The XPOTUS's handlers cut short his appearance this afternoon at the National Association of Black Journalists convention just 2 km from where I'm sitting. The XPOTUS began by insulting the hosts and the panelists. Then, when one of the panelists had just brought up Project 2025 (the Republican Party's blueprint for rolling the country back to the 1850s), the moderator suddenly interrupted and said the campaign had told her to wrap it up. The 37 minutes of Harris Campaign footage the XPOTUS had already provided will have to do, I guess.
In other end-of-July news:
Finally, the Justice Dept has accused the Norfolk Southern Railroad of illegally delaying passenger trains, after Amtrak suffered an ungodly 11,500 minutes of delay in just the first three months of this year. "Freight-train interference" is the principal cause of delays for US trains because the country has almost no dedicated passenger mainlines. The freight railroads that own the tracks have a statutory obligation to prioritize passenger trains, but no other incentives to do so. It's about the dumbest way to organize passenger rail anyone could come up with, other than separating out the track from the operations. I mean, we're dumb, but we're not that dumb.
The US election is 98 days away, and August starts Thursday. Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...into the future...
And yet, the ever-present Now keeps us here:
Finally, Bruce Schneier warns that automobile companies and their suppliers have many disincentives to providing software updates for the entire lifetime of their products. Microsoft stops supporting Windows versions after just a few years, while cars live for decades.
President Biden has (finally!) proposed using the power of Article I to de-politicize Article III:
[W]e have had term limits for presidents for nearly 75 years. We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court. Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary. It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court.
He also proposed a constitutional amendment to ensure presidents can be held criminally liable for acts while in office, and extending the judicial code of conduct to the Supreme Court.
The thing is, it sure looks like Article I gives the legislature the power to enact term limits on the Court without an amendment. And doing so should command bipartisan support, because it ends the Supreme Court sweepstakes that destabilizes the rule of law.
Of course, one of our parties has strayed a bit from believing in the rule of law, which means it will probably be ours who enacts this reform. So we'll just have to win both houses of Congress and the White House in November, right?
Watch how new UK Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak (Cons.-Richmond and Northallerton) used his first Question Time with new UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (Lab.-Holborn and St Pancras) last Wednesday:
Sunak's Conservative Party suffered the worst electoral loss of any party since before World War I to Starmer's Labour Party. A month ago Sunak sat where Starmer sits today, and vice-versa. And Sunak knows that just about every policy he cares about will end under the new Labour government, while he sits there and watches.
And yet, Sunak and Starmer made it absolutely clear to the UK and its adversaries that they both respect the rule of law, the necessity of a peaceful transition of absolute power (UK prime ministers have much more power than US presidents but much less predictable terms), and that both men respect each other.
Of course, PMQs the day after tomorrow will not be so friendly. But that's OK; Sunak behaved like a defeated politician and not like a petulant infant, demonstrating to the UK and to the world that the UK is bigger than anyone sitting in that House. Exactly as it should be in all democracies.
Cassie and I spent all day outside yesterday, and today we're both pooped. We spent about 30 minutes at the dog beach before getting lunch at the Dock, the outdoor restaurant at Montrose Beach. Did Cassie enjoy the dog beach? Oh, yes she did:
From the Dock we walked 5.1 km along the lake to the new Duke of Perth:
From there, we headed home, but wouldn't you know we got distracted by the beer garden at Begyle Brewing?
By this point we'd walked over 3 hours and covered 15½ kilometers, so Cassie took a well-deserved nap:
Altogether, we walked 17.9 km (11.2 miles for the 19th-century crowd) over 3½ hours. Today we're taking it a bit easier. But Cassie was excited to take her morning walk at 7 am, so she clearly has Weimaraner-grade energy reserves.
Cassie and I have already walked 15.6 km (9.7 miles for the luddites), and have another 2 km or so to go before we get home. Tomorrow I'll have photos from our adventures, including from Montrose Dog Beach.
For now, though, we're enjoying nearly-perfect weather outside.
One of the many stories that piqued my interest this morning included a rant by the anti-Sorkin himself:
- Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, does not like how "politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." (He also implies that Liz Truss, and not Kamala Harris, most embodies the character of Selina Meyer.)
- Former President Obama has endorsed Vice President Harris.
- John Scalzi received a press release from the Harris campaign that he says demonstrates how "it's harder to stab when you're being punched in the face."
- David Frum sees President Biden's retirement as making himself "a modern Cincinnatus."
- Alex Shephard wonders if "JD Vance [is] the worst Vice Presidential pick ever?" (Vance "is not only one of the greatest frauds in American politics, he is the most obvious fraud in American politics.")
- Dana Milbank suggests (tongue in cheek) that the XPOTUS just "needs a mulligan:" "Vance, who has served 19 months in the Senate after writing a book and briefly dabbling as a venture capitalist, was picked by Trump on the merits. But Harris, who spent decades as a prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and senator, became vice president because of diversity, equity and inclusion."
- George Will, not tongue-in-cheek, warned that if Democrats re-take the Senate, we're going to get rid of the filibuster, oh dearie dearie me! Because chucking something that gives 20% of the US population a veto over the other 80% would mean Republicans would have to drum up a majority of the states to do something instead of just a coalition of the small ones.
- If you have a computer built before 2024 by one of the major manufacturers, your Secure Boot might not be secure. If you want to find out whether your system is secure, open up PowerShell and run this command:
[System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString((Get-SecureBootUEFI PK).bytes) -match "DO NOT TRUST|DO NOT SHIP")
Finally, Journalist Lewis H Lapham has died, aged 89. He edited Harper's during the time that I read it regularly, and no coincidence that I dropped it shortly after he did. I found his work engaging and sometimes enraging, but always smart. He will be missed.
Too bad I'm in my downtown office. It's a perfect, sunny day in Chicago. I did spend half an hour outside at lunchtime, and I might take off a little early. But at least for the next hour, I'll be looking through this sealed high-rise window at the kind of day we only get about 25 times a year here.
Elsewhere in the world:
- Former CIA lawyer James Petrila and former CIA spook John Sipher warn that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v US could undo 50 years of reforms that reined in illegal clandestine activities here and abroad.
- James Fallows reviews President Biden's "quasi-valedictory" address from last night.
- The doddering, elderly, convicted-felon Republican nominee for President seemed to have some difficulties at last night's rally. Maybe he's too old to be president and he should withdraw from the race?
- Helen Lewis, shaking her head sadly at the mess of a human being that is Republican Vice-President nominee JD Vance, hopes the XPOTUS "kept the receipt."
- Bowing to market pressure, Southwest Airlines has announced an end to its chaotic boarding process, and will now assign seats like a grown-up airline.
- London expanded its Ultra-Low-Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to encompass most of the metro area last year, which has resulted in improved air quality equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road.
- Unfortunately, this side of the pond, the Illinois Dept of Transportation seems unable to comprehend the opportunity we have to remake DuSable Lake Shore Drive for the future, and instead wants to repeat all the mistakes of the past. All the aldermen along the north lakefront oppose the plan, fortunately.
- The South Works site on the southeast side of Chicago, which used to house one of the world's largest steel mills, will soon become a quantum-computing research facility.
Finally, the various agencies charged with protecting the Democratic National Convention next month have published their plan for a 60-hectare "pedestrian restriction" zone around the United Center and a smaller zone around McCormick Place. "Only people with credentials who 'have a need to be there' – such as delegates, volunteers and other workers – will be allowed within that inner perimeter, said 2024 DNC coordinator Jeff Burnside." Presumably people who live on the Near West Side will be able to get to and from their homes as well.
The President will go on the air tonight at 8pm EDT to explain why he dropped out of the race, and presumably also to endorse Vice President Harris as his successor. This has the XPOTUS so rattled that a campaign lawyer whined to the television networks that the XPOTUS wants equal time so they can whine to everyone. OK, Boomer.
Meanwhile:
- Hillary Clinton lays out a strategy for Harris to do what she couldn't: become our first female president.
- The European Union's climate-tracking directive reported that Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history, with the average surface temperature of the planet cresting 17.09°C.
- Jennifer Rubin (and a few other writers) believe we'd all be better off with a centrist government. (I'm sure if we explain this to the Republican Party carefully and rationally, they'll tone down their extremism right away.)
- Speaking of centrism, Julia Ioffe digs into what a President Harris foreign policy might look like.
- Because of a confluence of events "that Tolstoy could not have made up," Israel has an opportunity this week to change the Middle East for the better—if only they didn't have a troglodyte for a prime minister.
- Pilot Patrick Smith explains turbulence, and why it has suddenly become so newsworthy.
Finally, the Times examines why some people continue to write negotiable orders of withdrawal (i.e., paper checks) despite their obvious inconveniences and vulnerabilities. I haven't written one in about 18 months, and the last time I used one in any capacity was (with no small irony) to set up automatic billing with my HOA.
The last 48 hours have no precedent in US politics. People have only just started to absorb what it means for President Biden to drop out of the election and Vice President Harris to take his place (which she has almost certainly done, based on delegate counts--and the endorsements of both the House Minority Leader and Senate Majority Leader). No polling data released before Thursday will have captured any of that.
I will say, however, that I feel so much better about the election than I did Sunday morning, I believe we will win it. Clearly, I'm not alone.
The election is 15 weeks from today. That's 13 weeks longer than most people pay attention. And given how much has happened in just the last 4 weeks, a lot more can happen before November.
But for the first time in a while, I feel great about our chances.