He’s baaaaaa-aaaack / Prosecutors’ puzzle / Year of the Lies

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He’s baaaaaa-aaaack. Block Club: Border Patrol boss Gregory Bovino and about 200 of his lackeys have returned to the Chicago area—today targeting Cicero.
■ WBEZ and the Sun-Times trace his roots—including a father who was imprisoned after a drunk-driving accident that killed a 20-year-old woman.

DePressing. DePaul University’s laying off 114 staffers …
■ … citing in part the Trump administration’s moves to cut the number of foreign students studying on American campuses.
■ The American Prospect: Republicans are forcing eight million student loan borrowers into repayment.

Prosecutors’ puzzle. Updating coverage: Police say Nick Reiner is “responsible” for the deaths of his parents, filmmaker Rob Reiner and producer Michele Reiner …
■ … but the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office had yet to decide whether and how to charge him.
■ In a revealing and heartbreaking account, Hollywood Reporter tech and politics editor Steven Zeitchik recalls sitting down with Rob, Michele and Nick: “Strip away the larger-than-life persona of the father and the son’s addiction struggles (and maybe not even that) and it becomes any other tense family dinner where baggage and demons hover.”
■ A number of accounts indicate that Nick and Rob got into an argument at a party Conan O’Brien hosted Saturday night.
■ Popular Information: Rob “leaves behind a rich political legacy.”
■ That includes the movie that inspired the series The West Wing: The American President, which historian Heather Cox Richardson celebrates for its “meditation on what it means to be the president of the United States.”
■ Michele inspired the happy ending to Rob’s movie When Harry Met Sally…

‘What is wrong with him?’ Add Gov. Pritzker, who met with Rob and Michele Reiner just last week, to the list of those condemning President Trump’s hateful remarks about them. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
■ Columnist Eric Zorn calls it “a new low, but probably not rock bottom.”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “We are a sick country with a person like Trump at the helm. Reiner knew that. … Now, more people, even those who’ve devoted themselves to the president, are seeing it as well.”
■ Rocker Jack White addressed the president directly: “You disgusting, vile, egomaniac, loser child.”
■ Trump niece Mary Trump: “You are a depraved, deviant, damaged little man who cannot bear the thought that there are people in this world who are talented, valued and loved—three things you are not.”
■ Jimmy Kimmel: “Rob Reiner … would want us to keep pointing out the loathsome atrocities that continue to ooze out of this sick and irresponsible man’s mouth. And so we’re going to do that over and over again until the rest of us wake up.”
■ Late-night chronicler Bill Carter: “Hosts who went on the air last night … made four different choices in how they would deal with topical news this disturbing.”
■ Columnist Elaine Soloway, 87, is petitioning God: “Hold off on any age/illness demise until Trump is out of office.”

‘A weekend of hellish violence.’ A Tribune editorial (gift link) ponders the mayhem “that seemed to explode across the planet just as the season of peace and goodwill was getting underway.”
■ Australian police are linking say the Bondi Beach massacre—which (clarifying yesterday’s Chicago Public Square) took at least 15 lives—was “inspired by Islamic State” …
■ … and Jewish leaders in the U.S. are urging increased security measures for public events celebrating Hanukkah.
■ The (at Square’s deadline) unresolved hunt for a Brown University killer who took the lives of an aspiring neurosurgeon and a leading student Republican has sparked a campus petition for increased security.
■ The Onion (again and again and again and again): “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

‘I could have gone either way.’ Pritzker says his decision to sign Illinois’ new “right-to-die” law was a close one.
■ Here’s what’s in that law.

All opposed, say ‘AI.’ Add the Tribune to the list of media organizations going to court complaining that an artificial intelligence company’s been stealing its work.
■ Illinois lawmakers are vowing not to back down in the face of a Trump executive order shielding tech companies from state laws.

Year of the Lies. That’s what PolitiFact has dubbed 2025.
■ Editor & Publisher reviews a year of fear for U.S. news media.
■ The BBC’s the latest media company to face a Trump lawsuit—this one to the tune of $10 billion.
■ CNN’s Brian Stelter: “Until this year, it was unheard of for a sitting American president to sue a news outlet.”
■ Columnist Julie Roginsky: “Trump is a psychopath. And the media is complicit.”
■ Mark Jacob at Stop the Presses: “What if a member of the public—not me, but someone—created a GoFundMe account that would pay big bucks to the first reporter to tell Trump to his face that he should f– off?”

Thanks. Mike Braden made this edition better.

Cultural giant gone / ‘Illinois is back’ / SNL’s AI backlash

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Cultural giant gone. Updating coverage: Director-actor Rob Reiner and his wife Michele are dead—apparently stabbed in their Los Angeles home.
■ Columnist Charlotte Clymer: “He created some of the greatest films across numerous genres.”
■ Here’s Reiner in September, interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air.
■ Without evidence—and in contradiction of early reports—President Trump attributed the deaths to Reiner’s “massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

‘The horrors continue.’ Media writer Tom Jones reviews how reporters covered a weekend of mass shootings across two continents …
■ … including what appeared to have been a father-son attack on a Hanukkah celebration along Australia’s Bondi Beach—killing at least 15, including a 10-year-old girl, a rabbi and a Holocaust survivor and hurting dozens of others.
■ Time: Australians’ assumption “that their schools and malls and beaches were almost assuredly gun-free … has now been shattered.”
■ Julie Roginsky at Salty Politics: The Bondi attack exposed “not a new virus but an old one that has learned how to survive in modern conditions.”
■ Chicago radio, NBC and NPR veteran Jeff Kamen—who’s reported from Australia: “There was a terrible failure of the Australian government to provide any real security at the Hanukkah celebration … which should have been regarded by the authorities as a very likely target for attack.”
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg: “Jews carry the stain of recent Israeli policy in Gaza, and no joyous gathering anywhere on earth can be free from the risk of blame showing up, uninvited.”
■ One of the heroes in this case—a Muslim father of two who wrested a gun from one of the attackers—may lose an arm.

‘No, Mr. President, that is not all you can do.’ Philadelphia Inquirer columnist—and Brown University alumnus—Will Bunch (gift link) says Trump blew it in his response to a Brown assault that left two dead and nine wounded …
■ Lawyer and columnist Robert Hubbell: That “an assault rifle ban is not a complete answer to mass shootings … does not mean it should not be enacted.”
■ Your Local Epidemiologist: Mass shootings outnumber days in the U.S.

‘Serious questions … cry out for an independent investigation.’ A Tribune editorial (gift link) demands Chicago take seriously a complaint that a Chicago cop’s shooting and killing of his partner—and estranged romantic partner—wasn’t an accident (Dec. 10 Sun-Times link).
■ Separately, the Trib reports, “the process for meting out discipline in the most serious cases of misconduct by Chicago police officers has been largely at a standstill for more than two years.”

‘Illinois is back.’ Politico’s Shia Kapos says this is again “a hub of national political activity. … Suddenly, the state’s tourism slogan—‘Middle of Everything’—feels less like branding and more like political reality.”
■ MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow celebrated Chicago’s ICE resistance in a special recorded here and broadcast Friday: “Honestly, Chicago, you won.”
■ The New Republic: Chicago’s “making a genuine difference.”
■ The Media and Democracy Project’s Hero of the Month: The Chicago Headline Club, for its “bold fight against the Trump regime’s recent assault on the people and the press of Chicago.”
■ WBEZ: A group of Chicago teens is raising money to help classmates whose parents are stuck in immigration detention.

Face it. Reveal and 404 Media detail a Chicago case illustrating how the feds are “scanning people’s faces with a facial recognition app that brings up their name, date of birth, ‘alien number’ if they’re an immigrant, and whether they have an order of deportation.”
■ Columnist Steven Beschloss on state and federal lawmakers’ pushback against federal agents concealing their identities: “Enough with the masked men.”

‘Trump officials celebrated with cake. … Then people died of cholera.’ ProPublica tracks the consequences of cuts in U.S. aid to South Sudan.
■ Popular Information: “As measles ravages South Carolina, RFK Jr. undermines the vaccine.”

But … but … the year’s not done yet! Nevertheless, fact-checker Glenn Kessler has curated a list of the top 10 lies of 2025 from Donald Trump—“a president who produces falsehoods faster than fact-checkers can catalog them.”
■ Contrarian columnist Jennifer Rubin warns that the president’s “losing it”—and a wounded, humiliated Trump may be the most dangerous of all.
■ Journalism watchdog Margaret Sullivan: As the U.S. has slid into authoritarianism, news media are still stuck in old ways.

Photos of the year. The Trib’s assembled its photographers’ 100 best in 2025 (gift link).
■ Merriam-Webster’s word of the year: Slop.

SNL’s AI backlash. Viewers have been dinging Saturday Night Live over its apparent use of AI-generated imagery.
■ Columnist Matthew Yglesias has talked himself into accepting a Netflix-Warner merger—with a few concerns.
■ Economist Paul Krugman: Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner “is, above all, a political move in the pursuit of cementing the dominance of MAGA-supporting tech billionaires.”

Thanks. Mike Braden made this edition better.

A Square public service announcement
Add some journalism sparkle to your holiday season. The Chicago Headline Club Foundation will host a screening of All the President’s Men, 5:15 p.m., Thursday at the Siskel Film Center—a fundraising event to support the foundation’s scholarship and internship programs. Tickets available here.

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