Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it.
Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist:
- Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of the National Guard] during the Civil Rights Era were over the refusal of segregationist state governments to enforce federal law under court order. Trump’s argument is...[that] the President [has the right] to decide when a state government isn’t protecting or enforcing civil order to his liking and to intervene with federalized National Guard or the U.S. military to do it at the point of a bayonet. ... The crisis the administration insisted it needed to solve was a crisis of the administration’s creation."
- Philip Bump puts the encroaching fascism in broader context: "What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. ... The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel...."
- The Guardian highlights how Chicago has led the way in resisting the OAFPOTUS's xenophobic mass-deportation program, as part of our long history of respecting immigrant rights.
- Anne Applebaum looks at last week's election in Poland and feels a chill that "every election is now existential."
- Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former film critic for Entertainment Weekly, likens the OAFPOTUS's style of governing to Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
- Ezra Klein expresses surprise at who has objected the most to the recommendations in his recent book Abundance, and the left-wing emphasis on messaging: "Democrats aren’t struggling primarily because they choose the wrong messages. They’re struggling because they fail to solve problems. ... [Brandon] Johnson is the most proudly left-wing big-city mayor in the country. ... He’s also the least popular big-city mayor in the country and may well end up as the least popular mayor in Chicago’s history. Policy failure breeds political failure."
- Oh, by the way, Meta and Yandex have started to de-anonymize your Android device by abusing how your Internet browser works.
Finally, a community group on the Northwest Side has launched an effort to build a 5-km rails-to-trails plus greenway project to connect the Bloomingdale Trail with the North Branch Trail. This would create a direct connection between the southern flank of Lincoln Park and the Chicago Botanic Garden in suburban Glencoe. It's still early days, though. I'd love to see this in my lifetime. I'm also waiting for electrified railroads around Chicago, but this project would be a lot cheaper.
A smattering of stories this morning show how modern life is both better and worse than in the past:
- A criminologist at Cambridge has spent 15 years working on "murder maps" of London, Oxford, and York, showing just how awful it was to live in the 14th Century: "The deadliest of the cities was Oxford, which he estimated to have a homicide rate of about 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, while London and York hovered at 20 to 25 per 100,000. (In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, London’s homicide rate was about 1.2 per 100,000 inhabitants.)"
- An economist I've quoted often on The Daily Parker looks at the entirely-predictable falling out between the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X and finds a perfect example of the worst corruption the US government has ever experienced: "both men start from the presumption that the U.S. government is an entirely corrupt enterprise, with the president in a position to hand out personal favors or engage in personal acts of vengeance."
- Yascha Mounk sees it as the OAFPOTUS failing to build a coalition. (That this feud has erupted between two malignant narcissists and may be entirely kayfabe is left unexplored by both writers.)
- Jeff Maurer takes a different view that is no less depressing: "that farting baby penguin is a harbinger of the end of democracy (is a sentence that I thought I’d never write). ... Trump found a major flaw in our system, which is that you can get away with illegal stuff as long as you do so much illegal stuff that nobody can keep track."
- A tech bro with about the competence you'd expect named Sahil Lavingia used an LLM to create a script that purged more than 600 Veterans Affairs contracts in a partially-successful attempt to become the Dunning-Krueger Champion for the month of April.
- I'm not sure Slate's Scaachi Koul is entirely fair to Katy Perry in an article from earlier this week, but it's a compelling read.
Finally, I plan to spend a good bit of this afternoon on my semi-compulsory half-day holiday reading an actual book, John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye, his latest and one of his silliest. What would happen in the moon suddenly turned to cheese? Hilarity, in Scalzi's world. It's a lot more fun to read than any newspaper.
And then...dinner at Ribfest!
We had a lovely double rainbow yesterday:
But this morning, we had something else entirely:
Canadian wildfire smoke raised the air-quality index in Chicago to well over 150 this morning. This is the satellite view from about 20 minutes ago:
Unlike the last couple of weeks, however, the smoke has now descended to ground level, making Chicago look like it did in the 1970s, before the Clean Air Act started to do its thing:
We're hoping the smoke clears up soon. And that the Canadian firefighters will get the prairie fires under control.
As for the politics, well, the droughts and changing moisture patterns leading to the fires up north are predicted consequences of human-induced climate change.
Really, this post is just a list of links, but I'm going to start with Dan Rather's latest Stack:
- US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) started her 2026 re-election campaign last week by telling constituents not to worry about the proposed $880 billion cuts to Medicaid because "we are all going to die."
- Writer Andy Craig takes a look at the destruction the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have caused, and tries to find a path back to a constitutional republic. "Whatever eventually replaces this crisis-ridden government will result in a new constitutional settlement, not a simple revival of what came before. We will find ourselves engaged in a kind of constitution-making arguably not seen since Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War."
- Paul Krugman looks at what professional money people are doing, and thus what they're predicting, and warns that the TACO trade is misguided, because the OAFPOTUS really has no off-ramp for his tariff obsession: "[T]he nonsensical nature of the whole enterprise is why I don’t think he’ll find an off-ramp. After all, it’s obvious that the increased steel tariff wasn’t a considered policy, it was a temper tantrum after the Court of International Trade ruled against his other tariffs. ... If you want to know where this is going, keep your eyes on the bond and currency markets, where cool-headed traders realize that U.S. policy is still being dictated by the whims of a mad king."
- Evan Osnos smacks his forehead at the unprecedented scale and reach of said mad king's plundering of the United States.
- Max Boot points to the OAFPOTUS's assault on science and education as "the suicide of a superpower."
- Jen Rubin believes the Republican Party has "no good options on the budget," thanks to a Democratic Party in array.
- The Clown Prince of X likes to excuse his sociopathy, cruelty, immaturity, and incompetence by claiming he's "Aspie." (He isn't. He's just a rich asshole.)
- Josh Marshall relays the story about the mess (literal and figurative) that the United States Institute of Peace faced when they got back into their offices after its illegal DOGE takeover in March.
Finally, Streetsblog Chicago's Harjas Sandhu shakes his fist at the seeming inability of the Chicago Transit Authority to find competent leadership. At least it's not currently run by a not-too-bright reality TV star. (And I don't mean the OAFPOTUS.)
I have had no more than 15 consecutive minutes free at any point today. The rest of the week I have 3½-hour blocks on my calendar, but all the other meetings had to go somewhere, so they went to Monday.
So just jotting down stories that caught my eye:
Finally, the Illinois House failed to pass a budget bill that included funding the Regional Transportation Authority. Despite regional transport agencies facing a $770 million funding shortfall later this summer, the House couldn't agree on how to pay for it, in part because downstate Republicans don't want to pay for it at all. The Legislature could return in special session this summer, but because of our hippy-dippy 1970 state constitution, they need a 3/5 vote to pass a budget after June 1st. If they can't pass the budget soon, the RTA may have to cut 40% of its services, decimating public transport for the 7 million people in the area.
My party wants to govern, and understands that government needs to provide a service that millions of people who depend on even if people who don't use the service have to contribute. I mean, some of my taxes go to Republican farm subsidy programs, and I accept that's part of the deal. Republicans no longer think our needs matter. They need to be careful what they wish for.
Two photos this morning. First, Cassie tried to convince the other patrons at Spiteful Brewing yesterday that no one ever pats her:
She was pretty successful with the ruse. People stopped to pat her continuously. She has us all trained.
Second, here is the GOES-East visible light photo from about half an hour ago:
See all that haze from Alberta and Saskatchewan in the northwest, through the US Midwest, and swooping all the way down to Jacksonville and out to the Atlantic? That's wildfire smoke from the Canadian plains. There isn't a cloud in the sky over Chicago right now, but we can really see the haze.
Cassie and I are about to go on an adventure involving A Ride in the Car!, and we'll probably get another hour of walkies today. The smoke hasn't yet descended to ground level so the AQI is not great (61) but so far not hazardous. Still, the number of fires this early in the season doesn't bode well for the summer fire season.
First, an update on Cassie: her spleen and lymph cytology came back clean, with no evidence of mast cell disease. That means the small tumor on her head is likely the only site of the disease, and they can pop it out surgically. We'll probably schedule that for the end of June.
I have had an unusually full calendar this week, so this afternoon I blocked off three and a half hours with "No Meetings - Coding." Before I dive into finishing up the features for what I expect will be the 129th boring release of the product I'm working on, I am taking a moment to read the news, which I have not had time to do all day:
Finally, the city of Chicago has started formal negotiations with the Union Pacific Railroad to acquire an abandoned right-of-way on the Northwest Side—that Cassie and I walked on just a week ago and that my Brews & Choos buddy and I used to get to Alarmist back in November 2023. The project still requires a few million dollars and a few years to complete. Still, the city also is talking about building a protected bike lane along Bryn Mawr Avenue in the North Park and Lincoln Square Community Areas, which would connect the Weber Spur with the North Shore trail just east of the Chicago River. For the time being, the UPRR doesn't seem to mind people walking on their right-of-way, though technically it's still private property. But that trail will be really cool when completed.
And now, I will finish this feature...
On some days, I have more meetings than others. Today was a more extreme example, with meetings for 6 of the 8½ hours I put in. Somehow I also managed to read some documentation and get some other things accomplished. I also can't say that any of the meetings was a waste of time, either. Welcome back to management.
Unfortunately, that meant I could only put these stories in a queue so I can read them now:
- William Finnegan wonders if he or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi "Dead Puppies" Noem is brain-damaged.
- Chicago's animal shelters report a surge in surrenders as people discover pets cost a lot of money (I'm looking at you, Cassie).
- Does it make sense for the CDC to recommend that healthy children and pregnant women not get a covid booster? Yes, with some pretty big caveats, and a reminder that corruption and incompetence make it really hard to trust what comes out of the executive branch these days.
- With only a couple of days left until the Illinois legislature lets public transit in Chicago fall off a cliff, a bill is slouching towards the governor's desk to reorganize our multiple transit agencies into one big one.
OK, Cassie is sitting next to me and staring into my eyes with an intense "feed me" vibe, so off I go. I really hope I have fewer meetings tomorrow.
Cassie spent yesterday morning at the local veterinary oncology clinic getting poked. The ultrasound looked good, so we're just waiting for results from her spleen and lymph cytology. They said she was a model patient, although they did give her a light sedative so she wouldn't squirm during the ultrasound.
And for the next couple of weeks she'll have a naked belly:
The sedative had quite an amusing effect. I've only seen her stoned once before. Yesterday she acted more like she'd just come from a Playing Dead ("No, man! Play Floyd!") concert than the inert blob she was last time.
More info when the cytology comes back. Plus all the news stories that have accumulated while I've been in meetings all day.
The OAFPOTUS is blatantly selling pardons now:
[Paul] Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak’s offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.
Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden — an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.
[W]eeks went by and no pardon was forthcoming, even as Mr. Trump issued clemency grants to hundreds of other allies.
Then, Ms. Fago was invited to a $1-million-per-person fund-raising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Mr. Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.
Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Mr. Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon.
Imagine if any other president had done this—and I mean, any other president—he'd be impeached and convicted by the end of June.
The Republican Party has embraced corruption in all its forms. Selling a pardon doesn't even make them blink.