The Daily Parker

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.)

Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era:

• Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans.
• An assassin shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, this morning in midtown Manhattan.
• The president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, attempted an autogolpe yesterday that failed when the military and police refused to prevent the legislature from meeting to reverse his martial law declaration and start impeaching him.
• US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will move back to his house eight blocks from mine in January as he decides what to do with himself next. (Personally, I'd like to see him back on the Fifth Floor.)
• The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has reversed its stance on end-to-end cryptography for mobile phones now that international hackers are running amok with insecure iPhone-to-Android messages.
• Bruce Schneier analyzes the good and bad ways that AI was involved in the world's elections this year.

Let's hope tomorrow's mood is a different Far Side comic...

This morning's stand-up meeting begins in a moment, at the only time of day that works for my Seattle-Chicago-UK team (8am/10am/4pm respectively). After, I have these queued up:

• EJ Dionne lists some bright spots for progressives in the late election, and points out that we have won the issues that the Right no longer talks about. But actor Joel Gray warns us that Cabaret isn't as far from where we are as we'd like.
• Robert Wright says Pete Hesgeth has an Islam problem that disqualifies him for taking over the Dept of Defense.
• Charles Marohn has moved off Xitter*, "but not for the reasons you might think."
• The Chicago Transit Authority is heading for billion-dollar losses by 2031 if it can't secure new funding sources—or cut costs.

Finally, a new paper found something I've long suspected: small amounts of alcohol actually do help you speak a foreign language better. (Large amounts do not.)

* The X in "Xitter" is pronounced "sh," as in Xi Jinping.

The weather doesn't seem that great for a planned 15-kilometer walk through Logan Square and Avondale to visit a couple of stragglers on the Brews & Choos Project. We've got 4°C under a low overcast, but only light winds and no precipitation forecast until Monday night. My Brews & Choos buddy drew up a route starting from the east end of the 606 Trail and winding up (possibly) at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe.

Also, I've joined BlueSky, because it's like Xitter without the xit. The Times explains how you, too, can join. (Cassie also has an account, of course.)

My 4-minute train to Clybourn leaves in 45 minutes, so I want to save a few things for later reading:

• Josh Marshall says: "There’s plenty of time for theorizing and message testing. But the first thing to do is to oppose. Less arguing, more doing."
• After Pro Publica reported on the deaths of two women due to Georgia's religiously-motivated anti-abortion laws, Georgia disbanded its Maternal Mortality Committee, embarrassing not only the Republican-led government in the state but also every ostrich at the Atlanta Zoo.
• Blue Man Group has announced it will close its Chicago run on January 5th after 30 years at the Briar Street Theater.
• The Chicago Tribune, once more reminding me why I need to just give up my subscription, raised a hue and cry that "Lake Michigan water levels drop to lowest in years" without providing the context that the lake level is just 40 millimeters below its long-term average. Oh the humanity!
• Molly White spends 30 minutes explaining how crypto charlatans spent unbelievable sums to get their favored stooges elected, and largely succeeded.

Finally, NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day this morning has a diptych of the Earth, one side from Saturn and the other side from Mercury. What makes it even more interesting is that both photos were taken 19 July 2013, making it the first time the Earth was photographed simultaneously from two other worlds in the solar system.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens suggests that a holier-than-thou attitude from Democrats contributed to Tuesday's electoral disaster:

The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

[Democrats'] mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border, that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants committed crimes.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

My social media keeps blowing up with my friends catastrophizing and much rending of garments. These are the same people who believed, without doubt, we would win yesterday. I don't know how many people asked me "how do you think we'll do?" to which I had to reply "I don't know." Because I also talk to the other side, and I knew they really felt like we talked down to them all the time.

If a motivating factor for a lot of people, white and Hispanic men in particular, was feeling dissed and wanting to stick it to the liberals, antagonizing them was a pretty stupid thing to do. Moralizing at them was even worse. Because no matter how much the other side offends your morality, or how superior you feel to them, you still need to win the election.

Democrats, including me, have complained about the POTUSE engaging in identity entrepreneurialism. But the response to that cannot be our own identity politicking. And now that our side has gotten spanked, I hope we can finally move the party back to the center.

I'm off to the Bay Area today, so I'll have four hours on an airplane to think more about how we can learn from Tuesday and win the legislature back in 2026.

Some of these may be correct, but not all of them are:

• Rafael Baer: "The whole apparatus of voting for a candidate who might not satisfy your exact needs, and probably doesn’t embody all the values you hold sacred, but might at least make some half-decent decisions for the country as a whole over the coming years, feels oddly antiquated. It is alien to the click-and-collect spirit of digital commerce."
• The Economist: "Mr Trump’s victory has changed America, and the world will need to grasp what that means. America remains the pre-eminent power. However, without American enlightened self-interest as an organising principle, it will be open season for bullies. Countries will be more able to browbeat their neighbours, economically and militarily, without fear of consequences. Their victims, unable to turn to America for relief, will be more likely to compromise or capitulate. Global initiatives, from tackling climate change to arms control, have just got harder. For a time—possibly for years—America may do fine. Eventually, the world will catch up with it."
• James Fallows: "By the standards of any presidential race in modern times, Kamala Harris ran a very “good” campaign. By those same standards, Trump ran a very bad campaign. And none of it mattered. The Republican presidential candidate had won the popular vote only once in the past 32 years. Eight years ago, Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by three million votes. Four years ago, he lost to Joe Biden by seven million. Yesterday, our fellow Americans appear to have given him an absolute majority—as I type, over 51% of the total vote, and a margin of several million."
• David Frum: "Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too."
• Carlos Lozada: "Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad. The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it."
• Josh Marshall: "[E]xhaustion is the greatest threat to continued opposition to Donald Trump. There’s no one election that saves democracy. That whole construct is wrong. It’s the enduring question of what kind of society we want to live in and what we’re going to do about it."
• Daniel McCarthy: "Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. Mr. Trump has shown that the nation’s political orthodoxies are bankrupt, and the leaders in all our institutions — private as well as public — who stake their claim to authority on their fealty to such orthodoxies are now vulnerable."
• Robert Reich: "If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do. All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty. We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny."
• Michael Tomasky: "If you go carefully through the exit polls and compare them to 2020, you actually see a fair amount of stability. Only one group of voters really stands out. Biden had won Latinos 65–32. Harris won them by only 53–45. And the biggest change of all is among Latino men: Biden won them 59–36, and this time, Trump beat Harris outright, 54–44. I kept wishing that I would see an ad by one of the prominent Black or Latino men who endorsed her that didn’t focus on praising Harris or even denouncing Trump in the normal, he’s-a-threat-to-democracy way. I wanted to see, say, LeBron James talking directly to young men of color about why Trump was not a tough guy at all; why he was a weakling and a bully, and explaining that a real man doesn’t lie or make excuses or disrespect women."
• George Will: "Enough has been said about the Republican Party’s eight years of self-degradation. More needs to be said about the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president. Before claiming to sniff Nazism on the other party (and its supporters), Harris’s party should deal with the stench of its antisemitic faction that is pro-Hamas and therefore pro-genocide."

Meanwhile, here in Chicago, voters elected only a couple of the Chicago Teachers Union candidates in our school board vote, as well as a couple of school-choice (read: taking public money for private schools) folks. I really disliked most of the candidates, including the one who won in my district. So that will be fun. Even though I don't have a kid in school, I do pay property tax, and I'm really tired of so much of it going to pay settlements for people beaten up or killed by cops and for a totally dysfunctional school district.

Update: Jonathan Pie has the acerbic British comedian view:

I'm not going to lie; this one stings:

We have a lot more data to gather to learn why we lost and why slightly more than half the electorate felt comfortable returning one of the least competent and most corrupt men back to the White House. Given this ridiculous person as our opponent, we have to acknowledge that we simply failed. I'll have a lot more to say about why over the next days and weeks, but the President's decision to run for a second term is probably the precipitating cause.

This sucks. Harris failed to win over enough voters to overcome a clownish demagogue. Her job from today until November 2028 will be to help the Democratic Party find someone else who can.

Right now, though, our first duty in protecting democracy in the United States is simply to accept that we lost and start preparing for at least two years in the minority. Being in opposition sucks; but notice, Republicans, how we're not storming the Capitol.

We can wallow in self-pity for the next 57 days, but come January 3rd, we need to be a disciplined, focused opposition party until we win the Senate back in two years and the White House two years after that. Resist the temptation to blame or point fingers; we Democrats have a long history of circular firing squads that we need to put behind us. We need to look at the data figure out what worked and what didn't, learn from our mistakes, and win the next election. We're not going to be in the desert for long unless we choose not to look at a map.

Very busy day—I'll explain more tomorrow—so all I have to say right now is, I can't wait until Wednesday. I voted yesterday, so the 90% of my inbox taken up by the Democratic Party and various candidates all pleading for something represents a lot of wasted time and bytes.

Not to mention the dozens of spam texts I receive. Thank you, T-Mobile, for shunting those away from me.

Just stop, y'all. I live in Chicago, I've already voted, and I gave money where it mattered most this cycle. You're wasting my time. Just stop.

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:

• Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
• Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
• Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
• James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
• Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
• Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
• Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
• American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
• SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.

Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.

The only reaction to last night's debate that I need to share is Cassie's:

Talk about on-the-nose commentary!

Right. Anyway, in other news since yesterday:

• Elaine Godfrey explains what Democrats don't understand about JD Vance.
• Julia Ioffe interviews Justice Dept official Matt Olsen, who heads up the Biden Administration's anti-election-interference group.
• Meteorologists estimate that Hurricane Helene dumped 150 trillion liters of water on Appalachia as it stalled out, with one town in North Carolina getting a staggering 796 mm of rain.

Finally, the New York Times dips into the history of chicken tenders, an American pub staple that (allegedly) turns 50 this year. Love me tenders, love me sauce...

Because I had a busy weekend, I had quite a full inbox this morning. After deleting the 85% of it that came from the Democratic Party and the Harris-Walz campaign (guys, you've already got my vote, FFS), I still had quite a few items of interest:

• Michael Tomasky reminds everyone: the XPOTUS is an evil buffoon, not an evil genius.
• Yesterday that same evil buffoon mooted a "Purge"-like day for the police to rough everyone up a bit.
• Contra most New York Times articles this election cycle, the Post's Jennifer Rubin lays out Kamala Harris's actual policy proposals.
• The Tribune's Laura Washington asks the same question I've asked several times: why is Dorval Carter still the CTA president?
• Chicago will elect half its school board for the first time in November, but other than a few articles in Block Club, no one seems to care.
• Over 100,000 Verizon customers lost service across the country today; no one knows why yet.
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology has finally proposed common-sense password recommendations that I hope someone in my company's Global Corporate Services IT department actually reads.
• Because of climate change, Switzerland and Italy have to redraw part of their shared border in the Alps.

Finally, astronomers have found a rocky, Earth-sized planet orbiting a dying main-sequence white dwarf star, seemingly having survived the star's expansion during its red-giant phase. This suggests that our planet may last until the end of time itself. Life on Earth probably won't last more than a billion more years, but that's someone else's problem.