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Daily Bread for 9.29.20

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy a high of fifty-six.  Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 6:37 PM, for 11h 46m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand four hundred twenty-first day. 

 On this day in 1957, the Packers dedicated City Stadium, now known as Lambeau Field, and defeated the Bears, 21-17.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Russ Buettner, Mike McIntire, and Susanne Craig of the New York Times report – in part 2 of their series –  How Reality-TV Fame Handed Trump a $427 Million Lifeline (‘Tax records show that “The Apprentice” rescued Donald J. Trump, bringing him new sources of cash and a myth that would propel him to the White House’):

From the back seat of a stretch limousine heading to meet the first contestants for his new TV show “The Apprentice,” Donald J. Trump bragged that he was a billionaire who had overcome financial hardship.

“I used my brain, I used my negotiating skills and I worked it all out,” he told viewers. “Now, my company is bigger than it ever was and stronger than it ever was.”

It was all a hoax.

Months after that inaugural episode in January 2004, Mr. Trump filed his individual tax return reporting $89.9 million in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year. The red ink spilled from everywhere, even as American television audiences saw him as a savvy business mogul with the Midas touch.

….

Divorced for the second time, and coming off the failure of his Atlantic City casinos, Mr. Trump faced escalating money problems and the prospect of another trip to bankruptcy court. On his income tax returns, he reported annual net losses throughout the 1990s, some of it carried forward year to year, a tide that would swell to $352.8 million at the end of 2002.

Few people knew this, however, because he kept up the relentless self-promotion that had served him well: a half-serious 2000 presidential campaign that lasted four months but got him on Jay Leno; a TV ad touting McDonald’s new $1 “Big N’ Tasty” burger; another ghostwritten book.

But if Mr. Trump was still living off his residual fame, his biggest splashes were behind him. Something had to change. And as fate would have it, Mr. Trump got a boost from an unexpected source, one that would do much to shape his future, if not that of the country itself.

Mark Burnett, a British television producer best known for the hit series “Survivor,” approached him with an idea for a different reality show, this one based in a boardroom. In Mr. Burnett’s vision, a cast of wannabe entrepreneurs would come to New York and compete for the approval of the Donald, with the winner to work on a Trump project. Mr. Trump eagerly agreed to host “The Apprentice” and went on to ham it up as the billionaire kingmaker, yelling “You’re fired” each week until one contestant was left.

Some of Mr. Burnett’s staff members wondered how a wealthy businessman supposedly running a real estate empire could spare the time, but they soon discovered that not everything in Mr. Trump’s world was as it appeared.

(Emphasis added.)

Anna Deavere Smith Performs MLK’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”:

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