Events

The pardon power granted in Article II of the Constitution exists so that the President can save people from true miscarriages of justice. Well, originally, anyway. Now it exists to save President Trump's friends from their own misdeeds, as demonstrated once again last night: President Trump has said he learned lessons from President Richard M. Nixon’s fall from grace, but in using the power of his office to keep his friend and adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. out of prison he has now crossed a line that even...

So many months and so many lies ago, the President of the United States doctored a weather map with a Sharpie so that he wouldn't be wrong about saying a hurricane was going to hit Alabama. Yes, he'd rather look stupid than incorrect. But OK, whatever. Today the Dept of Commerce Inspector General released a 107-page report (!) on the incident, which must have cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff time and effort, not to mention it still makes the president look stupid. TPM has more...

Tom Friedman gives Joe Biden some good advice: First, Biden should declare that he will take part in a debate only if Trump releases his tax returns for 2016 through 2018. Biden has already done so, and they are on his website. Trump must, too. No more gifting Trump something he can attack while hiding his own questionable finances. And second, Biden should insist that a real-time fact-checking team approved by both candidates be hired by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates — and that 10...

I was in meetings almost without break from 10am until just a few minutes ago, so a few things have piled up in my inbox: Writing in the Washington Post, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule explains why conservative justices vote with liberals more than the reverse (tl;dr: our system of government has a well-known and intentional liberal bias). NBC's Jonathan Allen calls the president's re-election campaign "desperate." The Mayor's Office in Chicago has put out a 100-page plan for how we can repair...

The US Supreme Court handed down a pair of 7-2 decisions this morning about who can see the president's financial records, both written by Chief Justice John Roberts, and both dissented by Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. In the first, Trump v Vance, private citizen Donald Trump appealed a decision of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a district court order to Trump's accountants to hand over documents to a grand jury empaneled by New York City District Attorny Cyrus Vance...

Stuff to read: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany accidentally referenced the Armenian genocide, which would have been great if she had any clue why the Turkish embassy immediately demanded she apologize. Paul Krugman says that we lost the war on Covid-19 because of our leadership, not because of our culture. Crain's reports that Illinois had its best month ever in legal marijuana sales, and yes, they made a bad pun in their headline. NPR reports that phase transitions, the physics concept...

Writing for New Republic, Ari Shulman presents a nuanced and well-thought analysis of the apparent right-wing hostility to science. It's not science per se they object to; rather, they object to what they perceive to be left-wing science: The panel of experts that Covid skeptics have arrayed provides a case in point. Where mainstream opinion quickly converged on flattening the curve, Boris Johnson sang the praises of a herd immunity strategy, an idea that continues to hold sway among many skeptics in...

Chicago had no official Independence Day fireworks display this year, because we didn't want to encourage a million people to converge on Grant Park. Instead, we appear to have had a record number of, ah, unofficial displays: The 911 call center received 9,092 calls between June 28 and Sunday, approximately three times the number of calls received in the same time period last year, according to data provided by Mary May, an Office of Emergency Management and Communications spokesperson. As of Sunday...

Because Covid-19 infections have started to climb again after just a few weeks of slowly dropping, the worst-affected states (coincidentally those with Republican governors who really, really wanted to re-open the economy) have had to slam on the brakes again. John Scalzi is pissed: Nearly every other Western country in the world has seen their infection rates drop down from the March/April time frame, but we haven’t, and now our leaders want to suggest that this is just the way it is and we’ll have to...

I originally posted the top photo a couple of weeks ago, before I found the legal loophole allowing me to take my drone above 120 m AGL. (It turns out I can take it 120 m above the tallest structure within 120 m.) So early this morning, in calm winds, I took it up to 150 m, almost exactly matching the view. If only my drone had a slightly longer lens, I could duplicate it exactly. At least I got the parallax right, meaning I now know the original photo was taken only 150 m up. It would not be legal for...