The Daily Parker

I come to bury Cheney, not to praise him:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who extolled the power of the presidency, died Monday at the age of 84, his family said in a statement.

The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, the statement said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney advocated an aggressive new foreign policy in which potential threats would be met with swift, pre-emptive action. No longer would the U.S. wait for an enemy to strike first. He helped sell the Iraq War by issuing dire warnings to the American people. At the same time, he famously predicted that the mission itself would be relatively easy.

On Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who then hosted the show, asked Cheney if the American people were ready for a long, bloody battle.

"I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Cheney said.

There were other controversies that dogged Cheney as the Bush administration's popularity plummeted in its second term. In 2007, his chief of staff and top adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury in an investigation into the leaking of the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cheney was not implicated in the case legally, but he was tainted by the scandal nonetheless.

Then, in what was one of the more bizarre incidents involving someone as high ranking in the government as Cheney, he accidentally shot and wounded a friend, attorney Harry Whittington, in the face and chest with birdshot pellets during a 2006 weekend quail-hunting trip at a Texas ranch.

Cheney advocated for a stronger executive, rejecting the framers' ordering of the branches of government.

The analysts will have a lot to say today about Cheney's "complicated" life story. But he made the OAFPOTUS's power grab possible, by supporting Federal candidates and judicial nominees who agreed that Congress should take a back seat to the President, regardless of the actual text of the Constitution. He even admitted that, in a way, when he supported Democratic candidates in 2022 and 2024 simply because they weren't insane.

One pundit, I forget who, said recently that Republicans and Democrats like me used to disagree on how to drive but we agreed on the destination, while people like the OAFPOTUS want to crash the car. Cheney may have been one of the former type of Republicans, and he may have agreed broadly on where we were going, but he yanked the wheel pretty hard to the right.

With my PTO cap continuing to force me into Friday afternoons off this summer (the horror!), and the sunny but (smoky 23°C) weather, Cassie and I will head to the Horner Park DFA just as soon as I release a new version of Weather Now in just a few minutes.

When Cassie and I come back, I'll spend some time reading all these nuggets of existential dread:

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last 3 months of US jobs data down to basically nil (which Krugman blames on tariffs), prompting the OAFPOTUS to fire BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
• Not only is the State Department's HR director a "RIF-happy, Christian evangelizing MAGA warrior with an axe to grind," he's also apparently kind of creepy.
• Former intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper "set the record straight on Russian and 2016."
• James Fallows once again calls on everyone to help protect our institutions.
• Yascha Mounk sees the rise of AI as akin to the Industrial Revolution.
• After more than a century of slow traffic through Wrigleyville, the CTA finally straightened out a section of the Red Line to cut travel times for everyone, which unfortunately means more noise.
• The impending merger between the Southern Pacific and Norfolk Southern railroads will have a huge impact on Chicago rail traffic—but no one yet knows whether it will be up or down.
• Molly White suggests using RSS readers instead of email lists to reduce the enshittification of news publications.
• Jeff Maurer, who spent several years writing for John Oliver as you may recall, wants to have a serious autopsy of late night television that includes all the uncomfortable topics.

By the way, the new Weather Now build allows users to create their own weather lists and share them with the world or keep them private. I've wanted to build this feature for a long time, finally starting work on it two weekends ago. Try it out and let me know what you think!

The Manhattan jury in the first felony trial of a former president took only about 10 hours to reach a conclusion. He's GUILTY.

Let the op-eds flow!

I just popped out for lunch. It's 17°C in the Loop with lots of sun, the kind of day when I wonder why I went back to the office. Summer begins Saturday. Ah, to be French and take an entire month off...

This time of year has other features, many of which popped up in my various RSS feeds this morning:

• For the first time in his life, the XPOTUS finds himself waiting for a jury to decide whether he's a felon. In closing arguments yesterday, his attorney nearly got himself sanctioned on the spot for a wildly inappropriate statement.
• David Masciotra reminds us that Ted Kennedy warned us about Justice Samuel Alito (R) back at the latter's confirmation hearings in 2006.
• Residents of my neighborhood have reported at least one unusually aggressive coyote, near Ravenswood Ave. and Irving Park Rd. Chicago Animal Care & Control suspect a nearby den with pups that the adult is guarding.
• The Chicago Tribune has a map of its twentysomething reporter's favorite patios in Chicago. Neither coyotes nor cougars will likely bother you at these spots.
• It turns out, climatologists really don't know enough about clouds.
• Whisky Advocate explains why Scotch distilleries have pagodas (more properly "Doig Ventilators") over their malting rooms, and how this makes my favorite Islay malts taste so good.
• Years after everyone thought brick-and-mortar bookstores had gone extinct, Barnes & Noble has opened a new one at Clark and Diversey, with others opening in Wicker Park and Northbrook soon.

And finally, Block Club Chicago sent a reporter to the Duke of Perth yesterday to surveille the packing. Other than giving GM Mike Miller a completely new last name, he generally got the story right, and even included some photos guaranteed to make anyone who loved the place hold back a tear.

Yesterday, the XPOTUS began his first (!) criminal (!!) trial of the multiple legal actions he currently faces, and it didn't go well. For starters, as Josh Marshall pointed out, the XPOTUS has always behaved as if he believes nothing more than one is either dominating or dominated. Being at the defense table on trial for multiple felonies puts one distinctly in the second category:

What is clear to anyone who has ever tried to understand the man is that he lives in a binary world of the dominating and the dominated. The visuals around the man endlessly illustrate this. Most of us live in a much more fluid and textured world. We interact with most people on a ground of relative equality. Where real differentials of power exist most of us try to paper over those realities with softening trappings. Trump’s whole world view, the way he interacts with friends and foes, won’t accept any middle ground. And this is more than just performance. It’s clear that this is deeply rooted in his experience of the world. Being dominated is a kind of social and ego depth. That’s why he’s so good at his whole racket. Because it’s coded so deeply into him.

At the most basic level, sitting in the dock is horribly and perhaps even fatally off brand. Trump’s brand is swagger and impunity. Always be dominating. Until you’re not.

The XPOTUS's first reaction? He fell asleep, which comedian Trae Crowder summarized as, "there's an ongoing screaming match where one side is like, 'your guy can't even stay awake in the Oval Office,' and the other side accurately responds, 'your guy can't even stay awake in his criminal trial,' and somehow that doesn't immediately end the debate."

So far, jury selection in that trial has actually found 6 jurors, despite everyone having heard of the XPOTUS. Alexandra Petri imagines how the New York County District Attorney could amend the jury questions to speed this along:

1. Wait, you don’t have any strong opinions or firmly held beliefs about Donald Trump?

2. Have you been living in a hole for the past 20 years?

3. For the past 50 years?

I dunno, man. I feel for everyone involved in the trial—well, except that one guy—having to slog through that exercise.

The XPOTUS will do everything he can to make the trial a circus, partly because he does that with everything, but partly to force a mistrial so he won't have to run for president as a convicted felon. Meanwhile, he has three other trials going on. This will be a long summer.

Political writer and YouTube creator Ian Danskin put together a series of videos in the aftermath of the 2016 election to explain what we Democrats did wrong, and how we need to engage with the Alt-Right (now known as the Republican Party). The whole series is worth watching, but if you want to skip to the end, watch this one:

Some things have changed since 2017, but not as many things as one would hope. We need everyone in the Party to understand the core message of the above video: we need outcomes, not just process, if we're going to save democracy. Think of LBJ, not Walter Mondale, for f's sake.

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Anyway, here are a couple other stories from the last couple of days:

• A New York appellate judge took all of two hours to toss out a frivolous lawsuit by the XPOTUS seeking to get his gag order removed in the Stormy Daniels case, bringing the world just that little bit more relief from the XPOTUS's endless polysyllabic farts. Jennifer Rubin lists the reasons this case might even stop those noisome emanations for good.
• The Arizona Supreme Court voted 4-2 to allow enforcement of a territorial (i.e., before Arizona became a state) law banning most abortions from the moment of conception that predates the famous gunfight in Tombstone by 17 years. (NB: most Arizona voters favor legal abortions.)
• MP William Wragg (Hazel Grove, Manchester) got kicked out of the Conservative Party for sending other MPs' personal phone numbers to a spear phisher, along with photos of his junk, after falling for a Grindr honeypot.
• Paul Krugman wonders about the persistence of people reporting negative feelings about the economy even though they and all their friends and family are doing great.
• Car and Driver columnist Ezra Dyer identifies the main problem electric cars have getting people to buy them: they're boring.

Finally, Ohio State wildlife and ecology professor Stanley Gehrt has written a book I will have to stop myself (for now) from adding to my ever-expanding shelf of books I need to read. Gehrt spent decades studying Chicago's coyote population and how well they co-exist with us, tagging more than 1,400 coyotes and collaring another 700.

My only complaint about the animals is they don't eat enough rabbits. I live near several suspected dens, the closest only about 400 meters from my front door. I can't wait to read the book.

As for the risks coyotes pose to humans, he lets us know who the real enemy is: “If you were to ask me, ‘What’s the most dangerous animal out there [for urban dwellers]?’, it’s white-tailed deer,” Gehrt said.

With tomorrow night having the earliest sunset of the year, it got dark at 4:20 pm—two hours ago. One loses time, you see. Especially with a demo tomorrow. So I'll just read these while devops pipelines run:

• Reversing their First Amendment argument from only 18 months ago, the Chicago Tribune editorial board finally agrees with most Chicagoans that the big sign facing down Wabash Street from the tower named after the XPOTUS has to go.
• After reporting on elections for 22 years, Josh Marshall finally realizes that watching election returns on TV harms one's health.
• Megan Stack takes a sympathetic view of Reality Winner, who leaked information about Russian interference in the 2016 election (and the XPOTUS's cover-up) and spent years in jail because of it.
• Tom Nichols laments that, loss or not, Herschel Walker represents the future of Republican candidates. David Von Drehle just calls Walker "a tragic figure."
• James Fallows breaks down what looks to me like journalistic malfeasance from Pro Publica.
• Twelve years ago, Salon ran a series of shorts on "how America will collapse (by 2025)" that don't seem far-fetched in 2022.
• One of Illinois' oldest movie theaters, the Pickwick in Park Ridge, will close at the end of January.
• In his third excerpt from his update to 2010's Walkable City, Jeff Speck points to the data showing that rideshare companies won't save your city.

Finally, John Seabrook takes a few pages to explain how to become a TikTok star. Hint: do it before you turn 22.

The Washington Post Fact Checker digs deep into the allegations of mishandling classified material against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and finds, nah, she good:

The Justice Department investigation of classified documents found at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club has brought inevitable comparisons to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server that she used while secretary of state. The FBI investigation into her emails arguably tipped the close 2016 presidential election to Trump.

During the contest between Trump and Clinton, we wrote 16 fact checks on the email issue, frequently awarding Pinocchios to Clinton for legalistic parsing. But in light of the Trump investigation, Clinton is trying to draw a distinction between Trump’s current travails and the probe that targeted her.

As shown in an FBI photo of some of the documents seized from Trump, many have clear markings indicating they contained highly sensitive classified information. Clinton, in her tweet, suggests none of her emails were marked classified. That’s technically correct. Whether those emails contained classified information was a major focus of the investigation, but a review of the recent investigations, including new information obtained by the Fact Checker, shows Clinton has good reason for making a distinction with Trump.

In other words, [two] State Department probes under Trump knocked Clinton for maintaining a private server for State Department communications — but did not hold her responsible for mishandling classified information.

Of course, all the Benghazi and email server hearings that Clinton had to endure had nothing at all to do with their subject matters, because the current Republican Party doesn't care at all about substance. Everything they do is performance, for political points. And they've been at that so long, in fact, that many Republicans can't fathom that the probe of the XPOTUS's mishandling of classified material has nothing to do with political points and everything to do with the damage that he did to national security.

Meteorological summer ends in just a few hours here in Chicago. Pity; it's been a decent one (for us; not so much for the Western US). I have a couple of things to read this afternoon while waiting for endless test sessions to complete on my work laptop:

• Former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev died at 91.
• Julia Ioffe looks at Ukraine's risky counter-offensive—that might just work.
• Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle, who has covered the XPOTUS since the 2016 campaign, wonders if the XPOTUS might go to jail because he used the classified documents as props.
• Jennifer Rubin wonders why some die-hards in the GOP have yet to back away slowly from the obviously-deranged XPOTUS.
• Peter Wehner lists three strategies to help get rid of the XPOTUS blues.
• Those XPOTUS blues might be why more people in the US now smoke pot than smoke tobacco.
• Margaret Talbot warns that Justice Sam Alito (R) hasn't even started destroying civil rights yet.
• Catalytic converter theft is up 1,215% since 2019, with Priuses near the top of the list.
• New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority will get rid of their colorful MetroCard vending machines next year. Aww.

And via Bruce Schneier, a group of local Chicago high schoolers will never give you up and never let you down.