Millennium menace? The Sun-Times reports that the horizontal trellis beams soaring over Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion are “severely rusted … in desperate need of repair or even replacement.” (2017 photo: Brian Crawford in the Chicago Public Square Flickr group.)
■ As Lollapalooza returns to nearby Grant Park today through Sunday, docs counsel: Hydrate …
■ … but, ironically, water’s one of the things you can’t take into the festival.
■ Lolla’s like Christmas for nearby cannabis shops …
■ … with some of the nation’s highest prices.
■ The food and entertainment lineup’s out for next month’s NASCAR-delayed (free!) Taste of Chicago.
‘The heat will kill you first.’ Author Jeff Goodell says the hot weather of a changing climate is the deadliest threat of all.
■ Experts tell Block Club Chicago that climate change poses special challenges to the city's underserved communities.
■ Also: A virus that kills rabbits quickly has hopped into town.
‘The most important criminal case in American history.’ That’s veteran Washington journalist—and native Chicagoan—Jonathan Alter’s take on Donald Trump’s latest indictment …
■ … for which, amid tight security, Trump’s third perp walk was scheduled at 3 p.m. Chicago time.
■ Salon’s Amanda Marcotte: This Trump indictment’s different because this time there are victims.
■ The Bulwark’s transformation of the indictment into a podcast makes clear just how well it’s written (and listening at double speed gives you the whole thing in 45 minutes).
■ Ex-Vice President Pence—whose contemporaneous notes from conversations with Trump in the days leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection are central to the case—tells Fox, “The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes.”
■ The Intercept: One of those lawyers, “the man with no pants,” is the indictment’s star.
■ Popular Information’s Judd Legum discounts an argument advanced by Trump’s defenders and mainstream media: “A successful prosecution does not hinge on what Trump believed about the 2020 election. If Trump is convicted, it will be based on his actions.”
■ The evening the indictment was revealed, Trump dined privately with Fox executives.
‘Behold co-conspirator No. 1.’ The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes analyzes damning audio tapes of “the man the former president of the United States enlisted as one of his chief advisers/confederates/co-conspirators in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election,” Rudy Giuliani—transcripts of which have been filed in a sexual abuse lawsuit against him.
■ The plaintiff—his former aide—says he forced her to perform sex acts and work in the nude.
■ Legal scholars tell the AP the decision not to charge Giuliani—or any of Trump’s other alleged co-conspirators—signals prosecutors’ desire to nail Trump without complication from more defense lawyers, more legal motions and more delays.
‘Everything has fallen off a cliff.’ Politico says Republican Party organizations across the country—especially in so-called “battleground states”—are broke or struggling.
■ A Tribune editorial: “The GOP must excise [Trump], once and for all, for its good and for the good of this country.”
All-day kindergarten. Gov. Pritzker’s signed a law requiring it in all Illinois public schools by 2027.
■ Also: A law extending a probation program for people facing first-time gun-possession charges.
■ A jury’s handed down a death sentence for the gunman in the nation’s deadliest antisemitic attack—a Pittsburgh massacre that left 11 dead.
‘I’m gonna take my time because getting this right is important.’ Mayor Johnson’s overarching message to reporters in an unrestrained news conference yesterday, according to Politico’s Shia Kapos, was this: “He’s not going to make shoot-from-the-hip decisions that he’ll be criticized for later.”
■ The mayor on large, chaotic teen gatherings: “To refer to children as, like, baby Al Capones is not appropriate.”
■ He assured the room migrants weren’t moved out of a downtown police station because of Lollapalooza.
Collector’s items. As of this week, the manufacture and sale of energy-inefficient incandescent light bulbs is history in the U.S.
■ You can still use the ones you have …
■ … but, really, it’s cheaper not to.
About age and term limits. Reader Joan Pederson counsels skepticism about an item in yesterday’s Chicago Public Square: “If declining capacity is the argument for term limits, why allow a new 60-year-old senator the same maximum number of terms as one elected at the age of 35? Further weakening the seniority system would be more effective. So would a congressional equivalent of the exam required when getting or renewing a driver’s license: More frequent after age 70 or so … appropriately reducing power and responsibility. … Voters would be likelier to elect alternatives to declining representatives who were no longer as well empowered as they’d once been. Such a test may be a pipe dream, but it has the merit of addressing the issue of declining capacity directly. Term limits don’t.”