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One of the many stories that piqued my interest this morning included a rant by the anti-Sorkin himself: Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, does not like how "politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." (He also implies that Liz Truss, and not Kamala Harris, most embodies the character of Selina Meyer.) Former President Obama has endorsed Vice President Harris. John Scalzi received a press...

Twenty years ago today, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) showed enthusiasm for his 3rd-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses in a way he came to regret: Conventional wisdom says that this scream tanked (see what I did there?*) his campaign, but really, Dean never had the momentum or following needed to win the nomination. Plus, President Bush had taken us to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and with common sense in Iraq, so war hero John Kerry looked like the best person to challenge him. I can't...

As far as I know, I'm moving in 2½ weeks, though the exact timing of both real-estate closings remain unknown. Last time I moved it took me about 38 hours to pack and 15 to unpack. This time I expect it to go faster, in part because I'm not spending as much time going "oh, I love this book!" I'm taking a quick break and catching up on some reading: Federal District Judge Aileen Cannon (R-Fla.) continues to help the guy who appointed her in absurd ways large and small. David French explains why "strong"...

In just a few minutes I will take Cassie to boarding, then head up to Northwestern for a rehearsal (I'm in the chorus at Ravinia's upcoming performances of La Clemenza di Tito.) I'll then have to pack when I get home from rehearsal, then head to a hotel by O'Hare. Ah, how much fun is an 8:30 international flight! As I'll have some time at the airport in the morning, and no time now, I want to queue these up for myself: Jonathan Chait says Senator Joe Manchin (D?-WV) didn't kill President Biden's agenda...

But he still has a lot to say about what he calls "successor ideology:" The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative...

After taking Cassie on a 45-minute walk before the heat hits us, I've spent the morning debugging, watching these news stories pile up for lunchtime reading: The US Supreme Court once again upheld Obamacare, with only Alito and Gorsuch dissenting. The Illinois legislature passed a common-sense gun control law, supported by the State Police, that largely brings us back in line with the rules we had in the 1990s. Illinois Deputy Governor Dan Hynes has resigned (ahem) ahead of the 2022 election. The BBC...

Jennifer Rubin (a Republican, I keep having to remind myself) finds former President Obama's mockery of the current president impressive and effective: In Orlando on Tuesday, Obama told the crowd, “Our current president, he whines that ’60 Minutes’ is too tough,” he said referring to Trump’s walking out of an interview last week with CBS News’s Lesley Stahl. “You think he’s going to stand up to dictators? He thinks Lesley Stahl’s a bully.” He does not need to say Trump is a “crybaby” or “weak”; he lets...

On 30 April 2011, President Obama addressed the White House Correspondents Dinner. The funniest bit starts 9 minutes in, when he takes on his successor, so many years before anyone thought that would ever be a true sentence. And at 12:45, roasts the 46th president, even more years before anyone expected that to happen. And he's really funny: Oh, one other thing. Don't forget that the next evening (Washington time), the US Navy killed Osama bin Laden, for which Obama took complete responsibility—as he...

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee from 31 December 2015:

It's official: I mean, we all knew this was coming, especially after Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden yesterday. Because, I mean, he had to. Lookit: Yesterday the president went so far off the rails at his daily press briefing it's hard to say there's still a train. Or rails. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may actually be starting to see the downside to being the president's chief lickspittle. Spikes in deaths at home in several cities suggest Covid-19 numbers need some revision....

American late-night host Jimmy Kimmel wondered if there were differences between President Obama's announcement that we had assassinated Osama Bin Laden and President Trump's announcement that we had assassinated Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. He only found a few: To quote The Untouchables, "We laugh because it's true."

That's American for the English idiom "penny in the air." And what a penny. More like a whole roll of them. Right now, the House of Commons are wrapping up debate on the Government's bill to prorogue Parliament (for real this time) and have elections the second week of December. The second reading of the bill just passed by voice vote (the "noes" being only a few recalcitrant MPs), so the debate continues. The bill is expected to pass—assuming MPs can agree on whether to have the election on the 9th...

...Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. Happy anniversary, Barry.

This year the WHCA won't have a comedian or the president at its annual dinner. Instead, historian Ron Chernow will speak. Can't think why: Go back a few minutes to hear the whole thing. I'm highlighting that passage because, don't forget, two days later Osama bin Laden was dead—because two hours earlier, President Obama gave the final order to have him killed. Leadership.

While trying to debug an ancient application that has been the undoing of just about everyone on my team, I've put these articles aside for later: Using the example of an automated process that sends out emails that your inbox subsequently deletes without any intervention on your part, Raymond Chen discusses Le Chatelier's Principle. Demonstrating that a stopped clock is correct twice a day, it turns out the Trump tax cuts have given a (temporary) boost to craft distilling. Whisky Advocate name-checks...

I've been in frenetic housecleaning mode today, since it's the first work-from-home Wednesday I've had in...let me see...10 weeks. And apparently I last had my housekeeping service here 16 weeks ago. (It wasn't that bad; I do clean up occasionally.) The activity and actually having to do my job has led me to miss a couple of news stories, which I will now queue up to read: Former President Obama spoke at the Economic Club of Chicago last night, and said, at one point, "American democracy is fragile, and...

Too much to read today, especially during an hours-long download from our trips over the past two weeks. So I'll come back to these: The CIA recently fired Lulu, a black Lab, because she didn't want to sniff for bombs after all. But more seriously: Josh Marshall calls out White House Chief of Staff for making the detestable argument that an attack on the President is an attack on the troops. Alex Shepard at New Republic just shakes his head sadly. London is running adverts aimed at cleaning up its air...

While I'm trying to figure out how to transfer one database to another, I'm putting these aside for later reading: Chicago Magazine thinks global warming could be worse for Illinois than previously thought. (But we're still going to do better than Florida.) Citylab reviews Sarah Williams Goldhagen's new book on the science behind appreciating architecture. Conservative (!) columnist Jennifer Rubin believes her party can no longer defend our national interests or our Constitution. Krugman once again...

Krugman nails it: Believe it or not, conservatives actually do have a more or less coherent vision of health care. It’s basically pure Ayn Rand: if you’re sick or poor, you’re on your own, and those who are more fortunate have no obligation to help. In fact, it’s immoral to demand that they help. This is a coherent doctrine; it’s what conservative health care “experts” say when they aren’t running for public office, or closely connected to anyone who is. I think it’s a terrible doctrine – both cruel and...

Among the browser windows I have open are these: An AI is getting inspirational posters horribly wrong...or is it? An 80-year-old woman wanted good luck on her flight from Shanghai to Guangzhou threw coins in one of the engines, causing a 5-hour delay and $140,000 in damage. Crain's looks at census data in an interactive feature on Chicago's wealth divides. Republicans still refuse to acknowledge that the goal of their Obamacare repeal efforts is to get millions of people off government-backed health...

No. Just no. Really, no, they're not: Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) admitted as much as he left the meeting Friday. Reporters asked why, after Republicans held dozens of nearly-unanimous votes to repeal Obamacare under President Obama, they were getting cold feet now that they control the levers of power. “Sometimes you’re playing Fantasy Football and sometimes you’re in the real game,” he said. “We knew the president, if we could get a repeal bill to his desk, would almost certainly veto it. This time we knew...

Despite controlling two of three branches of government and most of the third, the Republican Party suffered a humiliating defeat this week when Paul Ryan couldn't muster enough votes to destroy health care in the U.S. We can all breathe a little easier: House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, facing a revolt among conservative and moderate Republicans, rushed to the White House Friday afternoon to inform President Trump he did not have the votes to pass legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to decide...

Two big Obama stories today. First, the president has commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence. She'll be freed in May: In recent days, the White House had signaled that Mr. Obama was seriously considering granting Ms. Manning’s commutation application, in contrast to a pardon application submitted on behalf of the other large-scale leaker of the era, Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who disclosed archives of top secret surveillance files and is living as a fugitive in Russia. Asked...

The outgoing president has authorized $1.1 billion in Federal transportation funds to modernize the northern half of the CTA's Red Line: City Hall has received the parting gift it wanted from the Obama administration: just under $1.1 billion in federal grants to rebuild a key stretch of the Chicago Transit Authority's Red Line north. The city and U.S. Department of Transportation officials are scheduled to sign a contract tomorrow, known as a full-funding grant agreement, committing the DOT's Federal...

Even though there are about 58 hours left in the year, I still have work to do. Meanwhile, a few things to read have crossed my RSS feeds: Maybe I should retire to Ecuador? 538.com lists the best and worst data stories of the year. Will President Obama violate previous norms of office to weigh in on the Trump administration's egregious violations of previous norms? One can hope. What's Brexit going to do to London, and vice-versa? OK, back to work.

President Obama yesterday called Donald Trump "woefully unprepared" and "unfit" to be president: During a press conference at the White House with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Obama posed the question to the Republican Party: "If you are repeatedly having to say what Trump says is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?" "The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn't appear to have...

From AVWeb: one of the world's two remaining B-29 Superfortresses flew for the first time this weekend after being grounded for more than 60 years. From CityLab: Nice's surveillance network is extensive—possibly too extensive to do any good. From New Republic: Jeet Heer says the GOP is the party of death. Brian Beutler says Trump lying about plagiarising Michelle Obama is making it worse. Alex Shepherd says news outlets actually need to call it plagiarism. Over in the Atlantic, James Fallows just adds...

Via Daily Kos, the President gave the commencement address at Howard University Saturday, giving a clear rebuke to Bernie Sanders' central message throughout: The president was not attacking Sanders’ ideology of fairness. But he was clearly separating himself from Sanders’ dogmatic insistence on revolutionary transformation. If you want to make life fair, then you have to start with the world as it is. The balance between idealism and pragmatism was clearly at the forefront of the president’s mind....

Five years ago yesterday, President Obama announced to the world that U.S. forces had captured and killed Osama bin Laden. Earlier that night, after making one of the biggest decisions of his presidency, he did this: Back in September, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik made the same observation: What was really memorable about the event, though, was Trump’s response. Seated a few tables away from us magazine scribes, Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set...

What happens when the smartest and coolest guy to hold the office in the last century doesn't give a shit about poll numbers anymore? Funny stuff:

In between four rehearsals and two performances this week (Monday through Sunday), I'm taking tonight off. So while I have a minute or two between helping new developers understand some old code, I'm jotting down this list of things that looked particularly appealing when they came up on RSS feeds: Citylab explores cities that use numbers for both streets and avenues. They also wonder why America hates roundabouts. New Republic reassures Republicans that it's OK to burn down their own party, and...

Krugman destroys the myth of Job-Killing Obama: And yes, I'm back in Chicago.