Having the morning free, and having a lot of cool air and sun, I took a quick stroll around Nashville. I'll have more later, but for now, here's the Tennessee State Capitol, apparently under construction:
Of course, since the Tennessee General Assembly has a well-Gerrymandered 75-24 Republican majority, I would expect they're actually deconstructing the Capitol. But whatever.
I also passed by Riverfront Station, the downtown terminus of Nashville's adorable little 6-times-a-day toy commuter train:
It may be a really sad attempt to have real public transportation, but it's also a train station, meaning there are Brews & Choos-qualified breweries right by my hotel. I'm planning to visit one today. You'll have to wait until at least Friday for the reviews, though. And also for better photo editing.
Leading the hit parade of horrors this morning, London's Heathrow Airport completely shut down after an electric transformer caught fire yesterday, leading to over 1,100 flight cancellations so far. Flight operations have resumed, sort of, but Europe's busiest airport going offline will cause rippling failures throughout world aviation for a few more days at least.
Speaking of massive transport failures, we have yet more evidence that the Clown Prince of X knows dick about cars (or rockets or software or anything, really) as Tesla recalled nearly all of its Cybertrucks after people discovered the door panels can fall off. That's if they don't rust, or crumple, or warp, or cut your fingers off.
I Googled "how bad is the Tesla Cybertruck" and got so many responses I had to whittle the search down to just the last month, and it still took a couple of pages to find a source that most people trust: Consumers Union. And they don't like it at all. (I love this bit, too: "Unfortunately, we can’t ask Tesla any follow-up questions about the vehicle—even clarifying ones that could help us better understand it—because Tesla dissolved its media relations department in 2020, and the company did not respond when contacted through its press email." This is the guy now destroying the US government. You were warned, and you voted for the OAFPOTUS anyway.)
Time to walk the dog again, now that it's up to 9°C.
Before getting to the weather, I don't anticipate any quiet news days for the next couple of years, do you?
- Someone who owns at least 16 rooms and condos in the OAFPOTUS's Wabash Ave. building in downtown Chicago has sued, alleging that—wait for it—the organization running the building is bilking investors. I mean, how preposterous!
- Speaking of corruption flowing from the OAFPOTUS like toxic waste from a Union Carbide plant, Molly White mourns the end of SEC oversight of the crypto industry.
- Former US Representative Adam Kitzinger (R-IL), the last sane Republican, calls the "desperate, weak, and ultimately meaningless bluff" that the OAFPOTUS won't honor President Biden's pardons.
- James Fallows steps through the "correlation of forces" that defines the struggle between the OAFPOTUS and the Constitution.
- Jennifer Rubin interviews Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), "a man refreshingly candid about his disgust with the current administration's policies and its lack of humane leadership."
- Yascha Mounk thinks "the World Happiness Report is a scam," just a pile of elite misinformation.
- A sophisticated supply-chain attack may have put 20,000 GitHub projects at risk of subtle but far-reaching security problems.
Finally, the snow that covered Chicago and parts north and west has indeed melted in the past few hours, even though we've barely gotten above 2°C:
It wouldn't be a day ending in "y" without people looking at some stupid thing the OAFPOTUS said and asking "why?" Or, you know, lots of people:
Finally, not that I complain about the weather enough already, but just look at the cold front that came through yesterday around 7:30pm:
I got caught outside wearing just a sweater and was quite unhappy. As in every March, we just want warmer weather already. Like, you know, yesterday afternoon.
The Post's Monica Hesse watched the entire first season of "The Apprentice," now streaming on Amazon. Pray you never have to do this:
A refresher, since it’s been awhile since “The Apprentice” debuted in 2004. The show was a competition in which the prize was a vague job at the Trump Organization.
Upon this viewing, what surprised me the most is how much this show primed the country to think of Trump as imperial. I cannot stress this enough. Fanfares play when he enters the room. Contestants grovel for his attention. His properties, business deals and business acumen are all touted as “the best” and nobody fact-checks any of this.
But there were signs, I’m telling you. Bad signs....
Like Sam. There is a contestant named Sam, and he is terrible — he falls asleep in the middle of one challenge — and for two straight episodes everyone who works with him tells Trump that he is terrible and needs to be fired. But Sam talks a good suck-uppy game and he looks the part, so Trump keeps letting him stay, and anyway 21 years later Pete Hegseth is our defense secretary.
Or Omarosa. As soon as Sam is gone, Omarosa emerges as the next conniving, two-faced villain, single-handedly torpedoing her team’s success in multiple challenges. This time Trump sees it, too, but does he fire her? No. He fires the people he thought should have stood up to her better. Malevolence isn’t a sin, only weakness, and so here we are today watching Trump and JD Vance push around the Ukrainian president instead of the Ukrainian president’s bully.
“The Apprentice” was corporate cosplay, with decisions made based on what would play well with an audience rather than what would do best in a workplace.
Is there any reason, now, for DOGE to set completely arbitrary and legally contested deadlines for millions of federal workers to decide whether to quit their jobs? Any reason for Trump to fire the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center and appoint himself chair? Any reason for the United States to buy Greenland, which is not for sale, or annex Canada, which is not interested?
It’s government cosplay....
I've said it often: having spent the late 1980s and much of the '90s in New York, I have always considered the OAFPOTUS to be a boorish clown with horrible business skills and a schtick I found grating. It turns out, nothing has really changed except his platform.
Stuff to read:
- Forgetting (or just plain ignorant) that we have a Coast Guard better suited to the task of guarding our coasts, the OAFPOTUS has ordered the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely to the Texas-Mexico border.
- The OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X, apparently not seeing the connection between weather forecasters and weather forecasts, have illegally fired 10% of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff just as a violent tornado outbreak killed 40 people in the Midwest and South.
- The administration's attacks on universities fit the Orban plan of creating a failed democracy, so naturally the OAFPOTUS has doubled down on them.
- Krugman points out that all of the above administration malfeasance has had a depressing effect on the US economy by reducing demand for our key exports, not least of which includes the $50 billion foreigners used to spend to get American educations. (He also has a good, long explanation of how inflation works, if you subscribe.)
- Surprising no one but still an illegally-targeted exercise of Federal power, the Federal Communications Commission has demanded to see the contracts between a number of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System stations and their acknowledged donors.
- The Waterbeach development outside Cambridge, England, has a new car-free housing complex—though it's still a 10 kilometer walk from the nearest railway station.
- Pilot Patrick Smith wishes the public would have a better sense of perspective about the safety of air travel, while acknowledging that it has seemed a bit rockier than usual.
Finally, thanks to reduced funding and deferred maintenance, the Chicago El has seen slow zones balloon from 13% of its tracks to 30% since 2019. Fully 70% of the Forest Park branch has reduced speed limits, making the trip from there to downtown take over an hour. But sure, let's keep funding below the minimum needed to function, and keep the CTA, Metra, and Pace all separate so they can each fail in their own ways.
As forecast, O'Hare had an official high temperature of 26°C yesterday, the warmest temperature recorded there since 4pm on October 30th and the normal high temperature for June 10th. Inner Drive Technology WHQ got all the way up to 23.3°C just after 5pm, so we had all the windows open until the squall line blasted through after midnight.
Today we have a lot of wind and a lot of dust blown up from storms in Texas and Oklahoma. Without the dust, we'd have clear blue skies right now:
Remember what I wrote Thursday about how the air usually looked this time of year back in the 1980s? Today is just a little hazier. Well, OK, quite a bit hazier:
Even Cassie is wondering what that scent is:
That's the scent of climate change, baby. Same as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Fitting that we've got the resurrected zombie corpse of Herbert Hoover in the White House today.
When the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X turned their attention to the Environmental Protection Agency this week, it hit Chicago almost immediately:
President Donald Trump this week ordered closures of offices at the Environmental Protection Agency that help low-income communities overwhelmed with pollution.
It’s unclear how many positions will be cut in Chicago, but union officials estimate it may affect 20 to 30 of the roughly 1,000 EPA regional employees. Most significantly, the order ends a practice of “environmental justice” at the agency that has responded to people threatened by pollution in urban and rural areas.
“Environmental justice simply means ensuring the communities most disproportionately impacted by pollution are protected,” said Nicole Cantello, president of the union representing EPA employees in Chicago and across the Midwest. “The core mission of the EPA is simple: Protecting human health and the environment.”
Of course the Republicans want to cut these programs: it will allow their friends in polluting industries to create more externalities. Or, rather, to return to the way it was before the EPA existed, when industries happily shifted their environmental remediation costs to the public.
As an illustration, here's a photo I took 40 years ago this week:
Notice the lovely, warm colors behind Lauren. That's not an artifact of Kodachrome or of the scan; that's what the air around Chicago looked like in 1985. Since then, those orange skies have completely disappeared (except when we get hit with wildfire smoke from out west), and we all breathe a lot easier. That's what the EPA and the Clean Air Act did.
When anyone lies that the EPA "costs too much," get the person lying to you to admit that deaths and illnesses that result from pollution cost a lot more in the aggregate. That's the whole point of externalities. And that's what the OAFPOTUS wants to bring back.
It seems Elon Musk tanking Tesla's brand value may lead to some very bad consequences for him and for the car company he pretends to run:
Donald Trump transformed the White House into a car dealership to save Elon Musk’s floundering Tesla stock—to keep him from defaulting on his massive loans.
Trump took a shot at being a shady car salesman Tuesday during a press event for Tesla at the White House. The president posed for photos behind the wheel of a Tesla he apparently can’t drive with a grinning Musk, remarked with astonishment that “everything’s computer” in the futuristic vehicles, and even read from what appeared to be a sales pitch sheet listing prices for different Tesla models.
Trump’s rather unpresidential measures to boost Tesla’s floundering stock could serve a greater purpose: keeping the not-so liquid Musk from defaulting on his loans.
In a 2024 SEC filing, Musk was listed as holding a whopping 238,441,261 shares of Tesla stock that were “pledged as collateral to secure certain personal indebtedness.” At the time, he held 715,022,706 shares in total, according to the filing, meaning that roughly one third of Musk’s shares were serving as collateral for his loans.
The Daily Show had a ball with this.
In all seriousness, though, it highlights Musk's crashing lack of qualifications for the job—any job, really. Two SpaceX rockets blew up in quick succession this year, Xitter is destroyed, and who even thinks about the Boring Company anymore?
Musk is the greatest living advertisement for a real inheritance tax we have had since the House of Bourbon.
After our gorgeous weather Sunday and Monday, yesterday's cool-down disappointed me a bit. But we have clear-ish skies and lots of sun, which apparently will persist until Friday night. I'm also pleased to report that we will probably have a good view of tomorrow night's eclipse, which should be spectacular. I'll even plan to get up at 1:30 to see totality.
Elsewhere in the world, the OAFPOTUS continues to explore the outer limits of stupidity (or is it frontotemporal dementia?):
- No one has any idea what the OAFPOTUS's economic plan is, though Republicans seem loath to admit that's because he hasn't got one.
- Canada and the EU, our closest friends in the world since the 1940s, have gotten a bit angry with us lately. Can't think why.
- Paul Krugman frets that while he "always considered, say, Mitch McConnell a malign influence on America, while I described Paul Ryan as a flimflam man, I never questioned their sanity... But I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality."
- On the same theme, Bret Stephens laments that "Democracy dies in dumbness."
- ProPublica describes a horrifying recording of Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek's meeting with senior SSA officials last week in which he demonstrated why the OAFPOTUS pulled him from a terminal job as "the ultimate faceless bureaucrat" to head the agency. (Some people have greatness thrust upon 'em?)
- Molly White sees "no public good" for a "strategic bitcoin reserve," but is too polite to call the idea a load of thieving horseshit.
- Author John Scalzi threads the needle on boycotting billionaires.
- Writing for StreetsBlog Chicago, Steven Vance argues that since the city has granted parking relief to almost every new development in the past few years, why not just get rid of parking minimums altogether?
Finally, in a recent interview with Monica Lewinsky, Molly Ringwald said that John Hughes got the idea for Pretty in Pink while out with her and her Sixteen Candles co-stars at Chicago's fabled Kingston Mines. Cool.