The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Slouching towards fascism

The software release yesterday that I thought might be exciting turned out to be fairly boring, which was a relief. Today I'm looking through an ancient data set of emails sent to and from some white-collar criminals, which is annoying only because there are millions and I have to write some parsing tools for them.

So while I'm decompressing the data set, I'll amuse myself with these articles, from least to most frightening:

Whee! WinZip has finished decompressing all 517,000 files. Now to write a parser...

About Virginia

I'm not even a little surprised that Republican Glenn Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Viriginia governor's race last night. The margin of 80,000 votes is just over 2% of the vote, so Youngkin can't exactly claim he won in a landslide. And, let's face it, President Biden doesn't exactly have Obama levels of popularity today. (He's still more popular than the last guy. And Gerald Ford.)

I worked in Virginia for six months in 2003, and I can tell you most of the state has, shall I say, not quite progressive politics.

Ross Douthat believes some of McAuliffe's problems come from the way he failed to address the popular—if inaccurate—perceptions of the latest boogeyman on the Right, "critical race theory." Since no one really knows what CRT actually is, Youngkin had no trouble banging that drum to scare all the suburban women that he handily shifted to his side in the last six weeks.

As for the president's agenda, as long as 52 senators want to stop him from doing anything in his first term, he can't get it done. The slave-owning Southerners who wrote the Constitution, particularly the ones from Virginia, designed the Federal government to do as little as possible.

We're five years in to historical political unrest and division in the United States, which I suppose was the Karmic balancingof the Cubs winning the World Series. The last time the US went through this much turmoil, we got the Civil Rights Act. But the time before, we got a Civil War.

Finally, let me grab a few grafs from Chris Cillizza on what CRT actually means:

For the record, here's what critical race theory actually is -- courtesy of Education Week:

"Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies. ... A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas."

And here's another helpful explainer via Brookings:

"CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people. Simply put, critical race theory states that U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race."

The basic idea is that racism is systemic in many of the institutions of America -- and that by acknowledging that reality, we can work to overcome it.

Yeah, wow, I'd hate to teach children that...

Evening reading

I was pretty busy today, with most of my brain trying to figure out how to re-architect something that I didn't realize needed it until recently. So a few things piled up in my inbox:

And finally, Whisky Advocate has four recipes that balance whisky and Luxardo Maraschino cherries. I plan to try them all, but not in one sitting.

Busy day in the news

So many things this morning, including a report not yet up on WBEZ's website about the last Sears store in Chicago. (I'll find it tomorrow.)

  • Jennifer Rubin advises XPOTUS "critics and democracy lovers" to leave the Republican Party.
  • Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) completely caved against a unified Democratic Party and will vote to extend the (probably-unconstitutional) debt limit another three months.
  • An abolitionist's house from 1869 may get landmark approval today from the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. (It's already in the National Register of Historic Places).
  • Could interurban trains come back?
  • Arts critic Jo Livingstone has a mixed review of No Time to Die, but I still plan to see it this weekend.
  • 18 retired NBA players face wire-fraud and insurance-fraud charges for allegedly scamming the NBA's Health and Welfare Benefit Plan out of $4 million.
  • Even though we've had early-September temperatures the past week, we've also had only 19% of possible sunlight, and only 8% in the past six days. We have not seen the sun since Monday, in fact, making the steady 19°C temperature feel really depressing.
  • Two new Black-owned breweries will go on the Brews and Choos list soon.
  • Condé Nast has named Chicago the best big city in the US for the fifth year running.

Finally, President Biden is in Chicago today, promoting vaccine mandates. But because of the aforementioned clouds, I have no practical way of watching Air Force One flying around the city.

Update, 12:38 CDT: The sun is out!

Update, 12:39 CDT: Well, we had a minute of it, anyway.

Why Biden's plan matters

Forget the amount (especially because the headlines completely mis-state the value), the "human infrastructure" bill winding through Congress right now matters in all the places it needs to:

Over the past few decades there has been a redistribution of dignity — upward. From Reagan through Romney, the Republicans valorized entrepreneurs, C.E.O.s and Wall Street. The Democratic Party became dominated by the creative class, who attended competitive colleges, moved to affluent metro areas, married each other and ladled advantages onto their kids so they could leap even further ahead.

There was a bipartisan embrace of a culture of individualism, which opens up a lot of space for people with resources and social support, but means loneliness and abandonment for people without. Four years of college became the definition of the good life, which left roughly two-thirds of the country out.

And so came the crisis that Biden was elected to address — the poisonous combination of elite insularity and vicious populist resentment.

The Democratic spending bills are economic packages that serve moral and cultural purposes. They should be measured by their cultural impact, not merely by some wonky analysis. In real, tangible ways, they would redistribute dignity back downward. They would support hundreds of thousands of jobs for home health care workers, child care workers, construction workers, metal workers, supply chain workers. They would ease the indignity millions of parents face having to raise their children in poverty.

The Republican Party have no similar policies. In fact, their policies would accelerate the "distribution of dignity" upward, even while they blamed the results on the Democrats. The reconciliation bill will help millions of Americans. And, oh yeah, it might even win us a couple of elections.

Shoot the f**ing hostage already

I don't usually agree with Josh Marshall's panics. He cries "wolf" every time he passes the zoo. But you have to remember, every time he points to a wolf, there's a wolf. And based on his reporting for the last couple of days, I agree that if Senators Manchin (D?-WV) and Sinema (D?-AZ) don't get behind their own President's agenda, then maybe the President needs to paint them with their own sabotage:

Sen. Manchin just put out a statement, scorching in its appraisal of the proposed reconciliation bill and making me think for the first time that this entire thing – both bills – may go down in flames. It’s a lot of the same stuff: debt, inflation, mean taxations, means-testing. But the volume is turned … well, up to 11. It’s not remotely the statement of someone who is on the verge of finding common ground with the rest of the caucus.

Through this whole saga Manchin has been riffing, saying what comes into his head on a given day. There’s no real strategy or logic to it. That’s why there’s little consistency. But the riffing, the saying what comes into your head each given day is particularly perilous at a moment like this. Because you’re navigating with emotion. You’re navigating with the consensus of establishment Washington which has been dour at best on President Biden since mid-summer.

There was a deal, an agreed upon framework. The Manchin-Sinema-Gottheimer troika got their bill. And as soon as they did they backed out of the deal. That is how we got here. We knew it would be hard to come to an agreement, a lot of tense moments and standoffs. What we’ve actually seen is rather different. They’re not having a hard time coming to an agreement. The troika is refusing to negotiate.

Obviously, the problem with the Democratic Party is that we try to negotiate in good faith, and we get all ferklempt when the other guys fuck us. So maybe we should just continue to negotiate in good faith and not act surprised when the other guys fuck us, especially when the guys doing the fucking claim to be members of our party. Like, you can offer a good-faith negotiation and still have a baseball bat in your left hand. Don't start the fight, but FFS, end it.

What if we just ejected Sinema and Manchin from the party and painted them with the failure of Congress to pass legislation that an overwhelming majority of Americans want passed? What if we just started acting like we won every election since 2006?

Someday, good historians will figure out what actually happened in the mid-21st Century. I may even live long enough to read those histories. And I hope against reason that those well-researched histories find strong evidence that people like Manchin and Sinema voted against the will of most Americans because they believed strongly and correctly in their positions at the time. But the evidence I see right now, right in front of me, says that Sinema and Manchin have no such integrity.

Manchin, maybe he gets a pass. He has a tough gig right now as an out Democrat in West Virginia, though given the behavior of the Republican Party there for the past 10 years I can't think why. (By that I mean, I cannot think of any organization more hostile to the interests of ordinary West Virginia workers than the Republican party.) And yet, West Virginia workers keep voting for the people who keep them in poverty. Manchin may believe that he can help his constituents by holding up a bill that could pay for their child care, but I'm having trouble following his logic.

Sinema, though.

Hey, Senator Durbin? I've voted for you a bunch of times, could you please do your job and whip Sinema into line like the Majority Whip is supposed to do? She's polling in the 40s in her home state. There's some whippin' to do.

Here's the thing. The Democratic Party believes we Americans are better than this, and the Republican Party keeps trying to get people to believe we aren't. That's why the Republicans have only won one national election since 1988. Because we are better than this.

We're more ready for a true left-of-center party than we've been since TR. If Sinema and Manchin blow up this administration, it's time for a new party.

I love it when people point to Lyndon Johnson's presidency and how he controlled the agenda without acknowledging that the Democratic Party had 68 Senate seats and a similar majority in the House. Oh, and many of those guys were white supremacists who promptly left the party after Johnson forced them to vote for the Civil Rights Act. Also, Johnson had a progressive Supreme Court and not a lot of pushback from the communities of color who were just trying not to get their heads bashed in whenever they protested the injustices they faced daily.

Yes, I'm saying that the Civil Rights Act was easier to pass in an unjust era, for the same reason the 13th Amendment passed before Appomattox. When you're losing, you prioritize the things you're giving away to hold on to what you can.

The Republican Party is doing exactly that. Let me repeat myself: when you're losing, you prioritize the things you're giving away to hold on to what you can. The behavior of the Republican Party over the last 20 years is exactly that. They can't win on policy, so they've stopped telling people why they want power, because the "why" would lose votes. They just keep grabbing power, any way they can, because they know they won't get their agenda through otherwise.

A healthy democracy requires a healthy debate. We don't have that right now. I'm worried we've lost it permanently, but hopeful we haven't. Regardless, "healthy debate" means the Republican Party needs to explain what they want, as does the Democratic Party, and let the people decide. And if the people overwhelmingly reject your point of view, you sit down and reformulate your argument. This, I submit, is why the Republican Party refuses to state its position: because most people disagree.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. What does it tell you that the Republican Party keeps trying it?

Sure Happy It's Tuesday

Actually, I'm ecstatic that a cold front blew in off the lake yesterday afternoon, dropping the temperature from 30°C to 20°C in about two hours. We went from teh warmest September 27th in 34 years to...autumn. Finally, some decent sleepin' weather!

Meanwhile:

And though the article could use an editor, Whisky Advocate has a short bit on Aaron Sorkin's love of whisky in his movies.

Beautiful autumn morning

I've opened nearly every window in my house to let in the 15°C breeze and really experience the first real fall morning in a while. Chicago will get above-normal temperatures for the next 10 days or so, but in the beginning of October that means highs in the mid-20s and lows in the mid-teens. Even Cassie likes the change.

Since I plan to spend nearly every moment of daylight outside for the rest of this weekend, I want to note a few things to read this evening when I come back inside:

Finally, if you really want to dig into some cool stuff in C# 10, Scott Hanselman explains implicit namespace support.

Late morning things of interest

So these things happened:

And finally, break out the Glühwein: Chicago's Christkindlmarket will return to Daley Plaza and Wrigleyville this winter.

Third Monday in September

Today might be the last hot day of the year in Chicago. (I hope so, anyway.) While watching the cold front come through out my office window, with the much-needed rain ahead of it, I have lined up some news stories to read later today:

And finally, Metallica has an unexpected show tonight at Metro Chicago, about two kilometers from my house. Tickets are $20. I hope people show up for my board meeting tonight.