‘Trump is a huge national security risk.’ Historian Heather Cox Richardson assesses The New York Times’ revelations about the president’s income taxes: “He owes money—to whom we don’t know—and he does not have it.”
■ Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien: “What trade-offs would a president with this level of indebtedness be willing to make?”
■ The Times’ interactive timeline details Trump’s “huge losses” and “looming financial threats.”
■ The AP: The report goes “to the very heart of Trump’s appeal, especially among the blue-collar voters.”
■ The New Yorker’s David Remnick: “He is an almost comically inept businessman. … The question is: Will anyone care?”
■ … including $70,000 Trump spent on hairstyling during his TV show The Apprentice. (Cartoon: Keith J. Taylor.)
■ The paper’s executive editor explains why it chose to publish the president’s personal information.
■ Mother Jones’ David Corn—who almost daily for the last four years has tweeted out the observation “Today would be a good day for @realDonaldTrump to release his tax returns”—has a new one.
‘I think it should be Ivanka.’ A new book by Trump’s ex-campaign deputy says Trump wanted his daughter as his running mate in 2016.
■ Trump’s ex-campaign manager was hospitalized after police said he threatened to harm himself.
■ Satire from The Onion: “Biden Removes ‘Defeating Trump’ From Platform To Avoid Alienating Swing Voters.”
Change of heart? If you applied for a mail-in ballot but have since decided since to vote in person, the Illinois State Board of Elections wants you to hang on a bit.
■ Don’t vote in ignorance on all those judges at the bottom of the ballot*: Check the VoteforJudges.org website to see how bar associations rate them all.
About that Handmaid’s Tale thing. Vox dissects and discredits reports of a link (noted in Wednesday’s Chicago Public Square) between Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett and Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel.
■ PolitiFact: Barrett’s “Kingdom of God” comments were “ripped out of context” …
■ … and yet, Politico reports, her religious group’s influence has pervaded politics, business and culture in South Bend.
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■ Trump broke a personal record Saturday in his remarks introducing Barrett.
■ HBO’s John Oliver (in video you can watch free on YouTube): “The Supreme Court is about to lurch to the right for the foreseeable future, and if things seem hopeless right now, it’s because … they basically are.”
‘Carpocalypse.’ Transit activists warn of a traffic nightmare if “hundreds of thousands of former transit riders try to squeeze onto roads that already were congested before COVID-19.”
■ Student-athletes and parents planned to file a lawsuit today demanding the state risk students’ health to resume fall sports in a pandemic.
■ The pandemic has fueled a movement toward outdoor preschool—a shift that the Tribune says some parents and educators hope will be permanent.
We could turn back the hands of time. New research concludes that paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible …
■ … but that, regardless of time travelers’ actions, events would adjust themselves to avoid inconsistency …
■ … suggesting the futility of this classic plan by the great Tyrone Davis, who died in Hinsdale in 2005.
Chicago onscreen. The Trib serves up a list of Chicago-area filming locations used in FX’s new season of Fargo and Amazon Prime’s Utopia.
■ Miss the pandemically reimagined edition of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival over the weekend? Much of it lives on at the fest’s Facebook page.
How private is your browsing? A new tool from The Markup, Blacklight, lets you enter the address of any page on the web and learn which companies are looking over your shoulder when you visit that page.
■ And thanks to reader Mike Braden for spotting a redundancy above.
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* One of whom is married to your Square proprietor.