The Daily Parker

Despite the FAA reducing flights at O'Hare and Midway today because of the Republican-caused government shutdown (longest in history!), I got from my house to O'Hare and through security in just over an hour. Red-state friends: I took the #81 bus to the Blue Line, so the whole 45-minute trip cost $3.00. I even had time to get coffee.

So far my flight is on time, and--unusually for the heavily-traveled ORD-SFO route--I got upgraded. Sometimes I think about cancelling my club membership because I only fly 8 to 10 segments a year these days, and then a day like this happens, where I mentally prepared for delays and disruptions but nothing happened.

We'll see if my good luck holds up for my 6am flight Sunday morning...

A warm and dry October has given us unusually late fall colors this year. They seem close to peak intensity this week, at least in my local park. Enjoy:

I'm heading to the Bay Area tomorrow, and I know I will get there, but thanks to the Republican Party I'm not sure whether I'll arrive when I'd planned to:

The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it would cut 10 percent of air traffic at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports, in a move that analysts said would force airlines to cancel thousands of flights while the administration tries to push Democrats to end the government shutdown.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the reductions were an attempt to “alleviate the pressure” on air traffic controllers, who have been working without compensation since the start of the shutdown and have not received a paycheck since mid-October. He said the administration would announce the affected markets on Thursday, as the year’s busiest travel season approaches.

The cuts would start taking effect on Friday, potentially forcing hundreds of thousands of travelers to change plans on short notice, as airlines are pressured to slash capacity across their routes. Representatives of several major airlines and Airlines for America, a trade association, said they were working with the Federal Aviation Administration to understand the details of the new requirements, but had yet to make changes.

O'Hare is, of course, one of the airports expected to have cuts.

I have traveled a lot over the years, and I've experienced flight delays, so I'm not particularly worried. Sometimes weather interferes; sometimes planes need maintenance. Worst case, they'll re-route me through Phoenix or Dallas.

It took me 28 hours to get to Dubai in 2009, and it took me 21 hours to get to Shanghai the next year. But this is the first time I've had a delay threatened because of the longest government shutdown in history.

They really love their incompetence, those Republicans.

You know, I probably won't be online much Friday through Sunday. I should try to do that more often.

• The OAFPOTUS pretty much guaranteed that Zohran Mamdani will win today's New York City mayoral election by endorsing former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, which I'm pretty sure Cuomo didn't want either.
• Brian Beutler chastises the Democratic Party for "the scourge of wimpiness." I am tempted to send him a strongly-worded email.
• US Rep. Jan Schakowsky's (D-IL9) departure from the US House has led to so many candidates running for her seat] in the March 2026 primary, it's hard to figure out who's who or what they stand for.
• Amherst College political science professor Javier Corrales outlines how Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro has woven the fates of the country's elites together to ensure that their literal survival depends on his political survival.
• Thirteen years after the USDOT and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania spent $77 million building two off-ramps into Chester, Pa., that the community didn't ask for, absolutely no benefits have accrued to the city. As Charles Marohn reminds us, this is "the predictable outcome of a transportation funding system that rewards appearance over impact."

Finally, Block Club Chicago spent the day at one of the last 24-hour-diners in Chicago, which happens to be just 2 km from my house. Now I know where to go if I'm craving a burger at 4am.

I come to bury Cheney, not to praise him:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who extolled the power of the presidency, died Monday at the age of 84, his family said in a statement.

The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, the statement said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney advocated an aggressive new foreign policy in which potential threats would be met with swift, pre-emptive action. No longer would the U.S. wait for an enemy to strike first. He helped sell the Iraq War by issuing dire warnings to the American people. At the same time, he famously predicted that the mission itself would be relatively easy.

On Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who then hosted the show, asked Cheney if the American people were ready for a long, bloody battle.

"I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Cheney said.

There were other controversies that dogged Cheney as the Bush administration's popularity plummeted in its second term. In 2007, his chief of staff and top adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury in an investigation into the leaking of the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cheney was not implicated in the case legally, but he was tainted by the scandal nonetheless.

Then, in what was one of the more bizarre incidents involving someone as high ranking in the government as Cheney, he accidentally shot and wounded a friend, attorney Harry Whittington, in the face and chest with birdshot pellets during a 2006 weekend quail-hunting trip at a Texas ranch.

Cheney advocated for a stronger executive, rejecting the framers' ordering of the branches of government.

The analysts will have a lot to say today about Cheney's "complicated" life story. But he made the OAFPOTUS's power grab possible, by supporting Federal candidates and judicial nominees who agreed that Congress should take a back seat to the President, regardless of the actual text of the Constitution. He even admitted that, in a way, when he supported Democratic candidates in 2022 and 2024 simply because they weren't insane.

One pundit, I forget who, said recently that Republicans and Democrats like me used to disagree on how to drive but we agreed on the destination, while people like the OAFPOTUS want to crash the car. Cheney may have been one of the former type of Republicans, and he may have agreed broadly on where we were going, but he yanked the wheel pretty hard to the right.

With the unusually late colors we have this autumn against the much earlier sunsets that started yesterday (before 4:30 pm from November 15th to December 31st, ugh!), things have remained tolerable. It will snow eventually; we'll have a freeze eventually; but for now, I'll just enjoy it.

I didn't enjoy these things, though:

• Humans formed governments in the first place to feed people; the OAFPOTUS and his village of idiots have failed at that basic task.
• Architects who have looked at the paltry plans and Goebbels-inspired model of the White House Ballroom cannot fathom why it's the size of a convention center.
• It's not that Nick Fuentes is a Nazi sympathizer, racist, sexist, misogynist asshole—he's probably all of those things—but he's also a nihilist bullshit artist.
• My party really has to stop nominating old faux-centrist dickheads for public office and get behind the people who can actually win.
• Global warming may not make your city warmer on a specific January day, but it might make your city get 20 centimeters of rain in one day.

In one bit of good news, the Illinois legislature restored $1.5 billion to state transit agencies, which means the CTA and Metra will live to fight another day. Included in the legislation was an end to parking minimums within 800 meters of public transportation hubs or corridors. I hope this encourages developers to build density where it's needed.

The Los Angeles Dodgers won game 7 of the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays last night in one of the best baseball games I've ever seen—though, for obvious reasons, not nearly as exciting as game 7 of the World Series in 2016.

The Dodgers looked buried early, falling behind 3-0 when a hobbled Bo Bichette took an exhausted Shohei Ohtani deep in the third inning. They seemed finished until the ninth, clawing back within one but never completely erasing the deficit — until Rojas saved the season with his game-tying home run to left.

Rojas saved the day for a second time on a ground ball at second base, fielding it from a drawn-in position before firing for a force-out at home plate. The next batter, Ernie Clement, sent a fly ball to deep left-center. Kiké Hernández and defensive replacement Andy Pages collided at the warning track. Hernández hit the deck. Pages completed the catch.

The game ended in the bottom of the 11th with a perfectly-executed 6-4-3 double play.

I had been rooting for the Blue Jays, but only because I thought that this year would be exactly the right year for the only Canadian team to win it all.

But it occurred to me, this may have been the first World Series ever in which the President of the United States was not welcome in either city.

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 consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections.

Why the backloading? Presumably Republicans believed that by the time Americans woke up to what was happening, the G.O.P. would have effectively consolidated one-party rule, making future elections irrelevant.

Instead, however, the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule.

So what went wrong? I’d attribute it to a combination of policy ignorance, visceral hatred of doing anything that helps people in need, and the Epstein files. (Seriously.)

But remember, the modern Republican Party has "a visceral dislike for doing anything that helps people in need" which makes them unlikely to take the simple steps necessary to solve the problem they created. Like, for example, doing what their fearless leader has asked: end the filibuster and pass a clean resolution reopening the government. (Of course, that would be a gift for my party that could only be enhanced by candy and a stripper.)

Fortunately for the 42 million people who were about to starve next month, a Federal judge in Rhode Island has ordered the Dept of Agriculture to distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to the people entitled to them "as soon as possible."

We'll see how this plays out over the weekend.

My old Surface decided it didn't trust its own drive this morning when I booted up in my downtown office. Instead of getting a new laptop, I had stumped for the $30 fee to buy another year of security patches for Windows 10. Well, the latest one changed the Bitlocker settings, requiring me to enter the recovery key...which I couldn't get to from my downtown office.

Fortunately I had the key at home and entered it manually without a problem, so the Surface has sprung back to life. I will have to replace it soon, too, if for no other reason than I was worried for most of the day that it was bricked.

It also means I just had to declare bankruptcy on most of my news emails when I finally got home. But that's probably better for my mental health anyway.

Also, final note: the next version of The Daily Parker is up and running in its dev/test environment. We're still weeks away from me publicizing the URL, but I am pretty stoked that it has a functioning UI with some actual blogging features.

Even though I have a cute beagle hanging around my office this week, and even though I've had a lot to do at work (including a very exciting deployment today), the world keeps turning:

• The OAFPOTUS pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for the crime of running a massive money-laundering website, because of course Zhao bribed him.
• Brian Beutler thinks the OAFPOTUS's corruption has gotten too obvious for even his supporters to ignore, leading to "the things Democrats like to talk about and the things I wish they’d talked about [beginning] to converge."
• Speaking of corruption, not to mention things that are so prima facie bad that it takes a special kind of felon to even suggest it, privately funding the US military is an obviously illegal and demonstrably dangerous idea. Just ask the Roman Senate.
• Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to reconvene the House, and the Republican majority in the Senate refuse to waive the filibuster on funding SNAP, which are the two biggest things the Republican majority has chosen to do instead of making sure 40 million Americans don't go hungry next week.
• Michael Tomasky makes a point that I've made to one of my Republican trolls acquaintances: it really doesn't matter to the national Democratic Party if Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday: It's NYC, not Maine.

Finally, if you're looking to pick up a little lakeside real estate, this house in Kenilworth, Ill., is on the market for the first time ever. It's a steal at $7 million.