Trump’s racist demand / Don’t get comfy / WWCD?

Trump’s racist demand. The president’s threatening to kill a deal for a new football stadium if Washington’s team doesn’t forsake the name Commanders and return to a word offensive to indigenous people.
Trump’s also fantasized on his Truth Social platform about tossing Barack Obama in jail—as his administration takes steps that could lead to just that …
 … all of which brings to mind a vintage internet meme.

Did Trump write it? Rising to the challenge of Trump defenders who contend a note The Wall Street Journal says he wrote to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein doesn’t read like Trump’s work, Popular Information begs to differ—and has the receipts.
Poynter’s Tom Jones: Trump’s suit against the Journal “is designed, in part, to scare all media outlets.”
Liz Dye at Law & Chaos calls it another of Trump’s “garbage pleadings … consisting of just 18 threadbare pages larded with inflammatory rhetoric. … As to actual law … not so much.”
Lawyer/columnist Robert Hubbell: “Ever since the Watergate scandal, it has been accepted political wisdom that ‘The cover-up is (usually) worse than the crime.’ Not so here. Both the cover-up and the crime are depraved.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson notes social media skepticism about the president’s health: “Chronic venous insufficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein Files still haven’t been released.”

Chicago on ICE alert. A Tribune analysis finds a big increase in the number of immigrants detained in the area—especially of people with no known criminal background.
Axios: In January, ICE arrested 160 people in Illinois, of whom 31% faced no criminal charge.
Veteran Chicago journalist Jeff Kamen: “I can tell you with a great deal of confidence that most of the FBI and DEA officers who are being pressed into supporting brutal performative ICE operations are nauseated.”
Block Club: Federal agents broke a Chicago mom’s car window to detain her outside her Montclare home.
She shared much of the encounter on Facebook Live.
Vandals spray-painted “ICE rules” and swastikas on Little Village buildings—including the office of a state senator.
The AP: Volunteers are flocking to immigration courts to support migrants getting arrested in the hallways.
The Sun-Times: A Chicago soccer club for kids, founded by an immigrant, is sending players to the pros and the Under-17 World Cup.

Don’t get comfy. Chicago’s air today ranks as “unhealthy,” with a return to the 90s by Wednesday.
 [Missing link added] The Trib reports: The Midwest’s “silent killer,” climate-change-fueled topsoil erosion, has crop experts worried.
Young climate activists yesterday gathered to push Illinois legislation that would make the fossil fuel industry fund environmental protection programs.
Gov. Pritzker’s pushing lawmakers to take action against State Farm for a huge increase in homeowner insurance rates—a thing the company blames on climate-driven extreme weather events.
See an armadillo or a black bear in Illinois—pushed north by warmer weather? The state wants to hear from you.

‘Downtown Day.’ Block Club reports that hundreds of kids from the West and South Sides gathered Saturday for a celebration organized by Chicago-based nonprofit My Block, My Hood, My City—to show them city perks they rarely experience.
Newcity publisher Brian Hieggelke: “It is time to put red-light cameras at every intersection in downtown Chicago.”

WWCD? CNN media-watcher Brian Stelter speculates on what to expect as Stephen Colbert tonight delivers his first Late Show since announcing that CBS would cancel the series in 10 months.
Stelter says local CBS stations have reason to fear loss of “the Colbert bump” for their 10 p.m. (Central) newscasts.
Public Notice columnist Noah Berlatsky fears that “execs at CBS’s parent company Paramount may have dumped Colbert not to appease Trump, but to join with him.”
A Tribune editorial (gift link, courtesy of Chicago Public Square supporters like you) is hopeful about that 10-month grace period: “The host and his staff have the chance for lots of unfettered comedic and political creativity. It can be freeing to know you are on your way out.”
Journalism visionary Jeff Jarvis conceives a future in which Colbert takes a stand against “fascist authoritarians and craven capitalists … by making his own, independent media.”
From 2011: The Tribune’s Chris Borrelli assessed the political consequences of Colbert’s growing sphere of influence.
Even though he’s not gone yet, Common Cause has launched an online petition to “Tell CBS: Bring Colbert back.”

A home run. John Oliver was on hand before a record-setting crowd as the minor league baseball team he rebranded, the Detroit Tigers’ Pennsylvania minor league affiliate, made its debut as the Erie Moon Mammoths.
He waxed enthusiastic about the sport: “Over half the league was willing to … put their trust in the hands of a group of people who are untrustworthy. That’s a bad decision. And it is that kind of bad decision-making that I love about Minor League Baseball.”

‘My son, Neil Steinberg Jr., will be taking over this space.’ Neil Steinberg’s joking as he warns against replacing a Chicago City Council member with that guy’s son.

Colbert’s out / ‘This is absolutely insane’ / Death by AI / Quizzes!

Colbert’s out—next year. Days after he accused corporate parent Paramount of settling a Donald Trump lawsuit to win government approval for a merger, Stephen Colbert told his audience that CBS is canceling his show as of next May.
A statement from Paramount’s corporate overlords doth protest too much: “This is purely a financial decision. … It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters” …
 … but long-time late-night observer Bill Carter says “the timing tells a different story.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter: “The incoming owner wants a big change made, but doesn't want the blame, so the outgoing owner does the dirty work.”
Chicago-born journalist and friend of Colbert Jonathan Alter: “If you think The Late Show got torched just for ‘financial reasons,’ I’ve got swampland to sell you.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.”
David Graham at The Atlantic: “The network that once made Cronkite the most trusted man in America no longer gets the benefit of the doubt.”
Trump’s gleeful: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired.”
Let us not forget Colbert’s career was forged in Chicago—at Northwestern University and Second City.
Amid speculation his Daily Show could be next in Paramount’s sights, Jon Stewart says: “Let me tell you something—I’ve been kicked out of shittier establishments than that. We’ll land on our feet.”
ABC host Jimmy Kimmel: “Fuck you and all your Sheldons CBS.”

Elsewhere on the dial … The House has sent Trump that bill to strip a billion bucks from public radio and TV stations.
As bad as that is for Illinois public media—including Sun-Times and WBEZ owner Chicago Public Media—it stands to devastate the rural U.S.
Columnist Neil Steinberg: “Enjoy the national museums while they’re still here.”

Game on. It’s Trump vs. longtime enabler Rupert Murdoch as Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal reveals that Trump—who’s struggled mightily to deny a relationship with now-dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—in 2003 sent Epstein a bawdy 50th birthday greeting that concluded, “May every day be another wonderful secret” (gift link, courtesy of Chicago Public Square supporters).
Trump’s promising (another) legal action against Murdoch: “I’m going to sue his ass off.”
Stelter observed early today: “And yet … Murdoch’s Fox News has not mentioned the story once.”
Law prof Joyce Vance: “The Epstein scandal is starting to look like an albatross around this administration’s neck that can’t be removed.”
Men Yell at Me columnist Lyz Lenz’s Dingus of the Week: The Epstein Files.
After Coldplay leader Chris Martin called out a couple canoodling at a concert Wednesday, internet sleuths ID’d them as a tech CEO and his head of human relations.

‘This is absolutely insane.’ Sen. Cory Booker and other Democrats—including Illinois’ Dick Durbin—walked out of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday …
 … after Iowa’s Chuck Grassley cut off their comments on the nomination of one of Trump’s former criminal defense lawyers to a lifetime appointment on a federal appeals court.
The federal prosecutor who helped convict Epstein—Maurene Comey, abruptly fired this week—writes to her colleagues: “If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain. Do not let that happen. Fear is the tool of a tyrant.”

Chicago’s ‘good trouble.’ The turnout paled in contrast to last month’s “No Kings” rally, but hundreds showed up downtown last night for another round of Trump protests.
Mayor Johnson told demonstrators the city won’t cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. (Photos: A Square fan.)
Columnist Robert Hubbell: “It is no cause for disappointment that every new protest is not the largest in history; indeed, it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise.”

Know someone on Medicaid? Now so will ICE—under what the AP says is an agreement that’ll give the agency access to personal data— including home addresses and ethnicities—of the nation’s 79 million recipients.
The Tribune reports that Cicero residents are demanding the town president take action after yet another stop by unidentified federal agents.
Public Notice columnist David Lurie: “The U.S. for the first time will have a massive federal police force with its own rapidly growing concentration camp system.”
PolitiFact: Trump’s assertion that the “worst of the worst” have been detained at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” internment center is off the mark.
WBEZ’s Chip Mitchell reports: An ex-Guantánamo Bay detainee will get to testify about alleged torture by an ex-Chicago detective.

Death by AI. Pulitzer-winner Dave Barry writes: “I found out about my death the way everybody finds out everything: From Google.”
In what their firm concedes was a “serious lapse,” lawyers hired by the Chicago Housing Authority confess to having used ChatGPT to write a post-trial motion that cited a non-existent Illinois Supreme Court case.
Having secured an upgrade in Chicago’s ethics ordinance, Inspector General Deborah Witzburg says she’s hanging it up after this term.

‘All you have to do is fill in the blanks from recent headlines.’ The Conversation’s quizmaster, past Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel, pronounces this week’s news quiz so easy.
Your Chicago Public Square columnist nevertheless blew two answers …
 … but nailed a perfect score in City Cast’s latest Chicago news quiz.

With corporate media bending the knee daily … Independent news sources—like many you’ll find linked here in Squareneed your support more than ever.
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