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I figured out why comments broke for anonymous users: caching is hard. I spent some time yesterday after work digging into the caching code and realized that I was an idiot. I also found where my bad decision about what to cache caused unrelated things to work, which they wouldn't have done had I done caching correctly. I'll fix that tonight.

I haven't had a chance to work on the comments problem, because, you see, I have another job. I've also had a plumber and a carpet cleaner here today, traumatizing poor Cassie who couldn't show them her blanket because she got shoved into a different room. She's now on her bed in my office rather than on one of the couches downstairs. I expect she'll get over the soul-crushing exile she experienced for nearly an hour today.

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

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.

Yesterday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement—who have no jurisdiction over US citizens—murdered another US citizen in what witness videos clearly show as a depraved act involving at least two shooters. Alex Pretti, the murdered ICU nurse who tried to shield other observers from being assaulted with chemical irritants, was unarmed and subdued when ICE agents shot him at least 8 times.

After bottoming out at -21.3°C (-6.3°F) around 8:30 this morning, the temperature has skyrocketed to -18.7°C (-1.7°F) a few minutes ago. I decided to walk to my optometrist appointment, 12 minutes there and 13 minutes back thanks to a red light, which wasn't too bad in my swaddling. When I got back, Cassie lasted just over 4 minutes before bolting for my front door. Smart dog.

I've just had a lot to do today and I'm not feeling particularly creative. So, nu, maybe Friday?

Before I throw my chicken soup in my slow cooker, and before I take advantage of this holiday from work to release a package of minor improvements and fixes for bugs I discovered using the new Daily Parker blog engine for a week, I need to mention the latest clear and convincing evidence that the OAFPOTUS has lost his mind and needs to be removed from power.

Even though I wrote this thing, the new editor interface is so radically different from the old one that it will take getting used to. Also, the new blog engine uses Markdown instead of HTML, which makes writing quicker with a lot less formatting.

Ah, December, when the easy cadence of weekly rehearsals becomes a frenzy of performances and, yes, more rehearsals. This is Messiah week, so I've already spent 8 hours of it in rehearsals or helping to set up for them. Tonight I've got the first of 4 Messiah performances over the next two weeks, plus yet another rehearsal, a church service, and a Christmas Eve service. Then, after Christmas, a bunch of us will be singing at the 50th anniversary party for a couple who have sung with us for longer than...

I'm listening to the corporate annual update, which is neither corrupt nor stupid, though only about 20% of it applies to my job. So I'll just spend the other 80% lining up these articles about corruption and stupidity for lunchtime reading: Whether because of "you can't make me" or just doing the opposite of whatever President Biden's administration did, the latest toddler behavior in the administration comes from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who decided that Calibri is too DEI so State will go back...

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...

Between meetings and getting into the zone while fixing a bug, I worked straight through lunch and only got Cassie out around 4. So before my next meeting at 8pm, I've got a few minutes to catch up on all...this: Josh Marshall reflects on the 8 Democratic Senators (including one of mine, who is also the minority whip) making a deal with the Republicans, and says the next Congress must eliminate the paper filibuster and reform the Supreme Court. David Graham takes a more nuanced view. Krugman wants...

Economist Paul Krugman shakes his head at the GOP's own goal, bringing misery to millions of Americans way ahead of their original schedule: Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer. But the...

Rosh Hashana begins in just a few hours. To celebrate, let's sing! Corruption, corruption! Corruption!Corruption, corruption! Corruption! Who, day and night, has got his tiny hands out?Reaching for a pay-out, raking in the cash?And who keeps on whining, every day he's whining,"I'm the real victim here!" The POTUS, OAFPOTUS! Corruption!The POTUS, OAFPOTUS! Corruption! Who must know the way to break a proper law,A needed law, a settled law?Who must shred all precedent and end the law,So billionaires can...

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...

In the day since a yet-unknown sniper assassinated far-right activist Charlie Kirk, people across the political spectrum have reacted with anger and horror. Most--at least, from the center-right to the center-left--decried the violence itself, even when they found Kirk's politics reprehensible: Former presidents Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton soundly condemned the killing, with Obama posting, "We don't yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable...

A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely. In other eclipses this past week: The OAFPOTUS has so badly damaged US foreign policy and our standing in the world that China has eclipsed us as the de...

I have a chunk of work to do this afternoon, but I'm hoping I can sneak in some time to read all of these: Dan Rather cheers on the Democratic Party for finally finding the fight. Francis Fukuyama says: move over Berlusconi; the Clown Prince of X has done considerably more to harm Western civilization than you ever did. David Daley puts responsibility for the exploding fight over Congressional maps squarely on US Chief Justice John Roberts. Jennifer Rubin wants us to stop using the word "guarantee" when...

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...

The United States will spend a generation or longer in the "find out" phase after the OAFPOTUS began a trade war against our most powerful adversary while simultaneously crippling our ability to win it: You can see it in the economic numbers: China’s economy grew by an average of 5.3 percent in the first half of the year, America’s by only 1.25 percent. You can see it, too, in Trump’s failure to wring significant concessions from Beijing. Though most countries have acquiesced to U.S. trade bullying...

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...

Historian Timothy Ryback, writing in The Atlantic, takes us through a short history of a not-so-long-ago German Chancellor's war with his country's apolitical civil service: A memorandum was circulated to all state civil servants demanding blind loyalty to the Hitler government. Anyone who did not feel they could support Hitler and his policies, [future war criminal Hermann] Göring added, should do the “honorable” thing and resign. The Berliner Morgenpost observed that Hitler was clearly working to...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ has passed 32°C (with a 42°C heat index!) and it keeps going up. Welcome to the summer heat advisory season, with 30 million hectares of maize corn sweating to our west. Speaking of an uncomfortable atmosphere, the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have had a bad couple of days, which they responded to by making everyone else's days bad as well. First, on yesterday the US Court for the District of New Jersey declined to allow acting US Attorney Alina Habba (whom...

Leading off the news this afternoon, Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne died today at age 76. I am surprised he lasted this long, as he didn't exactly take care of himself over the years. In other news: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has stopped the legislative process of the United States rather than vote on releasing details of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with the OAFPOTUS. Adam Kinzinger details the quiet cruelty of the OAFPOTUS's droogs. Tom Nichols points out that the...

As promised, here's a roundup of some reactions to the tax bill with the infantile name that the Senate passed yesterday with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The Economist: "Despite Mr Trump’s talk of helping the least well-off, the bill’s biggest beneficiaries would be the rich. Analysis of the House version by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that Americans earning less than $16,999 would lose about $820 a year—a 5.7% reduction in median income for that group....

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

Today's theme—in fact, almost every day's theme on the Daily Parker lately—is a group doing one thing that freaks everyone out to distract from the other thing that they really want to do. For instance: In the middle of passing the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history, Republicans are lying about the plight of the working class being all Obama's fault. Because of course they are, and of course it isn't. Even though the OAFPOTUS is attacking Harvard to take attention away...

First, there is no update on Cassie. She had a quick consult today, but they didn't schedule the actual diagnostics that she needs, so we'll go back first thing Tuesday. She does have a small mast cell tumor on her head, but the location makes her oncologist optimistic for treatment. I'll post again next week after the results come back from her spleen and lymph node aspirations. Meanwhile, in the real world, things lurch forward and backward as the OAFPOTUS's political trajectory slides by millimeters...

I encountered a couple of head-scratchers in today's news feeds. They seem like parodies but, sadly, aren't. Exhibit the first: Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss (Cons.—South West Norfolk), who got tossed from office in less time than it takes for a head of lettuce to rot because of her disastrous mismanagement of the UK economy, has an op-ed in today's Washington Post praising the OAFPOTUS and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for the "herculean task ahead of them in turning around the U.S. economy and...

Just a couple of eye-rolling stories. First, Charlie Warzel mocks the OAFPOTUS's "tactical burger unit:" We now inhabit a world beyond parody, where the pixels of reality seem to glitch and flicker. Consider the following report from Trump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia this week, posted by the foreign-affairs journalist Olga Nesterova: “As part of the red-carpet treatment, Saudi officials arranged for a fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit to accompany President Trump during his stay.” A skeptical...

I had a lot going on today, so I only have a couple of minutes to note these stories: Not only is the OAFPOTUS's "new" (actually quite well-used) Qatari Boeing 747-8 a huge bribe, it will cost taxpayers almost as much as one of the (actually) new VC-25B airplanes the Air Force is currently building, as it completely fails to meet any of the requirements for survivability and security. (“You might even ask why Qatar no longer wants the aircraft," former USAF acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter said. "And...

As a devout atheist, I'm not especially concerned with the election this afternoon of Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, though I am tickled he's a South Sider from Chicago. (Next up: Malort for communion!) I'm less tickled that about the "deal" that the US and UK have reached on trade as it appears to be nothing more than "concepts of a plan" that leaves in place a 10% tax on UK goods. As Krugman explains, Nobody knows what will eventually come out of it, but we can be sure of one thing: It won’t lead to...

Radley Balko, who has spent his career examining police policy and law-enforcement mission creep, elucidates the latest authoritarian trolling from the White House: Donald Trump says he wants to “unleash” the police. The [latest executive order] is more virtue signaling than policy — more an expression of Trump’s mood than a serious proposal. And, when it comes to conventional crime, Trump’s mood is right where it’s always been: fearful, demagogic, and perpetually stuck in 1988. The key term in the...

Happy May Day! In both the calendar and crashing-airplane senses! We start with two reports about how the Clown Prince of X has taken control over so much government data that the concepts of "privacy" and "compartmentalization" seem quaint. First, from the Times: Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of...

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...

The American Revolutionary War began 250 years ago today when Capt John Parker's Minutemen engaged a force of 700 British soldiers on the town green in Lexington, Mass. Just over a year later, England's North American colonies declared their independence from King George III with a document that you really ought to read again with particular focus on the King's acts that drove the colonists to break away. It was almost as if they believed having a temperamental monarch with worsening mental-health...

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...

When the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X turned their attention to the Environmental Protection Agency this week, it hit Chicago almost immediately: President Donald Trump this week ordered closures of offices at the Environmental Protection Agency that help low-income communities overwhelmed with pollution. It’s unclear how many positions will be cut in Chicago, but union officials estimate it may affect 20 to 30 of the roughly 1,000 EPA regional employees. Most significantly, the order ends a...

James Fallows highlights how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince of X have put their own enrichment ahead of public safety in ways that will be hard to miss: In aviation, almost everything about safety is tied to the weather. Likely turbulence, which has caused some recent fatalities. Locations and likelihood of “airframe icing,” which was a cause of the Colgan crash in Buffalo back in 2009. Gusty crosswinds and wind-shear, very low cloud layers, and so many more factors that affect when and where planes can...

By yesterday evening I managed to import all the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency country place data through the Bs. This morning, I couldn't get to the NGIA website. All right, sometimes these things happen. No biggie. Yet, knowing a little about how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince Elon have operated the last 30 days, I did some digging. And I discovered yet another example of how imbecilic these infants are. Simply: someone has removed the agency from the Internet. All DNS records for the agency...

I had a delightful 2-hour lunch with a friend I've not seen in a while, after a morning of non-stop meetings. I also updated a piece of software that gets deployed tomorrow. I've got about 20 minutes now to jot down all of the things I hope to read later today: An Army helicopter on a training flight collided with an American Airlines CRJ on approach to DCA last night, killing 64 people; the OAFPOTUS blamed black folk. (I'm not kidding, he really did.) Paul Rosensweig explains how the flurry of orders...

First: the good. My friend Kat Kruse has a new book of her short stories coming out. She let me read a couple of them, and I couldn't wait to pre-order the entire collection. I should get it on February 17th. Still on the good things—or at least the things that don't seem so bad, considering: The Guardian has a reflection on Seoul removing the Cheonggyecheon Expressway in 2005 to expose the historic stream that the highway previously covered. Margaret Renkl praises the coyotes that live with us in our...

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...

The US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow provides me with a long-awaited opportunity to clean out the closet under my stairs so an orphan kid more boxes will have room to stay there. I also may finish the Iain Banks novel I started two weeks ago, thereby finishing The Culture. (Don't worry, I have over 100 books on my to-be-read bookshelf; I'll find something else to read.) Meanwhile: Even though I, personally, haven't got the time to get exercised about the OAFPOTUS's ridiculous threat to impose crippling...

The most hated person in Congress until his resignation two weeks ago has decided he really, really didn't want the House Ethics Committee to release its report on him, and has therefore withdrawn his nomination for Attorney General. He used the classic "I don't want to be a distraction" excuse, even though his entire career in politics has been a distraction. Meanwhile, John Hendrickson guesses about the OAFPOTUS's pick for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr Donald Duck Mehmet Oz: As...

The sky above Chicago has nothing but sun this morning. It won't last—the forecast for tomorrow night points to July-like atmospheric moisture and epic rainfall—but Cassie and I will enjoy it as much as we can. Maybe I should stay away from these news stories until the rain starts for real: Michelle Goldberg reminds all you Hannah Arendt fans that fascism takes time to establish itself, so we have perhaps a couple of years to emigrate if the XPOTUS takes power in January: "The transition from democracy...

Jennifer Rubin adds her voice to the growing chorus warning that the XPOTUS doesn't seem to have even a full Euchre deck: Trump seems unable to handle reality. His opponent is beating him by multiple metrics, especially crowd size. In response, he posted several obvious lies on Truth Social, claiming that “nobody was there” and that photos and video of Vice President Kamala Harris’s crowds were AI-generated (our own reporters were eyewitnesses to the event). Trump might be conditioning voters for...

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...

Everyone in the world knows that President Biden had a bad night two weeks ago. Since then, we've heard a steady drumbeat of calls for him to withdraw from the race. But did anyone watch last night's press conference? Here it is; I'll wait: The convicted-felon rapist XPOTUS could not have done that press conference, because he lacks the knowledge, the focus, the sanity, and frankly the IQ to answer questions for that long. And still, what did most press outlets report? That he bobbled the name of the...

Yes, President Biden is old, but he doesn't want to recreate the world of Victor Hugo. The Republican Party does, and this morning, they showed how they'll do it. The debate last night did not fill me with joy, as it showed my guy looking like the 82-year-old great-grandfather he is, and showed the convicted-felon other guy looking like the 78-year-old con artist he is. I may come back to this train wreck for democracy later today, but for now, I'd rather focus on why the President's geriatric...

I'm trying to get home a little earlier than usual, so this will be a lazy post. Stuff to read: Hillary Clinton, who has debated both President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, has thoughts on tomorrow night's event. Dana Milbank doesn't mourn Rep. Jamaal Bowman's (D-NY) loss last night, and neither do I. If you hate corporations, you might want to support President Biden's increase to the corporate income tax as well as to his proposed increase in the share-buyback tax. The village of Wheaton...

Oh, so many things: Ankush Khardori lays out how "the Alito scandal is worse than it seems." US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a former constitutional law professor, has a plan for how to get Justices Alito (R) and Thomas (R) to recuse themselves in any January 6th case. The non-disclosure agreement The Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt signed to work on the show recently expired, and wouldn't you know, he has tapes. Pass the popcorn. Matthew Yglesias describes his drift from left to center-left....

I took Cassie out at 11am instead of her usual 12:30pm because of this: The storm front passed quickly, but it hit right at 12:30 and continued for half an hour with some intensity. It'll keep raining on and off all day, too. Other things rained down in the past day or so: Robert Wright points out the obvious, warning that the XPOTUS was (and would be again if re-elected) way, way worse than President Biden on Gaza. Jennifer Rubin points out the obvious, echoing the warnings of Republican...

I usually spend the first day or two of a sprint researching and testing out approaches before I start the real coding effort. Since one of my stories this sprint requires me to refactor a fairly important feature—an effort I think will take me all of next week—I decided to read up on something today and have wound up in a rabbit hole. Naturally, that means a few interesting stories have piled up: The Presidential Greatness Project released its annual list of, well, presidents, putting Lincoln at the...

Angry Staffer, one of the last remaining informative Twitter accounts, had this yesterday: Gen Z: WE DEMAND A CEASEFIRE!Biden: I want that too. Blinken: I’m working on that right now. Trump: Israel has to finish the problem. FINAL SOLUTION!!Biden: no, that’s wrong. Civilians must be protected. Hamas: we aren’t releasing the hostagesIsrael: we aren’t going to stop bombing Gen Z: that’s it. I can’t vote Biden. — Angry Staffer 🌻 (@Angry_Staffer) May 2, 2024 Sigh.

A cold front passed this morning right after I got to the office, sparing me the 60 km/h winds and pouring rain that made the 9am arrivals miserable. The rain has passed, but the temperature has slowly descended to 17°C after hanging out around 19°C all night. I might have to close my windows tonight. I also completed a mini-project for work a few minutes ago, so I now have time to read a couple of stories: The voir dire in the XPOTUS's porn-star-payoff criminal trial forced him to listen to a lot of...

I'm almost done with the new feature I mentioned yesterday (day job, unfortunately, so I can't describe it further), so while the build is running, I'm queuing these up: Philip Bump analyzes the New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan's dismissal of the XPOTUS's bogus immunity claim. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) told reporters he's done everything he promised to do when he took office a year ago, at which point the reporters no doubt collectively cocked their eyebrows. Molly White doesn't think...

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...

We've switched around our RTO/WFH schedule recently, so I'm now in the office Tuesday through Thursday. That's exactly the opposite of my preferred schedule, it turns out. So now Tuesdays feel like Mondays. And I still can't get the hang of Thursdays. We did get our bi-weekly build out today, which was boring, as it should be. Alas, the rest of the world wasn't: The XPOTUS has vowed revenge on everyone who has wronged him, pledging to use the US government to smite his enemies, as if we needed any more...

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....

A rainy cold front passed over Inner Drive Technology WHQ just after noon, taking us from 15°C down to just above 10°C in two hours. The sun has come back out but we won't get a lot warmer until next week. I've had a lot of coding today, and I have a rehearsal in about two hours, so this list of things to read will have to do: Mother Jones's Russ Choma thinks the XPOTUS doesn't really want to win his fraud trial. Robert Wright interviewed Brown University professor Lyle Goldstein, late of the US Naval...

Somehow, it's already the end of September. I realize this happens with some predictability right around this time of year, but it still seems odd to me. Of course, most of the world seems odd these days: As we careen into the 4th Republican-caused government shutdown in the last 30 years, we might want to reflect on the fact that only 68,000 people elected the 8 clowns most responsible for this year's bullshit. New York Times editorial board member Alex Kingsbury wants people to keep top of mind the...

It's only Wednesday? Sheesh... The Writers Guild of America got nearly everything they wanted from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (i.e., the Astroturf organization set up by the big studios and streamers to negotiate with the Guilds), especially for young writers and for hit shows, but consumers should expect more bundling and higher monthly fees for shows in the future. Josh Marshall suspects that the two competing storylines about the XPOTUS (that he's about to return to...

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...

The XPOTUS continuing to get indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election wasn't the only bit of authoritarian fuckery this week: Constitutional law professor Deborah Pearlstein wonders, as do many other people, why so many of the XPOTUS's mooks are lawyers. Nicholas Grossman can't figure out why the media spend so much time trying to understand the populist right when Biden got millions more votes than the other guy. The Marion, Kan., police department raided the town newspaper and seized its...

Former UK Prime Minister and professional circus clown Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Cons.—Uxbridge and South Ruislip) resigned his seat in Parliament this week ahead of a damning all-parties report recommending he be suspended for 90 days: The death certificate for Boris Johnson’s career in politics read June 12th. A government statement appeared that evening appointing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as “Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern”, the title MPs accept, according...

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

Between my actual full-time job and the full-time job I've got this week preparing for King Roger, Cassie hasn't gotten nearly the time outdoors that she wants. The snow, rain, and 2°C we have today didn't help. (She doesn't mind the weather as much as I do.) Words cannot describe how less disappointed I am that I will have to miss the XPOTUS announcing his third attempt to grift the American People, coming as it does just a few hours after US Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) announced his bid for Senate...

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...

With the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the British National Anthem has changed back to "God Save the King" for the third time in 185 years. In other news: The Guardian explains Elizabeth's funeral and other events that will take place over the next 10 days. James Fallows takes a second look at President Biden's speech from last week, in the context of the predictable reaction cycle about anything he does. Dana Milbank doesn't worry the MAGA folks want a Mussolini, since some of them keep going on about...

I took Friday off, so it felt like Saturday. Then Saturday felt like Sunday, Sunday felt like another Saturday, and yesterday was definitely another Sunday. Today does not feel like Tuesday. Like most Mondays, I had a lot of catching up at the office, including mandatory biennial sexual harassment training (prevention and reporting, I hasten to point out). So despite a 7pm meeting with an Australian client tonight, I hope I find time to read these articles: The Chicago Bears have revealed a preliminary...

The South's misfortune is Chicago's benefit this week as a hot-air dome over Texas has sent cool Canadian air into the Midwest, giving us in Chicago a perfect 26°C afternoon at O'Hare—with 9°C dewpoint. (It's 25°C at IDTWHQ.) Add to that a sprint review earlier today, and I might have to spend a lot more time outside today. So I'll just read all this later: The Justice Department and the XPOTUS have gone back and forth about what parts of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant to publicize, with the XPOTUS...

Happy Monday: The XPOTUS uses the same pattern of lies every time he gets caught committing a crime. Jennifer Rubin says this was his dumbest crime yet. Usability experts at the Nielsen/Norman Group lay out everything you hate about phone trees, and how companies could fix them. My generation should be your boss now, but of course, we aren't. Within 30 years, Chicago could experience 52°C heat indexes. I would now like to take a nap, but alas...

Leading off today's afternoon roundup, The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) announced today that Netflix has a series in production based on his game Exploding Kittens. The premise: God and Satan come to Earth—in the bodies of cats. And freakin' Tom Ellis is one of the voices, because he's already played one of those parts. Meanwhile, in reality: A consumers group filed suit against Green Thumb Industries and three other Illinois-based cannabis companies under the Clayton Act, alleging collusion that has driven...

I've gotten two solid nights of sleep in a row, and I've got a clean desk for the first time in weeks. I hope that this becomes the norm, at least until November, when I'll have a packed musical schedule for six weeks as the Apollo Chorus rehearses or performs about 30 times. But that's seven months off. That gives me plenty of time to listen to or read these: Time Zone Database coordinator Paul Eggert explains the TZDB, its history, and how it works. David Sedaris discusses how the US changed between...

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...

Some of these will actually have to wait until tomorrow morning: Adam Serwer thanks Justice Samuel Alito (R) for confirming Serwer's complaints about the Court. A trove of XPOTUS-branded gifts meant for foreign heads of state representing "significant" monetary value disappeared at some point. Can't imagine how. The BBC Reality Check column suggests that reports in some journals about Invermectin may have painted an incomplete picture, putting it mildly. Cranky Flier explains that Southwest Airlines'...

Adam Gopnik makes a good point about President Biden's successful, if invisible, ideology: Biden and his team, widely attacked as pusillanimous centrists with no particular convictions, are in fact ideologues. Their ideology is largely invisible but no less ideological for refusing to present itself out in the open. It is the belief, animating Biden’s whole career, that there is a surprisingly large area of agreement in American life and that, by appealing to that area of agreement, electoral victory...

After 7,927 blog entries over more than 23 years, I must express surprise that the XPOTUS managed a full 29 days: Former President Donald Trump’s blog — a webpage where he shared statements after larger social media companies banned him from their platforms — has been permanently shut down, his spokesman said Wednesday. The page, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” has been scrubbed from Trump’s website after going live less than a month earlier. After he launched the thing, people stayed away in...

A supporter of the XPOTUS has organized, with the help of the Arizona State Senate, a private hand-recount of Maricopa County's ballots. Apparently they're looking for bamboo fibers? Yeah, it's just as crazy as it sounds: On the floor of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where Sir Charles Barkley once dunked basketballs and Hulk Hogan wrestled King Kong Bundy, 46 tables are arrayed in neat rows, each with a Lazy Susan in the middle. Seated at the tables are several dozen people, mostly Republicans, who spend...

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...

Some stories in the news this week: The Muldrow Glacier in Denali National Park began to surge a few months ago and has accelerated to almost 30 meters per day. Chicago-area transit agencies believe that about 20% of former transit riders won't come back after Covid, leading them to re-think their long-range planning. The IRS will begin sending parents a monthly payment that replaces the annual child tax credit starting in the beginning of July. Guess what? Whether intentionally or not, the XPOTUS's...

Writing for Just Security, Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley decodes the structural and content similarities between the propaganda film that introduced the XPOTUS on the Ellipse on January 6th and the propaganda films a certain central-European country produced in the first half of the previous century: Fascism is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to...

The US Constitution, Amendment XX, section 1, says point blank that the STBXPOTUS will be XPOTUS in less than 24 hours. Between now and then, I have no doubt he'll shit the bed (possibly even literally) on his way out the door. Just a few minutes ago the Times reported that the outgoing administration has declared China's treatment of Uighurs "genocide," which may complicate President Biden's plans to pressure the country diplomatically. (Biden apparently supports this designation, however.) From...

The House of Representatives have started debate on a resolution to ask Vice President Mike Pence to start the process of removing the STBXPOTUS under the 25th Amendment. As you might imagine, this was not the only news story today: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking officers in the US military, released a letter to the entire military reminding everyone that the military serves the Constitution, not the man who happens to hold the office of President. Bandy X. Lee, interviewed in the next...

We had a relatively quiet day yesterday, but only in comparison to the day before: Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (wife of presumptive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned after nearly four years (and with nothing to gain from staying in Cabinet) mostly because they no longer needed those jobs. Said the Post: "Resigning now feels a little like eating all but the last bite of a piece of cake at a restaurant and then asking for a refund." The BBC has a...

A couple of articles piqued my interest over the last day: Via IFL Science, a team of graduate students from three European universities studied how long humans would survive the emergence of a vampire population. (It depends a lot on how effective your slayers are.) They even built a calculator. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe, writing in the Financial Times, argues the STBXPOTUS should face prosecution for using the pardon power to obstruct justice. Emma Goldberg describes some coronavirus-era...

You have to admire Vladimir Putin's sense of humor. For five years, he's manipulated our STBXPOTUS into doing just about everything Russia could have wanted. Now that our STBXPOTUS has become STBX, Putin doesn't need him anymore. So why not come clean? He did just that at his year-end press conference last Thursday: Steve Rosenberg, BBC: Don't you think over the last years you also have borne part of the responsibility for making these relations [with Europe and the West] seem like a cold war...? Putin...

The December solstice happened about 8 hours ago, which means we'll have slightly more daylight today than we had yesterday. Today is also the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's meeting with Richard Nixon in the White House. More odd things of note: Former Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel attorney Erica Newland has some regrets. Congress finally passed a $900 million stimulus bill that has no real hope of stimulating anyone who's unemployed or about to lose his home. Nice work, Mitch. Canada...

Author John Scalzi posted two missives on his blog over the weekend that sum up a lot of what I'm thinking lately. He concludes the second one: Trump is a virus and he infected our body politic, a body that the GOP spent four decades lowering its immune system so that it could receive just the sort moral and political sickness that Trump personifies. And it worked! We got very sick, and we’re very sick still. But it turns out our antibodies were stronger than suspected. We rallied despite the best...

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...

It could be worse. It might yet be: Covid-19 cases have started to climb once again in the US, passing 8 million just three weeks after passing 7 million. In Illinois, we hit a second consecutive record, with 4,554 new cases today. (There were a record 4,015 yesterday.) TNR's Alex Shepherd says NBC did the Biden campaign a huge favor by booking the president, forcing a direct comparison between the two candidates in real time. The Atlantic's Adrienne LaFrance compares the absurd conspiracy theory QAnon...

Today's lunchtime round-up only had one article about current politics: John Scalzi warns that "nostalgia is a luxury." The president, sick with Covid-19, took a joyride around the grounds of Walter Reed Army Medical Center yesterday, resulting in several aides and USSS officers going into quarantine. Devon Price asks, "do you have 'Zoom Fatigue' or is it existentially crushing to pretend life is normal as the world burns?" Spirit Hub, a Chicago-area startup, aims to sell spirits from distilleries too...

First, a quick note: Joe and Jill Biden have tested negative for the virus. Many of my friends, who I consider reasonable people, have spent the morning freaking out on social media about the President's Covid-19 infection. I'm a little alarmed and a little sad. Alarmed, because an unhealthy proportion of my friends seem to believe that the President or the White House is lying about it, perhaps to get out of the debate in two weeks, or perhaps to set up a hero's narrative when the President gets...

After presidential adviser Hope Hicks tested positive for the coronavirus yesterday, he and the First Lady have also tested positive, and he showed symptoms at a fundraiser in New Jersey last night: President Trump is showing symptoms of the novel coronavirus, but mild ones, according to two people familiar with his condition. The president, who said on Thursday night that he had tested positive for the virus, has had what one person described as coldlike symptoms. At a fund-raiser he attended at his...

On 30 April 2011, President Obama addressed the White House Correspondents Dinner. The funniest bit starts 9 minutes in, when he takes on his successor, so many years before anyone thought that would ever be a true sentence. And at 12:45, roasts the 46th president, even more years before anyone expected that to happen. And he's really funny: Oh, one other thing. Don't forget that the next evening (Washington time), the US Navy killed Osama bin Laden, for which Obama took complete responsibility—as he...

Last night's, ah, debate between the president and Joe Biden raised eyebrows worldwide: The Chicago Tribune: "But despite his efforts to dominate the discussion, Trump was frequently put on the defensive and tried to sidestep when he was asked if he was willing to condemn white supremacists and paramilitary groups. ... The scattershot debate bounced from topic to topic, with Trump again refusing to embrace the science of climate change while Biden accused Trump of walking away from the American promise...

Every single talking head in the US is now saying "I've never seen a debate like this one." No kidding. Judy Woodruff: "I can say we broke new ground with presidential debates." I'm going to watch PBS's talking heads for a bit, until my head explodes, and then I'm going to read some of Kay Ryan's poetry because...because I need to. I promised some reactions from friends: "Joe's inherent goodness is actually breaking through." "I wish I hadn't stopped drinking right now." "Biden lost. He should have...

Start refreshing this page around 21:00 EDT. I'll be watching the festivities intently and reacting in real time. The best idea for a drinking game I've heard is to take a drink every time the president tells the truth. (It's the best way to stay sober throughout.) In no small irony, neither of the candidates drinks, and both for largely the same reason (alcoholism in a close family member). I think the public will drink enough for both of them tonight, though. All times below are Eastern US time, 4...

Daniel Shaviro, a veteran tax attorney, lays out 10 takeaways from the New York Times story Sunday about the president's tax returns: 1) Tax is the least of it. The article offers direct evidence of Trump’s impending financial liability to unknown lenders, and of pervasive conflicts of interest as president, that are of grave national security concern. 6) The consulting fees that Trump’s various foreign businesses paid to Ivanka Trump and others look potentially fraudulent.  Based on what the article...

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...

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...

I'm taking a day off, so I'm choosing not to read all the articles that have piled up on my desktop: Tropical Storm Josephine has formed east of the windward islands, becoming the earliest 10th named storm on record. The National Hurricane Center promises an "extremely active" season. By tracking excess deaths in addition to reported Covid-19 deaths, the New York Times has concluded we've already surpassed 200,000 and could hit half a million by the end of the year. The General Accounting Office, a...

It has cooled off slightly from yesterday's scorching 36°C, but the dewpoint hasn't dropped much. So the sauna yesterday has become the sticky summer day today. Fortunately, we invented air conditioning a century or so ago, so I'm not actually melting in my cube. As I munch on some chicken teriyaki from the take-out place around the corner, I'm also digesting these articles: James Fallows points to the medieval alcohol-distribution rules in most states as the biggest threat to craft brewing right now....

Happy tax day! And now, we're off to the races: Jeff Sessions lost the Republican US Senate primary in Alabama. What the hell was the president talking about yesterday? George Will explains the differences, such as they are, between  Illinois governor JB Pritzker announced a tightening of the state's re-opening rules, while Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned we're dangerously close to shutting down again. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt tested positive for Covid-19. Author John M. Barry, who wrote about...

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"...

Last weekend's tsunami continues to ripple: Ultra-right-wing US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), writing in the New York Times to great opprobrium, recommends sending in the troops. Former general and Defense Secretary James Mattis publicly rebuked President Trump in a 3-page letter published in the Atlantic, a move that Josh Marshall supports while adding that the letter also "its own form of militarization of society." Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mike Mullen also criticized the president earlier this week. In...

This morning, the Labor Department reported 2.1 million new unemployment claims, bringing the total to almost 41 million since the pandemic hit the US. As horrifying as that number is, I actually wanted to highlight two articles that appeared today. The first, by Trump biographer Tony Schwartz in Medium, warns us that having a psychopathic president makes November's election "a true Armageddon:" The trait that most distinguishes psychopaths is the utter absence of conscience — the capacity to lie...

Since January 2019, Chicago has had only two months with above-average sunshine, and in both cases we only got 10% more than average. This year we're ticking along about 9% below, with no month since July 2019 getting above 50% of possible sunshine. In other news: Former White House Butler Roosevelt Jerman, who served from 1957 to 2012, died of Covid-19 at age 91. One wonders, if the current White House had acted more propitiously, would Jerman have lived longer? Researchers suggest yes, if we'd locked...

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...

James Fallows: Reporters from the Washington Post quoted Dara Kass, of Columbia University Medical Center, on the difference between this and Trump’s previous, now-discredited advice that people start taking a certain kind of pill: “The difference between this and the chloroquine [pills] is that somebody could go right away to their pantry and start swallowing bleach. They could go to their medicine cabinet and swallow isopropyl alcohol,” Kass said. “A lot of people have that in their homes. There’s an...

Another 4.4 million people filed unemployment claims last week, bringing the total unemployed in the US to 26 million and the unemployment rate to around 20%. This is the fifth straight week of record weekly unemployment filings, but the third straight week of declining filings, which is about the only silver lining in economic data today. For comparison, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), it took three years for unemployment to go from 4.7% to over 20% in the Great...

Illinois' doubling time for Covid-19 cases has increased from 2.1 days to 7.9 days, as of yesterday. In other news: The Times has a complete timeline of how the White House missed all the warnings about the disease until it became too big to lie about. George Conway places the blame for Wisconsin's voting fiasco last Tuesday on the state legislature, not on the courts. Thirsty? How about a Covid-19–themed drink? NPR interviews a psychiatrist about how single people are coping with quarantine. Food &...

I'm trying to get my mind around a Conservative government announcing this a few minutes ago: The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has announced the government will pay the wages of British workers to keep them in jobs as the coronavirus outbreak escalates. In an unprecedented step, Sunak said the state would pay grants covering up to 80% of the salary of workers kept on by companies, up to a total of £2,500 per month, just above the median income. “We are starting a great national effort to protect jobs,” he...

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...

By "this," I don't mean the Covid-19 outbreak itself, though by cutting CDC pandemic funding 80%, ending epidemic prevention aid to 37 of 47 countries, or by appointing perhaps the worst possible administration official to lead the response effort, he has almost certainly increased the risk of infection to every person in the world. No, I mean that we're dangerously unprepared for the recession the virus outbreak appears to be encouraging. Economists have had a hunch we'd eventually get the stock-market...

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...

Author Nicole Hemmer outlines how the American right wing has prepared itself for the impeachment trial for the past 50 years, and it's to all our detriments: If you tuned in to Fox News to watch the opening arguments of the impeachment trial on Wednesday night, you were out of luck. Oh, the trial was still technically being broadcast on the network, but it had been reduced to a muted box on the side of the screen, while Sean Hannity assured viewers, “None of this will matter.” This was the purest...

Josh Marshall says we should hold Republican senators accountable for their handling of President Trump's impeachment trial—especially vulnerable ones up for re-election this year: We know what Trump did. What remains to be seen is whether Senate Republicans will back his behavior. Monday evening we got a big part of the answer. When we say that it’s Senate Republicans who are on trial, that’s not just rhetoric or wordplay. It’s the reality and understanding it is a guide to political action. I’ve...

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...

Benjamin Wittes, writing for Lawfare, points out that Alexander Hamilton predicted exactly how an impeachment would bring partisan differences into even sharper relief than ordinary politics. So Republicans in Congress have to change the subject: Yes, Trump’s approval numbers show there are cracks in the wall, as every pundit is busily pointing out. But the larger point, it seems to me, is that there is still a wall. And as Hamilton argued, it is the comparative strength of that wall, not any...

I wanted to call special attention to an article in Mother Jones I linked to earlier this evening. In it, Tim Murphy shows that the historical precedent for President Trump's impeachment isn't Richard Nixon, it's Andrew Johnson. Key paragraph: The real tragedy of the trial wasn’t poor, pathetic Edmund Ross losing his seat. When the vote fails, Wineapple takes us to places that Kennedy never ventured in his book—churches in Charleston and Memphis where African Americans mourned what they knew they’d...

October began today for some of the world, but here in Chicago the 29°C weather (at Midway and downtwon; it's 23°C at O'Hare) would be more appropriate for July. October should start tomorrow for us, according to forecasts. This week has a lot going on: rehearsal yesterday for Apollo's support of Chicago Opera Theater in their upcoming performances of Everest and Aleko; rehearsal tonight for our collaboration Saturday with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony of Carmina Burana; and, right, a full-time job....

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....

I'll circle back to a couple of these later today. But at the moment, I've got the following queued up for my lunch hour: The Washington Post charitably describes yesterday's press conference in France as "a glimpse into Trump's unorthodox mind." As in, he lied through the whole thing. MSNBC says the G7 as a whole (which ended in the aforementioned presser) shows that other world leaders have learned to manipulate the president pretty well. Brazil, meanwhile has become the latest country to discover...

The Daily Parker will have a bit of activity today, so let me get the two political stories out of the way immediately. First, Josh Marshall points out a yuge consequence of President Trump's constant lying: people have a hard time believing the administration's claim that Iran had anything to do with the attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. He connects the dots: [Y]ou don’t need to assume irrationality or perfidy on the part of the Iranians for them to be behind this. We had a deal with the...

Not a lot new in David Roth's takedown of the president today, but he does have a few good bits: The spectacle of expert analysts and thought leaders parsing the actions of a man with no expertise or capacity for analysis is the purest acid satire—but less because of how badly that expert analysis has failed than because of how sincerely misplaced it is. Trump represents an extraordinary challenge to political media precisely because there is nothing here to parse, no hidden meanings or tactical...

As the only president we have leaves the UK after a bizarre visit, he leaves behind a collection of inventive and colorful protest effigies: A giant rendering of US President Donald Trump astride a golden toilet while tweeting has appeared in Central London ahead of protests against Mr Trump’s state visit. The 16-foot model, nicknamed “Dump Trump”, reportedly also has an audio function that makes fart noises and repeats the president's most famous statements, including “no collusion”, “witch-hunt”, “you...

So far, 657 former Federal prosecutors, appointed by presidents from both parties, have signed a letter pointing out the obvious conclusions of the Mueller Report: Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice. The Mueller report describes several acts...

The day after a 3-day, 3-flight weekend doesn't usually make it into the top-10 productive days of my life. Like today for instance. So here are some things I'm too lazy to write more about today: More evidence that living on the west side of a time zone causes sleep deprivation. Over the weekend, at 2pm on Saturday, Chicago set a record for the lowest humidity on record. A software developer and pilot looks at the relationship between the software and hardware of the Boeing 737-MAX. The grounding of...

The always-incisive Alexandra Petri provides a more honest view of AG William Barr's press conference yesterday: Hello, everyone. I am here to repeat the words “no collusion” as many times as I can without sounding suspicious, but first, I would like to thank Rod Rosenstein. He is here standing behind me. He had plans to step back from public service before I came along and asked him to assist me. Then again, some would argue that by assisting me, he did not perform a public service. Anyway, he is here....

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...

As we finish the 23rd month of the Trump Administration, Philip Bump has a graphic showing how all of the investigations into the president's organizations overlap: An article from The Washington Post on Saturday opened with such a striking line that it’s worth lazily co-opting for the opening of this article: “Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency, nearly every organization he has led in the past decade is under investigation.” That report outlined the scope of existing probes targeting...

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...

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an anonymous op-ed from a "senior White House official" that described a "resistance" inside the White House against President Trump's insanity. Greg Sargent calls bullshit: If anything, the sum total of the revelations offered, while valuable in some respects, reveals the sharp limits on which Trumpian impulses these greatly alarmed patriots discern to be seriously damaging to the country. In so doing, it actually reveals just how deeply insufficient these constraining...

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...

Jennifer Rubin believes she's found President Trump's stupidest Tweet ever: President Trump has issued shameful tweets, offensive tweets and self-serving tweets. Rarely, however, has he sent out a tweet that better conveys his abject ignorance about the country and economics than the tweet he posted Wednesday: Our Country was built on Tariffs, and Tariffs are now leading us to great new Trade Deals - as opposed to the horrible and unfair Trade Deals that I inherited as your President. Other Countries...

Temperatures in southern Portugal and Spain have reached 45°C as dust from the Sahara turns skies orange: In the latest phase of a summer of extreme weather that has brought blistering heat to Britain, drought to the Netherlands and deadly wildfires to Greece, the heatwave affecting parts of southern Europe has reached a new intensity this weekend. According to IPMA, the Portuguese weather agency, about a third of the country’s meteorological stations broke temperature records on Saturday. The highest...

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...

This is not an innocent man: I mean, credit to Putin for keeping a straight face. But I can see why officials in both major U.S. parties have called this treasonous or nearly so. Let's see what the Republicans in Congress do now. Update: Around 30:15, Putin offers to have Russian law enforcement interrogate the Russian GRU agents who were named in the Justice Department indictment from Friday. Where does one even start? What does he have on Trump, seriously?

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...

McKay Coppins, who profiled Miller for The Atlantic last month, believes that the outrage over the immorality of the administration's immigration policy is exactly the point: A seasoned conservative troll, Miller told me during our interview that he has often found value in generating what he calls “constructive controversy—with the purpose of enlightenment.” This belief traces back to the snowflake-melting and lib-triggering of his youth. As a conservative teen growing up in Santa Monica, he wrote...

Andrew Sullivan says the President "is making us all live in his delusional reality show:" The president believes what he wants to believe, creates a reality that fits his delusions, and then insists, with extraordinary energy and stamina, that his delusions are the truth. His psychological illness, moreover, is capable of outlasting anyone else’s mental health. Objective reality that contradicts his delusions is discounted as “fake news” propagated by “our country’s greatest enemy,” i.e., reporters. If...

Stuff that landed in my inbox today: Illinois has secured a $132 m grant to fix one of the worst rail bottlenecks in the state. Crain's Greg Hinz sort-of compliments Illinois governor Bruce Rauner for finally making a budget deal...in his 4th year as governor. Meanwhile, the administration's trade war will hurt Illinois harder than most—a feature, one suspects, and not a bug. WaPo's Amber Phillips lists the winners and losers from yesterday's primary elections in California and other states. New...

Not all of this is as depressing as yesterday's batch: Dana Milbank raises the question, once again, whether President Trump is just a liar or really mentally ill. McCay Coppins describes how professional troll Stephen Miller got and kept his job. Illinois is getting an anti-carjacking bill that doesn't go as far as Chicago's police superintendent wanted. Josh Marshall wonders why Missouri Governor Eric Greitens resigned so abruptly yesterday. Via Bruce Schneier, an explanation of numbers stations....

I've queued up a few articles to read while eating lunch. I just hope I don't lose said lunch after reading them: Jeet Heer worries about President Trump's willingness to destroy everything around himself to distract from his own scandals. Catherine Rampell walks through the ways the administration's policy of separating children from parents at the border reveals the GOP's grand scam. James Fallows lays out the ways the administration continues to screw up our relationship with China. Josh Marshall...

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...

Jeet Heer describes the vacuity of the current conservative media: While Trump remains a divisive figure among conservative intellectuals, the space for debating his merits is dwindling in the right-of-center media. Both the dictates of the market and the demands of employers like Salem are pushing conservative pundits and journalists to act, as [Salem Media Group senior vice president Phil Boyce] put it, as trial lawyers who defend their client regardless of their private scruples. What happened at...

In the last seven days, these things have happened: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (the worst Secretary of State in modern history?) got kicked out in typical Trump Administration fashion (i.e., without notice and on Twitter). This may have had something to do with him stating firmly that... ...Russian operatives attempted to assassinate a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England, resulting in... ...the UK government expelled 23 Russian diplomats after determining that the assassination attempt...

I'm actually coughing up a lung at home today, which you'd think gives me more time to read, but actually it doesn't. Really I just want a nap. Andrew Sullivan's weekly column asks whether this is the beginning of the end for the President. Even absent the Russia scandal, the new tariffs make no sense at all, and represent the shrinking of America (at least to Jeet Heer). Even the Wall Street Journal thinks it's the biggest policy blunder of his presidency. David Corn points out that Hope Hicks, late of...

President Trump told friends that the Nunes memo could help discredit the Mueller investigation, basically proving obstruction of justice. But is it really possible to hold him accountable? And what happens if Mueller gets fired? Amazon distribution centers don't really create a ton of jobs, so why are we subsidizing them? The UK's model of public-private partnerships doesn't work anymore because of the country's austerity. Jackpotting ATMs is a thing, and it has arrived in the US. Fun times, fun times.

Aside: how the hell is it already February? Moving on. Two more articles popped up about Tuesday night's State of the Union speech. First, via Deeply Trivial, Andrea Jones-Rooy at 538 points out that very little of what presidents propose in the SOTU actually gets enacted: From Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, according to [Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard], presidents made an average of 34 proposals in each State of the Union or initial address to a joint session of Congress. The most requests a...

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...

Too much to read today, especially during an hours-long download from our trips over the past two weeks. So I'll come back to these: The CIA recently fired Lulu, a black Lab, because she didn't want to sniff for bombs after all. But more seriously: Josh Marshall calls out White House Chief of Staff for making the detestable argument that an attack on the President is an attack on the troops. Alex Shepard at New Republic just shakes his head sadly. London is running adverts aimed at cleaning up its air...

I'm about to fly to San Antonio for another round of researching how the military tracks recruits from the time they get to the processing center to the time they leave for boot camp (officially "Military Basic Training" or MBT). I have some stuff to read on the plane: WPA, which is probably securing your WiFi, has been hacked after 14 years. Great. At least SSL is still secure. The New Republic claims that Republicans are ignoring the will of the people by tossing out ballot initiatives. (This is not...

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...

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...

I've watched Scott Adams defend President Trump for years now, and I'm always fascinated by his ability to accuse people who disagree with him of any number of mental deficiencies. I am surprised that it took until today for him to pipe up about Trump's latest self-inflicted wound, but not by how he approached it. In today's post, Adams continues his longstanding argument that, when it comes to Trump, we're experiencing a "mass hysteria bubble." How does he know? Because lots of people disagree with...

Scottish authorities are making it difficult for Donald Trump to expand his money-losing golf course outside Aberdeen: Two Scottish government agencies—the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Scottish Natural Heritage, a conservation agency—say they will object to the Trump Organization’s plans to build a second 18-hole golf course at Aberdeen, known as the Trump International Golf Links. If they succeed in killing this expansion, it will be a major setback for Trump and raise doubts about the...

The President can't actually change military policy with a tweet: This morning there is news that there will – for now – be no change in the US military’s policy toward transgender service members. The news comes in the form of a letter shared with members of the press from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford. On its face this is no more than a statement of military command protocol and the chain of command. The President is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, with vast powers...

I'm in New York for a friend's wedding this weekend, so light posting, depending on what blows up in Washington tonight. Josh Marshall is already in total freak-out mode. But President Trump tends not to do any work over the weekend, or in the evenings, or at all. Anyway, regular posting returns Monday.

The Post's Dana Milbank thinks that President Trump's polling numbers—already the lowest for any president since polling began 70 years ago—are about to get worse: I asked The Post’s polling chief, Scott Clement, to run a regression analysis testing how views of the economy shape overall support for Trump when other variables such as party are held constant. The result was powerful: People who approve of his handling of the economy are 40 or 50 percentage points more likely to approve of him overall....

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...

On Friday, President Trump sat down with AP reporter Julie Pace, and...well...here's the transcript, annotated by WaPo. I suppose I have to read it, but even in the first few moments, I'm struggling.

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...

Quick hits: This week's "What Just Happened?" column from Alex Shepherd is a must-read. And by the way, as I've been saying, the president has done everything he promised. Why is anyone surprised? Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has proposed a high-speed rail link between O'Hare and downtown. And soon, the weekend...

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...

In yet another unprecedented rejection of historical norms that has tremendous potential to encourage corruption and double-dealing, Senate Republicans are rushing Trump cabinet confirmations so much that the Office of Government Ethics can't keep up. This means that some confirmation hearings might start before nominees have even finished their background checks and ethics disclosures: In a letter to Senators Chuck Schumer of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the leader of the Office of...

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...

While we can't say for certain what Trump's policies will actually be, or what effects they'll actually have, London-based writer Feargus O'Sullivan has an idea what the atmosphere might be like: As a British person, the experience of waking up to find that Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States seemed freakishly familiar. Being shaken awake before dawn with shock news, then finding that most people I knew were awake, punch drunk, and already posting on social media—it all feels...

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...

Tonight I've gotten invited to hear Lin-Manuel Miranda speak at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and after that, a masquerade. Then tomorrow is Chicago Gourmet. Then Sunday I'll either plotz or walk 30 kilometers. (Though in truth I'll probably be fine as my cold, tapering though it is, makes me not want to indulge too much.) Meanwhile, here are some articles that I may read in the next few hours: This month has been really hot and rainy in Illinois. Bleah. One more thing Trump is wrong about: Stop and...

I'll have more Schadenfreude after November 8th (assuming things go as the polls suggest), but right now I'll just pass on NBC's analysis of what might happen to the Republican Party over the next four years: Whether or not Trump prevails in November, the GOP is set for a rebuilding process like none in recent memory. If he wins, he’ll face a Congress whose leaders have largely distanced themselves from his brand and who oppose much of his agenda. If he loses, his one-of-a-kind candidacy offers each...

Some articles to read: Trump, the single best example of the Dunning-Kruger effect since Dunning and Kruger identified it, thinks he can end Chicago's crime wave in a week. Right. Also, there is no retail voter fraud. Trump's call for vigilantes to police polling places is nothing more than Jim Crow tactics. Josh Marshall wonders just what Trump's immigration policies really are. (Hint: he doesn't have any.) Scott Hanselman has advice for how to reduce your psychic weight. David Dayin in New Republic...

Day two of Certified Scrum Master training starts in just a few minutes (more on that later), so I've queued up a bunch of articles to read this weekend: The climate prediction center forecasts a warm, dry fall for Illinois followed by a normal winter. Reactions to Trump dumping Russian stooge Paul Manfort in favor of right-wing nutjob Steve Bannon are pretty consistent: here's Fallows and Bloomberg, for starters, plus analysis from the Times and Marshall on how Trump's support is declining even among...

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.

Via The Daily Show:

Skipping Mitt Romney's dig that Trump's wives have been foreign-born because "there are jobs that Americans won't do," it's becoming obvious that Trump has a problem with women mocking him. New Republic's Jeet Heer explains: An old-fashioned sexist boor, Trump tends to divide the world into a simple binary: men are rivals to be bested and women are potential sexual conquests. When he’s confronted by a strong, assertive woman outside the mating arena, his synapses tend to short-circuit, leading him to...

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...