The Daily Parker

Yesterday, Axios and HBO ran a 45-minute interview between Axios' Jonathn Swan and the President of the United States filmed last Tuesday. I haven't seen it, and I'm not sure I can stomach the whole thing after watching some excerpts. Fortunately, other people watched it for me.

Greg Sargent cites it as an example of "how to interview a serial liar and narcissist who is unfit to be president:"

Again and again, Swan practically pleaded with Trump to demonstrate a shred of basic humanity about the mounting toll under his presidency, and to display a glimmer of recognition of responsibility for it. Again and again, Trump failed this most basic test.

Even during the very occasional moments in which Trump did show a glimmer of awareness of the human toll, he immediately marred it with absurd blame-shifting to governors, who were screaming about the dangers for weeks early on while Trump dithered.

Trump simply doesn’t view the coronavirus as something to be defeated. Making this more destructive, Trump and his propagandists are working to keep the actual real-world failures of his response cosseted away in a place where they cannot be subjected to outside criticism — or corrected.

I would only add that Trump’s true position here, laid bare, is that this is the best we can do. Whether this is due to narcissism and the inability to hear criticism and self-correct, or whether it’s due to naked malevolence, that may be the biggest revelation here of all.

Inae Oh highlights "the 3 worst moments from Trump's newest Axios interview:"

In a heated back and forth, Trump and Swan sparred over the best statistics to assess the United States’ response to the coronavirus pandemic. Trump falsely asserted that US deaths from the virus are “lower” than anywhere in the world, rifling through a disorganized stack of printed charts to somehow back the absurd claim. “Lower than the world? In what?” Swan asked.

Glancing at the charts Trump was referencing, Swan said, “You’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of the population.”

“You can’t do that,” an outraged Trump replied.

After a brief explanation of the statistical importance of comparing coronavirus numbers in proportion to a country’s population, Trump then pivoted and suggested that South Korea has been falsely reporting its numbers in order to give the appearance of a more effective response. “You don’t know that,” Trump said when Swan mentioned South Korea’s low number of deaths from coronavirus. “You think they’re faking their statistics, South Korea?”

“Uh, I won’t get into that because I have a very good relationship with the country but you don’t know that.”

About accused sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, he said "I wish her well," and don't even get Maggie Haberman started on what he said about John Lewis:

“I never met John Lewis, actually,” Mr. Trump said. “He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches, and that’s OK. That’s his right.”

When asked to reflect on Mr. Lewis’s contributions to the civil rights movement, Mr. Trump instead talked up his own record.

“Again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have,” he said. “He should have come. I think he made a big mistake.”

Mr. Trump declined to say whether he found Mr. Lewis’s life story “impressive.” He seemed indifferent to renaming the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., after the congressman.

Does he even know who John Lewis was? Does he know anything at all?

It has cooled off slightly from yesterday's scorching 36°C, but the dewpoint hasn't dropped much. So the sauna yesterday has become the sticky summer day today. Fortunately, we invented air conditioning a century or so ago, so I'm not actually melting in my cube.

As I munch on some chicken teriyaki from the take-out place around the corner, I'm also digesting these articles:

• James Fallows points to the medieval alcohol-distribution rules in most states as the biggest threat to craft brewing right now.
• Greg Sargent thinks Fox News and its effect on the president's already-fragile psyche may hasten his downfall.
• Jonathan Last dissects the Trump campaign ad that featured a photo of a 2014 pro-democracy protest in Ukraine. It gets better.
• Scientists and shipping companies both study Arctic sea-ice, which continues to recede faster than earlier models predicted.
• The Chicago Tribune reports on the history of redlining and how it continues to affect minorities today.
• The BBC debunks a few fantasies about vaccination.

Can you believe we're only 99 days from the election? How time flies.

I'm back in the office tomorrow, after taking a 7:15 am call with a colleague in India. So I won't spend a lot of time reading this stuff tonight:

• Tom McTague sees other countries pitying us, and would prefer they get back to loathing.
• Harry Cheadle says we've "failed the existential-crisis test."
• The Economist decries the politicization of the Justice Department. So do Aaron Blake and Aaron Zelinsky.
• Eric Lach muses over "Donald Trump's empty campaign rally in Tulsa."
• Jamelle Bouie calls the President "the boy who cried fake news."
• Jonathan Chait believes "Joe Biden is actually running a great campaign."
• Wired reports on the Trump Administration's suspension of visa classes particularly valuable to the tech industry.

OK, I need 3,700 steps before 10pm, and then I need to empty my dog and go to bed.

The Washington Post's Karen Attiah imagines how an American newspaper would cover the protests in Minnesota if it used the same tropes as typically found in Western articles on politics elsewhere:

The country has been rocked by several viral videos depicting extrajudicial executions of black ethnic minorities by state security forces. Uprisings erupted in the northern city of Minneapolis after a video circulated online of the killing of a black man, George Floyd, after being attacked by a security force agent. Trump took to Twitter, calling black protesters “THUGS”’ and threatening to send in military force. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts!” he declared.

Ethnic violence has plagued the country for generations, and decades ago it captured the attention of the world, but recently the news coverage and concern are waning as there seems to be no end in sight to the oppression.

Around the world, grass-roots organizations, celebrities, human rights activists and even students are doing what they can to raise money and awareness about the dire situation in America.

“It’s sad that the Americans don’t have a government that can get them coronavirus tests or even monthly checks to be able to feed their families,” said Charlotte Johnson, a 18-year-old Liberian student activist, who survived the Ebola pandemic. “100,000 people are dead, cities are burning, and the country hasn’t had a day of mourning? Lives don’t matter, especially not black lives. It’s like they’re living in a failing state.”

Meanwhile, opinion writers have ratcheted up the rhetoric as violence continues around the country.

As CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew asked riot police where they would like them to move early this morning, the police abruptly arrested the group:

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz spoke with CNN president Jeffrey Zucker shortly after:

Mr. Walz told Mr. Zucker that the arrest was “inadvertent” and “unacceptable,” according to CNN’s account of the call. By about 6:30 a.m. local time, the crew had been released and was back on television.

“Everyone, to their credit, was pretty cordial,” Mr. Jimenez said of his interaction with the police officers after his arrest. “As far as the people that were leading me away, there was no animosity there. They weren’t violent with me. We were having a conversation about just how crazy this week has been for every single part of the city.”

At a news conference on Friday, Mr. Walz issued what he called “a very public apology” to CNN for the morning’s events, saying, “I take full responsibility; there is absolutely no reason something like this should happen.”

Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor, wrote on Twitter that “arresting journalists is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. We live in a democracy.” Bret Baier of Fox News wrote that “this should never have happened. Period.”

The presumptive Democratic nominee for president, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., weighed in on the incident in a Twitter post on Friday. “This is not abstract: a black reporter was arrested while doing his job this morning, while the white police officer who killed George Floyd remains free,” Mr. Biden wrote. “I am glad swift action was taken, but this, to me, says everything.”

Exactly. I expect that someone in the Minnesota State Patrol will get fired over this, but probably not the person who ordered the arrest. I find it shocking that this happened in Minneapolis, one of the most progressive cities in the country.

But police killings have not declined despite years of attempted reforms. As Radley Balko wrote today, "White people can compartmentalize police brutality. Black people don't have the luxury."

I think today is Tuesday, the first day of my 10th week working from home. That would make today...March 80th? April 49th? Who knows.

It is, however, just past lunchtime, and today I had shawarma and mixed news:

• Carbon emissions have declined 17% year-over-year, thanks to Covid-19-related slowdowns reducing petroleum consumption. (See? It's not all bad news.)
• Crain's Chicago Business reviews how businesses rate Mayor Lori Lightfoot's first year in office. And their editorial board says we should "start rethinking 'normal'."
• Consistent with the way authoritarian governments have always worked, Attorney General Bill Barr wants to send his own personal history down the memory hole.
• Speaking of populist lies, McSweeney's has the new New York Times style guide on how to avoid saying "the president lied."
• Scientific American explains "death awareness" and how it makes people respond to, say, pandemics.
• Metra, Chicago's heavy-rail commuter agency, will break ground on a new station in Edgewater this month.

Earlier, I mentioned that the state's unemployment office accidentally revealed thousands of records in an own goal. Turns out, Deloitte Consulting did the work, so I am no longer surprised. Note to anyone who needs software written: don't hire a big consulting firm. They don't attract the best developers because they use manager-driven development patterns that irritate the hell out of anyone with talent.

The President continues to fire anyone suspected of disloyalty despite the ongoing national emergency:

The president’s under-cover-of-darkness decision late the night before to fire Michael K. Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general who insisted last year on forwarding a whistle-blower complaint to Congress, swept away one more official deemed insufficiently loyal as part of a larger purge that has already rid the administration of many key figures in the impeachment drama.

Mr. Trump made no effort at a news briefing on Saturday to pretend that the dismissal was anything other than retribution for Mr. Atkinson’s action under a law requiring such complaints be disclosed to lawmakers. “I thought he did a terrible job, absolutely terrible,” Mr. Trump said. “He took a fake report and he brought it to Congress.” Capping a long, angry denunciation of the impeachment, he added, “The man is a disgrace to I.G.s. He’s a total disgrace.”

At his briefing on Saturday, Mr. Trump likewise endorsed the firing of Capt. Brett E. Crozier of the Navy, who was removed from command of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt after sending his superiors a letter pleading for help for his virus-stricken crew. “He shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter,” the president said. “I thought it was terrible what he did.”

Note that acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly got his job after former Navy Secretary Richard Spencer got the sack after resisting Trump's interference in the Gallagher case. For more, even though it will make you so angry you might cry, I recommend George Packer's description of how Trump has almost destroyed the civic institutions our country depends on.

Meanwhile, Charlie Warzel makes the case that "what we pretend to know about the coronavirus could kill us."

It's a wonderful time to be alive.

I had a lot going on at work today, so all I have left is a lame-ass "read these later" post:

• Cranky Flier wonders why Delta is Tweeting to individual passengers.
• James Fallows looks at Bob Garfield's latest book.
• Bruce Schneier says China isn't the problem in crappy 5G security.
• And John Scalzi has a new book coming out, which he'll sign if you pre-order.

I'd say "back to the mines," but I believe I have a date with Kristen Bell presently.

Today in Chicago we have seen more sun than in the past several weeks, and yet here I toil in my cube. But a lot is going on outside it:

• Josh Marshall has come around to agreement that the House should move forward with impeaching the president, as in fact they plan to do before Christmas.
• Esquire calls the Republican defense of the president a "Catch-22 of stupid."
• In Israel, a 29-year-old former Haredi woman had never heard of television or the Internet until a non-profit sprung her from her ultra-Orthodox community.
• The Lakeview condo where Mike Royko lived in the early 1980s is on the market for about $1m.
• A project to construct a 50-story office tower across from Union Station has secured financing.
• Federal prosecutors have charged two Russians with causing millions in damage and theft in one of the largest cybercrime sprees in history.

And we now return to our regular JSON debugging session, already in progress.

As I try to understand why a 3rd-party API accepts one JSON document but not another, nearly-identical one, who could fault me for taking a short break?

• Feargus O'Sullivan explains in more detail why London wants Uber gone.
• Hypocrisy and absurdity collide as Franklin Graham literally demonizes the president's opponents.
• A man from rural California explains to Brits in the Independent why his neighbors support Trump.
• Continuing the Republican Party-as-farce stories, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Dean Steve Coll bemoans how nothing in the rapidly-strengthening case for impeachment will change the Senate's likely verdict.
• And Baltimore constitutional law professor Garrett Epps says C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters get the closest to Bill Barr's descent into madness.
• Closer to home, today is the 186th anniversary of Chicago's first newspaper.
• Writer Ethan Sacks tries to get at the heart of why my generation gets ignored and sidelined so much. (Hey, Boomers and Millennials? We built the world you live in.)
• Finally, Cranky Flier reports that by next summer, Tokyo's Haneda airport will handle more traffic to North America than Narita—which will make things a lot easier for travelers.

Back to JSON and my miserable cold.