New things. Chicagoans casting ballots in this year’s primaries will see the city’s first updated electronic voting machines since 2005—and those who opt for paper ballots will fill them out differently.
■ For the first time in the country, a Cook County Jail polling place will be available for detainees awaiting trial.
Hard Times Dept.
■ The Wall Street Journal: Democratic presidential candidates ended January short on cash.
■ Under pressure from younger voters, Republicans are reluctantly coming around on the climate crisis.
‘She has strengths that no other candidate does.’ The New York Times’ David Leonhardt takes a critical look at Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy and concludes she has “a better claim to being the strongest potential Democrat president than to being the strongest potential nominee.”
■ Warren’s zinger at Mike Bloomberg in Wednesday night’s debate has inspired a new T-shirt from rebel clothing maker* RAYGUN.
■ Bernie Sanders tells 60 Minutes Bloomberg’s flatfooted debate performance suggests that in a general election President Trump “will chew him up and spit him out.”
■ The ex-federal judge who blocked Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk police policy blames him for an attempt to scare her into ruling otherwise.
■ A University of Oregon law professor debunks Bloomberg’s reasons for refusing to release his ex-employees from nondisclosure agreements: They protect Bloomberg—not the women who sued him.
■ NBC News: Bloomberg may have set out to “consolidate the anti-Bernie Sanders vote, but he may have ended up fracturing it further while reviving the campaign of … Warren, by being her perfect foil.”
■ The Trib’s Dahleen Glanton bemoans the Democratic campaign’s millennial-vs.-boomer dynamic.
‘Nearing a meltdown.’ An ex-official of the organization says the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence is in trouble after Trump’s anger at the office’s acting director for briefing the House on Russia’s moves to help Trump by interfering in the 2020 election.
■ The AP: A senior administration official says the news infuriated Trump, who complained Democrats would use the info against him. (Cartoon: Keith J. Taylor.)
■ Esquire’s Charlie Pierce: “In Trumpland, telling the truth about a national security issue is a ‘tactical error.’”
‘The new RBG.’ The Daily Beast’s Molly Jong-Fast praises the judge who yesterday stuck it to “the president’s favorite dirty trickster, Roger Stone.”
■ Tribune movie critic Michael Phillips mocks Trump’s nostalgic praise for the movie Gone With the Wind, maybe for “its evocation of … white supremacy and a deeply divided nation.”
■ The Trib’s Eric Zorn on Trump’s acts of mercy for convicts like ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich: “I do grudgingly give him credit for issuing them when he still has to face the voters instead of in a cowardly flurry on his last days in office as, say, Obama did.”
Bring back CTA conductors? Streetsblog Chicago proprietor John Greenfield says restoring a job eliminated in the ’90s would reduce crime, encourage compliance with rules against smoking and littering and provide support to the homeless who use the trains for shelter.
■ Chicago Public Schools is suing the son-in-law of former Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios, accusing him of parking cars at three schools near Wrigley Field even after he stopped paying for the right to do so.
■ Consumer Reports lists its best new cars of 2020.
Chicago’s war on poverty. Mayor Lightfoot says the city has a plan to end it within a generation, but she says a universal basic income isn’t the way.
■ But, hey, Chicago’s fired top cop, Eddie Johnson, is all set: He’ll collect a pension totaling almost $190,000 a year.
■ For the first time in more than a decade, the Housing Authority of Cook County is opening its waitlist for public housing in the suburbs.
Jobs incoming. Chicago’s booming Fulton Market is getting another corporate HQ: Aspen Dental is moving from New York, with plans to hire up to 500 people.
■ EVBox, which makes electric vehicle charging stations, is headed to Motorola’s old Libertyville campus and planning to add at least 80 new jobs.
■ Five years after its clock tower was designated a national monument, Chicago’s South Side Pullman neighborhood is celebrating an ongoing revival.
Praise be allowed. A federal judge has ruled that, at least for now, Chicago can’t keep Wheaton College’s Evangelism Team from preaching in Millennium Park.
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg in September: “This is the same Wheaton College that in 2015 canceled its own students’ health insurance … lest one of them use it to secure contraception under Obamacare.”
The Chicago Journalism Town Hall is a Chicago Public Square advertiser.
Chicago Public Square wouldn’t come your way without support from readers including Martha Intrieri, Joanne Rosenbush, Les Nelson, Judy Sherr, Tom Marker, Beth Botts, Angela Mullins, Sharon and Alec Bloyd-Peshkin, Janet Grimes, William Wheelhouse, Reginald F. Davis, Nile Wendorf and Ada Tikkanen. Learn more here. Or just tap one of these two buttons:
Square’s worth $5/month |
No, make it $10 |
Thanks to reader Pam Spiegel for some editorial fixes to this edition.
*And sometime Chicago Public Square advertiser.