Healthquake. Politico says President-elect Trump’s nominee to head Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., could trigger “the biggest rethinking of the U.S. public health system ever.”
■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich shares “a fun story from RFK Jr’s recent past.”
■ Discourse Blog proprietor Jack Mirkinson: “Which old-timey diseases are going to come roaring back. Polio? Diptheria? Smallpox? Leprosy? Come on down!”
■ Jimmy Kimmel: “Who better to be in charge of health and humans than a guy whose brain was partially devoured by a worm?”
‘Trump’s choice for siccing the military on The Enemy Within.’ Columnist Evan Hurst sounds the alarm about defense secretary nominee and Fox host Pete Hegseth.
■ Rolling Stone: Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault.
■ The Chicago Board of Education’s unanimously passed a resolution forbidding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from entering the schools or interacting with staff without a criminal warrant.
■ Trump’s choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, was born in Mount Prospect and grew up in Palatine.
‘He must not be confirmed.’ A Tribune editorial: Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz to lead the Justice Department cannot stand.
■ Veteran journalist Dan Rather: “There is no world in which Matt Gaetz should be the top law enforcement officer in the United States.”
■ Columnist Josh Barro says “any handful of Republican lawmakers can stop Trump’s insane nominations” …
■ … an assortment that New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser constitutes Trump’s “God-tier level trolling” of America …
■ … but a member of Trump’s transition team tells Rolling Stone the nominations are designed to bend Republican senators to his will “until they snap in half and then thank him for the privilege.”
■ Setting the stage for a review of last night’s monologues, LateNighter columnist Dennis Perkins describes Gaetz as “a person so slimy his own party will have to think about it for two, maybe three seconds.”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: Republicans should approve ’em all, so “responsibility for the farce will be right where it should be: In the laps of lapdog Republicans.”
‘The censorship is stunning.’ Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that, within minutes of his publication of the Trump campaign’s vetting dossier of Sen. Marco Rubio—Trump’s pick for secretary of state—“Facebook banned links not just to the article but to every other article from this newsletter, notifying thousands of accounts [including Chicago Public Square] that their links had violated its terms of service.”
■ Here’s his original post.
■ The Guardian: Amid growing fears of what a second Trump term would mean for press freedom …he’s suing The New York Times, CBS and other media for billions …
■ … and “members of Congress and other U.S. public officials targeted for ‘retribution’ by Donald Trump … are now bracing for scenarios as extreme as the possibility of being rounded up and arrested.”
■ Cartoonist/columnist Jack Ohman assures friends and readers, “I’m, you know, OK. … I’m a privileged white male Pulitzer Prize recipient with a college degree,” but “there are people in my life who aren’t OK, and it would break your heart for me to tell you who they are.”
■ Columnist and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: Trump appears set on turning America into a police state.
‘A mistaken expression of shock and confusion.’ The editor-in-chief of Scientific American, the nation’s oldest magazine, is quitting after posting an expletive-filled rant about Trump voters on Bluesky.
■ She’s deleted those posts and apologized.
■ You may recall the magazine’s rare endorsement of Kamala Harris.
‘The Dingularity.’ Columnist Lyz Lenz: You Are Here.
■ The Lever’s David Sirota has assembled a “Handbook For The Politically Deceased: Your guide to what the hell just happened in the election and what’s ahead.”
Back to the drawing board. The Chicago City Council’s unanimously and extraordinarily rejected Mayor Johnson’s call for a $300 million property tax increase …
■ … setting the stage for a new round of talks over what to cut and what to tax …
■ … in what a Trib editorial perceives as the first time in more than half a century that Chicago’s seen a true “strong-council, weak-mayor” form of government.
■ Block Club: Most Chicago street fests aren’t paying police overtime, leaving taxpayers on the hook.
■ Also: The mayor’s call to cut police therapist positions is raising alarms.
Chicago’s now an InfoWars zone. The Onion’s purchase of blowhard Alex Jones’ toxic conspiracy empire brings the brand right here …
■ … at the forefront of a campaign to fight conspiracy theories with comedy.
■ The Onion’s CEO tells CNN: “We’re going to … just pave it over.”
■ Columnist Parker Molloy: “If we’re looking to The Onion to keep people honest, it’s probably time for serious news to take a hard look at itself.”
■ Adweek: Comcast, Disney and IBM are returning to Twitter X after an ad freeze.
‘I can’t believe the geniuses at ComEd can’t put their heads together and come up with something better for a man so closely associated with both ComEd and the history of the city we all love.’ Columnist Neil Steinberg: “Historian Shermann Dilla Thomas had a six-figure day job at ComEd; then he took the CEO’s suggestion and ended up canned.”
■ The company could use some better publicity, given its central role in the ongoing corruption trial of former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan.
A question about lab rats driving tiny cars! That’s one of the highlights of this week’s news quiz, courtesy of past Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel …
■ … and it happens to be one of the four your Chicago Public Square columnist got wrong. ✅✅❌✅❌✅❌❌
■ … on which your Square columnist scored a mediocre 3/5.
If not for you … Square would have been gone long ago without the support readers have provided through the years.
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