Hey, old ladies! The Republican Senate candidate from Ohio’s been caught on camera saying, “Sadly … there’s a lot of suburban women … that are like … ‘If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ … Especially for women that are, like, past 50. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”
■ In Pennsylvania yesterday, Donald Trump promised women, “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared.”
■ Stephen Colbert on Trump’s hollow promise to “protect women”: “I’m not sure if he’s running for president or marketing a new brand of tampon.”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “Trump is the man you can trust to protect your non-man interests and rights! What could possibly go wrong?”
■ A Trump-appointed federal judge has blocked the federal government from protecting a nationwide Catholic association’s employees seeking time off or other accommodations for an abortion or in vitro fertilization treatment.
Jumping ship. North Carolina scandal-scarred gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s campaign staff has quit en masse.
■ The Republican Governors Association’s bailed, too.
■ Seth Meyers on vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s reluctance to condemn Robinson: “The dude called himself a Nazi on a porn website. … If you can’t denounce that, you can’t denounce anything. Which of course is one of the job requirements when you’re Donald Trump’s running mate.”
■ Heated asks: “Why are Republicans so obsessed with refrigerators?”
‘He’s confident his sycophants and enablers … are going to pre-rig the results in swing states where polls show a frighteningly close race.’ Mary L. Trump sees a pattern in her uncle’s campaign strategy: “When is the last time you saw Donald try to appeal to voters beyond his base? Has he ever reached out to independents or women in the suburbs, for example? Why is he spending so much [time] talking to his base this close to an election?”
■ Profile in courage: A single Republican state senator in Nebraska has blocked a plan to lock down all the state’s Electoral College votes for Trump.
■ Add Illinois to the list of states whose election offices have received suspicious packages—one of which prompted an evacuation at the State Board of Elections office in Springfield Friday.
Relief in Ohio. Newsweek says Trump’s backing down from a pledge to visit Springfield, Ohio—a town whose migrants he’s demonized—falsely—for “eating the pets of the people that live there.”
■ Popular Information’s Judd Legum says the Trump campaign’s still being hacked—he’s been sent a 271-page dossier on JD Vance and two other potential Trump running mates—but Legum says he won’t publish them because they’re “stolen, and publishing the documents would be a violation of privacy and could encourage future criminal acts.”
■ Trump hulks out in a new cartoon from Tom Tomorrow: “Trump tired of media talking about Ka-mah-la! Trump want to change subject—back to Trump.”
■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich sees lots of good news all around for Democrats.
‘A frightening escalation.’ Zeteo’s Pulitzer-winning Spencer Ackerman: “Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was terrorism.”
■ Updating coverage: The death toll from a massive Israeli bombardment hit nearly 560 people.
■ ProPublica: Two government bodies concluded that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, but U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken disagreed.
■ The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart laid into Israel and the U.S. for a strategy that one reporter describes as “de-escalation through escalation”—or, Stewart yelled in frustration, “as that is sometimes called: War!”
■ Chicago protesters gathered downtown yesterday to demand a ceasefire.
■ Besieged by thousands of protest emails, a suburban library’s canceled the showing of a movie about how—to quote one of the film’s champions with the group Jewish Voice for Peace—other Jewish organizations court youth support for Israel with “a sanitized, historically inaccurate narrative of its founding.”
A different kind of service. The longest-serving member of the Chicago City Council, Ed Burke, is now behind bars, serving a two-year sentence for racketeering, bribery and attempted extortion.
■ The mayor of tiny Ford Heights has been found guilty of stealing from the town.
■ An ex-Chicago cop who went on to talk on network TV about police misconduct now stands accused of pretending to be a federal agent.
Cards against Musk. Chicago-based Cards Against Humanity, which in 2017 bought land on the U.S.-Mexico border to mess with Trump’s border wall, is now suing billionaire and Twitter X overlord Elon Musk’s SpaceX for moving into that land without permission.
An ‘immediate halt.’ Friends of the Parks has launched an online petition to block plans for a new Bears stadium on the lakefront.
■ As of this morning, a couple of hundred people had signed on.
More journalism conflict. Poynter’s Tom Jones spotlights a New York Post reporter covering Wisconsin races—without disclosing that she “was twice paid by the state Republican Party for consulting work.”
■ Business Insider: New York reporter Olivia Nuzzi’s relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was an “open secret” before the scandal broke.
■ The Los Angeles Times’ Anita Chabria asks of RFK Jr., “Why isn’t he being scrutinized … with the same intensity as Nuzzi, who honestly, average Americans have no interest in?”
■ Media watcher Simon Owens: How Block Club Chicago reached 20,000 paying subscribers.
Facebook censorship update. Among the company’s latest irrational and unexplained acts of repression: A historic interview with Mad Magazine founder William M. Gaines shared to a Facebook group titled “Mad Magazine”—rejected, because “it looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.”
■ It’s Banned Books Week …
■ … which Penguin Random House is marking by sending a “Banned Wagon”—a truck filled with free banned or challenged books—around the country, including a stop in Chicago Friday.
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■ You can use PayPal if you prefer.
■ Mike Braden made this edition better.
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