The Daily Parker

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?

"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 !

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:

• Josh Marshall reflects on the 8 Democratic Senators (including one of mine, who is also the minority whip) making a deal with the Republicans, and says the next Congress must eliminate the paper filibuster and reform the Supreme Court.
• David Graham takes a more nuanced view. Krugman wants Democrats to hammer the Republicans on their unnecessary cruelty to Americans in need. Rubin says the word "moderate" lets people weasel out of being a "fighter" or a "defeatist."
• Adam Kinzinger is outraged that the OAFPOTUS has openly sold pardons, in contravention of literally everything the founders (and everyone since) stood for.
• Dan Williams lays out a strategy for confronting "highbrow misinformation."
• Calculated Risk, the blog that predicted the 2008 financial meltdown three years ahead of time, is starting to warn about the next financial meltdown from the inevitable cryptocurrency collapse.
• Matt Yglesias takes a break from the news to speculate about what would have happened had Italy joined the Central Powers in 1914.

And yesterday, as most people know, was the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior.

I come to bury Cheney, not to praise him:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who extolled the power of the presidency, died Monday at the age of 84, his family said in a statement.

The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, the statement said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney advocated an aggressive new foreign policy in which potential threats would be met with swift, pre-emptive action. No longer would the U.S. wait for an enemy to strike first. He helped sell the Iraq War by issuing dire warnings to the American people. At the same time, he famously predicted that the mission itself would be relatively easy.

On Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who then hosted the show, asked Cheney if the American people were ready for a long, bloody battle.

"I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Cheney said.

There were other controversies that dogged Cheney as the Bush administration's popularity plummeted in its second term. In 2007, his chief of staff and top adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury in an investigation into the leaking of the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cheney was not implicated in the case legally, but he was tainted by the scandal nonetheless.

Then, in what was one of the more bizarre incidents involving someone as high ranking in the government as Cheney, he accidentally shot and wounded a friend, attorney Harry Whittington, in the face and chest with birdshot pellets during a 2006 weekend quail-hunting trip at a Texas ranch.

Cheney advocated for a stronger executive, rejecting the framers' ordering of the branches of government.

The analysts will have a lot to say today about Cheney's "complicated" life story. But he made the OAFPOTUS's power grab possible, by supporting Federal candidates and judicial nominees who agreed that Congress should take a back seat to the President, regardless of the actual text of the Constitution. He even admitted that, in a way, when he supported Democratic candidates in 2022 and 2024 simply because they weren't insane.

One pundit, I forget who, said recently that Republicans and Democrats like me used to disagree on how to drive but we agreed on the destination, while people like the OAFPOTUS want to crash the car. Cheney may have been one of the former type of Republicans, and he may have agreed broadly on where we were going, but he yanked the wheel pretty hard to the right.

With the unusually late colors we have this autumn against the much earlier sunsets that started yesterday (before 4:30 pm from November 15th to December 31st, ugh!), things have remained tolerable. It will snow eventually; we'll have a freeze eventually; but for now, I'll just enjoy it.

I didn't enjoy these things, though:

• Humans formed governments in the first place to feed people; the OAFPOTUS and his village of idiots have failed at that basic task.
• Architects who have looked at the paltry plans and Goebbels-inspired model of the White House Ballroom cannot fathom why it's the size of a convention center.
• It's not that Nick Fuentes is a Nazi sympathizer, racist, sexist, misogynist asshole—he's probably all of those things—but he's also a nihilist bullshit artist.
• My party really has to stop nominating old faux-centrist dickheads for public office and get behind the people who can actually win.
• Global warming may not make your city warmer on a specific January day, but it might make your city get 20 centimeters of rain in one day.

In one bit of good news, the Illinois legislature restored $1.5 billion to state transit agencies, which means the CTA and Metra will live to fight another day. Included in the legislation was an end to parking minimums within 800 meters of public transportation hubs or corridors. I hope this encourages developers to build density where it's needed.

Even though I have a cute beagle hanging around my office this week, and even though I've had a lot to do at work (including a very exciting deployment today), the world keeps turning:

• The OAFPOTUS pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for the crime of running a massive money-laundering website, because of course Zhao bribed him.
• Brian Beutler thinks the OAFPOTUS's corruption has gotten too obvious for even his supporters to ignore, leading to "the things Democrats like to talk about and the things I wish they’d talked about [beginning] to converge."
• Speaking of corruption, not to mention things that are so prima facie bad that it takes a special kind of felon to even suggest it, privately funding the US military is an obviously illegal and demonstrably dangerous idea. Just ask the Roman Senate.
• Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to reconvene the House, and the Republican majority in the Senate refuse to waive the filibuster on funding SNAP, which are the two biggest things the Republican majority has chosen to do instead of making sure 40 million Americans don't go hungry next week.
• Michael Tomasky makes a point that I've made to one of my Republican trolls acquaintances: it really doesn't matter to the national Democratic Party if Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday: It's NYC, not Maine.

Finally, if you're looking to pick up a little lakeside real estate, this house in Kenilworth, Ill., is on the market for the first time ever. It's a steal at $7 million.

As I mentioned yesterday, the OAFPOTUS has illegally destroyed the East Wing of the White House, including the portico and everything right up to the original east entrance. This is part of his plan to build a ridiculous and unnecessary ballroom, funded by big-tech billionaires. The Post's architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, cannot hold back his revulsion:

The leader as builder is an ancient idea, older than the Egyptian pyramids, older than the great public monuments of Rome, older than Emperor Constantine’s clumsy effort to eradicate memories of his predecessors by repurposing and rebranding their works as his own.

But there are subtle differences between the images of authoritarians and elected leaders, in body language and other details. Is the leader acting as a quality-control agent, asking questions, studying details? Or surveying his domain in miniature? Is he simply toying with the world?

Trump made speedy demolition his priority, and speedy construction of the new ballroom is essential to his symbolic purpose, to offer a stark contrast to the dysfunction of Congress and, by extension, the torpid rhythms of democratic self-governance. He is the master builder, the developer who can cut through red tape. That image, whether deserved or not, is why many people voted for him. But to shred precedent is simply to set new precedents. And the precedent he is setting is that history doesn’t matter; laws, procedures and customs are irrelevant; and there is no role for collaboration, transparency and review in the construction of new buildings. Buildings are gifts to the people from leaders who are infallible, not the organic expression of civic values and ideals.

Krugman posits that a lack of good taste is a feature, not a bug, of the OAFPOTUS's style:

Why, you might ask, at a moment of national crisis am I writing about Trump’s bad taste?

[B]ecause tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.

So is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North?

So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.

I now find myself frequently thinking of how the Roman Republic degenerated into a dictatorship. For, in essence, Roman emperors were dictators, regardless of the fancy trimmings.

What happened? Modern historians of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire mostly agree upon one explanation for the Republic’s collapse – namely that the enormous loot from Rome’s conquests created a class of incredibly wealthy oligarchs who were too wealthy and powerful to be constrained by republican norms, institutions and laws.

Meanwhile, a man is suing the administration for being unlawfully detained by members of the Ohio National Guard, who he followed and videoed while playing the "Imperial March" from Star Wars. It's funny, but it also underscores how the military simply do not know how to enforce domestic law, nor should they be used that way. Fun times, fun times.

Naturally, the press had a lot to say about the largest protest in my lifetime (I was born after the Earth Day 1970 demonstration):

• As many as 250,000 people turned out for the downtown Chicago event, which included a procession that carried a 23-meter replica of the US Constitution, and resulted in zero arrests or reports of violence. (The video of the procession leaving Grant Park is epic.)
• David Graham of The Atlantic explains why the protests got under the OAFPOTUS's skin: "Trump’s movement depends on the impression that it’s unstoppable and victorious. ... Huge protests that demonstrate he is not invincible endanger his political success: They offer people who voted for Trump reluctantly or who have had second thoughts a feeling of camaraderie and hope, and give them a way to feel okay ditching him. ... Trump and his allies seem to grasp what Saturday revealed: The protests are popular, and the president is not."
• Brian Fife sees a paradox in the protests: "One could find this inspiring, so many disparate causes united under one banner. But for those of us who want to see tangible reform in the United States, the lack of clear messaging or policy recommendations—especially during a protest intended to inspire action—was disorienting."
• Josh Marshall disagrees, lauding "the subtle genius of 'No Kings'," saying the name itself is "a deceptively resonant name and slogan with the deepest possible roots in American history. This brings with it a critical inclusivity, which grows out of the name itself and the lack of those specific and lengthy sets of demands that often characterize and ultimately fracture such movements. ... The jagged and total nature of the onslaught against the American Republic creates a clarity: We all know what we’re talking about. You don’t need to explain. The imperfect but orderly and generally lawful old way versus this. And when you say “No Kings,” you’re saying I don’t want this. I don’t accept presidential despotism. I’m here ready to show my face and say publicly that I will never accept it."
• Brian Beutler has "22 thoughts on No Kings DC," of which: "I do not think it’s a coincidence that, as anticipation grew, and the GOP panicked and smeared, universities rejected Trump’s extortionate higher-education “compact,” and the Chamber of Commerce finally decided to sue Trump, etc. The days of proactive capitulation seem to be ending."

I looked for mainstream Republican reactions to the event but only heard crickets. The OAFPOTUS's own response, which I will not dignify with a link, would be grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment in any normal era.

Meanwhile, the vandalism continues:

• Workers have begun demolishing the east side of the White House East Wing as the OAFPOTUS continues to wreak historical violence on the Executive Mansion without Congressional—i.e., the owner's—approval.
• Writing in Harvard Magazine, Lincoln Caplan examines the damage that US Chief Justice John Roberts has done to the Constitution, tracing his legal career from Harvard Law through his clerkship under US Chief Justice William Rehnquist, another hard-right ideologue who, unlike Roberts, didn't have the votes to become his generation's Roger Taney.
• Jeff Maurer suggests that Democrats simply change the conversation about immigration and not apologize for our past policy misses: "I think that Democrats can craft a positive, forward-looking message on immigration that starts a new conversation without dwelling on the past. It would tell a story that happens to be true, which is nifty, because I prefer political narratives that aren’t a towering skyscraper of bullshit whenever possible. The narrative goes like this: 'America is rich, safe, and vibrant because we’ve always attracted the smartest, hardest-working people from around the world. We need an immigration system that attracts the best and the brightest for years to come.'"
• North Carolina, already one of the most-Gerrymandered states in the union, has passed a new congressional map they believe will give them a 10th Republican US House seat, with only three Democratic-majority districts in Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte. (They've even managed to get Asheville to turn pink, based on 2024 election results.)
• Adam Kinzinger suggests encouraging Russia to end its war in Ukraine through the simple expedient of giving $2 billion of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine each day the war goes on.
• Julia Ioffe reviews the life of Lyudmila Ocheretnaya, Vladimir Putin's ex-wife.
• Molly White explains the October 10th crypto meltdown that destroyed $19 billion of Bitcoin holdings in just a few seconds.

And hey, I even read some non-political news in the past 24 hours:

• The Nielsen-Norman Group digs into the usability of Google's new AI Mode feature, which most people don't seem to know about.
• New Republic's Timothy Noah wonders if the propensity of failsons to piss away their inherited fortunes (like the OAFPOTUS before he began the biggest grift of all time) could help solve the wealth-distribution problem in the world.
• Whatever happened to the decommissioned Staten Island ferryboat that entertainers Colin Jost and Pete Davidson bought? Not much.
• Speaking of New York, Block Club Chicago compares Chicago's Bloomingdale Trail with Manhattan's High Line.

Finally, it warms my heart to read that Gen Z workers have the same attitude toward workplace "emergencies" that Gen X workers have always had. (Boomers and Millennials, WTF is wrong with y'all?)

After almost two years, Chicago's "rat hole" continues to leave an impression on people:

Initially, the origin story of the hole seemed straightforward: a brown rat scurried onto a wet layer of concrete and became trapped. There were no signs of escape, so the rat most likely died and was somehow eventually removed, leaving behind a cavity as the concrete dried. The series of events seemed plausible in Chicago, which was named the country’s “rattiest” city for the 10th year in a row in 2024 by the pest control service Orkin. However, there has been little evidence to tie the rat hole to its eponymous rodent.

A team of researchers recently analyzed the anatomical dimensions of the rat hole to identify the critter that left the sidewalk impression. Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, reveal that another rodent is responsible for the hole. “We can affirmatively conclude that this imprint was not created by a rat,” said Michael Granatosky, an evolutionary biomechanist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Statistical analyses revealed that the size and shape of the hole closely aligned with larger-bodied rodents, particularly tree squirrels in the genus Sciurus. The team concluded with nearly a 99 percent likelihood that the rat hole was left by either an eastern grey squirrel or a fox squirrel, both found within Chicago’s city limits.

A squirrel creating the hole is not a complete surprise.

No, and in fact I thought we'd settled this over a year ago. The most likely hypothesis that I've encountered posits that, sometime in 1993 when the concrete was first poured, a raptor startled a squirrel who was either in the then-existent tree above the sidewalk or on the roof of the apartment building next to it. The squirrel decided that down was better than dead (squirrels can fall any distance without harm if they're conscious) and was surprised to discover the wet concrete below. The lack of exit tracks is easily explained either by the squirrel not having enough mass to make further impressions in the concrete, or the aforementioned raptor plucking the confused, now-stuck rodent up into the air.

In any event, the squirrel has been dead for at least 25 years, the hypothetical hawk probably just as long, and the concrete square containing the impression has buggered off to City Hall.