The Daily Parker

The only thing Illinois governor JB Pritzker said this afternoon that I quibble with is that Stephen Miller is a "complicit lackey*:"

* Pritzker has the relationship wrong; Miller is no more a lackey than Goebbels was. The OAFPOTUS just doesn't care what Miller does as long as Miller delivers the goods.

In yet another consequence of the ongoing stupidity of the OAFPOTUS and his droogs, postal services around the world have suspended service to the US while they figure out how they're going to deal with the end of the de minimis tariff exemption:

The Trump administration ended the exception for China and Hong Kong in May. In an executive order signed last month, Trump extended the decision to all countries starting Aug. 29, meaning that most low-value parcels will also be charged tariffs.

Suspensions have also been announced across Asia and the Pacific. India’s Department of Posts said that it would temporarily stop mail service to the U.S. beginning Monday. Thailand temporarily suspended all international postal parcel services to the U.S., while South Korea, Singapore and New Zealand suspended most shipments. Australia Post has temporarily suspended what is known as transit shipping — where goods from other countries are shipped to the U.S. via Australia.

The extra charges on a package will depend on the methodology used to calculate it, according to the executive order. The duty rate will either match the level of tariff the U.S. has imposed on the country of origin, or a specific duty based on the following:

• For countries with a tariff rate of 15 percent or less, such as Britain, each package will incur an additional charge of $80.
• Parcels originating from countries with U.S. tariffs of between 16 and 25 percent will incur an additional $160.
• Countries with a tariff rate of more than 25 percent will face an extra $200.

So, yeah, don't send any packages home from your trip abroad. Who knows, maybe it'll cost $200 for your post cards, too?

The stupidity would be funnier if it weren't costing us billions.

My friends just dropped Butters off, and so far she hasn't complained too much after a bit of whining when they left. I'm sure she's going to find the next hour objectionable when I take Cassie for a half-hour walk after I take Butters around the block. Since Cassie walks about 3x as fast as Butters, it's possible both walks will take 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, I commend to you Julia Ioffe's latest observations on "the art of getting played," in which she breaks down how the OAFPOTUS and US Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff are just embarrassing the United States because they refuse to learn how New York real-estate salesmanship differs from negotiating with Russia:

“Something got garbled,” the source told me. “Trump said, Let’s have a meeting,” between the three of us, and “Putin, as I understand it, answered evasively. But Trump probably didn’t understand it.” What Putin did say, according to this person, was that he’d “raise the level” of the talks. It didn’t mean that Putin agreed to meet with Zelensky, but rather that, this time, he’d agree to sending higher-ranking people to participate in Russian-Ukrainian talks. “But Trump heard it as an agreement,” the source said. “Putin tries to play with words, but Trump thinks it’s a yes.”

It’s hard to imagine a more ridiculous outcome. Trump and Witkoff, former real estate tycoons, want to push through a deal yesterday and tout their accomplishments to the media. Trump, as he’s made clear, wants deals, deals, deals—because is a peace deal really so different?—so he can finally get his Nobel Peace Prize. But the world of New York real estate is a soothing spa compared to the dark, Byzantine maw that is the Russian state, and Trump and Witkoff are clearly no match for it. They are so illiterate in the context, culture, and even the reality of what they’re dealing with that it is, frankly, embarrassing. Even worse, they clearly don’t even realize how badly they are out of their depth. As one analyst in town put it, “These people are idiots.”

Yes, these people are idiots. It gets worse: Witkoff is so out of his depth that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin could use him to punk the entire CIA:

[Take] the case of Juliane Gallina, a senior C.I.A. official whose mentally ill 21-year-old son, Michael Gloss, was killed fighting for the Russian army in Ukraine in April 2024. Earlier this month, Witkoff had visited Moscow to meet with Putin, who had given him a gift for Gallina: the Order of Courage, a Soviet-era award for outstanding civilian service, in honor of her son.

At the time, the gesture was described in the press alternately as “a dig” and a way to “needle” the American president. But let’s be serious. This was Putin, a former K.G.B. officer and head of the F.S.B., using Witkoff to say “fuck you” to his old enemy, the American intelligence services. It was saying, in essence, even the children of your spooks choose our side—and using the president’s own envoy to deliver the message.

Witkoff had not only accepted the Order of Courage, but passed it on. “For Witkoff, who lost a son in the opioid epidemic, losing a child is a traumatic experience that transcends geopolitics,” Tapper wrote. “And he thought it worthwhile to give the medal to Juliane Gallina, the C.I.A.’s deputy director for digital innovation.”

Witkoff saw it as a way to bond with a fellow grieving parent, but that’s almost certainly not how Putin meant it. Putin was sending a message to Gallina and the C.I.A. that was packaged so that Witkoff wouldn’t understand it. That too is part of the insult: pointing out that Witkoff understands so little, and is so easily manipulated by the Russian president, that he can use him, like an unwitting mule, to give a senior American intelligence officer a black eye.

“Witkoff may be the most inept and clueless envoy in the history of U.S.-Russian diplomacy,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired senior C.I.A. officer who learned about playing nice with the Russians the hard way. “By first accepting and then delivering the medal, he both went along and then actually actively aided Putin’s mockery and trolling of America.”

Look, I don't believe that the OAFPOTUS is a Russian spy or that Putin has kompromat on the guy. But it's obvious that the President of the United States is a Russian asset. There have always been useful idiots, just never one so useful.

OK, Butters has decided she's unhappy that her family have left her here and has started singing to the neighborhood. Must run.

Author Chris Armitage makes an uncomfortable observation:

Here's what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think.

The pattern is so consistent it's almost funny if it weren't so terrifying. Every single time it goes like this: Conservatives panic about socialism or progressives or whatever. They ally with fascists as the "lesser evil." Fascists take power. Fascists immediately purge the conservatives who helped them. Then it's 30-50 years of dictatorship. This happened in Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.

And here's the part that breaks your heart. Violence works. For them. Fascists use violence while claiming to be victims. They create chaos that "requires" their authoritarian solution. Then they purge anyone who opposes them. Meanwhile, democrats keep insisting on following rules that fascists completely ignore. They file lawsuits. They write editorials. They vote on resolutions. And fascists just laugh and keep consolidating power.

So, how are we doing this time? Armitage actually has a smidgin of optimism:

No wealthy democracy with nuclear weapons has ever fallen to fascism. The 1930s examples everyone cites were broken countries. Weimar Germany was weakened by World War I and hyperinflation. Italy was barely industrialized. Spain was largely agrarian. They didn't have the world's reserve currency. They didn't have thousands of nukes. They didn't have surveillance technology that would make the Stasi weep with envy.

America has all of that. Plus geographic isolation that makes external intervention impossible. Plus a population where 30-40% genuinely wants authoritarian rule as long as it hurts the "right people." The historical playbook is useless here. We're in unprecedented territory.

But that also means the old rules about what's possible might not apply.

He has a few concrete suggestions that depend on the cojones of Democratic governors in the states that make up 70% of the United States' economic output. This, by the way, is also unprecedented. In every other case where authoritarians have taken over, it helped that the leaders had much more popularity (at first) than the OAFPOTUS has ever had, and that much of their popularity came from the economic powerhouses of the country.

It wasn't the happiest read of the day, but I thought it worth sharing.

I have a chunk of work to do this afternoon, but I'm hoping I can sneak in some time to read all of these:

• Dan Rather cheers on the Democratic Party for finally finding the fight.
• Francis Fukuyama says: move over Berlusconi; the Clown Prince of X has done considerably more to harm Western civilization than you ever did.
• David Daley puts responsibility for the exploding fight over Congressional maps squarely on US Chief Justice John Roberts.
• Jennifer Rubin wants us to stop using the word "guarantee" when we don't mean it—which would include every single time the OAFPOTUS utters it, obviously.
• Matthew Yglesias points out that mothers leaving the workforce has very little to do with "tradwives" and everything to do with "the economy."
• Rick Harnish and Theo Anderson argue that Illinois needs to expand and improve Metra if it wants to lead the quantum computing revolution: "Converting Metra to electrified regional rail is the key."
• Yascha Mounk asks "how we got the Internet all wrong."
• Meghan Daum looks on with some amusement at the new feud between New Yorker culture critic Doreen St Félix and conservative activist Christopher Rufo.
• Ellen Steinke, writing for Streetsblog Chicago, argues while that getting former Chicago Transportation Authority president Dorval Carter, Jr., out of the agency ended his reign of incompetence, the impending $771 million shortfall in State funds will keep his successor from fixing the damage.
• Paul Krugman argues that consumers are paying more because data centers are demanding so much more electricity than even a couple of years ago, to the point of creating the giant pin that will burst the AI investment bubble without regulation.

Finally, after complaints up and down the lakefront that the US Air Force Thunderbirds caused a sonic boom during Chicago Air and Water Show practice on Friday, University of Illinois aeronautics professor Matthew Clarke says that while none of the F-16s appear to have exceeded Mach 1, he is confident that part of one of the planes did. “Even though the global flow may not be faster than the speed of sound, there are places locally faster than the speed of sound, creating shock waves,” he said. “While I can’t say that the whole plane went supersonic, I can say — from the video — shock waves [were created] from parts of the aircraft.” The mini-sonic boom broke the lobby windows of four Lakeview high-rises but caused no significant injuries.

Also: I am beyond overjoyed that the National Weather Service predicts dewpoints below 18°C by Wednesday and below 15°C by Saturday. We have had the most uncomfortable summer that I can remember, with dewpoints at Inner Drive Technology WHQ lingering above 20°C since 10:30 Friday morning after a very brief respite on Thursday. If I have time this week, I'm going to analyze the data to see exactly how humid it's been here lately. But this prediction is delightful:

Even though I put aside Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism for the moment because it was just too depressing, I do still think about the ongoing destruction of the United States from within.

Over the weekend I realized that one way the billionaire class have approached their accelerating theft of our collective wealth is to attack the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. By undermining the lowest two levels, physiological needs and safety needs, they render entire communities unable even to address the higher needs that the modern Democratic Party tends to worry about.

This makes it even more of an imperative for our party to present an actual plan for how we're going to make sure people have homes, food, health care, and physical security. This shouldn't be hard. Until we do, people won't have any space in their minds for long-term infrastructure project let alone social justice.

The Republican Party, in service of their billionaire donors, have bombed the US Government back to the 18th Century. We've go a lot of work to do before we can campaign on DEI or UBI. I don't for a second want us to stop doing those things; but FFS, we need to talk about much simpler issues until people feel secure enough to listen.

It's no accident that the most prosperous period in the most prosperous country in world history coincided with a strong middle class, highly progressive taxes, and strong labor unions. Only then did people have the mental energy to worry about civil rights for people they'd never meet. And the Republican Party has spent the last 70 years trying to prevent and then undo those gains.

Everything we're seeing is about corruption: taking money from us and giving it to billionaires instead of investing it in the country. It won't stop until we make it stop by winning back power and taxing the shit out of them.

The OAFPOTUS met with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, yesterday. I can't overstate that Putin won on so many levels, from getting the OAFPOTUS to agree to meeting on US soil in the first place to getting the OAFPOTUS to stomp on a rake on international television right at the end of it.

Let's start with the location. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin that most ICC signatories have said they will honor. We're not signatories, in part because President GW Bush was afraid of getting arrested overseas for the Iraq debacle. So the US is one of only a handful of countries Putin can even visit.

Next, though the OAFPOTUS probably doesn't remember this if he even learned it in the first place, Russia sold Alaska to the US in 1867 for $7 million (about $150 million today). Putin has made lots of noise about restoring Russian "greatness," making photos of him standing on the ground in Alaska a tremendous win for his domestic agenda. We gave this thing of great value to him for nothing. Nothing.

As even Ted Baxter could have predicted, the summit ended with no deal.

Then came the news conference, at which Putin said with a shit-eating grin while the OAFPOTUS wiped the shit off of his chin, "Next time, in Moscow." In fucking ENGLISH, just to twist the knife a bit more.

Oh, just FUCK YOU VERY MUCH, Vlad. I don't have the mental energy to explain all the ways that was possibly the most insulting, most trolling, least serious way he could possibly have ended the conference. And all of our allies and adversaries understood him perfectly.

Did the OAFPOTUS respond with at least the diplomatic awareness of the lunch lady at Foggy Bottom by saying something like, "Thank you for the thought, Mr President, but we have a lot of work to do before we can begin to consider such a step"? Of course not. No, the lunch lady at Foggy Bottom desperately wished she could wrap a diaper around his incontinent mouth, because the OAFPOTUS instead said, "Ooh, that's an interesting one. Uhh, I'll get a little heat for that happening, but I could see it possibly happening."

Somebody, please, invoke the 25th already. And Donald, please zip up your fly; no one needs to see that.

So, yesterday we got less than nothing. Ukraine got nothing (which, ironically, was better than they feared). Putin got everything he wanted and more. He played the OAFPOTUS like Stevie Ray Vaughn played a '63 Stratocaster. It was like watching your asshole uncle Dwayne go hard-core in Sorry! against a toddler. (At least the toddler would have the sense to cry and throw the board at him.)

I know I promised to concentrate on calling out the guy's corruption and not the myriad other ways he doesn't have the fitness of mind or morals to serve as a Chicago alderman, let alone President of the United States. But holy shit, this was one of the most embarrassing US diplomatic own-goals of the past hundred years.

Brendan McGann cannot come to the White House, and Vladimir Putin cannot come to the United States. This isn't hard.

Update: It gets better. State Department officials appear to have left behind classified documents that "shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees" on a fucking public printer. Putin was already laughing so hard on the flight home that they heard him in Japan, and we just gave him a lagniappe.

The OAFPOTUS has moved to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force under the DC Home Rule statute that gives him a little more than a month to do so before Congress has to consent. As with many of his more dramatic trolls, this has sent everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell into varying degrees of outrage.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort warn that the "military crackdowns are only going to get worse:"

The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end with D.C. and L.A., that other military options are very much on the table. The facts, the laws, and data do not seem to matter: Trump and his team believe he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, including using the U.S. armed forces for domestic political purposes as well as intimidating his enemies. His team is privately putting together plans for him to do just that.

Trump has long yearned to unleash the military on American soil for his political agenda, and the D.C. and L.A. deployments this summer are critical stepping stones in his increasingly authoritarian government’s vision for punishing his enemies Democratic area of the country, carrying out his brutal immigration agenda, and making life hell for unhoused people. Trump said on Monday that federal forces will work to remove “homeless encampments from all over our parks,” and that the unhoused will not be “allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.”

Trump officials note that it is a priority of the president’s that these kinds of military deployments — in L.A., and now D.C., in times of relative calm — become normalized in American political culture.

(Emphasis mine.) Federal agents have already started clearing DC homeless encampments and marching the homeless off to jail in a show of performative cruelty unmatched since Jim Crow.

Josh Marshall warns us not to get distracted by the legal niceties and to look at this as the first of many steps to occupy left-leaning US cities:

My argument was that even though the unique rules governing DC make this legal it is by Trump’s own argument part of a rollout he envisions for using federal police (ICE, CBP, FBI) and the National Guard to start taking over policing in big U.S. cities, universally blue cities and in every case in blue states.

We are fundamentally in a battle over public opinion. If a decisive majority of the public opposes Trump, his rule and criminality won’t stand. What follows from that is that what might be technically legal under some obscure statute or simply unreviewable isn’t the point. That’s deep in the weeds. That’s Michael Dukakis delving into statutes and principled opposition to the death penalty when the moment calls for modulated fury and outrage.

The issue is do people want to live under martial law, in cities occupied by the military.

Radley Balko breaks down "the White House lies about DC:"

So let’s get this out of the way, first: As I wrote in my previous post, Donald Trump’s “takeover” of Washington, D.C. is authoritarian thuggery. It’s a projection of power, driven by retrograde racism. It has nothing to do with recent crimes, or actual crime, or actual crime rates. We know this because it’s been in the works for more than a year. That said, I think it’s still important to point out when they’re lying. And everything they’re claiming in justification of the deployment of National Guard troops to D.C. is a lie.

This seems like a good time to remind everyone that when he first entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump inherited the lowest murder rate of any president in 50 years. Four years later, he was the first president in 30 years to leave with a higher murder rate than when he started.

Deploying the military won’t make people safer — and it won’t make people feel safer. We’re seeing more disorder because the pandemic brought a surge in mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness, and funding for social programs hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Now that the Trump administration has taken a huge bite out of federal supplemental funding for those programs, it’s probably going to get worse.

I’m fairly comfortable predicting that, contrary to the administration’s claims, Donald Trump will not end crime in D.C. I’ll also go out on a limb and predict that the Democrats are not going to unravel civilization. To the extent that our own civilization is in jeopardy, Donald Trump is a big part of the cause.

NPR's Steve Inskeep, a DC resident, says "of course DC has crime," but c'mon, man:

[T]here is crime, and local politicos know they need to address it. But that’s not really the question raised by President Trump’s decision to seize formal control of the DC police and send in federal agents to help them.

Trump’s declaration, and all the rhetoric that accompanied it, lean into prejudice. People who do not live in big cities are conditioned to be afraid of them. I learned this as someone who did not grow up in a big city. The declaration plays on that fear, and widens the gulf between Americans.

Statistics are different from place to place. But unfortunately, crime is everywhere and anywhere; you are more likely to have a drug problem in your own family or on your own block than you are to encounter trouble in somebody else’s city.

James Fallows contrasts the OAFPOTUS's deranged ranting with "what it actually 'feels like' in DC:"

Donald Trump obviously does not know this city. According to press accounts, and to judge by his own rhetoric, Trump lurched into declaring a “public safety emergency” for DC based mainly on two pieces of evidence. One was the reported injury of the 19-year-old former Doge staffer Edward Coristine, generally known as “Big Balls,” in an alleged carjacking. The other was Trump’s alarm at seeing a homeless encampment while being driven from the White House to his own golf course in Northern Virginia.

Anyone in DC can tell you that it has big problems. My experience is that the same is true of anyone in Shanghai about their home city, anyone in LA about LA, any Londoner about London, anyone anywhere about the place they live.

But if you can find anybody who knew the area in the 1970s, the 1980s, or even the 1990s, and does not think that the DC of 2025 is vastly more pleasant, more stimulating, more beautiful, more environmentally sustainable, more cultured, better managed, and safer than it was a generation ago, then you have found someone detached from reality.

What’s the even bigger problem for DC? Taxation without representation.

Anyone paying attention to city life in the US knows the OAFPOTUS is full of shit. But that doesn't mean he can't make life difficult for everyone he hates. I'm glad DC is pushing back to the extent they're able, and I know that Illinois will push back as well if he tries that shit here. It's going to be a long 18 months until the next Congress.

Ninety years ago today, FDR signed Social Security into law:

In his public statement that day, FDR expressed concern for “young people [who] have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age” as well as those who had employment but no job security. Although he acknowledged that “we can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life,” he hoped the act would prevent senior citizens from ending up impoverished.

Although it was initially created to combat unemployment, Social Security now functions primarily as a powerful safety net for retirees and the disabled, and provides death benefits to taxpayer dependents. The Social Security system has remained popular and relatively unchanged since 1935.

Alas, the Republican Party has wanted to end or privatize Social Security since, oh, 1935, and they're getting closer to doing so. (Just look what they did to schools in Texas.) It would be the biggest heist in history and it would risk the retirement security of millions of senior Americans. As I get closer to the age when I will start taking payments from the system, I really hope the thieves in the party opposite don't succeed.

Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer describes a method of creating legislative districts that is provably and undeniably fair, even as he acknowledges that the nature of American politics would make adopting it nearly impossible:

Back in 2004, soon after earning my Ph.D., I found myself in the Harvard Society of Fellows chatting with a Supreme Court justice. I asked what single problem math or economics could solve for the Court. The answer was instantaneous: Give us an objective yardstick for political maps.

After months huddled around a whiteboard with a sharp graduate student, Richard Holden, fueled by too much bad Harvard Square coffee, we created a measure we call the “Relative Proximity Index.”

Picture every voter as a dot on the state map. First, we pin down the geometric minimum — the most compact way to bundle those dots inside the state’s jagged borders into its exact number of congressional districts, each with equal population, whether that means wrapping around Florida’s panhandle or hugging Georgia’s slanted shoulder. Then we compare the map the legislature actually draws to that floor. The ratio is the Relative Proximity Index. An R.P.I. of 1 means you’ve hit the geometric ideal; an R.P.I. of 3 means voters within a district would live — on average — three times farther apart than necessary.

In my view, the R.P.I. is the most attractive measure of gerrymandering. While it focuses on compactness to the exclusion of other criteria, it is a simple, easy-to-understand approach. It does not require an opaque computer algorithm to draw thousands of maps for comparison, and it does not rely on an assumption that a fair map will produce proportional representation (which may not be true, depending on how the parties’ constituencies are distributed geographically).

This fight hits home for me. I moved to Texas at age 5 and stayed through college. We pride ourselves on straight shooting. But the facts — who lives where — don’t match the tall tales coming out of Austin. One district hugs the Rio Grande for well over 500 miles, from San Antonio’s outskirts almost to El Paso. That’s not state pride; it’s sleight of hand. “Don’t mess with Texas”? Fine. Stop messing with Texas, and with the blue states preparing to respond in kind.

He calls my objection "fatalistic." I'd say "historical," but sure. I would wholeheartedly endorse a fair method of redistricting like this, just as I wholeheartedly endorse non-partisan redistricting commissions and expanding the House of Representatives to about 700 members. (Not to mention DC statehood.)

With one of our parties headed toward fascism and another one getting shut out of power through the kind of political skulduggery we haven't seen since the 1850s, I'm afraid this proposal will have to wait a few years.