Lots of morning meetings, then stuff so far this afternoon, and now...a quick breath. Of course, given that it's still 2025, I'm not exactly breathing sweet summer air:
Finally, Wicker Park's Smoke Daddy, one of my favorite rib joints, will close January 4th after 31 years on Division Street. I admit, I haven't been there since March 2023, but that has more to do with my cholesterol than with my feelings about the place. The restaurant's Wrigleyville location will keep going, and the owners say they'll open something else in that spot sometime in 2026. There are only a few days between now and its closing that I'm able to get there, but I will. Oh yes. I will.
I've been heads-down debugging, except for going to the meetings already on my calendar, and just realized I've got to leave for rehearsal soon. I'll have to come back to these fun little nuggets later:
- What is this bullshit the OAFPOTUS is pushing about "white genocide" in South Africa?
- After some consideration, James Fallows has come around to believing that the way Senate Democrats ended the government shutdown will actually help us next year.
- The Chicago City Council finance committee rejected Mayor Brandon Johnson's tax plan for the second year in a row, principally over his plan to tax every employer in the city with more than 200 100 workers $21 $18 a month per employee.
- Weakness in downtown the real estate market has pushed up property taxes all over the city, on average by 17%. My tax bill came Saturday and had a 12% increase, so I guess I got off lucky?
Finally McSweeney's wonders what it's like to work for an evil company and still consider yourself a good person.
As many of the founders feared, the OAFPOTUS's worst offenses against the rule of law have come from his abuse of the pardon power. David French takes us through the history of how it got into our Constitution:
As our newsroom reported this week, at least eight people to whom Trump granted clemency in his first term have since been charged with a crime.
In addition, “Several others pardoned more recently after being convicted of offenses committed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have also run into trouble with the law.”
But the pardons just keep coming. On Sunday, Trump granted sweeping pardons to 77 people who helped him attempt to subvert the 2020 election. Last week, Trump pardoned Glen Casada, the Republican former speaker of the Tennessee House, and Casada’s former chief of staff, Cade Cothren. Both men had been convicted of charges including wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. If there was one element of the American Constitution that set off the most urgent alarm during the founding era, it was the pardon power — Article II’s grant of absolute, unchecked power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
Here’s one suggestion: Amend Article II so that it states that the president “shall have Power, with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate, to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
The pardon power should exist as a matter of last resort, deployed only when the American legal system has truly failed to deliver justice, or when the national interest in a pardon is overwhelming.
I'm in favor of that. I think the wording needs to be changed. And I still support a change to the structure of the US government that makes the Attorney General answer to voters and not the president, as I outlined during the OAFPOTUS's first term.
Speaking of abuses, today is the 65th anniversary of Ruby Bridges breaking the color barrier in New Orleans schools. Remember when Federal power was used to protect people?
"Enjoy:"
- Charles Marohn rips apart the OAFPOTUS's half-baked proposal to allow 50-year mortgages, which would transfer even more rents to bankers than the current housing situation does.
- In a spectacular own-goal that will, I hope, be rolled back very soon, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has decided the city will no longer buy US treasury bonds, which are still the safest investments in the world and do not "support the regime" as she daftly claims.
- Jennifer Rubin cheers the millions of voters who have come around to the unavoidable conclusion that the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are horrible, incompetent, corrupt people.
- Kyla Scanlon toured 30 states and two other countries to answer the question, "where did American prosperity go?"
- Will Gotsegen warns that, even though the Republican-caused, longest government shutdown in history ended yesterday, cleaning up from it will take a while.
- Historian Zachary Karabell explains that the OAFPOTUS's eye-watering corruption is (a) nothing new in US politics and (b) not the end of the Republic. (He agrees its awful, at least.)
- The US Mint in Philadelphia stamped out the last pennies ever yesterday. The first ones, minted in 1793, had the purchasing power equivalent of 33c today.
Finally, Chicago's Alinea has lost its third Michelin star, fundamentally changing the fine-dining scene in the city. When the 2026 Guide comes out officially next week, Chicago will have only one 3-star restaurant. Quel horreur !
A coronal mass ejection late last week caused Kp7-level aurorae last night that people could see as far south as Alabama. Unfortunately, I missed them, though some of my friends did not. Fortunately, NOAA predicts that another mass of charged particles will hit around 6pm tonight, causing even more pronounced aurorae for most of the night. This time, I plan to get to a dark corner of the suburbs to look for them.
Meanwhile:
- ProPublica has an extended report about how the OAFPOTUS uses pardons and clemency far more corruptly than Harding, Jackson, or Reagan could imagine. (Madison, Jefferson, and the rest of the founders could imagine it, however, and they did not like it one bit.)
- John Judis thinks "the 8 dissenters did Democrats a favor:" "I believe that as the shutdown dragged into Thanksgiving, and as more jobs were lost, social services suspended, and planes grounded, the public would have begun blaming the Democrats more because — let’s face it — they had initiated the shutdown. The polls also showed that far more Democrats than Republicans felt affected by the shutdown."
- Brian Beutler wonders whether the divergence between people's perception of the economy and reality has more to do with the fracturing media landscape than with people's ability to intuit reality the same way economists do: "Our collective, manic emphasis on the cost of things has both made people upset, and given people a peg to hang their political frustrations on—but people did not become upset over nominal prices in some organic way. Democrats shouldn’t convince themselves that if they manage to lower prices, they’ll be assured more victories, or that if Trump manages to get costs down (perhaps with the help of the Supreme Court) he’ll become politically invulnerable. They certainly shouldn’t convince themselves that all things unconnected to prices are politically inert."
- Amanda Nelson reminds us that in 2008, the wealthy people who got wealthier even as the housing market collapsed and impoverished millions weren't stupid; they just didn't care. And neither do the authors of Project 2025.
- The $1.5 billion Illinois just pledged to transit projects fundamentally changed the vision of passenger rail across the region, according to the High Speed Rail Alliance.
- Chicago has issued the first permits for construction of the new O'Hare Concourse D, the first new concourse built at the airport since Terminal 5 opened in 1993. Construction could complete as early as 2028.
Finally, the OAFPOTUS's latest demented assertion about crime on the "miracle mile shopping center" left people baffled and also led to city council member Brendan Reilly (D-42), whose ward includes the Magnificent Mile, clapping back: "My suggestion to President Trump: spend more time focusing on your struggling real estate investments, especially the 70,000 square feet of vacant retail space that has remained un-leased since the opening of Trump Tower, 16 years ago...."
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:
And yesterday, as most people know, was the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior.
I posted too soon. Obviously, I tempted the wrath of the whatever high atop the thing, and it noticed:
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Here's the ironic part: the government shutdown has (almost) nothing to do with this delay. The plane is broken. And because of the capacity controls today, the airline can't simply swap in another 737-800.
Fortunately, I live in Chicago, so I'll just go home for a few hours. Updates as the situation develops.
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...
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.
Voters across the US told the OAFPOTUS to pound sand in the clearest electoral rebuke to a major political party since 1984, and the hardest slap to an incumbent president probably since 1868. Democrats won crushing victories in Virginia, New Jersey, California, and even Mississippi. Almost every county in Virginia shifted toward Democrats, and no amount of money could unseat three Democratic Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania. Plus, Zohran Mamdani beat the OAFPOTUS-endorsed candidates to win the New York City mayoral election, which doubles as a bitch-slap to the establishment pundits who can't wait for him to fail.
The Republicans, in short, got spanked hard.
I don't have time to summarize all the reactions, so I'll just list a few:
While voters were handing the OAFPOTUS and his droogs their political asses during the longest government shutdown in history (second only to the one in their first term), armed thugs from the Dept of Homeland Security burst into a fucking day-care just a couple kilometers from my house to arrest a woman that the day care says is legally authorized to work for them. But little kids screaming in terror while one of their caregivers gets thrown to the floor and handcuffed is the point for these assholes, and is just one of the many malfeasances of this administration that led to yesterday's decisive losses for their party.
Yesterday showed that Americans learned the correct lessons from Venezuela and Hungary, and the Republicans didn't. Know hope.