NOTEWORTHY NOTE. That President Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to enforce his travel ban isn’t as remarkable as the statement with which he did it. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza takes a closer look.
■ Meet Yates’ replacement.
■ How many people have been affected by Trump’s order? Try 90,000.
■ “So Americans are now cool with people being separated and ripped from their families, as long as it’s just temporary?”—Rex Huppke’s rebuke to Kellyanne Conway.
■ Eric Zorn: Imagine what’s going to happen when …
■ Trump’s “America First” refrain has roots in Chicago.
■ But in Arizona: “This gives me hope. It’s the right direction.”
‘HOW CAN I HATE TRUMP RIGHT NOW?’ “Daily Show” correspondent Hasan Minhaj says Trump’s done Muslims a favor: “I land at JFK and … three white people run up to me and say, ‘Thank you for being Muslim.’ I’m 31. That’s the first time anyone’s thanked me for being Muslim.”
■ Trump imitator Alec Baldwin will headline a Chicago Ideas Week event in April.
■ Toronto Raptors guard Kyle Lowry minces no words in his assessment of Trump’s immigration limits.
OBAMA’S BACK. Didn’t take the previous president long to return to politics.
■ In a move rare for an ex-president, Barack Obama’s encouraging Americans to protest Trump’s actions.
■ He’s endorsing an old friend for alderman in Chicago.
PLAGIARISM PLAGUE. A streak of literary theft through the Trump campaign and presidency may be getting longer. His nominee for Secretary of Education “appears to have used several sentences and phrases from other sources without attribution — including from a top Obama administration civil rights official.”
■ Trump’s voter fraud expert was registered to vote in three states during the 2016 presidential election.
‘EVEN IF THEY CAN’T TALK OR EVEN IF THEY CAN’T WALK, THEY DESERVE THE BEST LIFE POSSIBLE.’ Moved by a Chicago Tribune investigation, Illinois lawmakers are proposing tougher laws to govern thousands of homes serving adults with disabilities.
HOW FAR WE HAVEN’T COME. Cambridge researchers say they’ve identified the 540-million-year-old fossil remains of humans’ earliest known ancestor: Saccorhytus, “an egg-shaped creature that ate and expelled from the same gaping orifice.”
■ But: Walmart’s launching free, two-day shipping without a membership on purchases of $35 or more.
WHO SHOULD GET SQUARE? If you find this dispatch useful, share this page with a friend and recommend a (free) subscription to what media critic Robert Feder calls “an ambitious new daily email newsletter and website.”