The Daily Parker

As forecast, the temperature dropped steadily from 3:30 pm Monday until finally bottoming out at -5.6°C (22°F) just after sunset yesterday. It's crept up slowly since then, up to -2.5°C (27.5°F) a few minutes ago. C'mon, you can do it! Just a little farther to reach freezing! Because the forecast for tomorrow morning (-13°C/9°F) does not look great. At least we'll see the sun for a few hours.

You know what else is cold? My feelings toward the OAFPOTUS. I'm not alone:

• Peter Hamby looks back on the OAFPOTUS's recent election endorsements and wonders why any sane Republican would want one.
• Paul Krugman draws a straight line between Calvin Coolidge and the OAFPOTUS, as neither president believed that the US government has any business helping disaster victims. (NB: all the presidents between them emphatically did.)
• Matt Ford chuckles quietly at the brilliance of Costco's lawsuit to claw back the taxes they've paid under the OAFPOTUS's illegal tariff policies.
• Amanda Nelson continues her examination of the more unhinged parts of Project 2025 that the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are actually implementing, looking at the ongoing degradation of the Federal Trade Commission under Adam Candeub.
• Todd Zwillich gives a thumbs-up to US Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and the other lawmakers with intelligence and military backgrounds whose November 19th video teed up the OAFPOTUS's and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's self-owns on the law of war.
• Matt Yglesias reminds both parties that immigration is good for the United States, so cut out both the talk of "remigration" and all the ridiculous land acknowledgements.
• Jeff Maurer laments the decline of comedy movies, and offers six theories about why they died.

Finally, today is the 60th anniversary of The Beatles releasing Rubber Soul in the UK. It's always been one of my favorite albums, and not just from The Beatles. I finished re-watching the 5th season of Mad Men a few nights ago, so I've been trying to put myself back in the 1960s to imagine what revelations the 1965 and 1966 Beatles albums would have been (Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver)—not to mention how much the Fab Four's own sound changed in that 12-month period between 6 August 1965 and 5 August 1966.

Before listening to Rubber Soul one more time, though, I have a dog to walk.

Russia expert (and emigrée) Julia Ioffe picks apart the OAFPOTUS's clownish attempts to end the war in Ukraine one more time:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. President Donald Trump, eager to get another peace deal under his belt, sends everyone in Washington, Kyiv, Moscow, and Brussels scrambling as he announces that an agreement to end the Ukraine war is imminent. The proposal, on even the most cursory examination, is revealed to echo the Russian position, at which point Volodymyr Zelensky and the Europeans start an all-out offensive to pull the American president over to their side. The text is amended to reflect some of what Ukraine needs and wants in a settlement. This then renders it unacceptable to Vladimir Putin, and puts the peace deal Trump promised to deliver within 24 hours of taking office, 10 months ago, back out of reach.

The first time we witnessed this sequence was in February, soon after Trump’s inauguration. Then in the spring. Then again in August, in Anchorage, just ahead of the Labor Day holiday. Now, with a day to go before Thanksgiving, we’re somewhere around 80 percent through the script, though it’s pretty clear how it’ll end. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said as much on Tuesday: Given how much the plan has changed, Moscow is likely no longer on board.

In Washington—at least among the bipartisan crowd that, like most Americans, still backs Ukraine—people are alarmed. ... In Moscow, this latest round of chaos was greeted with wincing skepticism: They’ve been down this road before.

The absolute, best-case, pie-in-the-sky scenario, [a] source close to the Kremlin said, would be a peace deal by spring, following months of intense, round-the-clock work. Right now, though, that work isn’t happening. “The way it’s organized now, I don’t see a chance,” the source said. “It’s all very poorly organized. But it is what it is. It’s better than nothing.”

This is what happens when you don't believe expertise has value, and you send a real-estate developer to attempt diplomacy with one of the wiliest and slipperiest regimes on Earth.

Dan Rather piles on:

Less than a year into the second Trump term, the long view of American foreign policy, if you can even call it by such sober terminology , is a confusing jumble of transactional moves with no through line.

It’s guided by the whims du jour of our allegedly “America First” president. Even if you don’t agree with his isolationist stance, it is a definable policy, but one that he seems to have abandoned on a whim.

This president – aided by his business cronies with no diplomatic or foreign policy experience – has systematically put this country in the precarious position of being less safe than it was on Inauguration Day.

We still have more than three years to go. At least we have the possibility of electing a sane legislative branch next November.

So in case I don't have a chance to read all of these tonight:

• Did the White House staff put up tacky, gold-colored, signage outside the Oval Office because the OAFPOTUS is a classless tool, or because he's well along the dementia highway?
• Dan Rather puts the blame for declining educational outcomes in the US squarely on the party who has attacked public education for 40 or 50 years now.
• DOGE has officially ended, having accomplished absolutely nothing good, and of course it'll be up to my party to repair all the damage.
• The bottle of hairspray in the Pentagon's A-Ring wants the Defense Department to cut ties with Scouting America, accusing them of attacking "boy-friendly spaces" because they let girls in now. (Seriously. I am not making this up.)
• The DoD is also threatening US Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired US Navy captain and former commander of the Space Shuttle, for telling troops not to follow illegal orders. (Kelly noted that he merely repeated the relevant section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which, of course, the Defense Secretary has probably never read. Also note that, under Article I, section 6 of the Constitution, sitting legislators can't be prosecuted for anything they say in pursuance of their elected duties.)
• The Attorney General of Alaska would like you to know he's tired of progressives in California making it hard for his state to despoil the wilderness.
• Matthew Yglesias has "been covering Larry Summers controversies" for most of his life, and he's pretty tired of it.
• After reading about her a bit, I have concluded that journalist Olivia Nuzzi probably has a cluster-B personality disorder, which Melody Schreiber does not see as an excuse for her elevating the most dangerous quack ever to grace the halls of the Dept of Health and Human Services.
• Bruce Schneier found four examples of "AI...being used to strengthen democracies worldwide," which is heartening.
• Charles Marohn also sees some good coming out of our "Gutenberg moment" where new technologies are exposing corruption and allowing new movements to gain traction.

Well, that seems to be enough for now.

I'm a bit under the weather but still have to get to rehearsal tonight, so just briefly:

• Michael Tomasky observes that the general public have developed antibodies to the nonstop lies coming from the OAFPOTUS.
• Adam Kinzinger takes on the big piggy in the Oval Office as well as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) resignation late last week.
• Chris Dalla Riva explains how the US copyright system bears some of the responsibility for the enshitiffication of music and movies.
• Tim Wu thinks the federal judge who dismissed the government's antitrust case against Meta "did so in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, not to mention common sense."

Finally, Robert Wright asks, "is Marc Andreesen just flat-out dumb?" Quite possibly.

Republicans in Congress have reached for the trough of public money with both hands, just as the OAFPOTUS is about to steal hundreds of millions from us in the most offensive way possible, according to Radley Balko:

Last year, New York City paid out $205 million to settle 956 lawsuits alleging police abuse. That figure includes about $16 million each to two men who served three decades in prison for a murder they didn’t commit. It also includes people who were wrongly raided and beaten by police, and people who were outright framed by law enforcement.

I bring up these figures because, according to multiple reports, Donald Trump is about to order the government to pay him “damages” for the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion and for special prosecutor Jack Smith’s two investigations of him — one for stealing, hoarding, and improperly sharing classified documents, and the other for Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He’s going to pay himself $230 million.

But it gets worse.

This brings me to the Republicans’ most recent example of shameless, nakedly corrupt self-dealing: Republican senators tucked a provision into the bill to reopen the government that would allow any senator whose phone records were obtained by Jack Smith to sue the federal government — for $1 million per phone.

It appears that eight senators would be authorized to sue. To be clear, Smith did not bug these senators’ phones. With a judge’s authorization, he obtained a record of these senators’ ingoing and outgoing calls around January 6th, 2021. That’s not only perfectly legal, it’s routine in criminal investigations.

Remember, the entire point of right-wing rule is to funnel your money to billionaires. They know the clock is ticking, so they're stealing everything they can. When—not if—we take power back from these thieves, we must hold them to account and claw back every penny they stole.

Jeff Maurer warns us not to get our hopes up that the Epstein scandal will be the undoing of the OAFPOTUS, as he has a long record of trying and failing to cover stuff up that wouldn't really matter if he'd just been transparent:

It’s not possible for Trump to act more guilty than he’s acting about the Epstein files. His behavior makes the sweating guy from the Key & Peele “browser history” sketch look cool and composed. The logical deduction when someone acts like they have something to hide is that they do, indeed, have something to hide.

But one thing makes me think that there might be less in the Epstein files than a rational person would assume. And that’s the fact that I can think of four instances in which Trump stonewalled, made himself look very guilty, and even put himself in legal jeopardy, but didn’t need to do that — the smarter play would have been to let things play out. He wasn’t innocent — I honestly think that Trump struggles to keep all his shady dealings straight — but he mis-played his hand so badly that it’s hard to call his actions “rational”. So, one answer to the question “Why would Trump act so guilty about the Epstein files?” is “Because he’s a huge moron and sometimes stonewalls when a smarter person would just stand down.”

Meanwhile, because he's too dumb to keep his mouth closed (ironic as that phrasing is), his malicious prosecution of former FBI director James Comey is about to get thrown out by two different judges.

Lots of morning meetings, then stuff so far this afternoon, and now...a quick breath. Of course, given that it's still 2025, I'm not exactly breathing sweet summer air:

• The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked the (obviously unlawful) Texas redistricting effort, using logic that would very likely bolster the way California passed theirs.
• Paul Krugman muses that the billions the cryptocurrency industry spent to "buy a president" may not be the winning investment they thought, perhaps because they got high on their own supply. "I don’t know how this ends, but all of a sudden a rapid implosion looks possible," he warns.
• Michelin has not explained why Alinea, Chicago's first 3-star restaurant, lost its third star.
• Baby Boomers piled up $85 trillion in assets while changing policies to make it difficult or impossible for their Millennial and Gen X children to follow them, writes Shannon Najmabadi and Frederica Cocco for the Post.

Finally, Wicker Park's Smoke Daddy, one of my favorite rib joints, will close January 4th after 31 years on Division Street. I admit, I haven't been there since March 2023, but that has more to do with my cholesterol than with my feelings about the place. The restaurant's Wrigleyville location will keep going, and the owners say they'll open something else in that spot sometime in 2026. There are only a few days between now and its closing that I'm able to get there, but I will. Oh yes. I will.

I've been heads-down debugging, except for going to the meetings already on my calendar, and just realized I've got to leave for rehearsal soon. I'll have to come back to these fun little nuggets later:

• What is this bullshit the OAFPOTUS is pushing about "white genocide" in South Africa?
• After some consideration, James Fallows has come around to believing that the way Senate Democrats ended the government shutdown will actually help us next year.
• The Chicago City Council finance committee rejected Mayor Brandon Johnson's tax plan for the second year in a row, principally over his plan to tax every employer in the city with more than 200 100 workers $21 $18 a month per employee.
• Weakness in downtown the real estate market has pushed up property taxes all over the city, on average by 17%. My tax bill came Saturday and had a 12% increase, so I guess I got off lucky?

Finally McSweeney's wonders what it's like to work for an evil company and still consider yourself a good person.

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 !