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Well, it looks like Jeff Bezos has decided to light the Washington Post on fire as he just can't seem to figure out how newspapers work. Josh Marshall, a 25-year veteran of online journalism, congratulates Bezos on getting to the "F this" part of the billionaire ownership lifecycle (also known as "Dunning-Krueger strikes again"):

The sun just came out, reminding me that gray skies don't last forever. Neither will all this crap:

On 28 January 1986, 40 years ago today, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Six astronauts and a teacher from New Hampshire died when the crew cabin of the orbiter impacted the Atlantic Ocean more than three minutes later; most of them were likely conscious and aware at the time.

On January 27th, we still have 5 weeks until spring officially begins. The forecast doesn't predict any above-freezing temperatures as far as it can see, and we've already had 10 days below freezing in this seemingly endless cold snap.

Now that I've had a good night's sleep and the sun is out for the first time all year, I have the energy to start reading the news again. On January 2nd, most of the stories are about things that have changed since Wednesday: Chicago had 416 murders in 2025, the lowest number recorded since 1965 when the city had 620,000 (23%) more people. In 2025, the hottest temperature recorded at Inner Drive Technology WHQ was 34.3°C (93.7°F) on June 23rd; the coldest was -20°C (-4°F) January 21st. Officially at...

The Post has woken up to the lack of success Federal incentives have had in promoting Vision Zero, an international strategy "to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all." Despite the success of Vision Zero in Europe (especially in the Netherlands), it isn't doing particularly well over here, which the Post blames on drivers: Vision Zero’s failures in more than two dozen cities fit a predictable pattern, according to the Post...

Russia expert (and emigrée) Julia Ioffe picks apart the OAFPOTUS's clownish attempts to end the war in Ukraine one more time: Stop me if you’ve heard this one. President Donald Trump, eager to get another peace deal under his belt, sends everyone in Washington, Kyiv, Moscow, and Brussels scrambling as he announces that an agreement to end the Ukraine war is imminent. The proposal, on even the most cursory examination, is revealed to echo the Russian position, at which point Volodymyr Zelensky and the...

First, just a reminder: anthropogenic climate change (aka global warming) will not wipe out humanity; but it will lead to millions of deaths, plus immense costs and disruptions, which the next few generations will bear. And we could have prevented it. Another reminder: despite what this map shows, as soon as the first real cold of the 2025-26 winter hits after Thanksgiving, lots of people will say "this disproves global warming." No, climate theory predicts weather extremes with the average temperature...

The OAFPOTUS sued the New York Times in the Middle District of Florida on Monday. It only took until this morning for Senior US District Judge Stephen Merryday to throw it out: Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, said the president’s 85-page complaint was unnecessarily lengthy and digressive. He criticized Mr. Trump’s lawyers for waiting until the 80th page to lodge a formal allegation of defamation, and for including, ahead of it, dozens of “florid...

The OAFPOTUS met with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, yesterday. I can't overstate that Putin won on so many levels, from getting the OAFPOTUS to agree to meeting on US soil in the first place to getting the OAFPOTUS to stomp on a rake on international television right at the end of it. Let's start with the location. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin that most ICC signatories have said they will honor. We're not signatories, in part because...

Former Chicago Opera Theater artistic director Lidya Yankovskaya, with whom I have worked several times, has started moving to London because she doesn't want her children to grow up in the anti-humanities environment the United States is becoming: “I want to be sure that my children can grow up feeling like they can always express themselves freely. I want my children to live in a society that really takes care of its people. I want my children to live in a world that really values things like the...

With my PTO cap continuing to force me into Friday afternoons off this summer (the horror!), and the sunny but (smoky 23°C) weather, Cassie and I will head to the Horner Park DFA just as soon as I release a new version of Weather Now in just a few minutes. When Cassie and I come back, I'll spend some time reading all these nuggets of existential dread: The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last 3 months of US jobs data down to basically nil (which Krugman blames on tariffs), prompting the OAFPOTUS to...

We start this morning with news that US Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), for whom I voted all 5 times he ran for Senate, will not run for re-election in 2026. He turns 82 just after the election and would be 88 at the end of the term. I am very glad he has decided to step aside: we don't need another Feinstein or Thurmond haunting the Senate again. In other news: Vice President JD Vance outlined a proposal to reward Russia for its aggression by giving it all the land it currently holds in the...

Michael Tomasky takes the educated-elite-leftist view that, somehow, the OAFPOTUS actually bamboozled 77 million voters—twice: How many times did Trump say he’d end that war on the first day of his presidency? It had to have been hundreds. I saw a lot of those clips on cable news over the weekend, as you may have. He did not mean it figuratively. You know, in the way people will say, “I’ll change that from day one,” and you know they don’t literally mean day one, but they do mean fast. But that isn’t...

Before I go through the stories from the last day about how we live in the stupidest timeline, here's a photo of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station I snapped heading to my return train on Friday: Elsewhere in the stupidest timeline, where maximizing corruption is the defining goal of the Republican Party: James Fallows takes us through Harvard's big "fuck you" to the OAFPOTUS's demands that the university install minders in its HR and academic departments, as does Josh Marshall. Jennifer Rubin reminds...

I may have dodged a virus this week, though I'm not 100% sure yet. I have a lot more confidence in my health than the world has in the OAFPOTUS, however. And the news today doesn't change that at all: Radley Balko, tongue firmly in cheek, satirizes the Republican Party in a way I will not spoil for you. (His takedown of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, made me guffaw.) Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's irrational and malignantly stupid attack on the very things that made America great in...

With the total acquiescence of the Republican majority in Congress (only Congress has the power to impose tariffs, really), the OAFPOTUS has exceeded everyone's expectations with yesterday's tariff announcement, solidifying himself as the stupidest person ever to hold the office: Mr. Trump’s plan, which he unveiled on Wednesday and is calling “reciprocal,” would impose a wave of tariffs on dozens of countries. The European Union will face 20 percent tariffs, but the heavier levies will fall on countries...

I don't necessarily agree with everything Nate Silver wrote in his analysis from last week, but he makes a some excellent points: Biden hadn’t delivered the complete repudiation of Trump that polls — showing a massive 8.4-point popular vote lead — had been projecting. That’s why the election took four long days to call. Biden’s popular vote (4.5 points) and Electoral College (306-222) margins had been perfectly solid, and the migration of Georgia and Arizona into the blue column had enhanced its visual...

We've gotten about 4 cm of snow so far today, with more coming down until this evening. Cassie loves it; I have mixed feelings. At least the temperature has gone up a bit, getting up to -0.6°C for the first time since around this time on Monday. Elsewhere: Federal Judge Aileen Cannon (R-SDFL) got overruled again, this time after her corrupt effort to block Special Counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on January 6th. George Will bemoans Congress ceding so much of its authority to the office of...

The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime. Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these: Andrew Sullivan shakes his head at "the dumb luck" of the OAFPOTUS. On David Roberts' podcast, Dan Savage muses on "blue America in the age" of the OAFPOTUS....

First, Andrew Sullivan makes a very good, nuanced point about President Biden pardoning his son: A consensus of sorts has emerged among historians. Little abuses of power in the Roman system slowly multiplied, as rival factions exploited loopholes, or made minor adjustments, for short-term advantages. And so, for example, the term-limits of consuls — once strictly limited to two years in order to keep power dispersed — were gradually extended after the first breach, which set a precedent for further...

I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write. Meanwhile: The OAFPOTUS has picked South Dakota governor Kristi Noem (R) as his Homeland Security secretary and Mike Huckabee to represent the US in Israel, which have me straining not to tell the left wing of my party...

I can scarcely believe I took these 10 days ago, on Friday the 20th. I already posted about my walk from Borough Market back to King's X; this is where I started: You can get a lovely snack there for just a few quid. In my case, a container of fresh olives, some bread, and some cheese set me back about £6. Next time, I'll try something from Mei Mei. Later, I scored one of the rare pork baps at Southampton Arms. Someone else really wanted a bite, too: Sorry, little guy, I can't give you any of this—oh...

Last weekend, California governor Gavin Newsom (D) announced that the San Francisco-San Jose heavy commuter rail line had entered the late 19th century (in a good way): On Thursday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority named its new CEO, Ian Choudri – and today, Choudri joined Governor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco to help celebrate the debut of Caltrain’s new electrified train fleet that will transform rail service in the Bay Area and play a key role in California’s high-speed rail system. The...

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...

I'm about to leave the office for the next 4½ days. Happy Independence Day! And who could forget that the UK will have a general election tomorrow? To celebrate, the Post has a graphical round-up of just how badly the Conservative Party has screwed things up since taking power in 2010: There’s a widespread feeling among voters that something has gone awry under Tory government, that the country is stagnating, if not in perilous decline. Nearly three-quarters of the public believes that the country is...

I woke up at my usual time this morning, noticed how dark it was, checked radar, and got Cassie out the door less than 10 minutes later. Because by the time I had her to day camp and got myself to the Metra platform, it looked like this: Waiting for the train, I got this: But what luck, it let up just as the train arrived. The photo doesn't do it justice: those are horizontal rain bands, and I was standing behind a window. By the time I got down to Ogilvie, we had this: Again, just a bit of light rain...

The last three days—i.e., the first three days of Summer—have shown us most of the weather we can expect this season. It rained most of Saturday, yesterday we had cool, sunny, and eminently walkable weather, and today it's hot and sticky with thunderstorms on the way. At least Cassie and I got to spend most of yesterday outside. In other news: David French argues that Justice Sonia Sotomayor's (I) recent opinion defending the National Rifle Association "reinforced the constitutional wall of protection...

Cassie got a bad result from the lab yesterday: a mild giardia infection. It's a good-news, bad-news thing: The bad news, obviously, is that she can't go to day camp (meaning I can't spend a full day in my downtown office) for at least a week. The good news is that she's mostly asymptomatic, unlike the last guy. So we just went to the vet again, got another $110 bill for dewormer. But at least she wasn't crated for three hours with her own diarrhea. Poor Parker. In other good news, bad news stories...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ bottomed out this morning, hitting -4.8°C at 10:41 am, and it may even end the day above freezing. So this mercifully-short cold snap won't keep us out of the record books, just as predicted. It's still the warmest winter in Chicago history. (Let's hope we don't set the same record for spring or summer.) Meanwhile, the record continues to clog up with all kinds of fun stories elsewhere: Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has led his...

In light of the report from special counsel Robert Hur that James Fallows calls "tendentious," Republican pollster and Lincoln Project member Stuart Stephens wonders why Democrats don't crow more loudly about all that President Biden has actually accomplished: A plea to my Democratic friends: It’s time to start calling Joe Biden a great president. Not a good one. Not a better choice than Donald Trump. Joe Biden is a historically great president. Say it with passion backed by the conviction that it’s...

Ah, Tricky Dick, you were far worse than a crook: For context, Woodward and Bernstein had only just started investigating Watergate, and he still hadn't gotten us out of Vietnam. But good thing he reassured us he didn't do anything illegal.

I have tickets to a late concert downtown, which means a few things, principally that I'm still at the office. But I'm killing it on this sprint, so it works out. Of course this means a link dump: The XPOTUS has a hate-hate relationship with life. After a damning ethics report, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has announced he won't run again, which is too bad because it would have been an easy D pickup. Speaking of Republicans in Congress, why do they behave like adolescent boys all the time? Israel is seeing...

I'm iterating on a UI feature that wasn't 100% defined, so I'm also iterating on the API that the feature needs. Sometimes software is like that: you discover that your first design didn't quite solve the problem, so you iterate. it's just that the iteration is a bit of a context shift, so I'm going to read for about 15 minutes to clear my head: Kevin Philips, whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority laid out Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" and led to the GOP's subsequent slide into...

I could have worked from home today, and probably should have, but I felt well enough to come in (wearing an N95 mask, of course). It turned that I had a very helpful meeting, which would not have worked as well remotely, but given tomorrow's forecast and the likelihood I'll still have this cold, Cassie will just have to miss a day of school. I have to jam on a presentation for the next three hours, so I'll come back to these later: Alex Shephard says this is the week Twitter finally went totally evil....

New York Supreme Court (i.e., trial court) judge Arthur Engoron ruled yesterday that the XPOTUS's eponymous family business committed fraud on such a scale that the company is no longer allowed to do business in New York State: The surprising decision...is a major victory for Attorney General Letitia James in her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, effectively deciding that no trial was needed to determine that he had fraudulently secured favorable terms on loans and insurance deals. Ms. James has argued that...

Meteorological autumn begins at midnight local time, even though today's autumn-like temperatures will give way to summer heat for a few days starting Saturday. Tomorrow I will once again attempt the 42-kilometer walk from Cassie's daycare to Lake Bluff. Will I go 3-for-4 or .500? Tune in Saturday morning to find out. Meanwhile: Quinta Jurecic foresees some problems with the overlapping XPOTUS criminal trials next year, not least of which is looking for a judicial solution to a political problem. Even...

Not Just Bikes shows the difference between places and non-places in ten short minutes: Fortunately the part of Chicago where I live has a sense of place that he'd recognize, but you have to cross a stroad (Ashland to the east, Western to the west, Irving Park to the south, Peterson to the north) to get to another place like this. I also can't help but think that a new culture will arise in a couple of millennia that will look at "the great American roads" as something to emulate. Maybe the Romans had...

I'm still working on the feature I described in my last post. So some articles have stacked up for me to read: The US Senate has the second-highest average age in its 234-year history, with 34 members over 70. The House is the third-oldest, with 72 members over 70. Josh Marshall (and The Daily Parker) don't extend that worry to the presidency, however: we're just fine with four more years of President Biden being the oldest president ever. The Chicago Transit Authority has cut over the CTA Red and...

Thanks in part to Conservative Party mismanagement of the UK transport sector for the last 13 years, things have gotten a bit fraught in the Old Country. And now, I get to spend a bit of extra time getting from Gatwick to my hotel on Saturday: The Gatwick Express takes about 30 minutes from the airport to London Victoria Station. There is no other train option. Instead, it looks like I can take a cab straight to my hotel for about £90, or a bus to bloody Heathrow and the Elizabeth Line for about £25....

The Daily Parker began as a joke-of-the-day engine at the newly-established braverman.org on 13 May 1998. This will be my 8,907th post since 1998 and my 8,710th since 13 November 2005. And according to a quick SQL Server query I just ran, The Daily Parker contains 15,043,497 bytes of text and HTML. A large portion of posts just curate the news and opinions that I've read during the day. But sometimes I actually employ thought and creativity, as in these favorites from the past 25 years: Old Man...

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...

I'm arguing with the Blazorise framework right now because their documentation on how to make a layout work doesn't actually work. Because this requires repeated build/test cycles, I have almost no time to read all of this: The US Surface Transportation Board has approved a merger between the Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern railroads, which will almost certainly bollix up commuter rail traffic in Chicago's western suburbs. A Russian warplane downed a US drone over the Black Sea. George Will...

After standing on the Ravenswood Metra platform for 10 minutes in 40 km/h winds and blowing rain, I hearby sentence former Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner to 100 days of standing on said platform without an umbrella or waterproof shoes for the offense cutting off funding to all Illinois transportation projects for 3 years in a fit of ideological pique and general lack of empathy for anyone else. Each instance of Rauner's prickishness causing suffering and inconvenience to the citizens of Illinois shall...

Chicago mayoral candidate and Fraternal Order of Police endorsee Paul Vallas blames "hackers" for his own choices to use a weak password and not to use multi-factor authentication on his Twitter account: Mayoral candidate Paul Vallas on Friday blamed unnamed hackers for his Twitter account liking offensive tweets over the past several years as he faced criticism from rival candidates over the social media posts. The comments came after a Tribune review this week found that Vallas’ Twitter account...

Let's start with combat-actor Jill Bearup explaining how the Netflix-ITV-BBC ban on corsets solves entirely the wrong problems: Meanwhile, in the modern world: The National Transportation Safety Board reported that an axle on the 23rd car of the train that derailed in East Palesine, Ohio, had a bearing temperature 140°C over normal—which is 30°C over "critical." The crew were trying to stop the train when the bearing failed. Perhaps if the train had fewer cars, or more crew, or the proper braking...

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing. While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company: US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if...

In a form of enlightened laziness, I often go into my company's downtown Chicago office on Friday and the following Monday, avoiding the inconvenience of taking my laptop home. It helps also that Fridays and Mondays have become the quietest days of the week, with most return-to-office workers heading in Tuesdays through Thursdays. And after a productive morning, I have a few things to read at lunch: The Economist says a lot of nice things about Chicago, including that we have an almost inexhaustible...

The House will probably elect a Speaker before the end of March, so we probably won't set any records for majority-party dickery before the Congress even starts. (We might for what the 118th Congress does, though.) But with three ballots down and the guy who thought he'd get the job unable to get the last 19 votes he needs, it might take a few days. Meanwhile: How does the House elect its Speaker, anyway? Whoever the Republicans elect, they have already made clear their intentions for the 118th to...

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...

The Washington Post Fact Checker digs deep into the allegations of mishandling classified material against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and finds, nah, she good: The Justice Department investigation of classified documents found at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club has brought inevitable comparisons to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server that she used while secretary of state. The FBI investigation into her emails arguably tipped the close 2016...

Every time I commute to work from the Ravenswood Metra station, I get annoyed. Metra has yet to finish the inbound platform after almost 10 years of delays. So I emailed the alderman to ask why, and CC:d Block Club Chicago, the local news outlet. Reporter Alex Hernandez called me the next morning, and ran this story today: The Ravenswood Metra station overhaul that began more than a decade ago is hitting yet another bump.  The $30 million project to renovate 11 bridges along Metra’s Union Pacific...

Even though I feel like I have a moderate cold (stuffy, sneezy, and an occasional cough), I recognize that Covid-19 poses a real danger to people who haven't gotten vaccinations or who have other comorbidities. So I'm staying home today except to walk Cassie. It's 18°C and perfectly sunny, so Cassie might get a lot of walks. Meanwhile, I have a couple of things to occupy my time: Arthur Rizer draws a straight line from the militarization of police to them becoming "LARPing half-trained, half-formed kids...

The Atlantic makes a solid case for treating Covid-19 as a behavior problem, not a virus: The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention. The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par...

Jessica Stolzberg hopes to follow the success of Washington, D.C.'s gas-powered leaf blower ban elsewhere: The gas leaf blower is by all measures, and without dispute, harmful — to the environment, to neighbors, to workers who carry them on their backs. These hazards have been the subject of countless articles. Local and national organizations work to educate and empower property owners, providing guides to alternatives. The fix is so easy. Electric leaf blowers are effective, available and affordable....

Actually, it's 5pm here. And I have a few stories queued up: Oklahoma has a new law making abortion a felony, because the 1950s were great for the white Christian men who wrote that law. Monika Bauerlein explains why authoritarians hate a free press. Not that we didn't already know. Jonathan Haidt explains "why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid." ("It's not just a phase.") Inflation in the US hit a 40-year high at 8.5% year over year, but Paul Krugman believes it will drop...

Former Illinois governor Bruce Rauner (R, of course) famously stopped almost all discretionary spending in the state during his term in office by continually vetoing state budgets passed by the Democratically-controlled legislature. His term overlapped with a project to rebuild 11 railroad bridges on the North Side of Chicago, and which included a companion project, partially necessitated by the track reconfigurations required to replace the bridges, to rebuild the Ravenswood Metra station serving...

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle read through a week of newspapers to understand the hot topics of 100 years ago: First, there is news of the great Washington Naval Conference, which has commanded half of the front page since opening in mid-November. The idea of the conference is for the great powers to jointly reduce their armaments, so everyone can spend the money on better things. Inside the paper, we may spend some time browsing the ads, perhaps pausing over the homage to the REO Speed Wagon...

Even though the Court probably won't release its ruling in the Mississippi anti-abortion bill until June, just about everyone has the same understanding about how it will turn out. No one seems to believe abortion will remain legal in much of the US beyond the end of this term. My guess: Justice Amy Coney Barrett (R) writing the opinion for a 5-4 Court with an unusual number of concurrences and dissents. If the Court overturns or significantly curtails Roe v Wade, it will be one of the rare times that...

I've spent today alternately upgrading my code base for my real job to .NET 6.0, and preparing for the Apollo Chorus performances of Händel's Messiah on December 11th and 12th. Cassie, for her part, enjoys when I work from home, even if we haven't spent a lot of time outside today because (a) I've had a lot to do and (b) it rained from 11am to just about now. So, as I wait for the .NET 6 update to build and deploy on our dev/test CI/CD instance (I think I set the new environments on our app services...

The software release yesterday that I thought might be exciting turned out to be fairly boring, which was a relief. Today I'm looking through an ancient data set of emails sent to and from some white-collar criminals, which is annoying only because there are millions and I have to write some parsing tools for them. So while I'm decompressing the data set, I'll amuse myself with these articles, from least to most frightening: The Chicago Tribune lists six breweries they think you should take out-of-town...

Chicago's Navy Pier organization wants to cut down the trees and put 'em in a tree museum: Navy Pier’s Crystal Gardens could be removed and replaced with what’s billed as “the next generation in immersive entertainment” — but a petition to save it has racked up more than 15,000 signatures. Crystal Gardens is a 1-acre indoor garden that is free and accessible to the public. It’s often used as a venue for events or for people to stop by and escape chilly weather. But a new attraction is set to take its...

Eric Schnurer outlines the alarming similarities between our present and Rome's past; specifically, the end of the Republic in 54 BCE: History isn’t destiny, of course; the demise of the Roman Republic is a point of comparison—not prediction. But the accelerating comparisons nonetheless beg the question: If one were to make a prediction, what comes next? What might signal the end of democracy as we know it?  There is, it turns out, an easy answer at hand. While there is no precise end date to the...

Those topics led this afternoon's news roundup: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 6th periodic report on the state of the planet, and it's pretty grim. But as Josh Marshall points out, "Worried about life on earth? Don’t be. Life’s resilient and has a many hundreds of millions of years track record robust enough to handle and adapt to anything we throw at it. But the player at the top of the heap is the first to go." Charles Blow has almost run out of empathy for people who...

Amanda Mull examines why. Because consumer identities are constructed by external forces, [historian Susan Strasser, the author of Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market] said, they are uniquely vulnerable, and the people who hold them are uniquely insecure. If your self-perception is predicated on how you spend your money, then you have to keep spending it, especially if your overall class status has become precarious, as it has for millions of middle-class people in the past...

While I look out my hermetically-sealed office window at some beautiful September weather in Chicago (another argument for working from home), I have a lot of news to digest: The infrastructure bill unveiled in the US Senate this morning would give $66 billion to Amtrak, which desperately needs the money. Josh Marshall argues that social-group identity drives resistance to vaccination. Brooke Harrington elaborates by pointing out that people who are conned usually can't admit to being conned. In...

Oh, to be a dog. Cassie is sleeping comfortably on her bed in my office after having over an hour of walks (including 20 minutes at the dog park) so far today. Meanwhile, at work we resumed using a bit of code that we put on ice for a while, and I promptly discovered four bugs. I've spent the afternoon listening to Cassie snore and swatting the first one. Meanwhile, in the outside world, life continues: Ukrainian police arrested members of the Cl0p ransomware gang, seizing money and cars along with the...

I'm sure I must have read this when it came out, but I have just (re-?)read Andrew Sullivan's 2019 essay "Our Caesar," just to refresh my sadness at the parallels between early-21st-century America and early-2nd-century-BCE Rome: It’s impossible to review the demise of the Roman Republic and not be struck by the parallel dynamics in America in 2019. We now live, as the Romans did, in an economy of massive wealth increasingly monopolized by the very rich, in which the whole notion of principled public...

Josh Marshall looks at the results of this week's election in Israel and concludes that only one thing has stopped the country yet again from forming a government: It’s all such a mess there’s a serious discussion of forming a short term government which would simply pass a law barring anyone currently under indictment, as Netanyahu is, from serving as Prime Minister. In other words, a government whose sole act would be to remove Netanyahu from the political scene before yet another election. This all...

Even though my life for the past week has revolved around a happy, energetic ball of fur, the rest of the world has continued as if Cassie doesn't matter: US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has taken the lead in spewing right-wing conspiracy bullshit in the Senate. Retired US Army Lt Colonel Alexander Vindman joins Garry Kasparov in an op-ed that says it's not about the individual politicians; Russia's future is about authoritarianism against democracy. Deep waters 150 meters under the surface of Lake...

The CDC just released guidance on how vaccinated people should behave. It doesn't seem too surprising, but it also doesn't suggest we will all go back to the world of 2019 any time soon. In other news: Washington Post global opinions editor Karen Attah likens living in Texas right now to "an exercise in survival." The New York Times looks at where US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) came from, without explicitly telling him to go back there. Crain's Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz outlines what Chicago...

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) Tweeted yesterday morning, "Protecting and defending the Constitution doesn’t mean trying to rewrite the parts you don’t like." Josh Marshall wasted no time taking her to school: Who's gonna tell her? There's a worthwhile point that we can draw out of this otherwise useless dumbshittery. Folks on the right who stile themselves "constitutional conservatives" generally know next to nothing about the constitution and treat it as a kind of go to unicorn to validate what they want...

President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Vice President Kamala Devi Harris started their terms at noon Eastern today. It's the 59th time that the United States has transferred executive authority according to law. Let's hope for at least 59 more times.

The New Yorker next week has Lawrence Wright's excellent long-form history of "the mistakes and the struggles behind America's coronavirus tragedy:" There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the covid-19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently. The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which was...

No, not a reference to a now-famous article of amendment to the US Constitution. One of my favorite movies, The American President, was released 25 years ago today. I plan to watch it again tonight.

Jennifer Rubin (a Republican, I keep having to remind myself) finds former President Obama's mockery of the current president impressive and effective: In Orlando on Tuesday, Obama told the crowd, “Our current president, he whines that ’60 Minutes’ is too tough,” he said referring to Trump’s walking out of an interview last week with CBS News’s Lesley Stahl. “You think he’s going to stand up to dictators? He thinks Lesley Stahl’s a bully.” He does not need to say Trump is a “crybaby” or “weak”; he lets...

I dropped off my completed ballot this afternoon, so if Joe Biden turns out to be the devil made flesh, I can't change my vote. Tonight, the president and Joe Biden will have competing, concurrent town halls instead of debating each other, mainly because the president is an infant. The Daily Parker will not live-blog either one. Instead, I'll whip up a stir-fry and read something. In other news: Chris Christie continues the tradition of Republican politicians not understanding something until it happens...

In an interview yesterday, the president refused to say that he would allow a peaceful transfer of power if he lost the election. Understandably, people are upset that a sitting president would hint at doing anything else. But as Josh Marshall points out, this guy lies more easily than most people breathe, so maybe we don't need to freak out as much as we are: No one needs to tell us these threats and bogus claims are wrong. But it is still necessary to step back and realize that there’s no chaos. We...

More than 200,000 people have died of Covid-19 since we started paying attention six months ago. Let me put that into perspective: The columns represent the total number of deaths for each event (blue) or per year (gray). The line represents those deaths on an annualized basis. At 400,000 deaths per year, Covid-19 now ranks as the third leading cause of death in the US for 2020 after cancer and heart disease. We're on course to have 133 9/11s or 12 times our usual number of car crash deaths just this...

Tropical Storm Zeta formed in the Atlantic on 30 December 2005 and almost became a hurricane on 2 January 2006. When Zeta finally dissipated on January 6th, it ended the most active Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history, and also one of the most destructive: category-5 hurricanes Emily, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma caused incredible damage and loss of life throughout the US. The season also included three unnamed tropical depressions and an unnamed tropical storm. That season, Tropical Storm Alpha...

The cartoonist and author behind Hyperbole and a Half has returned with a new book, which I should receive tomorrow. This news offsets pretty much all the other news from today: Author John Scalzi, who lives in a very red, rural county in Ohio, has a depressing report about mask-wearing in his area. Wisconsin is back on Illinois' shit-list for its rapidly-increasing Covid-19 case load. Olga Khazan says the 200,000 Covid-19 deaths (officially, as of today) signal a "failure of empathy." Wired has the...

The GOP panic to fill the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat makes three things absolutely clear: first, they expect to lose bigly in six weeks; second, they realize they're against public opinion; and third, they realize that public opinion is continuing to turn against them. In short, this is quite literally their last chance to get a SCOTUS seat for a generation. You know what? Everyone else is sick of their bullshit. We're going to win both houses and the presidency, and then we're going to...

Choral board meeting followed by chorus rehearsal: all on Zoom, and as president and generally techy guy, I'm hosting. After a full day of work and a 5 km walk. Whew. So what's new? David Corn advises the Democratic Party to "go nuclear." Greg Sargent views the malarkey from Republican senators and the president as unmasking their "vile game." The CDC abruptly withdrew guidance warning about the airborne spread of Covid-19, which could not have more obviously come from political interference. Democratic...

The official death toll in the US for Covid-19 has passed a milestone Deborah Birx predicted back in March: In the predawn hours of March 30, Dr. Deborah Birx stepped in front of the camera on the White House lawn and made an alarming prediction about the coronavirus, which had, by then, killed fewer than 3,000 people in the United States. "If we do things together, well, almost perfectly, we can get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities," Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task...

Here we go: A wildfire currently burning north of Sacramento has become the largest in California history. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr Anthony Fauci doesn't expect us to get back to normal until "well into 2021." Law professor Rosa Brooks reviews Bob Woodward's Rage and finds nothing surprising. The Kissimmee Star Motel outside Orlando, Florida, is a case study in the state's abrogation of its basic duties to its citizens, or the apotheosis of the Calvinist ethics...

Today is former president Bill Clinton's 74th birthday. Last night, he spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where the party formally nominated former vice president Joe Biden to be president. In other news: Chicago removed Wisconsin from the list of states too dangerous to visit without quarantine. With the exceptions of California and Nevada, the map now looks a lot like projections of the 2020 election. Five Thirty Eight updated its interactive guide to voting by mail this fall. In Illinois...

As I take a minute from banging away on C# code to savor my BBQ pork on rice from the local Chinese takeout, I have these to read: President Trump once again said the quiet part out loud, announcing he plans to gut fair-housing rules because otherwise they would "have...a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas." The Supreme Court will hear arguments whether the House can have access to Robert Mueller's unredacted report—in the fall. Josh Marshall goes over the "ominous and harrowing"...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 14-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2019, and the world has changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 20 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many...

My inbox does not respect the fact that I had meetings between my debugging sessions all day. So this all piled up: Josh Marshall calls our Covid-19 response an "abject failure" compared to, say, Europe's. Paul Krugman says it shows we've "failed the marshmallow test." Former CIA acting director Michael Morell says President Biden will inherit "a world of trouble." ("Arguably, only Abraham Lincoln, with Southern secession waiting, faced a tougher challenge when taking office than would Biden.") Illinois...

I think today is Tuesday, the first day of my 10th week working from home. That would make today...March 80th? April 49th? Who knows. It is, however, just past lunchtime, and today I had shawarma and mixed news: Carbon emissions have declined 17% year-over-year, thanks to Covid-19-related slowdowns reducing petroleum consumption. (See? It's not all bad news.) Crain's Chicago Business reviews how businesses rate Mayor Lori Lightfoot's first year in office. And their editorial board says we should "start...

Starting tomorrow at 5pm, through April 7th, Illinois will be on a "stay-at-home" order: Residents can still go to the grocery stores, put gas in their cars, take walks outside and make pharmacy runs, the governor said at a Friday afternoon news conference. All local roads, including the interstate highways and tollways, will remain open to traffic, as well. “For the vast majority of you already taking precautions, your lives will not change very much,” Pritzker said. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said “now is...

Actually, things seem to have quieted down. Bars and restaurants in Illinois closed last night at 9pm, and my company has moved to mandatory work-from-home, so things could not be quieter for me. I'm also an introvert with a dog and gigabit Internet, meaning I have a need to leave my house several times a day and something to do inside. (I'm also working, and in fact cracked a difficult nut yesterday that made today very productive.) Outside of my house: New Republic's Nick Martin asks, why should we...

Some headlines this morning: My preferred candidate for the Democratic nomination, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), came in 4th in yesterday's New Hampshire primary. John Judis is already reading her campaign its last rites. Jonathan Chait, for his part, says former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign "was a disaster for liberalism and his party." Also from TPM, remember all the hand-wringing we did about whether the president would try to influence the Mueller probe? Such innocent times those were. The...

In just one more example of the president slipping his leash, thanks to the Republican trolls in the Senate giving him permission to do so, the Justice Department said it found prosecutors recommendations for Roger Stone's sentence "shocking." Three Assistant US Attorneys immediately quit the case: Jonathan Kravis, one of the prosecutors, wrote in a court filing he had resigned as an assistant U.S. attorney, leaving government entirely. Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, a former member of special counsel Robert S....

I realized this morning that I've missed almost the entire season of The Good Place because I don't seem to have enough time to watch TV. I also don't have enough time until Friday to read all of these pieces that have crossed my desk only today: Writing in the New Yorker, Steve Coll worries how the public phase of the House's impeachment hearings will move the public. Meanwhile, Seinfeld screenwriter and New York native Peter Mehlman points out that Donald Trump "was always a joke" in New York. (I...

A few good reads today: Bruce Schneier compares genetic engineering with software engineering, and its security implications. The Atlantic has goes deep into the Palace of Westminster, and its upcoming £3.5 bn renovation. NOAA's chief scientist publicly released a letter to staff discussing the "complex issue involving the President commenting on the path of [Hurricane Dorian]." Illinois has pulled back some regulations on distilleries, giving them an easier time competing with bars and restaurants....

The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, announced this evening in London that he would step down at the end of October: At the 2017 election he promised his wife and children that it would be his last, he says. He says if the Commons votes for an early general election, his tenure as Speaker and as an MP will end when this parliament ends. He says, if MPs do not vote for an election, he has concluded the least disruptiveoption will be to stand down at close of play on Thursday 31 October. He...

Yep, one of these posts. Alaska is having its warmest summer ever, and by a lot. Ronald Reagan had not-nice things to say about Africans in a phone call to Richard Nixon. Chicago's new LED street lights could increase the incidence of mosquito-borne illnesses. (Which, by the way, have ended civilizations.) You can run Ruby on Rails natively in the next update to Windows 10. Broadway producer Hal Prince has died at 91. Back to coding...

If only it weren't another beautiful early-summer day in Chicago, I might spend some time indoors reading these articles: On the 40th anniversary of the Flight 191 disaster in Chicago, Ask the Pilot draws comparisons between the troubles of the DC-10 and the 737-MAX. Does ride-sharing increase traffic congestion? Uh, yeah. Duh. Yesterday was the Chicago El's 127th birthday. Scott Hanselman remarks on "clever little C# features" that make him happy. A 68-year old survey, the Public Policy Mood estimate...

Writing for the conservative National Review, Jim Geraghty correctly diagnoses a fundamental problem with Movement Conservatism as a governing philosophy, forgetting that Movement Conservatism is actually a wealth-generating philosophy: Back in 2014, Politico researched 33 political action committees that claimed to be affiliated with the Tea Party and courted small donors with email and direct-mail appeals and found that they “raised $43 million — 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs...

Burger King has decided to embrace the suck: Sir, this was a Burger King commercial. Part of a partnership with the nonprofit Mental Health America — as well as an unsubtle dig at the McDonald’s Happy Meal — the nearly two-minute “short film” promotes a limited-time, select-city product called “Real Meals,” which correspond to a customer’s “real” mood: Blue, Salty, Pissed, DGAF and YAAAS. In place of information about where to seek help if you’re experiencing feelings of depression, which would usually...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 13-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2017, and a couple have things have changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 16 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations....

Chicago Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz vented his frustration about outgoing mayor Rahm Emanuel in a letter to incoming mayor Lori Lightfoot earlier this week. Today, Emanuel responded: When you own something, you pay the costs and you reap the benefits. Welcome to capitalism and the private sector, Rocky. Look, I get it. For those who have become accustomed to the rules of the road of crony capitalism, and have had sweetheart deals and special arrangements no one else receives, it is tough when you are...

Today actually had a lot of news, not all of which I've read yet: About 60,000 commuters couldn't get home tonight after Amtrak signaling at Union Station, Chicago, broke down. Writing for New Republic, Matt Ford calls Michael Cohen's testimony to Congress today "the art of the deal you can't refuse."  David Frum (among others) points out that for all the GOP's impugning of Cohen's character, no one actually refuted the facts of his testimony. The Economist's Gulliver column speculates that US carriers...

I've had a lot going on this week, including seeing an excellent production of Elektra at Lyric Opera of Chicago last night, so I haven't had time to read all of these articles: A 12-year-old journalist in southern Arizona stands up to the local marshal and wins. The US Dollar is still the world's reserve currency—and in fact foreigners are buying more than ever. The Jussie Smollett case was the least important of a number of stories in the news this week. The North Carolina 9th shows us an "important...

I wanted to post this when it came out but life intervened. A couple weeks ago, New Republic reported on the sad tale of exurban town Elwood, Ill., and the "opportunity" they seized on with a giant intermodal freight terminal in 2002: Fifteen years before Amazon’s HQ2 horserace, Elwood had won the retail lottery. “Nobody envisioned what we have out here,” said Jerry Heinrich, who sat on the board of the planning commission that first apportioned the land for development in the mid-1990s. “It was never...

We're gonna have the greatest government shutdown ever! It'll be a big, beautiful shutdown, because we need a wall! Yep. It's the biggest one ever, all right: Approximately 800,000 federal employees are estimated to be furloughed or working without pay because President Donald Trump and Congress cannot reach a deal to reopen the government. They are at an impasse over $5.7 billion for construction of a wall along the southern border. The number of furloughed employees does not include federal...

Former Assistant Solicitor General Neal Katyal and George Conway III (yes, Kellyanne's husband) say President Trump's "appointment" of Matthew Whittaker to oversee the Justice Department is flatly unconstitutional: Mr. Whitaker has not been named to some junior post one or two levels below the Justice Department’s top job. He has now been vested with the law enforcement authority of the entire United States government, including the power to supervise Senate-confirmed officials like the deputy attorney...

I'm about to go home to take Parker to the vet (he's getting two stitches out after she removed a fatty cyst from his eyelid), and then to resume panicking packing. I might have time to read these three articles: Lelslie Stahl interviewed President Trump for last night's 60 Minutes broadcast, with predictable results. The Smithsonian explains how Chicago grew from 350 people in 1833 to 1.7 million 70 years later. The Nielsen-Norman Group lays out how people develop technology myths, like how one study...

Two weeks after a local artist completed a mural commissioned by the local chamber of commerce, Chicago's Streets and Sanitation department destroyed it: Chicago-based artist JC Rivera’s signature bright yellow “bear champ” went up earlier this month at the CTA Paulina Brown Line stop. But the mural, commissioned by the Lakeview Chamber of Commerce and paid for out of a special taxpayer fund, wasn’t long for this world: In fact, it was on display for a shorter time than it took Rivera to paint the...

Yesterday, President Trump's longtime fixer Michael Cohen plead guilty to 8 crimes at almost the exact moment a jury convicted his former campaign manager of another 8. The Atlantic explains what the first part means: The most important takeaway Tuesday is that the president’s own former personal attorney pleaded guilty to breaking campaign-finance laws at his alleged direction. While the bank- and tax-fraud charges do not involve the president, the campaign-finance charges indisputably do. Cohen made...

Writing for New Republic, Conor Lynch speculates that President Trump may not be a Russian asset per se; he might just be a fellow traveler: To be fair to the critics..., Trump’s behavior was indeed troubling. During the NATO summit, Trump insulted and alienated leaders of the United States’ closest allies, and it became clear early on that he had no intention of toning down his rhetoric. After declaring that Germany was “captive to Russia,” blasting other members as “delinquent,” and threatening to “go...

It's been a busy news day: The Post's Robert Kagan says everything will not be all right. Andrew Sullivan asks, "did Trump just stop Brexit?" TPM has a rundown on Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross's chicanery. A state board in Michigan controls, to some extent, the water levels in Lakes Michigan and Huron. There was also an article on tuple equality in C# 7.3 that, while interesting to me, probably isn't interesting to many other people.

Josh Marshall says that, despite what will probably come from a hard-right Supreme Court over the next few years, this isn't the end of the left: Elections have consequences. Often they are profound consequences stretching years or decades into the future from their inception point. Trumpism is civic poison. There is a temptation to think that this is another reverse coming after Trump’s election, the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, the reversal of DACA protections and more. I don’t see...

This past weekend included the Chicago Gay Pride Parade and helping a friend prepare for hosing a brunch beforehand. Blogging fell a bit on the priority list. Meanwhile, here are some of the things I'm reading today: From last week, the Times discusses whether Earth's 23.4° axis tilt was actually a necessary precursor to life. New Republic's Josephine Huetlin asks, "Why do populists get away with corruption?" One of Chicago's last remaining over-the-tollway oases is slated for demolition. Josh Marshall...

A student at the University of Cincinnati has filed a fascinating lawsuit against the school for discrimination in its enforcement of sexual misconduct: Is it possible for two people to simultaneously sexually assault each other? This is the question—rife with legal, anatomical, and emotional improbabilities—to which the University of Cincinnati now addresses itself, and with some urgency, as the institution and three of its employees are currently being sued over an encounter that was sexual for a...

A little Tuesday morning randomness for you: Millions of people who voted for President Trump have discovered that his policies are horrible for them. As only one example, MSNBC looks at the devastation immigration changes have caused to the crab industry in Hoopers Island, Md. Microsoft's Raymond Chen explains why the technology for compressing Windows folders hasn't changed since 2000. An artist has put up a Divvy-style "Chicago Gun Share Program" exhibit in Daley Plaza. (I'll try to get a photo this...

The shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last week have galvanized students across the country. Here are three of the more thoughtful reactions. First, David Kurtz at TPM Prime (sub.req.) thinks these murders might finally, and suddenly, break the NRA's choke-hold on the Republican Party: The NRA’s power lies in having made anything other than maximal support for gun rights a nearly impossible position for Republican officeholders to sustain. The very definition of Republican is...

Today is the last work day of 2017, and also the last day of my team's current sprint. So I'm trying to chase down requirements and draft stories before I lose everyone for the weekend. These articles will just have to wait: The New York Times interviewed President Trump; Josh Marshall has some thoughts about it. The Times also describes how a small section of the 2nd Avenue Subway is the most expensive mile of subway track on earth. Mother Jones has a video tribute to Trump Administration staffers who...

Julia Ioffe knows more about Russia than just about any other American journalist. Writing in the current Atlantic magazine, she analyzes and explains what Putin really wants: Putin had always been suspicious of democracy promotion, but two moments convinced him that America was coming for him under its guise. The first was the 2011 nato intervention in Libya, which led, ultimately, to the ousting and gruesome lynching of the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Afterward, many people who interacted with...

You might not like the military or its mission, but I can tell you it's one of the more meritocratic organizations I've ever worked with. That's great if you're a woman—until you leave, as Sarah Maples explains: The military doesn’t just urge women, it requires them—especially if they want to succeed—to view themselves on the same playing field as their male counterparts. They are also expected to behave and perform in traditionally masculine ways—demonstrating strength, displaying confidence in their...

I...I just... President Trump on Tuesday told Puerto Rico officials they should feel “very proud” they haven’t lost thousands of lives like in “a real catastrophe like Katrina,” while adding that the devastated island territory has thrown the nation’s budget “a little out of whack.”   “Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous — hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm...

Via Bruce Schneier, a British reporter requested her data dossier from Tinder. As with so many other things in life, she was shocked, but not surprised: The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Tinder. With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier...

While not quite as viscerally grotesque as a 140-tonne fatberg, new details about the failures at Equifax that led to its massive data breach are still pretty disgusting: Equifax has confirmed that attackers entered its system in mid-May through a web-application vulnerability that had a patch available in March. In other words, the credit-reporting giant had more than two months to take precautions that would have defended the personal data of 143 million people from being exposed. It didn't. As the...

Articles I haven't got time to read until later: Tropical storm (and former hurricane) Harvey has dumped more rain on Houston than the city has ever seen, and it's still coming down. The Chicago Tribune recaps last night's Game of Throne finale. (I've already read the New York Times, Washington Post, and Vox.) Greg Sargent says President "Trump is dragging us towards a full-blown crisis" which leaves open the question what the ongoing crisis actually was already. On the same topic, James Fallows...

While I'm trying to figure out how to transfer one database to another, I'm putting these aside for later reading: Chicago Magazine thinks global warming could be worse for Illinois than previously thought. (But we're still going to do better than Florida.) Citylab reviews Sarah Williams Goldhagen's new book on the science behind appreciating architecture. Conservative (!) columnist Jennifer Rubin believes her party can no longer defend our national interests or our Constitution. Krugman once again...

Washington Post retail reporter Sarah Halzack reviews the history of Sears and how it's done the last few years: Decades of missed opportunities have brought Sears to this. It lost its focus with ventures into Discover credit cards and Coldwell Banker real estate in an attempt to diversify. Then big boxes such as Home Depot and Best Buy chipped away at lucrative product niches. But maybe the biggest whiff: Executives knew as far back as the early 1990s that they had to wean Sears off its dependency on...

Despite his initial skepticism, Crain's Greg Hinz sees the value: Ponder for a moment what $200 million can accomplish, even in government, and even at a time when money isn't worth what it used to be. Two hundred million dollars would pretty much fill the hole in the Chicago Public Schools budget, the one that had officials threatening to end school three weeks early. Two hundred million dollars would completely pay for the budget of the city Department of Streets & Sanitation for a year (with $50...

Oh, I hope this art installation flies: In a planned one-day protest, four golden pig balloons will take anchor in the Chicago River, lined up to cover President Donald Trump's last name on his building's southeast facade.   The giant swine come by way of Chicago-based design company New World Design Ltd., and will arrive by barge. New World is still negotiating how and when the pigs will arrive, but architect and firm principal Jeffrey Roberts says he is confident the project will come to fruition....

A little busy today, so I'm putting these down for later consumption: Via the Illinois State Climatologist, NOAA has released its state climate summaries for the country. Brian Beutler worries about President Trump's ego driving life-or-death decisions. Hollywood Reporter has some new photos from Game of Thrones' upcoming 7th season. Space junk and thousands of tiny, new satellites might make low orbit inaccessible in 50 years. Why are Germany's nude beaches (and parks and lawns and basically every part...

Apparently we're now frightened of everything: Passengers on foreign airlines headed to the United States from 10 airports in eight majority-Muslim countries have been barred from carrying electronic devices larger than a cellphone under a new flight restriction enacted on Tuesday by the Trump administration. Officials called the directive an attempt to address gaps in foreign airport security, and said it was not based on any specific or credible threat of an imminent attack. The Department of Homeland...

Diners at Mar-al-Lago overheard the President talking with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the latest in a string of idiotic security breaches he's made all by himself: As Mar-a-Lago's wealthy members looked on from their tables, and with a keyboard player crooning in the background, Trump and Abe's evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN. News of Pyongyang's launch had emerged an hour earlier, as...

The fallout from Friday's executive order halting some immigration continues to rain down on Washington, and no one has emerged unscathed. Medium still thinks it's the beginning of an executive-branch coup against the rest of the U.S. government, and that Bannon on the NSC is the real news. They have some good points, but for now I'm going to go with Brian Beutler's analysis: it's incompetence, not (entirely) malice: The early days of Trump’s presidency, and the humiliating rollout of the anti-refugee...

By now, everyone in the world has heard about President Trump's patently unconstitutional order to ban refugees from some majority-Muslim nations (except, coincidentally, not from those with which he has business dealings). But after his first Take Out the Trash Day, he did something a lot more far-reaching and dangerous yesterday: President Donald Trump is reshuffling the US National Security Council (NSC), downgrading the military chiefs of staff and giving a regular seat to his chief strategist Steve...

Trump continues to crap all over American institutions before he's even legally elected President. His latest cabinet pick is a doozy: [I]t is somehow an appropriate metaphor of our era that, if he is nominated and confirmed, this could be the sequence of U.S. Secretaries of Energy: 2009-2013, Steven Chu, winner of the Nobel prize in physics, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; 2013-2017, Ernest Moniz, professor of nuclear physics at MIT, former under...

It's not all about PETUS today: Via AVWeb, the FAA has issued an airworthiness directive requiring owners of Boeing 787-8 airplanes to reboot them at least every 21 days. I am not making this up. Trump, never a fan of intelligence of any kind, is sticking his fingers in his ears about Russian hacking of our election. Jeet Heer warns that this yet another way Trump is very dangerous. Plus, he's lying about the CIA's role in the Iraq WMD fiasco. It wasn't the CIA who lied; it was the Administration. By...

I took a personal day yesterday to get my teeth cleaned (still no cavities, ever!) and to fork over a ton of cash to Parker's vet (five shots, three routine tests, heartworm pills, one biopsy, $843.49). That and other distractions made it a full personal day. So as I start another work day with the half-day of stuff I planned to do yesterday right in front of me, I'm queuing up some articles again: Then and Now, Armitage-Bissell Programming is Hard The Founding Fathers' Power Grab The Chicago Tribune...

New York Times reporter Jonathan Mahler watched the debate with the sound off. He still had no doubts who won: It was a little shimmy of her shoulders — cheeky, insouciant — accompanied by a big, toothy grin. Her opponent smirked. She looked as if she was having fun. He, not so much. Visually, anyway, there was a discernible arc to the event, with Mr. Trump growing more agitated as the night wore on, and Mrs. Clinton becoming almost giddy with what felt increasingly like genuine pleasure. Which brings...

We had nearly-perfect weather this past weekend, so I'm just dumping a bunch of links right now while I catch up with work: Foursquare reports that Trump's presidential campaign is really, really hurting his businesses. Chicago's U.S. Cellular Field (the minor-league park on the South Side) will be getting more events now they've worked out a deal with the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority. Wired reports on how scary-easy it is to hack electronic voting machines. Paul Krugman puts out the economic...

The Daily Beast reports that Arlington, Va.-based ThreatConnect has revealed the DNC hacker to be an agent of the Russian government. The first Sears-Roebuck store, near my house, will remain largely intact during its conversion to condo units. A remote Irish island is offering itself as a haven for Americans wanting to flee a Trump presidency. Medium.com posts the Hillary Clinton speech (NSFW) we all know she wants to give. Paul Krugman compares Trump's foreign policy ideas to Pax Romana. All for now.

At trivia (pub quiz) on Tuesday, we had this question: Name 4 of the 6 U.S. presidents who have served in the Navy or Naval Reserves. We got it wrong, unfortunately, and the answer surprised me. All six of the men in the list served in WWII, and all six served in the White House successively: Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George H.W. Bush. (Bush was Reagan's vice president, remember.) So...was there a secret conspiracy of Naval officers in the 1960s to take over the U.S. government?...

Think Progress grinds through the history of Trump Steaks™: Reporters from Home magazine, Gourmet magazine, People, New York Daily News, and Every Day with Rachael Ray showed up to the launch, which featured speeches by both Levin and Trump. Trump took the opportunity to boast of the steaks’ quality, telling reporters that the product was going to be a boon for the company, equivalent to Trump Vodka, which had launched just a year earlier. The steaks were only available for mail order, and ranged from...

After watching the state of the union address, my party (small sense) decided to watch The American President. In the first ten minutes, we watched agog as we realized that none of the principal political arguments in the U.S. have changed since 1995.

I lost my Kindle on the flight to London last week, and only just got its replacement yesterday afternoon. Good thing, too, because I'm loading it up with articles I can't read until later: Anthropologists have discovered a new human species and it's weird. A Federal investigation into New Jersey politics that led to United Airlines' CEO resigning started with an unprofitable weekly flight that the airline allegedly scheduled to bribe an official. (Aviation, politics, and corrupt Republicans...total...

Yeah, when my friend sent me an email about "Spocking the five" yesterday, I read it a couple of times before giving up, too. But the Bank of Canada has no problem with it: It turns out there's not a lot of logic in the belief that it's against the law to Vulcanize Sir Wilfrid Laurier's likeness on the $5 bill. The death of Leonard Nimoy last week inspired people to post photos on social media of marked-up banknotes that show Canada's seventh prime minister transformed to resemble Spock, Nimoy's famous...

Another big walking day in sunny weather took me up to Bernauerstraße and the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial): That's a mostly-preserved but partially-reconstructed section of the wall at the corner of Bernauerstraße and Ackerstraße, near the site where the first person trying to flee over the wall was killed. It's hard to imagine that the place I'm sitting now was once in East Berlin, just a few hundred meters from the place by the Wall where Reagan gave his famous speech in 1987. I...

Writing in today's Times, Richard Florida explains the long-term costs of red state/blue state differences: The idea that the red states can enjoy the benefits provided by the blue states without helping to pay for them (and while poaching their industries with the promise of low taxes and regulations) is as irresponsible and destructive of our national future as it is hypocritical. But that is exactly the mantra of the growing ranks of red state politicos. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a likely 2016 G.O.P....

The latest infliction of Haredi nonsense on innocent victims comes via Gulliver this week, as religious nutters apparently can't deal with sitting next to women on airplanes: One flight last week, from New York’s JFK airport to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport, descended into chaos according to passengers, after a large group of haredim, or ultra-orthodox Jews, refused to take their seats next to women, in accordance with strict religious customs. Amit Ben-Natan, a passenger on last week’s El Al flight...

Actually, there are two scandals: first, red light cameras in general, and second, an alleged $2m bribe: The former City Hall manager who ran Chicago’s red-light camera program was arrested today on federal charges related to the investigation of an alleged $2 million bribery scheme involving the city’s longtime vendor, Redflex Traffic Systems. A federal complaint filed in U.S. District Court today accused John Bills of taking money and other benefits related to the contract with Redlfex. Mayor Rahm...

After going to the Korean history museum on Sunday, I went over to the War Memorial. This isn't entirely a memorial to the Korean War, though about half the building is devoted to it. The basement has artifacts and busts commemorating two millennia of wars on the peninsula. Outside the memorial building is an assortment of weapons from World War II onwards, including OH MY GOD THAT IS A B-52: A B-52 that children can climb on, apparently: They also have a Nike missile next to a SCUD, which was...

Wow, this weekend was busier than I anticipated. You know what's coming. Links! From the Washington Post, the IRS will have a helluva job enforcing the ACA; The Sun-Times has yet another example of government capture in Chicago; We're almost out of effective antibiotics, and that's not good; Charlie Trotter died of a stroke brought on by high blood pressure; and Note to self: Don't let Parker eat a pile of cheese unless you're prepared to walk him every three hours the next day. Oh, and we're out of...

Chicago's bike share program could become the nation's largest, thanks to Federal subsidies: There are currently 300 Divvy stations up and running around Chicago, with 100 more stations in the works to be installed by next spring. Officials from the Chicago Department of Transportation said Wednesday they’ve secured a $3 million federal grant to build 75 additional stations next year, bringing the total to 475 by next year. The grant comes from the US Department of Transportation’s Congestion Mitigation...

Former law professor Barack Obama makes the case: “This is probably controversial to say, but what the heck, I’m in my second term so I can say it,” Obama said during a stop at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “I believe, for example, that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years because [….] in the first two years young people are learning in the classroom.” In the third year, he said, “they’d be better off clerking or practicing in a firm...

You call that a filibuster? That's not a filibuster. This is a filibuster: With tensions running high on both sides, state Sen. Wendy Davis [mounted] a dramatic filibuster Tuesday...to block passage of a controversial and politically charged anti-abortion bill. Because the special legislative session [ended] at midnight, the Fort Worth Democrat [succeeded by] talking on Senate Bill 5 — a move that [blocked] a mandate by top state Republican leaders to pass the measure during the special legislative...

When the U.S. Supreme Court issues a 5-4 decision, it means, for practical purposes, they haven't actually decided anything to help lawyers figure out how similar cases will proceed in the future. Sandra Day O'Connor put the "5" in "5-4" so many times during her 23 years on the Court that for a time it seemed she was single-handily causing an explosion of litigation, re-litigation, and rogue appellate court decisions. None of her 5-4 votes had a worse outcome than her vote in 2000 on Bush v Gore. Now...

Back in November, Chicagoans voted to buy electricity in the aggregate from Integrys rather than the quasi-public utility Exelon. As predicted, the big savings only lasted a few months: And Chicago, where residents saw their first electric-bill savings this month under a 5.42-cent-per-kilowatt-hour deal completed in December with Integrys, will see its energy savings shaved to just 2 percent. ComEd's new price is not yet official. But utility representatives have filed their new energy price of 4.6...

Glad we cleared that up: White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced during Thursday’s briefing that Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) this morning regarding the administration’s policy on drone strikes targeting Americans on U.S. soil. Holder’s letter stated definitively that the U.S. would not use “weaponized” drones to targets American citizens on domestic soil. Reading directly from Holder’s letter to Paul, Carney said, “Does the President have the authority...

Ho did the accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen LLP miss that Dixon, Ill., comptroller Rita Crundwell embezzled $53 million? CliftonLarson in 2005 resigned as auditor for Dixon in order to keep other city assignments such as ledger-keeping after an influx of federal funds required the town to hire an independent auditor. In its lawsuit, however, Dixon contends that CliftonLarson continued to do the annual audit and get paid for it, while hiring a sole-practitioner CPA from nearby Sterling to sign off on...

Via some Facebook friends in Tel Aviv, I'm getting news that the Israeli election may result in a center-left coalition and sacks Netanyahu: Israel's three major television networks published exit polls on Tuesday night, after polls closed across the country at 10 P.M. According to Channel 2's exit polls, the battle was tight between the left and right, with 59 percent of votes going to the left-wing block, and 61 percent to the right. Yes, that's right, 59-61 is a possibility the way Israeli voting...

Three unrelated stories drew my notice this evening: PATH service has resumed to Hoboken. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—I lived in Hoboken, N.J., the birthplace of Frank Sinatra (really) and baseball (not really). I took the Port Authority Trans-Hudson train almost every day when I worked in SoHo, and about every third day when I worked in Midtown. Having experienced other ways of commuting to New York—in fact, the switch up to 53rd and Park finally got me to return to Chicago, after my...

The National Hurricane Center predicts that Tropical Storm Isaac, currently smashing through the windward islands, may strike Tampa during the GOP convention: Of course, five days out the forecast has tremendous uncertainty. The storm could change course or dissipate before hitting Florida, for example. But Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, speaking about next week's GOP convention, is absolutely willing to call it off if they need to evacuate Tampa: So, my question is, now that the religious right has all but...

In my first pass through National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, I am alternately stunned, fascinated, confused, and relieved. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that big business was the big winner today. Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court, upholding nearly all the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamneycare"). Justice Kennedy, usually the swing vote, joined on the right-wing dissent. In a nutshell, the court ruled: The...

If you're driving in San Francisco, don't block the MUNI: By early next year the city's entire fleet of 819 buses will be equipped with forward-facing cameras that take pictures of cars traveling or parked in the bus and transit-only lanes. A city employee then reviews the video to determine whether or not a violation has occurred — there are, of course, legitimate reasons a car might have to occupy a bus lane for a moment — and if so the fines range from $60 for moving vehicles to more than $100 for...

Not just here, where we're looking forward to 10°C on New Year's Eve to complete a streak of 21 days above normal temperatures,, but also Northern Europe: Britons getting ready to ring in 2012 can expect highs of up to 15°C after a year of unusually mild weather. Forecasters said the past 12 months have been the second warmest for the UK after 2006, in which the average temperature reached 9.73°C. The average for 2011 was just a shade lower at 9.62°C. It comes after the warmest April and spring on...

I'm still banging away at software today—why is this damn socket exception thrown under small loads?—so I only have a minute to post some stuff I found interesting: Chicago and the State of Illinois are planning the largest urban park in the world in the mostly-abandoned Lake Calumet and South Works areas of the south side. It looks like the far-right has hijacked Hungary's government, in the way that right-wing governments do, which should remind everyone who lives in a democracy how fragile the form...

That's what Fallows says the headline should be: Here is the headline in the online home page of the NYT, about Obama's "pass this jobs bill, pass it now" proposal. Note the word "fails": Obama's Jobs Bill Fails in Senate in First Legislative Test The subhead and the rest of the article make clear that more Senators voted for the bill than against it -- 50 to 49. It would have been 51-48 except for a parliamentary ruse by Majority Leader Harry Reid, who switched to a "No" vote so that he would later be...

Via TPM, search-engine watcher Danny Sullivan says former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum hasn't been Googlebombed; he's simply lost the war: In a classic Googlebombing — which Google did crack down on when it was used to tie searches for “miserable failure” to George W. Bush back during the Republicans administration — pranksters tricked Google’s algorithm into sending (for lack of a better term) the “wrong” results for a search. An example could be you entered “apple” in the Google bar and got back a page...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's...

In a move that brings progressives and libertarians together better than a runaway defense budget, Gotham has banned dogs from bars: Since the health department adopted a letter grade system for bars and restaurants last year, bar owners say, health inspectors are allowing no wiggle room for four-legged patrons. The stricter enforcement is apparently bringing to an end a rich tradition of dog-friendly bars in New York. The health department issued 469 violations for live animals in food-service sites...

Constitution scholar and writer Garrett Epps lays out the case for the constitutionality of requiring Americans to "maintain a minimum level of health insurance." Well, for starters, it doesn't: This snappy apothegm is the logical equivalent of saying that the Defense Appropriations Act "requires that every United States citizen, other than those who leave the country, engage in accepting a minimum level of protection by the United States military." The provisions of the Health Care Act provide a...

Doonesbury turned 40 today. NPR reports: Created in the throes of '60s and '70s counterculture, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip blurred the lines between comics and the editorial pages, and produced some of the most memorable cartoon characters ever sketched. Trudeau developed Doonesbury around three foundational characters — everyman Mike Doonesbury, football quarterback B.D. and campus radical Mark Slackmeyer. They represented the center, the right, and the left, Trudeau says. Six weeks after...

From guest blogger Diane W.: Lately, the news is awash with story after story about youngsters committing suicide as a result of homophobic bullying. The nation's eye is finally turning to organizations like The Trevor Project, with celebrities climbing out of the rainbow-colored woodwork to lend their voices in the collective cry of, "Why is this happening?!" Our nation is stunned by the news, stunned, I tell you, that kids as young as 11 are taking their own lives because dying seems a better option...

Before going to Shanghai, I picked up James Fallows's Postcards from Tomorrow Square, a collection of his essays from living there 2006-2009. (Yes, he lived in the building that houses the hotel where our CCMBA cohort stayed.) First, I'd like to call attention to page 76: The easier America makes it for talented foreigners to work and study there, the richer, more powerful, and more respected America will be. America's ability to absorb the world's talent is the crucial advantage no other culture can...

Paul Krugman has a good explanation today why the problems of Spain and Greece come from the ways Europe and the U.S. are different: [T]here’s not much that Spain’s government can do to make things better. The nation’s core economic problem is that costs and prices have gotten out of line with those in the rest of Europe. If Spain still had its old currency, the peseta, it could remedy that problem quickly through devaluation — by, say, reducing the value of a peseta by 20 percent against other European...

The Duke CCMBA has a five-term course called "Culture, Civilization, and Leadership" that gives us structures to help us understand—wait for it—cultures and civilizations. At the end of each term, each team produces a paper analyzing the place in which we started the term. This term, I drew the short straw volunteered to write the first draft. We just submitted the final paper, after a few days of revisions. If you're interested, here it is. We didn't put it in the paper, but throughout the process, I...

One of Chicago's largest real-estate companies has defaulted on $1.72 bn in loans: The portfolio, which also includes 161 N. Clark St., 30 N. LaSalle St. and 1 N. Franklin St., already illustrates several recent real estate trends, such as rapidly falling property values after prices peaked thanks to large amounts of cheap debt. With credit now virtually gone, defaults on downtown buildings are likely to rise, forcing them into foreclosure or onto the market at big discounts that will put more downward...

The Chicago Tribune today has an in-depth article about the misuse of autism research in therapy: In his letter, obtained by the Tribune, [Florida family physician Dr. Dan] Rossignol justified the unorthodox treatment in part by writing that "a recent study out of Johns Hopkins has shown that children with autism have evidence of neuroinflammation on autopsy and (cerebral spinal fluid) evaluations." It was [Dr. Carlos] Pardo's study. Rossignol did not mention that Pardo's team had written in its online...

Mostly photos today, because I have an economics assignment due before I can get some desperately-needed sleep. Today we did our Culture Dash (see the entry about the deliverable) through some of the same Dubai streets I walked just yesterday. Some highlights: first, Dubai Creek, with an abra (commuter flatboat) in the foreground and an Airbus 330 taking off in the background: The textile souk in the old Bur Dubai neighborhood: And last one tonight, a minaret during the evening call to prayer: More...

After a two-hour walk in the 34°C heat, I actually feel much better. (People who know me can feel free to express surprise and alarm.) As I mentioned yesterday, spending too much time in a hotel depresses the life out of me. When will I ever again visit Dubai? Probably never. Since the hotel has gone to great lengths to make itself indistinguishable from any other similar hotel in the world, I fled the official corporate tours and hopped the Dubai Metro for Deira, the old part of the city. Sadly for my...

Is anyone surprised that Hamid Karzai, who brazenly stole the election in Afghanistan not too long ago, managed to get rid of the constitutionally-required runoff scheduled for this week? It really makes you wonder what we're fighting for over there.

Tom Friedman on why the U.S. is falling behind in alternate-energy research: The reason that all these other countries are building solar-panel industries today is because most of their governments have put in place the three prerequisites for growing a renewable energy industry: 1) any business or homeowner can generate solar energy; 2) if they decide to do so, the power utility has to connect them to the grid; and 3) the utility hasto buy the power for a predictable period at a price that is a...

Via Calculated Risk, tomorrow the Irish Finance Minister will explain, somehow, what Ireland's government will do with the €90 bn in real estate loans now crippling the country's economy: In what may be the biggest financial gamble in 87 years as a sovereign state, the government will become the owner of loans for property developments that have plunged in value. Ireland is suffering the worst economic slump of any developed nation since the Great Depression, according to the Economic & Social Research...

Patrick Smith ("Ask the Pilot") wonders why we still can't get airport security right: [T]he primary threat to commercial planes is, was and shall remain explosive devices. The Sept. 11 skyjack scheme is today unworkable for a variety of reasons. Yet those who run airport security refuse to acknowledge this, wasting time and resources ransacking people's luggage for what are, in effect, harmless items. Has anybody at the Transportation Security Administration bothered to peruse the air crimes annals of...

Wasn't yesterday Sarah Palin's last day as a public nuisance official? Did anyone outside Alaska even notice?

Via The Daily Dish: Ok, I really must do some work now.

Apparently the Duchy of Lancaster, which is essentially the property of the British Royal Family, has suffered a bit of a decline: The Duchy of Lancaster - a portfolio of land, property and assets held in trust for the Sovereign - saw a drop of £75m to £322m in the 2008-9 financial year. But the income the Monarchy received from the Duchy, used to fund her public and private activities, increased by 5.4% from £12.6m to £13.3m. During the last financial year, the total cost to the taxpayer of keeping the...

Lots to do for the next, oh, 17 months, so I thought I'd get started. My first Duke box arrived today, containing 6 kg of books, course packets, handouts, and more books, all of which have to be read by August 15th. Fortunately I have a few extra hours each day to do all this (I use them to sleep right now, so they're kind of wasted). Just a couple news stories of note today: President Obama gave an hour-long press conference yesterday in which he spent 50 minutes discussing the single most important...

Via Beth Filar-Williams, the National Resources Defence Council has ranked U.S. cities by environmental factors. The study ranks 67 large (population 250,000+), 167 medium (100-250k), and 405 small (50-100k) cities on nine factors, including standard of living, water management, transportation, and environmental participation. Seattle comes out on top for big cities; San Francisco, 2nd; Chicago, 10th. Other leaders include Madison, Wis. (medium) and Bellingham, Wash. Bottom of the pack: Lexington, Ky....

All of these are true, and all of these are appropriate for April Fool's day: Punzun Ltd., my software firm, proudly announced record earnings yesterday, earning a net profit of $0 on $0 of gross revenue and ($0) expenses (all figures in millions). It's the best quarter we've ever had, 11% better than our last record in 4th quarter 2004. Mark Morford, on GM's "recovery:" "Behold this weird new Camaro. It is, in sum, exactly the wrong car at exactly the wrong time with exactly the wrong attitude attached...

Via TPM Muckraker, the Boston Globe reports today that the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation moved from bonds into stocks just before the market fell last fall: The agency refused to say how much of the new investment strategy has been implemented or how the fund has fared during the downturn. The agency would only say that its fund was down 6.5 percent - and all of its stock-related investments were down 23 percent - as of last Sept. 30, the end of its fiscal year. But that was before most of the...

No matter how bad it seems in Illinois right now, at least we have a functioning state government. California, on the other hand... A state budget deal to close a $41 billion shortfall has been put further into question early this morning after Senate Republicans ousted their leader who had helped negotiate the long-awaited plan with other top lawmakers in California. ...[T]he ousted Minority Leader Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto, ...was one of the four legislative leaders who negotiated the emergency budget...

I'm not a big fan of Seinfeld but I am a fan of this sort of thing: The debate over religious displays in the Illinois Capitol's rotunda took a farcical turn this week when a student at a Lake Forest boarding school put up an aluminum pole to honor Festivus. For those in the dark, Festivus is a mock holiday popularized by a 1997 episode of "Seinfeld." The pole is a Christmas tree-like symbol, and semi-ironic celebrations of Festivus, usually observed on Dec. 23, include such traditions as the "Airing of...

Another Democratic pick-up: Oregon Senate to Merkley.

The state that fought privacy rights all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965 has now embraced them: The Connecticut Supreme Court overturned a ban on same-sex marriage Friday in a victory for gay-rights advocates that will allow couples to marry in the New England state. The court found that the state's law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. Not the most important item of news today, but one more example of how the right wing have failed to...

(I mean, other than because he loathes water.) No, it's about gasoline. I'm taking a summer vacation this year for the first time since 1992, and I had planned to load Parker and his smelly blanket into my Volkswagen and drive to San Francisco with him. Only, I just filled up my car this morning, and for the first time ever I crested $50. For gasoline. In my bleeding Volkswagen. Which caused me to whip out a spreadsheet and determine conclusively whether driving with Parker out to California makes any...

(All times EST) 9:01pm: I'm having a strange duality of experience. It's hard enough listening to Dubya; I simply can't subject myself to Tim Russert on top of it. So I'm watching the NBC feed while listening to NPR and hoping there isn't a delay. 9:05pm: Yep. Minor delay. I might have to return to NBC's audio. "Madame Speaker:" now that is cool. 9:08pm: Why NBC, by the way? Dana Hork. 9:11pm: Bi-partisanship...from him? (It's 9:11: do you know where Giuliani is?) 9:13pm: Job growth for 52 straight...

Fully 63% of Americans want a timetable for our withdrawal from Iraq. This percentage includes me, 42% of registered Republicans, every member of my immediate family who can vote, Parker (who agrees with everything I say except "down, stay!"), the Speaker of the House (who is also my father's Congresswoman), and both of my U.S. Senators. Unfortunately for the free world, majorities of both houses of Congress don't. So sad. Correction, 9:00 CT Friday: Crap. One of my U.S. Senators, Dick Durbin, voted for...

I haven't really formed an opinion on Sen. Obama's office giving an internship to the son of a guy who gave $10,000 to the 2004 campaign. I'm not really surprised, nor do I really think it's a big deal. I've got a sort-of meta-concern about it, because I think it presages the kinds of stories we'll have to read every week after Obama announces he's running for President. Perhaps I've just got a typical native Chicagoan's indifference to petty nepotism. I'm wondering if this hints at a deeper connection...

From the Houston Chronicle this morning: Early voters in the heart of the heated race to succeed former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay were greeted Wednesday with red and white signs that read: "Want more illegals? Vote Democrat" and "Encourage Terrorists. Vote Democrat." Precinct 3 Fort Bend County Commissioner Andy Meyers acknowledged paying $2,800 to the Republican Victory Committee PAC for 75 signs that tied Democrats to terrorists, higher taxes and illegal immigration. "All I am doing is repeating...

Two related stories about religious fundamentalists appeared in the news this week. First, it turns out that Mel Gibson really is an anti-Semitic religious nut who believes millions of witnesses somehow hoodwinked the world about millions of murders. I, for one, find this shocking. Gibson has shown nothing but sensitivity and a desire for accuracy in his historical films, give or take an ancient dialect, and he has gone to great lengths to distance himself from his nutter father, so it really must have...

Why did the only government we have approve a deal to give nuclear materials to one of only two nuclear-armed countries that rejects the Non-Proliferation Treaty? (Possible answer: because the other one is Pakistan?) Yes, Congress voted 359-68 to give India nuclear technology: For Bush to implement his accord with India, lawmakers must first exempt New Delhi from U.S. laws that bar nuclear trade with countries that have not submitted to full international inspections. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio)...

On this day in 1941, the universe changed: NBC broadcast the world's first television commercial, heralding the end of the existing civilization.

New Scientist is reporting this hour that a man died in Beijing of H5N1 bird flu fully two years before China admitted any human cases: The case suggests that, as has long been suspected, many more people have caught H5N1 flu in China than have been reported, and for a longer time. The more human cases there are, the more chances the virus has to evolve into a human pandemic strain of flu. "It's a very important issue that needs to be clarified urgently," Roy Wadia, a spokesman for the World Health...

I'm not sure what to make of an MSNBC report about a circumcision trial, except tasteless jokes: Groups opposed to circumcision are watching the case of an 8-year-old suburban Chicago boy whose divorced parents are fighting in court over whether he should have the procedure. The child’s mother wants him circumcised to prevent recurring, painful inflammation she says he’s experienced during the past year. But the father says the boy is healthy and circumcision, which removes the foreskin of the penis, is...

Excellent column by Bruce Schneier: A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home....

Direct Democracy has a wonderful pair of maps showing, shall I say, a subtle change in political colors since the 2004 election. For those keeping score at home, there are only 171 days and 22 hours until the 2006 election.

It's unusual to find such rousing agreement between left and right, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has gotten it. The Economist says "George Bush is a fool for keeping Donald Rumsfeld in his job" (though I can think of other reasons): Getting rid of Mr Rumsfeld is no guarantee that things will get better. But keeping him ensures that they will get worse. Mr Bush made a huge mistake in not accepting Mr Rumsfeld's offer to resign in the wake of Abu Ghraib. Every day he keeps him in his job he...

You've got to hand it to USMC Chief Warrant Officer James Averhart: he's doing his part in the war on terrorism by tracking down Vietnam-era deserters: A man was being held in a US military prison yesterday for deserting from the marines 38 years ago after being caught on the American-Canadian border amid a new drive to track down Vietnam-era deserters. Since he took over the marine corps Absentee Collection Centre in 2004, Averhart has reopened cold cases and claims to have tracked down 33 deserters....

Ah, the Peter Principle rears its ugly head once again, in its purest form. MSNBC is reporting that a Costa Mesa, Calif., middle school has suspended students for viewing a Web page. They're also trying to expel the student who put up the page (internal links mine): A middle school student faces expulsion for allegedly posting graphic threats against a classmate on the popular myspace.com Web site, and 20 of his classmates were suspended for viewing the posting, school officials said. Police are...

First, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has a great column today (sub.req.): [The President's] breathtaking arrogance is exceeded only by his incompetence. And that's the real problem. That's where you'll find the mind-boggling destructiveness of this regime, in its incompetence. ... [T]he plain truth is that he is the worst president in memory, and one of the worst of all time. Second, I've been ambivalent about the Times charging $49.95 per year to read most of its content, but I think more and...

First, I'd like to welcome my mom to broadband. She's been on dial-up since she got her first home computer (in, I think 2001), but she finally got a cable modem. I clocked the thing at 9.1 Mbps downstream, which is about 160 times faster than her 56.6k analog modem. I mention this because yesterday she asked me to pick up a copy of Turbo Tax at the store. I pointed out that, with a super-fast Internet connection, she could simply download the product and save a tree. In an unrelated train of thought...

What I'm reading right now (and what Anne can't wait to borrow):

From Molly Ivins' column today: One of our better political commentators, Tom Tomorrow, has boiled down our entire current political debate to one question: "Are they stupid, or are they lying?"