fantasies until he melts down.

Last night, however, CNN chose one of the worst possible options. Instead of a candidate interview, CNN Chairman Chris Licht apparently thought it would be a great idea to cast Trump in a remake of The Jerry Springer Show, complete with vulgar jokes, hooting fans, and a mild-mannered host—in this case, the CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins—stuck with the thankless of job of trying to intervene in the shouting and angry finger-pointing. Instead of an important one-on-one interview with a dangerous and malevolent demagogue, CNN presented another episode of Trump’s ongoing reality show.

The Economist's Lexington agrees:

And so american politics came to this: the day after a jury concluded in a civil case that Donald Trump had committed sexual abuse and then defamed his victim, he preened on national television as the front-runner for the presidential nomination of the party of family values and law and order, of American greatness and American pride. Mr Trump’s gall should not surprise anyone, of course, not after his success for seven years in defining Republican values down. Yet what a degrading spectacle it was.

But, unfiltered by his aides, Mr Trump damaged himself in the town hall for purposes of a general-election campaign. Mr Biden was fundraising off the event as it ended (“Do you want four more years of that?” he asked on Twitter) and within half an hour his team released an ad interleaving Mr Trump’s musings about the beauty of January 6th with images of violence that day. Should Mr Trump win the nomination, his boasts about overturning abortion rights would haunt him, along with many other remarks, some of which may also enhance his growing legal jeopardy.

The Times expands on that last point:

Mr. Trump described for Ms. Collins how he had apparently taken materials from the White House not only on purpose, but in plain view of the public.

“When we left Washington, we had the boxes lined up on the sidewalk outside for everybody,” he said. “People are taking pictures of them. Everybody knew we were taking those boxes.”

Mr. Trump’s attempts to play down or explain away his handling of the documents came at a moment when Mr. Smith’s office was increasingly homing in on the key question of whether the former president sought to hide some of the documents in his possession after the Justice Department issued a subpoena last May demanding their return.

Finally, James Fallows indicts CNN for its complicity in this nonsense:

—The least cynical explanation for why CNN offered Trump this opportunity is that they are trying to ingratiate themselves with Trump and his GOP. Perhaps a “re-centered” CNN could occupy the space opened by chaos at Fox?

—The more cynical explanation is that for CNN’s leadership the difference between spectacle and news was meaningless. A live Trump show would draw an audience and make headlines. Which is part of the defense its new CEO, Chris Licht, reportedly offered on a staff call today.

Fallows includes a bit from his 2016 interview with primatologist Jane Goodall, which really sums up the CNN town hall and, in fact, anything that the XPOTUS does in public:

“In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,” Jane Goodall, the anthropologist, told me shortly before Trump won the GOP nomination. “In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.”

In her book My Life With the Chimpanzees, Goodall told the story of “Mike,” a chimp who maintained his dominance by kicking a series of kerosene cans ahead of him as he moved down a road, creating confusion and noise that made his rivals flee and cower. She told me she would be thinking of Mike as she watched the upcoming debates [between Trump and Hillary Clinton].

Yes. The XPOTUS has normalized chimpanzee behaviors in American politics.

So, who else is excited for the 2024 election?

Let me repeat that: Former President Donald Trump sexually abused at least one person, not "allegedly," but "really." A jury has said so:

A verdict has been reached in the E Jean Carroll v Trump trial, according to a court spokesman. It [was] delivered at 3 p.m. today in the courtroom. The jury began deliberating today shortly before noon.

The jury has found that Carroll did not prove Trump raped her, but they did determine that he had sexually abused her. The jurors also found that Trump had defamed Carroll when he called her accusations false. They awarded her $5 million damages.

As a matter of law, a jury verdict establishes the allegations as facts. And as truth is an absolute defense against a libel accusation, that means we can all go ahead and repeat the horrible truth that the former president almost raped someone in a changing room at a department store.

This demented thug remains the head of the Republican Party.

So, if you vote for this horrible person, you're basically saying you have no objection to his conduct. You're saying it's OK that the person you voted for stuck his fingers inside someone without permission in public. You're saying that you wouldn't mind if he did it to someone else. Someone like you, or your spouse, or your parent.

We all knew what kind of person he was, but until a few minutes ago, at least Republicans had a tissue-paper-thin defense that no one had ever "proven" it. That defense has dissolved now. The Republican Party now owns this asshole completely.

If you don't like the Democratic party, and don't want to vote for us, that's fine. But please: form a new party that doesn't have people in it who endorse this man or his actions. We need a real opposition party in this country, not the right-wing looney bin that endorses sexual abuse. Because at this point, if you stay in the Republican Party, you're showing everyone where you stand on this behavior.

Michael Tomasky has no patience for the "leave it to God" crap the Republican Party spewed after our 199th mass shooting of the year:

We’re on pace for close to 600 shootings, and perhaps 60,000 willful, malicious, or accidental deaths (there’ve been 20,200 so far this year, according to the GVA, in the first four months and one week of 2023). That 60,000 is roughly equal to the number of Americans who died in Vietnam in nearly a decade. We’ll witness the same amount of carnage in one year. Shopping zones are war zones.

But it would seem that little girl getting her face blown off as if she lived in Stalingrad in 1943 is just God’s will. This was the verdict of the congressman who represents Allen, Republican Keith Self, who went on CNN after the shooting. He offered his prayers. The anchor interjected that some people think “prayers aren’t cutting it.” Self responded: “Well, those are people that don’t believe in an almighty God who is absolutely in control of our lives. I’m a Christian. I believe that He is.”

Governor Greg Abbott, meanwhile, offered the usual pointless bromides: “unspeakable tragedy,” “our hearts are with” the people of Allen. Well, at least, as of Sunday afternoon, he hadn’t gone out of his way to discuss anyone’s immigration status, as he did the previous week after the Cleveland, Texas, shooting, when he took pains to note the status of both the shooter and the victims.

He called this “freedom.” I wonder what that little girl’s parents think of this definition of freedom.

There’s only one logical conclusion to be drawn from all this. This is what the America gun manufacturers, the NRA, and right-wing politicians want: a country where we know that any trip to the mall involves a certain rolling of the dice. After all, that’s freedom.

Religion poisons everything, especially our debates on violent crime. And part of the Republican Party's religion is a worship of guns.

James Fallows contrasts the behavior of octogenarians US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and President Joe Biden:

It boils down to this:

—Sometimes what helps an individual hurts a larger cause. Things have come to that point for Senator Dianne Feinstein.

—Sometimes it works the other way, and an individual’s interests are aligned with a cause. I believe that applies to Joe Biden’s announcement that he is running for a second term.

Feinstein staying on, at age 89, increases problems for her party. Biden staying on, at age 80, reduces them. Here’s why.

Roger Federer stepped away, because of injury, at a point when our mental images are still of his grace. We are fortunate that Joan Baez and Paul McCartney are performing into their 80s, that Bonnie Raitt is sweeping the Grammys in her 70s, that Robert Caro is at work on his LBJ saga as he nears age 90.

The key difference between most of the people listed above, and these two senior Democratic leaders, is being in someone else’s way. Joan Baez can keep singing, and that doesn’t hurt Billie Eilish. The next novel by Joyce Carol Oates, in her 80s, will not stop writers in their 20s or 30s from making their mark.

But political figures like Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein are unavoidably in other people’s way.

Fallows has an upcoming post on the US Supreme Court, where reports about the corruption of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (R-$$) just keeps getting worse.

I think I wrote software and read a lot. You know, just what I do today. Stuff like this:

• Josh Marshall sums up the current Republican majority on the Supreme Court as a "casual mix of sweetheart deals and billionaire gifting [that] just stems from the same arrogance and corruption at the heart of the Federalist Society project," which sounds correct to me.
• On the same front, Pema Levy argues that "the Dobbs leak didn't wreck the Supreme Court—the justices' scandals did," which also sounds correct to me.
• Oddly, here in Chicago, anti-corruption forces just won a major victory as a jury today convicted four Commonwealth Edison lobbyists of bribery and conspiracy in a set of deals with former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan (D) that made my electricity needlessly expensive.
• Alex Shephard thinks he may have solved the mystery of US Senator Kristen Sinema's (WTF?-AZ) politics.
• Rebecca Mead wonders, can King Charles learn to shut up and be king, or will he continue making republicans' arguments for them?
• Illinois had a warmer and drier April than normal, even though the first two days of May have been dreary and cold.
• A dust storm in central Illinois contributed to a pile-up on Interstate 55 that killed 2 and injured dozens.

This afternoon we concluded Sprint 84 with a boring deployment, which makes me happy. We've had only one moderately-exciting deployment this year, and even that one didn't take long to fix, so I'm doing something right.

The North Carolina supreme court reversed itself on a major Gerrymandering question for the simple reason that it flipped parties. Guess which way:

Last year, Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts drawn to give Republicans lopsided majorities were illegal gerrymanders. On Friday, the same court led by a newly elected Republican majority looked at the same facts, reversed itself and said it had no authority to act.

The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled General Assembly to scrap the court-ordered State House, Senate and congressional district boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in Republicans’ favor for elections in 2024. The 5-to-2 ruling fell along party lines, reflecting the takeover of the court by Republican justices in partisan elections last November.

Legal scholars said the ruling also seemed likely to derail a potentially momentous case now before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the same maps. In that case, Moore v. Harper, leaders of the Republican-run legislature have argued that the U.S. Constitution gives state lawmakers the sole authority to set rules for state elections and political maps, and that state courts have no role in overseeing them.

I've got $1 to bet you that they'd have gone the other way if Democrats controlled the legislature. Note, also, that North Carolina's judicial districts also have a patina of Governor Gerry about them, and the state has a slight (1-2 point) Republican majority. But in the long run, a loss of faith in the courts doesn't hurt Republicans, as they generally don't want to govern, but to rule. You know, like their Russian friends.

I'm chasing down a bug that caused what we in the biz call "unexpected results" and the end-users call "wrong." I've fixed it in both our API and our UI, but in order to test it, I need the API built in our dev/test environment. That takes about 18 minutes. Plenty of time to read all of this:

• Ruth Marcus wants you to really think about Jean Carroll's testimony in her defamation suit against the XPOTUS.
• Tom Nichols sees narcissism, not "misguided patriotism," as the root of the classified intelligence leaks endangering the US.
• Jamelle Boule reminds the Chief Justice of the United States that when Congress calls, he needs to answer.
• Alex Shephard tells us what we can all see: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) sucks at his job.
• Tim Murphy can't wait for Twitter to die so news stories no longer quote "another Twitter user" ever again.
• ProPublica exposes the dangers children face when trains park across their route to school, forcing them to crawl over (or under!) them.

Finally, the Times explains how last year's 257 traffic fatalities in New York City undermine the claims that "Vision Zero" is working. But Strong Towns already told you that.

OK, build succeeded, fix is now in Dev/Test...on with the show!