The Daily Parker

I'm flying tomorrow and Sunday, giving me a few uninterrupted hours to read between now and Monday. So I'm just queuing some of these things up:

• The US Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibits certain medical interventions for minors who want to transition genders.
• As the opinion came from Justice Samuel Alito (R) and the dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I), I have a feeling both it and the dissent will satisfy no one.
• The Times characterizes the decision as setting back "the movement" a generation. I'm sure Andrew Sullivan will have a lot to say tomorrow, too.
• James Fallows contrasts his friend William Langewische with the OAFPOTUS's nominee to lead the Federal Aviation Administration.
• The New Republic has a series this week on "the obscene wealth issue."
• One more reason never to buy a Tesla: its cameras are always on.

Finally, after four years, the CTA Red Line stations at Lawrence, Argyle, Berwyn, and Bryn Mawr will re-open July 20th, which also means that Purple Line trains will resume running express. I am very pleased that a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar transport project actually finished on time and within budget in Chicago. If only we could do more of them.

The OAFPOTUS threatened to kill an adversary's head of state today, showing the world not only how reckless and stupid he is, but also that he has never actually seen the movie he clearly wants to emulate:

Lebanon, desperately wanting to stay out of this one, has warned the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah not to attack Israel. No word yet from our allies, who I'm sure did not want our village idiot to go rogue on this one. But, hey, he's the Inciter in Chief back home, so why would we expect any measured diplomacy from him abroad?

As if that were the only thing going on today:

• The Atlantic's Andrew Ryvkin argues that the OAFPOTUS has become a problem for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
• Philip Bump tells Democrats to quit catastrophizing: protests against the OAFPOTUS do not help him.
• Staff at Le Musée de Louvre went on strike yesterday to protest "untenable" working conditions because of crowding and chronic understaffing.
• As I've warned for years, the United States has fallen behind our peer countries because of our crumbling and obsolete infrastructure.
• Bruce Schneier lays out four ways that AI is actually useful, even though many uses remain problematic.

OK, I'm done for now. Say what you will about President Biden, but we didn't have this kind of chaos every day while he was in office.

I've had a lot to do in the office today, so unfortunately this will just be a link fest:

• I agree with Jeff Maurer that "I hate that when some dickhead sets a car on fire, we have to talk about it for a week."
• Journalist G. Elliott Morris argues that the Los Angeles protests have a higher probability of hurting the OAFPOTUS than helping him.
• Paul Krugman sighs that "we finally know what 'American carnage' was about."
• Russian emigrés Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev have a list of Russian words to help explain the OAFPOTUS and his droogs.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who served in the Wisconsin Air National Guard both here and in Afghanistan, has absolutely no patience for the OAFPOTUS militarizing the situation in Los Angeles.
• Jennifer Rubin similarly has no patience for referring to the first Defense Secretary who never served in uniform as a "warrior."
• Oh, and let's not forget the bill House Republicans passed a couple of weeks ago that, if the Senate passes it, would reshape American democracy in some pretty horrifying ways.
• Writer Michael Hirschorn thinks Democrats are missing a huge opportunity by staying away from bro-sphere podcasters like Joe Rogan.
• Both Google and Apple have reportedly added a time zone for Cape Breton Island after an article on a satirical Canadian site joked about the municipality creating an "even more annoying time zone between Atlantic and Newfoundland time."

Finally, while Graceland Cemetery in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood doubles as an arboretum and a great place to walk your dog, right now a different set of canids has sway. Graceland has temporarily banned pet dogs while a litter of coyote pups grows up. They are totes adorbs, but their parents have behaved aggressively towards people walking dogs nearby.

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it.

Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist:

• Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of the National Guard] during the Civil Rights Era were over the refusal of segregationist state governments to enforce federal law under court order. Trump’s argument is...[that] the President [has the right] to decide when a state government isn’t protecting or enforcing civil order to his liking and to intervene with federalized National Guard or the U.S. military to do it at the point of a bayonet. ... The crisis the administration insisted it needed to solve was a crisis of the administration’s creation."
• Philip Bump puts the encroaching fascism in broader context: "What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. ... The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel...."
• The Guardian highlights how Chicago has led the way in resisting the OAFPOTUS's xenophobic mass-deportation program, as part of our long history of respecting immigrant rights.
• Anne Applebaum looks at last week's election in Poland and feels a chill that "every election is now existential."
• Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former film critic for Entertainment Weekly, likens the OAFPOTUS's style of governing to Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
• Ezra Klein expresses surprise at who has objected the most to the recommendations in his recent book Abundance, and the left-wing emphasis on messaging: "Democrats aren’t struggling primarily because they choose the wrong messages. They’re struggling because they fail to solve problems. ... [Brandon] Johnson is the most proudly left-wing big-city mayor in the country. ... He’s also the least popular big-city mayor in the country and may well end up as the least popular mayor in Chicago’s history. Policy failure breeds political failure."
• Oh, by the way, Meta and Yandex have started to de-anonymize your Android device by abusing how your Internet browser works.

Finally, a community group on the Northwest Side has launched an effort to build a 5-km rails-to-trails plus greenway project to connect the Bloomingdale Trail with the North Branch Trail. This would create a direct connection between the southern flank of Lincoln Park and the Chicago Botanic Garden in suburban Glencoe. It's still early days, though. I'd love to see this in my lifetime. I'm also waiting for electrified railroads around Chicago, but this project would be a lot cheaper.

Really, this post is just a list of links, but I'm going to start with Dan Rather's latest Stack:

• US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) started her 2026 re-election campaign last week by telling constituents not to worry about the proposed $880 billion cuts to Medicaid because "we are all going to die."
• Writer Andy Craig takes a look at the destruction the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have caused, and tries to find a path back to a constitutional republic. "Whatever eventually replaces this crisis-ridden government will result in a new constitutional settlement, not a simple revival of what came before. We will find ourselves engaged in a kind of constitution-making arguably not seen since Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War."
• Paul Krugman looks at what professional money people are doing, and thus what they're predicting, and warns that the TACO trade is misguided, because the OAFPOTUS really has no off-ramp for his tariff obsession: "[T]he nonsensical nature of the whole enterprise is why I don’t think he’ll find an off-ramp. After all, it’s obvious that the increased steel tariff wasn’t a considered policy, it was a temper tantrum after the Court of International Trade ruled against his other tariffs. ... If you want to know where this is going, keep your eyes on the bond and currency markets, where cool-headed traders realize that U.S. policy is still being dictated by the whims of a mad king."
• Evan Osnos smacks his forehead at the unprecedented scale and reach of said mad king's plundering of the United States.
• Max Boot points to the OAFPOTUS's assault on science and education as "the suicide of a superpower."
• Jen Rubin believes the Republican Party has "no good options on the budget," thanks to a Democratic Party in array.
• The Clown Prince of X likes to excuse his sociopathy, cruelty, immaturity, and incompetence by claiming he's "Aspie." (He isn't. He's just a rich asshole.)
• Josh Marshall relays the story about the mess (literal and figurative) that the United States Institute of Peace faced when they got back into their offices after its illegal DOGE takeover in March.

Finally, Streetsblog Chicago's Harjas Sandhu shakes his fist at the seeming inability of the Chicago Transit Authority to find competent leadership. At least it's not currently run by a not-too-bright reality TV star. (And I don't mean the OAFPOTUS.)

Welcome to stop #129 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: McHenry Brewing, 3425 Pearl St., McHenry
Train line: Union Pacific Northwest, McHenry (Zone 4)
Time from Chicago: 88 minutes
Distance from station: 1.3 km

It finally happened: I cheated. I couldn't figure any reasonable way to visit McHenry Brewing without taking an expensive and rare Lyft part of the way home, because the UP-NW line only has three daily trains to McHenry in the afternoon with three return trains in the morning. So, not wanting to find myself stranded two counties over, I bundled Cassie into the car and drove up there.

(Spot the happy dog.)

I also had a bit of serendipity as the brewery were celebrating the owner's 50th birthday, which explains the hats. The building has a long history of brewing beer, too: it first opened as Lager Brewery back in 1868.

Because we drove up there, and I didn't get lunch on the way up, I only had one pint of the Pearl Steet Pils (5.5%, 13 IBU). I liked it, especially sitting outside on a sunny (but smoky) first day of summer.

I wouldn't mind another trip up to McHenry, as the area just east of the brewery has a nice, big park and lots of shops and restaurants along the Fox River. The brewery itself was OK and so was the beer I tried. And hey, Cassie got lots of pats, so she'd go back too.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Yes, avoidable
Serves food? BYOF
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

I have had no more than 15 consecutive minutes free at any point today. The rest of the week I have 3½-hour blocks on my calendar, but all the other meetings had to go somewhere, so they went to Monday.

So just jotting down stories that caught my eye:

• Ukraine's masterful and crippling strike against the Russian Air Force over the weekend has changed warfare forever, writes Max Boot.
• Jen Rubin wants to end the creeping normalization of the OAFPOTUS and his droogs because, as she says, they're all nuts.
• Because they want to nominate obviously unqualified people to the Federal judiciary, the Justice Dept will no longer ask the American Bar Association to vet them.
• Michael Tomasky explains why the Republican Party runs up massive deficits while complaining about massive deficits.
• Why does the MAGA right hate New York City, wonders Paul Krugman?
• Writer Anne Lamott cautions against "putting Biden's head on a spike."
• The oldest company in North America, the Hudson's Bay Co. founded 355 years ago, will permanently close its doors this summer.

Finally, the Illinois House failed to pass a budget bill that included funding the Regional Transportation Authority. Despite regional transport agencies facing a $770 million funding shortfall later this summer, the House couldn't agree on how to pay for it, in part because downstate Republicans don't want to pay for it at all. The Legislature could return in special session this summer, but because of our hippy-dippy 1970 state constitution, they need a 3/5 vote to pass a budget after June 1st. If they can't pass the budget soon, the RTA may have to cut 40% of its services, decimating public transport for the 7 million people in the area.

My party wants to govern, and understands that government needs to provide a service that millions of people who depend on even if people who don't use the service have to contribute. I mean, some of my taxes go to Republican farm subsidy programs, and I accept that's part of the deal. Republicans no longer think our needs matter. They need to be careful what they wish for.

Two photos this morning. First, Cassie tried to convince the other patrons at Spiteful Brewing yesterday that no one ever pats her:

She was pretty successful with the ruse. People stopped to pat her continuously. She has us all trained.

Second, here is the GOES-East visible light photo from about half an hour ago:

See all that haze from Alberta and Saskatchewan in the northwest, through the US Midwest, and swooping all the way down to Jacksonville and out to the Atlantic? That's wildfire smoke from the Canadian plains. There isn't a cloud in the sky over Chicago right now, but we can really see the haze.

Cassie and I are about to go on an adventure involving A Ride in the Car!, and we'll probably get another hour of walkies today. The smoke hasn't yet descended to ground level so the AQI is not great (61) but so far not hazardous. Still, the number of fires this early in the season doesn't bode well for the summer fire season.

Welcome to stop #128 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Black Lung Brewing, 115 Nippersink Rd., Fox Lake
Train line: Milwaukee District North, Fox Lake (Zone 4)
Time from Chicago: 105 minutes
Distance from station: 750 m

Fox Lake isn't the farthest station from downtown Chicago on the Metra system. At 110 km, that honor goes to Harvard; Fox Lake is only 80 km out. And yet, as I discovered yesterday, it can take almost 3 hours to get back to Union Station if the aging-but-repainted SD70MACH locomotive can't go backwards. (Thank you, America, for strangling public transit for decades and wondering why it sucks!)

Regardless, I don't regret the trip. Because just a 10-minute walk from the Fox Lake station along the lake shore you will find the Black Lung Brewing taproom and its pleasant beer garden.

Despite the overcast skies and Canadian wildfire smoke, and despite my train arriving 45 minutes before the brewery opened, I sat by the lake and read my book and didn't want to leave. If Metra had an option for returning to the city between 4:25 pm and 8:37 pm, I would have stayed for a while longer, but I didn't want to get home after 11 pm.

The beer was not bad. I started with the Trampled By Sliders Pale (5.5%, SRM 6), "brewed in collaboration with the Grayslake Youth Baseball Association." It had a nice bitter/malt balance and short finish, with a good flavor. The Maui Wowie Hazy IPA (6.5%, 25 IBU) had lots of hops right off the bat without being overwhelming, a smooth mouthfeel, and a long finish. A bit less Citra flavor than expected. And thanks to bartender Joanie for a half-pint lagniappe when the keg kicked on her first draw.

It is a very long way to go, unfortunately. And yet I think I'll stop by again this summer—perhaps even this weekend, since I had already planned a Brews & Choos expedition to the hardest-to-reach brewery in the Metra system tomorrow.

One other thing: in addition to their production facility and taproom in Round Lake Beach, Black Lung has taken over the Light the Lamp space in Grayslake and plans to open in August. When I get out there in the fall, why not stop at the Fox Lake taproom as well?

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Yes, avoidable
Serves food? Full pub menu
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Because I'm about to hit my PTO cap at work, I'm taking the next few Friday afternoons off. Today I've planned a Brews & Choos trip out to the wilds of Lake County. Check back tomorrow for the result!

Meanwhile, I have more meetings...