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?

The Word Of God

Eagerly awaiting the free speech mavens on the right, screaming about how "safe spaces" and "political correctness" are destroying America when this nonsense is the actual real problem. 

A UC Berkeley student whose family fled Iraq in 2002 after his diplomat father was killed under Saddam Hussein’s regime, was booted from a Southwest Airlines flight and questioned by the FBI after another passenger heard him speaking Arabic, NBC Bay Area reports.

In a story originally reported in the Daily Californian, student Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, 26, states he was flying home from attending a dinner at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council with Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon when he stopped to make a call to an uncle.

Makhzoomi explained that conversation was conducted in Arabic and, as he said goodbye, he used the phrase “inshallah,” which translates as “if God is willing.”

The student said that after hung up, he noticed a female passenger looking at him who then got up and left her seat.

“She kept staring at me and I didn’t know what was wrong,” he explained. “Then I realized what was happening and I just was thinking ‘I hope she’s not reporting me.’”

Moments later an airport employee asked Makhzoomi to step off the plane and onto the passenger boarding bridge where he was greeted by three security officers.

Makhzoomi was told the woman thought he said “Shahid,” meaning martyr — a term linked to Islamic terrorists

After pointing out the incident was rooted in Islamophobia, the student was told he would not be allowed to get back on the plane as he heard one of the security officers speaking with the FBI.

“At that moment I couldn’t feel anything,” he said. “I was so afraid. I was so scared.”

If Islamophobia has reached this point in 2016, imagine what it'll be like after Trump wins.  I'm tired of hearing about how "liberal fascism" is preventing people from saying things when the real fascism is -- surprise! -- coming from the usual assholes on the "libertarian" right.

And I Miss You Already

GQ columnist Jim Nelson feels much the same way that I do, that America is going to desperately miss Barack Obama when he's no longer President of the United States, and that he'll go down as one of the greats.

Wait. One of the Greatest? you ask, your thumb emoticon poised to turn up or down on me. The guy haters love to hate with their very best hate game? Like 20-Dollar Bill great? Like Mount Rushmore great?

Yep. (We just won’t build Mount Rushmores anymore.) In so many ways, Obama was better than we imagined, better than the body politic deserved, and far, far better than his enemies will ever concede, but the great thing about being great is that the verdict of enemies doesn’t matter.

In fact, and I say this as a Bill Clinton fan, I now feel certain that, in the coming decades, Obama’s star will rise higher than Clinton’s, and he’ll replace Bill in the public mind as the Greatest Democrat since FDR.

This has to do with the nature of Obama’s leadership, which is to play to legacy (and Clinton’s impulse, which is to play to the room). Bill Clinton will long be revered because he’s charismatic, presided over an economic revival, and changed and elevated the view of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama will long be revered because he’s charismatic, presided over an economic revival, and changed and elevated the view of the presidency. He’s simply bigger than Bill.

More to the point, Obama’s legacy is the sort that gets canonized. Because the first rule of Hall of Fame-dom: The times have to suck for the president not to. Civil wars, World Wars, depressions and recessions. You got to have ’em if you wanna be great. That’s why we rate the Washingtons, Lincolns, and Roosevelts over That Fat Guy with the Walrus Mustache. Like Obama, these Great Men were dealt sucky hands, won big, and left the country better off than it was before.

But it’s also why we downgrade the Jimmy Carters and Herbert Hoovers. Were they as bad in real time as we remember them in history? Probably not. But they were dealt sucky hands, only played one round, and left the country feeling worse off. Legacy Game over. (Hoover reminds me more and more of Donald Trump! Elected with little political experience, Hoover was a rich bastard whose central theme was that government was wasteful. His answer to the Great Depression was to start a trade war and build a massive project called the Hoover Dam. The dam turned out to be a giant wall that did not stop or solve larger problems. Déjà vu, thy name is Trump Wall!)

Obama has a few other edges in the long haul of history, beyond specific hurrah moments like Obamacare, rescuing the economy, and making America way more bi-curious. Being the first black president of course secures a certain legacy. But what now feels distinctly possible is that, just as Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed, over time he may be judged less for the color of his skin than for the content of his character. That character came across every time haters or Trumpers or birthers tried to pull him down into the mud or question his American-ness. He just flew above it all. And, luckily, he took most of us with him. He was the Leader not only of our country but of our mood and disposition, which is harder to rule. At a time when we became more polarized, our discourse pettier and more poisoned, Obama always came across as the Adult in the Room, the one we wanted to be and follow.

The "adult in the room that we wanted to be and to follow" characteristic is the one that made me appreciate Barack Obama.  Yes, he's far from perfect and he's made mistakes and outright awful decisions that I've detailed numerous times here over the last seven years and change.

But Barack Obama was the person who got me involved in local and state politics, and made me want to make my country better than it was.

Reagan and Poppy Bush made me think of the presidency as something to be angry at as a kid.  They sent people to wars and those people were hurt and killed.  Clinton didn't make me care either way. Bush 43 certainly didn't make me believe the presidency would ever be used by anyone other than for personal gain.

Obama?  Yeah.  I'll miss the guy, and that's putting it mildly.

Wage Slaves, Con't

With Hillary Clinton joining Bernie Sanders in the national "Fight for $15" minimum wage movement in this week's final scheduled Democratic primary debate in New York, Ezra Klein sounds very large alarm bells that a $15 federal minimum wage would wreck the economy.

He's probably right, and he explains why.

A $15 per hour minimum wage is so high that we don't have any real idea how it would affect the American economy. The all-time high for the national minimum wage, after adjusting for inflation, was about $11 per hour in 1968. Since the 1980s, the national, inflation-adjusted minimum wage hasn't been higher than $8 per hour. 

Economists disagree about whether these more modest minimum wages have produced significant job losses. One recent study, for example, found that the most recent national minimum wage hike — between 2006 and 2009 — "reduced employment among individuals ages 16 to 30 with less than a high school education by 5.6 percentage points." 

Other economists dispute that. A comprehensive study of state-level minimum wage hikes between 1990 and 2006 by economist Arindrajit Dube and two co-authors found "no detectable employment losses from the kind of minimum wage increases we have seen in the United States." 

But when I asked the lead authors of both studies about California's recent move to boost the minimum wage to $15, I found they were on the same page: the increase was so large that the effects are unpredictable. Neither man could rule out the possibility that a $15 per hour minimum wage would cause dramatic job losses. 

One of the most prominent left-leaning economists in the minimum wage debate is Alan Krueger, co-author of a widely-cited 1993 paper finding that a modest minimum wage hike in Pennsylvania didn't cost jobs. Krueger has served in the Obama administration and supports raising the national minimum wage to $12 per hour. But in a New York Times piece last fall, he warned that "a $15-an-hour national minimum wage would put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and unintended consequences." 

There a two realities right now:  One, California and New York make up more than 56 million Americans, or easily one-sixth of the country.  With cities like Seattle moving towards $15, that number is pushing 60 million, or one fifth of America.  I understand the wage increases are designed to be incremental, but there's still a limit.

The other reality is that the rest of the country can't support a $15 minimum wage.

A big concern with California's minimum wage hike was that California is a large and diverse state. Some parts of the state — like the city of San Francisco — have high wages and a high cost of living; in these areas, a large majority of workers are already making more than $15 per hour, and employers paying less than that may not have much trouble finding the money to comply with the new wage. 

But other parts of California aren't so affluent, and in these areas, the higher minimum wage could cost a lot of jobs. Small businesses in cities like Fresno could be forced to shut down, as customers just aren't willing to pay the higher prices needed to cover the higher wage costs. 

In March I asked Dube — generally seen as a supporter of a higher minimum wage — if it was a mistake for a state as large as California to try such a big increase. Would it be better to let $15-an-hour experiments in San Francisco and Los Angeles play out? 

"If you're risk-averse, this would not be the scale at which to try things," Dube told me.
Of course, that point applies with even greater force to the nation as a whole. Themedian wage in Fresno was $15.48 per hour in 2015, meaning that almost half of Fresno workers will be affected by California's new minimum wage law — either getting a raise or losing their job. 

But as the Washington Post's Catherine Rampell points out, there are four states where the median wage is less than $15 per hour.

Yes, the federal minimum wage needs to go up.  $10.25, which Democrats pushed recently, was a good start.  States like California and New York are acting where Republicans in Congress continue to block any wage increase.  It's been $7.25 for a decade now and is still the minimum wage in 18 states, with another dozen less than $9.

But $15 will cause chaos in places like Alabama or Pennsylvania (yes, $7.25 is minimum wage is a union Rust Belt state like Pennsylvania, folks) or as much as I loathe to say it, here in Kentucky. Kentucky's economy isn't California's or New York's.

A $15 federal minimum wage is going to be ruthlessly painful, and I don't see Clinton or Sanders saying that they have plans to help the millions of people who would lose their jobs.  I don't even hear them admitting there's going to be serious pain in California and New York as a result.

Ezra's right, it's time for Dems to say "OK, but $15 an hour is going to require a lot of other things to make it work, so let's talk about what needs to be done."

Last Call For Out Like Flint, Con't

It's official, Republicans have killed federal funding to fix Flint, Michigan's water crisis again, and again the bad guy here is Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee.

Bipartisan Senate leaders reached an agreement Wednesday on a long-stalled energy modernization bill that some had hoped would include money to address the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan. 

But because the Flint provision is still the subject of a hold by Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee -- who objects to the way it is funded -- the energy bill will now move on without it. 

The setback is significant, because even if Lee's concerns are resolved eventually, it will likely be time-consuming and complicated to find a new legislative vehicle to pass the money for Flint. 

Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow quickly issued a statement knocking Lee for holding up the funds, which she argues are desperately needed. 

"It's totally unacceptable that Sen. Lee continues to block a vote on our fully paid for, bipartisan agreement to help Flint and other communities across the nation who have serious lead and water problems," the Democrat said. "This is about something as basic as making sure families have clean water to drink and children with lead poisoning get the help they need." 

"We will not give up until this gets done using whatever legislative vehicle it takes," she added. 

The Flint measure would provide $250 million for repairs to its lead-leaching water lines as well as deal with the health effects on the city's residents. The money would also be available to other communities with drinking water problems.

You think Lee is going to suffer an ounce of political fallout over this in a state like Utah?  He won in 2010 by nearly 30 points, and the Democrats are running Jon Swinton, a marriage therapist, against him.  The one poll I can find was from a year ago and Lee would win by six.  Now?  Who knows, nobody in Utah seems to care about removing Lee from office. 

Utah's Senate primary isn't until the end of June, so if the one remotely popular Democrat in the state, Rep. Jim Matheson is going to step in, he has plenty of time, except for the fact Matheson now has a comfy job as an energy company and payday lender lobbyist after getting clobbered by GOP Rep. Mia Love in 2014. Odds are real good Matheson isn't going anywhere.

So Sen. Lee makes the perfect bad guy here. Utahns aren't going to punish him, and Flint will continue to suffer.

And so it goes. America really doesn't seem too interested in helping Flint when "everybody needs help with my tax money" in the age of Austerity.

A House Afire, Con't

Larry Sabato's crew at Crystal Ball see the Dems picking up a significant number of seats in the House in 2016 at this point, and should the GOP really screw it up with a Trump or Cruz disaster at the top of the ticket, Dems winning back the House isn't totally out of the question.

Before this update, we rated 229 House seats as either Safe, Likely, or Leaning to the Republicans, 188 Safe/Likely/Leaning to the Democrats, and 18 Toss-ups. If one splits the Toss-ups 9 to 9, it would leave the House with 238 Republicans and 197 Democrats, or a net gain of nine seats for the Democrats. The new ratings are as follows: 227 Safe/Likely/Leaning Republican, 188 Safe/Likely/Leaning Democratic, and 20 Toss-ups. Split the Toss-ups, and Democrats net 10 seats, or only a third of what they need.

That is roughly what our outlook is right now — a small Democratic gain of about 5-10 seats — but as we showed earlier, the presidential math could change that calculation, swelling Democratic gains. On the flip side, Republicans still have a chance to hold Democrats to single-digits gains. A Republican net gain seems exceedingly unlikely at this point, but in this crazy cycle one cannot completely rule it out with seven months to go.

It's interesting to see that 5-10 seats is a middle point in a year where the Democrats have controlled the White House for two terms.  You would normally expect the non-incumbent party to make gains, but that's how bad the GOP has it right now, even with the significant structural advantages through redistricting in 2010 and gerrymandering after that gave them a huge win in 2014.

Not only are there a significant number of toss-ups on the Republican side, but several very likely Dem pickups too.  Getting enough to take back the House isn't likely, but they could gain 20 seats or so at this point.

We'll see.

A Mess Of Carolina BBQ, Con't

The most liberal part of North Carolina is definitely Asheville, where I went to college back in the 90's, and it's places like this that do give me hope that something can be done about NC's awful Republican problem.  The state's being boycotted by a number of groups over HB2, the recent "bathroom bill" legislation passed in less than a day by Republicans in a special session of the state legislature, and not everyone in the state thinks a boycott is fair or even helpful, like Linda-Marie Barrett, of the city's legendary Malaprop's Bookstore and Cafe.

We’ve just entered a particularly rough patch, though, as we endure the repercussions of a new law that bars transgender people from the bathrooms of their choice and permits discrimination based on sexual orientation. This horrible legislation goes against what we stand for: human rights, tolerance and inclusiveness. We’ve held meetings about how to respond. We’ve helped write a letter from North Carolina independent bookstores to the State Legislature demanding a repeal of the law, and we’ve signed onto a letter from children’s book authors in the state speaking out against it. We are heartened that Asheville’s City Council just passed a resolution calling for the law’s repeal.

But now we’re being made to pay a price for a law we vehemently oppose, as artists, businesses and government officials have begun to boycott North Carolina. Our store, too, is being boycotted. Customers from other states tell us they won’t visit until the law is no more. More threatening to us financially and to our community culturally is the cancellation of events by authors.

The National Book Award-winning author Sherman Alexie canceled an event in May that included a talk in a large ticketed venue and two school visits. Although we deeply respect the author’s reason for boycotting, we lost out on much needed revenue through book sales tied to his appearance. We also lost an opportunity to connect a beloved, charismatic author with fans in a city who would have been empowered by his outrage over the law.

After he canceled, other writers and booksellers let us know they stood with us. But this shows how precarious social protest can be, especially when it involves boycotting bookstores, which are financially vulnerable, and often the best place in a community to discuss controversial ideas.

As justified as a boycott can be, we ask authors to consider a way of protesting other than boycotting bookstores. We need your voices, your presence, your art. When you cancel events with us, you deprive readers of a voice that can buoy them up, enlighten them, and demonstrate the fellowship of being there for each other, in community.

For 34 years we’ve had authors’ backs when their books were challenged or their events protested. We need authors to have our backs, too.

And yeah, like every other UNC-Asheville student, I went to Malaprop's several times.  It's a great place and if you're ever in Asheville, PLEASE go there.  I hate to see it suffer like this.  Boycotts do have unintended consequences and are not always the best solution to a problem.  Small businesses, especially bookstores, are very vulnerable to economic pressure.

Voting out the lawmakers who caused the problem, well, that's entirely different.

StupidiNews!

• South Korea's military says a North Korean missile test has failed on the holiday for North Korea's founding dictator Kim Il Sung, the missile apparently never achieving flight.
• Tennessee GOP Gov. Bill Haslam has vetoed a bill that would make the Holy Bible the "state book" saying it would be unconstitutional, but GOP lawmakers vow to override the veto.
• British police say they have arrested five in connection with possible terrorist attacks as European Union governments step up security in the wake of attacks in Paris and Brussels.
• In Brazil President Dilma Rouseff is asking the country's top court to block impeachment proceedings ahead of Sunday's vote by lawmakers to bring formal charges.
• Apple has confirmed that it is no longer issuing security updates to fix its Quicktime player for Windows despite experts saying the software has known, active vulnerabilities.

Last Call For It's Not Just White Men

The opioid epidemic hitting white rural communities is not just killing men, but killing women as well.  New statistics show a major spike in the death rates of white women, particularly in the Midwest and among the lower middle class, people like Anna Marrie Jones of Tecumseh, Oklahoma.

Fifty-four years old. Raised on three rural acres. High school-educated. A mother of three. Loyal employee of Kmart, Walls Bargain Center and Dollar Store. These were the facts of her life as printed in the funeral program, and now they had also become clues in an American crisis with implications far beyond the burnt grass and red dirt of central Oklahoma.

White women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

What killed Jones was cirrhosis of the liver brought on by heavy drinking. The exact culprit was vodka, whatever brand was on sale, poured into a pint glass eight ounces at a time. But, as Anna’s family gathered at the gravesite for a final memorial, they wondered instead about the root causes, which were harder to diagnose and more difficult to solve.

“Life didn’t always break her way. She dealt with that sadness,” said Candy Payne, the funeral officiant. “She tried her best. She loved her family. But she dabbled in the drinking, and when things got tough the drinking made it harder.”

There were plots nearby marked for Jones’s friends and relatives who had died in the past decade at ages 46, 52 and 37. Jones had buried her fiance at 55. She had eulogized her best friend, dead at 50 from alcohol-induced cirrhosis.

Other parts of the adjacent land were intended for her children: Davey, 38, her oldest son and most loyal caretaker, who was making it through the day with some of his mother’s vodka; Maryann, 33, the middle daughter, who had hitched a ride to the service because she couldn’t afford a working car; and Tiffany, 31, who had two daughters of her own, a job at the discount grocery and enough accumulated stress to make her feel, “at least a decade or two older,” she said.

Candy, who in addition to being the officiant was also a close family friend, motioned for Tiffany and Maryann to bring over the container holding their mother’s cremated remains. They opened the lid and the ashes blew back into their dresses and out into the pasture.

“No more hurt. No more loneliness,” Candy said.

“No more suffering,” Tiffany said.

They shook out the last ashes and circled the grave as Candy bowed her head to pray.

“We don’t know why it came to this,” she said. “We trust You know the reasons. We trust You have the answers.”

The answers are that the economic conditions that have crushed a generation of black and Hispanic working class Americans, once confined to the inner cities, have now become commonplace across all of 2016 America.  White, rural America is just now catching up in the misery department, accelerated by red state austerity and voting constantly against their own self-interests.

But now that it's affecting white women, well, now the austerity regime is maybe a problem in a country where the richest 1% now account for close to two-thirds of the total wealth.  Hell, just the wealthiest twenty Americans alone now own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the country.

And that's just the money we know about.

Hillary's Lead Pipe Cinch

Greg Sargent breaks down Hillary Clinton's proposal to replace America's lead pipes and lead paint in five years, a plan that even I think is borderline Bernie Sanders unicorn territory.

The details are here: The proposal on lead in particular includes a promise to establish a Presidential Commission on Childhood Lead Exposure, which would be charged with “writing a national plan to eliminate the risk of lead exposure from paint, pipes, and soil within five years.” It also includes a vow to push for $5 billion to implement the commission’s recommendations, to “replace lead paint, windows, and doors in homes, schools, and child care centers and remediate lead-contaminated soil.” It also references a separate $275 billion plan for infrastructure modernization that includes “drinking and wastewater infrastructure.”

Public health problems such as this one historically attract widespread notice when there are glaringly awful outbreaks of it that command media and public attention, such as the one in Flint, Michigan. But in fact, a national effort along the lines of the one Clinton is suggesting has long been sought by advocates for reform — because this remains a national problem that afflicts other cities and localities, too. As the New York Times recently put it:

By the most recent estimate, about 37 million homes and apartments still have some lead paint on walls and woodwork, 23 million with potentially hazardous levels of lead in soil, paint chips or household dust.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that four million of those most dangerous households have children. A half-million children — in Atlantic City, Philadelphia and Allentown, Pa., where a remarkable 23.1 percent of children tested had excessive lead — are believed to have enough lead in their blood to merit a doctor’s attention.

“We know that there are many kids across the country that have high lead levels in their bodies — testing kids identifies exposure that you can’t do anything about,” Jerome Paulson, an emeritus professor of public health and pediatrics at George Washington University and a longtime advocate for cleaning up the lead threat, tells me. The goal, he says, should be to “proactively identify the old housing and lead pipes and take care of them.”

“There will never be no kids in the U.S. with some adverse lead exposure, but we can certainly make it a much smaller problem than we have to date,” Paulson continues.

Successful national efforts have been made, such as the elimination of lead in gasoline, which was “extremely successful in reducing child lead exposure,” but “there’s never been a proactive federal approach to lead based paint poisoning or lead poisoning from the use of lead pipes for water,” Paulson says.

It wouldn’t be easy, to put it mildly, and Clinton’s proposal raises a host of questions. Among them would be how this commission would go about identifying the lead threat throughout the country and assembling all that knowledge in one place, Paulson says. Another would be how such policies would be implemented — Clinton stops short of proposing a legislative solution, though she doesn’t rule one out.

Considering national infrastructure spending would again have to get through a Republican House, the same Republican House that went down to the wire just to pay for the roads we already have and had to be dragged kicking and screaming by President Obama to pass, and only then after the GOP cut $170 billion from the original proposal, fixing lead pipes seems almost impossible.

Hell, this is the same GOP Congress that won't authorize any funding for fighting the Zika virus, something that could drastically affect unborn children that Republicans are always screaming about. You think Clinton could get funding to help places like Flint fix their lead pipes with taxpayer money?

Not going to happen.  I appreciate Clinton actually trying to fix the problem, it's more than you'll ever see from Republicans, but you'd better believe the howling tea party austerity nutjobs won't authorize a dime for a Democratic president to fix infrastructure.

Tumblr Down House

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As always, I'm on the Twitter machine as well: @ZandarVTS.

StupidiNews!

• Florida officials will not press charges against Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski over alleged battery against former Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields.
• Former reporter Matthew Keys has been sentenced to two years in prison for helping hacker group Anonymous access the LA Times' website.
• The CDC is officially classifying the Zika virus as a threat to newborns, saying that there is now "no doubt" that virus does cause microcephaly in babies born to infected pregnant women.
• McDonald's has officially given up its chicken wraps after several years of low sales and the success of its all-day breakfast menu.
• Two new telescopes could finally help NASA hunt down killer asteroids that might threaten the earth.