The Daily Parker

Butters the Engineer sometimes gets too lazy even to get her whole body onto a bed that's twice her size:

Two more days of wrangling two dogs with opposite understandings of how to behave on a leash.

Economist Paul Krugman shakes his head at the GOP's own goal, bringing misery to millions of Americans way ahead of their original schedule:

Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer.

But the consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections.

Why the backloading? Presumably Republicans believed that by the time Americans woke up to what was happening, the G.O.P. would have effectively consolidated one-party rule, making future elections irrelevant.

Instead, however, the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule.

So what went wrong? I’d attribute it to a combination of policy ignorance, visceral hatred of doing anything that helps people in need, and the Epstein files. (Seriously.)

But remember, the modern Republican Party has "a visceral dislike for doing anything that helps people in need" which makes them unlikely to take the simple steps necessary to solve the problem they created. Like, for example, doing what their fearless leader has asked: end the filibuster and pass a clean resolution reopening the government. (Of course, that would be a gift for my party that could only be enhanced by candy and a stripper.)

Fortunately for the 42 million people who were about to starve next month, a Federal judge in Rhode Island has ordered the Dept of Agriculture to distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to the people entitled to them "as soon as possible."

We'll see how this plays out over the weekend.

My old Surface decided it didn't trust its own drive this morning when I booted up in my downtown office. Instead of getting a new laptop, I had stumped for the $30 fee to buy another year of security patches for Windows 10. Well, the latest one changed the Bitlocker settings, requiring me to enter the recovery key...which I couldn't get to from my downtown office.

Fortunately I had the key at home and entered it manually without a problem, so the Surface has sprung back to life. I will have to replace it soon, too, if for no other reason than I was worried for most of the day that it was bricked.

It also means I just had to declare bankruptcy on most of my news emails when I finally got home. But that's probably better for my mental health anyway.

Also, final note: the next version of The Daily Parker is up and running in its dev/test environment. We're still weeks away from me publicizing the URL, but I am pretty stoked that it has a functioning UI with some actual blogging features.

I'm a little delayed getting today's Morning Butters Report out for a couple of reasons. First, Butters and Cassie tag-teamed me starting just before 6:30 am. First Cassie poked me, then Butters poked me when Cassie kicked her off the dog bed in my room. Then Cassie came back when Butters used her engineering skills to ensure Cassie couldn't pull that crap again:

Last night, though, Butters showed me how much she cares about me—or how much she wanted another Greenie, it's unclear:

Meanwhile, all the major cloud providers are suffering a massive DNS outage right now, which fortunately hasn't spread to Inner Drive Technology. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and tons of other services have gone down. Updates as conditions warrant.

Even though I have a cute beagle hanging around my office this week, and even though I've had a lot to do at work (including a very exciting deployment today), the world keeps turning:

• The OAFPOTUS pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for the crime of running a massive money-laundering website, because of course Zhao bribed him.
• Brian Beutler thinks the OAFPOTUS's corruption has gotten too obvious for even his supporters to ignore, leading to "the things Democrats like to talk about and the things I wish they’d talked about [beginning] to converge."
• Speaking of corruption, not to mention things that are so prima facie bad that it takes a special kind of felon to even suggest it, privately funding the US military is an obviously illegal and demonstrably dangerous idea. Just ask the Roman Senate.
• Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to reconvene the House, and the Republican majority in the Senate refuse to waive the filibuster on funding SNAP, which are the two biggest things the Republican majority has chosen to do instead of making sure 40 million Americans don't go hungry next week.
• Michael Tomasky makes a point that I've made to one of my Republican trolls acquaintances: it really doesn't matter to the national Democratic Party if Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday: It's NYC, not Maine.

Finally, if you're looking to pick up a little lakeside real estate, this house in Kenilworth, Ill., is on the market for the first time ever. It's a steal at $7 million.

I have mentioned how odd Butters can be. Part of her oddness seems to come from her being a little princess who craves comfort to the exclusion of propriety.

Exhibit the first, this morning, less than a minute after I stripped my bed:

I had to pick her up to get her to move.

Exhibit the second, yesterday afternoon, rearranging the dog bed in my office for...reasons:

Exhibit the third, last night, getting quite annoyed that Cassie has trouble respecting her personal space:

The poor dear suffers so. 

It's late October, so the days are shorter. Then on Sunday, we get an extra hour of sleep at the cost of an hour of afternoon daylight.

Which is all to say I ran out of time today doing actual work and taking meetings at odd times because the UK switched their clocks yesterday.

And now I have to walk two dogs, feed two dogs, and run to rehearsal. More tomorrow.

I took the dramatic beagle and Cassie to Spiteful* yesterday afternoon. Butters got more pats than Cassie did. Perhaps it's this face?

This afternoon we took a half-hour walk through the local park because the weather is absolutely perfect. Whenever I stopped to try to photograph the two dogs, they immediately went in separate directions, so this is the best I could do:

The girls are now sunning themselves on my front porch, I'm up in my office coding away, and I've got chicken soup going in the slow cooker. It's definitely autumn.

* I really ought to update that Brews & Choos review...

I just got back from a 45-minute walk with Cassie, in which we covered 4.95 km (just over 3 miles) at a pace that Butters could never in a dog's age keep up for that long. According to my doorbell camera, Butters raised four objections to this at roughly 10-minute intervals, fortunately none of which lasted longer than 40 seconds. And she appeared to forgive me when we got back.

We're now heading to Spiteful for a little while. All of us will go. It can take 20 minutes to get there if Butters so desires.

I would apologize to my immediate neighbors, except the one to the north moved out recently, and the one to the south has a 4-year-old boy. Let's compare Butters bellowing for 4 minutes against the little boy refusing to eat for an hour, shall we?

I also made some progress this morning on the replacement for this blog software. Some of the fiddly bits are behind me, but some, including how to handle images, are ahead of me. But I hope to have the minimum viable product in a public test environment before the end of the year. Here's hoping.

As I mentioned yesterday, the OAFPOTUS has illegally destroyed the East Wing of the White House, including the portico and everything right up to the original east entrance. This is part of his plan to build a ridiculous and unnecessary ballroom, funded by big-tech billionaires. The Post's architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, cannot hold back his revulsion:

The leader as builder is an ancient idea, older than the Egyptian pyramids, older than the great public monuments of Rome, older than Emperor Constantine’s clumsy effort to eradicate memories of his predecessors by repurposing and rebranding their works as his own.

But there are subtle differences between the images of authoritarians and elected leaders, in body language and other details. Is the leader acting as a quality-control agent, asking questions, studying details? Or surveying his domain in miniature? Is he simply toying with the world?

Trump made speedy demolition his priority, and speedy construction of the new ballroom is essential to his symbolic purpose, to offer a stark contrast to the dysfunction of Congress and, by extension, the torpid rhythms of democratic self-governance. He is the master builder, the developer who can cut through red tape. That image, whether deserved or not, is why many people voted for him. But to shred precedent is simply to set new precedents. And the precedent he is setting is that history doesn’t matter; laws, procedures and customs are irrelevant; and there is no role for collaboration, transparency and review in the construction of new buildings. Buildings are gifts to the people from leaders who are infallible, not the organic expression of civic values and ideals.

Krugman posits that a lack of good taste is a feature, not a bug, of the OAFPOTUS's style:

Why, you might ask, at a moment of national crisis am I writing about Trump’s bad taste?

[B]ecause tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.

So is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North?

So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.

I now find myself frequently thinking of how the Roman Republic degenerated into a dictatorship. For, in essence, Roman emperors were dictators, regardless of the fancy trimmings.

What happened? Modern historians of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire mostly agree upon one explanation for the Republic’s collapse – namely that the enormous loot from Rome’s conquests created a class of incredibly wealthy oligarchs who were too wealthy and powerful to be constrained by republican norms, institutions and laws.

Meanwhile, a man is suing the administration for being unlawfully detained by members of the Ohio National Guard, who he followed and videoed while playing the "Imperial March" from Star Wars. It's funny, but it also underscores how the military simply do not know how to enforce domestic law, nor should they be used that way. Fun times, fun times.