‘Surge manpower’ / CDC ‘courage’ / Quiz!

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Chicago Public Square’ll take the long weekend off. Be here Tuesday.

■ Meanwhile, get breaking news and commentary via the Square Bluesky account. (Hey, play your cards right and you could be the 1,000th follower there.)

‘Surge manpower.’ That’s what sources tell NBC News multiple federal agencies are planning next week in Chicago as they ramp up immigration enforcement.
■ President Trump’s border czar confirms a “large contingent” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is headed this way.
■ Columnist Jamison Foser: “Trump’s military occupation of American cities is unpopular. The media is trying to manufacture consent for it.”
■ The American Civil Liberties Union’s launched an online petition: “Tell Congress: No Troops on Our Streets.”
■ A Labor Day protest march through Chicago will target Trump, oligarchic billionaires and knee-bending corporations, including, um, Target.

‘May all who hold the reins to power be haunted.’ Poet Lynn Ungar marks the shooting at a Minneapolis church full of school kids with a different kind of thought and prayer, including this passage:
May the soul of each and every
child shot in school follow
those with AR-15 pins on their lapels
through the halls of Congress, poking them
and demanding with the dreary repetition
of a bored child on a long car trip to know
Where are we going? What are we doing?
What is the plan?
■ Or, to quote Everyone Is Entitled to My Own Opinion proprietor Jeff Tiedrich: “Shove your thoughts and prayers.”
■ Investigators say the shooter “expressed hate towards almost every group imaginable” and was “obsessed” with the idea of killing children.
■ A 12-year-old girl injured in the attack was sent to a hospital in whose intensive care unit her mom was working at the time.
■ Prosecutors say the shooting death of UnitedHeathcare’s CEO has inspired followers.

CDC ‘courage.’ Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina praises Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees’ “solidarity and a refusal to be silent” in the face of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-science regime.
■ Columnist Robert Hubbell: “The chaos at the CDC makes all Americans less safe.”
■ The White House is backing Kennedy’s decision to fire the CDC’s director.
■ NOTUS: The Senate gets a say on whomever Trump picks as a permanent replacement.
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “Get on the phone and urge your lawmakers to get off their tails and boot this nutter out of the powerful seat he so clearly has no business occupying.”
■ The Bulwark: “RFK Jr. f*cked around. Now we get to find out.”
■ Stephen Robinson at Public Notice: “The White House is lying about Trump’s health. Their explanations are absurd and it’s time to start asking questions.”

An ‘erratic, vindictive’ call. Trump’s cutting off Secret Service protection for his 2024 opponent, former Vice President Harris—just as she launches a nationwide book tour. (Wall Street Journal gift link, underwritten by those who support Chicago Public Square.)
■ Investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein: In the Democratic Party’s first national meeting since Trump returned to the White House, chair Ken Martin complained the party’s brought just “a pencil to a knife fight.”
■ Columnist Paul Street: “Trump’s dictatorship is quite far along.”
■ The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols compares Trump to The Boys’ evil version of Superman, Homelander: “The corporations and public-relations spinmeisters who created and sold him to the public now realize that they are powerless to stop him.”
■ A year after Trump threatened to imprison Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Platformer says Zuckerberg “has the administration fighting battles for him around the world.”

Chicago’s lead problem. WBEZ’s analysis finds the threat of water contamination is worst in the city’s majority Black and Latino neighborhoods.
■ Enter a Chicago address to find out whether its water service is compromised by lead.

Mayor Johnson schooled. The Chicago Board of Education’s OK’d a new budget that rejects the mayor’s call for big-time borrowing to cover pension payments.
■ WBEZ: The Trump administration’s threatening to yank millions of dollars from the state unless it dumps teaching materials that acknowledge gender nonconformity.
■ Trump administration budget cuts have prompted layoffs and budget cuts at the University of Chicago.

‘A step toward drowning freedom of speech.’ The Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg sounds a warning about the president’s unconstitutional order to ban flag burning.
■ Neil Young broke out a new Trump protest song at his Chicago performance this week: “Big Crime.”
■ He’s released downloadable audio of the tune from his Wednesday soundcheck at Northerly Island.

One of our guys made it—and then didn’t. Chicago-born Emil Wakim’s among the casualties as Saturday Night Live trims cast members ahead of the new season.
■ Some fans note that he was the only SNL actor to deliver a pro-Palestine segment (October 2024 link).
■ The Hollywood Reporter praises as “thoroughly engaging” a new documentary profile of Chicago-born investigative reporter Seymour Hersh—still at it after close to 60 years.


‘This one’s for the workers!’ Past Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel’s clocked in with a nine-question Labor Day weekend news quiz.
■ Get at least eight of those questions right and you’ll have topped your Chicago Public Square columnist’s score.

‘The audience experience must be flawless.’ Assessing The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s plan to eliminate its print edition as of Jan. 1, Poynter’s Tom Jones cautions, “That means no delays logging in, no issues using the app and no hurdles navigating the site. And, needless to say, the journalism must be elite.”
■ Media watcher Simon Owens: More papers should do the same.

‘All the cool newshounds know: It’s hip to be Square.’ Those kind words for this service from reader and Square supporter Al Slater make an apt epigram for our roll call of those whose financial support keeps this service coming—including Patrick Olsen again just yesterday.
■ Join their ranks anytime—for as little as $1, just once—and see your name added to The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.

Death in ‘the house of God’ / Death of a newspaper / ‘Deal with the devil’

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Death in ‘the house of God.’ In another of the horrific school shootings that have plagued the U.S. for decades, two children are dead and 17 others were wounded in an assault at a Minneapolis Catholic school’s church.
■ A 10-year-student says a schoolmate protected him: “My friend Victor, like saved me, though, because he laid on top of me, but he got hit.”
■ Columnist Charlie Madigan: The tragedy “commands more than prayers. It commands political action. Between the 2001 and 2021 school years, 515 deaths were reported in school shootings in grades K through 12.” (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
■ Columnist and AP veteran Ron Fournier: “Republicans say ‘thoughts and prayers.’ Democrats say limit and regulate guns. I say: All of the above, and more.”
■ Lawyer Robert Hubbell: “We must ban assault rifles. We must restrict access to guns. We must impose liability on those who fail to secure their guns. We must permit families of victims and survivors to sue gun manufacturers.”
■ The FBI says the shooting’s under investigation as a hate crime targeting Catholics.
■ Law enforcement’s identified the shooter—found dead in the parking lot, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot—as a transgender person whose mother worked at the church for five years.
■ Minneapolis’ mayor: “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community … has lost their sense of common humanity.”
■ Self-described “Writer. Queer. Army Vet. Texan. Hoya” Charlotte Clymer: “You are far, far more likely to be killed by a mass shooter who isn’t trans.”
■ Add Chicago’s Advocate Health to the roster of institutions pulling back on gender-affirming care medication for those under 19.

Un-controlled. In what her lawyers call a dismissal for standing up for science, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s been fired …
■ … after reportedly refusing to fire several administrators and to “rubber-stamp” vaccine recommendations …
■ A resignation letter from one warns: “The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines … will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer.”
■ Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina: “Public health only works when the people leading it are strong, principled and supported in their duty to protect and serve individuals and communities. Right now, that foundation is eroding at a speed I never thought possible. The nation’s health security is at risk.”
■ The American Prospect: President Trump’s health chief, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who long railed against the data privacy compromises of smartwatches and similar tech, now curiously wants a gadget on every body.
■ The Washington Post (gift link): Days after Trump’s aborted Alaska summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, he and his national intelligence director have fired the CIA’s top Russia expert.

Invaders Trump’s OK with. The president’s at odds with Gov. Pritzker over plans to crack down on invasive carp in the Great Lakes.
■ To make his case that Chicago needs no National Guard reinforcements, Pritzker led reporters on a walk through the South Side.
■ Highlighting what Axios sees as a divide among Chicago’s black leaders, repeatedly failed mayoral candidate Willie Wilson embraces Trump’s threat to send the Guard to Chicago.
■ Ex-U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s counsel to Democrats: “Say safety is critically important, but local police rather than federal troops are best at dealing with it. Don’t stop there. Hammer Trump for pardoning the 1,500 criminals who violently attacked the United States Capitol … and for then firing the federal prosecutors who held them accountable.”
■ Law professor Anthony Kreis on news that the Guard deployment in D.C. has been assigned to spread mulch at federal monuments: “Congratulations, President Trump has remade the Civilian Conservation Corps.”
■ The Seattle Times: Federal immigration agents arrested firefighters working a fire on the Olympic Peninsula.
■ Snopes: Some people have been taking seriously satirist Andy Borowitz’s joke about National Guard troops refusing Chicago deployment due to bone spurs.

‘Go back to where you came from.’ Comments like that from fellow Chicago police officers have prompted one cop to sue the city for failing to protect him from discrimination.
■ A Chicago Teachers Union vice president writes for the Tribune: “Resist the efforts to revive the racist policing of the past.”
■ WTTW: Chicago paid $100,000 to a 14-year-old boy pinned to a Park Ridge sidewalk by an off-duty Chicago cop.
■ The police department’s launched a new podcast series* promising “candid, unfiltered conversations with members of CPD, residents and others who work closely with law enforcement.”

And so it goes. In what The Washington Post (gift link) calls “the most ferocious attack on the Ukrainian capital since President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s summit in Alaska failed to yield a ceasefire,” at least 17 are dead and 48 wounded.

Death of a newspaper. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is killing its print edition and going all-digital after Dec. 31.
■ Northwestern University noted last year that only about a third of the country’s more than 1,000 daily newspapers still print seven days a week.

‘I will walk out the motherf***ing door.’ Vanity Fair staffers have threatened a revolt if the magazine’s new editor follows through on the notion of putting First Lady Melania Trump on the cover.
■ “As a Jewish daughter of a father once in poor health,” Chicago author and columnist Elaine Soloway writes an open letter to Trump’s daughter Ivanka: “Insist he resign.”

‘Deal with the devil.’ Status reports that Google’s sibling YouTube TV cable TV alternative is adding the conspiracy-peddling One America News channel to its lineup …
■ Columnist Eric Zorn pronounces the Netflix documentary on Jussie Smollett’s lies a dud.
■ Historian Robert Loerzel marks the arrival on YouTube of David Letterman’s May 3, 1989, show at the Chicago Theatre.

Need a thing? Environmental activist website one5c’s out with a guide to “Where to rent (almost) anything.”

You (probably) owe ’em. If you’re reading Chicago Public Square for free, thank the people whose support has kept it coming all these years—including Al Slater, Christine Cooper (again!), Jill Brickman (again!), Judith Alexander, Peggy Swanson, Jeanette Mancusi, Dave McGovern, Arlene Thurow, Julia Gray, Ryan Arnold, Mike Krauser, Jon Hilkevitch, Angelika Kuehn, Jim Holmes, Stephen Schlesinger, Jeanne Mcinerney, Aris Georgiadis, Sandra Slater, Louise Dimiceli-Mitran, Maggie Ellsworth, Carol Hirschtick, Cheryl Foertsch, Ellen Mrazek, Frank Heitzman, Denise Mattson, Kevin Lampe, Mark Hines, Cathy Sullivan, David Boulanger, Vicki Seglin, Sandra Black, Chris Beck, Susan Gregoire, Alan Hoffstadter, Linnea Crowther, Linda Paul, Amy Lee Goodman, Kevin Weller, Martin Fischer, Sonya Booth, Ryan Bird, Tom Barnes, Ken Shiner, L ShoulterKarall, Victoria Quero, Lucy Tarabour, Doug Strubel, Allan Hippensteel, Marie Dillon, Mary Meegan, Karyn Esken, Timothy Mennel, Tom Macek, Jean Lubeckis, Kathy Burger, MJ Garnier, Mike Fainman, Suzy Carlson, Kevin Tynan, Elaine Soloway, Alice Cottingham, Dave Miretzky, Paul Zavagno, Helen Marshall, Rick Lunt, Betsy Blew-Ochoa, Susan Hardy, David Henkhaus, Andy Buchanan, Anne Frederick, Patricia Solano, Jan Kodner, Justin Walker, Alex Riepl Broz, Paul Clark, Ian Morrison and Andrew Thackray.
■ And that wraps up this periodic roll call of Square supporters—except for those who pitch in as little as $1, just once, today. They’ll get a shout-out in tomorrow’s end-of-summer edition.
■ Mike Braden made this edition better.

* For which—full disclosure—your Square columnist offered (without compensation) critical feedback to the department’s producer: An old friend, host and WBBM Newsradio alumnus Mariam Sobh.

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