The Daily Parker

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

In other news:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday Cassie and I took a 9 kilometer walk through the Lincoln Square and West Ridge community areas. If she got tired, she didn't admit it, at least not until we stopped for a beer:

Otherwise, not much to report, other than I started Agency, William Gibson's sequel to his novel The Peripheral. It's really good. I'm already a third the way done and should finish in a day or two.

The American Revolutionary War began 250 years ago today when Capt John Parker's Minutemen engaged a force of 700 British soldiers on the town green in Lexington, Mass. Just over a year later, England's North American colonies declared their independence from King George III with a document that you really ought to read again with particular focus on the King's acts that drove the colonists to break away. It was almost as if they believed having a temperamental monarch with worsening mental-health problems was a sub-optimal political situation.

Today is also the 30th anniversary of Timothy McVeigh's mass killing of Federal employees and their children in Oklahoma City. Any similarities between McVeigh's and the OAFPOTUS's politics are, I'm sure, coincidental.

• Dana Milbank staggers at the self-inflicted failures that have made this the most destructive first 100 days in presidential history—with 11 days to go, yet!
• Andrew Sullivan takes us through the history of El Salvador dictator Nayib Bukele's rise to power, which of course the OAFPOTUS wants to emulate.
• Molly White outlines how blatant self-dealing combined with firing all the regulators has launched a staggering cryptocurrency grift to enrich the OAFPOTUS and his family. Former SEC Office of Internet Enforcement chief John Reed Stark concurs.
• Administration officials now claim that their letter demanding Harvard University install party cadres in every department was "unauthorized," and reminded everyone not to pay attention to the little man behind the curtain. Regardless, Jennifer Rubin cheers Harvard on.
• Jeff Maurer struggles with getting to the appropriate level of vitriol against the extremists in our party who don't seem to get that we have to win elections before they can get anything close to what they want.

As for me, and the gap in posting yesterday: I have a cold which seems entirely contained in my eyes and sinuses, so I didn't really feel creative. (Not that today's post is creative either, of course.) Somehow I got 9½ hours of sleep last night, according to my Garmin device, though I distinctly remember getting up to close windows when the temperature plummeted from 16°C to 9°C in less than an hour. And when the thunderstorms came through. And when Cassie poked me in the head. Both times.

It feels like the cold has mostly gone away, though. And with tomorrow's rainy forecast, it looks like I might get some writing done this weekend.

Welcome to stop #127 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Explorium Brewpub Third Ward, 143 W. St. Paul Ave., Milwaukee
2 (of 5) stars
Train line: Amtrak, Milwaukee Intermodal Station
Time from Chicago: 89 minutes
Distance from station: 150 m

The best thing about Explorium is its proximity to the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, as it took me less than 5 minutes to get to my train home despite taking a couple of photos along the way. Otherwise it's a loud, TV-covered entertainment zone that could be anywhere in the US. It has decent wings though.

We tried another flight, including the Lost in the Sauce VX New England IPA (6.6%, 13 IBU), a fruity, malty, not horrible but too sweet beer that my Brews Buddy acknowledged was "very drinkable." The Wayfinder hazy pale ale (5.2%, 24 IBU) was even sweeter, with distinct banana notes, but also drinkable. Captain Kidd's Lost IPA (7.5%, 60 IBU) was...eh? My notes just say "bog-standard IPA." And the On Time IPA (no information) was...also drinkable.

I might go back, depending on what the outside spaces look like. It has an unbeatable location if you have to catch a train. Then again, Wizard Works is only 5 minutes farther away.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside
Televisions? Unavoidable
Serves food? Full pub menu
Would hang out with a book? No
Would hang out with friends? Maybe
Would go back? Maybe, but only outside

On Monday, Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin (the one with phallic space ships) sent an all-female "crew" into low orbit for ten minutes, pretty much demonstrating everything wrong with 2020s America:

Blue Origin's all-female crew, which included pop star Katy Perry, completed their trip into space Monday morning.

Along with Perry, the crew included Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos' journalist fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, who is also a helicopter pilot.

Speaking after touchdown, Perry said she brought a daisy with her into space, in honor of her 4-year-old daughter, Daisy, whom she shares with fiancé Orlando Bloom.

"I feel super-connected to love," Perry said. "I think this experience has shown me how much love is inside of me."

Sanchez described the trip as "profound," adding, "I was up there and you see Earth and then you know it's completely black, but … we got to see the moon and it was in complete and utter darkness and then you look back at Earth and it's like this jewel."

Perry agreed with describing the trip as a 'journey," adding that it was a "supernatural one."

I...I don't even know where to begin. Fortunately, The Guardian's Moira Donegan did:

Once, Nasa was the pride of the American experiment: a testament to how a society dedicated to legal equality and passionate hard work could expand the horizons of human possibility. Now, Blue Origin is a testament to the corruption and circumscribed possibilities of the profit motive run amok. Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic. The Blue Origin flight does not make me feel like humanity will reach new heights of achievement. It makes me feel like everything that is coming is grimly predictable, tailored to the impulses of the richest, least responsible and least morally intelligent people on Earth.

But the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man.

It is not misogynist to say that these women do not have their priorities in order. Rather, it is misogynist of them to so forcefully associate womanhood with cosmetics and looks, rather than with any of the more noble and human aspirations to which space travel might acquaint them – curiosity, inquiry, discovery, exploration, a sense of their own mortality, an apprehension of the divine. These women, who have placed themselves as representatives for all women with their promotion of the flight – positioning themselves as aspirational models of femininity – have presented a profoundly antifeminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly.

Donegan also points out that, after bribing the OAFPOTUS with a $1 m donation to his inauguration and suppressing the Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris, the OAFPOTUS rewarded Bezos with a $2 bn contract. Because corruption.

The Atlantic's Ellen Cushing thinks Perry was exactly the right celebrity to go on this "dumb stunt:"

The critics have a point. I’ve spent longer waiting for the subway than Perry was up in space. Space tourism is, at best, folly—silly, spectacularly wasteful, pointless by definition.

Beyoncé likely wouldn’t go to space. Taylor Swift probably wouldn’t either. Going to space for no reason—courtesy of a rich guy a lot of people don’t like—is risky in the physical sense, as well as in the sense that it’s an invitation to get made fun of online. And those two women are serious, careful people. They’re disciplined. They are always in control. Swift’s Eras Tour was a meticulously constructed monument to the singer-songwriter’s mythology—a spectacle, sure, but one less of pop loopiness than of precision logistics. In Perry’s Las Vegas residency, Play, by contrast, she sat perched next to a 16-foot-tall toilet and had a conversation with a giant anthropomorphic lump of excrement. If Eras was a novel, Play was a knock-knock joke. It was a psychedelically moronic piece of performance art, and possibly the most fun I’ve ever had seeing live music.

That’s Perry, though: Always misreading the room. She is, in a word, cringe. For Millennials, especially, she’s a reminder of just how embarrassing we all used to be: earnest, straightforward, unencumbered by irony or internet nihilism. With her, what you see is what you get. She’s a performer. She’s an old-fashioned celebrity in the sense that she is basically a clown.

And then there's this take.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we celebrated the people who got us into space in the first place: Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong. And, yes, Valentina Tereshkova. They didn't know if they'd survive the trip. Some of them almost didn't.

But at least Katy Perry "studied" string theory before her trip. And she has a very good tailor.

The era between the end of World War II and now is an aberration in world history. At no other time have so many people enjoyed a middle-class existence, with most—at least in the OECD and adjacent countries—able to afford all of life's necessities, like a house, decent health care, adequate nutrition, and leisure time. This general prosperity is what people like the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X want to end, and for no other reason than they want more for themselves.

The unprecedented attack on the rule of law in the United States is, really, in service of the super-rich at everyone else's expense. The average effective tax rate in the US is about 14.5%, with the people earning below-50% incomes paying about $63 billion, or 3%, of that amount. This low percentage reflects tax credits and deductions designed to ensure a decent life for below-average income earners.

But the unlawful cuts to the Federal government the OAFPOTUS and CPOX have pushed through have done the most damage to the agencies that specifically target corruption and tax cheating:

Trump’s Treasury Department announced last month that it would no longer enforce the Corporate Transparency Act, hampering recent congressional efforts to end money laundering, tax dodging, and other lawbreaking by anonymous investors. In an executive order, Trump suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American and foreign companies from paying bribes to do business. The Department of Justice is also disbanding a task force set up to administer sanctions on Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Oversight will be removed from many domestic financial and government institutions too. Trump ordered a full work stoppage at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been created to protect consumers from manipulation by banks and other financial institutions He has fired top officials overseeing ethics, whistleblower protections, and labor rights, including the heads of the Office of Government Ethics, the Office of Special Counsel, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials are drafting plans to reduce investigations of fraud and public corruption, which means that prosecuting crooked officials will be more difficult. Cuts to the IRS mean that tax fraud will also be harder to identify and prosecute. Just last week, the Justice Department announced that it would curtail investigations of cryptocurrency fraud and disband its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.

Musk slashed jobs at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that oversees auto safety and crash investigations, including those involving his own electric-vehicle company, Tesla. Musk oversaw mass firings at other regulatory agencies that had launched more than 30 investigations into his companies, which include SpaceX and Neuralink.

But these are only the conflicts of interest we know about. How many people benefited last week from advance knowledge that Trump would reverse his position on tariffs? How many others are making other stock-market bets based on their access to government information? We don’t know the answers, and Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to want to find out. We are living in the dark, just as people do in other kleptocracies, and this changes everything.

To understand Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine, for example, one should ask not merely How will they end the war? and How will they shape America’s relationship to Europe? but Who in Trump’s immediate circle will benefit from the lifting of sanctions? and Have the Russians made explicit financial offers already, and to whom? The rare-minerals deal now being negotiated with Ukraine deserves especially close scrutiny. We need to establish which Americans, exactly, will benefit, and how.

And, of course, the CPOX has stolen your data for his own purposes, with no oversight and no privacy controls:

It’s worth underlining the caveat that no one quite knows where the data allegedly pilfered from the NLRB is going—if indeed it has left the agency at all. But the information allegedly leaving the NLRB would be extraordinarily valuable to corporate titans like Musk looking for a leg up on rivals, as well as a window into the inner workings of the labor unions they despise. It would also explain why Musk is involved with DOGE to begin with. As a number of his companies, especially Tesla, struggle, the government systems DOGE now controls could provide invaluable information.

The theft of personal information also points to another more nefarious motivation for Musk and DOGE. It’s already abundantly clear that the group will not reduce the deficit. It likely will not even decrease federal spending, which is already $100 billion higher under Trump than it was under Biden at this point in his term. Instead, the group’s slashing of regulations and bureaucracy is aimed not at reducing “waste” but at cutting the many governmental layers that exist to fight risk—and fraud.

[U]naccountable coders with close ties to the world’s richest man have their mitts on the personal information of millions of Americans—that’s bad no matter what they’re doing with it. 

Remember, authoritarianism is, at its core, all about theft. Authoritarians use the government to advance their own business interests, taking your taxes to enrich themselves. All the culture war bullshit the Republican Party has stirred up over the past 40 years is meant only to distract you from that reality.

Welcome to stop #126 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Wizard Works Brewing, 231 E. Buffalo St., Milwaukee
4½ (of 5) stars
Train line: Amtrak, Milwaukee Intermodal Station
Time from Chicago: 89 minutes
Distance from station: 900 m

Once you find the door to the 19th-century office building housing this quirky magic-themed brewery, head down the stairs and grab a seat. My Brews Buddy and I enjoyed the place thoroughly, though we would prefer it had fewer TV screens.

We shared a flight and went back for seconds. From left to right, we had: Abracadabra English IPA (5.8%, 50 IBU), very malty with a long finish and good bitter notes; Box Jumper blonde ale (5.5%, 24 IBU), also malty and a little sweet for my palate, with honey, apricot, and banana notes; First Rabbit porter (6.2%, 33 IBU), really nice coffee, toffee, and a long finish; and Smoke & Mirrors hazy New England IPA (5.9%, 41 IBU), my favorite, with big juicy Citra flavors and a nice hazy mouthfeel.

We would definitely come back and hang out with friends or dogs, but not necessarily with a book because of all the TVs. Still, it was our favorite stop of the day.

Beer garden? No
Dogs OK? Yes
Televisions? Unavoidable
Serves food? Snacks
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Before I go through the stories from the last day about how we live in the stupidest timeline, here's a photo of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station I snapped heading to my return train on Friday:

Elsewhere in the stupidest timeline, where maximizing corruption is the defining goal of the Republican Party:

• James Fallows takes us through Harvard's big "fuck you" to the OAFPOTUS's demands that the university install minders in its HR and academic departments, as does Josh Marshall.
• Jennifer Rubin reminds everyone that a functioning center-left party opposing a rogue authoritarian party does not constitute "polarization."
• A memo from the Office of Management and Budget outlines the OAFPOTUS's plans to gut climate and weather research, bringing a fresh new anti-intellectual, anti-science mission to NOAA.
• Paul Krugman outlines how cuts to the IRS will enable the rich to steal even more from everyone else.
• A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board says the DOGE children have enabled Russian hackers to gain access to NLRB data.
• Coders using large language models to write code have given attackers an enormous opportunity to introduce malicious code into your favorite apps through supply-chain attacks.

Finally, take a few minutes to read Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns series on how municipalities in the US and Canada routinely hide (or simply don't know) their long-term obligations so as to make building new infrastructure look like a better financial strategy than repairing existing infrastructure. I can tell you that you get no better view of the shitty state of American roads than riding a Divvy down almost any Chicago street, because Americans seem allergic to maintenance spending.

I know we need to put the fire out in Washington before we can fix anything else. But the long-term damage the OAFPOTUS continues to inflict on us will include more failing roads, bridges, and trains. So if you voted for him, you voted for the US becoming a third-world country in our lifetime.