‘Vice President Trump.’ Answering his first question at what his staff had billed as a “big boy” news conference, that’s how President Biden mistakenly referred to Vice President Harris …
■ … shortly after he’d confused Ukrainian President Zelenskyy with Russia’s President Putin …
■ … and yet, CNN’s Oliver Darcy concludes, “the president emerged mostly unscathed.”
■ Add two more Illinois members of Congress to the roster of Democrats calling for Biden to drop out.
■ Donald Trump niece Mary L. Trump: “He may occasionally stumble over a word or mix up a name (just as most of us do on a daily basis), but … he never forgets America’s values. I don’t believe that President Biden is the only person who can beat Donald. But I do believe he is the person who has the best chance to beat him.”
■ Biden left the door open a crack: “If I show up at the [Chicago] convention and everybody says we want somebody else, that’s the Democratic process”—adding, in his trademark whisper: “It’s not going to happen.”
■ The Bulwark: Biden “knows at some level that he shouldn’t be running again.”
■ CNN: Ex-President Barack Obama and ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have privately “expressed concerns about how much harder they think it’s become for the president to beat Donald Trump. Neither is quite sure what to do.”
■ LateNighter: The session’s timing “right as the late-night shows taped their Thursday monologues robbed the comics of the punchlines for all their ‘should President Biden drop out/Biden is old’ material.”
■ Donning his “American Political Pundit Man” hat, USA Today’s Rex Huppke tells Biden, “If you want us to stop calling for you to step aside, you’re going to have to pass the following additional tests.”
Meanwhile … Convicted felon Trump’s self-declared “Secretary of Retribution” (link revised) has rolled out a list of 350 Democratic and Republican elected officials, journalists, Capitol police officers, impeachment witnesses against Trump and others that he wants arrested and punished for “treason” if Trump’s returned to the White House.
■ Popular Information: “How Trump played the media on abortion.”
■ Evan Hurst at Wonkette uses “this fun searchable version” of Trump’s Project 2025 to find “the times it mentions hot boner porns.”
■ Columnist Parker Molloy explains how the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery—parent to CNN, among many others—endorsed Trump without endorsing Trump.
■ Media writer Tom Jones: “Editorials saying Trump is unfit to return to the White House might have carried a bit more oomph had they been written a month or two ago” …
■ … but law professor Joyce Vance says a New York Times editorial doing just that is “too important to miss.”
Phantom tollbooths. With the last of Illinois’ highway collection points now history, the Sun-Times reports, the state has yet to deal with all the shift’s consequences.
■ After years of cuts, the CTA’s finally adding back some train service …
■ … and, despite some neighbors’ not-in-my-backyard objections, it’s won City Council committee approval to run Ashland Avenue buses north to Metra’s Ravenswood station.
■ Metra’s promising better service to and from O’Hare—for the Democratic National Convention.
News quiz: The almost all-politics edition. If it’s Friday, it’s time for past Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel to hit you up for eight truthful answers to eight challenging questions.
45 years ago tonight … Major League Baseball, the White Sox and WLUP-FM brought Chicago “Disco Demolition Night,” an event that a new multipart PBS/BBC documentary series concludes “hastened the commercial demise of disco” …
■ Block Club: As the city clears out tent cities, unhoused residents ask why it took the convention for them to get offers of housing.
‘The U.N. calls restraint chairs torture. Illinois jails use them every day.’ The Illinois Answers Project says nearly all the state’s jails have them.
■ CWBChicago: While a murder case was pending against a woman who killed and butchered her landlord, she won a $3 million lawsuit against the CTA.
Know a judge? With dozens of Cook County Circuit Court judges up for retention in November, Injustice Watch is gathering insight from people who’ve had firsthand experience with any of them.
■ U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pushing for impeachment of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito …
■ … prompting The Onion to weigh the pros and cons of impeachment.
■ The ACLU’s launched a petition drive calling on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment “restoring presidential liability. … We elect presidents, NOT kings.”
AT&T hacked. The company says users’ personal data—including Social Security numbers, passcodes, full names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and AT&T account numbers for nearly all its cellular customers, customers of mobile virtual network operators using its wireless network, and landline customers who interacted with those cellular numbers—fell into the custody of a third-party platform two years ago.
■ It says it’ll be in touch with customers affected.
Costco price hike. For the first time since 2017, the company’s increasing membership fees.
■ In yet another death knell for the DVD format, Redbox is shutting down …
■ … putting more than 1,000 people out of work.
■ It started at McDonald’s.
■ Get more than six right and you get bragging rights to lord over your Chicago Public Square columnist.
■ … as mentioned—but, in retrospect, significantly underplayed—the next day in your columnist’s July 13, 1979, debut as a news anchor on WXRT-FM.
■ The guy in charge of WLUP at the time tells author, publisher and media scribe Rick Kaempfer he remembers that night as … harrowing.
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