‘It feels like … a dream.’ Syrian Americans in Chicago are celebrating the fall of the Assad regime’s 50-year rule over Syria.
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones: “While CNN often gets beat up for its coverage … a story such as Sunday’s Syrian news shows the network at its very best.”
■ Victorious rebels have freed thousands of political prisoners and others who’d disappeared since the Syrian conflict began in 2011.
■ Columnist Charlie Sykes: This “extends a remarkable run of reverses” for Vladimir Putin …
■ … who’s welcomed dictator Bashar Assad to Russia.
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson: “President-elect Donald Trump’s social media accounts took Russia’s side in the Syrian events.”
■ On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder: Welcome to Trumpomuskovia.
‘Shooting one another won’t solve anything.’ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg decries social media’s explosion of joy at the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
■ The Wall Street Journal (gift link underwritten by Chicago Public Square supporters): “Manhunt for UnitedHealthcare CEO Killer Meets Unexpected Obstacle: Sympathy for the Gunman.”
■ In a TikTok video viewed more than 110,000 times, a Chicago woman acknowledges the tragedy but reflects on the health insurance industry’s denials of her parents’ claims.
■ Columnist Ken Klippenstein: “The major media’s obsession with decorum—we mustn’t speak ill of the dead!—has rendered it unable to tell the truth about who this man really was.”
■ Reader Joan Berman found “absolutely disgusting” a Taylor Lorenz column linked from Friday’s Square, seemingly celebrating Thompson’s death: “On the other hand, if I do run across anything else she has written I will remember reading this piece telling me who she really is!”
‘Exotically awful things.’ In a story centered on a Chicago institution where a “mystery corpse” spent a year in the morgue, The American Prospect warns that “Insight Health is … coming for a failing hospital near you.”
■ Wired: “The rich can afford personal care. The rest will have to make do with AI.”
‘You have no choice.’ That’s Trump on NBC, insisting he’ll have to deport everyone illegally in the U.S. …
■ … a thing that a Trump-supporting Chicago City Council member says won’t happen, “because we don't have the manpower for it.”
■ Trump added that “we have to end” birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
‘I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day.’ Trump also told NBC he’ll “most likely” pardon Jan. 6, 2021, rioters.
■ Law professor Joyce Vance: “The entire interview was full of lies and half-truths” …
■ … as confirmed by NBC’s own fact-check.
■ Former Chicago news executive Jennifer Schulze marvels at the blandness of a New York Times headline atop an account of Trump’s sit-down: “Trump Lays Out Agenda in Extended Interview.”
■ Then again, here’s columnist Jeff Tiedrich’s overview: “Donny … once again demonstrated that he has no fucking clue what he’s talking about.”
‘Bring it on, Donald.’ Ex-Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Trump’s threat in that interview to jail members of the House committee that investigated the insurrection: “I’m confident that the name ‘Trump’ will be a stain on our history, and my son will be proud of what I did.”
■ Kinzinger’s fellow ex-Rep.-turned-Trump antagonist Liz Cheney: “The public now deserves to see … the evidence and grand jury material assembled by Special Counsel Smith.”
■ Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: Cheney “doesn’t need a pardon from Biden because Trump’s claim wouldn’t last an instant in federal court. What she deserves from Biden is a Presidential Medal of Freedom.”
■ Fueling speculation she could fill a U.S. Senate vacancy, Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump is surrendering the Republican Party’s co-chair seat.
‘You’re a busy person, so …’ ProPublica editor-in-chief Steve Engleberg has penned an open letter to Trump’s government efficiency czar, Elon Musk, encouraging a critical look at the tax prep industry’s obstruction of free filing: “Eliminating the annual ritual of paying money to a third party … to tell the government what it already knows about your personal finances could be both popular and more efficient.”
■ A University of Virginia engineering professor anticipates a coalition of feminist movements, minorities and labor activists to keep Silicon Valley moguls in check.
‘I was puzzled about why anyone would think I wanted this kind of shit in my mailbox.’ Columnist Charlie Madigan was astonished to find—“in Evanston, of all places”—proof that the “old plague” of antisemitism is back.
■ Block Club finds North Side businesses struggling against a surge in burglaries: “At this point, it’s part of doing business in Chicago.”
Dry cleaning cleanup. The Environmental Protection Agency’s banning cancer-causing chemicals widely used in degreasing agents, furniture care, auto repair and dry cleaning …
■ … but the ban’s future under Trump is uncertain.
■ Environment Illinois is petitioning Home Depot: “Stop selling bee-killing pesticides.”
Public radio’s pickle. Semafor media editor Max Tani foresees NPR and its local affiliates in a fight for their lives next year.
■ Radio veteran Perry Michael Simon: “A lot of it comes down to whether radio’s providing … anything better than what you can get from streaming.”
■ Barrett Media founder Jason Barrett: Every top talent let go by old-school radio is “being dared to launch a business and create future revenue pain for their former outlet.”
Journalism’s ‘stupidest new idea.’ That’s Mark Jacob at Stop the Presses, ripping into Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong’s notion of an artificial-intelligence-powered “bias meter” for the paper’s stories, accompanied by AI-generated alternate versions of those stories.
■ American Crisis columnist Margaret Sullivan: “I’m especially appreciative of news organizations …which have no paywall.”
■ Tedium’s Ernie Smith reviews the curiously declining history of the G-rated movie.
Here comes the sun. Chicago’s sunsets today begin coming later …
■ … but get ready to bundle up.
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