Instagrudge. “No Kings Coalition” organizers are outraged after Facebook parent Meta suspended their Instagram account during the height of Saturday’s vote-early events across the country.
■ … but Popular Information says the shutdown fits a pattern “as Meta has sought to establish a close relationship” with President Trump.
■ Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy is demanding an investigation of “a total indictment of Meta’s outsized influence on our culture and politics. How were they not ready for the biggest day of anti-Trump protest of the campaign?”
■ Regardless, early voting is shattering records across the nation.
■ Satire from Andy Borowitz and Tom Toro: “Trump Furious After ‘Pro Kings’ Rally Draws Sparse Crowd.”
Early voting, easy. Beginning today, Chicagoans can cast their November ballots in their own wards.
■ In Cook County outside Chicago, a bunch of early-voting spots are now open, too.
■ Much more election intel is at your disposal in the Chicago Public Square Voter Guide Guide.
■ PolitiFact’s launched an updating blog fact-checking midterm election rhetoric nationwide.
‘Now they kiss my ass.’ Trump over the weekend bragged at his domination of Google over the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.
■ MapQuest—whose app is enjoying a surge of popularity after Google’s knee-bending—had a one-word retort.
■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich marvels at Trump’s deference to Russia: “That must be one hell of a pee tape.”
‘Three Shootings in America.’ Former Politico editor Garrett Graff reviews “a week of our entirely-ordinary extraordinary violence.”
■ A mom who drove a pickup truck onto a soccer field during a kids’ game in Kansas, killing a 6-year-old boy and a 35-year-old man, has been released without charges as the investigation unfolds.
Peeping peak postponed. Abnormal warmth, driven by El Niño weather patterns, is delaying leaves’ seasonal color changes here and around the world …
■ … foreshadowing a warm winter “that would exceed the strength of previous El Niño events dating back to 1950.”
■ The AP invites you to meet “researchers leaving the U.S. because of Trump’s funding cuts and politicization of science” …
■ … but the president was set to sign an order increasing federal research on women’s health …
■ … although you can put an asterisk by that, because the order doesn’t include funding goals and the task force it creates will be co-led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
‘When something has never happened before, the odds that it is happening now go way, way down.’ And yet columnist and author Neil Steinberg kept pulling the thread when he got a clearly AI-generated pitch seemingly from a London publisher.
■ Axios: “The AI attack-ad nightmare is coming true … a world where campaigns can put words in opponents’ mouths and create realistic-looking scenes that didn’t happen.”
Moonshiners, rejoice. The Supreme Court’s agreed to review a 150-year ban on the distilling of spirits in private homes.
■ Here’s the question before the justices.
No CNN? No problem for Trump. Poynter’s Tom Jones says the White House has a workaround when networks refuse to replace CNN’s slot in pool coverage of the president.
■ Under widespread criticism from other journalists, CBS News correspondent—and Chicago Tribune alumnus—Jan Crawford has apologized for and deleted a social media post critical of Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed …
■ … for an exchange with a Republican plant, caught on a video that’s gone viral.
■ Columnist Elaine Soloway is grateful to Trump for “introducing us to journalists who are exceptional.”
A Simpsons revival. For the first time in almost a decade, the character Apu was heard on last night’s episode …
■ … now voiced by a guy born in New Delhi.
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