Class dismissed. The Supreme Court’s cleared Donald Trump to cut nearly 1,400 employees of the Education Department …
■ … kneecapping the enforcement of civil rights protections for girls, students with disabilities, children of color and LGBTQ+ kids.
■ Read the decision here.
■ The American Prospect: The Republican wrecking ball is slamming through the U.S. medical system.
■ Block Club: As pressure from Trump mounts, Chicago’s Rush Medical Center is rolling back its gender-affirming care for minors.
Try not to inhale. Blame wildfire smoke in part for an air quality alert in effect through at least tonight.
■ Heavy rains across the Northeast triggered a state of emergency for New York and New Jersey, stranding vehicles and closing subway lines.
‘Companies are lining up to get out of repaying harmed customers.’ A former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director tells the AP that bureau employees are watching hopelessly as Republicans undo their work.
■ Columnist Robert Kuttner: “Trump’s destruction and the needed rebuilding should be a theme in every election between now and 2028.”
■ Ex-U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “15 months—476 days—remain until the 2026 midterm elections. The ballot on Nov. 3, 2026, will contain every House seat, 35 Senate seats, and thousands more at the state and local level. If our democracy survives that long.”
‘Elmo can’t go back on the streets, Jon!’ In a comedy tour de force last night, Jon Stewart interviewed “Elmo” (voiced by Stewart) about the antisemitic remarks attributed to Elmo after the hacking of his Twitter X account …
■ … only to have the puppet concede the tweets constituted pandering to Trump’s acolytes to avert cuts for PBS funding.
■ See the whole bit here.
This Way Out. Stop the Presses columnist Mark Jacob offers five scenarios for averting a Trump dictatorship.
■ CNN: Fox News has taken Trump’s plea for his allies to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein almost literally.
■ USA Today’s Chicago-based columnist Rex Huppke goes the other way, invoking Epstein’s name close to 50 times—concluding: “And definitely don’t look at the sentence that the first letter of each paragraph above spells out.”
■ Law professor and former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance gets out the popcorn to watch the war the Epstein saga has triggered between the FBI and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
■ Reuters: Two-thirds of Bondi’s staff charged with defending Trump’s policies in court have quit. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
■ Mother Jones’ Dan Friedman appeals to Democrats: “Stop taking the Epstein bait. … There are more than enough real Trump scandals.”
‘Fire fans contra ICE.’ That banner at Saturday’s game got ticketholders banned for a year.
■ Newcity publisher Brian Hieggelke, who was there: “I started fearing an ICE raid … for no logical or apparent reason other than the times in which we are living.”
■ Press Watch journalism critic Dan Froomkin says mainstream media’s anodyne coverage of Trump’s plans for “kidnapping our undocumented friends and neighbors and rendering them to random third countries where they may face torture, persecution or death” has “normalized evil.”
‘BOMB PLANTED.’ That threat to a Chicago city council member, posted on Facebook, has led to a Hyde Park man’s detention.
■ Mayor Johnson’s come to terms with the city’s inspector general on an ordinance that would limit his office’s power to obstruct ethics investigations.
Watch that speedometer. Block Club: Chicago’s added six more speed cameras.
■ See the full list of the city’s 200 or so camera locations here.
‘A big fat bribe.’ Back from a two-week break, Stephen Colbert didn’t hold back in condemning his Paramount bosses for their legal settlement with Trump.
■ Probably for the first time, broadcast TV networks’ share of viewing last month dropped below 20 percent.
■ Layoffs at Chicago’s WCIU include host, critic and podcaster Brandon Pope.
■ Updating coverage: At Chicago Public Square’s email publication deadline, Emmy nominations were being announced.
What could go wrong? Days after Elon Musk’s pet AI, Grok, went full Nazi, the Pentagon’s announced a multimillion-dollar plan to use Grok for national security stuff.
■ CNN’s Hadas Gold: Grok’s not the only AI entity easily nudged into antisemitism, misogyny or racism.
■ Platformer tracks conservative efforts to outlaw AI entities’ criticism of Trump.
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Thanks. Jim Polaski made this edition better.