Voters across the US told the OAFPOTUS to pound sand in the clearest electoral rebuke to a major political party since 1984, and the hardest slap to an incumbent president probably since 1868. Democrats won crushing victories in Virginia, New Jersey, California, and even Mississippi. Almost every county in Virginia shifted toward Democrats, and no amount of money could unseat three Democratic Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania. Plus, Zohran Mamdani beat the OAFPOTUS-endorsed candidates to win the New York City mayoral election, which doubles as a bitch-slap to the establishment pundits who can't wait for him to fail.
The Republicans, in short, got spanked hard.
I don't have time to summarize all the reactions, so I'll just list a few:
While voters were handing the OAFPOTUS and his droogs their political asses during the longest government shutdown in history (second only to the one in their first term), armed thugs from the Dept of Homeland Security burst into a fucking day-care just a couple kilometers from my house to arrest a woman that the day care says is legally authorized to work for them. But little kids screaming in terror while one of their caregivers gets thrown to the floor and handcuffed is the point for these assholes, and is just one of the many malfeasances of this administration that led to yesterday's decisive losses for their party.
Yesterday showed that Americans learned the correct lessons from Venezuela and Hungary, and the Republicans didn't. Know hope.
You know, I probably won't be online much Friday through Sunday. I should try to do that more often.
- The OAFPOTUS pretty much guaranteed that Zohran Mamdani will win today's New York City mayoral election by endorsing former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, which I'm pretty sure Cuomo didn't want either.
- Brian Beutler chastises the Democratic Party for "the scourge of wimpiness." I am tempted to send him a strongly-worded email.
- US Rep. Jan Schakowsky's (D-IL9) departure from the US House has led to so many candidates running for her seat] in the March 2026 primary, it's hard to figure out who's who or what they stand for.
- Amherst College political science professor Javier Corrales outlines how Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro has woven the fates of the country's elites together to ensure that their literal survival depends on his political survival.
- Thirteen years after the USDOT and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania spent $77 million building two off-ramps into Chester, Pa., that the community didn't ask for, absolutely no benefits have accrued to the city. As Charles Marohn reminds us, this is "the predictable outcome of a transportation funding system that rewards appearance over impact."
Finally, Block Club Chicago spent the day at one of the last 24-hour-diners in Chicago, which happens to be just 2 km from my house. Now I know where to go if I'm craving a burger at 4am.
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.
How is it October in two days? As in, how is it already a full month into autumn and O'Hare is reporting a higher temperature than Phoenix?
Meanwhile:
- Incumbent New York City mayor Eric Adams has dropped his re-election bid as polling reveals that most of the city actively despises him. Josh Marshall shrugs, but runs the numbers on a possible victory by former governor Andrew Cuomo.
- Paul Krugman warns that the Republican spending bill the Democrats are currently blocking in the Senate would cause massive increases in everyone's health insurance premiums next year.
- Brian Beutler wants the Democratic Party to pick new, better fights to get people on side, instead of continuing the same focus-group-tested crappy messaging it can't seem to shake.
Finally, if you've ever visited Chicago, you'll know that we have a lot of brick construction here. (In fact, the current Inner Drive Technology World HQ is the first place I've lived in Chicago that didn't use bricks.) It turns out, a guy named Will Quam will give you a guided tour of Chicago's brick structures for a small fee. What would Chuck Rainey say?
After winning 9 straight on the road for the first time since 1998, the New York Yankees (76-61, 3 GB) lost to the Chicago White Sox (49-88, 30.5 GB) yesterday at Rate Field in Chicago. And yet, it was a beautiful day for a baseball game!
My cousin got the tickets for $32 each, and they came with a hot dog, chips, cookie, and bottled drink. Each. He also said he popped for a 10-ticket package, good for any home games next season (except against the Cubs), for $14 each. Desperate times!
We also discussed why they oriented Rate Field southeast, which, as you can see in the photo above, has no view whatsoever. The original Comiskey Park pointed northeast so that fans sitting in the equivalent upper-deck seats we had yesterday would have seen the skyline:
Rate Field, which opened as "New Comiskey Park" in 1991, ended what my cousin and I call the "Ugly Years." My least-favorite parks on the 30-Park Geas were built between 1962 and 1991: Shea Stadium, Dodger Stadium, Kauffmann Stadium, Oakland Coliseum, and Tropicana Field. (Oddly, Angel Stadium was also built in 1966, but it has a beautiful view that makes up for the clunky architecture.)
I could go on about Mid-Century and Brutalist architecture at length, but I'd rather go play outside. Autumn has arrived, and the weather is perfect!
This weekend, I expect to finish a major personal (non-technical) project I started on June 15th, walk 20 km (without Cassie), and thanks to the desperation of the minor-league team on the South Side of Chicago, attend a Yankees game. It helps that the forecast looks exactly like one would want for the last weekend of summer: highs in the mid-20s and partly cloudy skies.
I might have time to read all of these things as well:
Meanwhile, my birthday ribs order got delayed. One of the assistant butchers backed into a meat grinder, so they got behind in their work. He was the biggest ass in the shop until he recently got unseated, so I don't feel too bad for making him the butt of my jokes.
G'nite.
It took several hours after the Gila River started rising for a general alert to go out. This doesn't appear to be anyone's fault so much as the way the alert system works, which is why a bill recently proposed in the Texas legislature would provide much-needed money to upgrade the system. Unfortunately for Texans who live near rivers, Republicans in the state house killed the bill in the most recent legislative session.
New York State has a similar problem. The Dept of Homeland Security just cancelled a $3 million grant to enhance "last-mile" alerts in extreme weather events, even as recovery workers found more bodies in Texas:
As the Empower website puts it, “By integrating advanced analytics, real-time localized high resolution Mesonet-based weather data, critical infrastructure ‘lifelines,’ social vulnerability data, and novel visualization capabilities, the Empower tool will provide a rapid assessment of changing weather conditions and their potential impacts on communities and critical infrastructure.”
But on Tuesday the grant recipients at State University of New York, Albany were notified by DHS in a termination form dated July 8th that the entire grant was being “terminate[d] for the convenience of the Government.” The order, signed by DHS contracting officer John Whipple, instructed researchers to immediately cease work on the project.
So while the Texas disaster last week wasn't the fault of Texas Republicans or the OAFPOTUS's hand-picked clown college, future disasters will certainly have higher tolls because of their actions.
My GOP friends: the Republican Party told you for decades it wanted to "drown the Federal government in a bathtub," and you either didn't believe them or thought that was just fine. At the moment, I don't care which. You will have some explaining to do later on, though.
I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.
Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:
- The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
- Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
- Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has quietly killed the most onerous MAGA over-reaches from the ridiculous Republican budget proposal.
- Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
- Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
- Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
- Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
- Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
- Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
- What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?
Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.
I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.
Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:
- The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
- Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
- Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
- Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
- Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
- Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
- Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
- Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
- What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?
Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.