Buckle up / Trump’s primary misfire / Pope Leo Island?

■

Buckle up. Chicago faced the prospect of two more rounds of storms today …
■ … with renewed risk of flooding.

‘An absolute joke.’ Wonkette’s Evan Hurst doesn’t think much of the “memorandum of understanding” to end the war in Iran: “Basically we’re paying Iran billions of dollars to reopen a strait that was open before Donald Trump touched it … and Iran is stronger than ever.”
■ The deal leaves unresolved one of the Trump administration’s professed major concerns: The fate of Iran’s nuclear program. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
■ Tom Nichols at The Atlantic (gift link): “Trump does not understand the war he lost.”

Trump’s primary misfire. In a departure from this year’s norm, the president’s endorsement wasn’t enough to save his favored gubernatorial candidate in Georgia’s Republican primary runoff.
■ If you got a bunch of Politico email alerts from the 2024 presidential election last night, you weren’t alone.
■ One email communications veteran on Bluesky: “HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME RELIVE MY TRAUMA.”

‘A Handmaid’s Tale quality.’ Law professor Joyce Vance flags the whackjob rhetoric shoveled out at the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit—like one right-wing influencer’s assertion that she’d “gladly give up my right to vote to have a more conservative country.”
■ American Freakshow columnists Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth ask, “Is having an education advisor married to a registered sex offender really a good look for TPUSA?”
■ The Sun-Times and Uncloseted Media: The Trump administration’s investigations of Illinois school district protections for trans students have cost schools hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What’s it all about? Algae. Days after a $14 million renovation, Trump’s remodeled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has developed an algal bloom.
■ Jimmy Kimmel: “He promised he would drain the swamp. Instead, he spent 14 million of our dollars building a new one.” (Cartoon: Jack Ohman, on fire.)
■ LateNighter: Bipartisan Senate support’s growing for what’s known unofficially as “The Jimmy Kimmel Act,” which would give U.S. citizens a new way to sue government officials who pressure private companies—like, say ABC—to suppress lawful free speech.
■ Y’know FBI Director Kash Patel’s boast of the arrest of people who planned to attack Trump’s UFC birthday bash? Not so fast.
■ Former Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler: “Why do Americans keep falling for this scam? Trump’s promises about the border wall, tariffs and now the White House ballroom all follow the same three-stage script.”
■ Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is suing the administration “for hiding how it decides what American history to rewrite.”

‘The less our young people had heard about this misguided young man from Naperville, the better.’ A Tribune editorial mourns all the attention politicians showered on the case of a burning cross in Grant Park.
■ Oak Park police were scouring security camera footage to learn who deployed antisemitic words and images on property being redeveloped.

Company’s coming. Tomorrow’s dedication ceremony for the Obama Presidential Center will feature performances by—among others—Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder …
■ … to be streamed live at 11 a.m. here.
■ Veteran Chicago journalist Andy Shaw, who covered Obama’s early political career, reflects on the new center and the old pol.
■ Politico: That building’s catching plenty of flak across social media.

Pope Leo Island? A Chicago City Council member’s proposing to rename Northerly Island in honor of the Chicago-born pontiff.
■ The petition to rename the street on which Trump Tower’s located “Obama Avenue” has more than 23,000 signatures.

‘No one can credibly investigate themselves.’ Lawyers for the Broadview Six defendants are asking a federal judge to appoint a special counsel to figure out how the U.S. Attorney’s office fouled up the dismissed charges against them.
■ The top Democrat on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin, wants an immediate investigation into U.S Attorney Andrew Boutros for “incalculable damage to public confidence in his office.” (Read Raskin’s letter here.)
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson: The case exemplifies a Justice Department “crisis of confidence in its work.”
■ The Justice Department’s seemingly running from the same playbook in new charges against 15 Minnesotans who protested ICE’s assault on the Twin Cities …
■ … which reminds us that Chicago Public Square’s co-presenting this:

Cross-burning suspect ID’d / ‘Trump lost this war’ / ‘Dominion over … streaming’

■

Cross-burning suspect ID’d. A University of Illinois Chicago senior says that symbol of hate in Grant Park a week ago was a protest of Donald Trump.
■ He tells NBC Chicago: “In no way possible was that a hate crime. … I apologize for that, but, no, the intent was not there.”

Make that 17 tornadoes. The National Weather Service has updated its tally of last week’s Chicago-region storms …
■ City Cast: The rough weather’s fueled in part by Midwest air that climate change has made increasingly humid.
■ Paul Waldman at Public Notice: “Trump is fighting the green energy revolution. He’ll lose.”

Gettin’ crowded. Add ex-Chicago City Council member George Cardenas to those running for mayor.
■ Mayor Johnson used last night’s James Beard Restaurant Award ceremony in Chicago to declare the city will “never bend, never bow” to authoritarian power.
■ The city’s one winner: Feld’s Jake Potashnick as Best Chef: Great Lakes.

‘Let’s say America does what Hungary has done, what the Knicks have done, and in literature, what Odysseus and Gandalf did.’ American Crisis columnist Margaret Sullivan ponders what comes after Trump—“the elements of an American comeback.”
■ Former U.S. attorney Harry Litman says the purging of “Trump taint” from the Kennedy Center offers “a workable template” for reversing “Trump’s lawless power grabs.”

‘Trump lost this war.’ A New York Times editorial (gift link) calls the “preliminary deal” ending the four-month conflict in Iran “a peace framework that the entire world understands is a defeat for him.”
■ … speaking of which: A Consumer Reports investigation concludes that Uber and Lyft are routinely using artificial intelligence to charge customers dramatically different prices—with differences on the order of 50%—for the same ride.

Real-life Idiocracy. Columnist Jeff Tiedrich says Trump’s White House birthday cage match felt like the 2006 satire made real: “Within the world of the movie, it took hundreds of years for the United States to devolve into a state of permanent, unending stupidity. In real life, it only took 10.”
■ Even Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White is critical of one of his fighters’ insults to Michelle Obama …
■ … a thing that PolitiFact felt compelled to declare still Pants-on-Fire false.
■ LateNighter’s Bill Carter says the spectacle was a gift to TV hosts “mocking the takeover of the White House by half-naked men firing fists and feet at each other.”
■ FBI boss Kash Patel claims his agents arrested several people in connection with alleged—but unspecified—“planned attacks” on the event.
■ Wonkette’s Evan Hurst is skeptical: “Patel singlehandedly thwarted attack on Trump’s UFC bouncy house birthday party!”

School closings’ sad legacy. A new study finds a 10% rise in gun violence near the Chicago school buildings shuttered 13 years ago on Mayor Emanuel’s watch.
■ A Tribune editorial (gift link) on a reported double-digit drop in the number of school-age kids who read for fun almost every day: “The pandemic did not create this problem, but it appears to have made an existing one worse.”
■ The Onion’s satiric take: “The sooner children learn to stop taking any pleasure in life, the better.”

‘Fox will basically have dominion over the entire streaming ecosystem.’ Media watcher Simon Owens says the potential takeover of Roku would give the Murdoch family “access to enormous amounts of data relating to how consumers interact with all the largest streamers.”
■ The American Prospect’s David Dayen says it also would hand Fox “the ability to diminish rivals.”
■ Another industry watcher: “Fox will control more of what viewers watch, how they discover it and how it gets monetized.”
■ Left wanting by the federal funding cutoff, Northwest Indiana’s WLPR-FM, Lakeshore Public Radio, is abandoning an over-the-air public radio feed of its own—instead to simulcast Lafayette’s NPR station, WBAA-FM.

Correction, clarification. Yesterday’s Chicago Public Square promised—but did not deliver—a gift link to Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch reflecting on last week’s “horrific” conflict in Belfast, and Elon Musk’s role in fanning those flames. Here is that link.
■ Regarding Brazil native Joabe Barbosa’s running every street in Chicago, WGN Radio News alumna and ultrarunner Elizabeth Braun explains, “Barbosa is far from the first person to run every street in Chicago, as many news outlets have claimed.”

A Square advertiser

Square up.

🟥 Subscribe free.
🟥 Search Square.

🟥 Square on Bluesky: