Climate derange / ‘Pants on Fire’ / Wildcuts

Climate derange. Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency chief is proposing to rescind a scientific declaration that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases fuel global warming and endanger humanity.
 Economist Paul Krugman on what looked like European Union concessions to Trump—including a “sort-of” pledge to invest in U.S. oil and gas: “Europe played Trump for a fool. Specifically, a fossil fool.”
 The American Prospect: A rule requiring employers to protect workers from extreme heat is in limbo under Trump.
 Next for Chicago’s forecast: Heavy downpours and flash flood risks …
 … as Southwest Siders push for emergency recovery help after flooding Friday and again Monday.
 A term this summer’s hot weather should add to your vocabulary: “Wet-bulb” temperatures.

Shaken, but not too stirred. Updating coverage: An earthquake in Russia sent tsunami waves into Japan, Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast.

Your election privacy on the line. The Trump administration’s asking Illinois to surrender its vast voter registration records—including sensitive data about individual voters.

‘Claiming a 17-year-old girl who fell into the hands of sex traffickers was stolen from you is the kind of thinking that makes sex trafficking possible.’ That’s USA Today’s Chicago-based columnist, Rex Huppke, on Trump’s complaint—“without a hint of empathy or compassion”—that now-dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “stole” a teenage spa worker from Mar-a-Lago.
 Closer to the Edge: Trump’s words “should have shattered headlines and ignited congressional investigations.”
 Popular Information: The president’s callous account raises at least four thorny new questions for him.
 Seth Meyers on Late Night: “Vice President J.D. Vance said that President Trump has been ‘incredibly transparent about that stuff.’ And I agree. We can absolutely see right through him.”
 Columnist Neil Steinberg: “If you are discovering the president is a liar and a perv, well, welcome to the party. But pardon me if I don’t share your excitement, because you’re discovering the painfully obvious.”
 Men Yell at Me columnist Lyz Lenz says Epstein’s imprisoned accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, “is swinging on the monkey bars of power, privilege and patriarchy.”

‘An employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct.’ The Trump administration has cleared federal workers to proselytize their colleagues.
 Stephen Colbert: “Of course, converting people to your religion is always very chill. That’s why all those people died in the Spanish Gentle Suggestion.”
 Desi Lydic on The Daily Show: “If you’re going to approach me at work and ask, ‘Have you heard the good news?’ it better mean there are donuts in the break room. Otherwise, keep it moving, Zachariah.”

‘Pants on Fire.’
That’s PolitiFact’s rating of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that “there is no starvation in Gaza.”
 An Army veteran who worked for the American and Israeli-backed nonprofit that has been given almost full control over food distribution to starving civilians, and that has reportedly been shooting and killing some of those very civilians: “I witnessed war crimes.”
 The Feed on social media platforms’ repressive policies: “If you post the word Gaza, you’re shadowbanned, demonetized or dropped from brand deals.”

‘The DOGE Boys and the barely-crypto Nazi punk overlords have, at baseline, slowed this down to the point where they’re making money on the deal by not sending it to a qualified American (me).’ Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Jack Ohman is having trouble collecting on his Social Security.
 The pool of future Social Security contributors is shrinking: The U.S. fertility rate hit an all-time low last year.
 The Wall Street Journal (gift link): The administration’s backing down from an effort to pause health research funding.

Wildcuts. Squeezed by Trump administration spending freezes, Northwestern University’s eliminating 425 positions.
 Bloomberg introduces you to a young man who “could have been an artist, or a builder, or someone dedicated to seeing a great historical mystery through. Instead he wound up at the Department of Government Efficiency, slashing, dismantling, undoing.”

Got a car insurance story? The Sun-Times reports Illinois’ secretary of state—pushing for reform—wants your tales of how non-driving factors like age, credit score and ZIP code have affected insurance rates.
 Block Club: Milwaukee Avenue through Wicker Park will go car-free once a month.
 Chicago’s Northwest Side has a newly improved bike-and-pedestrian route.

The Trump-CBS deal ‘is even worse than you thought.’ Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch (gift link, courtesy of Chicago Public Square supporters) envisions how the network’s news division will function—or not—in a year.
 ABC News alumnus Terry Moran: Trump’s cronies have moved in at CBS.
 Now in the Trump-compliant Federal Communications Commission’s sights: Comcast/NBCUniversal.

It’s corrections week. Embarrassingly enough, an item in yesterday’s Square about fact-checking … um … got a fact wrong. Snopes, not PolitiFact, confirmed as True that video showing Trump cheating at golf in Scotland.

Square No. 2,000’s coming. Sometime in the next few weeks—we haven’t done the final projection—this service will deliver its bimillennial edition.
 Your support has kept it going.
 Mike Braden made this edition better.

NFL’s ‘nightmare’ / Pardon her? / Illinois’ best hospitals

NFL’s ‘nightmare.’ News that the man who committed New York City’s deadliest mass shooting in 25 years was targeting the National Football League’s offices puts the league in what CNN’s Brian Stelter calls “a dreadful position”: “Headquartered at a crime scene, supporting an employee who was seriously wounded in the attack, and facing a renewed PR nightmare about head trauma problems.”
 Updating coverage from the AP: Police say the gunman—who took his own life—had a “documented mental health history.”
 He reportedly took the wrong elevator.

‘I’m tired of forcing our children to duck and cover.’ Gov. Pritzker’s signed legislation requiring gun owners to do more to keep their weapons out of kids’ hands.
 A judge has ordered continued confinement for a man accused of shooting and killing his daughter-in-law at a Schaumburg wedding—weeks after she’d announced plans to divorce his son.
 Columnist Ron Fournier asks in despair: “Will we ever come to grips with the gun and mental health crises?

‘Inhumane.’ That’s how a woman—a leader of Organized Communities Against Deportations arrested during her immigration check-in last month—describes conditions at Broadview’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility.
 Wonkette: “Would you believe a bunch of immigration agents lied about protestors assaulting them?”
 Trump’s Justice Department has filed a complaint against a judge who blocked deportations.

‘Make sure they get the food.’ President Trump’s applied a little pressure to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the famine conditions Israel has imposed on Gaza.
 Democrats—led by four Jewish senators—say that’s not enough.
 Gaza’s health ministry: The 21-month war has cost more than 60,000 Palestinians their lives.
 Seth Meyers broke format on Late Night to get serious: “We are appalled by the unspeakable horrors currently unfolding in Gaza.”

Pardon her? Popular Information’s Judd Legum explores Trump’s “personal interest in leading [convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine] Maxwell to believe that a pardon is a possibility, regardless of whether he ever intends to grant her one.”
 Andrew Egger at The Bulwark: “If Trump and his allies can convince their base that she … is the key to unlocking the [now-dead sex offender Jeffrey] Epstein story, they can recast their own role … as the people seeking out the critical information by getting Epstein’s top co-conspirator to at last spill the beans.”
 Maxwell’s also asking the Supreme Court to overturn her conviction. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
 Late night hosts had a field day with Trump’s phrasing when asked if he’d ever visited Epstein’s island: “I never had the privilege.”

Caught cheating. PolitiFact Snopes confirms as True video showing Trump cheating at golf in Scotland over the weekend …
 USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “It was nice of Donald Trump to travel to Scotland and show our European allies firsthand that the United States is led by a self-absorbed and deeply weird man in obvious mental decline.”
 Out at The Washington Post after 14 years: Fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
 Ex-Tribune columnist Eric Zorn on trolls celebrating layoffs at the Trib: “You’re a shitty person if you revel in the misfortune of hardworking, decent people. And you’re an idiot if you think weakened daily newspapers will improve our city.”

‘Carr used the FCC as a tool.’ The Freedom of the Press Foundation is asking the District of Columbia Bar’s disciplinary council to consider disbarring Federal Communications Commission chief Brendan Carr for his pressure on media organizations—notably, a “shakedown” of CBS parent Paramount Global—to benefit Trump.
 Pulitzer winner Gene Weingarten looks back to a time in 1967 when CBS “extinguished a performance by folk singer Pete Seeger on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for shabby and spineless reasons.”

Illinois’ best hospitals. U.S. News & World Report’s latest ratings put Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Rush University Medical Center in a tie …
 … although that report was compiled before the air conditioning in the main Rush tower downtown went south.
 Check your hospital’s ranking here.
 Abortion, Every Day: “We really needed a win, and we got one!

Not so bad. Concluding that Trump’s protectionist policies have so far proven less damaging than feared, the International Monetary Fund is upgrading the U.S. economic outlook …
 Economist Paul Krugman: “I coulda made a better deal” than Trump got from Europe.

R.I.P., Ryno. Iconic Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg is dead of cancer at 65.
 Just last week, he issued what apparently was his final message to fans.
 The AP calls the trade that brought him here “one of the most lopsided deals in baseball history.”

‘Do you love music enough to deal with this crap?’ As Lollapalooza returns to Chicago Thursday, the Reader’s Leor Galil is not enthusiastic.
 Erica Thompson at the Sun-Times: R&B and soul have yet to get their due at Lolla.
 Here’s the Chicago Music Guide overview of what’s new at this year’s fest.
 ProPublica: “A Las Vegas festival promised ways to cheat death. Two attendees left fighting for their lives.”

Correction corrected. The emailed republication of yesterday’s Chicago Public Square—correcting, among other things, the spelling of the word graffiti—again misspelled the word graffiti.
 And again, here’s a paywall-free link to that Will Bunch column: “Hours of TV coverage fail to grasp what really matters about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal: The anxieties of the U.S. middle class.” (Image: Bart Simpson Chalkboard Generator.)
 Making mistakes is bad; having readers who care enough to report them is great.
 Mike Braden made this edition better.

Subscribe to Square.