The Daily Parker

Just look at that cold front, wouldn't you? And notice how the dewpoint dropped hardly at all:

The same thing happened at the official Chicago station at O'Hare, where the temperature dropped from 31°C to 22°C in 15 minutes, while the dewpoint went up. At least the forecast predicts tomorrow will be lovely.

In a related note, the OAFPOTUS's and the Republicans' 40% reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped the agency's Atlas 15 project, which will have a ripple effect through urban planning and disaster management for decades:

The tool is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlas 15 project — a massive dataset that will show how often storms of a given duration and intensity could be expected to occur at locations across the United States. The project was intended to be published in two volumes: one that would assess communities’ current risks and a second that would project how those risks will change under future climate scenarios.

The release of Atlas 15 had been long awaited by civil engineers, regional planners and other groups that use NOAA’s precipitation frequency estimates to develop regulations and design infrastructure. Many parts of the country rely on decades-old data to determine their rainfall risks, and there is no authoritative national dataset of how rainfall and flood threats will rise in a warmer world.

But work on Atlas 15’s climate projections has been on hold for months after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered a review of Volume 2 this spring, according to current and former NOAA officials with knowledge of the project.

The review of Atlas 15 is among a number of efforts by the Trump administration to curb climate science. The administration dismissed the scientists responsible for writing the National Climate Assessment — a congressionally mandated study typically published every four to five years — and dismantled the program that oversees the reports. In a budget document submitted to Congress last month, Trump proposed zeroing out funding for NOAA’s climate research and eliminating many of the agency’s laboratories and institutes.

Do you know that more Republican voters live in areas negatively affected by climate change than Democratic voters? Neither did they.

We cannot comprehend the damage this administration has already done to the United States. And they plan to do so much more.

I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things:

• Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it."
• Linda Greenhouse condemns the pervasive cruelty of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Tom Homan: "Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other” — people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society."
• Paul Krugman explains more cogently than I did why the Republicans cutting NOAA will hurt everyone: "Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money. They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting 'La, la, la, we can’t hear you.' "
• The inconvenient evidence includes a growing realization in Mediterranean countries that their summer resorts are no longer habitable in the summer: "Across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and beyond, sand-devouring storms, rising seas, asphyxiating temperatures, deadly floods and horrific wildfires have year after year turned some of the continent’s most desired getaways into miserable locales to get away from."
• Ilya Shapiro, constitutional studies director at the Manhattan Institute, believes both the left and the right have got Amy Coney Barrett all wrong: "She’s an originalist with a strong devotion both to constitutional text and institutional procedure. But she’s also a stickler for prudence in the face of novelty. The one thing Barrett is zealous about is upholding the rule of law..."
• A group of mayors from the Chicago suburbs has decided they don't like the very same public-private partnerships between railroads and their surrounding areas that created many of the same suburbs: "Real estate could be the recipe for long-term fiscal sustainability for [the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, making some of the current revenue mechanisms only temporary and reducing the risk of a repeat of this year's fiscal cliff. [But y]ou can’t protest government overreach of private property rights, and then defend zoning in the same paragraph."
• At the same time suburban mayors rant against better transit, their residents have clogged half the side streets in Chicago to get around Kennedy Expressway construction this summer. Of course, better transit would obviate all those car trips that cause the congestion in the first place, but let's not think too hard about that.
• In some parts of the country, though, street designs from the Netherlands have become more popular as planners and citizens see how much safer they are for everyone.
• Patrick Smith takes a look at last month's Air India crash and fears the worst: "[I]f the [fuel] switches were moved to CUTOFF manually, the billion-dollar question is why? Were they moved by accident, or nefariously? Was it an act of absurd absent-mindedness, or one of willful mass murder, a la EgyptAir, Germanwings, and (almost certainly) MH370."
• Google announced a new partnership with electric truck maker Rivian to use Google Maps for navigation.
• New studies suggest that we have crooked teeth because our diet changed: "With softer diets came less mechanical strain on the jaw. Over generations, our mandibles began to shrink— a trend visible in the fossil record."

Finally, a number of commentators have experienced a healthy dose of Schadenfreude watching the OAFPOTUS's rabid followers turn on him, including Adam Kinzinger, Josh Marshall, Dan Rather, and of course, Jeff Maurer. It's not exactly "the blood of Marat strangles him," but as a centrist, I am enjoying this part just a little. (And in fairness, Kinzinger, a Republican, believes that the administration's policies will do more damage to the party than this nonsense about Epstein.)

Economist Paul Krugman started what has become a 7-part overview of inequality in the United States: how it started, how it's going, and how it has corrupted our politics to an extent not seen since the 1890s:

Between World War II and the 1970s income disparities in America were relatively narrow. Some people were rich and many were poor, but overall inequality among Americans in terms of wealth, income and status was low enough that the country had a sense of shared prosperity. Things are very different today, as American society is beset by extreme inequality, economic fragmentation and class warfare.

What happened? The economic data show a huge widening of disparities in income and wealth starting around 1980, eventually undermining the relatively equal distribution of income we had from the 40s to the 70s. Moreover, growing disparities in income have led to growing disparities in political influence and the reemergence of what feels more and more like an oppressive class system.

But it hadn’t always been stable. People often call the period we’re living in a “New Gilded Age,” in recognition of an earlier era of extreme income and wealthy inequality. For the purpose of comparison, can we document that earlier era statistically?

[T]he 90-10 ratio (and other measures of wage inequality) suddenly declined in the 1940s, then stayed low for several decades before widening again. This is consistent with what we see in data on the share of income going to the top 1 percent. The relatively equal income distribution of postwar America didn’t evolve gradually. Instead it emerged quite suddenly, roughly during World War II, and didn’t disappear until decades after World War II ended.

Krugman planned a 2-part primer; as of yesterday, it has 7 parts. Spend the $6 on a Substack subscription and then an hour reading the series. It's worth it.

As everyone should know by now, everything the OAFPOTUS or anyone around him does is in the service of self-enrichment. We can include "enriching friends" as well. And in the grand tradition of privatizing things that government absolutely does better than industry, it looks like the Administration intends to cripple the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) so their friends can start making rents from the vital functions it performs.

Enter Neil Jacobs, nominated to head NOAA, who claimed without evidence in a confirmation hearing Wednesday to undo the damage the Clown Prince of X inflicted on the agency:

“If confirmed, I will ensure that staffing the Weather Service offices is a top priority,” said Jacobs, who led NOAA on an acting basis in Trump’s first term. “It’s really important for the people to be there because they have relationships with people in the local community. They’re a trusted source.”

The agency’s staffing levels have been in the spotlight due to the recent floods. While NOAA sent a wide range of warnings and alerts prior to the storms that caused the deadly floods in Texas, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called on the Commerce Department’s inspector general to launch an investigation into the impacts the staffing cuts had on the crisis in Texas. That request is currently under review by the IG’s oversight teams, a spokesperson said.

Asked whether he supports President Trump’s proposal to cut NOAA’s budget by 27% in fiscal 2026, Jacobs confirmed that he did and suggested funding was being refocused from research to operations. The “mission-essential functions” of the National Weather Service and the National Ocean Service would continue, he said.

I'll believe it when I see it, Jake. At least Jacobs has a PhD in atmospheric science.

Another atmospheric scientist, meteorologist Alan Gerard, has a cogent and probably-correct hypothesis about why the OAFPOTUS made those draconian cuts to NOAA:

I have had many conversations with colleagues in recent weeks about the proposed NOAA budget cuts, and in the course of those discussions I have heard (and offered) many explanations, from the one that I gave to the reporter, to revenge against NOAA for Sharpiegate, to privatization of weather forecasting, etc. As I thought more deeply about all of this, though, I realized that I - and perhaps my colleagues, though I won’t speak for them - was likely looking at this from too myopic of a point of view.

I think the reality is that rather than support for weather science being caught in the flotsam of an anti-climate effort, weather and climate science are caught in the flotsam of anti-science efforts.

The administration’s own NOAA budget document states the need for an NWS that can provide “operational forecasts, warnings, impact-based decision support services (IDSS) and other life-saving products and services to the emergency management community and public as they prepare for and respond to increasingly frequent severe weather and water events (emphasis added).” The administration itself acknowledges the increasing frequency of events and hence growing societal needs for warning and forecast services. Destroying the NOAA research-to-operations structure built over decades seems all too likely to yield an NWS unable to evolve to meet those growing needs.

And yet I think the anti-science part isn't the point. As PBS reported earlier this week, administration officials from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik on down have financial interests that would benefit from outsourcing these functions to private firms. So instead of our tax dollars supporting weather research and forecasting, our tax dollars would support those things plus profits for private interests.

Again, it's all about the grift.

In a similar vein, I'm working on a hypothesis that tanking the economy through tariffs could just be about enriching bond holders, because if interest rates go up, we would pay more to the wealthiest among us in mortgages, student loans, credit-card interest, and yes, Federal bond coupons. Because to the OAFPOTUS and his friends, it's totally fine to burn everything down as long as they can profit from the ashes.

That has been the Republican Party since before Reagan was president. They've just stopped concealing it under this administration, because they're so close to everything they've ever wanted, they don't care who who knows.

Starting today's link round-up is a report that Deerfield, Ill.—based Walgreens Boots (the pharmacists/chemists, not footwear) shareholders have voted to sell out to a private-equity firm, which no doubt will destroy the company to extract every morsel of short-term value from it. Oh, well, the local CVS is closer than the local Walgreens.

In other fun news:

• Josh Barro hypothesizes that Democrats will actually have trouble running on the recently-passed Republican tax bill because of the timing and nature of the harms that the bill will cause.
• Similarly, Dan Rather frets that Republicans passed "the least popular piece of legislation in the history of modern polling" in part because they believe voters will never figure out what's in it: "The biggest political divide in this country is no longer between Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives. It is between the informed and the uninformed or misinformed."
• The Post fact-checks claims about the bill.
• Adam Kinzinger shakes his head at US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and how delusional theories now drive the Republican party.
• Nathan Taylor Pemberton examines the sadistic memes Republicans post with reckless glee these days portend even worse behavior from young right-wingers in the future.
• Jack Shafer distinguishes between the OAFPOTUS's "honest graft" and other forms of corruption.
• Julia Ioffe wonders what happened to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Finally, satirist Jeff Maurer asks, "Could a drug-fueled maniac be the right person to lead a common-sense political movement?" As he puts it, "If a House or Senate race was Goebbels McIncel versus Moonbeam J. Polycule, a third party could win." But this will probably not happen in 2026 or 2028, as Nate Silver explains less satirically.

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.

Cassie had a solid night of post-anesthesia sleep and woke up mostly refreshed. The cone still bums her out, and the surgery bill bums me out, but at least she's walking at close to her normal speed. She gets her stiches out—and her cone off—two weeks from today.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• Very stupid people have allowed measles, which we functionally eliminated from the US in 2000, to infect close to 1300 people this year.
• Jennifer Rubin argues that the Department of Homeland Security provides neither “freedom from danger” or “freedom from fear or anxiety,” i.e., security.
• Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers is ashamed of the OAFPOTUS's tax bill and what it will do to the most vulnerable Americans.
• George Will praises former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel for holding the center against the loony left.
• Echoing my own thoughts, Stephanie Bai wants people to stop throwing blame around for this past weekend's Texas floods. (The blame for future disasters, however, falls squarely on the Republican Party.)
• Paul Krugman lauds victories over NIMBYs that are starting to revitalize building in urban areas.
• Cook County's practice of stealing people's homes for non-payment of property tax will likely cost us hundreds of millions of dollars once the class-action lawsuit gets going.
• Strava has once again lost control of its subscribers' location data, this time outing the Swedish prime minister's bodyguards, and thus the PM himself. Oops. (In fairness, it might be that the bodyguards themselves failed to protect the data by posting workouts publicly.)

Finally, lightning bugs appear to have made a small comeback in the Chicago area after a few years of reduced numbers. Educational campaigns have encouraged people to leave leaf litter undisturbed whenever possible, to allow the critters to breed safely. A mild winter and wet spring also helped a lot.

Jamelle Bouie makes the point that, even though the OAFPOTUS is a narcissistic, infantile, horrible human being, his policies look exactly like those of most other Republican presidents:

As nearly every commentator under the sun has observed for the past decade, Trump is unique — and to his critics, transgressive — in ways that defy traditional categorization.

And yet, the most salient detail about Trump as an actual officeholder is that he is a Republican politician committed to the success of the Republican Party and its ideological vision. In this way, he is little more than a vehicle for the policy agenda of the most conservative Republicans, willing to sign whatever they might bring to his desk.

He spearheaded an assault on the federal administrative state, fulfilling a dream that dates back to conservative opposition to the New Deal, and has put his presidency behind large and unsustainable tax breaks for the rich as well as vicious cuts to the social insurance state.

[A]s irresponsible as [this week's tax] bill is, there is a dog-bites-man element to its existence. If we understand that Trump is, in most respects, an ordinary Republican president, then it is not news to learn that a Republican president wants to cut social services for the poor to sustain a large tax cut for the rich.

What’s striking isn’t that this is happening, but that Trump, in his 10 years on the American political scene, has successfully obscured his rigidly partisan agenda with claims of populism and ideological heterodoxy. His occasional gestures toward support for existing social programs or greater taxes on the rich — and his willingness to say anything to amass power — are enough to persuade many voters (and some professional political observers) that Trump will somehow moderate the Republican Party or turn it away from its traditional agenda. If anything, it’s been the opposite: Trump’s willingness to do everything favored by his partisan fellow travelers has only accelerated the Republican Party’s dash toward ideological and policy extremism.

Yes, you can attribute some of the worst of this administration to the specific authoritarian vision of Trump and his allies. But a good deal of what we have seen — and what we will see — is simply what happens when you elect a Republican to the White House.

When George W. Bush left office in 2009, the United States was mired in two wars and the global economy was in free fall. When Donald Trump left office after his first term, the United States was mired in a deadly pandemic and its economy was recovering from a free fall.

That’s two Republican presidencies over 20 years that ended in disaster. There is no reason to think that Trump’s second term will be the exception that breaks the rule.

I think Bouie is correct. All the insanity and deliberate incompetence (if such a thing exists) coming out of the White House distracts from the fundamental point that Republicans have wanted all of this since the parties flipped in the 1960s. Like GWB and Reagan and Nixon, the OAFPOTUS basically wants to turn the country into Mississippi.

As promised, here's a roundup of some reactions to the tax bill with the infantile name that the Senate passed yesterday with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.

The Economist: "Despite Mr Trump’s talk of helping the least well-off, the bill’s biggest beneficiaries would be the rich. Analysis of the House version by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that Americans earning less than $16,999 would lose about $820 a year—a 5.7% reduction in median income for that group. The richest 0.1%, earning more than $4.3m, would gain $390,000, a 2.8% increase."

Elaine Godfrey (The Atlantic): "The bill’s passage is part of an abortion one-two punch: Last week, the Supreme Court made it easier for states to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. “This is tremendous progress on achieving a decades-long goal that has proved elusive in the past,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in a statement about the SCOTUS decision and the GOP bill."

Adam Kinzinger: "Trump and many Republicans remain ideologically committed to tax cuts—especially for high earners and large donors. It’s a religion. Second, with defense, Medicare, and Social Security considered untouchable, social programs are the only place left to slash spending in order to offset revenue losses. And finally, there’s raw political fear: members of Congress worry that if they oppose the plan, Trump will back primary challengers against them. Just ask Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina—after Trump threatened to support a challenger, Tillis announced his retirement."

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias: "I think you could see there’s a mismatch in the way Mike Johnson characterizes this. He talks about: We’ve got all these able-bodied young men who are sitting on the couch all day playing video games, collecting Medicaid benefits. But you don’t collect Medicaid benefits. Able-bodied young men are not racking up incredible medical bills, almost by definition. So for the bill to save money, it has to be cutting off care to people who are in fact sick and in need of medical care. That’s how the savings work. The only way to offset the cost of tax cuts is to deny medical care to people who need treatments."

Paul Krugman: "I don’t know how many of the right-wingers clamoring for drastic Medicaid cuts believe the stories they tell about waste and lazy Americans who won’t get a job. My guess, though, is that they don’t care whether these stories are true. They’re going after Medicaid because they see it as a soft target — a program that helps lower-income Americans, and who cares about them? Medicaid’s beneficiaries, they imagine, are the new welfare queens driving Cadillacs. But a funny thing has happened to public opinion about Medicaid. The share of Americans covered by the program has increased a lot over the past 15 years."

Satirist Jeff Maurer: "Though the details are still being hammered out, Congress is most of the way to a bill that addresses this country’s woes with surgical precision. Kudos, sirs and madams! You have proven yourself equal to the moment. Because — in my humble opinion — we sorely need three things: 1) A less-accessible health care system; 2) Commitment to 19th-century fuel sources, and 3) A debt crisis so severe that it could give rise to a pre-civilizational economy in which power is held by warlords and exemplary prostitutes. ... As sure as John Travolta’s career revived, we will see a revival of industrial smokestacks churning out greenhouses gases and particulate matter that will shroud out great cities."

Dan Rather: "One example of a barbaric and nonsensical funding cut that will have real-world consequences is a grant for the University of Texas’s World Reference Center. The WRC has been collecting and housing viruses since the 1950s. Scientists are able to study old viruses to help them combat new ones like Zika, West Nile, and Covid. ... Yes, the WRC was used to research and fight the COVID-19 virus, but the grant existed long before 2019."

Jennifer Rubin: "Republicans refuse to admit that they are hurting ordinary, hard-working Americans trying to provide for themselves and their families. To do otherwise would be a confession of their inhumanity. Instead, using well-worn authoritarian techniques (e.g., demonization, dehumanization, and marginalization), MAGA politicians convince themselves that those who rely on vital benefits are unfit and undeserving. Republicans dub them 'rats' or 'vermin' or 'murderers.'"

It's going to be a long 18 months until we get a new Congress.

What a day for right-wing Republicans! Early this morning they managed to pass the OAFPOTUS's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" through the Senate, with every Democrat and three Republicans (Rand Paul, KY; Thom Tillis, NC; Susan Collins, ME) voting against it, forcing Vice President Vance to get out of bed before 6am:

Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote for the measure, which would extend trillions of dollars in tax cuts from Trump’s first term and implement new campaign promises — such as eliminating income taxes on tips and overtime wages — while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on immigration enforcement and defense.

To offset the cost, the legislation would cut about $1 trillion from Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income individuals and people with disabilities, and other health care programs. It would also cut SNAP, the anti-hunger Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. Nearly 12 million people will lose health care coverage if the bill becomes law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

[T]he measure is starkly regressive. The 10 percent of households with the lowest incomes would stand to be worse off by $1,600 on average because of benefits cuts, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the House version of the bill. The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes would be better off by $12,000 on average.

Combined with the impact of Trump’s tariffs — which the White House has argued will help pay for the bill’s tax cuts and new spending — the bottom 80 percent of households would see their take-home incomes fall, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

I'll have more reactions later, all of which I expect will use some variation on the phrase "most regressive Federal budget ever." The bill has to go back to the House of Representatives again because the Senate changed a few things, but it does look like it will pass—narrowly.

I'm sure it was a coincidence that televangelist con-man Jimmy Swaggart died almost immediately afterward:

Mr. Swaggart’s voice and passion carried him to fame and riches that he could scarcely have dreamed of in his small-town boyhood. At its peak in the mid-1980s, Jimmy Swaggart Worldwide Ministries had a television presence in more than 140 countries and, along with its Bible college, took in up to half a million dollars a day from donations and sales of Bible courses, gospel music and merchandise.

In October 1987, Mr. Swaggart was photographed entering a hot-sheet New Orleans motel with a woman. In a later television interview, the woman said that she and Mr. Swaggart had several encounters, describing them as “pornographic” but as not involving intercourse.

Mr. Swaggart responded in February 1988 with an extraordinary, tear-gushing mea culpa to some 7,000 followers at his World Faith Center in Baton Rouge. Turning first to his wife, Frances, he said, “Oh, I have sinned against you, and I beg your forgiveness.”

Some in the audience were so moved by the confession that they fell to their knees, praying in tongues, an indication to Pentecostals of possession by the Holy Spirit.

...or an indication to Psychologists of possession by intense cognitive dissonance, of the type that people experience when they realize they've wrapped their identity and worldview around a charlatan.

I guess the Lord giveth and He taketh away, right? Though if I were a religious person, I would see less of the Lord's work in both of these stories and more of the Adversary's.

Too bad Christopher Hitchens has left us. Given his obituary of Jerry Falwell, I can only imagine what he'd have to say about Swaggart.