'I am concerned' / 'This is not a way to live' / Thanks, COVID

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'I am concerned' / 'This is not a way to live' / Thanks, COVID

‘I am concerned …’ Wisconsin’s governor has written to President Trump, asking that he please not visit violence-torn Kenosha Tuesday …
■ … but seven members of the county board are encouraging the president to come.
■ The Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet explains why “radical right media and legal figures are embracing and defending … the Antioch teen charged with a double murder in Kenosha.”
■ A Sunday rally in Evanston grieved for former Evanstonian Jacob Blake—shot in the back seven times by a Kenosha cop, triggering the upheavals there.
■ Kenosha’s top cop reports 175 arrests in the week since Blake’s shooting.

‘You bring no peace.’ The mayor of Portland—scene of 90 straight nights of civil rights protest—fired back at the president after Trump called him “a fool” in the aftermath of a fatal shooting there Saturday night.
■ The victim was allied with the right-wing group Patriot Prayer.
■ Oregon’s governor is vowing a stepped-up law enforcement presence in Portland.

‘The claim that Biden is coddling criminals will be a centerpiece of Trump’s fall campaign.’ Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington says the president’s courting suburban woman who may be wondering, “Will Joe Biden protect me and my children from the criminals who could invade my own backyard?” And, she says, “So far, Biden and Co. don’t have much of an answer.”
■ Politico: The violence in Kenosha and Portland is forcing Biden to play on Trump’s turf.
■ Incoming: The Republican strategist credited with sinking John Kerry’s 2004 Democratic presidential bid has signed on with a big-bucks pro-Trump political action committee.
■ Biden’s campaign staff is donating cash to a Minneapolis group paying bail fees for people arrested in protests of a white cop’s killing of a Black man.

‘This is not a way to live.’ The president of a property management firm is among those worried that crime and the pandemic are killing downtown Chicago’s reputation for livability.

■ A father-and-son team has published a book celebrating the artwork that has blossomed in the wake of protests around town: Boarded Up Chicago: Storefront Images Days After The George Floyd Riots. (Cartoon: Keith J. Taylor.)
■ An audit finds that, in the year after indicted Ald. Ed Burke was squeezed out of his job as chairman of the Chicago City Council Finance Committee, the committee spent about a million dollars less.

Chicago’s mass shooting. Five people were shot—one fatally—in an attack at a Morgan Park pancake house Sunday morning.
■ One person’s been charged in the shooting of two Chicago police officers on the West Side early Sunday.

‘Maybe there’s more to this sports stuff than I thought.’ The Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg, for whom athletic competition is no big thing, perceives “a valuable lesson” in the answer to the question “Why did every NBA player go along with last week’s actions, even though many of them never protested racial injustice in their lives?”
■ The first Black coach to lead a team to the NCAA men’s basketball championship is dead.
■ The Trib’s Phil Thompson: Time for the National Hockey League to step out of its racial bubble.

Thanks, COVID. United Airlines is dropping its much-hated change fees on economy and premium cabin tickets …
■ … but not for its cheapest fares.

Seen onscreen. The Twitter account of former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who died of the coronavirus last month, is still tweeting: “The virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be.”
■ Twitter has yanked a Trump tweet that shared false info about COVID stats.
■ Students at a suburban middle school found their first day of online learning disrupted by “Zoom-bombers” spewing “inappropriate, racist, religious, hateful and homophobic language.”

Earthwatch. Fires in the Arctic this year have already generated 35% more planetary-warning carbon dioxide than for all of 2019.
■ Scientific American: “What Climate Change Does to the Human Body.”
■ The Conversation: Newly hatched Florida sea turtles are consuming dangerous quantities of floating plastic.

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■ … including James VanOsdol, who helped make this edition better.

— Charlie Meyerson, August 31, 2020

But wait—there’s more!

■ Previously in Square:
'Intentional homicide' / Escapes from Chicago / This bites
'Public safety cadet' / 'Mostly false' / Deadliest year
Death in Kenosha / Republicans behaving badly / Masks up
Kenosha in crisis / 'Extreme fear porn' / Falwell from grace
Now, Kenosha / 'Look what I did!' / Zoom gloom

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