All the links

I spent the morning on a bit of contracting I was glad to do, as it involved maintaining an application I wrote that I'm glad to see is still running and being used by actual users. This, after taking Cassie on a 4.9 km (3.1 mi) walk before 7 am during which the heat index got up to 36.2°C. We have a light lake breeze, but the heat index is still 36.4°C, so Cassie only got a 12-minute walk after lunch with absolutely no need to rush.

As a consequence, though, I let a bunch of articles pile up, and I may not get to all of them:

• Glenn Kessler points out what I and others who lived in New York in the 1980s and 1990s have long said: the OAFPOTUS's view of foreign policy was dumb back then and hasn't changed since.
• While most people are looking at Gaza, Jennifer Rubin says enough is enough with Israel's conduct in the West Bank.
• The war in Ukraine, and Ukraine's unexpectedly effective attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, have actually made the Strait of Hormuz less important to global oil markets than Iran would prefer right now. (Also, Venezuela stepped up and Saudi Arabia has ports elsewhere.)
• The Chicago City Council finance committee will look at a proposal to buy back our parking meters, the sale of which remains the most crooked deal in Chicago history.
• Roycemore School, a private school operating for 110 years and where I attended summer camp as a kid, has cancelled the 2026-27 school year due to declining enrollment.
• The Washington Post suggests these 25 works of American culture were the most influential over the last 250 years. (Not sure that Beyoncé's "Lemonade" necessarily should have made the cut, nor "Keeping Up With the Kardashians...")

Finally, Brian Beutler reminds us that the Republican Party has used the same bullshit strategy for decades in dealing with Democratic Party successes and their own failures, even when hundreds of people get explosive diarrhea due to GOP incompetence:

The basic idea was to ridicule liberal priorities sight unseen, impede liberal governance irrespective of merit, lay every social and economic challenge at liberal feet, while asserting ownership of every source of national pride.

The GOP’s deceptive methods went beyond opportunistic know-nothingism. Republicans went to lengths to obscure ownership of governing outcomes—the essential ingredient in democratic accountability. How can the public punish leaders for failure, or reward them for success, if they aren’t certain where responsibility lies?

Now to the diarrhea.

Cyclospora contamination has caused a huge wave of parasitic diarrhea—one of the explosive kinds—to spread across the country over the past two weeks. Hundreds have been hospitalized.

Why? Well, in part, because the Trump administration ended mandatory cyclospora monitoring last year! Cyclospora can be challenging to trace to a source, because unlike viral or bacterial or toxin-induced food poisoning, there’s a long lag between consuming contaminated food and the onset of symptoms.

When your political party is full of shit, sometimes it comes out.