The Daily Parker

All autocratic regimes suffer from endemic incompetence. It's easy to see why: if you can't contradict the autocrat, the government is only as competent as he is. When the autocrat is a pathological narcissist, you get another level of stupid on top. People work in governments like this for one reason only: to get rich. And they get rich by stealing from the public. Competence only gets in the way of the grift.

So here we find ourselves 65 days from an election in which the incumbent claims to have the ability to put out a fire that he started, who leads a party that has given up any pretense of governing in favor of supporting this circus clown no matter what he says.

And the president is a clown, a kind of malicious Zaphod Beeblebrox, whose only role as president of the galaxy was to distract from the people who really ran things.

I'm venting some frustration given two things that have come up in the last 24 hours. First, from the New York Times, an admission (of sorts) from the administration that demeaning the office of President of the United States by having a gauche campaign event on the lawn of the White House was all about owning the libs:

[The president's] aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him, said the aides, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal conversations.

Of course he did. The show is all that matters. Which, presumably, why he plans to visit Kenosha, Wis., on Tuesday (the second thing) so he can personally add gasoline to the fire burning there—a fire he started:

White House spokesman Judd Deere told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday that Trump will be meeting with law enforcement officers and “surveying” some of the damage from recent protests that turned destructive.

Joe Biden, and his running mate, Kamala Harris, have accused Trump of rooting for violence amid unrest in Wisconsin.

“He views this as a political benefit,” Biden said in an interview on MSNBC. “He’s rooting for more violence, not less. And it’s clear about that.”

Of course he is. The show is all that matters. All of this destruction and death is fun to a man like the president.

Meanwhile, 183,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 and another 1,000 die every day, while Europe gets to enjoy a normal autumn, because our incompetent, nihilistic, narcissistic president cares about nothing other than enriching himself by any means available.

I'm sitting at my desk waiting for my work laptop to finish updating, a process now in its 24th minute, with "Working on updates 25%" on the screen for the past 5. Very frustrating; I have things to do today; and if I'd known how long it would take (I'm looking at you, help desk), I would have started the update when I left this evening.

So, all right, I'll read a few things:

• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has resigned "for health reasons" merely four days after becoming the longest-serving PM.
• Playwright Aurin Squire describes his time as a Black Republican, how he got there, and why he ultimately grew out of it.
• New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie points out that the violence in Kenosha, and not the Republican National Convention, "tell us more about where the right is headed:" "the extent to which Carlson and Coulter and Turning Point are representative of conservative thought on violence against protesters is the extent to which we may have to prepare for further Kenoshas."
• Author John Scalzi muses on works the public domain, and how copyright status has nothing to do with an author's popularity. He also discusses the discomfort we feel today with the "Golden Age" sci-fi works: "a lot of [it] currently lies in a sort of cultural uncanny valley, existing in a simultaneous state of being too distant from contemporary readers, and also not nearly distant enough."
• Chicago Tribune food critic Nick Kindelsperger finds the 9 best grab-and-go pizza slices in Chicago, which I should not have read this close to lunchtime. Or when I can't just hop on a plane for New York.

My laptop has rebooted three times now and appears to have gotten up to 83% complete. I may in fact get something done today.

There's a lot going on today, what with the Republican National Convention celebrating the apocalypse they desperately want, but a few things outside of that also happened:

• The Lake County Sheriff has arrested 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people in a protest in Kenosha, Wis., last night. Eyewitness reports suggest Rittenhouse shot three people who tried to disarm him after he'd already shot at a few others.
• New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has a pretty convincing explanation for why the Republican Party doesn't actually care about its platform.
• The University of Miami has a Covid-19 outbreak that couldn't in a million years have a connection to a dorm party last weekend.
• A group of four brothers managed to swindle Amazon out of millions by taking advantage of their automation.
• Want to feel old? Macaulay Culkin is 40.

Finally, only a few blocks from my house my neighbors have set up a Wee Free Library...of sticks...for dogs.

Politico's Tim Alberta describes what happens "when a party gives up on ideas:"

It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator Sanford alluded to. If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

The party is now defined primarily by its appetite for conflict, even when that conflict serves no obvious policy goal.

The result is political anarchy. Traditionally, the run-up to a convention sees a party attempting to tame rival factions and unite around a dynamic vision for the future. Instead, Republicans have spent the summer in a self-immolating downward spiral.

And only this morning I had an online altercation with a friend-of-a-friend who lives in rural Upstate New York. It went like this:

Original poster: Register to Vote! Wear a mask! Make sure you vote! Fight systemic racism! Orange man bad! Resist Fascism! (OK, you can stop ORDERING me about what to do in our FREE COUNTRY! - that last "order" isn't TOO ironic)

Me: Thank you for laying it out so plainly: "I'm not going to do anything anyone tells me to do no matter how many lives it saves."

OP: "I will do whatever anyone tells me in order to save 'just one life' (including wear a seat belt in the back of a limousine) but will allow babies to be killed even after the moment of birth" because it's a women's right.

Me: "I'm not going to respond to your point because it's correct, so look over here at something irrelevant to what you said."

Me, thinking twice:

But let me take up your misdirection as if it were a serious point: abortion rights is an actual policy difference between us. We may never agree, but we can have an actual discussion about it as adults. Both sides have good points. Both sides have blind spots. And that's why we have a compromise that both sides hate (which is a good sign that it's a good compromise, at least from a policy perspective). You want to support pro-life or pro-choice candidates, that's your choice.

If you don't want to register to vote, you will get no argument from me. In fact, why don't you just rip up your registration card right now and let the rest of New York go about its business without you? You want to vote, or not vote; that's your choice.

If you don't want to fight systemic racism, you'll get a big argument from me, but not because of policy; because of morality. You don't have to go to a protest, but if you won't even entertain the possibility that we as white people may have to do more than just be nice to the people of color we personally know, then I'm going to question your prejudices. Can or should the state make you fight racism? Absolutely not. Go ahead and be a racist, or fight racism, or anything in between; that's your choice.

If you don't want to resist fascism, I will simply question your sanity. But hey, again, that's your choice.

But if you don't want to wear a mask in public, then yes, I will support fining your ass if you refuse, because this isn't [just] a policy dispute or a moral question. It's about everyone else's right to avoid dying from something preventable trumping your right to avoid a little discomfort when you're at a supermarket. The virus doesn't care about public policy. Wearing a mask works; we can see that in literally every other country that has mandated it. The only policy difference here is that some people don't want to be "told" what to do, in the same way they didn't like to be "told" to go to bed when they were 6. It's not a choice; it's the easiest way to end the pandemic, and the state is right to use its public health authority to make you.

Of course, as my old grand-pappy never said, "The thing about mud-wrasslin' with a pig is, you both get covered in shit, but the pig likes it."

Today is former president Bill Clinton's 74th birthday. Last night, he spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where the party formally nominated former vice president Joe Biden to be president.

In other news:

• Chicago removed Wisconsin from the list of states too dangerous to visit without quarantine. With the exceptions of California and Nevada, the map now looks a lot like projections of the 2020 election.
• Five Thirty Eight updated its interactive guide to voting by mail this fall. In Illinois, ballots must be postmarked on or before November 3rd, but counties won't stop counting them until November 17th. We really won't know the outcome of the 2020 election until Thanksgiving, it seems.
• Americans with IQs over 100 have lost patience with anti-mask covidiots. 
• Kevin Drum explains why the president "hates the Postal Service."
• Olivia Nuzzi digs into the president's "chaotic, desperate" re-election campaign.
• Mali's army has mutinied and its president has fled the country.

And finally, in about half an hour, Parker will get a much-needed bath. He has no idea this will happen. I'll let him sleep another 10 minutes before the horror begins...

I'm taking a day off, so I'm choosing not to read all the articles that have piled up on my desktop:

• Tropical Storm Josephine has formed east of the windward islands, becoming the earliest 10th named storm on record. The National Hurricane Center promises an "extremely active" season.
• By tracking excess deaths in addition to reported Covid-19 deaths, the New York Times has concluded we've already surpassed 200,000 and could hit half a million by the end of the year.
• The General Accounting Office, a non-partisan Congressional watchdog, says Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli are not legally qualified for their current positions, throwing into doubt all DHS actions under their leadership.
• CityLab sees parallels between Chicago's response to looting in the past few months and its response to the Lager Beer Riot of 1855.
• Has the European Central Bank "found a way around the lower bound on interest rates?"
• John Scalzi declaims, "Fuck you, I'm voting." ("You," in this case, means the Trump Administration, in case there was any doubt.)
• A former Google security engineer earned $50,000 for helping "a guy" get $300,000 in Bitcoin out of an old Zip file, thanks to advances in computing power and a flaw in the Zip implementation.

Finally, a "mania" set Stravinsky's Rite of Spring to Teletubbies footage, and it's horrifying.

Writing for The Week, David Linker lays out the problem confronting the Republican Party even if they get a solid thumping this November:

[Y]es, it would be very good for the Republican Party of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, Louie Gohmert, Devin Nunes, and all the rest of them to be leveled to the ground so a wholly new party — a more reasonable, responsible, principled, and honorable party — can be built in its place.

There's just one difficulty with the plan: It does nothing to address the root of the problem, which no one — not the minimalist Trump haters, and not the fiercest maximalists out to pummel the party's establishment — has a clue how to solve.

That is the problem of the Republican voter.

The voters who swooned for Sarah Palin in 2008; who seriously considered giving the nod to Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Ben Carson, and Rick Santorum in 2012; who four years later elevated a reality-show conman to the head of their party, cast ballots for him to win the presidency, and have rallied around him ever since — most of these voters remain undaunted in their conviction that politics is primarily about the venting of grievances and the trolling of opponents. The dumber and angrier and more shameless, the better.

Could anything change these voters — turning them, not into liberals or progressives obviously, but into thoughtful citizens capable of engaging with reality, thinking about actual problems, and rewarding public servants who make a good-faith effort to respond to them? The honest truth is that I don't have the slightest clue how to make it happen. Which also means that I have no idea how the United States might work its way back to having two civically responsible parties instead of just one.

Which also means we will have to go through some version of all this nonsense again in 2022, 2024, 2026...until something shifts and these wankers grow up.

I admire the New York Times for digging into how our pandemic response was so much worse than every other rich country, but ultimately, we already knew:

First, the United States faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic. It is a large country at the nexus of the global economy, with a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions. That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes — including higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy — than in most other rich countries.

The second major theme is one that public health experts often find uncomfortable to discuss because many try to steer clear of partisan politics. But many agree that the poor results in the United States stem in substantial measure from the performance of the Trump administration.

In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries, period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.

Some Republican governors have followed his lead and also played down the virus, while others have largely followed the science. Democratic governors have more reliably heeded scientific advice, but their performance in containing the virus has been uneven.

The Republicans who have done this, up to and including the president, need to face serious consequences for their inaction and malfeasance.

Here in Chicago, we've lost yet another convention, bringing our economic losses into the billions, including an estimated 1.3 million lost room-nights this year alone.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed suit to dissolve the National Rifle Association:

The lawsuit sets up a legal confrontation that could take years to play out and will leave the 148-year-old N.R.A. — long the nation’s most influential gun-rights lobby but recently hobbled by financial woes and infighting — fighting for its survival. The attorney general’s office previously presided over the dissolution of President Trump’s scandal-marred charitable foundation, but the N.R.A., with more than five million members, is a far larger organization that is expected to put up a more prolonged fight.

The lawsuit was swiftly followed by two others: The N.R.A. filed a suit against Ms. James’s office in federal court in Albany, claiming her action was politically motivated and violated the organization’s First Amendment rights. In addition, Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, D.C., filed suit against the N.R.A. and its charitable foundation, which is based in the city. Mr. Racine is seeking changes to the foundation and alleges that the N.R.A. misused millions of dollars of the foundation’s funds.

The suit accuses the N.R.A. and the executives of “violating numerous state and federal laws” by enriching themselves, as well as their friends, families and allies, and taking improper actions that cost the organization $64 million over three years. The attorney general has regulatory authority over the N.R.A. because it is chartered as a nonprofit in New York. She is also seeking to oust Mr. LaPierre and Mr. Frazer, and to bar all four men from ever serving on nonprofit boards in New York again.

The lawsuit, which was filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, is a civil action, and outlined a number of alleged tax violations. Ms. James said during a news conference that she was referring the matter to the Internal Revenue Service in addition to taking her own action, and did not rule out making a future criminal referral.

Never forget: the purpose of authoritarianism is theft. And very few organizations the size of the NRA represent authoritarianism so obviously. Never mind what they say; watch what they do. (Hey, Mr LaPierre, where were all your members when actual jack-booted government agents came to Portland and DC?)

The Post has more:

James said at a news conference Thursday that she is seeking to dissolve the NRA because of the brazenness of the group’s violations of law.

“The corruption was so broad and because they have basically destroyed all the assets of the NRA,” she said. “Enough was enough … No one is above the law, not even the NRA.”

The lawsuit also claims LaPierre failed to report large sums of personal income to the IRS. James’s office said it found that the NRA chief funneled personal expenses through an outside public relations firm, allowing him to avoid reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal income.

In response, the NRA said Thursday that it was filing its own lawsuit against James, alleging that the New York attorney general has violated the group’s free speech rights.

“This was a baseless, premeditated attack on our organization and the Second Amendment freedoms it fights to defend,” NRA President Carolyn Meadows said in a statement. “You could have set your watch by it: the investigation was going to reach its crescendo as we move into the 2020 election cycle."

Waaaaah. Another thing authoritarians hate: being called on their wrongdoing.

Do I think the lawsuit will succeed in dissolving the NRA? No, sadly. And anyway, gun manufacturers would simply create a new trade and propaganda association to continue making the Second Amendment a parody of itself.

But with this suit, and the deepening investigation into the Trump Organization's finances, also in New York State, I think the era of right-wing over-reach may have reached its conclusion. Don't expect them to go quietly, however.

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?