The Daily Parker

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.

But today? 10/10 would recommend!

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Everything else today has a proportion of funny to not-funny that we should work on a bit more:

• The administration served up two full helpings of corruption today: indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James as payback for prosecuting the OAFPOTUS, and finalizing a $20 billion gift to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's friends under the guise of propping up the Argentine Peso.
• US District Judge April Perry (NDIL) has blocked the National Guard from entering Chicago pending new arguments on the 24th.
• Julia Ioffe reports on what the troops sent to Portland, Ore., think of being sent there; Jeff Maurer reports on the twerking inflatable dinosaurs taunting ICE there.
• Paul Krugman patiently explains that, in fact, everything economists predicted about the OAFPOTUS's tariffs has happened, even though what non-economists claimed they predicted didn't: "The point is that corporations are very good at finding ways to avoid paying taxes, especially when the rules are complicated and the tax collectors don’t have enough resources to track down their clever strategies."
• Why is billionaire and scary dude Peter Thiel warning about the Antichrist? Seems, you know, unhinged. In fact, he sounds a lot like Charlotte Iserbyt. What is it with these people?
• Quico Toro has lived in Japan for a year, which gave him an unhappy view of Amtrak. (Though, frankly, living in any other OECD country except Canada would do that.)
• The Cubs beat the Milwaukee Brewers yesterday, so the two teams go on to a final, fifth game tomorrow at Miller Park.

Finally, Loyola University Chicago's Sister Jean has died at 106. She was the official team chaplain of the Loyola Ramblers men's basketball team, and well-loved throughout the University.

So many things passed through my inbox in the last day and a half:

• The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that an assistant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was observed over the weekend discussing plans over Signal with an aide to Reichsminister Stephen Miller to send the 82nd Airborne to Portland.
• Paul Krugman breaks from his usual economics beat to lambast the OAFPOTUS and his Reichskabinett der Nationalen Rettung for the horrifying ICE raid* on a Chicago apartment building last week: "What do we learn from the Chicago apartment raid plus the growing number of incidents in which ICE agents have physically attacked people who posed no conceivable threat? To me, it says that even 'alarmists' who warned about the threat a Trump administration would pose to democracy underestimated just how evil this administration would be."
• Adam Kinzinger draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS really, really not wanting anyone to read the Epstein files and the Republicans' not caring really one whit about "protecting kids."
• Jamelle Bouie suggests that if Hegseth and the OAFPOTUS want to see "the enemy within," they should glance at the nearest mirror. Jen Rubin concurs.
• In his latest column on the OAFPOTUS's bullshit, Glenn Kessler mocks the TACO King for "crying 'witch hunt' while stirring the cauldron."
• Josh Marshall applauds California governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois governor JB Pritzker for being willing to use the power they have to prevent the rending of our nation.
• Matt Yglesias wants to shake some sense into the "groups" who have clearly learned nothing from Kamala Harris's embarrassing loss last November.
• Pilot and journalist James Fallows once again reminds people that it's safe to fly during a government shutdown. Of course, since all the air-traffic control trainers were furloughed...
• The Times has yet another essay about craft breweries shutting down because there are just too darn many of them. (Since the Brews & Choos Project started in February 2020, 22 of the 146 breweries I've visited have closed—plus another 7 I didn't get to.)

Finally, Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford goes over the numbers: September was warm and very dry. October is shaping up to be as well, despite the forecast calling for rain tonight and cooler temperatures through Saturday.

* Seriously, doesn't anyone in ICE realize that people will talk about them 30 years from now the way we talk today about the Schutzstaffel?

The two biggest news stories of the past 24 hours are the government shutting down because Congress couldn't pass a spending bill by the end of fiscal year last night, and the pathetic attempted-fascist assembly of the United States' general and flag officers in Virginia yesterday.

We'll take the dumber one first:

• Jennifer Rubin shakes her head in sadness, but not surprise.
• Matthew Yglesias has 17 thoughts about the shutdown, and Brian Beutler has 20, but how many thoughts does Rabbi Eliezer have?

And then there's failed Minnesota National Guard major (and current Defense Secretary) Pete Hegseth's demonstration of why he never got promoted to lieutenant colonel:

• Glenn Kessler calls out the most prominent and stinky piles of bullshit in the OAFPOTUS's speech to the assembly.
• Tom Nichols shudders, "the commander in chief is not okay."
• Karen Tumulty suggests that Hegseth wanting to return the military to 1990 may not have been the best message to send *cough*Tailhook*cough*.
• Paul Krugman points out that most members of the military—other than Hegseth, obviously—are more valued for their brains than their biceps.
• Alexandra Petri wonders if the meeting could have been an email.

In other news:

• Conservationist and chimpanzee specialist Dr Jane Goodall has died at age 91.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones has a considered and sober reflection on Charlie Kirk's legacy.
• Anne Branigin marvels at how "cancel culture came for everyone."
• The secret to getting better sleep may be as simple as going to bed at the same time every night.

Finally, the forecast for Friday has us at 29°C (85°F) by late afternoon, exactly when we would hit the treeless McRory Trail north of Lake Forest. We have altered our planned route to use the tree-lined Sheridan Road from near the Lake Forest Metra station up to Lake Bluff Brewing, but it will still be wicked hot. It got that hot the day I attempted a marathon walk in 2022, but you'll recall I only got to Evanston before throwing in the towel. In 2023, it hit 29°C, and we did all right—but we moved the walk to mid-October last year and had much better weather.

We'll see how we do. It might just come down to how much sleep I get this week.

Tomorrow is, quite unexpectedly, October. Though the official temperature at O'Hare has not hit 32°C since August 16th, our weather has remained stubbornly summer-like. The 16-day forecast suggests the weather will continue as far as the model can predict, and may see 32°C as early as this weekend. That will make my Friday plans a bit more challenging as my Brews & Choos buddy has gotten over Covid and we're all set to walk to Lake Bluff then.

For my part, I am experiencing a very rare side effect of the Moderna MRNA vaccine: a persistent, metallic taste on the tip of my tongue. Its incidence is apparently something approaching less than 1 in 10,000, but it appears to be harmless and to clear up on its own. I have never had this side-effect from the Pfizer vaccine. I will request Pfizer again next year. Bleah. I'll let everyone know if I start growing a giant spike protein on my forehead.

Meanwhile, the OAFPOTUS has threatened to send 100 more troops to Chicago, a city which has something like 12,000 sworn police officers already. But it's kind of hard to take the regime seriously when this sort of thing happens. Or this sort of thing. Or this sort of thing.

As Joe Biden said five years ago yesterday, "Will you shut up, man?"

The stupidest person ever to sit behind the Resolute Desk has made most of the world feel sad for us. Let's check on why:

• Matthew Yglesias digs into the abject idiocy of the OAFPOTUS's war on Tylenol.
• Jeff Maurer puts on his OAFPOTUS mask and declaims "Tylenol is why I'm like this."

And yet, both Jennifer Rubin and Josh Marshall see the tide turning hard against the administration, though George Packer thinks we now live in an authoritarian state.

Meanwhile,

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called an in-person meeting of all 900 or so general and flag officers next week, an unprecedented move made even weirder by his office not telling any of them why.
• Yascha Mounk shakes his head at former US Senator Kamala Harris's refusal to acknowledge why the Democratic Party lost the last election.

And finally, the mold count in Chicago hit an all-time high on Tuesday of 82,121, which is nothing to sneeze at. The mold count is forecast to remain high until the first frost, which might be in November given the climate predictions this fall.

The only thing Illinois governor JB Pritzker said this afternoon that I quibble with is that Stephen Miller is a "complicit lackey*:"

* Pritzker has the relationship wrong; Miller is no more a lackey than Goebbels was. The OAFPOTUS just doesn't care what Miller does as long as Miller delivers the goods.

My friends just dropped Butters off, and so far she hasn't complained too much after a bit of whining when they left. I'm sure she's going to find the next hour objectionable when I take Cassie for a half-hour walk after I take Butters around the block. Since Cassie walks about 3x as fast as Butters, it's possible both walks will take 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, I commend to you Julia Ioffe's latest observations on "the art of getting played," in which she breaks down how the OAFPOTUS and US Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff are just embarrassing the United States because they refuse to learn how New York real-estate salesmanship differs from negotiating with Russia:

“Something got garbled,” the source told me. “Trump said, Let’s have a meeting,” between the three of us, and “Putin, as I understand it, answered evasively. But Trump probably didn’t understand it.” What Putin did say, according to this person, was that he’d “raise the level” of the talks. It didn’t mean that Putin agreed to meet with Zelensky, but rather that, this time, he’d agree to sending higher-ranking people to participate in Russian-Ukrainian talks. “But Trump heard it as an agreement,” the source said. “Putin tries to play with words, but Trump thinks it’s a yes.”

It’s hard to imagine a more ridiculous outcome. Trump and Witkoff, former real estate tycoons, want to push through a deal yesterday and tout their accomplishments to the media. Trump, as he’s made clear, wants deals, deals, deals—because is a peace deal really so different?—so he can finally get his Nobel Peace Prize. But the world of New York real estate is a soothing spa compared to the dark, Byzantine maw that is the Russian state, and Trump and Witkoff are clearly no match for it. They are so illiterate in the context, culture, and even the reality of what they’re dealing with that it is, frankly, embarrassing. Even worse, they clearly don’t even realize how badly they are out of their depth. As one analyst in town put it, “These people are idiots.”

Yes, these people are idiots. It gets worse: Witkoff is so out of his depth that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin could use him to punk the entire CIA:

[Take] the case of Juliane Gallina, a senior C.I.A. official whose mentally ill 21-year-old son, Michael Gloss, was killed fighting for the Russian army in Ukraine in April 2024. Earlier this month, Witkoff had visited Moscow to meet with Putin, who had given him a gift for Gallina: the Order of Courage, a Soviet-era award for outstanding civilian service, in honor of her son.

At the time, the gesture was described in the press alternately as “a dig” and a way to “needle” the American president. But let’s be serious. This was Putin, a former K.G.B. officer and head of the F.S.B., using Witkoff to say “fuck you” to his old enemy, the American intelligence services. It was saying, in essence, even the children of your spooks choose our side—and using the president’s own envoy to deliver the message.

Witkoff had not only accepted the Order of Courage, but passed it on. “For Witkoff, who lost a son in the opioid epidemic, losing a child is a traumatic experience that transcends geopolitics,” Tapper wrote. “And he thought it worthwhile to give the medal to Juliane Gallina, the C.I.A.’s deputy director for digital innovation.”

Witkoff saw it as a way to bond with a fellow grieving parent, but that’s almost certainly not how Putin meant it. Putin was sending a message to Gallina and the C.I.A. that was packaged so that Witkoff wouldn’t understand it. That too is part of the insult: pointing out that Witkoff understands so little, and is so easily manipulated by the Russian president, that he can use him, like an unwitting mule, to give a senior American intelligence officer a black eye.

“Witkoff may be the most inept and clueless envoy in the history of U.S.-Russian diplomacy,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired senior C.I.A. officer who learned about playing nice with the Russians the hard way. “By first accepting and then delivering the medal, he both went along and then actually actively aided Putin’s mockery and trolling of America.”

Look, I don't believe that the OAFPOTUS is a Russian spy or that Putin has kompromat on the guy. But it's obvious that the President of the United States is a Russian asset. There have always been useful idiots, just never one so useful.

OK, Butters has decided she's unhappy that her family have left her here and has started singing to the neighborhood. Must run.

The OAFPOTUS has moved to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force under the DC Home Rule statute that gives him a little more than a month to do so before Congress has to consent. As with many of his more dramatic trolls, this has sent everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell into varying degrees of outrage.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort warn that the "military crackdowns are only going to get worse:"

The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end with D.C. and L.A., that other military options are very much on the table. The facts, the laws, and data do not seem to matter: Trump and his team believe he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, including using the U.S. armed forces for domestic political purposes as well as intimidating his enemies. His team is privately putting together plans for him to do just that.

Trump has long yearned to unleash the military on American soil for his political agenda, and the D.C. and L.A. deployments this summer are critical stepping stones in his increasingly authoritarian government’s vision for punishing his enemies Democratic area of the country, carrying out his brutal immigration agenda, and making life hell for unhoused people. Trump said on Monday that federal forces will work to remove “homeless encampments from all over our parks,” and that the unhoused will not be “allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.”

Trump officials note that it is a priority of the president’s that these kinds of military deployments — in L.A., and now D.C., in times of relative calm — become normalized in American political culture.

(Emphasis mine.) Federal agents have already started clearing DC homeless encampments and marching the homeless off to jail in a show of performative cruelty unmatched since Jim Crow.

Josh Marshall warns us not to get distracted by the legal niceties and to look at this as the first of many steps to occupy left-leaning US cities:

My argument was that even though the unique rules governing DC make this legal it is by Trump’s own argument part of a rollout he envisions for using federal police (ICE, CBP, FBI) and the National Guard to start taking over policing in big U.S. cities, universally blue cities and in every case in blue states.

We are fundamentally in a battle over public opinion. If a decisive majority of the public opposes Trump, his rule and criminality won’t stand. What follows from that is that what might be technically legal under some obscure statute or simply unreviewable isn’t the point. That’s deep in the weeds. That’s Michael Dukakis delving into statutes and principled opposition to the death penalty when the moment calls for modulated fury and outrage.

The issue is do people want to live under martial law, in cities occupied by the military.

Radley Balko breaks down "the White House lies about DC:"

So let’s get this out of the way, first: As I wrote in my previous post, Donald Trump’s “takeover” of Washington, D.C. is authoritarian thuggery. It’s a projection of power, driven by retrograde racism. It has nothing to do with recent crimes, or actual crime, or actual crime rates. We know this because it’s been in the works for more than a year. That said, I think it’s still important to point out when they’re lying. And everything they’re claiming in justification of the deployment of National Guard troops to D.C. is a lie.

This seems like a good time to remind everyone that when he first entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump inherited the lowest murder rate of any president in 50 years. Four years later, he was the first president in 30 years to leave with a higher murder rate than when he started.

Deploying the military won’t make people safer — and it won’t make people feel safer. We’re seeing more disorder because the pandemic brought a surge in mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness, and funding for social programs hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Now that the Trump administration has taken a huge bite out of federal supplemental funding for those programs, it’s probably going to get worse.

I’m fairly comfortable predicting that, contrary to the administration’s claims, Donald Trump will not end crime in D.C. I’ll also go out on a limb and predict that the Democrats are not going to unravel civilization. To the extent that our own civilization is in jeopardy, Donald Trump is a big part of the cause.

NPR's Steve Inskeep, a DC resident, says "of course DC has crime," but c'mon, man:

[T]here is crime, and local politicos know they need to address it. But that’s not really the question raised by President Trump’s decision to seize formal control of the DC police and send in federal agents to help them.

Trump’s declaration, and all the rhetoric that accompanied it, lean into prejudice. People who do not live in big cities are conditioned to be afraid of them. I learned this as someone who did not grow up in a big city. The declaration plays on that fear, and widens the gulf between Americans.

Statistics are different from place to place. But unfortunately, crime is everywhere and anywhere; you are more likely to have a drug problem in your own family or on your own block than you are to encounter trouble in somebody else’s city.

James Fallows contrasts the OAFPOTUS's deranged ranting with "what it actually 'feels like' in DC:"

Donald Trump obviously does not know this city. According to press accounts, and to judge by his own rhetoric, Trump lurched into declaring a “public safety emergency” for DC based mainly on two pieces of evidence. One was the reported injury of the 19-year-old former Doge staffer Edward Coristine, generally known as “Big Balls,” in an alleged carjacking. The other was Trump’s alarm at seeing a homeless encampment while being driven from the White House to his own golf course in Northern Virginia.

Anyone in DC can tell you that it has big problems. My experience is that the same is true of anyone in Shanghai about their home city, anyone in LA about LA, any Londoner about London, anyone anywhere about the place they live.

But if you can find anybody who knew the area in the 1970s, the 1980s, or even the 1990s, and does not think that the DC of 2025 is vastly more pleasant, more stimulating, more beautiful, more environmentally sustainable, more cultured, better managed, and safer than it was a generation ago, then you have found someone detached from reality.

What’s the even bigger problem for DC? Taxation without representation.

Anyone paying attention to city life in the US knows the OAFPOTUS is full of shit. But that doesn't mean he can't make life difficult for everyone he hates. I'm glad DC is pushing back to the extent they're able, and I know that Illinois will push back as well if he tries that shit here. It's going to be a long 18 months until the next Congress.

I don't approve at all of Israel's actions in Gaza after they removed any serious military threat from Hamas or Hezbollah more than a year ago. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's declaration today that Gaza will become essentially a military protectorate of Israel means that, at least as long as Netanyahu can stay out of jail (his entire reason for staying in power at this point), Israel is no longer a democracy.

That said, Israel's utter humiliation of Iran and removal of Iran's proxies from the theater of combat will be the subject of military histories for a very long time. Politico has some of that story today, detailing how the Mossad recruited an army of Iranians in Iran to assist them against the Iranian regime:

The secret war between Israel and Iran has attracted far less public attention but has also played a significant role in the region’s changing balance of power.

In 2018, Israeli-trained operatives broke into an unguarded Tehran warehouse and used high-temperature plasma cutters to crack safes containing drawings, data, computer disks and planning books. The material, weighing over 1,000 pounds, was loaded onto two trucks and driven into neighboring Azerbaijan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed the material at a press conference in Tel Aviv and said it proved Iran had been lying about its nuclear intentions.

One key to the spy agency’s success is the ethnic composition of Iran. Israeli officials noted in interviews that roughly 40% of the country’s population of 90 million is made up of ethnic minorities: Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds and others.

The Mossad’s espionage efforts were helped by a geographic fact. Iran is bordered by Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Smuggling is a way of life in the region, as thousands of people earn their living using donkeys, camels, cars and trucks to carry drugs, fuel and electronics across the borders.

The Mossad had developed contacts with smugglers — and often with the government intelligence agencies — in all seven nations.

The problem facing Iran's regime is the same that all authoritarian governments ultimately have: they're fundamentally incompetent. Once pleasing the Dear Leader becomes more important to keeping your job than actually doing your job, it's hard to have integrity. The competent people get replaced with incompetent lickspittles, all up and down the chain. Just look at the OAFPOTUS and his Cabinet of Deplorables.

Iran's regime and its history also support Frank Herbert's observation that "all rebels are closet aristocrats." So do the OAFPOTUS's droogs. (Herbert also wrote, "Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible." I'll end with that this afternoon.)