Chicago Public Square will take Wednesday off. Back Thursday.
‘This is sabotage.’ With his first Pentagon news conference in five months, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth condemned his potential impeachment as “a farce.”
■ Overnight, President Trump said Hegseth “should be praised, not Impeached.”
■ Popular Information on the emerging MAGA civil war: “A recently departed Trump aide is accusing the White House of systemic corruption.”
Things Trump says. Remember how he seemed to accept the results of last week’s elections? Forget that.
■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich: “Donny, you’ve had seven whole days to work yourself up into a thermonuclear lather, and this is the pathetic mewling you end up farting out?”
■ Heather Delaney Reese at Hope for America: “The president of the United States … stood inside the White House and admitted that he lied to the American people because he wanted attention.”
■ Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias: 60 Minutes had an hour with Trump and never asked about his election lies.
■ Paul Waldman at Public Notice: “Despite what Trump says, his movement was never that popular.”
■ Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Jack Ohman dons his columnist hat: “Is there now any doubt the president of the United States is completely insane?”
■ Stop the Presses columnist and former Tribune editor Mark Jacob suggests a new way for journalists to throw shade on Trump when they can’t prove he’s lying.
■ The Onion: “Trump Gathers Cabinet In Situation Room To Watch Porn.”
Miller time-out. With Stephen Miller’s ascendance to Trump’s chief of staff, his wife Katie is hanging up her “Conservative Mom Podcast.”
■ Wonkette’s Brooke Binkowski calls it a “terrible week for the dead-eyed, racist MAGA entertainment world!”
■ Former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan decries the media’s “sanitizing and soft-pedaling” of Miller’s racism.
■ Newly relevant 2002 video (2017 link) shows Stephen Miller’s cringeworthy speech during a student government election: “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”
■ Miller reportedly has plans to crack down on press freedom.
■ Seth Meyers on NBC’s Late Night: “Trump acknowledged that his hardline immigration policy was too extreme and said, ‘I think it was too tough.’ So you made Stephen Miller chief of staff? He’s currently standing outside Home Depot with a fishing net.”
■ The Onion: “GOP Criticizes Trump For Promoting Stephen Miller Over Other, More Qualified Necrophiles.”
‘You’re about to blow it again.’ In an open letter to his former colleagues, ex-Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger warns the party not to repeat the mistakes of the past in picking a new House leader.
■ Columnist Charlotte Clymer: “The blue tsunami was so ridiculously large that the earliest the Republican Party could realistically take back the Senate is 2030.”
■ The Washington Sun: For her first votes in the House since she double-crossed her party in the Michigan Senate election, Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens cowered in the cloakroom.
‘America’s most consequential institution.’ Adapting some of her new book for The Atlantic (gift link), Rachel Maddow mourns the Justice Department’s collapse.
■ Law prof Joyce Vance: Attorney General Todd Blanche “should be impeached as soon as possible if he won’t resign.”
■ The department’s extended a legal middle finger to a Chicago federal judge who set a Monday afternoon deadline for it to turn over records about its botched prosecution of the Broadview Six case …
■ … in which a defense lawyer has been named one of Chicago magazine’s Chicagoans of the Year.
‘A political hack and vindictive thug.’ Columnist Eric Zorn is stunned to see Illinois Secretary of State and Chicago mayoral candidate Alexi Giannoulias supporting the reelection of Chicago City Council member Jim Gardiner.
■ City Cast: Meet Chicago’s new school board.
Serial news-site killer. Cubs owner Joe Ricketts, who founded and then killed Chicago’s DNAinfo after staffers moved to unionize, has done it again.
■ He writes to readers: “Belief in a mission does not by itself make a business sustainable.”
■ Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect on the death of Salon: “Quick-buck private equity ownership of independent media is a fatal proposition.”
Apple security update. Two weeks after its last software revision, Apple’s out with a security patch that TidBITS recommends all the company’s users adopt sooner than later.
■ Notes on the Crises: “A broken security upgrade at HUD has paralyzed the operations of housing authorities across the country.”
Google protest. A group of Chicago parents concerned about the company’s imposition of its AI tech on schools using its products plans a demonstration tomorrow outside its Chicago HQ.
■ Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect: “It is somehow appropriate, given how artificial intelligence has enabled the greatest explosion of scams and frauds in history, that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was reportedly entrapped by a good old-fashioned honeypot.”
■ Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis offers “a helpful glossary contrasting the AI boys’ language with ours.”
The Talarico bump. Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico’s Saturday Night Live cameo has become the show’s most-watched YouTube video of the season.
■ See it here.
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