Yeah, he said it. Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey’s doubling down on his description of Chicago as a “hellhole.”
■ WBEZ’s Dave McKinney says Bailey and four other candidates in last night’s debate treated the best-funded contender, Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin, as a “political pinata.”
■ Congressional contender Jonathan Jackson—son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson—blames “the people that I’m working with” for his failure to execute one of a candidate’s fundamental duties: Filing a financial disclosure report.
■ Columnist Neil Steinberg on the flood of political ads that air during Jeopardy!: “We live in dispiriting times, and these commercials make them feel worse.”
■ Don’t vote stupid: Check the Chicago Public Square primary election guide.
‘Another day, another man who thinks he can do … better than me.’ Mayor Lightfoot’s dismissive of the growing roster of candidates to succeed her.
■ Patch columnist Mark Konkol takes a dim view of the latest, Ald. Roderick Sawyer, “who openly opined that fellow aldermen, even the crooks, should stick together rather than help the feds root out corruption.”
■ “This is a scandal”: A homeowner complains to Axios Chicago about the city’s failure to make public the results of thousands of home water tests for lead.
Monkeypox is here—probably. Chicago reports the city’s likely first case: A man who recently traveled to Europe.
■ Rising COVID-19 levels have prompted Jewel-Osco stores to revive their mask mandate for all workers.
‘How much more carnage?’ With the repeated refrain, “Enough, enough,” President Biden demanded legislation against gun violence—and called on voters to make the issue central to November’s elections.
■ Esquire’s Charlie Pierce celebrates yesterday’s House hearing on gun control legislation for “an ensemble performance … of blowhard and ignorami.”
‘She’s heartbroken.’ The lawyer for a teacher at the Uvalde, Texas, school where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers says she’s traumatized by erroneous reports she left a school door open that fateful day.
■ The school psychologist at Winnetka’s Hubbard Woods Elementary School in 1988, when a woman entered and shot six students, says Uvalde could benefit from following Winnetka’s response.
■ A gunman’s murder of four people at a Tulsa medical center yesterday spotlights growing concern through the pandemic about threats and violence against health care workers.
■ He’d bought an AR-15-style rifle just hours earlier.
■ A shooting outside an Iowa church left two women and the gunman dead—apparently by his own hand.
■ A shootout with Texas police yesterday ended in the death of a convicted murderer who’d killed a family of five and stolen their truck from a rural weekend cabin.
■ CWBChicago: The man sought in the shooting of a Chicago cop faced a felony gun charge—but prosecutors dropped the charge in February.
■ Columnist Irv Leavitt: “Guns are for guys who don’t know how to fight.”
Hello, Elmhurst. Two women from that western suburb have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
■ Oak Park’s Wednesday Journal newspaper condemns that “pink slime” news report on Oak Park and River Forest High School’s grading policies as “a race-baiting crock” and appeals for financial help keeping “a real reporter … covering critical local news.”
■ Oak Park’s Wednesday Journal newspaper condemns that “pink slime” news report on Oak Park and River Forest High School’s grading policies as “a race-baiting crock” and appeals for financial help keeping “a real reporter … covering critical local news.”
■ The Sun-Times is getting a new top editor—its first to be a woman and a person of color.
■ She starts next week, but won’t move to Chicago from Los Angeles until September.
Breaking ‘breaking news’ news. CNN’s new chief is ordering a cutback on use of that phrase.
■ In his words: “Make ‘Breaking News’ mean something BIG is happening.”
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones: “CNN’s credibility is damaged when viewers, after just a few seconds, realize they are being duped.”
’Booking trouble. Sheryl Sandberg, the departing operations chief at Facebook parent company Meta, reportedly is leaving under a cloud: An investigation of charges she was using corporate resources to plan her wedding.
■ Motherboard: “Internal documents show Amazon’s dystopian system for tracking workers every minute.”
‘We have … not been censored, and we get to do what we want to do.’ The Onion’s editor-in-chief talks to the Tribune about the organization’s decade in Chicago.
■ The Onion’s list of pros for the city’s pending new casino includes “Only way to persuade Celine Dion to visit your shitty town.”
Correction. Yesterday’s Chicago Public Square goofed on the year the Chicago City News Bureau broke the Tylenol poisoning story. It was 1982, as noted by City News veterans—and Square readers—Mark Wukas and Rick Baert, who wrote: “I was the overnight city editor at CNB and we broke the story on my shift, Sept. 30, 1982. I assigned the tip to John Rooney to chase, and he ultimately broke the story before dawn that day.”
■ The Baltimore Sun has been notified of its error.
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