The Daily Parker

I'm flying tomorrow and Sunday, giving me a few uninterrupted hours to read between now and Monday. So I'm just queuing some of these things up:

• The US Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibits certain medical interventions for minors who want to transition genders.
• As the opinion came from Justice Samuel Alito (R) and the dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I), I have a feeling both it and the dissent will satisfy no one.
• The Times characterizes the decision as setting back "the movement" a generation. I'm sure Andrew Sullivan will have a lot to say tomorrow, too.
• James Fallows contrasts his friend William Langewische with the OAFPOTUS's nominee to lead the Federal Aviation Administration.
• The New Republic has a series this week on "the obscene wealth issue."
• One more reason never to buy a Tesla: its cameras are always on.

Finally, after four years, the CTA Red Line stations at Lawrence, Argyle, Berwyn, and Bryn Mawr will re-open July 20th, which also means that Purple Line trains will resume running express. I am very pleased that a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar transport project actually finished on time and within budget in Chicago. If only we could do more of them.

I'm cleaning out some old boxes, and in one from my college years in New York, I found this gem:

I clipped it because I found it shocking at the time. Here was this buffoon demonstrating the corollary to the proverb "even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise," spending whatever it cost to get a full-page ad on page A13 of The New York Times, yearning for the halcyon days when we could just string 'em up.

When I saw the performance-art piece "Imbecile Descending on an Escalator" ten years ago, I could not imagine this encased meat product becoming president. What's left of his drug-ravaged brain still thinks it's 1975* and New York is overrun by those people. He thought so in 1989, thought so in 2015, and thinks so now.

But hey, the old guy you'd move away from if he were ranting on a barstool is reshaping the world today. History will not be kind to him. Or us.

* See this.

We live in the weirdest era of the past 150 years. It's so weird, I agree with almost everything former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said about Iran today:

Let’s call this what it is: Iran has been in a slow-burn war against the United States for decades. Whether through Hezbollah, Shiite militias in Iraq, or direct attacks on oil infrastructure and U.S. assets, the Iranian regime has made its hostility clear. And they've never hidden their intentions. From “Death to America” chants in Tehran to plotting the assassination of former U.S. officials on American soil, their posture has never changed.

Now, with tensions escalating again—this time with former President Donald Trump’s renewed saber-rattling—it's time to ask the question: What would it actually look like if the United States struck Iran militarily? And perhaps just as important: What should we avoid repeating from past wars?

Let’s stop pretending Iran is some invincible superpower. Its economy is in shambles. Its currency has collapsed. Its population—especially its youth—are disillusioned, angry, and ready for change. Its military is large but outdated. And its strength relies on asymmetry and subterfuge, not traditional battlefield dominance. A quick strike focused not on the people but on the unpopular nuclear program and IRGC can possibly keep the people on our side, as they take their nation back. A prolonged, protracted fight risks losing that goodwill.

Fortunately, he's not advocating that we attack Iran. No one really is, though Josh Marshall makes the argument that it looks like a quick win for the OAFPOTUS (despite it being terrifying in the long term) to drop a 15-ton bomb on Iran's Furdow nuclear facility. I really hope he doesn't, not least because I would rather have the US set its own foreign policy, rather than Benjamin Netanyahu.

The OAFPOTUS threatened to kill an adversary's head of state today, showing the world not only how reckless and stupid he is, but also that he has never actually seen the movie he clearly wants to emulate:

Lebanon, desperately wanting to stay out of this one, has warned the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah not to attack Israel. No word yet from our allies, who I'm sure did not want our village idiot to go rogue on this one. But, hey, he's the Inciter in Chief back home, so why would we expect any measured diplomacy from him abroad?

As if that were the only thing going on today:

• The Atlantic's Andrew Ryvkin argues that the OAFPOTUS has become a problem for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
• Philip Bump tells Democrats to quit catastrophizing: protests against the OAFPOTUS do not help him.
• Staff at Le Musée de Louvre went on strike yesterday to protest "untenable" working conditions because of crowding and chronic understaffing.
• As I've warned for years, the United States has fallen behind our peer countries because of our crumbling and obsolete infrastructure.
• Bruce Schneier lays out four ways that AI is actually useful, even though many uses remain problematic.

OK, I'm done for now. Say what you will about President Biden, but we didn't have this kind of chaos every day while he was in office.

Earlier I mentioned Cassie and I had a fun weekend with lots of outdoor time. Unfortunately, the weekend wasn't as much fun for others:

• Contrasting the 5-million-plus No Kings demonstrators across the country with the desultory turnout to the Army's 250th birthday parade that the OAFPOTUS co-opted, Norman Eisen concludes that the OAFPOTUS "is a lousy dictator."
• The OAFPOTUS, disappointed that he didn't get loads of goose-stepping troops carrying his photo like the DPRK army on parade, predictably threw a tantrum, threatening to step up mass deportations in cities with large No Kings turnouts.
• Still, as Philip Kennicott reports, the Army comported itself professionally as the non-partisan organization it strives to be, on what was after all supposed to be their celebration. (This only made the OAFPOTUS angrier, of course.)
• And Yascha Mounk answers the question of whether we're headed towards dictatorship with some optimism: "Not today. Not tomorrow. But the danger is real. And the ultimate outcome, far from being predetermined, may not be knowable for decades to come."
• The Verge's David Pierce has a WTF? moment over the "Trump Mobile" T1 8002 (Gold Edition), the OAFPOTUS's latest scam.
• Jodi Kantor takes a look at Justice Amey Coney Barrett's rulings, speculating that she may indeed be the next Brennan.

Finally, and completely outside of politics, the Nielsen-Norman Group has a detailed analysis of the hamburger-menu icon. Though it's only about 10 years old, most people know what they are today. Fewer people know how usability experts criticized it when it emerged, and how it still has serious failings as a design element. But like the gearshift lever on the steering column, it persists because it persists.

Oh, and because today would have been Parker's 19th birthday...

Organizers estimate 75,000 people marched in downtown Chicago yesterday, joining groups in 2,000 other cities and towns across the country to protest against the OAFPOTUS's illegal and immoral actions since taking office:

While the big-city rallies attracted the attention and the cameras, smaller events were organized in rural areas, including three dozen in Indiana, a state Mr. Trump won last November by 19 points.

In Dallas, another stronghold of Mr. Trump’s support, crowds of protesters stretched across a wide street for at least five blocks. The Houston protest looked more like a block party, with dances to Mexican music and cool-offs in a fountain.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the OAFPOTUS celebrated his birthday in the classic style of Soviet-bloc dictators by hijacking the US Army's 250th anniversary celebration with a tank parade across the city:

The festivities were a rapid escalation of the fairly modest affair the Army had initially envisioned when they first filed a permit request with the National Park Service last June. The parade component, specifically, was added to existing birthday plans this year. The president has long mused about a display of soldiers and tanks on the streets of the capital with aircraft overhead but backed off the idea in 2018 amid pushback from the Army and D.C. officials over exorbitant costs and the damage tanks might cause to roads.

While the Army estimates Saturday’s spectacle will cost the branch $25 million to $45 million, the cost to the city, and potentially the entire government, remained unclear as the parade roared into action. The Army agreed to foot the bill for any damage to local streets, and in an effort to reduce impact, they reinforced parts of the route with metal plates and outfitted vehicles with new rubber track pads.

Many commentators remembered the President Eisenhower's thoughts on having a huge military parade to counter the Soviets: "For us to try to imitate what the Soviets are doing in Red Square would make us look weak."

The OAFPOTUS has weakened us. Two thousand cities and millions of Americans told him that yesterday.

I just finished 3½ hours of nonstop meetings that people crammed into my calendar because I have this afternoon blocked off as "Summer Hours PTO." Within a few minutes of finishing my last meeting, I rebooted my laptop (so it would get updated), closed the lid, and...looked at a growing pile of news stories that I couldn't avoid:

• Dan Rather calls tomorrow's planned Soviet-style military parade through DC a charade: "The military’s biggest cheerleader (at least today) didn’t serve in Vietnam because of 'bone spurs' and has repeatedly vilified our troops, calling them 'suckers and losers,'", Rather reminds us. "But when service members are needed for a photo op or to prop up flagging poll numbers, all is forgiven, apparently."
• Anne Applebaum reminds us of the history of revolutions, and what happens when the revolutionaries get frustrated that the masses don't agree with them (hint: ask Mao or the Bolsheviks.) "The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier."
• James Fallows praises California governor Gavin Newsom (D) as "the adult in the room" for his response to the OAFPOTUS federalizing the California National Guard.
• Andrew Sullivan draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS's behavior and an archetypical colonial-era caudillo.
• Timothy Noah, who may have his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, wonders aloud if the OAFPOTUS's incompetence relates somehow to his obsession with weight? (tl;dr: Narcissistic projection.)
• US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) agrees with the OAFPOTUS on only one thing she can think of: the need to abolish the debt ceiling. (I also agree!)
• The US House of Representatives voted 214-212 yesterday to claw back $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting, which particularly imperils NPR stations in Republican districts.
• Slate looks into signs that exurban areas may finally be slowing down their car-centric sprawl as the economics of maintaining all that barely-used infrastructure finally take hold.

Finally, Politico describes the absolute cluster of the Chicago Public Schools refusing to close nearly-empty buildings that, in some cases, cost $93,000 per student to keep open. But don't worry, mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union president and now the least-popular mayor in city history, is on the case!

Comrade OAFPOTUS! (h/t Paul Krugman)

Historian Timothy W Ryback outlines how the Chancellor of Germany used manufactured crises to take over the Bavarian State in 1933. If you hear an echo from the past coming from California this week, that may not be an accident:

Adolf Hitler was a master of manufacturing public-security crises to advance his authoritarian agenda.

The March 5 Reichstag elections delivered Hitler 44 percent of the electorate and with that a claim on political power at every level of government. The next day, 200,000 National Socialist brownshirts stormed state and municipal offices across the country. Swastika banners draped town halls. Civil servants were thrown from their desks.

But not in Bavaria. [Bavarian minister president Heinrich] Held’s solid block of more than 1 million voters, along with the threat of armed resistance by the Bavaria Watch, gave Hitler pause. So did [Bavarian People's Party chief Fritz] Schäffer’s threat to call on Bavaria’s Prince Rupprecht to reestablish monarchical rule.

Hitler huddled with his lieutenants to frame a strategy for Bavaria. Storm troopers would stage public disturbances, triggering a response under paragraph two of Article 48, enabling Hitler to suspend the Held government, and install a Reich governor in its place.

And let's not forget the Reichstag Fire, which Hitler claimed was the start of a Bolshevik revolution even though the lone arsonist who started it was caught in the act.

With a weakened OAFPOTUS unable to win popular support for, well, anything lately, and his plastic-headed defense secretary sending marines to Los Angeles, this does not look good for the United States.

The music legend has died at 82. Barenaked Ladies popped into my mind when I read the story.

Meanwhile, I've got a meeting in 10 minutes, so let me also add just small note how the OAFPOTUS has affected Chicago. A friend of mine works for Northwestern University, and she is pissed off:

In a message to the Northwestern community, the school’s leadership said the new measures would include a faculty and staff hiring freeze, reductions in academic budgets, and a “0% merit pool with no bonuses in lieu of merit increases,” among other actions.

“Like a number of our peer universities, we have now reached a moment when the University must take a series of cost-cutting measures designed to ensure our institution’s fiscal stability now and into an uncertain future. These are not decisions we come to lightly. The challenges we face are many, some of which have been building for some time and some of which are new,” the message said.

Other cost-cutting measures include modifications to the health insurance program and additional non-personnel budget reductions. The school said more information on each of the actions would be coming in the days and weeks ahead.

I'd also point out my agreement with Josh Marshall on how states like Illinois and California, by being net contributors to the Federal budget, are essentially funding the war on themselves.

We've got 19 more months of this shit, folks.

I've had a lot to do in the office today, so unfortunately this will just be a link fest:

• I agree with Jeff Maurer that "I hate that when some dickhead sets a car on fire, we have to talk about it for a week."
• Journalist G. Elliott Morris argues that the Los Angeles protests have a higher probability of hurting the OAFPOTUS than helping him.
• Paul Krugman sighs that "we finally know what 'American carnage' was about."
• Russian emigrés Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev have a list of Russian words to help explain the OAFPOTUS and his droogs.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who served in the Wisconsin Air National Guard both here and in Afghanistan, has absolutely no patience for the OAFPOTUS militarizing the situation in Los Angeles.
• Jennifer Rubin similarly has no patience for referring to the first Defense Secretary who never served in uniform as a "warrior."
• Oh, and let's not forget the bill House Republicans passed a couple of weeks ago that, if the Senate passes it, would reshape American democracy in some pretty horrifying ways.
• Writer Michael Hirschorn thinks Democrats are missing a huge opportunity by staying away from bro-sphere podcasters like Joe Rogan.
• Both Google and Apple have reportedly added a time zone for Cape Breton Island after an article on a satirical Canadian site joked about the municipality creating an "even more annoying time zone between Atlantic and Newfoundland time."

Finally, while Graceland Cemetery in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood doubles as an arboretum and a great place to walk your dog, right now a different set of canids has sway. Graceland has temporarily banned pet dogs while a litter of coyote pups grows up. They are totes adorbs, but their parents have behaved aggressively towards people walking dogs nearby.