* Center Square Club for Men…

It’s unclear how much taxpayers will have to pay, if anything, to breach a contract with a country act that has been removed from the entertainment lineup for the DuQuion State Fair […]

[Rep. Darren Bailey, R-Xenia] said there are some questions the Department of Agriculture is going to have to answer.

“There was probably a contract signed, so what did the state of Illinois give up, what is the cost of canceling Confederate Railroad?” Bailey asked.

I asked the governor’s office yesterday and was told the cost of canceling the Confederate Railroad show was $7,500. That’s the full amount the group was promised to play the fair. In comparison, Thomas Rhett’s base contract to play the Illinois State Fair last year was $280,000. But Rhett has had hits during this century.

* The area’s Harley Davidson dealership claims to have booked the band…

Black Diamond is proud to announce the Confederate Railroad band will be on stage September 5th at the Black Diamond Event Center (Black Diamond RV building) in Marion Illinois!

But this is from the Southern’s article yesterday…

After speaking with the band’s agent, McKinney believes the band is receiving at least partial compensation from the state, and remains legally bound to some elements of its contract.

That includes an obstacle to a makeup show: a “radius clause” that prohibits the band from playing any other concerts in the Southern Illinois area within 60 days of the Du Quoin show, McKinney said, which was set for Aug. 27.

That means the soonest the band could play in the region is late October.

The governor’s office will have no objection to the show, I’m told.

* In other developments, a whole lot of people seem to be “unclear on the concept.” Let’s start with this post on the Boycott Du Quoin State Fair Facebook page…

Ok Southern Illinois, this group is for those like me that are tired of the constant censorship and liberal political correctness that is constantly being crammed down our throats. Join me in boycotting the Duquoin State Fair this year due to their canceling of the band Confederate Railroad strictly because of their name and the Confederate flag. Governor Pritzker has stated let this be a “Teachable Moment for Southern Illinois”.

Help me show his regime that we in Southern Illinois don’t need to be taught anything from Cook County or their liberal agendas.

From comments…

Boycott a fair that has been on the chopping block for two decades over a band that hasn’t had a hit single in a quarter century.

I love southern Illinois, but sometimes….

The Illinois Department of Agriculture decided last month to drop the Du Quoin Fair’s $2 daily admission price and make it free after officials heard “many complaints” from locals, according to Fox St. Louis.

So, they’re calling for a boycott of a free event which provides a huge annual economic boost to their area, while the costs are underwritten by northern Illinois taxpayers.

* From my email inbox…

You people are just an embarrassment to this great country of ours! Why must you bring politics into everything done here? I bet if the Confederate Band had a name like LGBQT Band you would have let them play. Again what an embarrassment you are and shame on you!

Um, OK.

* The AP was particularly clueless…

The flare-up in DuQuoin, about 320 miles south of Chicago, rekindles a centuries-old rift in Illinois, whose southern tip reaches far into the confines of the old Confederacy

Kentucky, just to our south, was a “border state” and never seceded. A “rump” legislature in Missouri voted to secede, but it didn’t appear to have the authority or even a quorum to do so.

Yes, southern Illinois is on the same latitude as northern Virginia, but that AP claim is still pretty odd. Also, Virginia narrowly voted for the decidedly non-southern Hillary Clinton in 2016.

* Meanwhile, the boycott page has started to implode…

Well, it sucks, but it’s time for me to leave this group. I joined when it first started to support CR and show my disapproval of the censorship/loss of freedom of speech. I wish you all well and I hope it gets back to what it was originally about. It has become a page of posts wanting to ban another act, which is just more censorship. It has become about black and white, Republican and Democrat, and people wanting to do things that just reinforce what happened and make southern Illinoisans look like a bunch of redneck racists. I hope some of you will start thinking a little more before you post and maybe do some self reflecting. Good luck to the original movement. I hope to see CR playing somewhere close soon. God bless you all.

*** UPDATE *** Tina Sfondeles…

A day after the Pritzker administration defended its decision to bar Confederate Railroad from performing at the downstate DuQoin State Fair, the Democratic governor called the Confederate flag “a symbol of murder, of kidnapping, of rape.”

“The Confederate flag is a symbol of not just slavery, but of treason agains the United States,” Pritzker said at an unrelated press conference in Chicago. […]

“That’s what happened under the banner of the Confederate flag many years ago in this country,” Pritzker said at an unrelated press conference in the Loop. “It is today the symbol of racists, of white nationalists, of the alt-right and so I do not think that the state of Illinois should be sponsoring something that is amplifying that symbol.”

But Pritzker, too, was asked to respond to a lawmaker’s claim that Snoop Dogg, scheduled to perform at the Illinois State Fair on August 16 in Springfield, also has some controversial imagery. The rapper’s latest album, “Make America Crip Again,” features Snoop Dogg standing over a corpse with a toe-tag that reads “Trump.” That comparison was brought up by state Rep. Terri Bryant, R-Murphsyboro.

“There’s a big difference between what I just described and the hundreds of thousands of people [who] died; millions, in fact tens of millions of people, were enslaved. We’re talking about a history, a terrible history in the United States,” Pritzker said. “Death and destruction that took place under that flag — and on the other side, political satire.”

* Related…

* Mystery solved: Montgomery Gentry to do Fair Grandstand show