Last Call For A Fat Stack Of Tubmans

Sorry, Old Hickory.  You've been benched off the front of the $20.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Wednesday will announce plans to both keep Alexander Hamilton on the front of the $10 bill and to knock Andrew Jackson off the front of the $20 in favor of Harriet Tubman, sources tell POLITICO. 

Lew is expected to roll out a set of changes that also include putting leaders of the women’s suffrage movement on the back of the $10 bill, and incorporating civil rights era leaders and other important moments in American history into the $5 bill. Also, Jackson isn’t getting completely booted off the $20 bill. He’s likely to remain on the back.

Lew's reversal comes after he announced last summer that he was considering replacing Hamilton on the $10 bill with a woman. The plan drew swift rebukes from fans of Hamilton, who helped create the Treasury Department and the modern American financial system. Critics immediately suggested Lew take Jackson off the $20 bill given the former president's role in moving Native Americans off their land. 

Lew told POLITICO last July that Treasury was exploring ways to respond to critics. “There are a number of options of how we can resolve this,” Lew said. “We’re not taking Alexander Hamilton off our currency.” 

Supporters of putting a woman on the $10 bill have complained that it will take too long for the $20 bill to come up for a redesign. But people familiar with the matter said new designs for the bills should be ready by 2020. Treasury is likely to ask the Federal Reserve, which makes the final decision, to speed up the process and get the bills into circulation as quickly as possible.

But please, Andy, do make the most of taking a back seat to one of the most incredible black women in American history.

Rather than remaining in the safety of the North, Tubman made it her mission to rescue her family and others living in slavery. In December 1850, Tubman received a warning that her niece Kessiah was going to be sold, along with her two young children. Kessiah’s husband, a free black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife at an auction in Baltimore. Harriet then helped the entire family make the journey to Philadelphia. This was the first of many trips by Tubman, who earned the nickname “Moses” for her leadership. Over time, she was able to guide her parents, several siblings and about 60 others to freedom. One family member who declined to make the journey was Harriet’s husband, John, who preferred to stay in Maryland with his new wife. 

The dynamics of escaping slavery changed in 1850, with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. This law stated that escaped slaves could be captured in the North and returned to slavery, leading to the abduction of former slaves and free blacks living in Free States. Law enforcement officials in the North were compelled to aid in the capture of slaves, regardless of their personal principles. In response to the law, Tubman re-routed the Underground Railroad to Canada, which prohibited slavery categorically.
In December 1851, Tubman guided a group of 11 fugitives northward. There is evidence to suggest that the party stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. 

In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, who advocated the use of violence to disrupt and destroy the institution of slavery. Tubman shared Brown’s goals and at least tolerated his methods. Tubman claimed to have had a prophetic vision of Brown before they met. When Brown began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders at Harper’s Ferry, he turned to “General Tubman” for help. After Brown’s subsequent execution, Tubman praised him as a martyr. 

Harriet Tubman remained active during the Civil War. Working for the Union Army as a cook and nurse, Tubman quickly became an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the Combahee River Raid, which liberated more than 700 slaves in South Carolina.

So yeah, let's hurry these new bills along, shall we?

Water Main Leak

Looks like Michigan GOP Gov. Rick Snyder has found his scapegoats for the Flint water disaster.

A city worker and two state officials were charged Wednesday in connection with the Flint water crisis — the first criminal charges filed over the water contamination emergency in the Michigan city. 

Felony and misdemeanor charges were filed against Flint worker Michael Glasgow and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) employees Steven Busch and Michael Prysby, according to local media.

The charges were approved during a hearing by Judge Tracy L. Collier-Nix in the 5th division of Genesee County Court on Wednesday morning. 

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, whose office has led the investigation, is expected to officially announce the charges later today. 

Glasgow, the city’s water supervisor, is charged with willful neglect of evidence and tampering with evidence for allegedly changing test results to show less lead had leaked into the city’s water supply from its aging pipes.

The two MDEQ workers are also facing evidence tampering charges and misconduct in office.

Well then, after 200 plus days, problem solved and everything's okay, right?

Earlier this month, I suggested that the Snyder administration has no intention of replacing a single water line in Flint where the drinking water was contaminated with the powerful neurotoxin lead through the actions of Snyder’s appointed Emergency Managers and the ineptitude of his appointee at the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), Dan Wyant, a man with zero experience in managing water systems:

Amid all this non-action, the Snyder administration has started to warn municipalities that they should avoid “partial lead service line replacements”. […] 

Add to this the fact that Flint water lead levels are beginning to drop as the phosphate added to the water for corrosion protection is building up a protective layer on the inside of water lines and it is starting to look as if the Snyder administration is simply waiting until lead levels have dropped enough for Flint residents to begin using their water again. Once that has happened, they could simply point to the data and say, “See? Everything is fine. Nothing to worry about.” 

There’s now more evidence that this is exactly what their plan is:

“If we make a policy decision that we should replace the lead lines, then we have to be thinking about that across the state,” said John Walsh, strategy director for Gov. Rick Snyder, at a Grand Rapids chamber meeting in March. “If you do it for one community, another is going to wonder why you didn’t do it for them.” 

Mark my words, the Snyder administration is not going to be involved in replacing ANY lead water service lines in Flint. They are going to wait until lead levels drop and then suggest it’s unfair to give them any sort of “special treatment”. The fact is, after the catastrophe that they themselves caused, the Snyder administration owes it to Flint residents and the 9,000 children that have potentially been poisoned with lead to make it right. But that’s not going to happen.

As always, Chris Savage at Eclectablog has everything you need to know about Flint and Rick Snyder.  Yet another state where Republican austerity is costing lives and hurting kids....

There's quite a few of those these days.

A Castro Of Millions

Cuban dictator emeritus (you don't see a whole lot of those actually) Fidel Castro figures with the whole normalizing relations with America thing and befriending the Pope that he's going to go out on the best note a dictator like himself can, I guess.

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro delivered a valedictory speech Tuesday to the Communist Party that he put in power a half-century ago, telling party members he will soon die and exhorting them to help his ideas survive.

"I'll be 90 years old soon," Castro said in his most extensive public appearance in years. "Soon I'll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without a truce to obtain them."

Castro spoke as the government announced that his brother Raul will retain the Cuban Communist Party's highest post alongside his hardline second-in-command. That announcement and FidelCastro's speech together delivered a resounding message that the island's revolutionary generation will remain in control even as its members age and die, relations with the U.S. are normalized, and popular dissatisfaction grows over the country's economic performance.

Is it too much to hope for that his passing will clear the way for actual democracy and progress in Cuba?  Well, that is unless we get Trump, in case Cuba might actually end up ahead of us on the whole progress thing...

StupidiNews!

• Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump scored decisive wins in Tuesday's New York primary contests, with the campaigns now moving to Pennsylvania and mid-Atlantic states.
• Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette is expected to announce indictments related to Flint's ongoing water crisis as early as this afternoon.
• A magnitude 6.2 earthquake has struck off the coast of Ecuador, already reeling from a much larger quake over the weekend, with the death toll from that tremor reaching more than 500.
• With Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff facing impeachment charges, Vice-President Michel Temer is apparently putting together a new administration in anticipation of taking over.
• Tech giant Intel says it will lay off as many as 12,000 worldwide as the chipmaker says it will need an "evolution" away from the struggling PC business.

Last Call For Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

Things are so bad now with the Great Brownbackian Austerity Experiment in Kansas that the state's Republican lawmakers are no longer willing to sacrifice their careers on the Laffer curve hill along with the Governor. 

Brownback took office on a pledge to make Kansas friendlier to business and successfully sought to cut the top personal income tax rate by 29 percent and exempt more than 330,000 farmers and business owners from income taxes. The moves were popular in a Legislature where the GOP holds three-quarters of the seats. 

The governor argued that Kansas had to attract more businesses after a "lost decade" in the early 2000s, when private sector employment declined more than 4 percent. 

The predicted job growth from business expansions hasn't happened, leaving the state persistently short of money. Since November, tax collections have fallen about $81 million, or 1.9 percent below the current forecast's predictions. 

"We're growing weary," said Senate President Susan Wagle, a conservative Republican from Wichita. While GOP legislators still support low income taxes, "we'd prefer to see some real solutions coming from the governor's office," she said. 

Last month, Brownback ordered $17 million in immediate reductions to universities and earlier this month delayed $93 million in contributions to pensions for school teachers and community college employees. The state has also siphoned off more than $750 million from highway projects to other parts of the budget over the past two years. 

Lawmakers are worried about approving any further reductions in an election year. All 40 Senate seats and 125 House seats are on the ballot in November.

Brownback isn't on the ballot.  All state legislators are.  They're the ones who are going to take the fall for the austerity choking Kansas's economy and they know it.  The plan is to leave Brownback holding the bag.

Democrats have long described Brownback's tax cuts as reckless. Republican critics want to repeal the personal income tax break for farmers and business owners to raise an additional $200 million to $250 million a year. 

Debate over the next budget will intensify after lawmakers return from a recess later this month. They could follow through on their threat by adjourning without making specific reductions and leaving the governor with the authority to do so. He faces fewer repercussions because he will not appear on the ballot again before leaving office in January 2019. 

But with so many Republicans in office in Kansas, Democrats can afford to say "I told you so."

Meanwhile, Kansas reported gaining only 800 private-sector jobs between March 2015 and March 2016, a mere 0.1 percent increase.

800 jobs for the entire state in a year, because tax cuts going to "the job creators" don't create jobs when people can't afford to buy goods and services in order to create the demand for growth.  That's basic macroeconomics folks, and Kansas and Sam Brownback have utterly failed.

You elected Republicans, Kansas.  Time to vote them out.

Hot Sauce Time Machine

If Hillary Clinton's admission to a New York radio show yesterday morning that she carries hot sauce in her bag is "suddenly pandering to NY black voters" then she's been doing it since she was in the White House as First Lady.

So there are a couple of possibilities. One is that Hillary Clinton really does like hot sauce and carries it around with her so she can season her food. The other is that she’s been building an elaborate long con over hot sauce – because she’s been talking about it at least since 2008. A New York Times piece got at Clinton’s love of hot peppers, based on a “60 Minutes” interview:

“I eat a lot of hot peppers,” she told CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who had asked her how she maintains her stamina on the campaign trail. “I for some reason started doing that in 1992, and I swear by it. I think it keeps my metabolism revved up and keeps me healthy.”

Apparently she kept 100 bottles of hot sauce when she was in the White House. In 2012, she told Conde Nast Traveler about bringing red pepper and Tabasco on her trips as Secretary of State. And late last year, she and her staff talked about peppers and farm stands.

To Clinton doubters, perhaps this is all just something she’s been planning since Bill’s election. Could it be that Hillary has built an elaborate myth around herself as someone who is not as bland as she seems but is actually edgy, gutsy, and working so hard she needs to eat food that a lot of white Middle Americans consider too spicy so she can keep moving at high speed?

Gosh, it's probably a massive conspiracy.  But I like Scott Timberg's response in the article:

But here’s another way of looking at it: If Hillary Clinton predicted the impact of Beyoncé in 1992, saw her own likelihood of running for president decades later, and began eating raw peppers and carrying little bottles around in her purse back then, she’s not really a panderer. She’s the candidate we want debating Ted Cruz or Donald Trump. She’s the president who can deal with a Republican Congress. She’s the leader who can go head to head with Vladimir Putin. If you’re on the fence about Hillary Clinton, her calculating quality is what will make her an effective president. Given that politics is at least half theater, maybe the Democrats should nominate someone who’s comfortable playing a role?

 Yeah, I can see that.

Besides, I like hot sauce.

Berned Up And No Place To Go

Expectations for the Sanders campaign today in New York are already down to the "if he doesn't lose by double digits it's a moral victory" stage, which is never a good sign when you need to win by 20 points in order to close the delegate race with Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders will score a moral victory in New York’s Democratic primary if he can limit Hillary Clinton’s winning margin to single digits, party insiders say.

But they also caution that such a result would not be enough to change the overall shape of the race, in which Clinton holds a solid lead.

To have any real shot at wresting the nomination away, the experts say, Sanders would need to produce a seismic shock on Tuesday, defeating Clinton in the state she represented in the Senate for eight years. 

The odds of such an outcome look slight, given that most polls show the former secretary of State leading by more than 10 points. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Clinton ahead by 13.8 points in the Empire State. 

“If he loses but comes close in New York, he can claim a moral victory,” said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon. “The bad news is moral victories don’t do him any good. Winning delegates is what he needs.”

And he's not going to get them. 247 delegates are up for grabs today and Sanders is down by almost that many pledged delegates.  Clinton getting a double digit win would increase her delegate lead by 25 or so, all but erasing the gains Sanders has made in smaller states over the last several weeks.

Having said that, Sanders will probably pick up enough delegates today and next week's contests in Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic states to make sure that Clinton's not going to be able to put Sanders away until California and New Jersey in June, so expect another seven weeks of Sanders complaining about superdelegates.

Fun for all the kids.

StupidiNews!

• Afghan officials say at least 28 are dead and hundreds injured in a rush-hour suicide car bombing attack in Kabul, the target apparently the office of the presidential security service.
• Target is the latest retail chain to increase the minimum wage it will pay employees to $10 an hour, citing competitive pressure from Wal-Mart and calls from labor activists.
• The death toll in Saturday's powerful earthquake in Ecuador is now over 400 as President Rafael Correa has declared a national state of emergency.
• Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is vowing a "long-drawn out fight" to keep her office in the wake of impeachment, a Senate vote to remove her pending a trial could come in May.
• New fossil evidence suggests dinosaurs were on the way out tens of millions of years before a massive meteor impact paved the way for mammals.

Last Call For Invasion Of The Liz's People

Don't look now, but it appears that the House in 2017 will include the reprehensible Liz Cheney as she zeroes in on her father's former Wyoming House seat. You didn't think America would ever be free of the scourge of the Cheney political family, did you? 

Liz Cheney isn’t giving up.

After stumbling in her bid to become a senator in 2014, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney was back making the rounds at the Wyoming Republican Party’s state convention in hopes of becoming the state’s sole member in the House of Representatives. In a year when anti-establishment fervor is at a peak, Cheney is balancing the benefits and burdens of her famous last name.

“Not everybody likes Dick Cheney, I don’t know if you know that or not,” Cheney told the audience of Wyoming Republicans, when one inquired about the former Vice President’s health. “He’s doing great, thanks for asking,” she answered, adding he’s spending much of his time driving her daughter Grace to rodeos in the state. Continuing the story, Cheney said another child once taunted her daughter about her grandfather.

“Gracie didn’t miss a beat,” Cheney retold, speaking at a luncheon she sponsored for delegates to the state’s GOP convention. “She said that kid doesn’t know anything—he drives a Prius.” The line drew guffaws among the Republicans in the energy-heavy state.

Politics for the Cheneys is a family affair. The former Vice President held the seat she hopes to occupy for a decade in the 1980s. Liz Cheney’s children, including Grace—who skipped a rodeo to come—worked the convention in matching t-shirts and hats, handing out pamphlets and stickers to delegates.

Cheney’s first effort at statewide office—a primary challenge to incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi—ended before a single vote was cast. Branded by some as a carpetbagger (she lived in Virginia and worked in Washington, but grew up in Wyoming), Cheney’s decision to run against a member of her own party rubbed many Republicans the wrong way.

But whatever bitterness was there has since subsided, as Cheney has barnstormed the state. She is now the front-runner to replace Rep. Cynthia Lummis, facing off against as many as 10 GOP rivals in the state’s Aug 16 primary. On Friday, Cheney reported raising more than $730,000 for her effort since she launched her campaign in February—far out-raising her chief rivals—with more than $600,000 on hand. Her campaign bragged that “she didn’t accept one dollar of PAC money from Washington, D.C.”

Plenty of political families have existed in American history like this.  Few, outside maybe the Bush family, have done as much damage to the country as the Cheneys.  Now it looks like Liz will win the seat that got her father's awful career jump-started nearly 40 years ago.

How much damage will she end up doing?  We'll find out.

Love And Haiti In The Time Of Cholera

So if Slate writer Jonathan Katz is even remotely correct here, a CDC map in Atlanta on display in the agency's museum actually points out that the epidemiologists there knew full well that the massive cholera outbreak in Haiti following the earthquake there in 2010 was actually caused by a UN peacekeeping mission from Nepal.  Katz has long been on the trail of this story, but the map strongly seems to suggest that the US government was well aware and looked the other way for political expediency.

Which seems to happen a lot these days.

The U.N. soldiers at that base had just arrived from their home country, Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway. Thanks to negligent sanitation practices, such as the open dump pits above, there was a multiplicity of ways that their choleraic feces could have gotten from the base into the river, including latrine pipes leaking over a drainage canal that emptied into the river.

However it happened, from that very spot, that cholera strain—the same strain found in Nepal, which had never been seen before in Haiti, ever—spread throughout the country. By January 2011, the date given for the map, it had been well-established—mainly through my reporting and the work of French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux—that this was the case.

Since the first days of the epidemic, the U.N. has tried to cover up what it did. Everyone from the soldiers on the base to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been implicated. The Obama administration and the U.S. government did not want the U.N. to be held accountable, because doing so might persuade other people elsewhere to hold U.S. peacekeeping missions accountable—and because the U.S. foots about a quarter of the U.N. peacekeeping budget.

The CDC, a U.S. government agency, discouraged journalists from asking about the epidemic’s origin, telling them that pinpointing the source, Dr. Snow–style, was “not productive,” “not central,” and would likely never happen. Its epidemiologists did provide a key detail early on, when they identified the strain in Haiti as having a recent South Asian origin—meaning it could have come from Nepal and not from South America, Africa, or anywhere else cholera was circulating at the time. But after that, the CDC refused to take environmental samples from around the base or test the soldiers during the small window when doing either would have been worthwhile. All of this detailed in a damning new book by Ralph R. Frerichs called Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-Up in Post-Earthquake Haiti.

In the book, Frerichs also makes a good case that the agency used maps as tools of diversion. In one crucial map distributed in early 2011, he writes, the agency scrambled the order of dates for when cholera arrived in Haiti’s different regions, or départements—making it seem as if the disease had appeared on the coast before showing up near the U.N. base. Citing the CDC’s own manual, “How to Investigate an Outbreak,” which in his words emphasizes the “importance of correctly identifying infectious disease cases and then using a frequency distribution of the onset dates to estimate the outbreak’s start time,” Frerichs writes:

CDC had ignored its own standard procedure by using the “first confirmed case” in its Haiti Cholera Outbreak map of mid-February 2011. It based the onset time on laboratory confirmation, which falsely implied that cholera had first appeared on October 21 in downriver Artibonite département, then two days later in Ouest département, and finally a day after that, October 24, in upriver Centre département—findings entirely different from Piarroux’s and the Haitian public health team’s.

The timing of that map was crucial, because a panel of experts appointed, under pressure, by Ban was on its way to investigate the source of the outbreak:

Piarroux suspected that CDC had released the map in anticipation of the UN panel’s arrival in Haiti and was helping the UN shift attention away from the Nepalese peacekeeping base in Centre département. Implying that cholera had started elsewhere served that purpose.

It was the first in a series of online maps from CDC that used the poorest available measure to show when cholera had first appeared in Haiti’s ten départements. The CDC information remained widely circulated through updates in September 2011.

In rare a moment of clarity, as evidence mounted, Scott F. Dowell, then director of the CDC’s global disease and emergency response division, talked openly of political considerations in the agency’s response: “We’re going to be really cautious about the Nepal thing because it’s a politically sensitive issue for our partners in Haiti.”

The map flags the epicenter of the cholera infection, and surprise, it's right at the location of the Nepalese UN peacekeeper camp at the time in late 2010.






So yes, this is something that falls on the shoulders of the UN, and in part the US.  Realpolitik and diplomacy sucks, folks, only in this case thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have been sickened, and the cholera epidemic has been going on in Haiti now for almost six years.

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered by the UN about Haiti.  Quite a lot.

Bernie Takes A Shot (Back)

It seems even Bernie Sanders can be pushed to the left on some positions in a primary season.

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders on Sunday said Sandy Hook victims should be able to sue gun manufacturers for the 2012 elementary school shooting that killed 20 students and six adults, backtracking on previous comments.“Of course they have a right to sue, anyone has a right to sue,” the Vermont senator said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Sanders in an interview with the New York Daily News last week initially said the Sandy Hook family members should not have the right to sue gun manufacturers for damages.

"No, I don't," he said, in response to a question from the editorial board.

Rival Hillary Clinton attacked Sanders for those comments, calling his stance “unimaginable” and one of her “biggest contrasts” with the Vermont senator.

Sanders on Sunday said that a gun store owner who legally sells a weapon shouldn't be held liable for crimes committed with it.

He said he opposes the sales of assault-style weapons in the U.S., such as the one used at Sandy Hook.

"That's the kind of weapon that caused the horrible tragedy in Sandy Hook," Sanders said. "Those weapons should not be made in the United States of America. So in that sense, I agree with the Sandy Hook parents."

He was taking quite a bit of damage on this particular issue.  Guns have always been Sanders's weak point, where he's waaaaaaaay to the right of Clinton.  Glad to see even he can change his positions.

You know, like Clinton has.

StupidiNews!

• Lawmakers in Brazil's lower house have voted to impeach President Dilma Rouseff, passing the two-thirds majority needed, Brazil's Senate now needs a simple majority to begin a trial.
• President Obama's executive action on immigration, affecting some four million undocumented parents of children born in the US, goes before the Supreme Court today.
• Oil prices are down sharply after an OPEC meeting in Qatar collapsed due to Saudi Arabia demanding the deal to freeze output levels through October also affect Iran's production.
• The death toll in last week's twin earthquakes in southern Japan has risen to 42 as 25,000 rescue workers have been deployed to the island of Kyushu.
• London police are investigating a possible aircraft collision with a drone at Heathrow Airport, the British Airways jet was cleared with superficial damage.

Last Call For A Mess Of Carolina BBQ

NC GOP Gov. Pat McCrory went on Meet the Press to defend the state's awful omnibus Bad Bathroom Bill to the nation this morning, and it went poorly for him.

CHUCK TODD:

You can make a case, voters made the decision in Charlotte. Charlotte rejected it, then elected two new members of the city council. This has been a long debate in the city of Charlotte, this is where they came down. You guys debated for, like, ten seconds. I mean, don’t you regret the time of debate?

GOV. PAT MCCRORY:

Actually, Charlotte’s vote was a very little debate. They just had a lot of public speakers speaking for and against–

CHUCK TODD:

No, that night. But this has been months — this has been months of a debate.

GOV. PAT MCCRORY:

Look, when Charlotte had originally turned it down, just like Houston has. And there hasn’t been outrage, there wasn’t outrage towards Charlotte when they turned it down initially. There was an outrage towards Houston, Texas, when they turned it down recently. But I tell you what I have learned through this, is we’ve got to have more dialogue and not threats.

You know, I was in Hamlet, North Carolina, a small town that can be at any town in the United States of America. I walked into a buffet restaurant, African American buffet restaurant, and the people just welcomed me with open arms and said, “Thanks for protecting us.” I got back in my car, and I got a call from someone in corporate America going, “Man, you’ve got to change this. We’re getting killed.”

And it showed me the disconnect we have between the corporate suites and main street on a very complex subject, and a very personal subject regarding government policy of all things, which didn’t exist before this group brought this up.

Yeah, because trans people "didn't exist" in North Carolina before this got brought up. 

Jesus, what an asshole.  You know what, I know I've had mixed thoughts on the boycotts hurting NC's small businesses before, but after seeing McCrory simply pretend that the problem is somehow trans folks trying to exist at all in his state, where he's simply "protecting" the good people of the state from those trans people, I say the only way to hurt McCrory is for the business community to burn the place down.

Your bigotry will have consequences, Pat.

So be it.

The Race To Capital Punishment

When even the Wall Street Journal admits that the use of the death penalty in America has a massive racial imbalance that vastly kills more black and Hispanic people, you know that the days of America being able to justify its use are dwindling.  The case of Duane Buck, a Texas death row inmate, is a perfect example of everything wrong with the current death penalty system.

But there is a deeper, more troubling racial dimension to such cases. According to data from the Death Penalty Information Center, 72% of the nation’s executions since 1976 have occurred in the 11 former slaveholding states of the Old Confederacy, where lynchings and executions were routinely employed as methods of racial control. Between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and 1976, 87% of those executed in Mississippi were African-Americans, a figure slightly above the overall Southern average of 80%. Most Southerners put to death for a nonlethal crime in those years were blacks accused of robbing or sexually assaulting a white. Historians of the era have found a long record of trumped-up rape cases, like the one portrayed in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

A few years ago, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund hired criminologist Ray Paternoster to study the impact of race on death penalty prosecutions in Harris County during the 1990s, when Mr. Buck’s trial occurred. He found that prosecutors were three times more likely to seek the death penalty for blacks than for whites under similar circumstances. What he didn’t consider—because it had no direct bearing on Mr. Buck’s case—is perhaps the key factor in death penalty cases: the race of the victim.

Previous studies have shown that defendants are far more likely to be prosecuted for capital murder and sentenced to death when the victim is white. In places like Harris County, this still holds true. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the majority of African-Americans from Harris County on death row were convicted of killing a white, despite the high number of black-on-black homicides in the Houston area. (Indeed, Mr. Buck himself was offered a plea deal of life in prison for his double-murder, but he refused.) Equally important, every white awaiting execution from Harris County was convicted of killing another white. Here are signs that white lives do matter more than black lives, at least in capital cases.

Change may be coming. Texas currently houses 246 death row inmates, but the pipeline that supplies them appears to be closing. In 1999, Texas juries sent 48 defendants to death row; in 2015, they sent just three—none of them African-American and none from Harris County.

Many reasons have been given for this shift—the enormous cost of death-penalty cases, the racial imbalance, the stories of innocent men removed from death row. But the best explanation may be the law passed in 2005 that offers the option of life in prison without parole. Increasingly, Texas juries are taking advantage of it, regardless of the prosecutor’s recommendation.

Every year we get closer and closer to a Supreme Court case that will end the death penalty again, and I think the replacement of Antonin Scalia will play a big role in that.

Sunday Long Read: Everything In Moderation

This week's Sunday Long Read is definitely this piece from The Verge on the history of moderating content on the Internet's public forums in the earlier days of the Wild West, that ancient period of history known as "The Oughts", places like YouTube and their SQUAD (Safety, Quality, and User Advocacy Department).

Launched in 2005, YouTube was the brainchild of Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—three men in their 20s who were frustrated because technically there was no easy way for them to share two particularly compelling videos: clips of the 2004 tsunami that had devastated southeast Asia, and Janet Jackson’s Superbowl "wardrobe malfunction." In April of 2005, they tested their first upload. By October, they had posted their first one million-view hit: Brazilian soccer phenom Ronaldinho trying out a pair of gold cleats. A year later, Google paid an unprecedented $1.65 billion to buy the site. Mora-Blanco got a title: content policy strategist, or in her words, "middle man." Sitting between the front lines and content policy, she handled all escalations from the front-line moderators, coordinating with YouTube’s policy analyst. By mid-2006, YouTube viewers were watching more than 100 million videos a day.

In its earliest days, YouTube attracted a small group of people who mostly shared videos of family and friends. But as volume on the site exploded, so did the range of content: clips of commercial films and music videos were being uploaded, as well as huge volumes of amateur and professional pornography. (Even today, the latter eclipses every other category of violating content.) Videos of child abuse, beatings, and animal cruelty followed. By late 2007, YouTube had codified its commitment to respecting copyright law through the creation of a Content Verification Program. But screening malicious content would prove to be far more complex, and required intensive human labor.

Sometimes exhausted, sometimes elated, and always under intense pressure, the SQUAD reviewed all of YouTube’s flagged content, developing standards as they went. They followed a guiding-light question: "Can I share this video with my family?" For the most part, they worked independently, debating and arguing among themselves; on particularly controversial issues, strategists like Mora-Blanco conferred with YouTube’s founders. In the process, they drew up some of the earliest outlines for what was fast becoming a new field of work, an industry that had never before been systematized or scaled: professional moderation.

By fall 2006, working with data and video illustrations from the SQUAD, YouTube’s lawyer, head of policy, and head of support created the company’s first booklet of rules for the team, which, Mora-Blanco recalls, was only about six pages long. Like the one-pager that preceded it, copies of the booklet sat on the table and were constantly marked up, then updated with new bullet points every few weeks or so. No booklet could ever be complete, no policy definitive. This small team of improvisers had yet to grasp that they were helping to develop new global standards for free speech.

In 2007, the SQUAD helped create YouTube’s first clearly articulated rules for users. They barred depictions of pornography, criminal acts, gratuitous violence, threats, spam, and hate speech. But significant gaps in the guidelines remained — gaps that would challenge users as well as the moderators. The Google press office, which now handles YouTube communications, did not agree to an interview after multiple requests.

As YouTube grew up, so did the videos uploaded to it: the platform became an increasingly important host for newsworthy video. For members of the SQUAD, none of whom had significant journalism experience, this sparked a series of new decisions. 

In the summer of 2009, Iranian protesters poured into the streets, disputing the presidential victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Dubbed the Green Movement, it was one of the most significant political events in the country’s post-Revolutionary history. Mora-Blanco, soon to become a senior content specialist, and her team — now dubbed Policy and more than two-dozen strong — monitored the many protest clips being uploaded to YouTube.

On June 20th, the team was confronted with a video depicting the death of a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan. The 26-year-old had been struck by a single bullet to the chest during demonstrations against pro-government forces and a shaky cell-phone video captured her horrific last moments: in it, blood pours from her eyes, pooling beneath her.

Within hours of the video’s upload, it became a focal point for Mora-Blanco and her team. As she recalls, the guidelines they’d developed offered no clear directives regarding what constituted newsworthiness or what, in essence, constituted ethical journalism involving graphic content and the depiction of death. But she knew the video had political significance and was aware that their decision would contribute to its relevance.

Mora-Blanco and her colleagues ultimately agreed to keep the video up. It was fueling important conversations about free speech and human rights on a global scale and was quickly turning into a viral symbol of the movement. It had tremendous political power.They had tremendous political power. And the clip was already available elsewhere, driving massive traffic to competing platforms.

The Policy team worked quickly with the legal department to relax its gratuitous violence policy, on the fly creating a newsworthiness exemption. An engineer swiftly designed a button warning that the content contained graphic violence — a content violation under normal circumstances — and her team made the video available behind it, where it still sits today. Hundreds of thousands of individuals, in Iran and around the world, could witness the brutal death of a pro-democracy protester at the hands of government. The maneuvers that allowed the content to stand took less than a day.

YouTube's SQUAD set the ground rules for content on the website, and when Google bought them those rules became the ground rules for the Internet itself.  The people involved in SQUAD had to react daily to new challenges and new content.  The people who moderate that content today now have immense power over global information that could potentially be shared with billions...or censored for billions, sometimes regardless of national laws.

These folks have a lot of power, far more than we've ever seen in the Information Age.

So who moderates them?