‘It’s a shitshow on the one day you can’t have a shitshow.’ That’s an Arizona Democratic representative talking to Semafor about the Republican Party’s struggle to elect a speaker of the House.
■ Politico: The White House “is about as distraught over all this as a flock of vultures happening upon a freshly killed gazelle.”
■ The chaos raised the prospects for an upside-down outcome: A Democrat could become speaker of a Republican-dominated House. (AI illustration: DALL-E.)
■ Updating coverage: After the first time in a century that a speaker nominee didn’t nail it on the first vote—and in fact flubbed three—Kevin McCarthy was set to try again today, armed with fresh support from Donald Trump.
■ The Washington Post: All but two of 20 Republicans who voted against McCarthy on the third ballot embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
■ If you’re into that sort of thing, you can watch today’s struggle live.
■ Without a speaker, the House can’t swear in members, name committee chairs or launch investigations.
■ The Onion: “McCarthy Assures Skeptical Republicans He Shares Their Vision Of Innocents Drowning In Oceans Of Blood.”
‘He lied about—and I’m rounding down here—everything.’ Stephen Colbert assesses the plight of Republican Rep. George Santos …
■ … who faces fraud charges in Brazil.
■ Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin on the prospects Republicans might punish Santos: “We’ll give you a moment to remember the party we’re talking about here.”
■ Republicans managed to get one thing done Tuesday: They removed metal detectors at the entrance to the House floor—safety measures installed after the insurrection of 2021.
‘Professional football, which features athletes repeatedly crashing into each other for hours, will never be safe.’ Popular Information’s Judd Legum says the critical injury of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin turns a spotlight on the NFL’s “moral collapse.”
■ CNN reports that a high-ranking Bills executive broke down in tears after a day and night of meetings yesterday.
■ The Onion again: “NFL Releases Statement Clarifying There Are Not Things More Important Than Football.”
Who knows who’s boosted? Not Chicago Public Schools, which Chalkbeat Chicago reports isn’t tracking COVID-19 booster status for students or staff.
■ A variant about 25 times more contagious than the original now accounts for more than 40% of U.S. COVID cases.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is a Square advertiser.
Abortion, retail. The FDA has cleared regular pharmacies to dispense mifepristone to patients with a prescription.
■ Complaining of labor law violations, employees of Howard Brown Health clinics are picketing the organization’s medical facilities and its Brown Elephant resale stores.
■ Iconic Chicago theater pioneer Frank Galati is dead at 79.
‘The internet is a failure.’ Economist Umair Haque: “In its current form, the way it is, it’s doing … a lot more harm than good.”
■ Meanwhile: Twitter’s relaxing its ban on political ads.
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg isn’t so troubled by the rise of artificial-intelligence-generated illustration (like that one leading this edition of Chicago Public Square) and composition, comparing them to much older creative tools: “I use a thesaurus if I can’t immediately put my finger on the right term.”
■ Welcome, new readers here after reading Car Con Carne podcast host James VanOsdol’s kind words on the internet about Square.
■ Thanks to Mike Braden for making this edition better.