‘Lock Pritzker up. Lock the mayor up’ / ‘The real witch hunt is here’ / Egg-asperating / 8 years ago yesterday

‘Lock Pritzker up. Lock the mayor up.’ Donald Trump thrall Steve Bannon calls for imprisoning Illinois’ governor and Chicago’s mayor for “getting in the way of the ICE agents.”
 Mayor Johnson and his counterparts from New York, Boston and Denver have been summoned to testify about “sanctuary city” status before a Republican-controlled congressional committee Feb. 11.
 The feds have revealed little about who’s been swept up in Chicago and why.
 A Tribune editorial on Dr. Phil McGraw’s creepy presence at Chicago raids: “It implies that such people won’t just be removed; they’ll be humiliated.”
 Columnist Eric Zorn: “Scaring the crap out of them … is unconscionable.”
 The Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg: “The paper won’t even let me call whatever facilities they're building to corral immigrants—and no doubt, eventually, citizens—‘concentration camps.’ … I think we settled on ‘detainment camps.’”
 A Chicago-based bipartisan business coalition is launching a campaign to protect “law-abiding immigrant workers who are vital.”
 A group of Quaker congregations is suing the feds over Trump’s decision to allow raids within houses of worship.
 Wednesday night at 6:30: Indivisible Chicago hosts a virtual meeting, “Immigration Brief: What We Can Do as Allies.”

‘Could one woman with absolutely zero institutional backing … really be the one to break such an important story? Now we know the answer is yes.’ Solo newsletter proprietor Marisa Kabas did it, in reporting the president’s sweeping freeze of all federal aid programs—except Social Security and Medicare—beginning this evening.
 After she broke the news on Bluesky, the big news orgs followed.
 Pritzker calls the president’s move unconstitutional.
 One former Justice Department lawyer’s reaction: “Jesus f*&king Christ.”

‘The real witch hunt is here.’ Law professor Joyce Vance says the Trump Justice Department’s dismissal of more than a dozen employees who worked on criminal prosecution of the president is “a warning to all other federal employees to mind their loyalty if they want to keep their jobs.”
 New Republic editor Michael Tomasky: Trump’s firings “broke a law that Congress passed as a reform because of his own earlier behavior as president.”
 Columnist Charlie Sykes: “The final tattered bits left of the DOJ’s independence were bludgeoned into oblivion.”
 Dozens of top officials in the U.S. Agency for International Development have been placed on leave as the administration investigates what the AP calls “an alleged effort to thwart … Trump’s orders.”
 Also fired: Top leadership at the worker-rights protection agency, the National Labor Relations Board.
 Stephen Colbert: “Maybe Trump is getting rid of all the oversight so nobody sees him doing anything good?

‘DoD ≠ DEI.’ New Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are out under his reign.
 Trump’s signed orders overhauling the military—among other things, banning transgender troops and gutting diversity programs.
 Sam Stein at The Bulwark: “The tremors being sent throughout the government could hurt Trump in the long run.”

‘Will some serious pushback set in before Trump blows us and the Constitution to hell?’ American Prospect columnist Robert Kuttner flashes back to a Randy Newman song: “Setting off a nuclear war and blowing us all to bits has to be the top worry.”
 Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: Trump’s “using the presidency to glorify political violence and weaponize the threat of it against anyone who might consider criticizing him.”

‘I Googled shameless obedience to a dictator and look what came up.’ That’s veteran Chicago newspaper editor Mark Jacob, pointing to this CNN headline: “Google Maps will change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.”
 Speaking of corporate knees: In what Status says will be “music to Trump’s ears,” CNN’s squeezed out Trump-skeptical anchor Jim Acosta.
 Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein sounds an alarm about a late-Biden administration directive “encouraging America’s spies to make the corporations partners in their quest for secrets.”

Egg-asperating. With millions of chickens a month getting slaughtered in the fight against bird flu, don’t expect egg prices to drop anytime soon.
 Got eggs? Take good care of ’em.
 USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “Perhaps if we were dealing with undocumented Guatemalan chickens, President Trump would find time to address the bird flu issue.”
 Valentine’s Day alert: Trump’s trade dispute with Colombia threatens the No. 1 foreign source for cut flowers in the U.S.
 Bloomberg: “A deportation arrangement with Colombia that the White House … presented as a total victory for Donald Trump is looking less clear in the light of day.”
 Gary Legum at Wonkette: Trump caved To Colombia.”

‘Residents … have suffered needlessly.’ Delivering her final report as a village-hired investigator of Dolton Mayor Tiffany Henyard’s scandal-scarred administration, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot cited a “concerted and systematic effort” by Henyard to keep trustees from learning the village’s true financial condition.

‘AI Bubble, Meet Pin.’ David Dayen at The American Prospect assesses yesterday’s tech-stock meltdown in the face of cheap, open-source artificial intelligence models from a Chinese company, DeepSeek …
 … including an image generator that it says puts other models, like DALL-E, to shame.
 The Wall Street Journal (gift link; you’re welcome): “That DeepSeek appears to have been able to achieve state-of-the-art performance suggests that [U.S.] export controls may be ineffective—either because U.S.-designed chips aren’t necessary to make the best AI models, or because those chips are somehow making it to China in sufficient quantities anyway.”
 Apple’s unleashed a round of software updates supposedly enhancing its AI services.
 Quartz: How Netflix won the streaming wars.

Eight years ago yesterday … Chicago Public Square made itself known to the world in this WGN Radio interview …
 … so it was apt that an interview on WGN about Square’s origins hit the air this anniversary month …
 … during which a contribution of $80 to keep this thing coming will get you a free Square T-shirt …
Thanks. Daniel Horvath made this edition better.

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