Big Tuesday. Updating coverage: It’s primary day in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana …
■ … and NOTUS sees it as “a turning point in the election cycle. By tomorrow, we’ll know a lot about what comes next.”
■ Among things to watch: Donald Trump’s campaign to punish Republicans who haven’t drunk all the Kool-Aid.
■ Pod Save America cohost Dan Pfeiffer: “Trump turned his ballroom into a midterm gift for Democrats.”
■ Mark Jacob at Stop the Presses: “Let’s be optimistic—but not too optimistic. … Special elections have scared the hell out of Republicans.”
■ The Justice Department’s suing Illinois for access to its (your) complete, unredacted voter registration database.
■ The New York Times (gift link): Trump’s administration is demanding the names of Georgia’s 2020 election workers.■ Wonkette’s Gary Legum channels the acting attorney general: “Check my ID or I, Todd Blanche, will unleash the wrath of the United States government on your restaurant.”
‘Another day, another batshit speech.’ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich: Trump “brags about pointing at a squirrel.”
■ Trump’s boast that “I’m the only president to take a cognitive test” prompted this question from Jon Stewart: “Why do you think that is?”
■ Journalism monitor Margaret Sullivan condemns the media’s double standard in covering Trump: “Call it normalizing, sane-washing or giving him the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t serve the public.”
■ Former Chicago television news executive Jennifer Schulze warns that “local TV news is vanishing.”
‘War on Black America.’ MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow last night devastatingly detailed the Trump administration’s efforts to rid the nation of “the multiracial democracy that our Constitution is supposed to protect” …
■ … including an end to federal contracts’ explicit ban on “segregated facilities” (March 20 link).
■ See her segment here.
■ Veteran journalist Dan Rather: “Racism is alive and unwell. My front row seat to history helped me understand America’s complicated racist history.”
Trump vs. Leo—again. As his Catholic secretary of state planned to meet with the pope, the president took another false swipe at the church’s Chicago-born leader.
■ A number of reports say Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin—increasingly fearing for his life—has taken to living in bunkers.
‘Powerful coverage.’ For its documentation of “the Trump administration’s militarized immigration sweep” of Chicago, the Pulitzer Prize board has awarded the Tribune the prize for local reporting.
■ Sadly for democracy, the capstone of that reporting, “64 days in Chicago: The story of Operation Midway Blitz,” remains behind a paywall—but here’s a gift link.
■ The Washington Post won the public service prize—in part for reporting by a journalist whose home was later raided by the FBI.
■ The fiction Pulitzer went to Evanston’s Daniel Kraus for what the board calls “a breathless novel of World War I … that blends such … allegory, magical realism and science fiction.”
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones: A guy left ESPN to launch a podcast that won a Pulitzer.
■ Here’s a full list of this year’s winners.
Trump’s Uno goof. Stephen Colbert notes the president’s social media boast that he has “all the cards” in the Iran war displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how that card game works.
■ As Colbert’s show approaches its finale later this month, one of its longtime writers and cast members, Chicago-area native Brian Stack, reviews his three decades in late-night TV.
■ Almost half a century after the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati made its debut, Cincinnati has an actual WKRP Radio.‘We’re not lion about being understaffed.’ That was one of the protest signs on display as Brookfield Zoo workers went on strike.
■ More than a hundred University of Chicago Press workers have formed a union.
Good news on health. Your Local Epidemiologist offers a handful of reasons to be cheerful.
■ Citing an expiring lease and high levels of theft and violence, Walgreens is closing its only store in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood …
■ … triggering protests of the region’s growing “pharmacy desert.”
■ Block Club: Since the end of a pandemic ban on evictions, Cook County landlords have filed for more than 40,000 of ’em.
Cruise contamination. The AP has video from inside a ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak.
■ USA Today’s Chicago-based columnist Rex Huppke is asking readers to explain cruises’ appeal: “As much as I hear about people loving to go … I also hear about cruises that swiftly devolve into the basic starting scenario of most zombie movies.”
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