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.
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:
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.
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...."
We had a blast of lake-effect snow yesterday. This happens when cold air passes over a warm lake, pulling huge volumes of moisture from the water and freezing it into snow. The air got quite a bit below freezing yesterday morning, so the northeast winds picked up a lot of vapor from the 8°C water, which it promptly dropped on the city.
Through the spring and early summer we often hear that it's "cooler by the lake." But like the idea of "global warming," that hides a lot of nuance in a simple phrase. A slightly-more-accurate telling might be that it's "less variable by the lake." And yesterday we got an example of that.
At Inner Drive Technology WHQ, which is just over 2 km from Lake Michigan, yesterday was the first day since March 2nd during which the temperature didn't get above freezing. Yesterday the temperature ranged from -3.0°C to -0.5°C, with a dip during the second round of snowfall between 8 and 10 am. On March 2nd, it ranged from -5.4°C to -0.2°C.
Contrast with Chicago's official weather station at O'Hare (23.2 km from the lake), which last had a full day below freezing on February 21st. On March 2nd it did get down to -8°C, but it got up to 3°C, after hitting 14°C on February 28th. Similarly, yesterday O'Hare was both colder (-3.9°C) and warmer (2.2°C) than IDTWHQ, warm enough for all the snow to melt just a few hours after it fell.
Today's forecast promises above-freezing temperatures everywhere in the Chicago area today, rising to 18°C by Saturday. The snow doesn't bother me, but I hope the remaining ice melts from the sidewalks today.
After dragging my tired ass to Peet's just as they opened at 6 am (8 am back home), I got the same tired ass to the BART station just down the street and discovered that the Red Line operates as a shuttle between Millbrae and SFO sometimes. This knowledge came to me after I took an unplanned round-trip to the airport, learning this bit of BART lore at the cost of 25 minutes of my life.
I did make it to Powell and Market before 8:30 am, which allowed me plenty of time to take the oldest form of public transit in the city from there up to Hyde and Beach, then walk from there to the Caltrain station on 4th street, where I caught a train to San Jose and then a VTA light rail trolley to the closest stop near my family's house.
I'll have photos when I get back to Chicago, which I hope will be tomorrow. I've already ordered a Lyft for 4:15 am, which sounds awful except that I usually get up around 6:30 am in Chicago anyway.
For now, I'm going to digest this bit of rice I picked up from a local Millbrae Mandarin spot I like, then collapse.
You know, I probably won't be online much Friday through Sunday. I should try to do that more often.
- The OAFPOTUS pretty much guaranteed that Zohran Mamdani will win today's New York City mayoral election by endorsing former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, which I'm pretty sure Cuomo didn't want either.
- Brian Beutler chastises the Democratic Party for "the scourge of wimpiness." I am tempted to send him a strongly-worded email.
- US Rep. Jan Schakowsky's (D-IL9) departure from the US House has led to so many candidates running for her seat] in the March 2026 primary, it's hard to figure out who's who or what they stand for.
- Amherst College political science professor Javier Corrales outlines how Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro has woven the fates of the country's elites together to ensure that their literal survival depends on his political survival.
- Thirteen years after the USDOT and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania spent $77 million building two off-ramps into Chester, Pa., that the community didn't ask for, absolutely no benefits have accrued to the city. As Charles Marohn reminds us, this is "the predictable outcome of a transportation funding system that rewards appearance over impact."
Finally, Block Club Chicago spent the day at one of the last 24-hour-diners in Chicago, which happens to be just 2 km from my house. Now I know where to go if I'm craving a burger at 4am.
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.
It's late October, so the days are shorter. Then on Sunday, we get an extra hour of sleep at the cost of an hour of afternoon daylight.
Which is all to say I ran out of time today doing actual work and taking meetings at odd times because the UK switched their clocks yesterday.
And now I have to walk two dogs, feed two dogs, and run to rehearsal. More tomorrow.