The Daily Parker

...and it's Star Wars trivia tonight at Spiteful Brewing, so I'll just have to save some links to read tomorrow:

• Matt Bai shakes his head at the Clown Prince of X nakedly cashing in on the trade war.
• Yascha Mounk says the OAFPOTUS "has a genuine mandate," but can't get past his own narcissism and grievances to use it.
• Jennifer Rubin agrees, saying "doubling down with a pair of deuces isn't a winning strategy."
• Jeff Maurer shares his thoughts on the OAFPOTUS's "first hundred years in office."
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) calls out the dangerous corruption of betting on political outcomes.

Finally, WAPO has a list of 35 "definitive rules of train travel." Definitely Daily Parker bait. 

The OAFPOTUS took office for the second time 99 days ago, which means we already have a few 100-days stories to mention.

First, from Canadian prime minister Mark Carney (Lib.–Nepean), whose party won yesterday's election and has formed a 4th consecutive government:

"As I've been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country," Carney told supporters Monday night. "These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us. That will never ... ever happen."

Conservative leader Pierre Polivievre and New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh both lost their seats as well.

Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) decries "100 days of disaster:"

In just his first 100 days, Trump has issued more than 130 executive orders, throwing the economy, higher education, the legal system, and much of the federal government into chaos. He pardoned 1,600 insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. And most damaging of all, he declared a trade war with China — and pretty much the rest of the world — sending us hurtling toward a severe recession.

If there’s one thing Trump has proven in his first 100 days, it’s that he’s consistently bad at this job.

Former US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg asks, "are you better off than you were 100 days ago?"

In every presidency, the 100-day milestone is a key moment to check on the status of an administration and of the country. Today, Americans are experiencing an administration marked by historic shows of incompetence, cruelty, and confusion, and a country that is measurably worse off than just a hundred days ago.

At this 100-day mark, I’d encourage you to do everything you can think of to make clear how you feel, not just to your Member of Congress but to people in your life. This is a time to talk with friends and family, even or especially if they have different political views than you do. It’s a moment to listen to any doubts and concerns they may be having - as millions of Americans clearly do - with interest and empathy while sharing your own sincere convictions.

James Fallows takes the moment to laud the people standing up to the OAFPOTUS's clown show:

Mariann Edgar Budde had no way of calculating the risks she might be taking on. Soon after the service, Trump was attacking her by name (as “nasty” and dumb) on social media. A GOP congressman “joked” that she should go onto the ICE deportation list. Other threats were not in jest.

But she stood up and spoke.

Let us remember the story of Bishop Budde, 99 days ago. And remember the people fighting for decent values in all these days ahead.

Jonathan Chait calls it "an unsustainable presidency:"

Historians tend to rate presidencies by the breadth of their accomplishments, on a scale ranging from ineffectual to transformative. The classic measuring stick for 100-day achievements is the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The frenetic first stretch of the New Deal featured a raft of major legislation that established new financial regulations and ambitious public-works projects, helping the economy begin to recover from the Great Depression.

Judged against Roosevelt’s record, the first 100 days of the second Trump term can be deemed a miserable failure. The president has passed no major legislation, and his economic interventions have had the opposite effect of Roosevelt’s, injecting uncertainty into a healthy recovery and seeding an economic crisis.

Trump and his inner circle have consciously patterned themselves after Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, which seized control of the commanding heights of government power to suppress opposition, while permitting its president and his family to siphon vast corrupt fortunes. The Orbánization project has advanced like clockwork.

But one detail seems to have escaped the attention of Trump and his allies: Hungary, outside of its tiny parasitic elite, is a relatively poor country. That ought to have been a sign that, whatever benefits the Orbán model presented to the right-wing ruling class that would carry it out, it held little promise of helping to usher in the “golden age” of prosperity Trump offered the country.

Orbán’s economy has suffered a brain drain as the regime’s cronyism drives its great minds to work in freer societies. Trump’s policies have shown early signs of producing a similar outcome, as would-be international students must now consider whether pursuing an American degree is worth risking getting detained by ICE or having their visa revoked abruptly over minor legal infractions.

Trump’s first 100 days have set the country on an unsustainable course. The clash between the president’s determination to rule and his inability to govern has generated two opposing forces: a weaponized, illiberal state, and a smoldering political backlash. One of them will have to break.

Well, he's only got another 1,362 days to screw everything up even more. How bad can it get?

As I'm not at all expert on Canadian election law, and I have readers in Canada, I will refrain from making any political commentary until tonight. I should note that Canadians really do not like the OAFPOTUS, so a lot of them are seeing red—many more than you'd expect. As everyone knows, Canadians are very polite, which explains why so few of them are going blue today.

Politico called the final pre-election polling "strange," but they predict that fear and loathing of the OAFPOTUS has completely shifted Canadian politics in only five weeks. Of course, it could just be that Canadians got sick of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Lib.–Papineau) and find centrist Mark Carney (Lib.–Nepean) much more palatable.

Also, I do appreciate the Liberal Party having two back-to-back Gen X leaders.

I'll be watching this all day.

Not a lot to post today, as the weather is nearly perfect (for April) and I need a nap.

First, let's take a moment to acknowledge that the OAFPOTUS has the lowest approval rating (39%) of any president at the 100-day mark since polls began. That's quite an accomplishment. Until now, the record for lowest approval rating after 100 days was...well, the OAFPOTUS, at 42% in April 2017.

Second, how about this day? Cassie and I covered 6 kilometers around Uptown and Edgewater, including through Lakewood-Balmoral:

This is after Butters went home, which happened about 10 minutes after she decided that laying quietly in the sun was worth getting repeatedly smacked in the face by Cassie's tail:

That's par for Butters' course. She likes sleeping, after all. And she's one of the only dogs I've met who can throw shade in her sleep:

There you are, beagle photos as promised.

Taking 90 minutes to finish a novel this afternoon doesn't seem to have lessened my fatigue from the last couple of days. And now I'm off to a "friend-raiser" for an organization I've supported in the past.

As I'm also dogsitting Butters again, there's a good possibility that I'll have cute beagle photos tomorrow. For the next few hours, though, I need to smile and shake hands. I hope the passed apps are good...

Well, mixed, really. It turns out Cassie isn't entirely healthy, though at the moment she's fine and will remain so for a few years at least without intervention. (I'll get that sorted in a couple of weeks and explain more about it this weekend.)

Also, there's all this crap:

• David Brooks argues that the OAFPOTUS's single strength—his audacity—can be turned into a weakness: "Lacking any sense of prudence, he does not understand the difference between a risk and a gamble. He does daring and incredibly self-destructive stuff — now on a global scale. A revolutionary vanguard is only as strong as its weakest links, and the Trump administration is to weak links what the Rose Bowl parade is to flower petals."
• Anne Applebaum has started a Kleptocracy Tracker on her blog, to catalog as many instances of the theft, grifting, and corruption that animates the Republican Party and this administration.
• Julia Ioffe has "notes on the Rubio re-org scandal."
• Jennifer Rubin celebrates "four undaunted individuals," including recently-resigned 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens and the three SDNY prosecutors who quit rather than apologize for refusing to dismiss corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams (I).
• Dana Milbank wishes "there were a Yiddish insult that captured the missteps we’re seeing from the White House." (One comes to mind: putz mit zvey yegen.)
• Former US Representative "George Santos" (R-NY) was sentenced to 87 months in prison and ordered to pay $374,000 in restitution following multiple fraud convictions.
• Andrew Sullivan mourns Pope Francis I, who moved the Catholic Church closer to accepting homosexuality than any previous Pope.

Finally, Illinois has 4 of the highest property-taxing jurisdictions in the US (not including New York), because "we pay over $11 billion in interest on unfunded pension obligations." We don't pay the most in property taxes though, because our property values are lower than in other places. Still, as a percentage of property values, Chicago's property taxes are second-highest in the country. I feel this every February and August.

It was warm enough last night to leave a couple of windows ajar, which lets in fresh air along with every sound in the neighborhood. Also last night, an idiot cardinal found a convenient streetlight, stepped out of the shade, and said something like, "You and me, babe, how about it?" He started his serenade a little after 4 am, according to my Garmin sleep report, and continued well into the morning. I don't remember ever wishing for a cat as much as I did around 5.

Remember this little ode? Yeah. Really feeling it today.

I then had about 5 hours of meetings with various and sundry, with a vet visit sandwiched in for Cassie's annual wellness checkup. (She's in perfect health.)

I might have more creativity tomorrow. Anyway, I hope I do.

We start this morning with news that US Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), for whom I voted all 5 times he ran for Senate, will not run for re-election in 2026. He turns 82 just after the election and would be 88 at the end of the term. I am very glad he has decided to step aside: we don't need another Feinstein or Thurmond haunting the Senate again.

In other news:

• Vice President JD Vance outlined a proposal to reward Russia for its aggression by giving it all the land it currently holds in the sovereign nation of Ukraine, despite the crashing illegality of the war.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), rocking a 7% approval rating and having long ago made me regret voting for him, has gone into meltdown-panic mode now that it looks like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel might challenge him in 2027.
• Chicago landlords have moved away from taking refundable security deposits, which come with some strict-liability regulations, and into nonrefundable, unregulated "move-in fees." (I love Block Club Chicago, but I think they might not have quite enough balance in this report. See if you can spot what I mean.)
• Peter Hamby analyzes how the popularity of US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) within the Democratic Party contrasts with her unpopularity with everyone else.
• Greenland, for some reason no one could have predicted, has started looking for allies other than the United States.
• Radley Balko emphasizes the importance of remaining decent to each other during the long, difficult resistance to authoritarianism we've only just started.

Finally, I will say that despite all of the crap going on in Washington, the planet doesn't care (at least as long as the nuclear bombs stay in their silos and submarines). We had lovely spring weather yesterday and might have some tomorrow, while today we're getting rain showers and light jacket weather. I mean, Friday is the perfect date, after all.

I thought I was done with last week's cold, but no, not entirely. So I'm spinning my wheels looking at code today. I want to be writing code today, however. My brain wants to be three meters west and three meters down from IDTWHQ (i.e., in my bed).

I will note that Columbia Journalism professor Alexander Stille just came to the same realization Josh Marshall came to over nine years ago, that the OAFPOTUS resembles Benito Mussolini in all the ways that matter:

The comparisons between Trump and Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics between 1993 and 2011, are obvious and help us understand Trump’s initial political ascent and his first term in office. Both made their initial fortune in real estate, were better salesmen than businessmen, and developed a second career in television.

But Berlusconi’s political aims, by comparison, were comparatively modest.

Trump’s narcissism is very different from Berlusconi’s. Like Mussolini’s, it involves a desire for total dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence: hence his repeated threats to take over Canada and invade Greenland; to turn Gaza into an American beach resort. Mussolini, like Trump, had a keen instinctive animal cunning that helped him intuit the public mood and vanquish his domestic political opponents. He was a brilliant demagogue who could electrify the crowd and who shrewdly understood and exploited his domestic opponents’ weaknesses.

All this served him well at first. But when he began to move outside of Italy—creating an Italian empire and forcing Italy into World War II—his fundamental provincialism, his deep ignorance of the outside world, and his overestimation of his own instincts over objective facts did him in.

Mussolini careened from crisis to crisis—the invasion of Ethiopia, the civil war in Spain, the invasion of Albania and, finally, the entrance into World War II. If his career is any guide, we can expect four years of constant crisis. Autocrats require crisis to justify the extraordinary—and often illegal—measures they take and to distract the public’s attention from the fact that they are not actually improving the lives of ordinary citizens.

Don't worry, though. We only have 1,368 more days of this presidential term.

Michael Tomasky takes the educated-elite-leftist view that, somehow, the OAFPOTUS actually bamboozled 77 million voters—twice:

How many times did Trump say he’d end that war on the first day of his presidency? It had to have been hundreds. I saw a lot of those clips on cable news over the weekend, as you may have. He did not mean it figuratively. You know, in the way people will say, “I’ll change that from day one,” and you know they don’t literally mean day one, but they do mean fast.

But that isn’t what Trump said. He meant it literally. He used the phrase “in 24 hours” many, many times. So I ask you: Who really believed that?

Ditto with tariffs, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Just wait, Trump said, until you see me unveil my beautiful tariffs. They’ll fix everything.

Well … it’s not as if there weren’t hundreds of economists and others pointing out how much smoke he was blowing. Experts predicted exactly what has unfolded: that he’d start a trade war, which would roil the markets and result in higher prices, and that the rest of the world would stop trusting us.

Who’s looking more right today, Trump or the experts? The hated experts, by a mile. In fact, if anything, the experts understated the problem because Trump’s tariffs (at least the latest incarnation of them; it’s hard to keep track) have been higher than everyone thought they’d be.

Paul Krugman takes a more nuanced view, which I think gets closer to the truth, especially for both the extreme right and the extreme left:

Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.

If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.

The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.

And then just today I stumbled across a thread from Ethan Grey, "a former Republican who is now a consistent Democratic voter," which I believe tells the actual story:

Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:

1. They can tell people what to do.
2. You cannot tell them what to do.

This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (later in the thread), but this is the basic formula.

You've watched the Republican Party champion the idea of “freedom” while you have also watched the same party openly assault various freedoms, like the freedom to vote, freedom to choose, freedom to marry who you want, and so on.

If this has been a source of confusion, then your assessments of what Republicans mean by “freedom” were likely too generous. Here’s what they mean:

1. The freedom to tell people what to do.
2. Freedom from being told what to do.

When Republicans talk about valuing “freedom,” they’re speaking of it in the sense that only people like them should ultimately possess it.

So let’s add one more component to the system for who tells who what to do:

1. There are “right” human beings and there are “wrong” ones.
2. The “right” ones get to tell the “wrong” ones what to do.
3. The “wrong” ones do not tell the “right” ones what to do.

His whole thread is worth the read, because he's nailed it, though he leaves out the Christianist component at the end.

As I've said for many years on this blog, the modern Republican Party doesn't want to govern, it wants to rule. And it wants to rule so it can steal from you. There's nothing complicated about that.