I've been heads-down debugging, except for going to the meetings already on my calendar, and just realized I've got to leave for rehearsal soon. I'll have to come back to these fun little nuggets later:
- What is this bullshit the OAFPOTUS is pushing about "white genocide" in South Africa?
- After some consideration, James Fallows has come around to believing that the way Senate Democrats ended the government shutdown will actually help us next year.
- The Chicago City Council finance committee rejected Mayor Brandon Johnson's tax plan for the second year in a row, principally over his plan to tax every employer in the city with more than 200 100 workers $21 $18 a month per employee.
- Weakness in downtown the real estate market has pushed up property taxes all over the city, on average by 17%. My tax bill came Saturday and had a 12% increase, so I guess I got off lucky?
Finally McSweeney's wonders what it's like to work for an evil company and still consider yourself a good person.
Cassie and I took a stroll through the local park. The maples are holding onto their leaves like winter will never come—though they seem to have given up on the chlorophyll for now:
Mid-November light is about the equivalent of the end of January, peaking around 29½° above the southern horizon at noon. That gives us hours of low, warm light on days like today.
Also, after walking about 32 km in total yesterday, I had no aching desire to walk at my usual pace, and Cassie didn't either.
My Brews & Choos buddy and I repeated our walk from 2023 along the North Branch Trail to Barnaby's of Northbook because they have really great pizza. This time we skipped all detours and went straight up from the trail to the restaurant, thereby saving over an hour of walking and, therefore, getting pizza sooner.
It helped that Chicago tied the record high temperature yesterday, hitting 21.7°C (71°F) between 2 and 3 pm. We started with cool and gloomy weather that got progressively better throughout the walk, contra 2023 where it started cool and sunny and turned grim as we got closer to our destination.
We also saw some wildlife. The buck stopped here:
I think the two of them just wanted some alone time and hoped the humans would continue on their ways. We didn't see any other deer on the walk, though, so clearly the others found more privacy than these two.
As many of the founders feared, the OAFPOTUS's worst offenses against the rule of law have come from his abuse of the pardon power. David French takes us through the history of how it got into our Constitution:
As our newsroom reported this week, at least eight people to whom Trump granted clemency in his first term have since been charged with a crime.
In addition, “Several others pardoned more recently after being convicted of offenses committed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have also run into trouble with the law.”
But the pardons just keep coming. On Sunday, Trump granted sweeping pardons to 77 people who helped him attempt to subvert the 2020 election. Last week, Trump pardoned Glen Casada, the Republican former speaker of the Tennessee House, and Casada’s former chief of staff, Cade Cothren. Both men had been convicted of charges including wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. If there was one element of the American Constitution that set off the most urgent alarm during the founding era, it was the pardon power — Article II’s grant of absolute, unchecked power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
Here’s one suggestion: Amend Article II so that it states that the president “shall have Power, with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate, to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
The pardon power should exist as a matter of last resort, deployed only when the American legal system has truly failed to deliver justice, or when the national interest in a pardon is overwhelming.
I'm in favor of that. I think the wording needs to be changed. And I still support a change to the structure of the US government that makes the Attorney General answer to voters and not the president, as I outlined during the OAFPOTUS's first term.
Speaking of abuses, today is the 65th anniversary of Ruby Bridges breaking the color barrier in New Orleans schools. Remember when Federal power was used to protect people?
We get pretty sunsets this time of year:
"Enjoy:"
- Charles Marohn rips apart the OAFPOTUS's half-baked proposal to allow 50-year mortgages, which would transfer even more rents to bankers than the current housing situation does.
- In a spectacular own-goal that will, I hope, be rolled back very soon, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has decided the city will no longer buy US treasury bonds, which are still the safest investments in the world and do not "support the regime" as she daftly claims.
- Jennifer Rubin cheers the millions of voters who have come around to the unavoidable conclusion that the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are horrible, incompetent, corrupt people.
- Kyla Scanlon toured 30 states and two other countries to answer the question, "where did American prosperity go?"
- Will Gotsegen warns that, even though the Republican-caused, longest government shutdown in history ended yesterday, cleaning up from it will take a while.
- Historian Zachary Karabell explains that the OAFPOTUS's eye-watering corruption is (a) nothing new in US politics and (b) not the end of the Republic. (He agrees its awful, at least.)
- The US Mint in Philadelphia stamped out the last pennies ever yesterday. The first ones, minted in 1793, had the purchasing power equivalent of 33c today.
Finally, Chicago's Alinea has lost its third Michelin star, fundamentally changing the fine-dining scene in the city. When the 2026 Guide comes out officially next week, Chicago will have only one 3-star restaurant. Quel horreur !
I snapped this on my just-before-sunrise departure from SFO on Sunday:
Also, if you have any doubts that the earth is round, see the above. (And why are you reading this blog?)
I'll have my usual ranty news-related post after lunch.
A coronal mass ejection late last week caused Kp7-level aurorae last night that people could see as far south as Alabama. Unfortunately, I missed them, though some of my friends did not. Fortunately, NOAA predicts that another mass of charged particles will hit around 6pm tonight, causing even more pronounced aurorae for most of the night. This time, I plan to get to a dark corner of the suburbs to look for them.
Meanwhile:
- ProPublica has an extended report about how the OAFPOTUS uses pardons and clemency far more corruptly than Harding, Jackson, or Reagan could imagine. (Madison, Jefferson, and the rest of the founders could imagine it, however, and they did not like it one bit.)
- John Judis thinks "the 8 dissenters did Democrats a favor:" "I believe that as the shutdown dragged into Thanksgiving, and as more jobs were lost, social services suspended, and planes grounded, the public would have begun blaming the Democrats more because — let’s face it — they had initiated the shutdown. The polls also showed that far more Democrats than Republicans felt affected by the shutdown."
- Brian Beutler wonders whether the divergence between people's perception of the economy and reality has more to do with the fracturing media landscape than with people's ability to intuit reality the same way economists do: "Our collective, manic emphasis on the cost of things has both made people upset, and given people a peg to hang their political frustrations on—but people did not become upset over nominal prices in some organic way. Democrats shouldn’t convince themselves that if they manage to lower prices, they’ll be assured more victories, or that if Trump manages to get costs down (perhaps with the help of the Supreme Court) he’ll become politically invulnerable. They certainly shouldn’t convince themselves that all things unconnected to prices are politically inert."
- Amanda Nelson reminds us that in 2008, the wealthy people who got wealthier even as the housing market collapsed and impoverished millions weren't stupid; they just didn't care. And neither do the authors of Project 2025.
- The $1.5 billion Illinois just pledged to transit projects fundamentally changed the vision of passenger rail across the region, according to the High Speed Rail Alliance.
- Chicago has issued the first permits for construction of the new O'Hare Concourse D, the first new concourse built at the airport since Terminal 5 opened in 1993. Construction could complete as early as 2028.
Finally, the OAFPOTUS's latest demented assertion about crime on the "miracle mile shopping center" left people baffled and also led to city council member Brendan Reilly (D-42), whose ward includes the Magnificent Mile, clapping back: "My suggestion to President Trump: spend more time focusing on your struggling real estate investments, especially the 70,000 square feet of vacant retail space that has remained un-leased since the opening of Trump Tower, 16 years ago...."
Between meetings and getting into the zone while fixing a bug, I worked straight through lunch and only got Cassie out around 4. So before my next meeting at 8pm, I've got a few minutes to catch up on all...this:
And yesterday, as most people know, was the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior.
We had a blast of lake-effect snow yesterday. This happens when cold air passes over a warm lake, pulling huge volumes of moisture from the water and freezing it into snow. The air got quite a bit below freezing yesterday morning, so the northeast winds picked up a lot of vapor from the 8°C water, which it promptly dropped on the city.
Through the spring and early summer we often hear that it's "cooler by the lake." But like the idea of "global warming," that hides a lot of nuance in a simple phrase. A slightly-more-accurate telling might be that it's "less variable by the lake." And yesterday we got an example of that.
At Inner Drive Technology WHQ, which is just over 2 km from Lake Michigan, yesterday was the first day since March 2nd during which the temperature didn't get above freezing. Yesterday the temperature ranged from -3.0°C to -0.5°C, with a dip during the second round of snowfall between 8 and 10 am. On March 2nd, it ranged from -5.4°C to -0.2°C.
Contrast with Chicago's official weather station at O'Hare (23.2 km from the lake), which last had a full day below freezing on February 21st. On March 2nd it did get down to -8°C, but it got up to 3°C, after hitting 14°C on February 28th. Similarly, yesterday O'Hare was both colder (-3.9°C) and warmer (2.2°C) than IDTWHQ, warm enough for all the snow to melt just a few hours after it fell.
Today's forecast promises above-freezing temperatures everywhere in the Chicago area today, rising to 18°C by Saturday. The snow doesn't bother me, but I hope the remaining ice melts from the sidewalks today.