The Daily Parker

It wouldn't be a day ending in "y" without people looking at some stupid thing the OAFPOTUS said and asking "why?" Or, you know, lots of people:

• As the things the OAFPOTUS's defenders say get even more disconnected from observable reality, Occam's Razor shows us that the guy has no master plan; he's just insane.
• Of course, that suits the wannabe oligarchs who have surrounded him as he's allowing them to direct billions of your dollars and mine to their private interests.
• One of the top lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service warned that the unsigned letter from the Clown Prince of X purporting to fire 7,000 probationary employees contained material falsehoods designed to commit fraud upon the courts.
• The stupidest trade war in history has already started to affect New York City's tourism industry as Canadians—over a million of whom visited and spent over $600 million last year—are vacationing elsewhere.
• Jeff Maurer shakes his head at the number of Democrats confusing "fight" with "flail in a way that achieves catharsis and nothing else."
• The preliminary NTSB report on the near-miss at Chicago Midway Airport on February 25th suggested that sunlight disoriented the pilots of the business jet that incurred upon runway 31C, forcing a landing Southwest B737 to go around.

Finally, not that I complain about the weather enough already, but just look at the cold front that came through yesterday around 7:30pm:

I got caught outside wearing just a sweater and was quite unhappy. As in every March, we just want warmer weather already. Like, you know, yesterday afternoon.

The Post's Monica Hesse watched the entire first season of "The Apprentice," now streaming on Amazon. Pray you never have to do this:

A refresher, since it’s been awhile since “The Apprentice” debuted in 2004. The show was a competition in which the prize was a vague job at the Trump Organization.

Upon this viewing, what surprised me the most is how much this show primed the country to think of Trump as imperial. I cannot stress this enough. Fanfares play when he enters the room. Contestants grovel for his attention. His properties, business deals and business acumen are all touted as “the best” and nobody fact-checks any of this.

But there were signs, I’m telling you. Bad signs....

Like Sam. There is a contestant named Sam, and he is terrible — he falls asleep in the middle of one challenge — and for two straight episodes everyone who works with him tells Trump that he is terrible and needs to be fired. But Sam talks a good suck-uppy game and he looks the part, so Trump keeps letting him stay, and anyway 21 years later Pete Hegseth is our defense secretary.

Or Omarosa. As soon as Sam is gone, Omarosa emerges as the next conniving, two-faced villain, single-handedly torpedoing her team’s success in multiple challenges. This time Trump sees it, too, but does he fire her? No. He fires the people he thought should have stood up to her better. Malevolence isn’t a sin, only weakness, and so here we are today watching Trump and JD Vance push around the Ukrainian president instead of the Ukrainian president’s bully.

“The Apprentice” was corporate cosplay, with decisions made based on what would play well with an audience rather than what would do best in a workplace.

Is there any reason, now, for DOGE to set completely arbitrary and legally contested deadlines for millions of federal workers to decide whether to quit their jobs? Any reason for Trump to fire the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center and appoint himself chair? Any reason for the United States to buy Greenland, which is not for sale, or annex Canada, which is not interested?

It’s government cosplay....

I've said it often: having spent the late 1980s and much of the '90s in New York, I have always considered the OAFPOTUS to be a boorish clown with horrible business skills and a schtick I found grating. It turns out, nothing has really changed except his platform.

Winter ends two weeks from tomorrow, but climate science and meteorology can only study nature, not command it. That explains why, despite ample sunshine, the temperature at IDTWHQ has stayed around -7°C since it leveled out this morning, and promises to shed another 8-10 degrees tonight. Then we're in for a few blasts of cold interspersed with warm days and some snow here and there for about a week before it consistently warms up.

Elsewhere in the cold, cold world:

• The Senate confirmed the unqualified and probably demented Robert F Kennedy, Jr., as HHS Secretary on a 52-48 vote, with Mitch McConnell (R-KY) crossing the aisle to vote against him.
• In yet another Orwellian display of up-is-downism, Elon Musk and his army of crybabies have started labeling ordinary journalism as "doxxing."
• Josh Marshall says the OAFPOTUS used his order to pause the corruption prosecution of New York mayor Eric Adams to essentially become the unelected mayor of New York—at least until everyone ordered to file the motion to do so has quit.
• Michael Tomasky urges Democrats to hit "economics, culture, and media" in order to take back the legislature next year. Trissie McMillan Cottom agrees.
• A jury convicted former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago) of 10 counts of corruption but acquitted him or deadlocked on about half of the charges. (Who says only Illinois governors get all the fun of public corruption?)

Finally, Google has suspended comments on the label "Gulf of America" because of all the one-star reviews people gave the body of water. I realize Google just follows the USGS on American place names (same as Weather Now), but still, they could have slow-walked it (as Weather Now is doing).

Paul Krugman wonders aloud why people in Upstate New York—who will probably never in their lives drive to SoHo—care so much about the lower-Manhattan congestion pricing zone:

Morning Consult found that while residents of New York City approve of the congestion charge, residents of New York State as a whole disapprove by a substantial margin. What this tells us is that negative views of the charge come from upstaters, people who will almost never pay it or experience its effects.

Which brings me to the most important enemy of this remarkably successful policy, someone who definitely isn’t personally affected: Donald Trump, who told the New York Post that he wants to “kill” congestion pricing (and bike lanes too.)

The first question is, why should Trump be weighing in on this issue at all, let alone trying to force the city to change policy? Aren’t conservatives supposed to believe in local control?

I do wonder whether general hostility to New York is part of the story. Many people, and Trump in particular, are committed to the view that one of the safest places in America is an urban hellscape. A policy that improves life in the city runs counter to that narrative and inspires visceral opposition. And Trump in particular surely wants to hurt a city that has never supported him.

But maybe the biggest reason for Trump’s desire to kill the congestion charge is a phenomenon I identified the last time I wrote about this: the rage some Americans obviously feel at any suggestion that people should change their behavior for the common good.

This is literally why we can't have nice things. Why, as anyone who has traveled to Europe or East Asia can tell you, we have fallen so far behind our peers.

Demonstrating one more time that the OAFPOTUS is all hat and no cattle, the White House announced that it will "postpone" the crippling and needless tariffs he had threatened to impose on our second-biggest trading partner in exchange for...something Mexico would have done anyway. Avocados will continue to flow north, and dollars will continue to flow south.

Canada, meanwhile, has taken a more hardline position on the threat, which James Fallows calls "an international lesson in leadership." Perhaps Canada will agree to increased anti-coca-production efforts in exchange for the OAFPOTUS "pausing" the tariffs that it seems he never really intended to impose in the first place. Because of course he didn't.

The OAFPOTUS is a con man, and this was a grift, just like everything else he does. Or maybe, as Timothy Noah suggested, it's a simple protection racket.

Meanwhile:

• Paul Krugman is shocked—shocked!—that the OAFPOTUS is doing what he threatened to do to the economy. But he's more worried that unelected, unconstrained tech bros have apparently gained access to the Treasury Department payment system.
• Cranky Flyer fears for aviation safety after the OAFPOTUS's unhinged and narcissistic response to the crash of AE 5342 on Wednesday.
• Charls Marohn argues that the response to 67 people dying in a plane crash should be the response to over 100 people dying every day in car crashes.
• John Scalzi explains how his next novel's title got translated into Hungarian as an example of why machines are simply not up to the task of translating yet.

And finally, the New Yorker has a cautionary tale about a real-estate deal that (quite literally) went sideways.

Update, 15:52 CST: Yeah, called it. Tariffs against Canada also paused, "in exchange" for Canada allocating 10,000 staff to policing the border—which I'm pretty sure they had already planned to do.

The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime.

Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these:

• Andrew Sullivan shakes his head at "the dumb luck" of the OAFPOTUS.
• On David Roberts' podcast, Dan Savage muses on "blue America in the age" of the OAFPOTUS.
• Ross Douthat worries that "it's going to be normal to have extreme beliefs."
• Amtrak has announced it will bring brand-new Alstom train sets into Acela service this spring, bringing the top speed of the route up to 250 km/h—at least for the Trenton-to-Newark segment. (At this rate, assuming no improvements in European train service, Acela should reach comparable speeds in the 2050s.)

Finally, a friend recently sent me a book I've wanted to read for a while: The Coddling of the American Mind, which civil-liberties lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt expanded from their September 2015 Atlantic article. I have noticed that people born after 1995 don't seem to have the same resilience or tolerance for nuance that even people born a few years earlier have. Lukianoff and Haidt make an interesting case for why this is. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I finish.

A contractor punctured the iron casing around the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in New York City, but fortunately thousands of motorists escaped a horrible death:

Workers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the tunnel, first noticed the curious downpour in the eastbound tube around 10 a.m. Leaks are not unheard of, and at first it appeared routine. An initial report indicated that officials suspected that the water was coming from a broken main on the Queens end of the tunnel.

But there was no evidence to support that guess. So, as the water continued to pour in, a tunnel worker performed a simple test using the most sensitive of instruments: his tongue.

The water, the worker discovered, was salty.

Immediately, it was clear that this was no burst pipe. City mains carry fresh water; salt water could only be rushing in from the river above.

[T]he cause of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel’s sudden failure was ... clear. Floating on the river, high above the tunnel, was a barge working on an entirely different infrastructure project, probing deep into the water with a large, red drilling rig.

When contractors punctured Chicago's Loop tunnel network in 1992, we got flooded basements. A QMT failure could have drowned thousands of people.

My day got away from me yesterday afternoon, so all this shiznit piled up:

• In the first of two gobsmacking First Amendment stories this week, the Florida Dept of Health has threatened television stations with criminal prosecution after they aired a pro-choice ad that appears to be working.
• In the second horrific First Amendment violation story, the state of Oklahoma is backpedaling after mandating that every school kid gets a Bible that just happens to look like the one the XPOTUS is hawking. (Note to international readers: the First Amendment to our Constitution not only protects free speech, but also prohibits the government from establishing an official religion. Handing Bibles to school kids is a prima facie violation of the Establishment Clause.)
• The XPOTUS has such a credibility gap that his own supporters don't believe he'll do the things he absolutely would do if re-elected.
• Mara Gay traces the downfall of New York mayor Eric Adams to his time with the police force, and says the city deserves better.
• Hurricane Milton destroyed Tropicana Field's roof, leading one to hope that they tear the monstrosity down and build something people would actually want to visit.

Finally, it turns out the principal difference between the 12-year-saga to replace the Ravenswood train station and the 15-year-saga to build the Peterson/Ridge station was that the Ravenswood station actually started construction 13 years ago. Streetsblog explains in detail why Chicago can't have nice transit things, and why I may never get to ride on a fully-electrified express train from Evanston to the Loop.

For once, Chicago's legendary corruption isn't the biggest news story of the day.

Let's start with New York, where the Adams administration seems determined to set new standards for public corruption, going so far as to float the "we're only a little bit criminal" defense:

The indictment alleged that, for years, starting during his tenure as Brooklyn borough president, Adams had cultivated a relationship with a representative of the Turkish government who arranged for him to receive some $123,000 worth of illegal gifts, such as discounted business-class tickets on Turkish Airlines and a stay in the Bentley Suite at the St. Regis in Istanbul. When Adams ran for mayor, his Turkish supporters allegedly channeled illegal donations to his campaign through straw donors with the connivance of Adams himself. In return, prosecutors say, Adams performed a number of favors as a public official, most notably pressuring FDNY inspectors to certify that the new Turkish Consulate near the U.N. was safe without conducting the necessary inspections.

The mayor’s defenders described all this as a whole lot of nothing. His defense attorney, Alex Spiro, ridiculed the indictment, calling it the “airline-upgrade corruption case,” and filed an immediate motion to dismiss the bribery charge, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that enlarged the bounds of acceptable gift taking. (He had less to say about the foreign donations.)

At the other end of the Acela, retired US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner and Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck warn the US Supreme Court that they are losing credibility, and thus, farther down the road, the power to do their jobs:

We have both been critical of the current justices for how their behavior, both on and off the bench, has undermined public faith in the court. Too many of its most important rulings can be chalked up to nothing more than the fact that Republican presidents appointed six of the justices, and Democrats appointed only three. And then there are the alarming ethical lapses of two of the six justices in the majority — lapses that have close connections to their relationships with right-wing megadonors.

A court that loses its institutional credibility is a court that will be powerless when it matters most.

A court without legitimacy is a court unable to curb abuses of political power that its rulings may well have enabled. It is a court that will be powerless when the next Chip Roy calls for disobedience because it will have long since alienated those who would otherwise have defended it. It would become a court powerless to push back against the tyrannies of the majority that led the founders to create an independent judiciary in the first place.

Will Republican Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch heed the warnings? Probably not. At least Special Counsel Jack Smith seems to have figured out how to get around some of their illegitimacy:

Smith’s filing tries to slice through the Court’s security shield regarding the insurrection. Skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion, the filing demolishes the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity. Outwardly, Smith’s filing respects the Court’s dubious ruling about the immunity of official presidential acts. Legally, Smith had no choice but to operate within that ruling, a fact that sharply limited how far his filing could go. But even though it never challenges the conservative majority directly, the filing makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions whatsoever. It persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself.

The crucial point to which the filing unfailingly returns is that none of Trump’s actions listed in the revised indictment, even those that the Court cited as “official,” deserves immunity. As Smith makes clear, the Framers of the Constitution deliberately precluded the executive branch from having official involvement in the conduct of presidential elections. The reason was obvious: Any involvement by a president would be an open invitation to corruption. To make the case that any such involvement falls within a president’s official duties would seem, at best, extremely difficult.

It is here that Smith turns the Court’s Trump v. United States ruling to his own advantage.

Only 28 more days until what I think we can comfortably predict will be the XPOTUS's last election—one way or another. But I think we'll be stuck with corruption for a very long time, until people get fed up with it enough to demand and enforce real anti-corruption laws.

The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week.

I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things:

• Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina), you are much better off than you were four years ago.
• The Illinois Attorney General has filed an environmental suit against Trump Tower for refusing to fix its water-intake system.
• A New York City cop who fought against "courtesy cards" won a $175,000 settlement from the city.
• A developer plans to raze a 175-year-old house in Glencoe, Ill., designed by William Boyington, because we can't have nice things anymore.
• Speaking of not having nice things, after £175m spent and 12 years of construction, the Old Street roundabout in Islington, London, looks...about the same as before.

Finally, the New York Times ran a story in its Travel section Tuesday claiming Marseille has some of the best pizza in Europe. I will research this assertion and report back on the 24th.