Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Now that the conventions are over and the campaign gets underway for real next week, the Trump regime is quietly making moves to cover up their election fraud.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has informed the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence that it'll no longer be briefing on election security issues, a senior administration official told CNN. It'll provide written updates, the official said.

Now ask yourself why the ODNI would refuse briefings on election security right before a presidential election?  Why would the regime not want Congress to ask questions directly to the ODNI's office, the people responsible for making sure the elections are protected?

I have a pretty good idea as to why.

Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, says President Trump's disinterest in election security and unwillingness to take a tough stand against Russia have made the November election more vulnerable to hacking and disinformation attacks.

Trump viewed any discussion about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election as attacking the legitimacy of his presidency – and ignored recommendations from his officials intended to help protect the vote, Taylor said in an interview.

During the first and only publicly acknowledged National Security Council meeting on election security in advance of the 2018 midterms, Taylor said, the president was dismissive, distracted and unwilling to issue a public warning to Russia and other U.S. adversaries to back off.

Instead of listening intently to officials briefing about the election threats, Trump talked about which counties he won in 2016, Taylor said. Officials were unable to convince him to issue a public warning that Russia would face serious consequences if it interfered in the midterms. Instead, those messages were largely delivered by lower-level officials.

“His bully pulpit was one of the things that we saw as most critical to keeping the bad guys from doing this,” Taylor said. “If the president of the United States stands up and says there are going to be severe repercussions, that sends a very different signal to a capital like Moscow than it does for the assistant secretary for X, Y or Z to say there will be consequences. But that’s what we were left with.”

A recent assessment from U.S. intelligence officials found that Russia is already “using a range of measures” to interfere in the 2020 contest aimed largely at hurting Trump's opponent Joe Biden.

“The president's attitude toward election security was effectively an open door to adversaries who wanted to meddle in our democracy,” Taylor said. “He has essentially offered up warm appeasement rather than tough deterrence. The consequences are evident in the fact that these countries have not been dissuaded from interfering. They have continued their efforts. In fact, more are getting in the game.”

Taylor is one of several former Trump officials to come out in favor of Biden in the 2020 election.

He's made no secret of his disdain for the president in a series of YouTube videos in recent weeks produced by the group Republican Voters Against Trump. Among his serious allegations is that Trump offered pardons to federal officials if they faced charges for actions aimed at limiting illegal border crossings.

But his criticisms on election security are particularly damning because they suggest the president is, at best, ambivalent about foreign efforts to undermine the very machinery of democracy.

He went so far as to argue the president’s disinterest in election security may be driven by an expectation that any Russian intervention in the 2020 election will help his candidacy, as it did in 2016. That’s a claim Democratic leaders have also leveled at Trump and Republican congressional leaders.

“Our biggest vulnerability from an election security standpoint going into this cycle is the president really hasn't made this a priority,” Taylor said. “He hasn't focused on how to keep governments like the Chinese, the Russians and the Iranians from meddling. And the simple reason is the president sees that interference largely as being beneficial toward him.”

The biggest single threat to national election security is Donald Trump himself. And the last thing Trump wants is televised hearings where the Acting Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe is on the hot seat saying Russia is in the middle of another massive operation to help Trump against Joe Biden while Trump is all but begging Putin to do just that.

The election is being compromised as we speak, and the cover-up is already underway.

Tales From The Trump Depression, Con't

As the Paycheck Protection Program, allowed to expire by Senate Republicans, has run out of money, and business leaders still see no clear plan from the failed Trump regime on COVID-19, companies are turning worker furloughs into millions of permanent job layoffs as the myth of the "V-shaped recovery" is being shattered.

A new wave of layoffs is washing over the U.S. as several big companies reassess staffing plans and settle in for a long period of uncertainty. 

MGM Resorts International and Stanley Black & Decker Inc. recently told some employees furloughed at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic that they wouldn’t be put back on the payroll. And companies bringing back the majority of furloughed workers, including Yelp Inc. and Cheesecake Factory Inc., are making reductions as they adjust to the new reality that many coronavirus-related closures won’t be resolved this fall.

More fresh layoffs at big employers loom. A day after Salesforce.com Inc. posted record quarterly sales, the business-software company notified its 54,000-person workforce that 1,000 would lose their jobs later this year. Coca-Cola Co. said Friday it plans to lay off some employees and offer voluntary buyouts to about 4,000 employees in the U.S. including Puerto Rico as well as Canada. American Airlines Group Inc. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. have said more than 53,000 workers could be affected in about a month if the airlines don’t receive another infusion of funds from the government. 

The outlook reflects an acceptance by corporate executives that they will have to contend with the pandemic and its economic fallout for a longer period than they had hoped. Some CEOs and other executives suggest more pain is ahead, said David Rubenstein, co-executive chairman of Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm with around $220 billion in assets under management.

“Privately, some of them may hint that they probably won’t need as many workers as they once thought,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “They’ll have to reinvent their businesses in ways that they hadn’t done before.” 

The latest layoffs come as there have been glimmers of an economic recovery. Many employers have rehired some workers after cutting jobs this spring, pushing the U.S. unemployment rate down to 10.2% in July after it nearly touched 15% in April, according to federal data. Some salaried workers and executives are seeing their pandemic pay cuts restored. That has led some to theorize that the economy is increasingly proceeding on two tracks, as companies modifying operations or shutting down entire divisions determine that they need fewer people, especially lower-income workers. 

A survey of human-resources employees released by Randstad RiseSmart found nearly half of U.S. employers that furloughed or laid off staff because of Covid-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.

New applications for unemployment benefits, a proxy for layoffs, have hovered around one million a week for much of the summer. A drop in jobless claims one week tended to be snuffed out within a few weeks when claims rose again. Summer unemployment has improved since March, when a peak of about seven million people applied for jobless benefits in one week, but the numbers remain stubbornly high.  

Economists say the new layoffs reflect a shift in corporate thinking toward a more protracted crisis. 

“Companies that thought they could either cut wages temporarily or cut costs temporarily or hold on are now finding out that the weakness of the pandemic is now longer than they hoped,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton.
Following casino shutdowns and furloughs in March, MGM Resorts said it would lay off 18,000 furloughed workers in the U.S. as the global travel slowdown impedes the gambling industry’s recovery. The job cuts, which start Monday, represent about one-fourth of the company’s prepandemic workforce of 68,000 U.S. employees.

American Airlines said that unless it receives more federal aid, it will furlough 17,500 union workers and move forward with 1,500 layoffs in its management ranks this fall. Flight attendants, 8,100 of whom are furloughed, would be the most affected. Airlines agreed not to terminate employees or cut pay rates through the end of September as a condition of taking $25 billion in federal funds. 

United Airlines said it would furlough 2,850 pilots, which is 600 more than it had anticipated, as it seeks more federal aid. United has warned that as many as 36,000 of its employees could be eliminated Oct. 1 if the airline doesn’t get more government help. The union that represents United’s pilots called it tragic that the carrier hasn’t provided more options to allow pilots to leave voluntarily. Delta Air Lines Inc. said it would let go of 1,941 pilots. 

After furloughing or reducing hours for more than 10,000 workers earlier this year, tool maker Stanley Black & Decker said that in October it will permanently lay off 1,000 of them but bring back 9,300 to a full-time schedule. Chief Executive Officer James Loree told investors on a recent call the cuts are part of a $1 billion cost reduction.
“It paves the way for us to manage successfully through any reasonable economic scenario which may unfold in the coming months,” he said. 

Hundreds of furloughed workers at C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc., one of the largest freight companies in North America, won’t be put back on the payroll, in part because their positions have been automated, the company told investors on a recent earnings call. The job cuts will become “permanent cost savings from our investments in tech,” said Bob Biesterfeld, chief executive of C.H. Robinson.

I fully expect the rebound that happened in June and July to be reversed completely and then some as the reality of a vicious COVID-19 flu season hits with the force of Hurricane Laura all across the US. We're still seeing 1,000+ deaths per day with literally no end in sight to the casualties.  We've passed six million COVID-19 cases, headed for seven million, headed for 200,000 dead by Labor Day.

By the time Joe Biden enters the Oval Office, we're going to have to deal with a full-blown depression with crippling double-digit unemployment as a pandemic burns through the US for a second year. And should Trump retain power, everything is lost.

It will take years to get us out of this hole, and that's only if Biden and the Democrats can win back the White House and Senate and keep power from the nihilist GOP in 2022, if we can avoid a full-blown terrorist insurrection by white supremacist militias, if we can avoid a pandemic causing systemic breakdown of basic services. We're going to permanently lose tens of millions of jobs, and they will have to be replaced by something.

None of this is guaranteed.  It's going to take a massive generational effort to come out of this decade just to get back to 2019's economy, much less 2005. But it starts with cleaning house and getting rid of the GOP, and getting to work again.

Without that, we're done.

The Turtle And The Sandmann

The right takes care of their own through a web of crony capitalism and nepotism, as evidenced by professional Junior Trumpentroopen Nick Sandmann getting a job with the McConnell campaign here in Kentucky.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's 2020 reelection campaign has hired Nick Sandmann, the Kentucky teenager who settled defamation lawsuits he brought against the Washington Post and CNN after his recorded encounter with a Native American elder went viral last year.

Sandmann, a Transylvania University student who was once again in the spotlight this week when he spoke at the Republican National Convention, now lists himself as a grassroots director for Team Mitch on his Twitter account.

McConnell is running for another term in the Senate this November, and Team Mitch press secretary Kate Cooksey confirmed Friday that Sandmann is a paid employee of the longtime senator's campaign.

McConnell's campaign manager Kevin Golden provided this statement on the new hire: "We’re excited to have Nicholas on Team Mitch. Along with our already strong team, his efforts to bring people together all across Kentucky will be critical to Senator McConnell’s victory this November."

He's exactly what Republicans want: a young white male face who cried FOUL and VICTIM so loudly that he was able to sue and settle with a number of media outlets, so that everyone can pretend he won a back-breaking victory over the forces of Fake Nooz™.

In reality, Sandmann settled for fractions of pennies for his multi-million dollar defamation suits and his lawyers took 95% of it, but the goal was the exposure and becoming a Racial Grievance All-Star as counter-programming to what in the right's eyes are the manufactured Black Lives Matter "victims".

It's a disgusting, toxic level of cynicism, but that's what the right needs. They need someone to rally around, a name to chant so they can "beat" the "martyrs created by the media" like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Jacob Blake and "win".

And there's nobody better at this style of manipulation than Mitch McConnell. This is the equivalent of Palpatine finding young Anakin Skywalker and taking him under his wing.

It's gross. It's also happening anyway.

The King Goes Home

Actor Chadwick Boseman, known for a number of groundbreaking black roles in film including Marvel superhero Black Panther, and two real-life superheroes, Thurgood Marshall and Jackie Robinson, has died from Stage 4 colon cancer at age 43.

In a statement posted to Twitter, the actor's reps said Boseman was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2016, but despite medical treatment, it processed to Stage 4. He had never spoken publicly about his diagnosis.

"A true fighter, Chadwick persevered through it all, and brought you many of the films you have come to love so much," his reps said.

Boseman died in his home with is family by his side, they added.

Born Nov. 29, 1977, in Anderson, South Carolina, Boseman studied at Howard University before landing at the Schomburg Junior Scholars Program in Harlem as a drama instructor.

He eventually moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, and landed multiple roles in film and television. His career took a major upswing with lead roles in the movies 42, Get on Up, and Marshall in 2017 before he entered the Marvel Studios cinematic universe as the comics character T'Challa, king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, in Black Panther in 2018. That award-winning film went on to gross more than $1.3 billion worldwide and became the first superhero movie to get an Oscar nomination.

Black Panther was considered to be a major game changer in terms of showing Hollywood an all Black, big budget film could succeed at the box office.

In an interview with Esquire about the impact of the film's success, Boseman said he had noticed some change in the industry.

"I’ve seen a willingness of production companies and studios to castings in a way that they wouldn’t normally do," he said. "You can’t make certain statements about a Black lead, or a Black cast, or having a certain number of people of color — it’s not just Black actors — anymore. In fact, it’s been proven that audiences want to see difference. They want to see variety and a world that reflects them whether it be race, gender, or sexuality. They want to see those things, so I think people are looking for opportunities in storytelling now."

The runaway success of Black Panther, a movie that made more than $1.3 billion dollars, unheard of for a majority black cast, let alone a superhero movie set in a fictional African nation of high technology, made a lot of other movies possible. Boseman was at the heart of that revolution and continued to be right up until his passing.

I am heartbroken for his family, but I will remember what he meant to the world over the last several years.  If you haven't caught his last film, Netflix's Da 5 Bloods, directed by Spike Lee, do yourself a favor and see it.  Black Lives Matter, and Boseman helped make that a literal truth.

Wakanda Forever.

Last Call For The Rand Grandstand

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul, a man I am utterly disgusted by to have representing me in the US Senate, was out last night confronting protesters with a phalanx of armed police, trying to provoke a violent event. Since it didn't happen, he's calling for all the protesters to be arrested by the FBI anyway.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul is calling for the FBI to arrest the few dozens protestors who hassled him after he left President Donald Trump’s RNC speech Thursday night. The Kentucky Libertarian Republican’s claims don’t appear to match the reality of what happened, based on multiple videos.

Sen. Paul says he and his wife left the White House and at some point instead of taking a shuttle they decided to walk several blocks to their hotel.

At 1:39 AM he posted this tweet:

Just got attacked by an angry mob of over 100, one block away from the White House. Thank you to @DCPoliceDept for literally saving our lives from a crazed mob.

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 28, 2020

Later, he went on “Fox & Friends,” which told viewers based on the videos it was more like about 30 people, not 100.

Paul, who all by himself for months has been holding up Senate passage of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act – which already passed the House almost unanimously, 410-4 on February 26 – claims he and his wife could have been killed.

“They were inciting a riot and they would have killed us had the police not been there,” Paul told Fox News. 

“I truly believe this with every fiber of my being, had they gotten at us they would have gotten us to the ground, we might not have been killed, might just have been injured by being kicked in the head, or kicked in the stomach until we were senseless,” he added.

And he’s pushing a literal conspiracy theory.

“I believe there are going to be people who are involved with the attack on us that actually were paid to come here, are not from Washington, D.C., and are sort of paid to be anarchists,” Paul says. “This is disturbing because really, if you’re inciting a riot that’s a crime, but if you’re paying someone to incite a riot that person needs to go to jail as well.”

Fox News adds, “the senator is still calling on the FBI to make arrests and conduct an investigation into the ‘interstate criminal traffic being paid for across state lines’ because people have already been killed in other cities.”

It does not appear Paul offered any evidence of “interstate criminal traffic being paid for across state lines.”

Let's frame this correctly from the word go here: Paul did this on purpose.  Like every US Senator, he has a car service.  He could have gone to his hotel in minutes.  But he chose to confront a crowd, with a phalanx of Capitol police protection mind you, and provoked them. This was planned.

They yelled back at him like I would have if I had been there.  And Paul is trying to turn this literally into a federal case against the people who hurt his feelings.

Snowflake.

Rand Paul was in more danger from his Neo-Praetorian Guard than he was from the protesters. But the greater issue is that not only is he trying to impress Dear Leader, he's trying to get people arrested like the fascist he is.

It's what he is, and what he does. The Libertarian, small government act is just that, an act, an affectation. What he really wants is government power used ruthlessly against his enemies and against them alone.

That's fascism, folks.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Fighting police brutality, police militarization, and police terrorism is being made all the more difficult when you realize that white supremacist groups and America's police departments are inextricably linked and have been for years now. A new report finds America's police are effectively compromised by right-wing white supremacist terrorists, and they're more than happy to use their positions to end Black lives.

White supremacist groups have infiltrated US law enforcement agencies in every region of the country over the last two decades, according to a new report about the ties between police and far-right vigilante groups.

In a timely new analysis, Michael German, a former FBI special agent who has written extensively on the ways that US law enforcement have failed to respond to far-right domestic terror threats, concludes that US law enforcement officials have been tied to racist militant activities in more than a dozen states since 2000, and hundreds of police officers have been caught posting racist and bigoted social media content.

The report notes that over the years, police links to militias and white supremacist groups have been uncovered in states including Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.

Police in Sacramento, California, in 2018 worked with neo-Nazis to pursue charges against anti-racist activists, including some who had been stabbed, according to records.

And just this summer, German writes, an Orange county sheriff’s deputy and a Chicago policeman were caught wearing far-right militia logos; an Olympia, Washington, officer was photographed posing with a militia group; and Philadelphia police officers were filmed standing by while armed mobs attacked protesters and journalists.

The exact scale of ties between law enforcement and militias is hard to determine, German told the Guardian. “Nobody is collecting the data and nobody is actively looking for these law enforcement officers,” he said.

Officers’ racist activities are often known within their departments and generally result in punishment or termination following public scandals, the report notes. Few police agencies have explicit policies against affiliating with white supremacist groups. If police officers are disciplined, the measures often lead to protracted litigation.

Concerns about alleged relations between far-right groups and law enforcement in the US have intensified since the start of the protest movement sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. Police in states including California, Oregon, Illinois and Washington are now facing investigations for their alleged affinity to far-right groups opposing Black Lives Matter, according to the report.

This week, police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, faced intense scrutiny over their response to armed white men and militia groups gathered in the city amid demonstrations by Black Lives Matter activists and others over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black father of three who was left paralyzed after being shot in the back. On Wednesday, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who appeared to consider himself a militia member and had posted “blue lives matter” content, was arrested on suspicion of murder after the fatal shooting of two protesters.

Activists in Kenosha say police there have responded aggressively and violently to Black Lives Matter demonstrators, while doing little to stop armed white vigilantes. Supporting their claims is at least one video taken before the shooting that showed police tossing bottled water to what appeared to be armed civilians, including one who appeared to be the shooter, the AP noted: “We appreciate you being here,” an officer said on loudspeaker.

Police also reportedly let the gunman walk past them with a rifle as the crowd yelled for him to be arrested because he had shot people, according to witnesses and video reviewed by the news agency.

This is why the right is so quick to dismiss structural racism, and racism doesn't get much more structural than "law enforcement dedicated to the collective punishment of Black America on a daily basis." Without the police, they lose their power to cause fear. An America where we're allowed to make it by becoming the exception that prove the rule isn't a free and fair America.

Exit question:

How many Kyle Rittenhouses will be “patrolling” when people protest in the streets if Trump wins?

How many Kyle Rittenhouses will be “patrolling” the streets if Trump loses?

— michaelharriot (@michaelharriot) August 27, 2020

Spoilers: the number's going to be the same.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Bill Barr's "Justice Department" is now openly targeting Democratic governors heading into the election, accusing them of killing seniors in veterans homes with COVID-19.

President Donald Trump’s top civil rights official at the Department of Justice announced this week that he was considering launching investigations into how state-owned nursing homes responded to the coronavirus. The four states he targeted all have Democratic governors. This highly unusual public announcement of potential investigations raised alarm bells among Civil Rights Division alumni and Democrats that DOJ’s move was motivated by partisan politics.

Eric Dreiband, the assistant attorney general running the Civil Rights Division, sent letters to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday, requesting documents and information under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) about how public nursing homes in their states responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cuomo and Whitmer said in a joint statement that the inquiries were “nothing more than a transparent politicization of the Department of Justice in the middle of the Republican National Convention.” They called DOJ’s move a “nakedly partisan deflection” and questioned why Republican-run states that, based on federal guidelines, had similar rules about nursing home admissions were not being targeted.

In a press release on Wednesday, the Justice Department claimed, without pointing to evidence, that state orders “may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents.” The department said it was “evaluating whether to initiate investigations,” meaning that it had not actually launched a probe. It is unusual for DOJ to highly publicize such a preliminary inquiry.

The press release went on to compare the COVID-19 death rate in the blue state of New York to the death rate in the red state of Texas, despite the vast array of factors and variables ― including population density and the geographical progression of COVID-19 ― that made the Empire State more vulnerable to the pandemic than the Lone Star State.

The bigger problem is that CRIPA cases cover prisons and jails, which have had massive outbreaks of COVID-19 in states like Alabama, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, but the Justice Department has yet to open a single investigation involving inmate deaths.

CRIPA is a 40-year-old federal statute meant to protect Americans held in government-run institutions like jails, prisons, mental health facilities and state-owned nursing homes. The vast majority of nursing homes in the United States are privately run and therefore not covered by CRIPA, even if those entities receive most of their funding through Medicare. Pennsylvania, for example, has just seven such state-owned facilities, which house roughly 1,300 residents ― a small fraction of the state’s nursing home population of more than 80,000.

With more than 180,000 Americans dead in a pandemic that has devastated the U.S. economy, Trump’s reelection campaign benefits from drawing heat away from the administration’s handling of the crisis and onto Democratic governors’ decisions. The best-known state-run nursing facilities tend to be veterans homes, allowing the administration to suggest that Democratic governors failed to protect our nation’s elderly war heroes.

Moreover, the most common CRIPA cases involve jail and prison conditions. But DOJ hasn’t announced any inquiries into how such facilities have handled COVID-19 despite the fact that jails and prisons have seen some of the biggest coronavirus clusters in the U.S. Nearly 160,000 incarcerated individuals and staffers have tested positive for the virus, and at least 1,000 have died ― including 116 people held in facilities run by the Justice Department’s own Bureau of Prisons.

While CRIPA gives DOJ limited jurisdiction over state-owned nursing homes, a department official suggested that the inquiry could drive at a much larger question that goes far beyond the scope of the preliminary probe.

“Those 50,000 COVID dead in NY/NJ deserve to have an investigation to determine if their Governors are responsible for their deaths,” the DOJ official wrote.

The Trump Regime is scrambling to remove blame for the federal government's failed COVID-19 response by any means possible, even if that means prosecuting Democratic governors. This is 100% a political witch hunt, announced on the final day of the Trump Dear Leader Show, and in a second term, Bill Barr will be completely free to prosecute as many Democrats as he can find.

And he will.  The thing with enemies' lists is that there's always more enemies to fill them with.

StupidNews!

• At least six are dead and many more casualties are expected in the days ahead in Louisiana as rescue workers attempt to reach areas of the coast flooded by Hurricane Laura.
• The trial of fourteen alleged accomplices in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre begins next week in Paris, in 2015 France was rocked by a wave of Islamist violence that left more than 250 dead.
• Walmart is joining Microsoft in the bidding for Social media app TikTok as CEO Kevin Mayer is quitting the company after just three months on the job.
• Nancy Pelosi and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows talked on the phone in order to try to restart COVID-19 legislation, but Senate Republicans are not ready to return to negotiations.
• A new study finds that in states that have gone to voting by mail, overall turnout doesn't improve, and neither party really benefits overall.

Last Call For Enemies Of The People, Con't

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold has been on the Trump corruption beat for four years now, and the White House is making it clear that he's on the list of Enemies of the People to be dealt with in a second Trump regime term as the Post has uncovered even more corruption at Mar-a-Lago.

The Secret Service had asked for a room close to the president. But Mar-a-Lago said it was too late. The room was booked. Would agents like a room across the street from the president, instead?

“I do have a Beach Cabana available,” a staff member at President Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla., wrote in March 2017 to a Secret Service agent seeking rooms for the upcoming weekend. “Across the street at the Beach Club, North end of the pool.”

The next time, the Secret Service didn’t take the same risk. It paid Mar-a-Lago to book rooms for two weeks at a time — locking them up before the club could rent them to others, according to newly released records and emails.

For Trump’s club, it appeared, saying no to the Secret Service had made it a better customer. The agency was paying for rooms on nights when Trump wasn’t even visiting — to be ready just in case Trump decided to go, one former Trump administration official said.

Trump has now visited his own properties 270 times as president, according to a Washington Post tally — with another visit planned for Thursday, when he is scheduled to meet GOP donors at his Washington hotel.

Through these trips, Trump has brought the Trump Organization a stream of private revenue from federal agencies and GOP campaign groups. Federal spending records show that taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $900,000 since he took office. At least $570,000 came as a result of the president’s travel, according to a Post analysis.
Now, new federal spending documents obtained by The Post via a public-records lawsuit give more detail about how the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service — a kind of captive customer, required to follow Trump everywhere. In addition to the rentals at Mar-a-Lago, the documents show that the Trump Organization charged daily “resort fees” to Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Pence in Las Vegas and in another instance asked agents to pay a $1,300 “furniture removal charge” during a presidential visit to a Trump resort in Scotland.

In addition, campaign finance records have provided new details about the payments the Trump Organization received from GOP groups, as a result of the 37 instances in which Trump headlined a political event at one of his properties. Those visits have brought the company at least $3.8 million in fees, according to a Post analysis of campaign spending records.

The regime's response? An enemies' list.

In response to questions for this report, White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement that Trump has “turned over the day-to-day responsibilities of running the company though he was not required to, [and] has sacrificed billions of dollars” because of discarded deals.

Deere did not directly address questions related to the second set of promises Trump made before taking office — the promises that he would not use his presidency to help the Trump Organization.

“The Washington Post is blatantly interfering with the business relationships of the Trump Organization, and it must stop,” Deere wrote in his statement. “Please be advised that we are building up a very large ‘dossier’ on the many false David Fahrenthold and others stories as they are a disgrace to journalism and the American people.”

They're saying the quiet part out loud now. Journalists "must stop interfering" with the Trump Organization.

Or else.

I'd hope that the Village press realizes that in a second Trump term, they will be among the first disposed of.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Very Concerned People Are Very Concerned™ about the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin costing Democrats the entire country.

Downtown buildings set ablaze by arsonists were still smoldering from the night before when Kirk Ingram started to paint an angel on his boarded-up store front.

Ingram, a Democrat who runs a massage therapy business, said the war-zone images of his city on TV — armed people running through the streets, burned cars and broken windows — were bolstering President Donald Trump's get-tough message. Maybe a few uplifting murals could start to tell a different story about Kenosha, Ingram said Wednesday.

Trump has attempted to frame the violent unrest in the wake of Jacob Blake’s shooting as fallout from inept leadership and the inability of Democrats to take control of their cities. On Wednesday, he announced he would send in the National Guard, while criticizing Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers for not doing so, even though the Democrat had deployed guard troops on Monday and increased them on subsequent days.

As this battleground state grapples with social unrest, some Democrats fear that the looting and rioting and clashes are feeding Trump’s argument that this is what life would be like under the so-called radical left. The worry is that especially among suburban swing voters, the more upheaval and violence they witness, the more their sympathy for peaceful Black Lives Matters protesters will wane.
“There’s no doubt it’s playing into Trump’s hands,” said Paul Soglin, who served as mayor of Madison, on and off, for more than two decades. “There’s a significant number of undecided voters who are not ideological, and they can move very easily from Republican to the Democratic column and back again. They are, in effect, the people who decide elections. And they are very distraught about both the horrendous carnage created by police officers in murdering African Americans, and ... for the safety of their communities.”

Trump, of course, is positioning himself as the antidote to urban unrest. "So let me be clear: The violence must stop, whether in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha," Vice President Mike Pence declared in his Republican convention speech Wednesday night, with Trump looking on. "We will have law and order on the streets of this country for every American of every race and creed and color."

Republicans had chided Joe Biden and other Democrats for not calling out the violence in the aftermath of the Blake shooting. Biden immediately addressed the shooting, but didn’t condemn the ensuing violence until Wednesday in a video posted on social media.

Outrage in Wisconsin over the Blake shooting reverberated beyond the streets of Kenosha into the world of sports, when players for Milwaukee Bucks NBA team took the extraordinary step of boycotting a playoff game. The move set off a wave of other sports game cancellations, ensuring the Blake shooting and its aftermath would touch many more Americans.

On the ground in Kenosha, meanwhile, frustrations were palpable.

“The National Guard ought to be on the corners right now,” fumed resident Ron Dooley, who said he was on his way to check whether his favorite diner had been burned down. “Look at this.” he said pointing to blocks of boarded-up storefronts. “It looks like I’m in the slums of L.A.”

 The New York Times is going with blaming Kenosha's Democratic Mayor, and Gov. Tony Evers.

While many demonstrators have been peaceful, others have set fire to buildings. At least four businesses downtown have been looted. Men armed with guns have shown up to confront protesters, leading to the shooting of three people, two of them fatally. On Wednesday, a white teenager from across the state line in Illinois was arrested in connection to the shooting, and Mr. Trump vowed to send in federal law enforcement and additional National Guard troops.

In Kenosha County, where the president won by fewer than 250 votes in 2016, those who already supported Mr. Trump said in interviews that the events of the past few days have simply reinforced their conviction that he is the man for the job. But some voters who were less sure of their choice said the chaos in their city and the inability of elected leaders to stop it were currently nudging them toward the Republicans.

Journalism for every part of life.Subscribe for $1 a week.

And some Democrats, nervous about condemning the looting because they said they understood the rage behind it, worried that what was happening in their town might backfire and aid the president’s re-election prospects.

Yet the situation in Kenosha remains extremely fluid. Many people in the city are enraged about the police shooting of the Black man, Jacob Blake; the Democratic nominee for president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., spoke with his family and said that “justice must and will be done.” On Wednesday night, in response to the shooting, athletes from the N.B.A., W.N.B.A., Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer refused to participate in games. And following the arrest of the teenager in connection with the two fatal shootings, it emerged that he had displayed support for Mr. Trump on social media.

Ellen Ferwerda, who owns an antique furniture store downtown just blocks from the worst of the destruction that is now closed, said that she was desperate for Mr. Trump to lose in November but that she had “huge concern” the unrest in her town could help him win. She added that local Democratic leaders seemed hesitant to condemn the mayhem.

“I think they just don’t know what to say,” she said. “People are afraid to take a stance either way, but I do think it’s strange they’re all being so quiet. Our mayor has disappeared. It’s like, ‘Where is he?’”

I guess I have to pull out Dr. King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail once again, because nothing has changed in 67 years.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

"But it's violence, you say".  Some violence does happen. It's awful, I condemn it, and it needs to stop. But collective punishment of Black America through police brutality and military National Guard force is not the solution.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

I guess I'm going to vote for Donald Trump's racism because you people won't behave" is a hell of a thing to admit, and yet here we are.  I was hoping that after George Floyd, this time would be different. After Jacob Blake, after Breonna Taylor, and after the murders of two by a 17-year-old boy in Kenosha itself, called to action by Trump's violent rhetoric.

If you tell me your support of my humanity rests solel, and conditionally, on what you choose to allow me to have by behavior you determine, then I will fight you every goddamn step of the way.

Because you? You're my number one problem.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The theme of the Republican Convention so far has been "We will act with total impunity" and while the Dear Leader Comedy Show is going on, it's distracting you from the 180,000-plus dead and the thousands upon thousands more casualties on the way.

A sudden change in federal guidelines on coronavirus testing came this week as a result of pressure from the upper ranks of the Trump administration, a federal health official close to the process tells CNN. 

"It's coming from the top down," the official said of the new directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The new guidelines raise the bar on who should get tested, advising that some people without symptoms probably don't need it -- even if they've been in close contact with an infected person. 

Previously, the CDC said viral testing was appropriate for people with recent or suspected exposure, even if they were asymptomatic. 

CDC would not comment on questions about its own policy change. A CDC spokesperson referred all questions to the Department of Health and Human Services.
In a statement to CNN, HHS Assistant Secretary Brett Giroir said: "This Guidance has been updated to reflect current evidence and best public health practices, and to further emphasize using CDC-approved prevention strategies to protect yourself, your family, and the most vulnerable of all ages." 

HHS has not specified what change in "current evidence" may have driven the change. Giroir is expected to address these issues at a briefing Wednesday afternoon. 

But the new directive also lines up with a trend in policy and rhetoric from the White House. President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested the US should do less testing.

Dear Leader wants less testing.  Less testing means fewer cases, and fewer deaths attributed to the pandemic, and less damage to his campaign.

That's all that matters, right?

The entire federal government now exists in service to Donald Trump and to keep him in power.

This is a regime. I have been calling it that for almost four years now. We live in a regime, ruled by a supreme leader. Whether or not your family suffers or dies from a raging pandemic is irrelevant to Donald Trump.

It has been from the beginning.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Laura slammed into the Texas/Louisiana border as a massive Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds and a 20 foot storm surge, inundating thousands of square miles of coastal lowlands.
• As the US passed six million COVID-19 cases, France is reporting 5,500 cases in one day, the most since April, as a new community outbreak near Paris has French health officials worried.
• The NBA's Milwaukee Bucks went on strike to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake, resulting in a league-wide strike that included the WNBA, and baseball, soccer, and tennis.
• The Libyan capital of Tripoli is under a 24-hour curfew as government and rebel forces clash over youth-led protests in the city.
• Federal prosecutors have charged a Russian national with a malware hacking ransomware scheme as he planned to pay an employee of a Nevada-based company to infect the company's network.

Last Call For The Headline Is Redlining

Being Black costs Black homeowners, on average, $48,000 per home. And it doesn't matter if you are in a Black neighborhood or not, you pay nearly a 25% penalty for simply being Black in America.

Abena and Alex Horton wanted to take advantage of low home-refinance rates brought on by the coronavirus crisis. So in June, they took the first step in that process, welcoming a home appraiser into their four-bedroom, four-bath ranch-style house in Jacksonville, Fla.

The Hortons live just minutes from the Ortega River, in a predominantly white neighborhood of 1950s homes that tend to sell for $350,000 to $550,000. They had expected their home to appraise for around $450,000, but the appraiser felt differently, assigning a value of $330,000. Ms. Horton, who is Black, immediately suspected discrimination.

The couple’s bank agreed that the value was off and ordered a second appraisal. But before the new appraiser could arrive, Ms. Horton, a lawyer, began an experiment: She took all family photos off the mantle. Instead, she hung up a series of oil paintings of Mr. Horton, who is white, and his grandparents that had been in storage. Books by Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison were taken off the shelves, and holiday photo cards sent by friends were edited so that only those showing white families were left on display. On the day of the appraisal, Ms. Horton took the couple’s 6-year-old son on a shopping trip to Target, and left Mr. Horton alone at home to answer the door.

The new appraiser gave their home a value of $465,000 — a more than 40 percent increase from the first appraisal.

This is what structural racism in America looks like.

Race and housing policy have long been intertwined in the United States. Black Americans consistently struggle more than their white counterparts to be approved for home loans, and the specter of redlining — a practice that denied mortgages to people of color in certain neighborhoods — continues to drive down home values in Black neighborhoods.

Even in mixed-race and predominantly white neighborhoods, Black homeowners say, their homes are consistently appraised for less than those of their neighbors, stymying their path toward building equity and further perpetuating income equality in the United States.

Home appraisers are bound by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to not discriminate based on race, religion, national origin or gender. Appraisers can lose their license or even face prison time if they’re found to produce discriminatory appraisals. Title XI of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, enacted in 1989, also binds appraisers to a standard of unbiased ethics and performance.
“My heart kind of broke,” Ms. Horton said. “I know what the issue was. And I knew what we needed to do to fix it, because in the Black community, it’s just common knowledge that you take your pictures down when you’re selling the house. But I didn’t think I had to worry about that with an appraisal.”

Appraisals, by nature, are subjective. And discrimination, particularly the subconscious biases and microaggressions that have risen to the fore in white America this summer following the death of George Floyd, is notoriously difficult to pinpoint.

Ms. Horton shared her experiment in a widely circulated Facebook post, earning 25,000 shares and more than 2,000 comments, many of which came from Black homeowners and carried the same message: This also happened to me.

In each comment, a repeated theme: Home appraisers, who work under codes of ethics but with little regulation and oversight, are often all that stands between the accumulation of home equity and the destruction of it for Black Americans.

At every juncture, the federal and state governments in this country make it as hard as possible to prosecute discrimination cases, because civil rights and hate crime laws are seen solely as vehicles to unfairly victimize white Americans who make "trivial mistakes". So-called "real" discrimination and racism simply doesn't exist, after all, we elected and re-elected a Black president, right?

And yet, here we are, with a 40% penalty for being Black, outright, in the value of your home.

But Black people are all poor and lazy, and if they wanted to be wealthy, they'd be wealthy because America!

But as Trump says:

"It is what it is."

And what America is?

Built on 400 years of structural racism.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Trump cultists are not going to accept a Trump loss. There will be violence across the nation as a result.  At some point, they are going to kill a lot of people in order to punish Democrats, and that scenario is coming closer every day.

Angry spectators who couldn’t get into the Idaho House of Representatives for a special session to deal with the coronavirus pandemic Monday shattered a glass door and rushed into the gallery that had limited seating because of the virus, including at least one person carrying an assault-style weapon.

Several conservative lawmakers went into the gallery to ask for calm and decorum, and the special session started anyway with a full House gallery and few if any people wearing masks.

The special session called by Republican Gov. Brad Little will look at changes to election laws to smooth voting in November, including dealing with extra absentee ballots and solutions to a potential shortage of polling places and poll workers amid the virus.

Lawmakers also plan to consider changes to liability laws they say are needed to protect businesses, schools and government agencies from lawsuits from people who get COVID-19.

People not let into the House gallery over social distancing requirements began chanting and banging on the glass doors. Witnesses said the crowd appeared to surge forward and the glass broke, and people rushed in to fill the gallery.

“This is our house,” said Allen Clark of Meridian, who was among those who rushed through the broken doors. “We own this house. We pay taxes. We’re citizens of Idaho. Why can’t we be allowed in a public meeting?”

Clark also carried across his chest what he said was a Yugoslavian M70B1 with a loaded 30-round magazine. Idaho permits the open carry of firearms, including in the Statehouse. People carrying assault-style rifles are not uncommon when the Legislature is in session, but usually when legislation involves gun restrictions. No such legislation has been proposed for the special session.

Once again, coercing lawmakers to change policy based on violence is terrorism.

Allen Clark is a terrorist. He should be in jail right now.  But he's not. There are thousands upon thousands of Allen Clarks out there.

Next time, they won't just go home after storming the statehouse, either.

Hell, we're probably not going to make it to the election itself before people die in a major terrorist militia shooting spree.

Unrest continued for the third night in a row in Kenosha, Wisconsin Tuesday night, over the shooting of Jacob Blake.

As CBS 2’s Charlie De Mar reported, peaceful protesters began circling at Civic Center Park near the Kenosha County Courthouse Tuesday evening. As the sun dipped away, the city’s 8 p.m. curfew kicked in for a declared state of emergency.

By the 10 p.m. hour, police cleared the park. Tear gas was deployed again.

A fence has been mounted guarding the courthouse. Officers with shields were originally behind the fence, but they drove armored vehicles out to disperse the crowd and officers systematically followed the armored vehicle to push the crowd back, deploying pepper spray and flash grenade-type devices.

The area near the courthouse has been a flashpoint for clashes between police and protesters in nights past. But on Tuesday night, the park brought out a mix of people including a group of armed Kenoshans going by the name “Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property.”
Protesters exchanged words with the armed group as they vowed to protect the city from continued looting and burning. Heavily-armed former Kenosha Ald. Kevin Mathewson was amongst the crowd.

“Last night, I saw law enforcement outnumbered by thug looting scumbags who were burning down buildings,” Mathewson said.

“I will stand in the way,” added Kevin Hladilek. “I will try and reason with them as much as I could possibly do.”

A protester yelled at the armed people, “That’s why you are out here now, because you want revenge for buildings.”

The Rev. Dr. Monica Cummings of Bradford Community Church added, “I question that gentleman showing up in military fatigues and sidearms at a peaceful protest.”

I don't question it. I expect it. It took all of 48 hours for an armed, white militia group to form to "protect" Kenosha, Wisconsin from "thug looting scumbags". These "fine people" immediately clashed with protesters last night.

Two people are already dead after this conflict.

Two people are dead and a third was injured in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following a shooting late Tuesday night, police said. 

The shooting happened amid the third night of protests over the police shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake on Sunday evening. 

On Tuesday, officers responded to reports of multiple gunshot victims around 11:45 p.m., the Kenosha Police Department said in a news release early Wednesday. 

The person injured was taken to the hospital with "serious, but non-life threatening injuries," police said. 

An investigation into the shooting is ongoing and the names and ages of the victims are still being determined, according to the release. 

Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth told The New York Times his office is investigating whether the shooting resulted from a conflict between demonstrators and a group of men with weapons who were protecting businesses.

The worst-case scenario is starting to play out before our eyes, one where violence by Trump supporters "forces" Trump to intervene in the election he cannot lose if he wants to retain his freedom from prison.

He will do anything to stay out of prison.

Including rallying white supremacist hit squads. His supporters do not care about anything other than staying in permanent power. White supremacy will be protected at all costs, as it always has been throughout the bloody history of America.

DiAnna Schenkel is a law school graduate who once ran on the Democratic ticket for her city council. She voted twice for Barack Obama. A 59-year-old suburbanite in North Carolina, she worries about her Black son-in-law being racially profiled by the police, pulled over and beaten or worse.

The portrait of a Biden voter?

No, Ms. Schenkel, who is white, is a confirmed supporter of Donald J. Trump. She voted for him enthusiastically four years ago after becoming disillusioned with the Obama presidency, and plans to vote for his re-election. At the same time, she is wary of expressing her politics openly because she believes that stereotypes of what she calls “Trumpers” like herself, as portrayed on social media and in conversations, are smug and spiteful.

“There’s so many people throwing down really inflammatory words: Racist. Xenophobic,” she said of the way people regard Trump supporters. “And these inflammatory words carry emotions. It just pivots people to where they’re not going to even tolerate someone for supporting that person. You’re automatically put on trial and you have to testify why you believe what you believe.”

As Mr. Trump takes center stage at the Republican National Convention this week, he maintains a core of rock-solid supporters like Ms. Schenkel who believe he is fighting in America’s best interests and has achieved many of his goals — which are their goals too. He has aggressively cultivated these voters over the last few months with scathing criticism of vandalism that has occasionally arisen from mostly peaceful protests calling for racial justice, and by boasting that, pre-coronavirus, he had built an economy second to none.

For Democrats and many independents, Mr. Trump has shattered the norms of presidential behavior with racist tweets and divisive policies; his use of federal agencies to advance his personal interests; and, perhaps most important, his detachment from managing the pandemic, which has killed more than 175,000 Americans.

The revulsion toward the president that his opponents feel has colored how many regard Mr. Trump’s supporters. Portrayals of his base, these supporters say, are often distilled into a caricature: that they are all white bigots, in thrall to an authoritarian leader and lost in a fog of fact-denial.

While polling and interviews turn up ample evidence of these traits, tens of millions of Americans will vote for Mr. Trump, and there are plenty of supporters who transcend the stereotypes, whose personal experiences or policy interests make him the right fit for them.

The GOP is the White Grievance Party.  Trump is the White Grievance Candidate.  And white America will absolutely reelect him in November, because there is not a white Trump voter who would trade places for 24 hours with a Black, Latino, or Asian-American.

Their response is "If you call me a racist, I will vote for the racist and his racist policies until you have nothing. I will take everything from you, because you calling me racist is the worst thing possible and I will destroy you for that."

And it will work.

Watch.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Jacob Blake was shot in the back eight times at point blank range by Kenosha Police on Sunday evening. His father now says Jacob may be paralyzed for the rest of his life.

When Jacob Blake’s father talked with his son Sunday morning, the younger Blake was gearing up for a day of celebrating his son’s eighth birthday.

That evening, the father got word that his son had been shot eight times by police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Eighteen minutes later, he saw the now-viral video, he said.

“What justified all those shots?” his father said. “What justified doing that in front of my grandsons? What are we doing?”

Some witnesses say Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who attended middle and high school in Evanston, was simply trying to break up a fight Sunday evening. The cellphone video of the incident shows Blake walking around and opening up his car door before appearing to be shot in the back by police.

His father said there are now “eight holes” in his son’s body, and he’s paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors don’t yet know if the injury is permanent.

The elder Blake is now making the drive from Charlotte, North Carolina, to be with his son in the hospital Tuesday.

“I want to put my hand on my son’s cheek and kiss him on his forehead, and then I’ll be OK,” his father said. “I’ll kiss him with my mask. The first thing I want to do is touch my son.”

Jacob Blake's grandfather, the late Rev. Jacob Blake, was an active member of the civil rights community in Evanston, Illinois.

On April 7, 1968, an estimated three thousand Evanston residents took part in a march that combined a tribute to King with a stand for fair housing. The march began at Emerson Street and McCormick Boulevard, proceeded through the downtown area, and ended in Raymond Park at Chicago Avenue and Grove Street, where a memorial was held.

“The fittest tribute the city of Evanston can pay to Martin Luther King,” the Reverend Jacob Blake, pastor of Evanston’s Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church, told the crowd, “is the immediate passage of an effective and comprehensive housing law.” Blake had been a principal organizer of the march and a staunch advocate of fair housing legislation.

Blake asked the gathered crowd to take a “voice vote” on a new fair housing resolution that had recently been drafted. After it was “approved,” he handed it to Mayor John Emery. The mayor had also joined the march and addressed the crowd in tribute to King.

Soon, fair housing advocates formed a “strategy committee” and issued a pledge that the marches would continue until an ordinance was passed. A “Statement of Intent” was also issued that stated “emphatically and unequivocally that if [an] ordinance was not passed on or before April 29, 1968,” the movement would “move . . . from non-violent protest. . . to nonviolent resistance,” involving an “economic boycott of all Evanston businesses, transportation systems, and profit making operations within the city limit of Evanston.”

On April 11, 1968, the Fair Housing Act (Title XIII of the Civil Rights Act) was signed into law by President Johnson, expanding existing laws and prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, and national origin. King’s assassination, it was noted, was a “decisive factor” in the bill’s passage.

Still, in Evanston, no comprehensive fair housing law existed, and so the marches continued – daily reminders that “freedom of residence” in Evanston had not yet been realized.

Each day, people marched from Ebenezer AME Church on Emerson Street to the First Methodist Church on Hinman Avenue in an effort to bring about a city council vote on a comprehensive ordinance. Petitions were circulated, with signatories demanding the “immediate passage” of a fair housing ordinance. 

On April 15, 1968, the city council finally agreed to take a vote on a new, comprehensive fair housing ordinance. On Monday, April 29, 1968, just over 3 weeks after King’s death, two hundred people packed into the city hall chamber; outside, a crowd of 600 gathered to await the outcome of the vote.

The marches and hard work finally brought success: Fifteen to one, Evanston city council members voted to pass the ordinance, forbidding discrimination on the basis of race in the sale or rental of housing, and this time including steep fines and penalties for property owners, brokers, realtors, bankers, and others who practiced discrimination.

Evanston’s Mayor, John D. Emery, refused to sign the bill, arguing that the city had no “authority to pass such an all-encompassing law.” However, he stated, “the ordinance becomes effective without my signature.”

After the vote, the Reverend Jacob Blake, who was in the city council chamber, walked to the window and announced the result to the crowd outside. A loud cheer erupted. “I am overwhelmed,” Blake said.

The fight has gone on for centuries before I was born, and I believe the fight will continue for a long time after I am gone.  But while I am on this Earth, I want to see that fight through.