‘This is sabotage’ / Miller time-out / Serial news-site killer

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?”

■ Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes: Miller is “one of those dangerous evil people around Trump who will encourage him to burn it all down.”

■ 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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■ Mike Braden made this edition better.

Whitewashed / ‘A disaster’ / ‘Hell yes’

Whitewashed. Popular Information, surveying 105 articles in 36 mainstream U.S. publications, finds them sanitizing new White House chief of staff Stephen Miller’s racist worldview.

■ Columnist Andy Borowitz—who, departing from his usual satiric mode, assures you “the following is 100% factual (because I couldn’t make it up)”—spotlights things Miller doesn’t want you to know about himself.

■ Miles Taylor, a Trump administration whistleblower turned documentarian: “I worked with Stephen Miller every day. He’s going to fail. Catastrophically.”

■ Columnist Elaine Soloway wonders whether Miller’s Russian Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors knew hers.

‘A disaster.’ Last Week Tonight host John Oliver lays out a devastating case for ending the damage done by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and for “impeaching and removing this f*cking asshole as soon as possible.”

■ See Oliver’s show here.

■ Columnist and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “Stephen Miller knows Hegseth would be a convenient fall guy for the war.”

Ya think? Trump tells 60 Minutes last week’s vote suggests his deportation policies “might be too tough.”

■ But lest anyone think he’s going soft, he also said he couldn’t forgive his political enemies—even if that would get him into heaven—“because I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.”

■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich is gobsmacked that Trump’s team OK’d the interview: “Dear Leader was so befuddled, and so compromised—both cognitively and ethically—that even a complete lightweight … was able to nail him to the wall on corruption.”

■ See the interview here.

■ In a new memoir, former President Joe Biden says Trump’s 2021 Capitol insurrection “should follow him to his grave.”

■ Over the weekend, Trump used his Truth Social platform to threaten Democrats with imprisonment …

■ … as his administration moved to shut down Planned Parenthood.

■ Law and Chaos columnist Liz Dye: Trump’s sycophantic Attorney General Todd Blanche “took to the Sunday shows to complain about Democratic lawmakers being so mean to the Trump administration.”

■ CNN’s Brian Stelter on a sea change for Joe Rogan’s podcast, once a platform for Trump’s reelection and now “a place for a whistleblower-style conversation alleging ‘corruption’ at the highest levels of the Trump administration.”

■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson sees “signs that the president is deeply concerned about anyone getting a window into how his administration has been operating.”

‘Golly, I like these politicians.’ On Facebook, former Tribune columnist Mary Schmich celebrates last week’s big election winners: “Good people saw a calling and an opportunity in the madness.”

■ Journalist and filmmaker Steven Beschloss: “Young voters … have overwhelmingly said … that the country is on the wrong track.”

■ Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis dives into the stats: “Who didn’t join this great pluralistic election? The uneducated.”

■ Columnist Mike Gold: “Trump will have a hard time …getting any part of his agenda through Congress. Should he actually attempt to get one of his Nazibots a permanent job in his cabinet after New Year’s Day, he will not have the votes.”

■ Law professor Joyce Vance: “Whatever else happens this week, it won’t be a great one for the Trump administration, and that’s enough for me.”

■ Columnist and cartoonist Jack Ohman cautions, “We all have to keep up the volume so this never, ever happens again.”

■ Science fiction author Cory Doctorow’s not upbeat: “America … cannot be relied upon to serve as the world’s hyperpower. Trump forever … destroyed its capacity to even try.”

AIiiiii! Artificial intelligence company Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang is under investigation for an affair with a woman who The New York Times reports was gathering intel for the government of China.

■ He’s apologized to employees and his family.

Truck off. Elon Musk says Tesla’s discontinuing its (ugly, ugly, ugly) steel-plated pickup …

■ … and returning deposits for “a lot of people.”

‘Hell yes.’ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg: “You could be forgiven for overlooking that more than two-thirds of Chicago voters—68%—said ‘yes’ on the referendum question: ‘Should Chicago develop a permanent festival and outdoor event space?’”

■ WBEZ: The outcome “doesn’t mean the city is destined to develop a Summerfest-esque destination anytime soon.”

■ Tribune critic and editorial page editor Chris Jones (free link): “Kicking Lollapalooza out of Grant Park would be madness.”

■ To no avail, hundreds of people gathered in the park yesterday for a (vain) stab at pushing The Bean “seven inches to the left.”

She won her job back—but won’t take it. Fired Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah—awarded by an independent arbitrator with reinstatement and full back pay after her dismissal apparently for refusing to genuflect before the memory of slain reactionary activist Charlie Kirk—is taking a hard pass, because she wouldn’t have “the guaranteed freedom and institutional support to do what I loved: use my voice, seek truth, and serve readers.”

■ WBEZ’s going with a team of three staffers—at least temporarily—to replace departing In the Loop host Sasha-Ann Simons.

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