Myths, Misinformation, and the Founding

 

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. 

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There's something odd about being so self-righteous when you're so wrong. Mamdani is, of course, correct, and Posobiec is wrong - New York was the first capital of the United States of America. pic.twitter.com/ytYUU9tHXr

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) July 6, 2026

No…the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights including Life, Liberty & the pursuit of Happiness. “Made in the image of God” is from the Bible. I guess its easy to confuse 2 things you’ve never read https://t.co/x729uCghhP

— Andrew—#IAmTheResistance (@AmoneyResists) July 5, 2026

Clemency and Video

Many posts have discussed executive clemency.

Matt Nadel and Jan Kobal at NYT:

Using lights, a camera and a tried-and-true narrative formula, Matt Nadel produces short films about incarcerated people in New York. His goal? To persuade the governor, Kathy Hochul, to grant his clients clemency.

Thanks to the tough-on-crime zeitgeist that began in the 1980s, governors have often come to view clemency as a political liability rather than an opportunity to give people second chances. Grants of clemency in New York, for example, have plummeted as a result. Filmmakers like Mr. Nadel — hired by lawyers — have become a last resort.

“It feels like I’m trying to hack a broken system,” he says.

But as Mr. Nadel argues in the Opinion Video above, it shouldn’t require such an elaborate production to get people out of prison.

A Strong Letter

Many posts have discussed prosecutors.

 From WP:Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor in Mayor Eric Adams’s federal corruption case, has quit over the Justice Department’s demand that the case be dismissed, calling any lawyer who would move in court to toss the matter a “fool” or “coward,” according to a copy of a letter obtained Friday.

BY EMAIL 

Re: United States v. Eric Adams, 24 Cr. 556 (DEH) 

Mr. Bove,

 I have received correspondence indicating that I refused your order to move to dismiss the indictment against Eric Adams without prejudice, subject to certain conditions, including the express possibility of reinstatement of the indictment. That is not exactly correct. The U.S. Attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, never asked me to file such a motion, and I therefore never had an opportunity to refuse. But I am entirely in agreement with her decision not to do so, for the reasons stated in her February 12, 2025 letter to the Attorney General. 

In short, the first justification for the motion—that Damian Williams's role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys is so weak as to be transparently pretextual. The second justification is worse. No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives. 

There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake . Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative view of the new Administration. I do not share those views. I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me. Please consider this my resignation. It has been an honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. 

Yours truly, Hagan Scotten Assistant United States Attorney Southern District of New York

Article II and State Constitutions

Many posts have discussed the presidency.

At AEI: 

Reading the First State Constitutions on Executive Power: A Window into Article II Joseph M. Bessette, Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor (Emeritus) of Government and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College Joseph.Bessette@claremontmckenna.edu & Gary J. Schmitt, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute Gschmitt@aei.org

 Turning next to the opening words of Article II—“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”—the question arises whether those words were meant to grant substantive power or were merely meant to designate the office of the chief executive. First, as our review of the state constitutions showed, the executive vesting clause was not an invention crafted by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Virtually every state constitution included a general grant of executive authority, with the constitutions of three states—South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York—offering clear textual antecedents to the vesting formula found in Article II. In each of the three, there is evidence that the executive vesting provision was read, or assumed to be, a substantive grant of power. When that fact is combined with the most obvious reading of the text itself,78 it seems reasonable to conclude that the opening line of Article II was intended to give the president an actual power. And the fact that the power vested is “the executive power” implies that it was a power that was understood to have a distinct and discernable character.

Also worth noting is how Article II of the U.S. Constitution mirrors much of the structure of the New York constitution. As in the case of New York, Article II’s first section 57 vests the executive power and also spells out how the chief executive is selected. Then, in the following section in both constitutions, the executive is given a set of powers, such as being commander-in-chief and having the authority to grant pardons. And finally, Article II, sec. 3 of the Constitution, echoing Article XIX of the New York Constitution, states: 

[The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

The section appears as a mix of authorities—some significant, others less so; one seemingly discretionary, the others not (“shall”). What appears to tie them together is that each has in some way a role in keeping the government moving forward. This is both broad, such as in putting forward ideas for legislative consideration and ensuring the nation’s laws are properly administered, and, more mundanely, in formally accepting the credentials of foreign emissaries and ensuring civilian and military officials are properly authorized to carry out their duties. Given this list of responsibilities, it was perhaps one reason the nation’s chief executive was designated as “President,” presiding not over another branch of government or even a single chamber of the legislature but, rather, acting as a steward for government functions most aptly suited to the institution of the presidency. 

Finally, with the exception of Pennsylvania’s constitution, the U.S. Constitution is the only constitution in the founding period in which the executive is given both a list of 58 duties and an oath of office. And, with the exception of Georgia’s constitution, the Constitution is the only American governing charter of the period that had an oath specifically tailored for the chief executive. (“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”) It’s an oath that points toward the president’s official responsibilities being broader than being a mere executive—with the duty to faithfully execute the laws being just one of several responsibilities listed in Section 3 of Article II—while, at the same time, circumscribing their execution to supporting the political order itself. 

Perceptions of Group Size

 Jonathan V. Last:

Yesterday Jemele Hill recirculated a study YouGov did in 2022 about the gaps between people’s perceptions and reality.

YouGov asked a series of questions on “What percentage of Americans do you think are [fill in the blank]?” with the [blank] being all sorts of qualities: black, gay, Christian, left-handed, own a passport, etc.

The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:

• Transgender: 21 percent
• Muslim: 27 percent
• Jewish: 30 percent
• Black: 41 percent
• Live in New York City: 30 percent
• Gay or lesbian: 30 percent

We’ll get to the actual, in vivo percentages in a moment. First I want to point out the absurdity: 1-in-3 are gay/lesbian? Muslims and Jews make up 57 percent of the country? Blacks are 40 percent of the population?

Not to be crass, but if a third of the population is gay/lesbian then where are all the kids coming from?

If a quarter of the country is Muslim and a third is Jewish, then mosques plus synagogues would outnumber churches. Does anyone see more mosques and synagogues than churches as they drive around?

If 40 percent of the country is black then wouldn’t there be a lot more black people in Congress? I mean, there have only been 12 African-American senators ever.

You see what I mean: These perceptions do not square with any version of observable reality. Here the numbers as they actually exist in the real world:

• Transgender: 1 percent
• Muslim: 1 percent
• Jewish: 2 percent
• Black: 12 percent
• Live in New York City: 2 percent1
• Gay or lesbian: 3 percent

We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.

If you go down the list of characteristics YouGov asked people about, you see a persistent mistake in one direction: Americans vastly overestimate the numbers of people in minority groups. And by “minority groups” I’m talking not just about racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. They wildly overestimate all kinds of minorities.

New York Criminal Defendants Must Attend Their Trial

Many posts have discussed crime and the courts.

 SECTION 340.50

SECTION 340.50

Defendant's presence at trial

Criminal Procedure (CPL) CHAPTER 11-A, PART 2, TITLE K, ARTICLE 340

§ 340.50 Defendant's presence at trial.

1. Except as provided in subdivision two or three, a defendant must
be personally present during the trial.

2. On motion of a defendant represented by counsel, the court may, in
the absence of an objection by the people, issue an order dispensing
with the requirement that the defendant be personally present at trial.
Such an order may be made only upon the filing of a written and
subscribed statement by the defendant declaring that he waives his right
to be personally present at the trial and authorizing his attorney to
conduct his defense.

3. A defendant who conducts himself in so disorderly and disruptive a
manner that his trial cannot be carried on with him in the courtroom may
be removed from the courtroom if, after he has been warned by the court
that he will be removed if he continues such conduct, he continues to
engage in such conduct.

Every criminal defendant in the state will get this warning:

(Published Aug. 2016)

To the defendant:

You have the right to be present in court at any proceeding including, in particular, a hearing and trial. Do you understand?

However, by your conduct, you can waive, give up, forfeit, or lose that right to be present.

Add if defendant is in jail:

If you deliberately refuse to come to court when required, or in any way deliberately obstruct or interfere with the effort to bring you to court, then, any proceeding in your case, including hearing, trial and, if you are convicted, sentence, can and will continue in your absence. Do you understand?

Add if defendant is at liberty:

If you deliberately fail to appear in court when required, then any proceeding in your case, including hearing, trial and, if you are convicted, sentence, can and will continue in your absence. A warrant for your arrest will be issued and you will be subject to separate prosecution and separate punishment for bail jumping no matter what happens in this case. Do you understand?

1. See People v Parker, 57 NY2d 136 (1982) (advising the defendant of the right to be present and the consequences of nonappearance is a predicate to a trial in absentia).

New York and California are Losing Affluent Taxpayers

 Justin Fox at Bloomberg:

New York has been losing people to other states for a while. But something new happened during the pandemioc: The people who left had higher incomes than those who stayed behind — much higher.

The 2020-21 numbers here were released in late April by the Internal Revenue Service. They sort taxpayers by whether and where they moved between filing their taxes in 2020 and filing them in 2021; the adjusted gross incomes are for the 2020 tax year. It has been two years since May 17, 2021 — that year’s belated income tax filing deadline — and a lot has changed. But New York has continued to lose population, and if the trend depicted above were to continue, even in less extreme form, it would be disastrous for the finances of a state that relies on income taxes paid by those making $200,000 or more a year for almost half its revenue. (That is, before the pandemic in 2019, personal income taxes accounted for 65% of state revenue, and those making $200,000 or more paid 71% of the income taxes.)

...

The role of taxes in driving interstate migration is often exaggerated, but it’s not nothing. In a couple of recent papers, Joshua Rauh of the Stanford Graduate School of Business has shown that the percentage of very-high-income taxpayers leaving California jumped in the wake of one, a 2013 increase in the state’s top income tax rate, two, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Act’s curtailing of state and local tax deductions and three, the pandemic. Still, that’s not many people and for years those leaving California and New York have been mainly lower— and middle-income residents for whom expensive housing and other cost-of-living issues probably played a bigger role than tax rates per se.

In New York, the initial pandemic exodus was led by those who could afford to leave quickly and could work remotely. The composition seems to have shifted since then, with affluent Manhattan gaining population from mid-2021 to mid-2022, according to Census Bureau estimates, and the state’s poorest county, the Bronx, losing the biggest percentage of population. (The recent New York Times analysis showing an accelerating exodus of college graduates from the New York City metro area relies on different Census numbers that aren’t available yet for 2022.) New York has been finding all sorts of different ways to drive away all sorts of different people — and it looks as if that’s about to start seriously hampering the state’s ability to pay its bills.

Santos and the Decline of Local News

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

Sarah Ellison at WP:

Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate. The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later. … The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”

It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast. But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.

Black Mayors

Brakkton Booker at Politico:

When Karen Bass is sworn in as Los Angeles mayor next month, she’ll be making history in more ways than one.

Not only will she be the first woman to lead LA, Bass will complete a rare tetrafecta of sorts: Black mayors will be running the nation’s four largest cities, with the congresswoman joining Eric Adams of New York, Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and Sylvester Turner of Houston.

“Anytime we get a new mayor, it’s exciting,” Frank Scott, the Democratic mayor of Little Rock, Ark., said in a phone interview. “But to have another mayor, a Black woman, who’s going to lead one of our nation’s major cities? That’s a big deal.”

This marks the first time these major metropolises will simultaneously be led by African Americans — and it may be for just a brief period. The leadership acumen of big city mayors is being tested now in how they address issues ranging from upticks in crime, to a sagging economy and high inflation, to housing affordability and homelessness.

And this is all taking place as the cities undergo seismic demographic shifts. All four are “majority minority” cities and these Black mayors are governing municipalities where Latinos, not Black residents, make up the largest non-white ethnic group.

Hispanics accounted for more than half of the growth in the U.S. population, according to the 2020 Census. Meanwhile, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other big cities have seen their Black populations shrink in recent years in something of a reversal of what happened in the 1970s. These new migration patterns are altering political dynamics as Latinos consolidate power.

Racial and Ethnic Coalitions in Major Cities

Thomas B. Edsall at NYT:

Democrats in cities across America are having trouble holding their coalitions together.

In Los Angeles, the battle is over power in the form of representation on the City Council; in San Francisco and New York, it’s over affordable housing and access to public schools; across the nation, it’s over tough versus tolerant criminal prosecution and lenient versus punitive approaches to homelessness.

These tensions are, in turn, aggravated by white gentrification and have one thing in common: limited or declining resources, with shuttered businesses no longer paying taxes evident on downtown streets. An absence of growth prevents elected officials from expanding benefits for some without paring them for others.

Political tensions between African American, Hispanic American, Asian American and white communities in Los Angeles are now on full display as a result of the publication of a secretly taped conversation that exposed the crude, racist scheming of three Hispanic City Council officials and a Hispanic labor leader — who were, in the main, angling to enhance their power at the expense of Black competitors.

These zero-sum conflicts epitomize the problem for liberals struggling to sustain a viable political alliance encompassing core minority constituencies.

Attica

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Attica Massacre. On September 9, 1971, inmates in the Attica Correctional Facility, in Attica NY rioted and seized control of the prison.  They took 43 staff members hostage. During the next four days, authorities yielded to many of the prisoners' demands, but would not agree to amnesty or the removal of the prison's superintendent. On September 13, talks broke down and Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered state police to storm the prison.  In all, 43 people died, including ten correctional officers and civilian employees. (Source: NY State Library)

State Senator John Dunne -- who would later be my boss -- was there in his capacity as chair of the State Senate Corrections Committee.  Prisoners asked him to be one of the mediators because they trusted him. He had earned that trust by making unannounced inspections of prison conditions. In an oral history, he remembered calling Rockefeller and urging him to come to Attica.

I’m a Rockefeller Republican. But, let’s see, it was Wicker, Badillo, the editor of the Amsterdam News, and me, the four people who spoke to him that afternoon. I was the last one to speak with him. And he just wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t come. See, my thought was this, “Come and be there. Not meet with them, I don’t want you going in D Yard. Come, be there. So you’re symbolically involved.” For example, what’s going on in China now, they send a premier in China to go to the earthquake site so that you’re showing you’re involved, in your commitment, your interest. That’s what we were trying to achieve because we had agreed on, I think, 29 of the 32 or 33 demands. And what those guys inside were worried about was, “Hey, you know, once we lay down our arms, you know, they’re not going to honor any of these conditions.” So we wanted to get him to put his imprimatur on it. And now, people say to me, “Gosh, do you think it would have made a difference?” I don’t know if it would have made a difference. But when you consider the stakes that we were facing, and I knew, I had a very good idea of what was going to happen. Should have tried it.

...

It was his responsibility. I mean, it was very clear that they were going to use lethal force to retake the facility. You had guards who were in there who were targets, the likelihood, as it turned out, was correct, were going to meet their death. He was the man; he was in charge. The Sunday after the Attica riot I was on one of those Sunday morning programs; they asked me straight out, “Do you think he should have come?” And I said, “Yes.” You know, two years later I was stripped of my chairmanship. I don’t mean to be any kind of a martyr. But, yeah, I really, to this day, I think it could have made a difference. Could have.

 

AI and Astroturf

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier

This month, the New York state attorney general issued a report on a scheme by “U.S. Companies and Partisans [to] Hack Democracy.” This wasn’t another attempt by Republicans to make it harder for Black people and urban residents to vote. It was a concerted attack on another core element of U.S. democracy — the ability of citizens to express their voice to their political representatives. And it was carried out by generating millions of fake comments and fake emails purporting to come from real citizens.

This attack was detected because it was relatively crude. But artificial intelligence technologies are making it possible to generate genuine-seeming comments at scale, drowning out the voices of real citizens in a tidal wave of fake ones.

...

The big telecommunications companies paid millions of dollars to specialist “AstroTurf” companies to generate public comments. These companies then stole people’s names and email addresses from old files and from hacked data dumps and attached them to 8.5 million public comments and half a million letters to members of Congress. All of them said that they supported the corporations’ position on something called “net neutrality,” the idea that telecommunications companies must treat all Internet content equally and not prioritize any company or service. Three AstroTurf companies — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media — agreed to pay nearly $4 million in fines.

The fakes were crude. Many of them were identical, while others were patchworks of simple textual variations: substituting “Federal Communications Commission” and “FCC” for each other, for example.

Next time, though, we won’t be so lucky. New technologies are about to make it far easier to generate enormous numbers of convincing personalized comments and letters, each with its own word choices, expressive style and pithy examples. The people who create fake grass-roots organizations have always been enthusiastic early adopters of technology, weaponizing letters, faxes, emails and Web comments to manufacture the appearance of public support or public outrage.

Hamilton and Slavery

Jennifer Schuessler at NYT:

The question has lingered around the edges of the pop-culture ascendancy of Alexander Hamilton: Did the 10-dollar founding father, celebrated in the musical “Hamilton” as a “revolutionary manumission abolitionist,” actually own slaves?

Some biographers have gingerly addressed the matter over the years, often in footnotes or passing references. But a new research paper released by the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, N.Y., offers the most ringing case yet.

In the paper, titled “‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,” Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the mansion, examines letters, account books and other documents. Her conclusion — about Hamilton, and what she suggests is wishful thinking on the part of many of his modern-day admirers — is blunt.

“Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” she writes.

...

But Ron Chernow, whose 2004 biography calls Hamilton an “uncompromising abolitionist,” said the paper presented a lopsidedly negative view.

The paper, he said in an email, “seems to be a terrific research job that broadens our sense of Hamilton’s involvement in slavery in a number of ways.” But he said he was dismayed at the relative lack of attention to Hamilton’s antislavery activities. And he questioned what he called her sometimes “bald conclusions,” starting with the claim that slavery was “essential to his identity.”

“I don’t fault Jessie Serfilippi for her tough scrutiny of Hamilton and slavery,” he said. “The great figures in our history deserve such rigor. But she omits all information that would contradict her conclusions.”

Police Unions and Teacher Unions

 J.D. Tuccille at Reason:

Labor Day is a celebration of the labor movement and its representation of the interests of workers in American society. Unions have historically been a force for good as workers fought for better conditions. But 2020 has brought us a reality check about just how toxic organized labor—in the form of police and teachers unions—can be. These organizations aren't solely responsible for the ongoing disaster that is this year, but they've done their best to make it worse.

...

New York City's Police Benevolent Association, which represents rank-and-file officers, opposes standardized penalties for police misconduct. In July, it joined in a lawsuit with unions representing firefighters and corrections officers to block the release to the public of records of police officers who have been disciplined.

The union representing New Jersey state troopers similarly sued to keep disciplinary records secret. San Francisco's police union filed a lawsuit challenging the city's right to revise its use-of-force policy. California police unions joined together to defeat a bill that would have barred officers guilty of serious misconduct from further police work.
... 

Teachers unions, too, bear responsibility for worsening the catastrophe known as 2020. It's a union's job to protect the health and safety of its members. But teachers unions consistently went far beyond that mandate, choosing to play politics and push an unrelated anti–school choice agenda rather than focusing on reasonable accommodations in the middle of a national crisis.

As New York City officials struggled at the end of August to get schools reopened with precautions in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the United Federation of Teachers engaged in brinksmanship, leaving parents uncertain as to when, or whether, their kids would be able to resume educations cut short in the spring. The next day, city officials caved and school reopening was pushed back 11 days, subject to union conditions.

...

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) demanded wealth taxes, police reform, and a moratorium on charter schools as necessary preconditions for reopening public schools. The union settled for concessions that were more job-related.

"Teachers won newfound respect at the start of the pandemic as parents learned just how difficult it was to teach their kids at home," Politico noted of the flurry of union arm-twisting across the country. "But teachers unions now risk squandering the outpouring of goodwill by threatening strikes, suing state officials and playing hardball during negotiations with districts."

NYS v. NRA

A release from NY Attorney General Letitia James:

New York Attorney General Letitia James today filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the National Rifle Association (NRA), the largest and most influential pro-gun organization in the nation. Attorney General James charges the organization with illegal conduct because of their diversion of millions of dollars away from the charitable mission of the organization for personal use by senior leadership, awarding contracts to the financial gain of close associates and family, and appearing to dole out lucrative no-show contracts to former employees in order to buy their silence and continued loyalty. The suit specifically charges the NRA as a whole, as well as Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre, former Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Wilson “Woody” Phillips, former Chief of Staff and the Executive Director of General Operations Joshua Powell, and Corporate Secretary and General Counsel John Frazer with failing to manage the NRA’s funds and failing to follow numerous state and federal laws, contributing to the loss of more than $64 million in just three years for the NRA.

 In the complaint, Attorney General James lays out dozens of examples where the four individual defendants failed to fulfill their fiduciary duty to the NRA and used millions upon millions from NRA reserves for personal use, including trips for them and their families to the Bahamas, private jets, expensive meals, and other private travel. In addition to shuttering the NRA’s doors, Attorney General James seeks to recoup millions in lost assets and to stop the four individual defendants from serving on the board of any not-for-profit charitable organization in the state of New York again.

“The NRA’s influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets,” said Attorney General James. “The NRA is fraught with fraud and abuse, which is why, today, we seek to dissolve the NRA, because no organization is above the law.”

Since 1871, the NRA has operated as a New York-registered 501(c)(4) not-for-profit, charitable corporation. Under state law not-for-profit, charitable corporations are required to register and file annual financial reports with the Charities Bureau in the Office of the Attorney General (OAG). The assets are required to be used in a way that serves the interests of NRA membership and that advance the organization’s charitable mission. However, as today’s complaint lays out, the NRA is alleged to have fostered a culture of noncompliance and disregard for internal controls that led to the waste and loss of millions in assets and contributed to the NRA reaching its current deteriorated financial state. The NRA’s internal policies were repeatedly not followed and were even blatantly ignored by senior leaders. Furthermore, the NRA board’s audit committee was negligent in its duty to ensure appropriate, competent, and judicious stewardship of assets by NRA leadership. Specifically, the committee failed to assure standard fiscal controls, failed to respond adequately to whistleblowers, affirmatively took steps to conceal the nature and scope of whistleblower concerns from external auditors, and failed to review potential conflicts of interest for employees.

NRA’s Culture of Self-Dealing, Mismanagement, and Negligence

The lawsuit alleges that the four men instituted a culture of self-dealing, mismanagement, and negligent oversight at the NRA that was illegal, oppressive, and fraudulent. They overrode and evaded internal controls to allow themselves, their families, favored board members, employees, and vendors to benefit through reimbursed expenses, related party transactions, excess compensation, side deals, and waste of charitable assets without regard to the NRA’s best interests.

When board members challenged LaPierre and others over their financial governance and leadership of the NRA, LaPierre retaliated and turned the board against those who attempted to challenge the illegal behavior.

The complaint lays out numerous other instances in which LaPierre, Phillips, Powell, Frazer, and other executives and board members at the NRA abused their power and illegally diverted or facilitated the diversion of tens of millions of dollars from the NRA. These funds were in addition to millions of dollars the four individual defendants were already receiving in grossly excessive salaries and bonuses that were not in line with the best practices and prudent standards for evaluating and determining compensation.

Highways and Protests

Hadley Meares at LA Curbed:

When Angelenos gathered downtown to protest the murder of George Floyd, they started at City Hall and eventually made their way toward the 101. Pastor Stephen “Cue” Jn-Marie from the Row Church led the first group of protesters onto the freeway, which they occupied for roughly 30 minutes.

Ever since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, uprisings protesting police brutality and racism have blocked freeways throughout America. The freeway and highway systems in the U.S. are part of “a long, long, long history of looting our communities, looting our lives,” Pastor Cue explains.

Nowhere is this truer than in Los Angeles, where several generations of Angelenos, mainly people of color, have been displaced or trapped by the construction of freeways in the name of progress and ease of movement for white residents, many of whom moved outward to the suburbs of L.A. and Orange counties as the postwar era dawned.

“Communities of color, or black folks, were not permitted to live in the suburbs through land covenants made between white homeowners, through racism, through redlining,” Pastor Cue says. “The whole narrative that black folks would bring down the value of the communities … that narrative is lingering in our society, even today.”

Though racially restrictive land covenants were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1948, years of Jim Crow policies had already institutionalized racist housing practices that relegated black people and other people of color to certain neighborhoods — and labeled those neighborhoods as slums.

Those “slums” were the first places on the chopping block when freeways began to be routed across America in earnest in 1956, the year in which construction on 41,000 miles of interstate highways were authorized at a cost of $27 billion.

In 1957, one Urban Land Institute official celebrated that “inner belt expressways” would “inevitably slice through great areas of our nation’s worst slums,” writes UCLA professor Eric Avila, in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles.

Not just Los Angeles.  Alana Samuels at The Atlantic:

The urban planner Robert Moses was one of the first to propose the idea of using highways to “redeem” urban areas. In 1949, the commissioner of the Bureau of Public Roads, Thomas MacDonald, even tried to include the idea of highway construction as a technique for urban renewal in a national housing bill. (He was rebuffed.) But in cities across America, especially those that didn’t want to—or couldn’t—spend their own money for so-called urban renewal, the idea began to take hold. They could have their highways and they could get rid of their slums. With just one surgery, they could put in more arteries, and they could remove the city’s heart.

Homeless

A release from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority:

In a presentation to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority released the results of the 2019 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, which showed 58,936 people in Los Angeles County experiencing homelessness, representing a 12% rise from last year’s point-in-time count of 52,765. The city of Los Angeles saw a 16% rise to 36,300.

Two years into the 10-year investments from Measure H, LA County’s homeless services system has doubled the number of people moving from homelessness into housing over the course of each year, and tripled prevention, outreach, and engagement.

The homeless crisis response system helped 21,631 people move into permanent housing over the course of last year—40 percent of last year’s Count number, and a number that would end homelessness in most American cities and even states. Ninety-two percent of the people placed in permanent housing through our system in 2016 and 2017 stayed housed through the end of 2018 and did not return to homelessness.

Yet as thousands of people were permanently housed, thousands more fell into homelessness due to economic forces and the interlocking systems of foster care, mental health, criminal justice, and the housing market, outpacing the results.
...
This year’s Count revealed that 23% of the unsheltered people experiencing homelessness—more than 9,200 people—were homeless for the first time last year. The majority (53%) cited economic hardship as the cause.

The Count revealed that widely coordinated efforts to assist veterans had resulted in a small decrease in that population (from 3,886 to 3,874 ), a positive development given the overall rise. And Black/African-American people, who constitute 8.3% of the overall county population, continue to be overrepresented among people experiencing homelessness at 33%—though that figure has decreased slightly from its 2018 level of 35%.

Jill Cowan at NYT:

In Alameda County, the number of homeless residents jumped 43 percent over the past two years. In Orange County, that number was 42 percent. Kern County volunteers surveying the region’s homeless population found a 50 percent increase over 2018. San Francisco notched a 17 percent increase since 2017.

Madeline Holcombe at CNN:

Nationally, homelessness has been trending downward over the last decade, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. But this year's results, so far, offer a mixed bag.

For example, Seattle and King County, Washington, saw a decrease in homelessness for the first time in seven years with an 8% drop, according to a report by the organization All Home.

New York City said the number of unsheltered people -- those sleeping on the street, and in parks, subways and other public places -- declined by 2% from last year. In Indianapolis, the total number of people experiencing homelessness is down 7%, according to Indiana University's Public Policy Institute.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, said the number of people living on the street, in shelters and in transitional housing climbed 8%, and Austin, Texas, reported a 5% increase in the total number of people experiencing homelessness, according to Ending Community Homelessness Coalition.

Measles and the Antivax Movement

 Donald G. McNeil Jr.n at NYT:

Measles continues to spread in the United States, federal health officials said on Monday, surpassing 700 cases this year as health officials around the country sought aggressive action to stem the worst outbreak in decades.

In New York, an epicenter of the outbreak, city officials closed two more schools for Orthodox Jewish children for failing to comply with an order to exclude unvaccinated children.

In California, hundreds of students and staff members at two universities remained under quarantine following possible exposure to the virus.

And with measles spreading globally, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have urged Americans traveling abroad to make sure they are immunized against the disease. On Monday, the agency renewed an urgent call for parents to get their children vaccinated.

Bryan Llenas at Fox News:

"The biggest challenge we face right now is misinformation and myths about the vaccine. It's important that parents realize that the vaccine is safe and effective," Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told Fox News.

Anti-vaccination propaganda targeted specifically to parents has popped out throughout Hasidic communities in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and in Rockland County, N.Y. and it appears to have convinced some mothers that the vaccines are more dangerous than the disease. The vast majority of the 704 confirmed measles cases in 22 states are located in these communities, according to the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) latest data, released Monday. Of those cases, 432 are in Brooklyn.

An anti-vaccination organization known as PEACH has published a 40-page booklet, filled with misinformation and discredited science about why it says vaccines are unsafe. Among the many discredited claims are that vaccines cause autism and are made of aborted fetuses.

Union Membership in 2018

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--was 10.5 percent in 2018, down by 0.2 percentage point from 2017, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.7 million in 2018, was little changed from 2017. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers. 

...

Highlights from the 2018 data: --The union membership rate of public-sector workers (33.9 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.4 percent). (See table 3.) 

--The highest unionization rates were among workers in protective service occupations (33.9 percent) and in education, training, and library occupations (33.8 percent). (See table 3.) --Men continued to have a higher union membership rate (11.1 percent) than women (9.9 percent). (See table 1.)

--Black workers remained more likely to be union members than White, Asian, or Hispanic workers. (See table 1.)

--Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 82 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($860 versus $1,051). (The comparisons of earnings in this release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.) (See table 2.)

--Among states, Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership rates (23.1 percent and 22.3 percent, respectively), while North Carolina and South Carolina had the lowest (2.7 percent each). (See table 5.) 

Population Gainers and Losers

From the Census:

The U.S. population grew by 0.6 percent and Nevada and Idaho were the nation’s fastest-growing states between July 1, 2017, and July 1, 2018. Both states’ populations increased by about 2.1 percent in the last year alone. Following Nevada and Idaho for the largest percentage increases in population were Utah (1.9 percent), Arizona (1.7 percent), and Florida and Washington (1.5 percent each).

Washington, D.C., reached a population of 702,455 in July 2018, surpassing 700,000 for the first time since 1975, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s national and state population estimates released today. The change is due primarily to an influx of people from other parts of the country that began early in the decade. While the increase has begun to slow, the District of Columbia still grew by almost 1 percent last year.

Population declines were also common, with losses occurring in nine states and Puerto Rico. The nine states that lost population last year were New York (down 48,510), Illinois (45,116), West Virginia (11,216), Louisiana (10,840), Hawaii (3,712), Mississippi (3,133), Alaska (2,348), Connecticut (1,215) and Wyoming (1,197).

From Election Data Services:

New Census Bureau population estimates for 2018 released today shows a change of one more seat between two states from last year’s study generated by Election Data Services, Inc. on which states would gain or lose congressional seats if the current numbers were used for apportionment in 2018. But projecting these numbers to 2020, using several different methods, leads to more states being impacted by the decennial census scheduled to take place in just two years. These numbers will also be impacted by financial considerations being debated in the states, as well as in Congress as Commerce Department and Census Bureau appropriations hang in the balance of the government “shut-down” debate this week.

The Bureau’s 2018 total population estimates shows that now 13 states will be impacted by changes in their congressional delegation if these new numbers were used for apportionment today. The state of Arizona joins the previously indicated states of Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, and Oregon to each gain a single seat while the state of Texas is now shown to gain a second seat with the new data. The states of Rhode Island join the states of Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia to lose a seat in Congress using the new data.