The Daily Parker

With 58 days until the election, the noise keeps increasing. Here's some of it:

• Jeffrey Goldberg reports from multiple sources that the president referred to wounded soldiers as "losers" and "suckers" for serving the country. The administration moved quickly to lie about this.
• Andrew Sullivan calls the president a "metastasizing cancer."
• Catherine Rampell suggests ways to talk to right-wingers about the president's failures.
• Nick Martin asks, "how did 'if I die, I die' become this country's mantra?"
• Ross Douthat wonders "how many lives would a more normal president have saved?"
• A pro-president boat parade on Lake Travis, Texas, caused so much wake that several of the boats sank.
• Ken Griffin, the richest man in Illinois and therefore the one most likely to lose some money that he can never possibly spend, has donated $20 million to defeating the graduated income tax proposal in the state.
• Los Angeles has selected a new streetlight design, which is pretty cool.
• A bunch of 12-year-olds have discovered that the Edgenuity learning platform has easily-defeated grading algorithms.
• David Benioff and DB Weiss will adapt Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem for Netflix.

Finally, The Smithsonian describes how Greg Priore managed to steal priceless documents from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, because he was in charge of security for those items.

Stuff to read:

• White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany accidentally referenced the Armenian genocide, which would have been great if she had any clue why the Turkish embassy immediately demanded she apologize.
• Paul Krugman says that we lost the war on Covid-19 because of our leadership, not because of our culture.
• Crain's reports that Illinois had its best month ever in legal marijuana sales, and yes, they made a bad pun in their headline.
• NPR reports that phase transitions, the physics concept, may help explain how ALS damages cells.
• WBEZ explores why my neighborhood became an entertainment hub in the early 20th century.
• Writing for The Atlantic, Helen Lewis explores "how JK Rowling became Voldemort."

Finally, last June, Jennifer Giesbrecht wrote that "Babylon 5 is the greatest, most terrible SF series." She's mostly right.

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'm setting these aside to read after I race around my house closing windows in a few minutes:

• Midland, Mich., native Ben Mathis-Lilley examines why his home town flooded, and what could come next for it.
• National Geographic outlines how Covid-19 resembles other viral diseases, even though it seems to behave wierdly.
• Fox (who else? I mean, other than PornHub?) has a new show where 15 men compete to impregnate a 41-year-old woman. I am not making this up.
• Mel magazine says "America is officially in 'fuck it' mode."

I'm working on a longer-form entry bringing together some of the more serious books and essays I've read on our current situation.

Just when you thought the Republican Party couldn't become more anti-science and pro-profit (at the expense of workers), the Wisconsin Supreme Court just struck down Wisconsin's stay-at-home order on a 4-3 party-line vote.

If only that were all:

• Jennifer Rubin points out that "Trump's abject hypocrisy shows us where he's failed."
• Not only has Trump "lost the plot," he "has no plan," according to two articles this week in The Atlantic. How is this news cycle different from all other news cycles?
• The US Supreme Court listened to arguments this week about the electoral college and Trump's tax returns. It seems likely the nation will lose both cases.
• The judge presiding over Michael Flynn's case has asked a retired judge to brief him on whether to hold Flynn in criminal contempt for perjury, after the Justice Dept. sought to end its prosecution of Flynn.
• The City of Chicago has ordered food delivery services to disclose the fees they charge restaurants so consumers have more transparency. Restaurants have complained about price-gouging from GrubHub and others.
• Meanwhile, Uber is in talks to buy GrubHub. If we had a functioning FTC, this would never happen.
• David Kamp brings back my childhood with his paean to Zoom, the children's television show I watched religiously when I was a kid.
• Anthropologists have found a 45,000-year-old midden containing homo sapiens tools, bones, and jewelry in a cave in Bulgaria. It's evidence of the earliest modern humans in Europe.
• The New York Times has an oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road, which the author calls a "modern action classic." (It's one of my faves as well.)

Someday, we'll all look back on this time, laugh nervously, and change the subject.

My day kept getting longer as it went on in a way that people living through the pandemic will understand. So I didn't have time to read any of these yesterday:

• The Chicago Tribune produced six charts that explain the pandemic's economic effects.
• Rolling Stone identifies the four men most responsible for our current calamity.
• The Washington Posts lists six takeaways from Dr Anthony Fauci's testimony before the Senate today.
• Consumer Reports helps you avoid Zoombombing.
• The New Yorker describes the secret lives of fungi.

Finally, Jon Oliver has put out a line of Last Week Tonight stamps to help support the US Postal Service. So naturally I bought some.

Clarence Busch, a man with multiple arrests for intoxication including a hit-and-run drunk-driving charge from less than a week earlier, killed 13-year-old Cari Lightner on a quiet road in Fair Oaks, California, on 3 May 1980. In response, Cari's mother Candace founded MADD: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which in just four years got the Federal Government and most of the states to crack down on drunk driving. The organization and the legislation they got passed reduced drunk-driving deaths 40% by 2000.

My dad met Candy Lightner in 1982, and wrote an Emmy-nominated TV movie about her and her success in saving other people from drunk drivers, for which he received a Writers Guild award in 1984. (He would have won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Special as well but for the truly groundbreaking Special Bulletin.)

You can watch the trailer for MADD on Video Detective, and the entire movie Special Bulletin on YouTube.

Unemployment claims jumped another 6.6 million in the US last week bringing the total reported unemployed to 16.8 million, the largest number of unemployment claims since the 1930s. Illinois saw 200,000 new claims, an all-time record, affecting 1 in 12 Illinois workers. And that's just one headline today:

• The latest figures estimate Illinois will have 1,600 covid-19 deaths by August 4th and that hospitalizations will peak this weekend, a welcome revision of the previous estimate (3,400 deaths and April 20th).
• The hospitality industry saw its worst week ever, with hotel occupancy down 68.5% (to 21.6%) and revenue per available room (RevPAR) down 81.6% to $16.50.
• Washington governor Jay Inslee sounds the alarm over the president's "lack of urgency" contributing to vital equipment shortages and hobbled response efforts.
• The New York Times explains "why Republicans are so afraid of vote-by-mail." Hint: it has nothing to do with retail voter fraud.
• Atlantic media critic Sophie Gilbert calls Netflix's Tiger King "a moral failure."
• Writer Kris Gage predicts breakups (not divorces) will spike once stay-at-home orders relax.
• Mad Magazine caricature artist Mort Drucker has died at 91.
• Did you know that downtown Chicago almost got built in what is now the South Chicago community area?

After all of that, why don't you watch this adorable video of skunks chattering away as they investigate a cyclist?

...as I took the last squares of toilet paper from the roll this morning. I had to dig into the Strategic TP Reserve just to meet ends.

Before I round up the depression and sadness from around the world this morning, I would like to point out that yesterday's high temperature of 27°C at O'Hare was the warmest we've seen since the 30°C we had on October 1st, 189 days earlier. I opened all my windows, and Parker got his pace up just a little bit. Today's forecast calls for perfect spring warmth (21°C) and thunderstorms during what we used to call "rush hour." (I will probably have all my windows open when the rain starts and have to close them very quickly.)

So what else has the world thrown at us this morning? In addition to the usual drumbeat of deaths and Republican malfeasance, this:

• Just now, Bernie Sanders has ended his presidential campaign, leaving Joe Biden as the last remaining candidate. One hopes his supporters come back home before November 3rd.
• Comfort foods, aka that crap your parents didn't want you to eat when you were a kid, have made an amazing comeback as people shelter in place.
• Today is the 30th anniversary of Twin Peaks' debut.
• For the first time ever, people have adopted every single animal from Chicago Animal Care and Control. I really, really hope people keep them.
• The much-noted environmental benefits of shutting down a quarter of the world's economy seem great, but environmentalists have some pessimism about our return to full production when the emergency ends.
• Paul Krugman likens the government's crisis response to "learned helplessness."
• President Trump fired the inspector general just made responsible for overseeing the $2 trillion disaster-relief package, citing "bias." Of course Glenn Fine has a bias: he believes in evidence and government accountability. That makes him prima facie unacceptable to Trump. This comes days after he removed intelligence IG Michael Atkinson for similar reasons.

Well, now that I'm thoroughly pumped from reading the papers, I'm going to document an API while watching Schitt's Creek.

Even when I work from home, I have a lot to do. At least I don't have a commute today, giving me extra time to catch up later:

• On March 8th, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy turns 42. Yes, 42.
• It won't surprise anyone to learn that Donald Trump sucks at business. He certainly sucks at medicine. And at nominating people properly.
• Farhad Manjoo wants to live in Elizabeth Warren's America, and so do I.
• Josh Marshall analyzes why Bernie Sanders hit a wall last night.
• Philip Bump explains what happens to delegates when a candidate drops out.
• February set another record for the Lake Michigan-Huron system's water levels, causing extensive damage to beaches.
• Winter 2019-20 ended Sunday. In Illinois, though February was pretty normal, the winter itself was not.
• Let's Encrypt needs to invalidate most of its certificates due to an error.

And now, back to work.