The Daily Parker

When voting, consider that under a dictatorship, courts have no independence and have to issue nonsensical rulings like the one a Russian court just issued in order to remain in favor of the dictator:

U.S. tech giant Google has closed up shop in Russia, but that hasn’t stopped a court there from leveling it with a fine greater than all the wealth in the world — a figure that is growing every day.

The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.

Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters Thursday that the figure was symbolic and should be a reason for Google to pay attention to the Moscow Arbitration Court’s order to restore access to the YouTube channels.

The sum grew so large because the fine increases with time in noncompliance, with no upper limit. The order was made after 17 blocked channels joined a lawsuit against Google’s American, Irish and Russia-based companies, according to RBC. The lawsuit predates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was initiated in 2020 by a channel that YouTube blocked to comply with U.S. sanctions.

The Post drolly notes in the article that "Google did not respond to a request for comment."

In all seriousness, if the XPOTUS returns to office, it's only a matter of weeks before Judges Aileen Cannon (R-FL) or Matthew Kacsmaryk (Bigly R-TX) come up with something similar.

Very busy day—I'll explain more tomorrow—so all I have to say right now is, I can't wait until Wednesday. I voted yesterday, so the 90% of my inbox taken up by the Democratic Party and various candidates all pleading for something represents a lot of wasted time and bytes.

Not to mention the dozens of spam texts I receive. Thank you, T-Mobile, for shunting those away from me.

Just stop, y'all. I live in Chicago, I've already voted, and I gave money where it mattered most this cycle. You're wasting my time. Just stop.

Mayor Johnson's newly-appointed Chicago Public Schools Board president The Rev Mitchell Ikenna Johnson has resigned:

Amid a wave of backlash over troubling social media posts that were criticized as antisemitic, misogynistic and conspiratorial, Chicago’s new Board of Education president is resigning at the request of Mayor Brandon Johnson just seven days after he was sworn into office. It’s the latest stunning development in the ongoing leadership struggle atop Chicago Public Schools.

His resignation came after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday called for him to step down, according to NBC5, following similar calls by 40 alderpersons and many Jewish leaders.

The mayor said he asked for the resignation.

There also have been questions about whether Johnson lives in Chicago and about his past. He was disbarred in Ohio nearly 30 years ago and at one point was so delinquent on his child support that he had a lien on his house.

Given all the problems, many have questioned the vetting process for the new school board members. On Wednesday, Rev. Johnson said he was “pretty confident that the things that are relevant to my experience were vetted.”

As one of my friends said, "Our mayor is an imbecile. That's not fair; I should give him the benefit of the doubt. It's entirely possibly he's not an imbecile, and he actually agrees with the positions of his former school board president."

I don't usually regret voting for someone this much so soon after they take office, but wow.

Recently-elected Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson has made a couple of moves this week all but guaranteed to make him a one-term mayor. First, despite "no property tax increases" being the cornerstone of his campaign, he proposed a budget today that—wait for it—would increase property taxes:

“I’m not going to raise property taxes. I’m the only person running in this race who made a commitment to that,” he said during a Block Club interview in March 2023. “For my first term, we’re not raising property taxes.”

But facing a series of tough decisions over how to close a nearly $1 billion spending gap in 2025, now-Mayor Brandon Johnson is going back on that promise.

In his budget address Wednesday, Johnson will propose increasing the city’s property tax levy to bring in an additional $300 million per year, according to the mayor’s office.

The proposal would increase most people's taxes by 4% a year. But that may not have been his worst sin this week, compared with his appointment of The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson (no relation) to head the Chicago Public Schools Board. The Rev. Johnson, it turns out, has quite the social media history:

A majority of the City Council is calling for the newly appointed president of the Chicago Board of Education to resign in the aftermath of “antisemitic and pro-Hamas” comments, calling his appointment a vetting failure by Mayor Brandon Johnson.

The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson made comments containing tropes of antisemitism following Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year, Jewish Insider reports. The publication cited screenshots from various accounts linked to Mitchell Johnson, which included posts comparing “Zionist Jews” to Nazi Germany.

“My Jewish colleagues appear drunk with the Israeli power and will live to see their payment. It will not be nice and I care not how and what you call me,” he wrote in December.

The council is urging Mitchell Johnson to apologize and resign immediately, according to a joint statement signed by 26 council members. They singled out Brandon Johnson's vetting process when appointing new board members.

“Calling Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack an ‘absolute right’ and justifying it as resistance against oppression, as Rev. Johnson did in March of this year and on other occasions, is abhorrent, inexcusable and disqualifying from public service,” the statement said. “His continued role on the school board is non-negotiable, both he and Mayor Johnson must act now to correct this terrible mistake.”

Mayor Johnson's first choice for the post, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, was apparently unavailable.

"Vetting failure" my ass. Johnson has gone out of his way to piss off the moderates who decided to give him a chance over the right-of-center Paul Vallas, and boy has he succeeded. But we're stuck with him until 2027.

We officially set new record high and high-minimum temperatures yesterday, getting to 28°C (82°F) around 4pm and not dipping below 20°C for 24 hours. More autumnal weather seems likely tomorrow, but today we're still having more of a June-like day—except for the 5 fewer hours of daylight.

As for the coyotes, apparently around this time of year, coyote parents kick their pups out of the nest, so we should see more juvenile canis latrans in the area until the young-uns establish their own territories or, ah, fail to do so. We have some in the park 400 meters from my house, and they regularly use the UPRR embankment as a highway, so I'm looking forward to seeing a few.

In a decision that literally no one liked (except the XPOTUS's re-election campaign), Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos killed the Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris last week. As of today, the Post has lost 200,000 subscribers—about 10% of them—and Bezos has responded to his critics:

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.

When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

Josh Marshall calls bullshit:

In Bezos’ case he has multiple companies that do extensive government contracting. When Trump was President, Amazon very credibly sued the Trump administration for choosing Microsoft’s cloud hosting service over Amazon’s for a major Pentagon contract. He also owns the Blue Origin space delivery company. Needless to say, Amazon is a walking, talking advertisement for anti-trust enforcement. You may want the DOJ to crack down on Amazon’s practices. But that’s not the point. It’s a massive cudgel hanging over Bezos’ company and wealth.

Bezos addressed many of these issues in the op-ed he published late yesterday in the Post. I found the piece uncomfortable to read. He was refreshingly candid on certain points and he made some good points. Everything I’ve heard about his decade as owner backs up his claim that he’s given the paper complete freedom to report on his various companies. The whole thing was pretty good except for the rather central fact that his explanation for why he made the decision he did was entirely unconvincing. Not even close.

[A] lawless authoritarian government can up the ante way beyond contracts and regulatory enforcement. But a future Trump administration likely doesn’t need to. With someone like Jeff Bezos, it can do all sorts of damage under the general cloak of discretionary authority. There’s no right to a government contract and proving political interference must be quite difficult. Indeed, the way the Supreme Court now interprets the law, it’s not entirely clear to me why the President wouldn’t be at liberty just to overrule a contracting decision because he doesn’t like the owner of the company.

Or, as New Republic writer Timothy Noah pointed out, "the Post, along with other institutions and people that allow themselves to get intimidated into silence, invite a second Trump administration to intimidate them further. That’s how bullying works."

We have seven days to kick the XPOTUS to the curb. Let's see the back of him, once and for all.

PS: As a bonus, Anita Hill has an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times worth reading.

Forecasters predict a high temperature of 27.2°C (81°F) in Chicago today, 1.6°C (3°F) warmer than the previous record of 25.6° set in 1999. Moreover, the temperature last night only got down to 19°C, just a smidge warmer than the high-minimum temperature record set in 1946, which will likely stand as tonight's low will probably stay above 20°C.

Those are normal temperatures for mid-June.

Even better: those are 1991-2020 normals for mid-June, which are slightly warmer than the normals in use when I was a kid.

On the other hand, we've had a really lovely, warm autumn this year. If we continue to have slightly-warmer summers followed by much-warmer autumns and mild winters, as we've had for a couple years now, I think we might be OK. But wow does it suck for Arizona.

"Nice democracy you've got there. Be a shame if something happened to it..."—XPOTUS (paraphrased).

The man whose presidency did more damage to our country than any since James Buchanan's and wants another ride on the pony spent yesterday rallying the brownshirts at Madison Square Garden in an event his own supporters equated with the infamous Nazi rally there in 1939.

But I have to agree with Michael Tomasky this morning, when he says we "may as well spend this last week feeling confident:"

To put it simply, liberals tend toward fatalism and panic; the label often employed is “bedwetters.” Did you see those new anti-trans ads? She’s doomed. Oh my God, did you see what Nate Silver just said? It’s over. Yikes, the polls in Pennsylvania just shifted seven-tenths of a point in Trump’s favor, this is a nightmare. Oh dear, the Nevada early vote totals are a disaster. And on and on and on and on: Liberals look for things to panic about.

I think it starts with the fact that liberals worry more about the world; carry more psychic weight around with them. Conservatives worry about the world too, but they do so in a very different way. Liberals love complexity, while conservatives prefer simplicity.

[M]any liberals have, whether consciously or not, absorbed the lesson from the media that they don’t really represent or speak for America, while conservatives are serenely confident that they do represent and speak for America.

The Republican Party has become so extreme that it no longer represents middle America at all. Middle America wants women to own their reproductive freedom. Middle America wants sensible gun laws. Middle America wants the superrich to pay more taxes. Middle America wants a higher minimum wage, more housing, and more investments made in the middle class.

[F]reaking out and panicking just contributes to an overall atmosphere that helps the other side. Don’t do it. Fatalism is the opium of the people.

Josh Marshall points out that while the polls appear to say the election will be close, they're actually saying the election is actually uncertain:

I think there’s more uncertainty than usual because of 1) rapid changes in the polling industry in response to evolving technology, 2) methodological changes in response to polls twice underestimating Donald Trump’s electoral strength, and 3) the steep and inherent difficulties of separating what about the 2020 election was embedded electoral trends and what was the COVID pandemic. So yes, I really do think there are more question marks, more debatable assumptions packaged into the analyses than usual.

Of course, if the polls said that either candidate was 15 points ahead this would all mostly be moot. We know that the race is at least fairly close. That’s why all these factors are in play. And that’s a good way to conclude on the expectations setting — that I’m not saying some sort of blow out in either direction is likely. Just that it might not actually be that close. And we should be careful to distinguish between these two things — close and uncertain.

But just to remind everyone what's on the line here, even if the XPOTUS won't do all the anti-democratic and anti-American things he has threatened to do, the people coming with him will try to remake the country in ways that almost no one outside their Christian Nationalist bubble wants. To that end, I give you: Stop Project 2025, the web comic. That's right: if you're at all confused about what the extreme right will do should they get into power, this series of comics will explain it.

Happy Monday.

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:

• Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
• Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
• Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
• James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
• Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
• Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
• Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
• American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
• SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.

Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.

Absolutely slammed today, though only about 2 hours of it actually mattered in the scheme of things. Regular posting resumes tomorrow.