Sweeping amendments to a 66-year-old human rights ordinance might make Grand Rapids, Mich. the latest city to try to tackle the epidemic of racially-motivated abuses of emergency services. The planned changes “would make it a criminal misdemeanor to racially profile people of color for ‘participating in their lives.’”

Diversity and Inclusion Manager Patti Caudill said the ordinance is a new concept in Michigan. It isn’t meant to discourage 911 calls, she said. Rather, it’s meant to make people “check their biases” before calling the police.

“Call the police, but if you’re calling because your neighbors are having a barbecue and you’re calling because of some implicit bias because they’re people of color, we don’t want to see that,” she said.
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So how, exactly, does Grand Rapids plan to fight not just the abuse of 911, but the racism that fuels it?

The proposed changes include:

Identifying four primary potential areas of discrimination, which are discriminatory practices in housing, employment, contracting, and bias crime reporting. Each area has its own section in the ordinance.
Adding a “bias crime reporting prohibition” and making it a criminal misdemeanor to racially profile people of color for participating in their lives. That is, no person shall make a police report that is based in whole or in part on an individual’s membership in a protected class and not on a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity in consideration of all available facts and the totality of the circumstances.
The River City is hoping that threatening the pocketbooks of would-be BBQ Beckys and Pool Patrol Paulas will make them re-think their choice to dial 911 on a person of color for no reason. Violations would be subject to a $500 fine.

But let’s be real. Trump will not be removed by impeachment. No president has been. With a Republican Senate controlled by the most irresponsible political hack ever to be majority leader, the chances are nil.

Which means Trump will have to be removed the old-fashioned way – by voters in an election 19 months away.

The practical question is whether the Mueller report and all that surrounds it will affect that election.

Most Americans hold a low opinion of Trump. He’s the only president in Gallup polling history never to have earned the support of majority for single day of his term.

Yet Mueller’s report probably won’t move any of the 40% who have held tight to Trump regardless.

So how to reach the 11% or 12% who may decide the outcome?

Democrats and progressives tend to shy away from morality, given how rightwing evangelicals have used it against abortion, contraceptives and equal marriage rights.

But that’s to ignore Americans’ deep sense of right and wrong. Character counts, and presidential character counts most of all.

Funny how “values voters” were so much more OUTRAGED by @michelleisawolf calling Sarah Sanders a liar in a joke over dinner than by Sarah Sanders calling herself a liar in a statement under oath.

At times, especially reading the report’s difficult second volume – the part dealing with possible obstruction of justice – it felt like Mueller had decided, rather than make a decision, just to share his whole internal debate. The contrast between Mueller’s dense prose and Trump’s bombastic vacuity caused cognitive dissonance. The planets were colliding: Mueller’s black-and-white world of laws and truth plummeted toward Trump’s grey, murky world of lies. The two could not coexist.

Could Mueller really have not realised how this gargantuan document would be summarised, warped beyond recognition, by Trumpworld? The hopeful, at least, found comfort in the hints at other, as yet unknown investigations. Was that the plan? Or is Mueller, like everyone else, only human; fallible, and prone to missing the obvious?
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Mueller’s decision to not make a decision still seems far from the “total exoneration,” Trump is claiming. In fact, the totality of the document is incredibly damning. In the 200 or so pages about obstruction of justice, there is barely a pamphlet of exculpatory evidence. And what there is isn’t great: Mueller muses, for example, that there might be a chance “the president believed … he had never told McGahn to have Rosenstein remove the Special Counsel.”

Innocence by way of amnesia. It reads almost like a parable: the man who never forgets and only tells the truth, and the man who never remembers and deals in lies. No wonder the whole thing felt biblical.

The Providence Journal reports that a man and woman were seen outside a downtown eatery on South Main Street in Providence, Rhode Island, wearing swastika armbands—the woman had on a swastika-emblazoned shirt, while the man also wore a red Make America Great Again Trump hat.

According to Sondra Pierson, who took photos of the two and spoke with the Journal, the two smoked cigarettes, crossed the street to the Rhode Island Holocaust Memorial, and took photos of one another posing around the memorial park. Pierson says she confronted the two, who responded sarcastically and then got into their car and drove away. Pierson called the police, but realized there really wasn’t much the police could do.