File under ‘Gun Dealers Lacking a Sense of Irony.’ A suburban firearms shop owner complains that Illinois’ new ban on the sale of military-style firearms is “devastating.”
■ Maybe that guy will find solace in a WBEZ report about police inability to keep up with a law requiring registration of people with gun convictions.
■ The Chicago City Council member who complained about not getting a sympathy call from Mayor Lightfoot after he accidentally shot himself has been involved in another accidental shooting—this time of his daughter.
‘Deeply, deeply problematic.’ Chicago’s former inspector general is among those sounding an alarm about Lightfoot’s campaign emails encouraging public school teachers to encourage students to volunteer with her campaign for class credit.
■ Lightfoot’s campaign responded to those reports at least three times—before finally conceding that a “solid wall … must exist between campaign and official activities” and that contact with school employees “is off limits. Period.”
■ Columnist Eric Zorn: A Lightfoot TV ad reinforces the impression that she’s “thin-skinned and combative.”
COVID’s ‘most contagious’ version. Chicago’s top doc warns that the “kraken” coronavirus subvariant is here—meaning that people should, as the Tribune puts it, “get their booster shots and stock up on COVID tests.”
■ The World Health Organization isn’t getting all that excited—saying it’s just omicron.
Five days’ paid leave. That’s a guarantee for all Illinois workers—on its way to Gov. Pritzker, who says he looks forward to signing it …
Whoops. President Biden’s legal team has come across another cache of apparently classified documents—this time in his Wilmington garage.
■ Jimmy Kimmel: Biden staffers “are now searching everywhere he could’ve possibly left documents: His knapsack, his pill organizer, under the arch at the 1904 World’s Fair.”
■ Media writer Tom Jones: “What is not a story—at this time—is trying to create an equivalence between what Biden has done and what Trump did” …
■ … a fallacy Stephen Colbert exploded Tuesday night.
‘Just be calm.’ A mom in California recalls those final words from her 5-year-old son before floodwaters swept him out of her grasp.
■ He was still officially listed as missing, but hope for his survival was dimming.
■ And now, cyclones.
Walgreens’ shoplifting ‘frenzy.’ Popular Information says the company’s backtracking from its role “fomenting the national panic over retail theft”—augmented in part by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and other mainstream media.
■ Inflation seems to have eased up last month.
Twitter defections. Even the company’s co-founders are migrating to upstart competitors like Mastodon.
■ Behind in its rent, Twitter’s reportedly getting kicked out of offices around the world.
■ Gizmodo offers a guide to Twitter’s new system of checkmarks and labels.
Keep Square coming. Chicago Public Square’s nearing the end of its sixth year, but it wouldn’t have made it half that long without readers’ support. You can join their ranks for as little as $1 here.
■ And that will get you $5 off a Square cap or T-shirt. So why wait?
