Okay, I admit that I am a movement spy.
As thepeopleswhistle I fancy myself the Scarlet Pimpernel of class war. In the name of solidarity and equality, I work to solve problems caused by our governments and our businesses. This proud American Fascism, corporate and militarist to the core, plows through masses of at risk people who are sold and in the way – as consciously terrorist as that big French Truck plowing through the crowd of Bastille Day celebrants. It is fascism now with Hilary-types running the show – not a future fascism with Trump. The armed security forces are everywhere and they are heavily armed - double zeros licensed to kill. They don’t fear prosecution, just bad publicity. Why, you might ask, should we accept a situation where the person who stops me for a traffic violation has the option at their fingertips of killing me? Why should we agree that the person who patrols my camping activities in a state park is given the discretion of riddling me with bullets right there by my campfire? Recall the textbook definition of state power – it needs a monopoly on violence. Which monopoly has made “police forces” virtual armies of occupation in towns like Baton Rouge, Los Angeles and Eureka. Disarming these forces is crucial. Replacing them with civil, not military, interveners is necessary. And I am confident that the first wave of such civil interveners would be yesterday’s armed cops. It is the gun that draws the nuts. Any job whose description includes “can kill people when you want to” attracts a number of questionable candidates. The failure of police review, not to mention war crimes tribunals, shows the futility of policing the armed forces. Armed people functioning as units serve each other’s survival First and last. Us “citizens” are all Iraqi faces in a hostile crowd to those armed paranoids, increasing numbers of whom are Endless War graduates. These domestic occupation armies shoot black people at will. But if you lack black people the money elite are satisfied if enough time is spent terrorizing the homeless. American towns are Spanish Pamplonas where the blue-suited, silver-badged bulls are always running and the street people better be running too. The great urban parasite is always experimenting with tightening the noose of terror among the disposed. “Aggressive Panhandling” is the latest game in town One of the towns in my HumBayBeltWay tried it and failed in court. The local politicians know that this effort is doomed as well since it fundamentally defines “aggressive” as panhandling anywhere there are likely to be people. But the point behind such pointlessness isn’t success – the politicians merely want their wealthy patrons that they are giving it the old class war try. But wait, one of culture heroes was homeless. No, not Jesus, I mean George Orwell. Too many years in the Imperial Police in Burma and elsewhere eventually produced the radically socialist Orwell. (He wrote a novel “Burmese Days” and an essay “Shooting an Elephant” which give us a taste of his deep disillusionment with his role) Orwell purged himself of that experience by going homeless. Read his “Down and Out in Paris and London.” In fact, don’t wait. Here is an appropriate taste from George himself: “There is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. “And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him. “Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.” Another tweet from: thepeopleswhistle
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John Hardin
People sometimes criticize me for my over-the-top opinions and no-holds-barred writing style. They think I should moderate my views and be more sensitive to people’s feelings. Fuck that! In reality, these people just wish I would shut the fuck up and leave them alone with their illusions, but they want to say it in a way that sounds like constructive criticism. If Carl Hiaasen offered a few words of advice about my writing, I’d be all ears, but when I get writing advice here in SoHum, it usually comes from people who can barely read. I don’t listen to them any more than I would take target shooting advice from an unarmed blind man. If you can’t see the target, and you’ve never handled a gun, you won’t be much help, so relax. I know what I’m doing, and I shoot straight. You’re lucky to have me, frankly. Thirty years of silence, secrecy and sycophantic schemers has given this community a very distorted image of itself. The injustice of marijuana prohibition turned community values on their head. What began as a new green awakening, degenerated into the same old greed and dishonesty. We celebrate marijuana, but our addiction to the War on Drugs shapes us, and it shows. Greed is uglier than alcoholism. It’s even uglier than meth addiction, and that heartless, senseless, relentless thirst for more takes a toll. Like alcohol and meth, greed hardens people while it kills them from the inside. I see what that disease does to people. I see what that disease has done to this community. While cannabis may have healing qualities that make the user more sensitive to subtle emotional cues, the War on Drugs produces hard, rotten people. Every community has a few, quite a few, I’m sorry to say, just like every community has it’s share of alcoholics, tweakers and greed-heads. Unfortunately, the opportunities created here by the War on Drugs tend to attract them, so we have more than our fair share. We also have more than our fair share of money, which, like gravity, inexorably draws greedy scum towards it. The War on Drugs made bad people rich while it drove honest people out of town, just like it does in any drug ghetto, and just like in any drug ghetto, we have enormous social problems as a result. We try to put a nice face on it. We try to look like a normal, prosperous, small town, but the truth shows. It angers the rich ugly, hard, rotten people around here, that they can’t just sweep the poor, ugly, hard, rotten people out of sight, but that’s who we are, and that’s what the War on Drugs has done to us. So long as the War on Drugs continues, we shall remain, as a community, unnaturally rich, unnaturally poor, and rotten to the core. Greedy bankers and real-estate blood-suckers measure the marijuana industry in dollars, because that’s all greedy people see, but the more money the marijuana industry brings to Humboldt County, the more poverty it produces. The black market marijuana industry produces poverty all over this country, but here in SoHum, it produces some of the most expensive poverty money can buy. Greedy people, like drug addicts, become so focused on their addiction that they often fail to notice how poor they really are. The people who drive those spotlessly clean late-model trucks, often live in total squalor, expensive squalor, but squalor nonetheless. Lots of children grow up in dysfunctional homes, without books, living on junk food, and we have some of the highest suicide and drug addiction rates in the state. For all the money that the War on Drugs brings in, we sure don’t seem to live very well as a result. It takes more than money to make a community function. It takes culture, and hard, rotten people produce a hard, rotten culture. It’s a hard, rotten culture that blames the poor for their poverty, and rewards drug dealers for their greed, and this hard, rotten culture belies our deepest poverty: our penurious shortage of intelligence, imagination and moral courage. I know you don’t want to hear it, folks, but that’s the truth. You won’t get that from many people around here, but you can count on me. Far Worse than Hiroshima — The US Bombings on Japan the Govt Wants You to Forget
Matt Agorist May 27, 2016 This week, Barack Obama became the first US president in history to visit the memorial of the American atomic bombings of Japan in Hiroshima. However, in true American fashion, he offered no apology. “We have a shared responsibility to look directly in the eye of history. We must ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again,” Obama said in a speech at the memorial on Friday. The location of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was once the city’s busiest downtown commercial and residential district. However, the devastating atomic blast from the U.S. bomb that killed over 100,000 innocent civilians left the clearing in which the monument now sits. While this monument was specifically built to remember the horror of America’s nuclear bombs and the murderous devastation left in their wake, Japan is quite literally covered in lesser known silent monuments from dozens of firebombings carried out on its cities by the United States military — before the atomic blasts. One bombing campaign, in Tokyo alone, killed nearly as many innocent civilians as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. On the night of March 9, 1945, the U.S. launched one of the most murderous and horrifying bombing campaigns in the history of the world. That night marked the beginning of a several weeks-long wave of firebomb and napalm attacks across more than 60 Japanese cities. Many of these bombings were just as bad as the two atomic bomb attacks. However, when adding the sum total of innocence slain by U.S. bombs, the deaths in those five dozen cities eclipses the total deaths in both atomic bombings by several magnitudes. While Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been deeply engraved on the consciousness of humanity and commemorated in monuments, museums, films, novels and textbooks, the firebombing and napalming of civilians of many other Japanese and Asian cities has largely disappeared from consciousness, except for the victims. In Tokyo alone, U.S. bombers dropped 300,000 incendiary bombs, completely destroying 16 square miles of neighborhoods — killing more than 100,000 people, mostly civilians. Some survivor accounts detail flaming napalm seeping into bomb shelters and burning entire families alive. One of the reports from the bombers stated that the firestorm was so vast and hot that it caused a B-29 bomber weighing 60 tons to be thrust upward by 600 meters as it flew over. Tokyo was one of more than 60 cities in which hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were burned alive as they sought cover from the death raining down from above. During what some historians refer to as The Forgotten Holocaust, the U.S. dropped millions of incendiary bombs, napalm, and even fastened bombs to live bats that were trained to fly up underneath roofs to explode and set houses on fire. Some historians have calculated the total dead from the U.S. bombing campaigns in Japan to upwards of one million innocent civilians. It is no wonder you’ve never heard about these attacks in your high school history class as it shows the true face of American terror. In 2003, Errol Morris won an Academy Award for his documentary film, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. The film consisted mostly of interviews with Robert McNamara, one of which described his role in the bombings. McNamara was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, during which time he played a major role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Following that, he served as President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. McNamara also consolidated intelligence and logistics functions of the Pentagon into two centralized agencies: the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense Supply Agency. So, when this well-connected military industrial complex insider talks about U.S. war crimes, you should listen. Apparently knowing that he could not be prosecuted for his previous war crimes in World War II and Vietnam, McNamara spoke candidly in the film about strategizing with General Curtis LeMay to, quite literally, set Japan on fire. In the brief excerpt from the documentary below, McNamara explains how LeMay said that “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” “And I think he’s right,” says McNamara. “He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals,” McNamara continued. “LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” pondered the now deceased McNamara. McNamara was unapologetic in his testimony, and it seemed as if he really believed that since the U.S. ‘won’ the war, their horrifyingly murderous track record was somehow just. By this same logic, had Hitler ‘won,’ history should revere him as a hero instead of a murderous sociopath. Sadly, McNamara is right — had Germany been successful, they could very well be written into history by themselves as the saviors of the free world. “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” — the political ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania in George Orwell’s dystopian 1984. Below is that powerful video in which McNamara compares the Japanese cities’ sizes to that of American ones to illustrate the sheer size of destruction. To put the initial bombing of Tokyo into perspective, it would have been the equivalent of burning half of New York City, and all of its inhabitants, to the ground. As Obama poses the for the cameras on Friday, to hang a memorial wreath in Hiroshima, the families of the victims of one of the most horrific firebombing campaigns in the world — scream into deaf ears. Please share this article with your friends and families to let them know the real history behind America’s ‘exceptionalism.’ Non-Profit Anonymous Digital Art Revolution Art, Thoughts, Videos Info... Whatever I post, please just take it, or share it. Posts in English, German or Thai. Regards, David
There are things I never mentioned to anyone but my wife. So sharing this bit of my life is a big step in my life. I wrote this when I was in Bang Kwang Prison Bangkok, better known as the "Big Tiger" for it consumed/es so many lives. I have seen men so hopeless, that they were nothing but an empty shell. I have seen men trying to kill each other over a handful of rice. I have seen men so ignorant, they thought they had had everything, …but ended up with nothing and alone. I have seen men die with fear in their eyes, and I have seen men die with peace in their eyes. I have seen big, muscular men, crying and sobbing like infants, and I have seen tiny, short and skinny men showing enormous bravery. I have seen men with no regard for human dignity, and I have seen men with little regard for human dignity, but yet I haven’t seen a man with high regard of human dignity. I have seen men who were treated like animals for so long, that the actually became “animal like”. I have seen Women who have been imprisoned together with their children, even the unborn. I have seen men on death-row who looked me in the eyes and said:” Better dead, than locked up for life.” I, myself, have survived death itself, all the way through the tunnel and back, and ever since can see things happen, before they happen or things which happened already in my absence. Sometimes I wish that I died that day in the Siamese Prison, but it wasn’t my time to die yet, and I was told why. It was because my love was still needed for I was not granted to depart. Jeff Spross May 12, 2016 In the fight against homelessness, Central Florida has quietly achieved a remarkable victory over the last few years. As recently as January 2014, leaders in business and local government were wringing their hands over rising rates of homelessness in Florida's Osceola County. Now a new census of the Osceola, Orange, and Seminole County region shows homelessness there fell 23 percent since mid-2015 alone — and dropped over 60 percent since 2013. This didn't happen through some breakthrough discovery, or even major changes in program funding. It happened because of a simple conceptual shift: For a long time, it was assumed that you had to deal with the issues faced by homeless people — trauma, drug addiction, mental illness — before giving them heavily subsidized housing, often on the condition that they stayed clean and sane. Central Florida reversed the logic: Give people permanent housing with no strings attached. The philosophy is called, appropriately enough, "housing first." And it's not just working in Florida. A recent study in Canada showed that homeless people who received both guaranteed housing and social support held on to their homes 63-77 percent of the time, versus just 24-39 percent of people who received the standard approach. Cities like Seattle, Denver, and Washington, D.C. — plus states like Rhode Island, Illinois, and, most famously, Utah — are seeing success with it. But the story of "housing first" actually isn't a recent idea. It began in 1992 with a psychologist named Sam Tsemberis. Studying the issue from his perch at New York University, Tsemberis made a breakthrough that was basically taxonomic. He understood that there are two types of homeless: the temporary and the chronically homeless. The former, which make up the vast majority of the homeless population, are basically just down on their luck and can be helped by relatively straightforward government assistance. But the latter group, about 15 percent of the total population, are basically homeless because of deeper issues like substance abuse, trauma, or mental disorders. Tsemberis realized that forcing these people to jump through the hoops of testing and paperwork and rehabilitation programs before they could get a place to live was nuts. The chronic homeless more often face jail time and trips to the emergency room than the rest of the population. And homelessness is stressful: In a shelter, you can't even shut your door; if you can find a place to stay, you're often at the mercy of corrupt employers, irresponsible landlords, and abusive partners; there's no stable network of neighbors to rely upon for help looking after children. On top of it all, you can't even rest. "I can sleep," one beneficiary of housing first policy in D.C. told The Washington Post. "Oh my goodness, I can sleep." So Tsemberis proposed just giving the chronically homeless a place to live unconditionally and then building on that foothold by offering other social support. He helped set up a few test runs of the policy, but no one really paid him any mind until several people working on homelessness in Utah got a key official to give his ideas a hearing. Lloyd Pendleton was the executive manager of the Mormon Church's Welfare Department and director of Utah's Task Force on Homelessness. And when he heard Tsemberis' idea, he was sold. Pendleton's backing from the Mormon Church gave him the legitimacy to get Utah's famously conservative state legislature to sign off on using funds to give people homes unconditionally. And his connections to the state's network of aid programs helped cobble together the money to run the program and to coordinate with the various rehabilitation programs and social support providers that would help the tenants with their other struggles. This is how housing first works in most places: The chronic homeless are identified, and money is put together to permanently subsidize them in an apartment or other living space. They usually have to cover 30 percent of the rent themselves, either with money from a job or another aid program. But the rest of the subsidy is permanent and unconditional. And once they have a stable place to live, they can start regular work healing mentally or kicking their addiction or whatever challenge they need to deal with. As a result, Utah's population of chronic homeless dropped 91 percent and is almost nonexistent today. Programs in other states have reported similar victories. Most even report that the program has saved them money on net: Providing the chronic homeless a long-term place to stay, no questions asked, intrinsically makes their lives more stable. So governments spend less on them in other forms of aid. Expanding this approach nationwide will, of course, require more direct investment. Aid programs to help the homeless in any fashion remain horribly underfunded. In particular, sequestration and national budget cuts in recent years drastically reduced the streams of federal funding going to help these various programs at the state and local level. But as Utah and Florida and these other places show, we don't just need money. We need a conceptual change. The notion that homeless people have somehow failed society, rather than society having failed them, is baked into our cultural thinking on the issue. It's why people think budget cuts to aid programs to "get people off the dole" are a good idea, and why it can seem like common sense that homeless people need to get their act together before they get permanent housing. Arguably the most important innovation "housing first" has provided is it flipped those moral assumptions on their head. As Tsemberis told Mother Jones: "Going from homelessness into a home changes a person's psychological identity from outcast to member of the community." That comes first, not last. By Stephen Wm. Smith
U.S. Magistrate Judge sitting in Houston, Texas. Friday, May 6, 2016 Now that the cell phones in San Bernardino and Brooklyn have been unlocked (no thanks to Apple), FBI warnings about “going dark” in the face of advancing digital encryption seem less urgent than before. Perhaps there are other ways — buying exploits in the zero-day market, plea bargaining pressure — to skin the encryption cat, after all. Are privacy advocates correct that a “Golden Age of Surveillance” has arrived, and the real question is whether law enforcement has too many tools, rather than too few? Or will unchecked encryption enable criminals and terrorists to wreak havoc via the Dark Web, as Director Comey fears? Although an interested spectator, I am in no position to judge that technical debate. I am, however, better positioned to ponder a less publicized “going dark” threat to another branch of government, the branch most indispensable to the rule of law — our court system. Over the last 40 years, secrecy in all aspects of the judicial process has risen to literally unprecedented levels. Let me describe what I have seen, and why it is troubling. Secret courts, secret dockets In 1978, Congress created the first secret court in our history — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Staffed by Article III judges borrowed from federal district courts, this specialized tribunal issues surveillance warrants for foreign intelligence purposes. Understandably, given its mission, FISA court proceedings are ex parte and mostly secret, although the Snowden revelations in 2013 forced a partial lifting of the veil. While the FISA court remains the only congressionally authorized secret court in our nation’s history, secret dockets are another matter. In 1986, Congress enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to regulate government access to our cell phone and Internet communications and records. This law authorized court orders compelling such access to be sealed indefinitely, “until further order of the court”; in practice, this has meant that these surveillance orders are permanently sealed. Moreover, these orders are routinely accompanied by gag orders forbidding the provider from telling customers that the government has read their emails or tracked their cell phones. (This has become a customer relations headache for providers like Microsoft, who sued last month to have ECPA’s gag provision declared a prior restraint of speech in violation of the First Amendment.) How large is this secret ECPA docket? Extrapolating from a Federal Judicial Center study of 2006 federal case filings, I have estimated that more than 30,000 secret ECPA orders were issued that year alone. Given recent DOJ disclosures, the current annual volume is probably twice that number. And those figures do not include surveillance orders obtained by state and local authorities, who handle more than 15 times the number of felony investigations that the feds do. Based on that ratio, the annual rate of secret surveillance orders by federal and state courts combined could easily exceed half a million. Admittedly this is a guess; no one truly knows, least of all our lawmakers in Congress. That is precisely the problem. These breathtaking numbers have no precedent in our legal history. Before the digital age, executed search warrants were routinely placed on the court docket available for public inspection. The presumption was that the public should be able to monitor the level of governmental intrusion into the “persons, houses, papers, and effects” of its citizens. Apparently, that presumption does not apply to government intrusion upon our digital lives. Secret cases, secret evidence Still, the situation might be tolerable, if criminal investigations were the only area of rising judicial secrecy. But that is not the case. The same FJC study found that 576 civil cases filed in 2006 were completely sealed, meaning that the public was denied any information about the case, including the docket sheet. Rationales for the blackout varied from weak (“the parties wanted them sealed,” “to protect physicians reputations,” “to protect a party’s credit rating”) to non-existent (“17 pro se actions,” “30 habeas corpus and prisoner actions,” “33 forfeitures and seizures”). Equally concerning is what was omitted from the study — cases with highly redacted docket sheets, or a substantial number of sealed filings, were not counted at all. This is understandable, because the numbers would likely have been too large to tabulate in any meaningful way. In my experience on the bench, unwarranted sealing in civil cases has become rampant. Even the most mundane employment suit will have a docket sheet littered with “Sealed event” entries. Litigants must often be reminded that there is no unalienable right to a private trial in a public forum. Given the prevalence of the practice today, one easily forgets how new it all is. For most of our history, records of judicial proceedings were always accessible to the public, a practice inherited from English common law courts. Limited exceptions only began to appear around the turn of the 20th century, mostly in divorce, adoption, or juvenile proceedings. In 1915, the Supreme Court first encountered a judicial sealing order, which Justice Holmes denounced as “a judicial fiat” having “no judicial character” and “in excess of the jurisdiction of the lower court” before granting a writ of mandamus to revoke it. That traditional aversion to court secrecy has been overcome in the last few decades. To take but one example, the case name In re Sealed Case first appeared in 1981; it is now the most common case name on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals docket. Another telling sign is that the government is far more aggressively (and successfully) asserting evidentiary privileges than ever before. This includes well-established privileges like state secrets, and brand new ones like the privilege for investigative techniques and procedures. Unsurprisingly, the brainchild behind this particular privilege was J. Edgar Hoover himself, the godfather of the “black bag” job and other illicit techniques. (The story behind this privilege is told here.) Hoover’s privilege is often invoked to limit court testimony about technological tools routinely used by law enforcement, such as cell site simulators (Stingrays). Privatized justice, boiling frogs My concern is not merely that a velvet curtain is being drawn across wide swaths of traditionally public judicial business. Over the last 30 years, with Supreme Court enabling, much of that traditional judicial business has been outsourced to private arbitrators and non-public “dispute resolution” mechanisms. Employers, Internet service providers, and consumer lenders have led a mass exodus from the court system. By the click of a mouse or tick of a box, the American public is constantly inveigled to divert the enforcement of its legal rights to venues closed off from public scrutiny. Justice is becoming privatized, like so many other formerly public goods turned over to invisible hands — electricity, water, education, prisons, highways, the military. I realize that each of these developments has its arguable upside. Within the judiciary itself there are many who believe that, for cost and efficiency reasons, judges should spend more time managing cases off the record than adjudicating them on the record. My concern is that, like a frog in water heated gradually to a boil, these incremental changes to our judicial system will eventually produce a profoundly unpleasant transformation. Turn out the light, and then turn out the light? Absent good public information about what courts are doing, justice and the rule of law are left groping in the dark. Yale Professor Judith Resnik accurately summarizes the stakes: Without public access, one cannot know whether fair treatment is accorded regardless of status. Without publicity, judges have no means of demonstrating their independence. Without oversight, one cannot ensure that judges, tasked with vindicating public rights, are loyal to those norms. Without independent judges acting in public and treating the disputants in an equal and dignified manner, outcomes lose their claim to legitimacy. And without public accounting of how legal norms are being applied, one cannot debate the need for revisions. More elegant, perhaps, is the simple admonition added to the open court proviso of the New Jersey Provincial Charter in 1674: “Justice may not be done in a corner.” Unfortunately, this may prove to be one ancestral pearl of wisdom that our generation carelessly threw away.
By Mark Penn - 04/18/16
In recent debates, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump boasted about the millions of votes they have received in the presidential primaries, with each touting the 8 million or 9 million votes they have won so far. So, out of a country of about 321 million people, these candidates will take maybe 10 to 12 million votes each by June — votes from less than 4 percent of the country. Modern communications, higher voter education and the power of the internet are colliding with outdated methods of voting and participation to produce a system badly in need of reform. The result is a democracy that is veering off course, increasingly reflecting the will of powerful activist groups and the political extremes, and not of the broad population of the country. The numbers paint a stark picture of what is happening. When we subtract those under the voting age, convicted felons and undocumented immigrants, there are about 226 million people eligible to vote, according to the U.S. census. So forget one person, one vote — we are about 1.4 people, one vote. But there is nothing unusual here, though everyone should understand that every vote carries a special responsibility of also voting for those with no vote.Of the 226 million eligible voters, about 153 million voters were registered as of the last presidential election — left out of the system are mostly downscale, less-educated whites, and disproportionately more Asian and Hispanic voters. Black voters are 73 percent registered, compared with 73 percent of all women and 69 percent for men overall. So come November, 73 million eligible voters won’t be able to vote because they are not on the registration rolls. More people have cars than are registered to vote. More people have smartphones. More people even have healthcare than are registered to vote. Something virtually everyone should have, the right to vote, is something enjoyed by only 70 percent. About 130 million people vote in the presidential election, so the actual participants in the system for the most important election in the world represent just over 50 percent of those eligible to vote. There are 100 million left behind when it comes to getting up, registering and voting. This huge number of voters just outside the system distorts our elections and how they are fought, helping to foster gridlock and division because no one is trying to get the broad masses to the polls. Instead they are cherry-picking selected groups — religious and ideological — to gain an edge. With the presidential candidates now having $1 billion or more at their disposal, they realize that rather than appealing to pesky swing voters and to voters on the other side of the aisle, they can just double down on elements of their base. Rather than bring the country together, they demonize their opponents to hype turnout among select groups, targeted by race, religion or ethnicity. Fear and division replace hope as the motivating elements behind campaigns, and 90 percent of the advertisements are now negative ads. Most campaigns are no longer about reaching out to swing voters but rely more heavily on ginning up the base. While the candidates might win, the people lose, because government keeps getting more divided. Now let’s look at the presidential primaries. In the two contested party nomination processes we are having, a total of about 40 million people will participate in caucuses and primaries, about 20 million on each side, if contested races go on for long enough. So we now have a system in which it takes just 10 million votes out of 321 million people to seize one of the two coveted nominations — and that’s only if it goes all the way to West Virginia. So exactly how did we get a system in which so few determine the fate of so many? With 186 million people on the sidelines in the primaries, it is no wonder we are faced with more extreme candidates rising to the top on waves of new voters. After all, if all you need is 10 million, we’ve devolved to 30 people, one vote. We need to reform this system top to bottom if we want true representative democracy, as opposed to elections driven by causes on the left or the right. The registration process is broken; it should start at birthright. When kids are born in the hospital, give them a voter card and not just a Social Security card. Leave no child behind when it comes to being registered to vote and having voting ID. Second, we need to dramatically increase general election voting from 130 million to 200 million or more. Election Tuesdays come from the horse and buggy days — we need to move voting to weekends, allow voting from the internet or from secure accessible facilities like ATM machines. I am not a fan of early voting because it tends to mute the effect of the last two weeks of a campaign, which can be pivotal in many elections. I would rather have extended voting all day Saturday and Sunday. Third, caucuses need to be abolished. Often without even the secret ballot and open only to those with time on their hands, this is not a fair process for picking a president in the 21st century. Usually turnout to a caucus is only one-fourth of the turnout to a primary. Fourth, we need to rethink the party primary process to bring in far more voters, and we need to rotate the geographic order so that no one bloc of voters becomes a permanent gateway to the presidency. If we are going to have just two parties, then almost everyone has to be welcome to vote in one of them. The process has become dominated by activists, not everyday voters — it’s no accident America might wind up choosing between Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders, two candidates largely out of step with the true viewpoint of most Americans. It is the product of a system that fails to bring in most voters. And the candidates increasingly realize that with such low turnout, pitches to the left or the right are required to get elected in a country that is made up of more moderate voters than liberals or even conservatives. So while we all look at our TV sets in amazement watching candidates calling for mass deportation or tearing down our economic system, we have to understand we have not updated and modernized our democracy as we have grown, and we have not taken advantage of the technology and innovation that makes it easier today to get a car and drive than it is to vote. Most importantly, the effects of this crazy quilt of voter participation are not just to leave a lot of people out but to promote and even reward the politics of the extremes that have produced the gridlock everyone bemoans. If we reform the voting system, we will once again make elections about persuading a majority of all Americans and not just about driving those select few to the polls. It is time we rolled up our sleeves and started fixing this before one of the candidates skilled at manipulating the system actually becomes president. And if one does, let it be because that person are the real choice of a majority of Americans. Penn is managing partner of The Stagwell Group. He previously served as chief strategy officer at Microsoft and has advised numerous global political leaders, including serving as chief strategist on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and as White House pollster to former President Clinton for six years. He authored the New York Times best-seller “Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes.” Via Theo Horesh
A recently deceased mentor and friend once told me about a Vietnam War protest in front of the Pentagon, where against his more peaceful instincts, he spontaneously picked up a stone and threw it at the behemoth, and as his gaze softened and he looked around, he found to his astonishment that all its windows were shattering, as scores of protesters, in a moment of outrage, sent their own stones sailing. There is a moment like that happening today. Listen closely and you might feel a rumbling that courses through political conversations, and it is not just the familiar trumping of fascist boots-on-the-ground. We have watched the best minds of a generation ground-up by inequality and social-anxiety, watched the decline of democracy and the rise of dynasties, the worst prosper, while the rest fall behind—and Hillary Clinton is beginning to represent, to many young Americans, the most detestable elements of the new elite: the smug sense of entitlement, the fusion of money and politics, the craven clamor for war, the swaying to the winds of a public unhinged from reality. And the windows may be about to explode. Democratic Party elites are alienating a whole new generation of voters and potential party players through their dismissal of Bernie Sanders. Even as he crushes Clinton in a sequence of five-states by 50-percent margins, raises more money, draws in more donors, commands bigger crowds, inspires more devotion, steals the debates, and ruins Republicans in head-to-head polls, still, they insist the primaries are over. It does not matter, because Clinton is the new face of machine politics. Just as she is owned by the big-donors, she owns the party leadership, who serve as her backstop. The sense of entitlement is simply astounding. And the bullsh*t mounted when Clinton’s campaign strategist, a Wall Street consultant of all people, announced on CNN that Clinton would not debate Sanders unless he changed his tone--unless he changed his tone. The same people who tarred the Obama candidacy as a “fairy tale” in 2008, in the words of President Bill, portray Sanders as a racist, old, gun-toting white-man. The constant reference to Sanders’ purported pro-gun record is a barely disguised effort not to talk issues but to paint a caricature for inner-city African Americans. Clinton even hinted that Sanders supports the so-called Minute-Men, who guard the Mexican border. Never mind the fact he once got arrested fighting for civil rights, that the National Rifle Association score his record at a D-minus, or that his program would benefit the disenfranchised more than any President since FDR; the innuendo never lets up. And then Clinton projects onto Sanders the negative tone for which she is so well known. It is a common tactic of bullies. This same patronizing tone can be found among her supporters, who argue for realism as they worry for their assets. They act as if it is all decided and no one else had a chance. They reverse history and argue that having spent eight years living in the White House is not a reason to keep her out but to put her back in. They argue winning is impossible by blurring the difference between delegates and superdelegates, omitting that superdelegates have always shifted allegiance to the most popular candidate. It is a lie as big as the Iraq War Clinton helped start; it is as corrupt as her militant shilling for Israel to win support from the second most powerful lobby. Clinton supporters are running out of arguments. The “yes, we can” of Obama 2008 is morphing to the “no, you can’t” of Clinton 2016: no you can’t criticize our candidate, no you can’t pass big programs, no you can’t win the superdelegates, no you can’t beat Trump. This is cynical and wrong. Sanders has higher favorability ratings than anyone in this race. And he destroys Republican rivals in polls. He is popular because inequality and money-in-politics worry everyone, and they are arguably the most vexing issues in America today. And if he is nominated, he will bring a whole new generation out to vote, and will enter office with the Supreme Court, and possibly the House and Senate, on his side. We can win, actually, and we can win big. Tens of millions of us now feel the burn of economic inequality, of political corruption, of Presidential dynasties, of a patronizing Party, and the media’s half-disguised campaign; most of all, we feel the burn for something better. Bernie can win. And all of this hope and frustration looks poised to erupt over the next couple of weeks, as the media black out, the string of blowout victories, and the arrogant dismissals, collide with what is beginning to look like the largest social movement in a decade. But as you pick up your word-stones, take a moment to look around, inhale a deep breath, remember your ideals, and let this be an election in which love stares down hate and wins: something beautiful is about to blow open and it is time we open it together. Jonathan Webster writes: Dear LoCO, Please Stop Being DicksA couple weeks ago I went on Twitter to tell Lost Coast Outpost, Humboldt County’s very popular online news site, why I think they should post fewer mugshots. They did not agree. Now a Humboldt State University journalism professor has chimed in. She does not agree either. Her column in this week’s North Coast Journal provides ample room for LoCO’s editor to explain his justifications. (I wasn’t contacted by the author.) She also writes about websites that charge money to remove mugshots, a police agency in Utah that tried to copyright them, a legal battle in Michigan, and search engine results in Europe, but she never clearly articulates my argument for why LoCO, in this community, in 2016, should exercise a little restraint. Here’s my attempt to do that: LoCO has a relatively large audience among a small population, and that audience was built on Facebook. Facebook’s sorting algorithms favor links with images and the layout of the site makes them very prominent. When a LoCO post with a mugshot hits Facebook, the mugshot gets blown up, the face is cropped in on, and it is broadcast to a substantial percentage of Humboldt’s eyes. Normally, someone put in jail has to worry about what they’re going to say when they make their phone call and when a potential employer or date Googles their name someday. With LoCO and Facebook’s help, they now have to worry about the added humiliation of being recognized on the street. Without them ever being convicted of a crime, a picture that makes them look as guilty as possible pops up on 53,000 Facebook feeds simultaneously. They now have to worry about just going outside. The Journal’s columnist casually dismisses this fear by explaining that in her experience “people are terrible with faces.” Regardless of the actual risk, the psychological difference between having your name posted on the web somewhere and having your face (in addition to your name) blasted out to tens of thousands of people on social media is enormous. In short, LoCO has a lot of power. I think they should try to use that power responsibly. Lost Coast Outpost would like to abdicate that responsibility by becoming an information resource system that would contain “total coverage of the criminal justice system” and allow users to “track every crime and arrest through its resolution.” Unfortunately for LoCO, the police in Humboldt County do not cooperate with this idea. They selectively decide which crimes are worthy of press releases and which ones to give the media mugshots for, and that leaves LoCO in the awkward position of possibly having to do journalism. In the absence of a system that allows the media to become a window through which we can directly observe every detail of police activity, LoCO has a choice: they can either unquestioningly post every mugshot that the police have deemed suitable for our viewing (their current, admitted practice), or they can filter that information the same way they filter every other source of information they use. Every time the media chooses to report on a story and not another one, they are acting as a Jonathan Websteryesterday8 min readDear LoCO, Please Stop Being DicksA couple weeks ago I went on Twitter to tell Lost Coast Outpost, Humboldt County’s very popular online news site, why I think they should post fewer mugshots. They did not agree. Now a Humboldt State University journalism professor has chimed in. She does not agree either. Her column in this week’s North Coast Journal provides ample room for LoCO’s editor to explain his justifications. (I wasn’t contacted by the author.) She also writes about websites that charge money to remove mugshots, a police agency in Utah that tried to copyright them, a legal battle in Michigan, and search engine results in Europe, but she never clearly articulates my argument for why LoCO, in this community, in 2016, should exercise a little restraint. Here’s my attempt to do that: LoCO has a relatively large audience among a small population, and that audience was built on Facebook. Facebook’s sorting algorithms favor links with images and the layout of the site makes them very prominent. When a LoCO post with a mugshot hits Facebook, the mugshot gets blown up, the face is cropped in on, and it is broadcast to a substantial percentage of Humboldt’s eyes. Normally, someone put in jail has to worry about what they’re going to say when they make their phone call and when a potential employer or date Googles their name someday. With LoCO and Facebook’s help, they now have to worry about the added humiliation of being recognized on the street. Without them ever being convicted of a crime, a picture that makes them look as guilty as possible pops up on 53,000 Facebook feeds simultaneously. They now have to worry about just going outside. The Journal’s columnist casually dismisses this fear by explaining that in her experience “people are terrible with faces.” Regardless of the actual risk, the psychological difference between having your name posted on the web somewhere and having your face (in addition to your name) blasted out to tens of thousands of people on social media is enormous. In short, LoCO has a lot of power. I think they should try to use that power responsibly. Lost Coast Outpost would like to abdicate that responsibility by becoming an information resource system that would contain “total coverage of the criminal justice system” and allow users to “track every crime and arrest through its resolution.” Unfortunately for LoCO, the police in Humboldt County do not cooperate with this idea. They selectively decide which crimes are worthy of press releases and which ones to give the media mugshots for, and that leaves LoCO in the awkward position of possibly having to do journalism. In the absence of a system that allows the media to become a window through which we can directly observe every detail of police activity, LoCO has a choice: they can either unquestioningly post every mugshot that the police have deemed suitable for our viewing (their current, admitted practice), or they can filter that information the same way they filter every other source of information they use. Every time the media chooses to report on a story and not another one, they are acting as a gatekeeper of information. It is inherent to the job. To pretend that news organizations are suddenly not supposed to be gatekeepers where arrests are concerned is absurd. LoCO’s editor insists, “instead of complaining about selective reporting on the part of the media…people should push for complete and consistent release of information.” First of all, that is a false choice. Second, I am advocating for more selective reporting, not less. Third, if you admit that you don’t have access to complete and consistent release of information, why would you try to operate a news site as if you do? Even in parts of the country that do allow the media unfettered access to any mugshot they want to publish, many sites that consider it a public service to post all of them still have policies in place to reduce the chances of an innocent person being permanently tarnished. The Journal Star in Lincoln, NE, keeps the daily batch of photos it gets from the sheriff’s office online for only one day and does not store the images (unless one runs with a story.) The columnist in Humboldt’s Journal relates that LoCO’s policy is to never take down any of their mugshots except in extremely rare circumstances, even if the subject has been exonerated. She suggests that LoCO does this to avoid being confused with sites that extort people by posting their mugshots and charging a fee to have them removed. It is unclear why LoCO is required to adopt such an extreme position when they can simply state they don’t remove mugshots for money. (Perhaps it’s because they fear admitting that it’s possible to profit off of mugshots would draw attention to the fact that they’re essentially doing that too, only in a different form.) A publisher who runs several sites across the country that do remove mugshots after posting them is quoted providing exactly that disclaimer in a piece for Columbia Journalism Review: “Rickabaugh said his company does not charge to remove mugshots.” It’s that easy. The Tampa Bay Times also has no fear of this confusion, choosing to remove all mugshots after 60 days, “about the time it takes for a case to be adjudicated…especially when criminal charges could change, a person is found innocent, or a case is dismissed.” Matt Waite, a professor of journalism at University of Nebraska-Lincoln who helped build the Tampa Bay Times’s mugshot website, believes removing photos of people who are never convicted of a crime is essential to ensuring those sites are providing a positive public service: “If your Web application does not reflect the current reality, then you are wrong. You are publishing knowably false things, and by doing so you are harming people.” Of course, a lot of debate about when to take mugshots down is rendered unnecessary if mugshots of people who could easily be innocent are not published in the first place. But in the minds of LoCO’s editor and the Journal’s columnist, the media choosing to not post every mugshot they have the opportunity to post is tantamount to the government eliminating transparency altogether. The columnist writes: I feel uncomfortable about the posting of mugshots. But the first stage in the creation of a police state involves secret arrests, detentions and disappearances. What’s worse? That you get arrested for something you didn’t do and the whole world sees it and you have to explain it later to a potential employer? Or you get arrested and detained for something you didn’t do and nobody ever knows?Ignore the glaring false dilemma (her piece is full of them), and focus on the conceit behind it, that mugshots are a feature of government accountability. She appears to believe that photos taken by the police against people’s will, used by the police to identify and track them, and only selectively distributed to the press, are our first line of defense in fighting a hypothetical modern gestapo. The police, who control every stage of mugshots’ production and dissemination to the media, are somehow kept in check by those mugshots. This argument makes absolutely no sense. If the police wanted to arrest someone in secret, they just wouldn’t take the photo. Mugshots are a tool created by and for the police, not citizens. They exist not only to help identify people and catch criminals, but as PR tools, making arrestees look as much like criminals as possible and inspiring confidence that cops are doing their job well. When the media submits to being a mouthpiece for that PR, they are doing the police’s job for them, and neglecting their own. The first stage in the creation of a police state is not “secret arrests, detentions and disappearances.” There are certainly earlier stages, and it isn’t hard to imagine one of them involving the media refusing to question if broadcasting every single word and image the police want broadcast to the public is actually a good idea. Our media is supposed to be an ally in resisting a police state, not a collaborator with it. The assumed equivalency of mugshots and government accountability comes up again later in the column when she writes, “Some people argue that sites like LoCO publish mugshots for entertainment value. I’m not sure that I would devalue transparency just because some people find certain types of info entertaining.” Again, mugshots have nothing to do with transparency, but the more important issue she brings up here, one that gets right to the heart of LoCO’s carelessness and cruelty, is how they function as advertisements for recreational ridicule. There is no doubt that mugshots are good for generating internet traffic and stimulating rowdy comments sections. Megan Abbot writes in the New York Times, “the news media have realized the power of the mug shot to draw interest, to attract clicks.” The Journal’s columnist admits this power exists but puts the blame for it squarely on readers. In her eyes, it’s not LoCO’s fault that lots of people love to gossip about and make fun of human beings at extremely low points in their lives, it’s ours. But LoCO has shown over and over that they are perfectly willing to encourage this activity. Take for example a post from March 1st that popped up in my Facebook feed. At the top is a brief quote from a press release. In the middle is the obligatory huge and unflattering mugshot, serving as billboard advertisement for the post. Below that is a headline that jokingly refers to the subject’s “wardrobe malfunction”. Below that is a caption for the mugshot, reading “First, pull up your pants…”. This is not a case of shameless hooligans mocking someone because that’s the nature of the internet and there will always be those kinds of people, this is a case of LoCO actively inviting people to join in on the mockery they’ve already started. There is no mention of any alleged crime unless you click the link. It is the responsibility of every media organization to not add further misery to the lives of people put behind bars, many of whom are already battling poverty and addiction, if the best reason for doing so is attracting pageviews. If running a mugshot will help catch a criminal or prevent a crime, run it. If the subject is a well-known public figure or the alleged crime is egregious, by all means, run it. If the subject has been convicted of a crime that you believe is newsworthy, run it. If the subject has not been convicted of a crime, has not been accused of anything violent, and running it will negatively affect their lives and possibly even hinder recovery, consider allowing a tiny sliver of human compassion into your editorial process and maybe don’t run the mugshot with the story. Run some other kind of image. That’s all I’m asking. There is no good journalistic argument to not practice that restraint. Many publications already avoid mugshots. Even ones in Humboldt. This is not a crazy concept I just made up. Basic decency is expected of all local news outlets in certain parts of the country. Humboldt should expect it of Lost Coast Outpost. . It is inherent to the job. To pretend that news organizations are suddenly not supposed to be gatekeepers where arrests are concerned is absurd. LoCO’s editor insists, “instead of complaining about selective reporting on the part of the media…people should push for complete and consistent release of information.” First of all, that is a false choice. Second, I am advocating for more selective reporting, not less. Third, if you admit that you don’t have access to complete and consistent release of information, why would you try to operate a news site as if you do? Even in parts of the country that do allow the media unfettered access to any mugshot they want to publish, many sites that consider it a public service to post all of them still have policies in place to reduce the chances of an innocent person being permanently tarnished. The Journal Star in Lincoln, NE, keeps the daily batch of photos it gets from the sheriff’s office online for only one day and does not store the images (unless one runs with a story.) The columnist in Humboldt’s Journal relates that LoCO’s policy is to never take down any of their mugshots except in extremely rare circumstances, even if the subject has been exonerated. She suggests that LoCO does this to avoid being confused with sites that extort people by posting their mugshots and charging a fee to have them removed. It is unclear why LoCO is required to adopt such an extreme position when they can simply state they don’t remove mugshots for money. (Perhaps it’s because they fear admitting that it’s possible to profit off of mugshots would draw attention to the fact that they’re essentially doing that too, only in a different form.) A publisher who runs several sites across the country that do remove mugshots after posting them is quoted providing exactly that disclaimer in a piece for Columbia Journalism Review: “Rickabaugh said his company does not charge to remove mugshots.” It’s that easy. The Tampa Bay Times also has no fear of this confusion, choosing to remove all mugshots after 60 days, “about the time it takes for a case to be adjudicated…especially when criminal charges could change, a person is found innocent, or a case is dismissed.” Matt Waite, a professor of journalism at University of Nebraska-Lincoln who helped build the Tampa Bay Times’s mugshot website, believes removing photos of people who are never convicted of a crime is essential to ensuring those sites are providing a positive public service: “If your Web application does not reflect the current reality, then you are wrong. You are publishing knowably false things, and by doing so you are harming people.” Of course, a lot of debate about when to take mugshots down is rendered unnecessary if mugshots of people who could easily be innocent are not published in the first place. But in the minds of LoCO’s editor and the Journal’s columnist, the media choosing to not post every mugshot they have the opportunity to post is tantamount to the government eliminating transparency altogether. The columnist writes: I feel uncomfortable about the posting of mugshots. But the first stage in the creation of a police state involves secret arrests, detentions and disappearances. What’s worse? That you get arrested for something you didn’t do and the whole world sees it and you have to explain it later to a potential employer? Or you get arrested and detained for something you didn’t do and nobody ever knows?Ignore the glaring false dilemma (her piece is full of them), and focus on the conceit behind it, that mugshots are a feature of government accountability. She appears to believe that photos taken by the police against people’s will, used by the police to identify and track them, and only selectively distributed to the press, are our first line of defense in fighting a hypothetical modern gestapo. The police, who control every stage of mugshots’ production and dissemination to the media, are somehow kept in check by those mugshots. This argument makes absolutely no sense. If the police wanted to arrest someone in secret, they just wouldn’t take the photo. Mugshots are a tool created by and for the police, not citizens. They exist not only to help identify people and catch criminals, but as PR tools, making arrestees look as much like criminals as possible and inspiring confidence that cops are doing their job well. When the media submits to being a mouthpiece for that PR, they are doing the police’s job for them, and neglecting their own. The first stage in the creation of a police state is not “secret arrests, detentions and disappearances.” There are certainly earlier stages, and it isn’t hard to imagine one of them involving the media refusing to question if broadcasting every single word and image the police want broadcast to the public is actually a good idea. Our media is supposed to be an ally in resisting a police state, not a collaborator with it. The assumed equivalency of mugshots and government accountability comes up again later in the column when she writes, “Some people argue that sites like LoCO publish mugshots for entertainment value. I’m not sure that I would devalue transparency just because some people find certain types of info entertaining.” Again, mugshots have nothing to do with transparency, but the more important issue she brings up here, one that gets right to the heart of LoCO’s carelessness and cruelty, is how they function as advertisements for recreational ridicule. There is no doubt that mugshots are good for generating internet traffic and stimulating rowdy comments sections. Megan Abbot writes in the New York Times, “the news media have realized the power of the mug shot to draw interest, to attract clicks.” The Journal’s columnist admits this power exists but puts the blame for it squarely on readers. In her eyes, it’s not LoCO’s fault that lots of people love to gossip about and make fun of human beings at extremely low points in their lives, it’s ours. But LoCO has shown over and over that they are perfectly willing to encourage this activity. Take for example a post from March 1st that popped up in my Facebook feed. At the top is a brief quote from a press release. In the middle is the obligatory huge and unflattering mugshot, serving as billboard advertisement for the post. Below that is a headline that jokingly refers to the subject’s “wardrobe malfunction”. Below that is a caption for the mugshot, reading “First, pull up your pants…”. This is not a case of shameless hooligans mocking someone because that’s the nature of the internet and there will always be those kinds of people, this is a case of LoCO actively inviting people to join in on the mockery they’ve already started. There is no mention of any alleged crime unless you click the link. It is the responsibility of every media organization to not add further misery to the lives of people put behind bars, many of whom are already battling poverty and addiction, if the best reason for doing so is attracting pageviews. If running a mugshot will help catch a criminal or prevent a crime, run it. If the subject is a well-known public figure or the alleged crime is egregious, by all means, run it. If the subject has been convicted of a crime that you believe is newsworthy, run it. If the subject has not been convicted of a crime, has not been accused of anything violent, and running it will negatively affect their lives and possibly even hinder recovery, consider allowing a tiny sliver of human compassion into your editorial process and maybe don’t run the mugshot with the story. Run some other kind of image. That’s all I’m asking. There is no good journalistic argument to not practice that restraint. Many publications already avoid mugshots. Even ones in Humboldt. This is not a crazy concept I just made up. Basic decency is expected of all local news outlets in certain parts of the country. Humboldt should expect it of Lost Coast Outpost. |
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