The Daily Parker

As forecast, the temperature dropped steadily from 3:30 pm Monday until finally bottoming out at -5.6°C (22°F) just after sunset yesterday. It's crept up slowly since then, up to -2.5°C (27.5°F) a few minutes ago. C'mon, you can do it! Just a little farther to reach freezing! Because the forecast for tomorrow morning (-13°C/9°F) does not look great. At least we'll see the sun for a few hours.

You know what else is cold? My feelings toward the OAFPOTUS. I'm not alone:

• Peter Hamby looks back on the OAFPOTUS's recent election endorsements and wonders why any sane Republican would want one.
• Paul Krugman draws a straight line between Calvin Coolidge and the OAFPOTUS, as neither president believed that the US government has any business helping disaster victims. (NB: all the presidents between them emphatically did.)
• Matt Ford chuckles quietly at the brilliance of Costco's lawsuit to claw back the taxes they've paid under the OAFPOTUS's illegal tariff policies.
• Amanda Nelson continues her examination of the more unhinged parts of Project 2025 that the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are actually implementing, looking at the ongoing degradation of the Federal Trade Commission under Adam Candeub.
• Todd Zwillich gives a thumbs-up to US Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and the other lawmakers with intelligence and military backgrounds whose November 19th video teed up the OAFPOTUS's and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's self-owns on the law of war.
• Matt Yglesias reminds both parties that immigration is good for the United States, so cut out both the talk of "remigration" and all the ridiculous land acknowledgements.
• Jeff Maurer laments the decline of comedy movies, and offers six theories about why they died.

Finally, today is the 60th anniversary of The Beatles releasing Rubber Soul in the UK. It's always been one of my favorite albums, and not just from The Beatles. I finished re-watching the 5th season of Mad Men a few nights ago, so I've been trying to put myself back in the 1960s to imagine what revelations the 1965 and 1966 Beatles albums would have been (Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver)—not to mention how much the Fab Four's own sound changed in that 12-month period between 6 August 1965 and 5 August 1966.

Before listening to Rubber Soul one more time, though, I have a dog to walk.

As happens every December 1st, winter has begun. It's the first of 63 days with a 7am sunrise or later. And yet that's not as depressing as some of these stories:

• Jennifer Rubin argues (as do most lawyers with military backgrounds) that any order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to kill survivors of a boat the US Navy attacked would violate US law, international law, the law of war, and the US Law of War Manual, not to mention being morally abhorrent.
• An appeals court has ruled that Alina Habba's interim appointment as US Attorney for the District of New Jersey violated Federal law, potentially voiding every action of her office back to July 24th. This follows the disqualification of Lindsey Halligan two weeks ago.
• Sarah Lazarus imagines Robert F Kennedy, Jr's, holiday gift guide.
• In a post from October 28th, writer Adam Mastroianni blames "the decline of deviance" for the dearth of creativity in the world.

Finally, vendors at downtown Chicago's Chirstkinlemarket are furious with the city imposing a cap of 1,500 shoppers at a time, since raised to 2,500, as it's well under the 3,500 allowed during the pandemic-era 2021 market. “While we are working to address crowding issues at the Christkindlmarket, this level of restrictions poses an existential threat to the Christkindlmarket and the hundreds of artisans, performers, seasonal workers and businesses who depend on the visitors it brings to Downtown Chicago,” the German American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest, which organizes the event, said in a statement. I'll swing by next week when the temperature is a bit higher than this coming Thursday and see if it has made a difference.

Back to the mines. And sunset in half an hour. At least we should see the sun on Thursday.

I'm a bit under the weather but still have to get to rehearsal tonight, so just briefly:

• Michael Tomasky observes that the general public have developed antibodies to the nonstop lies coming from the OAFPOTUS.
• Adam Kinzinger takes on the big piggy in the Oval Office as well as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) resignation late last week.
• Chris Dalla Riva explains how the US copyright system bears some of the responsibility for the enshitiffication of music and movies.
• Tim Wu thinks the federal judge who dismissed the government's antitrust case against Meta "did so in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, not to mention common sense."

Finally, Robert Wright asks, "is Marc Andreesen just flat-out dumb?" Quite possibly.

Republicans in Congress have reached for the trough of public money with both hands, just as the OAFPOTUS is about to steal hundreds of millions from us in the most offensive way possible, according to Radley Balko:

Last year, New York City paid out $205 million to settle 956 lawsuits alleging police abuse. That figure includes about $16 million each to two men who served three decades in prison for a murder they didn’t commit. It also includes people who were wrongly raided and beaten by police, and people who were outright framed by law enforcement.

I bring up these figures because, according to multiple reports, Donald Trump is about to order the government to pay him “damages” for the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion and for special prosecutor Jack Smith’s two investigations of him — one for stealing, hoarding, and improperly sharing classified documents, and the other for Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He’s going to pay himself $230 million.

But it gets worse.

This brings me to the Republicans’ most recent example of shameless, nakedly corrupt self-dealing: Republican senators tucked a provision into the bill to reopen the government that would allow any senator whose phone records were obtained by Jack Smith to sue the federal government — for $1 million per phone.

It appears that eight senators would be authorized to sue. To be clear, Smith did not bug these senators’ phones. With a judge’s authorization, he obtained a record of these senators’ ingoing and outgoing calls around January 6th, 2021. That’s not only perfectly legal, it’s routine in criminal investigations.

Remember, the entire point of right-wing rule is to funnel your money to billionaires. They know the clock is ticking, so they're stealing everything they can. When—not if—we take power back from these thieves, we must hold them to account and claw back every penny they stole.

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:

• The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked the (obviously unlawful) Texas redistricting effort, using logic that would very likely bolster the way California passed theirs.
• Paul Krugman muses that the billions the cryptocurrency industry spent to "buy a president" may not be the winning investment they thought, perhaps because they got high on their own supply. "I don’t know how this ends, but all of a sudden a rapid implosion looks possible," he warns.
• Michelin has not explained why Alinea, Chicago's first 3-star restaurant, lost its third star.
• Baby Boomers piled up $85 trillion in assets while changing policies to make it difficult or impossible for their Millennial and Gen X children to follow them, writes Shannon Najmabadi and Frederica Cocco for the Post.

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.

"Enjoy:"

• Charles Marohn rips apart the OAFPOTUS's half-baked proposal to allow 50-year mortgages, which would transfer even more rents to bankers than the current housing situation does.
• In a spectacular own-goal that will, I hope, be rolled back very soon, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has decided the city will no longer buy US treasury bonds, which are still the safest investments in the world and do not "support the regime" as she daftly claims.
• Jennifer Rubin cheers the millions of voters who have come around to the unavoidable conclusion that the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are horrible, incompetent, corrupt people.
• Kyla Scanlon toured 30 states and two other countries to answer the question, "where did American prosperity go?"
• Will Gotsegen warns that, even though the Republican-caused, longest government shutdown in history ended yesterday, cleaning up from it will take a while.
• Historian Zachary Karabell explains that the OAFPOTUS's eye-watering corruption is (a) nothing new in US politics and (b) not the end of the Republic. (He agrees its awful, at least.)
• The US Mint in Philadelphia stamped out the last pennies ever yesterday. The first ones, minted in 1793, had the purchasing power equivalent of 33c today.

Finally, Chicago's Alinea has lost its third Michelin star, fundamentally changing the fine-dining scene in the city. When the 2026 Guide comes out officially next week, Chicago will have only one 3-star restaurant. Quel horreur !

Between meetings and getting into the zone while fixing a bug, I worked straight through lunch and only got Cassie out around 4. So before my next meeting at 8pm, I've got a few minutes to catch up on all...this:

• Josh Marshall reflects on the 8 Democratic Senators (including one of mine, who is also the minority whip) making a deal with the Republicans, and says the next Congress must eliminate the paper filibuster and reform the Supreme Court.
• David Graham takes a more nuanced view. Krugman wants Democrats to hammer the Republicans on their unnecessary cruelty to Americans in need. Rubin says the word "moderate" lets people weasel out of being a "fighter" or a "defeatist."
• Adam Kinzinger is outraged that the OAFPOTUS has openly sold pardons, in contravention of literally everything the founders (and everyone since) stood for.
• Dan Williams lays out a strategy for confronting "highbrow misinformation."
• Calculated Risk, the blog that predicted the 2008 financial meltdown three years ahead of time, is starting to warn about the next financial meltdown from the inevitable cryptocurrency collapse.
• Matt Yglesias takes a break from the news to speculate about what would have happened had Italy joined the Central Powers in 1914.

And yesterday, as most people know, was the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior.

I posted too soon. Obviously, I tempted the wrath of the whatever high atop the thing, and it noticed:

Here's the ironic part: the government shutdown has (almost) nothing to do with this delay. The plane is broken. And because of the capacity controls today, the airline can't simply swap in another 737-800.

Fortunately, I live in Chicago, so I'll just go home for a few hours. Updates as the situation develops.

Despite the FAA reducing flights at O'Hare and Midway today because of the Republican-caused government shutdown (longest in history!), I got from my house to O'Hare and through security in just over an hour. Red-state friends: I took the #81 bus to the Blue Line, so the whole 45-minute trip cost $3.00. I even had time to get coffee.

So far my flight is on time, and--unusually for the heavily-traveled ORD-SFO route--I got upgraded. Sometimes I think about cancelling my club membership because I only fly 8 to 10 segments a year these days, and then a day like this happens, where I mentally prepared for delays and disruptions but nothing happened.

We'll see if my good luck holds up for my 6am flight Sunday morning...

I'm heading to the Bay Area tomorrow, and I know I will get there, but thanks to the Republican Party I'm not sure whether I'll arrive when I'd planned to:

The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it would cut 10 percent of air traffic at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports, in a move that analysts said would force airlines to cancel thousands of flights while the administration tries to push Democrats to end the government shutdown.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the reductions were an attempt to “alleviate the pressure” on air traffic controllers, who have been working without compensation since the start of the shutdown and have not received a paycheck since mid-October. He said the administration would announce the affected markets on Thursday, as the year’s busiest travel season approaches.

The cuts would start taking effect on Friday, potentially forcing hundreds of thousands of travelers to change plans on short notice, as airlines are pressured to slash capacity across their routes. Representatives of several major airlines and Airlines for America, a trade association, said they were working with the Federal Aviation Administration to understand the details of the new requirements, but had yet to make changes.

O'Hare is, of course, one of the airports expected to have cuts.

I have traveled a lot over the years, and I've experienced flight delays, so I'm not particularly worried. Sometimes weather interferes; sometimes planes need maintenance. Worst case, they'll re-route me through Phoenix or Dallas.

It took me 28 hours to get to Dubai in 2009, and it took me 21 hours to get to Shanghai the next year. But this is the first time I've had a delay threatened because of the longest government shutdown in history.

They really love their incompetence, those Republicans.