The Daily Parker

It's hard to see the OAFPOTUS's actions towards our two biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, as in the interests of the United States. So far, the White House hasn't actually issued a (probably unlawful) order imposing steep tariffs that would undo our free-trade agreements, but just the threat has caused a lot of damage already:

As I wrote the other day, in the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low.

One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing — a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations’ borders.

But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on — that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate — that is, dis-integrate — reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.

And to think that many people imagined that Trump would be good for business.

We have, by a very narrow margin and with less than a majority of the vote, managed to put the most corrupt and possibly stupidest person in history into this office. If an adversary threatened to disrupt North American trade as much as this clown has, we'd threaten war.

And before you start wondering how long it will take for average Americans to get nervous, well, that's already happened: the only newly-inaugurated president in modern history with a lower approval rating was, of course, the same guy 8 years ago. (He has the highest disapprovals in history right now, though.)

Only 1,449 days to go...

Wednesday night saw the worst air-transport crash in the US in 19 years. The National Transportation Safety Board won't have a preliminary report until at least March 1st, but that didn't stop the OAFPOTUS from blaming everyone he doesn't like for it:

In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for imposing what he called “a big push to put diversity” that he said weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.

Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”

But here’s the rub: During Trump’s first term, the FAA began a program to hire air traffic controllers with the conditions that Trump decried.

James Fallows, like most of us, felt absolute disgust after seeing the press conference:

Donald Trump’s press appearance today, designed to advance this slur and fiction, was despicable.

-He made an event that should have been about victims, consequences, investigations, questions, lessons, all about himself. It was strongly reminiscent of his hogging-the-stage early press spectacles about Covid. This was the aviation version of one of his “ivermectin” rants.

-He made his raft of appointees and officials—the new Transportation Secretary, the new Vice President, the unspeakable new Defense Secretary—perform as North Korean-style adulatory lackies, each beginning his statement with admiration and thanks to the Dear Leader and his guidance. This too was a return to the Covid/ivermectin days.

-He did what no one should ever do in the hours after an airplane disaster, which is to presume detailed knowledge of what happened and who was to blame.

-He preposterously claimed that he and his people would always be known as “the best and the brightest,” obviously with no awareness of the sarcastic meaning David Halberstam attached to that term. This is the administration proposing a former WWE figure as Secretary of Education, of Dr. Oz as head of Medicare and Medicaid, of the very worst member of the Kennedy lineage in charge of the health of millions, with Fox News figures as far as the eye can see. He’s right. This era will stand as a symbolic moment in the history of the “meritocracy.”

The least of America’s “merit” problems is the skill and caliber of its air-traffic control cadre.

In fact, if any politician may get the blame for the state of air-traffic control in the US, it would have to be Ronald Reagan. And the OAFPOTUS just disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee and fired the head of the TSA.

Juliette Kayyem points out the obvious:

The precise immediate cause of the crash—which killed all 64 passengers and crew members aboard the airliner and all three people in the helicopter—will not become clear until investigators fully analyze recordings of air-traffic-control communications and the plane’s black box. But the accident follows a long string of alarming near collisions at airports across the country—a pattern suggesting that the aviation-safety systems upon which human life depends are under enormous strain.

In 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration identified 19 “serious runway incursions,” the most in almost a decade. The causes of these events are varied: air-traffic-control staffing shortages, pilot inexperience, demand for air travel, outdated technology. The increase in near misses led the FAA to create a safety review team and issue a rare industrywide “safety call to action” demanding greater vigilance throughout the community. These incidents do not appear to have prompted any major changes in safety practices either nationally or in the Washington area. Last year, the number of serious incursions declined, making the issue seem less urgent.

Safety systems are vulnerable to a phenomenon known in the disaster-management world as the “near-miss fallacy”—an inability to interpret and act upon the warnings embedded in situations where catastrophe is only narrowly avoided. Paradoxically, people may come to see such events as signs that the system is working. In her groundbreaking research on NASA after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, the American sociologist Diane Vaughan faulted the agency for its “normalization of deviance.” The direct culprits in the spacecraft’s fate were faulty booster-rocket parts known as “O-rings.” Vaughn noted that shuttle missions had been experiencing problems with the parts for years, but NASA had downplayed their importance. Engineers were able to normalize O-ring incidents and other safety issues because none had caused significant harm—until one did.

We don't yet know the entire accident chain that brought the Army helicopter and CRJ into a collision. But we have some clues about a system that didn't help—and will get worse with the OAFPOTUS's recent actions disbanding key safety oversight groups.

I had a delightful 2-hour lunch with a friend I've not seen in a while, after a morning of non-stop meetings. I also updated a piece of software that gets deployed tomorrow. I've got about 20 minutes now to jot down all of the things I hope to read later today:

• An Army helicopter on a training flight collided with an American Airlines CRJ on approach to DCA last night, killing 64 people; the OAFPOTUS blamed black folk. (I'm not kidding, he really did.)
• Paul Rosensweig explains how the flurry of orders coming out of the White House targeted the weak spots of the US government, "precisely [those parts] whose oversight might interfere with Trump’s activities, or those of his allies."
• Mark S. Zaid and Andrew P. Bakaj agree.
• David A Graham expands on this thought, looking at the funding-freeze memo and the chaos it caused.
• Matt Ford chuckles over the effort's "crash and burn."
• Paul Krugman points out that the Elon Musk-driven effort to get rid of a sizeable chunk of said bureaucracy is "a scam and a purge." 
• Jamie Bouie just calls the administration "delusional."

Finally, singer Marianne Faithfull has died at 78. She will be missed.

I reported earlier that our Once And Felonious President ordered a halt to all loans and grants, but oh my dog what he did is actually so much worse:

As President Donald Trump’s temporary freeze on federal funding to state and local governments seeded disruption and panic throughout the country Tuesday, state officials reported that Medicaid funding in Illinois had shut down.

Trump’s administration announced the pause in federal grants, loans and other financial assistance as they embarked on a sweeping review of spending — a measure aimed at “ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government,” according to a memo from Matthew Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Though Medicare and Social Security would not be affected by the freeze, White House officials initially would not commit to also shielding Medicaid from the administration’s move. “I’ll check back on that,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing Tuesday. Later, the White House stated that Medicaid would not be affected by the freeze, the Associated Press reported.

Nevertheless, state agencies started reporting to Gov. JB Pritzker’s office Tuesday morning issues with accessing federal funding sites and disbursement systems, including Medicaid systems, the governor’s office said. Pritzker has been in communication with the state’s federal delegation, local elected officials, nonprofits and other governors about the matter.

By mid-afternoon, Leavitt had tweeted on X, “The White House is aware of the Medicaid website portal outage. We have confirmed no payments have been affected — they are still being processed and sent. We expect the portal will be back online shortly.”

[Chicago] Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry said she is analyzing what impact the freeze would have on the city’s $17.1 billion budget and on “any existing projects and initiatives.”

The potential impact of even a temporary freeze could be staggering. Budget Director Annette Guzman said an analysis of all federal grant funding received by the city last year, as well as future appropriations enacted by Congress, showed that roughly $4 billion hangs in the balance. That figure represents total grant funding to Chicago; if Trump’s action is allowed to stand, some portion of that amount could be withheld.

The funding freeze appears to affect everything except the military, Medicare, and Social Security. As of half an hour ago, U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan (DC Circuit) has enjoined the funding freeze until Monday. And a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget claimed the funding freeze could last "as short as a day" if an agency finds its spending is "in compliance."

We should note, however, that "compliance" in this case means following an ideological reaction to the previous administration's DEI efforts. One over-reach causing another, as it were. It's just that the Biden administration's DEI efforts didn't keep your neighbors from receiving health care and food, as the OAFPOTUS order has done.

Oh, and the funding freeze blatantly violates the Impoundment Control Act and the OAFPOTUS's oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

The Republican Party, and certainly the OAFPOTUS, do not care if this hurts people. In fact, that's the point; they want people to stop looking at the Federal Government as a solution to any problem they have, all the better to privatize everything. This is late-republic bullshit of the kind that led Rome toward dictatorship.

If any elected Democrat fails to hang this albatross around the administration's neck until November 2026, that would be malfeasance.

First: the good. My friend Kat Kruse has a new book of her short stories coming out. She let me read a couple of them, and I couldn't wait to pre-order the entire collection. I should get it on February 17th.

Still on the good things—or at least the things that don't seem so bad, considering:

• The Guardian has a reflection on Seoul removing the Cheonggyecheon Expressway in 2005 to expose the historic stream that the highway previously covered.
• Margaret Renkl praises the coyotes that live with us in our cities.
• Christopher Geier equates mandatory return-to-office policies as a manifestation of the sunk-cost fallacy, on a par with the Concorde airplane.
• SBA and SSA Inspector General Mark Ware pushed back on the OAFPOTUS's purported firing of him and 16 others IGs in a letter suggesting that the White House check with counsel's office and Congress first.

Now for the bad:

• The OAFPOTUS has called on all federal agencies to halt all grants and loans, putting $1 trillion of funds at risk and creating the first constitutional crisis of his second term. This is especially evil because it's using the bogeyman of DEI to cover up an unconstitutional power grab.
• Maytal Eyal has had it up to here with "weepy influencers."
• Anne Applebaum warns that oligarchs like Elon Musk have undermined European elections to a dangerous degree.

And, of course, the stupid:

• Because Google Maps reflects the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), and because the OAFPOTUS directed GNIS to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to something too stupid ever to appear on The Daily Parker, Google will update the US view of Maps to reflect the new name. (Contra the Post article, Google's process has no mystery at all. They simply follow GNIS, as does Weather Now.)
• The OAFPOTUS lied (sacre bleu!) about reducing inflation, as his immediate steps upon taking office and his stated plans will, as everyone who has ever taken Econ 101 knows, actually increase inflation.

I might as well finish with a good thing. The temperature has gotten all the way up to 6.2°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and 7.8°C at O'Hare. It was last this warm at WHQ on December 29th. If O'Hare can get up to 11.1°C, it will eke past December 27th.

I don't necessarily agree with everything Nate Silver wrote in his analysis from last week, but he makes a some excellent points:

Biden hadn’t delivered the complete repudiation of Trump that polls — showing a massive 8.4-point popular vote lead — had been projecting. That’s why the election took four long days to call. Biden’s popular vote (4.5 points) and Electoral College (306-222) margins had been perfectly solid, and the migration of Georgia and Arizona into the blue column had enhanced its visual appeal on the map. But in the end, the tipping-point state — Wisconsin — voted for Biden by only 0.6 percentage points. Trump made gains in many areas, including South Texas, South Florida, and major cities, that would foreshadow his return to the White House four years later. If Trump’s handling of the pandemic hadn’t been so clumsy — he did get some of the big things right, including Operation Warp Speed and a stimulus package that quickly got the economy back on its feet — he might have been reelected.

Biden, despite a lot of effort — including making it the centerpiece of his aborted 2024 campaign — was never able to persuade Americans that January 6 had been on the same magnitude as a threat to the republic as September 11, for instance. Why not? Well, it’s hard to persuade people based on near-misses: thwarted attacks or narrowly averted disasters. Even actual disasters don’t always spur action when the inertia is high enough: America remains woefully unprepared for the next pandemic.

But I also think you can place some of the blame on the Democrats’ polycrisis framing (often echoed by a liberal establishment that over-selects for negative emotionality, less politely known as “neuroticism.”) If everything is an existential crisis, then nothing is. You’ll begin to suspect people of crying wolf. Or you’ll say, YOLO, if we’re all fucked anyway, let’s blow it all up, have some fun, and vote for Trump.

By July 2022, perceptions that the country was going in the wrong direction were among their highest-ever levels, worse than at any point, even in the annus horribilis of 2020.

In the end, Biden made what was essentially a triple devil’s bargain in exchange for winning the 2020 nomination and the presidency. First, he sold people on a quick return to normalcy from the pandemic when it would instead take until summer 2022 thanks to reinfections, new variants, and sharp divisions over mitigation measures. The extent to which this is his fault isn’t so clear. I have plenty of critiques of the White House’s handling of COVID — and plenty of critiques of Trump’s — but COVID is a uniquely wicked problem. Biden gambled on COVID going away when vaccines became widely available, and it didn’t work out. But he made matters worse by promising not just to solve COVID but also to save democracy and even deliver racial justice.

I suspect this won't be the last critique of Biden's presidency to come out this year. It will take decades, however, to knit all the threads into a coherent tapestry.

Just four, plus a bonus:

• Paul Krugman explains to Columbia Journalism Review why he left the New York Times, and that the OAFPOTUS "wants you to die."
• David Brooks predicts "how [the OAFPOTUS] will fail."
• Four little shits were charged with shooting a coyote with a bow and then stomping it to death on the South Side of Chicago.

Finally, in a column from just before the world ended, author Adam-Troy Castro explains, "Why do liberals think all Trump supporters are stupid?":

The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters — the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don’t ...

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.”

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.”

...

What you don’t get, Trump supporters in 2019, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also...hear me...charitable.

Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.

Exactly.

I had a thought about all the executive orders the OAFPOTUS signed Monday and Tuesday. Do they seem to anyone else like a King's Speech at the state opening of Parliament? Remember than an EO only directly affects the Executive Branch, and in many cases, still requires enabling legislation from the other end Pennsylvania Avenue.

I don't like how this reinforces the idea of the President as a monarch—something our founders explicitly said should never happen—but in terms of how an EO actually affects the world, it really could be read out by King Charles and have the same effect in the US.

In any event, it took less than 24 hours for a Federal judge to block the OAFPOTUS's executive order purporting to overturn the 14th Amendment, so our constitutional system hasn't completely collapsed yet.

In other news:

• Even before known crank Robert F Kennedy, Jr., gets sworn in as Heath and Human Services Secretary, the National Institutes of Health have abruptly stopped meeting with cancer researchers for no reason other than the incompetence of the incoming administration.
• Josh Marshall believes that the OAFPOTUS's pardons of 1,500 cop beaters and insurrectionists will come back to haunt his administration.
• Jennifer Rubin declares the OAFPOTUS's actions not just lawless; "they defy our deepest values."
• Jeff Maurer wonders why the OAFPOTUS has, of all things, a William McKinley fetish.
• Charles Marohn explains how a $5.5 million Federal high-speed Internet grant in Brainerd, Minn., will benefit "lifestyle" rural dwellers at the cost of of a long-term maintenance burden the city has no hope of meeting.
• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the Oscar Nominees for this year, of which I have seen almost none.

Finally, even though the high temperature today of -3.9°C happened right before sunrise and we're now scraping along at -7.6°C, and even though it hasn't been above freezing since before 8am Saturday, and even though tomorrow will be just as cold...it looks like we might get above freezing by noon this coming Saturday. I can't wait.

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Today is the first full day of the Once Again Felonious POTUS, who wound everyone up yesterday with a bunch of statements of intent (i.e., executive orders) guaranteed to get people paying attention to him again. Yawn.

But that isn't everything that happened in the last 24 hours:

• Jonathan Last argues that maybe the OAFPOTUS just doesn't like Americans.
• Jennifer Rubin reminds everyone to remain vigilant that the OAFPOTUS's mangling of the English language has consequences.
• Jeff Maurer is flabbergasted that the fanatical left wing has left behind "free speech, color-blindness, and meritocracy" on the playing field so that the right could pick it up at their leisure.
• Connor Echols worries that the US has developed a "total security" problem, with the impossible goal of making everywhere safe for Americans.
• In an unusual nontechnical post, The Daily WTF points out that "everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works."
• Bruce Schneier worries that we don't have the tools to deal with the kinds of mistakes AI LLMs will make.
• The 606 Trail, which runs along an abandoned railway right-of-way through several Chicago north side neighborhoods, won't get its promised eastern extension until at least 2027.
• Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who illustrated one of my favorite childhood books, The Phantom Tollbooth, died age 95.

Finally, while Chicago has almost no snow on the ground, which probably helped prevent the overnight temperature from going below -20°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, the same weather system has already dumped more snow on the Gulf Coast cities of Mobile and Pensacola than they have ever recorded. Right now at Pensacola International, they have snow and -4°C temperatures. Climate change science didn't predict this specific event, but it did predict the weakening of the circumpolar jet stream that made this possible. This is not normal (temperatures in Fahrenheit):

Oh, FFS. I tried to avoid the inauguration entirely, but since we're dealing with the OAFPOTUS again, I couldn't. Especially because of 3rd grader Elon Musk.

The OAFPOTUS's second inaugural address was the longest in modern history. If you really want to read the text, the New York Times has annotated it, but I wouldn't recommend it. James Fallows read it so you don't have to:

Donald Trump, as 5th-grader. Sometimes Trump’s formal speeches are “written,” in the sense of trying to have “eloquent” or “fine writing” passages. But these “fancy” parts of a speech—related to the parts we remember as the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, or Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall—are clearly tough sledding for Trump. You can tell that he plods his way through these obligatory passages, in the fashion of a fifth-grader called upon to read to the classroom from an assigned text. Halting, not sure of the words, pausing from time to time at a passage he’d never seen before, as if to say, “Hey, that’s interesting!”

The absolutely stupidest part of this speech was this. Any other public official would be embarrassed even to say something of this sort:

We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

If your second grader gave you this thought, you’d be having a little talk about how history and geography worked.

But second prize for stupidness goes to this, about Panama.

The speech did not get better. Shortly afterward, Elon Musk did this:

Well, that was certainly a departure from the usual nihilism of the incoming administration. Walter wasn't completely wrong, either. But yeah, Musk heiled the crowd:

Back in the first Trump presidency Trump’s critics spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Trumpers to admit they’d done this or that, to apologize, whatever. This was always a mistake. I don’t need anyone to validate what I saw. I saw it. I don’t care what the explanation is. These are just twisted anti-American degenerates. We know this. Just what level of exuberant disinhibition led Musk to this moment or why this unmistakable gesture came so naturally to him … well, that’s really not my problem. Everyone knows what they saw here.

Then, shortly after that, the OAFPOTUS pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,500 insurrectionists who invaded the US Capitol and killed cops:

At the time Trump issued the pardons, there were about 700 defendants who either never received prison sentences or had already completed their sentences, meaning pardons or commutations would have little practical impact on them, beyond restoring voting rights and gun rights for those who were convicted of felonies.

More than 600 people were sentenced to incarceration, but only a small fraction of them are still behind bars. Many of those who are in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons were convicted of violent attacks on police officers protecting the Capitol during an assault in which Jan. 6 defendants were armed with firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive “Trump” billboard, “Trump” flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device.

More than 140 police officers were injured and several Trump supporters died during the attack, including one who was shot trying to breach the House Speaker's Lobby and another who died in the middle of a brutal battle at the lower west tunnel, where some of the worst violence of the day took place.

Like I said, I don't really care about the OAFPOTUS's lies and bullshitting. I do care what he does, and what his toadies do when they have actual power. The first few hours of this presidency did not instill confidence.