The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Well, *this* disaster wasn't their fault, but...

It took several hours after the Gila River started rising for a general alert to go out. This doesn't appear to be anyone's fault so much as the way the alert system works, which is why a bill recently proposed in the Texas legislature would provide much-needed money to upgrade the system. Unfortunately for Texans who live near rivers, Republicans in the state house killed the bill in the most recent legislative session.

New York State has a similar problem. The Dept of Homeland Security just cancelled a $3 million grant to enhance "last-mile" alerts in extreme weather events, even as recovery workers found more bodies in Texas:

As the Empower website puts it, “By integrating advanced analytics, real-time localized high resolution Mesonet-based weather data, critical infrastructure ‘lifelines,’ social vulnerability data, and novel visualization capabilities, the Empower tool will provide a rapid assessment of changing weather conditions and their potential impacts on communities and critical infrastructure.”

But on Tuesday the grant recipients at State University of New York, Albany were notified by DHS in a termination form dated July 8th that the entire grant was being “terminate[d] for the convenience of the Government.” The order, signed by DHS contracting officer John Whipple, instructed researchers to immediately cease work on the project.

So while the Texas disaster last week wasn't the fault of Texas Republicans or the OAFPOTUS's hand-picked clown college, future disasters will certainly have higher tolls because of their actions.

My GOP friends: the Republican Party told you for decades it wanted to "drown the Federal government in a bathtub," and you either didn't believe them or thought that was just fine. At the moment, I don't care which. You will have some explaining to do later on, though.

I underestimated the insanity

On my flight yesterday, I finally read Nicholas Confessore's explanation of how US v Skrmetti got to the Supreme Court, and...wow. I am actually shocked at how illiberal and extremist the ACLU's leadership has become, and how far the transgender rights movement has moved to the left:

For Chase Strangio, the stakes were both personal and political. He joined the A.C.L.U. in 2013, a few years after undergoing top surgery, or a mastectomy, a procedure that “saved my life,” as he later wrote. “When you spend your life hiding from yourself, experiencing embodiment is nourishing, exhilarating,” Strangio wrote. “It is survival.” He vowed to work “to create social, political and legal conditions so that others could experience the same possibility.”

Like Strangio, the younger people going to work at L.G.B.T.Q. groups leaned further left than their older colleagues. Often identifying as queer — a label that could connote radical politics as much as any sexual or gender identity — they resented the incremental, assimilationist politics that had won the right to same-sex marriage. They sought to deconstruct assumptions about what was normal — to dismantle bourgeois institutions, not seek inclusion in them.

When the journalist Abigail Shrier published her 2020 book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” — casting the rise in dysphoria among teenage girls as a form of social contagion — Strangio tweeted that “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

An ACLU lawyer arguing in favor of book banning? What the actual? Confessore also elucidates Strangio's views on biology which don't, perhaps, conform with what actual biologists think:

Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be “born with a male body” or “born male”; in his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a “male body,” Strangio told his colleagues: “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

In interviews and on social media, he has described himself as “a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who felt his movement was overly devoted to gay white men with “social power and capital and political power” and to the “fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage.” The turn to trans rights would ultimately reopen an old fissure in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement: whether to seek civic equality — or liberation.

It's all of a piece with young people throughout history wanting to change the world and not wanting to wait around for inconvenient things like democracy, I suppose.

Andrew Sullivan has fought Strangio's way of thinking for years, frustrated that the LGBTQ+ movement has shortchanged the Ls and the Gs especially. He has a lot to say about the Skrmetti decision in genral and Strangio in particular:

This disdain for the greatest gay rights victory made him a Grand Marshal in the New York pride parade that year (that’s how far left the gay elite has now gone). His view of his critics was: “I think they genuinely want to take away rights for trans people and kill trans people.” Yeah, I’m not worried about safeguards for children and good scientific evidence; I just want to kill trans people.

Strangio, in line with the deep illiberalism of his movement, refuses to debate anyone who is not fully in agreement with him; won’t provide evidence to back up wild claims; and wouldn’t even agree to be interviewed in person on the record by the trans-friendly NYT! He opposed any journalistic coverage of the debate on child sex changes, and supported targeting the Times: “The NYT’s horrible coverage of and fixation on trans people has been central to the progression of anti-trans bills and policies nationally.”

In front of the Supreme Court, the gist of Strangio’s argument was, well, absurd. It was about puberty blockers that are used medically to stop a condition called “central precocious puberty” — where kids younger than 8 go into puberty because the hypothalamus triggers the pituitary gland prematurely. It can be caused by an endocrine disorder, tumors, rare genetic mutations, or appear without apparent cause in girls. Strangio actually tried to argue that because the drug is used for cis kids for this reason, it cannot be denied much older “trans” children with no precocious puberty who want to change sex before puberty for psychological reasons. Apart from the age and the diagnosis, exactly the same!

Strangio and his fellow nutters have also pushed the gay and lesbian rights movement onto thin political ice — and it’s now cracking beneath our feet. The queer radicals have lost an election, debates in 27 state legislatures, the Biden DOJ, public opinion, the Supreme Court, and now — with this definitive piece and a solid podcast series, The Protocol — the New York Times. And next month, the most famous clinic in the US transing kids, run by Johanna Olson-Kennedy, will shutter. She was a key promoter of the suicide lie. The lawsuits are going to be brutal.

Maybe there’s a chance for what’s left of the former gay groups to recover their liberal principles, support free speech, engage opponents, respect religious dissent, use plain English, and trust rigorous, evidence-based science again. If we can do that, and help kids in gender distress without irreversibly and prematurely medicalizing them, we can begin to regain the broader public trust we have recently lost.

I have personally experienced the results of this radicalization of the left, and I don't just mean the spanking our party received last November. I've been an ally all my life, as gay friends going all the way back to high school will attest (in the '80s, when being openly gay was dangerous), and even I have gotten pushback for not being in line with the Movement.

I really hope the Democratic Party can get back to the center in the next year or we're going to get smacked around again. There's no hope for the Republicans as long as the OAFPOTUS leads them; but we can--and absolutely should--peel off the 25% of their voters who think they've gone off the deep end to the right. Getting people like Strangio off the stage will help. They don't represent the majority of the Party and they certainly don't come close to representing a majority of Americans.

Catching up on the news

I spent a lot of time outside over the weekend until the temperature started to slide into the single digits (Celsius) last night, so I put off reading online stories in favor of reading real books. I also failed to mention that we had an honest-to-goodness haboob in Northern Illinois on Friday, the first significant one since 1934. Because hey, let's bring back the 1930s in all their glory!

  • Adam Kinzinger rolls his eyes at the world's oldest toddler: the OAFPOTUS himself, the biggest champion of the 1930s we have right now.
  • Josh Marshall shakes his head at the people in our party who think the electorate is waiting with bated breath to find out which nonessential policies we're going to go with in 2026.
  • Jeff Maurer draws similar parallels, this time between HBO/Max/HBO Max/whatever's branding problems and those of the Democratic Party.
  • Paul Krugman slaps the GOP hard for its "incredibly cruel" budget—which is their point: "Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards."
  • Speaking of cruelty, Jack Goldsmith picks apart Stephen Miller's trolling about habeas corpus, and pleads with journalists to stop falling for this stuff.
  • Michael Tomasky says that Kamala Harris's race and gender weren't the problem with her candidacy—it's that the party stopped all conversation about her fitness for the presidency because of her race and gender.
  • Tyler Austin Harper agrees, saying that the King Lear analogy with President Biden postulated in Jake Tapper's Original Sin doesn't quite work: his core advisers and his wife bear a lot more responsibility for our 2024 loss than they get credit for.
  • Oh, and hey, did anyone in North America notice that the PKK lay down their arms and have ended their 40-year insurgency against Türkiye? It's kind of a big deal.
  • In one bit of good news, the critically-endangered piping plovers nesting at Montrose Beach a few hundred meters to the east of where I'm sitting have laid an egg. Good luck, Imani and Sea Rocket!
  • The UK has asked if the US Federal Aviation Administration might possibly do their jobs a bit better regulating the Clown Prince of X's rockets, which keep blowing up over the UK's Caribbean territories and littering their beaches with debris.

Finally, Scottish writer Dan Richards looks across the Atlantic and sees that the infrastructure choices we've made have driven us to having only two bad options: slow cars or polluting airplanes. Europe made investments throughout the last 30 years that gave them sleek and comfortable overnight trains.

I last took an overnight European train in September 2013, on what may be my best visit to the UK ever. The Caledonian Sleeper leaves London Euston at 22:30 and gets to Edinburgh at 08:00, for about £250 per person. Put that price against a flight and a hotel, or even an daytime express train and a hotel, and it's not a bad deal. Plus you get a wake-up call with hot tea before arriving.

I got 99 problems, but a b- ain't one

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?

OAFPOTUS blinks, Mexico wins today; Canada wins tomorrow? [Update: today!]

Demonstrating one more time that the OAFPOTUS is all hat and no cattle, the White House announced that it will "postpone" the crippling and needless tariffs he had threatened to impose on our second-biggest trading partner in exchange for...something Mexico would have done anyway. Avocados will continue to flow north, and dollars will continue to flow south.

Canada, meanwhile, has taken a more hardline position on the threat, which James Fallows calls "an international lesson in leadership." Perhaps Canada will agree to increased anti-coca-production efforts in exchange for the OAFPOTUS "pausing" the tariffs that it seems he never really intended to impose in the first place. Because of course he didn't.

The OAFPOTUS is a con man, and this was a grift, just like everything else he does. Or maybe, as Timothy Noah suggested, it's a simple protection racket.

Meanwhile:

And finally, the New Yorker has a cautionary tale about a real-estate deal that (quite literally) went sideways.

Update, 15:52 CST: Yeah, called it. Tariffs against Canada also paused, "in exchange" for Canada allocating 10,000 staff to policing the border—which I'm pretty sure they had already planned to do.

This is all a con

Throughout all the bullshit the OAFPOTUS has spewed onto the nation in the past couple of weeks, Ezra Klein wants to remind you of something I have mentioned many times: he's a charlatan, and everything he does is a grift. Don't believe him:

People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency.

The president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president.

Josh Marshall has a slightly different, but overlapping, perspective:

The point is that you do “shock and awe” when you don’t actually have the power to pull the job off. You’re trying for a rapid-fire dramatic effect that gets your opponent to collapse or stand down. The psychological shock value is the additional weapon that fills the gap between your power and your intended goal. And understanding that is a critical, really the critical first step to combating it.

This stuff isn’t an illusion. It’s happening. It’s real. But you do “shock and awe” when you don’t actually have the power to make it stick. Otherwise there’s no need for the drama. You just do it. So recognizing that shock and confusion and not falling for it is essential to combating it.

It helps that they're not particularly competent at any of this. Not a lot, but it helps.

Nate Silver on "Why Biden Failed"

I don't necessarily agree with everything Nate Silver wrote in his analysis from last week, but he makes a some excellent points:

Biden hadn’t delivered the complete repudiation of Trump that polls — showing a massive 8.4-point popular vote lead — had been projecting. That’s why the election took four long days to call. Biden’s popular vote (4.5 points) and Electoral College (306-222) margins had been perfectly solid, and the migration of Georgia and Arizona into the blue column had enhanced its visual appeal on the map. But in the end, the tipping-point state — Wisconsin — voted for Biden by only 0.6 percentage points. Trump made gains in many areas, including South Texas, South Florida, and major cities, that would foreshadow his return to the White House four years later. If Trump’s handling of the pandemic hadn’t been so clumsy — he did get some of the big things right, including Operation Warp Speed and a stimulus package that quickly got the economy back on its feet — he might have been reelected.

Biden, despite a lot of effort — including making it the centerpiece of his aborted 2024 campaign — was never able to persuade Americans that January 6 had been on the same magnitude as a threat to the republic as September 11, for instance. Why not? Well, it’s hard to persuade people based on near-misses: thwarted attacks or narrowly averted disasters. Even actual disasters don’t always spur action when the inertia is high enough: America remains woefully unprepared for the next pandemic.

But I also think you can place some of the blame on the Democrats’ polycrisis framing (often echoed by a liberal establishment that over-selects for negative emotionality, less politely known as “neuroticism.”) If everything is an existential crisis, then nothing is. You’ll begin to suspect people of crying wolf. Or you’ll say, YOLO, if we’re all fucked anyway, let’s blow it all up, have some fun, and vote for Trump.

By July 2022, perceptions that the country was going in the wrong direction were among their highest-ever levels, worse than at any point, even in the annus horribilis of 2020.

In the end, Biden made what was essentially a triple devil’s bargain in exchange for winning the 2020 nomination and the presidency. First, he sold people on a quick return to normalcy from the pandemic when it would instead take until summer 2022 thanks to reinfections, new variants, and sharp divisions over mitigation measures. The extent to which this is his fault isn’t so clear. I have plenty of critiques of the White House’s handling of COVID — and plenty of critiques of Trump’s — but COVID is a uniquely wicked problem. Biden gambled on COVID going away when vaccines became widely available, and it didn’t work out. But he made matters worse by promising not just to solve COVID but also to save democracy and even deliver racial justice.

I suspect this won't be the last critique of Biden's presidency to come out this year. It will take decades, however, to knit all the threads into a coherent tapestry.

Quick links before my 3pm meeting

Just four, plus a bonus:

Finally, in a column from just before the world ended, author Adam-Troy Castro explains, "Why do liberals think all Trump supporters are stupid?":

The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters — the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don’t ...

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.”

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.”

...

What you don’t get, Trump supporters in 2019, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also...hear me...charitable.

Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.

Exactly.

Off to a spectacular start

Oh, FFS. I tried to avoid the inauguration entirely, but since we're dealing with the OAFPOTUS again, I couldn't. Especially because of 3rd grader Elon Musk.

The OAFPOTUS's second inaugural address was the longest in modern history. If you really want to read the text, the New York Times has annotated it, but I wouldn't recommend it. James Fallows read it so you don't have to:

Donald Trump, as 5th-grader. Sometimes Trump’s formal speeches are “written,” in the sense of trying to have “eloquent” or “fine writing” passages. But these “fancy” parts of a speech—related to the parts we remember as the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, or Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall—are clearly tough sledding for Trump. You can tell that he plods his way through these obligatory passages, in the fashion of a fifth-grader called upon to read to the classroom from an assigned text. Halting, not sure of the words, pausing from time to time at a passage he’d never seen before, as if to say, “Hey, that’s interesting!”

The absolutely stupidest part of this speech was this. Any other public official would be embarrassed even to say something of this sort:

We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

If your second grader gave you this thought, you’d be having a little talk about how history and geography worked.

But second prize for stupidness goes to this, about Panama.

The speech did not get better. Shortly afterward, Elon Musk did this:

Well, that was certainly a departure from the usual nihilism of the incoming administration. Walter wasn't completely wrong, either. But yeah, Musk heiled the crowd:

Back in the first Trump presidency Trump’s critics spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Trumpers to admit they’d done this or that, to apologize, whatever. This was always a mistake. I don’t need anyone to validate what I saw. I saw it. I don’t care what the explanation is. These are just twisted anti-American degenerates. We know this. Just what level of exuberant disinhibition led Musk to this moment or why this unmistakable gesture came so naturally to him … well, that’s really not my problem. Everyone knows what they saw here.

Then, shortly after that, the OAFPOTUS pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,500 insurrectionists who invaded the US Capitol and killed cops:

At the time Trump issued the pardons, there were about 700 defendants who either never received prison sentences or had already completed their sentences, meaning pardons or commutations would have little practical impact on them, beyond restoring voting rights and gun rights for those who were convicted of felonies.

More than 600 people were sentenced to incarceration, but only a small fraction of them are still behind bars. Many of those who are in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons were convicted of violent attacks on police officers protecting the Capitol during an assault in which Jan. 6 defendants were armed with firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive “Trump” billboard, “Trump” flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device.

More than 140 police officers were injured and several Trump supporters died during the attack, including one who was shot trying to breach the House Speaker's Lobby and another who died in the middle of a brutal battle at the lower west tunnel, where some of the worst violence of the day took place.

Like I said, I don't really care about the OAFPOTUS's lies and bullshitting. I do care what he does, and what his toadies do when they have actual power. The first few hours of this presidency did not instill confidence.

Here we go again

The good news is that there will be a different President in only 1,461 days. The bad news is that we could have up to 1,460 days of the Once Again Fucking POTUS before he finally goes away. His second inaugural address—the longest in modern history—made his first one sound like an ASMR video:

The 47th president’s 29-minute address on Monday, just after noon, painted an even bleaker portrait of a country in disarray, one seized by “years of a radical and corrupt establishment,” with the pillars of society “broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.” America, he said, “cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”

It was a misleading and incomplete assessment of a country that has a growing economy, with falling inflation, slowing illegal immigration, a record-breaking stock market, the lowest levels of violent crime in years and a military that has limited engagement in conflicts around the world.

There will be only two genders in America, he said, male and female. There will be no preferences for electric vehicles. There will be no escape from tariffs for other countries. And there will be no misunderstanding when it comes to the mission of the military. The Panama Canal will be taken, with the implication that he will do so by force if necessary. And the Gulf of Mexico will be renamed the Gulf of America, he claimed.

Like I've said many times, we need to oppose what he does and ignore what he says. I am not going to get exercised over us invading the Panama Canal Zone until the Navy blockades Colón.

Jason Linkins recommends we "shove the presidency down [his] throat:"

The most recent entry in the “good advice for Democrats” canon comes from occasional TNR contributor and Bulwark writer Jonathan V. Last, who wrote, “The job of the Democratic party comes in two parts. First: Do not help Republicans. Not in any way. Second: Make Donald Trump own every bad outcome that happens, anywhere in the world.”

Rather than exert so much energy trying to thrust Trump out of the presidency, liberals would be well served to spend their time thrusting the presidency upon Donald Trump. Instead of searching for illusory quick fixes for the existence of the Trump administration, start demanding the Trump administration fix everything quickly.

Krugman also urges us to hold him accountable:

Trump ran a campaign based entirely on lies, and his victory doesn’t make those lies true. No, the price of bacon didn’t quadruple or quintuple. No, America isn’t experiencing a vast wave of crime driven by immigrants.

[Y]ou should resist the temptation to engage in truthwashing, a close cousin to the sanewashing that may not have been decisive but certainly helped Trump win.

I see that temptation all around — commentators who want to seem relevant starting to say “Well, maybe Trump has a point about migrant crime/seizing Greenland/annexing Canada/whatever.” Before going there, look at yourself in the mirror.

So keep calling out lies, even if — especially if — they’re coming from people in power. I’d like to promise that the truth will win in the end, but I can’t. All I can promise is that those who continue to tell the truth as they see it will find it easier to live with themselves than those who don’t.

How to reconcile that advice with The Daily Parker's approach of not paying attention to what he says? Let me revise and extend: I won't pay attention to what he says about the future, but I will damn well hold him to account for his lies about his own actions.

Josh Marshall agrees:

The Trump people have been signaling for days that they’re going to hit the ground running with what they describe as an executive ‘shock and awe’. I don’t see any reason to be shocked or awed. I don’t say this in any grand metaphysical sense. I mean that I’ve seen headstrong winners of close elections high on their own supply before. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, all of this is meant to hit you with so much sensory stimulus that you become overwhelmed. But the images you see wrapped around you in an iMax theater aren’t real. It’s still a movie.

Everyone is so spun up on themselves, hungry for the killer strategy or tactic to get back in the political driver’s seat. That’s natural. But desperation doesn’t lead to clear or good thinking. When you have time – and I would argue that at the moment, paradoxically, you do have time – the best place to start is to think clearly about what you’re actually trying to achieve in your own small role in politics.

The role of a political opposition is to oppose. Oppose everything. That’s especially the case in a situation like this when all the power is in Republican hands. They have majorities in both houses of Congress. Whatever happens is entirely a conversation and decision among Republicans. Again, an opposition’s role is to oppose. Putting forward an alternative program becomes relevant at the next election. At the moment the role is simply to highlight the corruption, highlight the empowerment of the wealthy few over everyone else and be the vehicle of opposition. This is their high watermark. Impassivity. Patience. Focus. They’re not as big as they look.

It will be a long two or four years. So don't waste energy on trivia.