Class dismissed / ‘Elmo can’t go back!’ / ‘A big fat bribe’

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Class dismissed. The Supreme Court’s cleared Donald Trump to cut nearly 1,400 employees of the Education Department …
■ … kneecapping the enforcement of civil rights protections for girls, students with disabilities, children of color and LGBTQ+ kids.
■ Read the decision here.
■ The American Prospect: The Republican wrecking ball is slamming through the U.S. medical system.
■ Block Club: As pressure from Trump mounts, Chicago’s Rush Medical Center is rolling back its gender-affirming care for minors.

Try not to inhale. Blame wildfire smoke in part for an air quality alert in effect through at least tonight.
■ Heavy rains across the Northeast triggered a state of emergency for New York and New Jersey, stranding vehicles and closing subway lines.

‘Companies are lining up to get out of repaying harmed customers.’ A former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director tells the AP that bureau employees are watching hopelessly as Republicans undo their work.
■ Columnist Robert Kuttner: “Trump’s destruction and the needed rebuilding should be a theme in every election between now and 2028.”
■ Ex-U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “15 months—476 days—remain until the 2026 midterm elections. The ballot on Nov. 3, 2026, will contain every House seat, 35 Senate seats, and thousands more at the state and local level. If our democracy survives that long.”

‘Elmo can’t go back on the streets, Jon!’ In a comedy tour de force last night, Jon Stewart interviewed “Elmo” (voiced by Stewart) about the antisemitic remarks attributed to Elmo after the hacking of his Twitter X account …
■ … only to have the puppet concede the tweets constituted pandering to Trump’s acolytes to avert cuts for PBS funding.
■ See the whole bit here.

This Way Out. Stop the Presses columnist Mark Jacob offers five scenarios for averting a Trump dictatorship.
■ CNN: Fox News has taken Trump’s plea for his allies to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein almost literally.
■ USA Today’s Chicago-based columnist Rex Huppke goes the other way, invoking Epstein’s name close to 50 times—concluding: “And definitely don’t look at the sentence that the first letter of each paragraph above spells out.”
■ Law professor and former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance gets out the popcorn to watch the war the Epstein saga has triggered between the FBI and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
■ Reuters: Two-thirds of Bondi’s staff charged with defending Trump’s policies in court have quit. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
■ Mother Jones’ Dan Friedman appeals to Democrats: “Stop taking the Epstein bait. … There are more than enough real Trump scandals.”

‘Fire fans contra ICE.’ That banner at Saturday’s game got ticketholders banned for a year.
■ Newcity publisher Brian Hieggelke, who was there: “I started fearing an ICE raid … for no logical or apparent reason other than the times in which we are living.”
■ Press Watch journalism critic Dan Froomkin says mainstream media’s anodyne coverage of Trump’s plans for “kidnapping our undocumented friends and neighbors and rendering them to random third countries where they may face torture, persecution or death” has “normalized evil.”

‘BOMB PLANTED.’ That threat to a Chicago city council member, posted on Facebook, has led to a Hyde Park man’s detention.
■ Mayor Johnson’s come to terms with the city’s inspector general on an ordinance that would limit his office’s power to obstruct ethics investigations.

Watch that speedometer. Block Club: Chicago’s added six more speed cameras.
■ See the full list of the city’s 200 or so camera locations here.

‘A big fat bribe.’ Back from a two-week break, Stephen Colbert didn’t hold back in condemning his Paramount bosses for their legal settlement with Trump.
■ Probably for the first time, broadcast TV networks’ share of viewing last month dropped below 20 percent.
■ Layoffs at Chicago’s WCIU include host, critic and podcaster Brandon Pope.
■ Updating coverage: At Chicago Public Square’s email publication deadline, Emmy nominations were being announced.

What could go wrong? Days after Elon Musk’s pet AI, Grok, went full Nazi, the Pentagon’s announced a multimillion-dollar plan to use Grok for national security stuff.
■ CNN’s Hadas Gold: Grok’s not the only AI entity easily nudged into antisemitism, misogyny or racism.
■ Platformer tracks conservative efforts to outlaw AI entities’ criticism of Trump.

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Thanks. Jim Polaski made this edition better.

‘It’s dangerous to continue this’ / Thursday: ‘Make Good Trouble’ / Classical hacks

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‘It’s dangerous to continue this.’ As climate-change-driven summer storms menace the Chicago area, the Tribune tracks rising concern that Trump administration cuts to the National Weather Service will make things worse (gift link, courtesy of Chicago Public Square supporters like you).
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg, 30 years after Chicago’s deadly 1995 heat wave: “We pay lip service to problems, but the underlying social conditions are the same, or worse.”

‘They should have been paying attention.’ A lawyer whose two girls were rescued from Texas’ flood-devastated Camp Mystic reacts to Washington Post reporting (another gift link) that the camp’s executive director—who died in the onslaught—didn’t begin an evacuation for more than an hour after he got a phone alert.
■ The search for victims was to resume today—after yet another round of heavy precipitation.
■ Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice on the president’s rejection of any role in the disaster: “If Trump is never responsible for disaster, it makes sense that he shouldn’t prepare for disasters.”
■ Death threats against a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who used the Texas tragedy to jab those who maintain “government is the problem, not the solution” prompted cancellation of a Buffalo event to support local journalism.
■ The American Prospect: “Trump administration policy is now to make all future clean-energy projects as unprofitable as possible.”

Thursday: ‘Make Good Trouble.’ Lawyer/columnist Robert Hubbell says the timing couldn’t be better for this week’s sequel to the “No Kings” rallies.
■ Find—or maybe you’d rather avoid?—an event near you.
■ Journalist Karen Attiah: “Resistance Summer School is officially in session! Columbia cancelled my class on Race and Media, but I’m teaching the people anyway.”

‘The Epstein scandal is unlike any Trump scandal before.’ Acknowledging that it can seem like just “an enjoyable distraction from democracy circling the drain,” columnist and Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer explains why Donald Trump’s links to dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is looking increasingly “like the kind of scandal that has undone second-term presidents.”
■ Judd Legum at Popular Information says it’s one of the first issues “to create a genuine rift between Trump and his MAGA base.”
■ Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias: Trump seems to have pivoted “from insisting that there are no Epstein files to acknowledging their fabled existence.”
■ … a thing that historian Heather Cox Richardson perceives as “an extraordinary rift in MAGA world.”
■ CNN’s Brian Stelter: The conspiracy theories that put Trump in power are “coming back to bite him.”

‘I triggered another federal investigation.’ Sources tell investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein “the California National Guard cut off soldier access to vital military information because of what I reported on Tuesday.”
■ Columnist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich reassures readers concerned about his safety as he criticizes Trump and his acolytes: “I assure you I won’t take unnecessary risks. But I’m not going to stop speaking out.”
■ Jack Mirkinson at Discourse Blog: Journalist/entrepreneur Bari Weiss “is a perfect fit for the new CBS News … for the worst possible reasons.”

‘Making Immigration Great Again.’ Economist Paul Krugman says Trump’s inhumane actions have “reminded America that immigrants are people.”
■ The Tribune reports that a 47-year-old Lyons father in this country for decades—with a clean record—has become the face of a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
■ The Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times has published a database of “more than 700 people who have been detained or appear to be scheduled to be sent” to the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp.
■ PolitiFact rates “Mostly True” the assertion that “ICE will now become the country’s largest federal law enforcement agency.”

Classical hacks. Hackers reportedly have exposed financial data, contracts, payroll information and more from Chicago’s storied classical music station, WFMT.
■ Corporate parent Sesame Workshop now says Elmo’s Twitter X account has been “secured” after having been hijacked by someone who used it to spew expletive-filled antisemitic rants and anti-Trump statements.
■ The author of a new book, Attention and Alienation, ponders whether the internet can become a place where kindness flourishes.

E-bike bewilderment. When it comes to who gets to ride electric bicycles where in Chicago’s suburbs, the Trib documents wide disparity—and confusion to match.
■ The Cyclist Choice website reviews laws across the state: “Sidewalks are a no-go, so steer clear of them.”

Thanks. Mike Braden made this edition better.

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