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?

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."