I click over to The Chicago Tribune on the daily because, frankly, no one is better at weather than Tom Skilling. I'm pretty sure Tom Skilling doesn't so much report on the weather as he controls it (magic!). Back in the old Streeter's days, my lunchtime crowd was often made up of construction dudes who would demand that I turn on the WGN news so they could check with "SkilletHead" about the weather. "Skillethead is always right," they told me. They were not wrong.
Fun fact: Tom Skilling is Jeffrey Skilling's brother. If you don't know who Jeffrey Skilling is, congratulations on forgetting about the Bush years - but seriously, you should remember the Bush years because they were terrible and instructive of how Trump is a symptom of the evils inflicted on this country and the world at large by movement conservatism and getting rid of him will not fix everything; in fact, it won't fix much of anything. We have to do it, but don't kid yourself that a Trunp-free America will soon be anywhere near what America had oughta be.
(Man, it'll be nice, though, to see the back of the lying loudmouth tacky tacky tacky old racist misogynist. Pick your candidates, volunteer, knock on doors. Engage.)
Anyhoo - back to the Trib. They also have good food critics and theater critics and some good OpEd writers. But I refuse to subscribe to them because they endorsed Gary Johnson in 2016. Gary Who? Gary Not Hillary Clinton, I'm sure, was all the hoary old conservatives manning (word choice intentional) the Trib editorial board cared about.
So they get no money of mine; but I do return, on the daily, to find out what old SkilletHead says is comin' down the weather pike or what Chris Jones thinks about whatever play I might be checking out. And I always start on the front page.
The Trib has been flogging two stories on that front page for what feels like forever (this is how time works now). One of them is the Jussie Smollett thing. We'd all be better off letting Jussie Smollett fade into obscurity. I believed him when the story first broke. Turns out he was lying. But this doesn't mean there isn't a huge surge in right-wing violence in America. It doesn't mean the CPD is suddenly a paragon of professionalism and public service. It feels less substantial as a celebrity scandal than the Varsity Blues thing.
Their other story du jour is that terrible, TERRIBLE story about the Crystal Lake couple that murdered their 5 year old son. That is such a tragic, horrifying, upsetting story. But I also don't get why it remains front page news. Those two should die in jail - what more is there to say about it? I guess there's an argument that the bigger story is how the system failed that little boy - but it sure does feel like the paper is trotting out the pictures of those two monsters for us to gawk at and feel superior to (lord, is a lower bar possible?).
Earlier today, I clicked over to the Trib on my way to find out if it'd be raining tomorrow (it will) and saw a breaking news post about William Barr deciding to skip the House Judiciary Hearing. "Can he just do that?" I wondered. But I had some work to do and figured I'd come back to that later.
When I went back, I had to scroll past two stories about Jussie Smollett before I got to one about Bill Barr.
