The Daily Parker

Well, here we go: the only real debate between the candidates for President of the United States during this election cycle. We have 8 weeks to go until November 5th. Both candidates are, for reasons passing understanding, neck and neck in the polls. (Don't read the polls!) Just remember what President George HW Bush said during the 1988 campaign: "It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or the other."

I'll update this post throughout the event. I'm watching the PBS broadcast on YouTube, if it matters.

All times are local to the event site, Eastern Daylight Time:

21:03: "We're looking forward to a spirited...debate."

21:04: "Are we better off than four years ago?" You mean, during the darkest time of the pandemic?

(I'm adjusting my monitor, because those two people can't possibly have the same skin color. One of them might be wearing way too much makeup.)

21:05: Harris labels the 20% tariffs a "sales tax," which it is.

21:05: The XPOTUS really doesn't understand how tariffs work. Tariffs are paid by the country imposing them.

21:07: "Inflation like no one has ever seen before." Harris is laughing at him. Then "Jobs are being taken from African-Americans" and she rolls her eyes, which I almost missed because I was rolling mine.

21:08: "What we have done is clean up [the XPOTUS's] mess. ... You're going to hear from the same old tired playbook."

21:10: Maybe appealing to the authorities of the Wharton School and Morgan Stanley might not be her best appeal to the voters. But then again, he doesn't actually know the name of the school where he got his MBA.

21:11: WTF is "run, spot, run?"

21:12: He just does not get what tariffs do. It's sad, really.

21:13: OK, he's starting to yell now. (DUDE, HE'S NOT THE PRESIDENT.)

21:14: Harris is controlling this debate. He's completely on defense. She's openly laughing at him now.

21:16: Hey, XPOTUS, what about your complete flip-flop on abortion? "They have abortion in the 9th month! The baby will be born and we'll execute the baby!" Whaaaaa? "Execution after birth is OK!" What in the name of hell...?

21:19: "There is no state in the country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born. VP Harris?" Linsey Davis isn't having his bullshit either.

21:21: Why is he harping on the lie that everyone wanted abortion back in the states?

21:23: "I didn't discuss it with JD. ... She'll never be able to get [the abortion law]. So it doesn't matter." And back to the lie about going back to the states.

21:25: "What you are putting her through is unconscionable." True. "I have been a leader on IVF!" False.

21:28: "The people of this country need a leader. ... Attend one of his rallies. He'll talk about Hannibal Lecter, about windmills. People leave out of exhaustion and boredom."

21:29: Oh, marvelous, he took the bait on the rallies.

21:30: "They're eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets!" Whaaaaa...?

21:31: "This is one of the reasons why I have the endorsement of 200 Republicans. ... When we listen to this kind of rhetoric, when the issues are not being addressed, the people deserve better."

21:34: How would you deport 11 million undocumented immigrants? "They allowed criminals! Terrorists! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!"

21:36: According to the FBI, the "murder rate fell by 26.4%, reported rapes decreased by 25.7%, robberies fell by 17.8%, aggravated assault fell by 12.5%, and the overall violent crime rate went down by 15.2%" in the first 3 months of 2024.

21:37: "They're the ones that made them go after them! Joe Biden was found guilty on the documents case! My hand-picked judge, that I appointed after I lost the election, threw my case out!"

21:39: NYT Pitchbot: "Harris seems a little overprepared for this debate."

21:42: "A true leader understands the value of building people up, not beating people down." "My father only gave me a small fraction of that $400 million..." Wow, he's chasing every dog treat she throws at him. "I'm talking now. Does that sound familiar?" And there go the suburban women.

Wow, does this old man need a nap:

21:45: A long-time Daily Parker reader texts, "He's making faces like an orangutan." And the entire island of Borneo lodges a complaint.

21:47: My entire Facebook feed is about people eating their pets.

21:48: "I was in the capitol, bub. Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining." And let's not forget Charlottesville, and "fine people on both side." "We're not going back. It's time to turn the page."

21:50: Using Laura Inghram and Sean Hannity to say something is debunked? They build the bunks. They are bunkies. But whatever.

21:51: Old man is getting angrier. It's at this point where the bouncer comes over and says, "OK, Donnie, keep it down or we're going to have to go outside for a minute."

21:52: "I got more votes than any sitting president!" Yes, but your opponents got more votes both times.

21:53: Now he's shouting at the moderators. The bouncer looks at the bar manager and shrugs, but moves closer.

21:54: "World leaders are laughing at [the XPOTUS]. ... It leads one to believe [you] do not have the temperament, and the ability not to be confused." And he responds with Victor Orbán's endorsement.

21:55: "I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline!" Uh, no, Ukrainian Special Forces did. Unless...was he in the Ukrainian Special Forces?

21:59: Cassie has a comment about the debate:

22:02: Apparently, I don't get half of what he's saying because I don't read 4Chan.

22:09: OK, we're back, with a drink, because oh my god. "It's worse than the numbers you're getting and they're fake numbers." Whaaa...?

22:10: He still doesn't understand how NATO funding works. It's always transactional, and always someone else pays, and always it's not his fault.

22:11: Did he just admit to a violation of the Logan Act by meeting with Putin? And wow, his jaw is working hard. 

22:12: "Tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how you would give up to the dictator who would eat you for lunch."

22:14: "Putin would have been sitting in Moscow, and he wouldn't have lost 300,000 men. ... And maybe he'll use [nuclear weapons]." WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. WHAT. THE. FUCKING. FUCK. But he didn't say whether he wants Ukraine to win.

22:17: "I agreed with President Biden's decision to pull out of Afghanistan. ... The first time this century no American soldier is on combat duty anywhere in the world."

22:19: "And this...[meaningful pause]...former president invited [the Taliban] to Camp David." Wow.

22:22: "Let's remember he was investigated for not renting to Black families. ... The Central Park Five full-page ad. ... Birther lies about the first Black president. The American people want better than this." And he defended his choice to slander the Central Park Five.

22:24: I'm just going to leave this Tweet from Betty Bowers right...here.

22:29: "So, just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?" Oh, Linsey, you are wonderful.

22:32: "Access to health care should be a right, and not just a privilege for those who can afford it."

22:34: I have to say, as someone who lived through the 1980s and 1990s, there's some frission hearing that an American presidential candidate has the endorsement of Sinn Féin. Sorry, Sean Fain. See what I mean? (Gerry Adams could not be reached for comment.)

22:36: What is the old man yelling about now? Joe Biden getting paid by the mayor of Moscow's wife? OK, viejo, time to pay your tab and go home.

22:41: "Two visions ... the future, and the past ... and we're not going back. ... Having a plan. Understanding the aspirations, the hosts, the dreams ... Giving hardworking folks a break and bringing down the cost of living ... Sustaining American's standing in the world ... Protect our most fundamental rights and freedoms ... "

21:43: "They've had 3½ years ... why hasn't she done it? She should leave right now ... You believe in things like 'we're not going to frack' ... Germany tried that and within one year they were back to building normal energy plants ... We're a failing nation ... serious decline ... all over the world they're laughing at us ... we're not a leader ... we don't have any idea what's going on ... Because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry ... allowing millions of people to come into our country ... the worst president." Literally nothing at all about what he would do.

Well, the XPOTUS's campaign did not get Uncle Fluffy today, did they?

And will someone let that poor deranged old man have a nap?

A few weeks ago I planned a PTO day to take a 25 km walk tomorrow along the North Branch Trail with pizza at the end. (I'll do my annual marathon walk in October.) Sadly, the weather forecast bodes against it, with scattered thunderstorms and dewpoints over 22°C. But, since I've already got tomorrow off, and I have a solid PTO bank right now, I'll still take the day away from the office. And autumn begins Sunday.

Good thing, too, because the articles piled up this morning, and I haven't had time to finish yesterday's:

• Ruth Marcus indicts the Roberts court for its idiotic presidential immunity ruling, and how that required prosecutor Jack Smith to contort the new charges against the XPOTUS.
• Oh, goody: Mayor Brandon Johnson's 2025 budget for the City of Chicago will have nearly a $1 billion deficit.
• Despite having spent billions of euro to upgrade the scanners at major European airports, the EU will (temporarily) go back to a 100-mL limit for carry-on liquids on Sunday.
• Timothy Noah celebrates the mediocrity of late August.

Finally, Washington Post reporter Christine Mi spent 80 hours crossing the US on Amtrak this summer. I am envious. Also sad, because the equivalent trip in Europe would have taken less than half the time on newer rolling stock, and not burned a quarter of the Diesel.

The Democratic National Convention opened today here in Chicago, so naturally that's the main topic in today's lunchtime roundup:

• I can barely wait until Thursday when I get to see the sparkling-clean O'Hare CTA station, freshened up for the convention.
• The DNC projected fun messages onto the XPOTUS's eponymous Tower from their hotel across the river. (No comment from the XPOTUS.)
• Vice President Kamala Harris continues to climb in the polls as people come to realize that she's the real deal and the XPOTUS can't deal.
• Ezra Klein highlights one thing the XPOTUS did well: he "turned the Democratic Party into a pitiless machine" that wins elections.
• James Fallows really wishes the press would cover the issues Americans want covered, especially that the big media outlets would report on the XPOTUS's obvious cognitive decline.

Well, that about covers it, until later this afternoon at least. I may have to walk Cassie a couple more times because it's 24°C and sunny, which we don't get a lot in August.

The problem with having 8 billion people on Earth is that every single one of us has different ideas and opinions. If there's an opinion out there so fringe and so bizarre that only 1/10th of 1% of us share it, that's still about a quarter of the population of Chicago.

I thought of that because of how much news we have. And I imagine that from the ancestral environment thousands of years ago until the last century, we just didn't have all that much. I don't think that's entirely because of light-speed communications since the telegraph informing us of more things than the horse-drawn post could do before the 1840s. I also think we've just got so many more people, with so many more crazy people.

How much has happened in the last 50 years, for example? And by "50 years" I mean exactly that, since this speech on 8 August 1974:

That got me thinking about the relentlessness of news in the telecommunications era, and how we didn't evolve like this. Even Aldous Huxley thought our downfall as a culture would be drugs and sex, simply because in 1932 no one looked at screens all day. (I have always thought that he, and not Orwell, got the overall prediction correct—at least as regards the Anglosphere.)

Anyway, I have to debug a new feature and not worry about the Post.

The XPOTUS's handlers cut short his appearance this afternoon at the National Association of Black Journalists convention just 2 km from where I'm sitting. The XPOTUS began by insulting the hosts and the panelists. Then, when one of the panelists had just brought up Project 2025 (the Republican Party's blueprint for rolling the country back to the 1850s), the moderator suddenly interrupted and said the campaign had told her to wrap it up. The 37 minutes of Harris Campaign footage the XPOTUS had already provided will have to do, I guess.

In other end-of-July news:

• Julia Ioffe wonders what Kamala Harris's foreign policy will look like.
• Army Lt William Calley, the only American service member convicted of a crime after the My Lai massacre in 1968, died in April.
• Did Coinbase just commit the largest campaign finance violation in history?
• The Exchange Club of Naperville has permanently ended its Ribfest after 35 years, citing the cost of renting the space and declining revenues since the pandemic.
• The US Navy has nearly completed swapping out crews and equipment between the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) and the USS George Washington (CVN-73) as the latter prepares to move permanently to Japan.

Finally, the Justice Dept has accused the Norfolk Southern Railroad of illegally delaying passenger trains, after Amtrak suffered an ungodly 11,500 minutes of delay in just the first three months of this year. "Freight-train interference" is the principal cause of delays for US trains because the country has almost no dedicated passenger mainlines. The freight railroads that own the tracks have a statutory obligation to prioritize passenger trains, but no other incentives to do so. It's about the dumbest way to organize passenger rail anyone could come up with, other than separating out the track from the operations. I mean, we're dumb, but we're not that dumb.

One of the many stories that piqued my interest this morning included a rant by the anti-Sorkin himself:

• Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, does not like how "politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." (He also implies that Liz Truss, and not Kamala Harris, most embodies the character of Selina Meyer.)
• Former President Obama has endorsed Vice President Harris.
• John Scalzi received a press release from the Harris campaign that he says demonstrates how "it's harder to stab when you're being punched in the face."
• David Frum sees President Biden's retirement as making himself "a modern Cincinnatus."
• Alex Shephard wonders if "JD Vance [is] the worst Vice Presidential pick ever?" (Vance "is not only one of the greatest frauds in American politics, he is the most obvious fraud in American politics.")
• Dana Milbank suggests (tongue in cheek) that the XPOTUS just "needs a mulligan:" "Vance, who has served 19 months in the Senate after writing a book and briefly dabbling as a venture capitalist, was picked by Trump on the merits. But Harris, who spent decades as a prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and senator, became vice president because of diversity, equity and inclusion."
• George Will, not tongue-in-cheek, warned that if Democrats re-take the Senate, we're going to get rid of the filibuster, oh dearie dearie me! Because chucking something that gives 20% of the US population a veto over the other 80% would mean Republicans would have to drum up a majority of the states to do something instead of just a coalition of the small ones.
• If you have a computer built before 2024 by one of the major manufacturers, your Secure Boot might not be secure. If you want to find out whether your system is secure, open up PowerShell and run this command: [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString((Get-SecureBootUEFI PK).bytes) -match "DO NOT TRUST|DO NOT SHIP")

Finally, Journalist Lewis H Lapham has died, aged 89. He edited Harper's during the time that I read it regularly, and no coincidence that I dropped it shortly after he did. I found his work engaging and sometimes enraging, but always smart. He will be missed.

Time for another reminder. If you see something on social media that:

• seems to confirm something you already believed about the "other side,"
• comes from someone claiming to have inside knowledge, and
• makes you angry

...then it's almost certainly fake*.

The Economist prominently featured a story on the onslaught of conspiracy theories today, as did NPR. Will those stories help? Probably not. After all, "men willingly believe what they want," as Julius Caesar once (may have) said. But let's review anyway.

The FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police aren't going to leak information about Saturday's shooting on Facebook. They're going to make sure they have it right, then hold a press conference, where journalists from real news organizations will ask them questions and report what they said. I can't believe people have trouble understanding this. "Officer Krupke" was posting bullshit to TikTok from an industrial park outside Minsk on Sunday morning, not hearing the latest secrets about the investigation from his higher-ups at the incident response center outside Pittsburgh. And you almost certainly know that, but you reposted the meme anyway.

What we do know about Saturday makes the event no less horrible but a lot less surprising. All of the public evidence points to a pathetic post-teen white incel with too-easy access to near-military-grade weapons deciding to become famous in the worst possible way. It was similar to almost every other time someone has shot at a US president throughout history. This pathetic boy will be remembered in the long list of similar nutters that includes Hinckley, Fromme, Schrank, Oswald, Guiteau, Booth, Czolgosz, Zangara, and the dozens who never got the chance because the USSS or their local cops got to them in time.

The worst part about Saturday isn't its effect on the election or that the convicted-felon XPOTUS got nicked in the ear; it's that two people died, and absent the immediate actions of the best-equipped, best-trained armed guards in the history of the world, many more would have. Two more Americans are dead because a trade group has convinced a huge swath of the country—and an overwhelming percentage of those at Saturday's rally—that buying their member-organizations' products is a God-given right.

Because of those policies, promoted by the Republican Party and enshrined in Pennsylvania law, this postpubescent hobgoblin obtained a military-style rifle, loaded it, and got it to within 150 meters of the presumptive Republican nominee for president, all completely legally. Until he pointed the rifle at the XPOTUS, he hadn't committed a crime.

In fact, as Josh Marshall laments, this wasn't much different than a school shooting. He makes good points, including that it doesn't really matter what flavor of mass shooting it was. He also notices that Republicans office-holders were the first to politicize the event. Well, of course they were, because otherwise someone might connect their rhetoric and their policies with the increased frequency of shootings.

I don't think this event will move the needle on the election, not one little bit. We're too entrenched in our candidates. That said, I fully expect the next four days in Milwaukee to showcase exactly how deranged the rapist XPOTUS is—but no one will change his mind because of it. Tonight, in fact, we get to find out who he's picked to be his panegyrist running mate, and we can all feel a little sorry for that person when he or she gets kicked to the curb in a year or two. (Update: it's US Senator JD Vance (R-OH), one of the only people in US politics who is possibly less genuine than the XPOTUS.)

The next 113 days will suck. Probably the two months after that will suck, too. And there's a real possibility that the XPOTUS could win, making the next few years after suck as well, at least until 78 years of Big Macs and rapidly-advancing frontotemporal dementia catch up to him.

But enough with the misinformation. Seriously.

* Unless it's the New York Times telling you that a corrupt Federal judge dismissed a criminal case against an unrepentant felon on a theory so batshit crazy that not even Sam Alito signed on to it when he had the chance. That actually happened this morning.

But only for a moment. I've spent most of today trying to fix things, or at least trying to figure out what problems need fixing. One of the problems has generated a comment thread on a vendor website, now at 44 comments, and I think after all that work I found the problem in an interaction between my code and Microsoft Azure Functions. If I'm right, the confirmation will come around 3pm.

Naturally, I haven't had time to read any of these:

• Jamie Boule points out that the myth of the convicted-felon XPOTUS is very far from the truth.
• Federal district judge Aileen Cannon (R-SDFL) found yet another excuse to delay the felony classified-documents trial of the convicted-felon XPOTUS, this time probably until 2025 or sometime after the 11th Circuit removes her from the case.
• McKay Coppins reviews a new book about "the most consequential TV show in history," which turned the convicted-felon XPOTUS into a star.
• The Guardian reports that Sir Keir Starmer will put language supporting Palestinian statehood into the Labour Manifesto ahead of the UK's July 4th general election.
• Illinois governor JB Pritzker (D) signed a $53.1 billion state budget for 2024-25 that includes a child tax credit, limits corporate operating loss deductions, and eliminates the 1% grocery tax.
• New York governor Kathy Hochul (D) has paused the rollout of New York City congestion pricing that the city planned to put into effect at the end of this month. The measure has gone through years of reviews and studies already, and has shown success in cities like London.
• Puck's Dylan Byers digs into Sally Buzbee's firing from the Washington Post, as does Josh Marshall, while NPR is reporting the Post CEO Will Lewis has tried to bribe reporters from other organizations more than once to kill stories about himself.

I wrote the intro to this post around 2:45 and had to pause for a while. It's now 3:25, and I appear to have solved the problem. I will now document the solution and apologize to the vendor. Fun times, fun times.

The satirical newspaper The Onion just got bought by a newly-formed LLC called, yes, Global Tetrahedron. Longtime Onion readers will probably recognize the name; I had to remind myself.

Other events in the past day or so:

• Among the labor-rights wins on Tuesday was a tweak to wage and hour laws that will qualify millions more Americans for overtime pay.
• Despite having earned the title "Useful Idiot of the Year" a couple of times already, we haven't heard the last of US Representative Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) because her district's voters are just as stupid as she is. Tina Nguyen piles on.
• Julia Ioffe interviews Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt about the rise of anti-Semitism in left-wing student protests. Charles Blow speculates that the protests could come to Chicago for the DNC.
• Microsoft has released the source code to MS-DOS 4.00, which came out in (I think) 1988, just a few days before the 4.01 bug fix.
• The Civic Federation of Chicago, a government watchdog group, has recommended combining the Chicago Transit Authority, PACE (the suburban bus company), and Metra into a single regional organization.

Time to fetch Cassie from school.

It's a gorgeous Friday afternoon in Chicago. So why am I inside? Right. Work. I'll eventually take Cassie out again today, and I may even have a chance to read all of these:

• A Florida man set himself on fire across the street from where the XPOTUS was sitting through jury selection, apparently to protest the lack of mental health care in the US.
• Josh Kovensky draws a straight line from the XPOTUS's narcissistic need to cast everyone who disagrees with him as an enemy to be defeated to his lawyers trying to undercut the bedrock principle of impartial jury trials.
• Graeme Wood says Iran has handed Israel an opportunity, so what will Netanyahu do now? Julia Ioffe wonders the same thing.
• Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) admitted (perhaps unintentionally) in a recent Politico interview that he, more than anyone else in the country, caused imbecilic grandstanding rather than actual legislating to become the main measure of Congress in some districts, like his own.
• The Governor of Illinois joined the Daily Parker and the Chicago Tribune editorial board in demanding that the city fire Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter, who (to give just one example of why) takes a chauffeured car to his office which is adjacent to an El station.
• Uri Berliner's resignation from NPR continued to generate op-ed columns, with Eric Wemple taking him to task and Andrew Sullivan taking Katherine Maher to task.
• Edinburgh, Scotland, recently opened a 3-kilometer, £23 million bike path that not everyone in the capital wants.

Finally, a milestone of sorts. The retail vacancy rate in downtown Chicago continues to climb as a longtime institution on North Wells finally closed. That's right, Wells Books, the last adult-entertainment store in the Loop, has closed.