BOOKS: "Capitalism & Disability," by Marta Russell.

My friend Loren is COO at Sweet Behavior LLC, and he mentioned this book a while back. I bought it immediately and read these essays earlier in the month. 

I can tell you is made an impression, and before the reference to capitalism is dismissed out of hand, as many of you will do, I'd recommend at least reading the publisher's tout here. 

There's quite a bit to this. 

Capitalism & Disability

This book comprises a collection of groundbreaking writings by Marta Russell on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. 

Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.

Strong Towns: Redlining in Kansas City: What local reparations might look like.

The actual title of the article is "The Local Case for Reparations," which Lauren Fisher explains. It's about reparations for redlining, in case you're wondering.

 

On Monday, I was wringing my hands about how our morning article would go over. Within it, Chuck discusses a local strategy for investing in disinvested neighborhoods using opportunities and incentives that are often extended to large investors. Instead of wasting resources on big businesses that will take more than they give to a city, this approach would immediately, measurably uplift entire communities. Pretty much normal Strong Towns stuff. So why was I so nervous about it? The title is “The Local Case for Reparations.” I was worried about the reactions we’d receive. This piece is challenging to people with all kinds of views on reparations for slavery. It changed the way I think about the issue. Maybe it will do the same for you.

Previously:

On understanding reparations.

“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

The Strong Towns no-gimmicks approach truly is a "third way" for the city of New Albany because it crosses political boundaries.

"As you address “systemic racism” in Louisville look at pollution in Black neighborhoods and the institutions that profit from it."

Photo credit goes to J. Tyler Franklin, at WFPL's 2019 series on toxic air pollution in Louisville.

You can almost hear the rejoinder: "Well, if it's dangerous, move ... but not into OUR neighborhood, of course."

Pollution in Black neighborhoods part of Louisville's systemic racism, by John Hans Gilderbloom, Gregory D. Squires, Robert P. Friedland and Dwan Turner (Courier Journal)

Thousands of Black and white protesters got a taste recently of what it is like to feel the agony of being gassed by the police. It was painful, sickening and scary.

But citizens in western Louisville are regularly “gassed,” causing long-term health problems. The mayor’s own office admits this truth, with people dying an average of 10 years earlier in western Louisville compared to the rest of the city. In some neighborhoods, the life span is less than in war-torn Iraq according to Louisville’s Health Department.

In other words, 60,000 folks (enough to fill Cardinal Stadium) are dying prematurely and most of them are African Americans. As you address “systemic racism” in Louisville look at pollution in Black neighborhoods and the institutions that profit from it. Western Louisville’s air, water and soil are so toxic and rank among the worst of any American city. It is unlivable for a modern American neighborhood ...

snip

The calls for greater equity also means cleaning up the air, water and soil. Poor people needlessly suffer more here than the same low-income people in West Coast cites. If we adopted the same tough, environmental regulations as our West Coast counterparts, western Louisville would surely bloom.

The unfairness between black and white neighborhoods is stark and vivid. As the great urbanist, Jane Jacobs, once said: "everyone hungers for a first class neighborhood for both pride and dignity ... nobody wants a second class neighborhood." First class neighborhoods are safe, healthy, sustainable, and prosperous. It is a human right, an American right.

The electorate isn't biased. Rather, party elites and donors stack the deck against women and people of color running for office.

And appointments? Lonely Dr. Joshua ...

I'm shocked ... just shocked.

The “Biased Electorate” Myth Has Been Debunked Again, by Carl Beijer (Jacobin)

The deck is stacked against women and people of color seeking political office. But it's not because of a reactionary electorate — it's because of party elites and donors.

Conventional wisdom on the liberal left holds that bias among voters is so prevalent that it creates a disadvantage at the polls for women and people of color running for office. The numbers, however, beg to differ. In “The Electability Myth,” a new study of the 2018 US election, the Reflective Democracy Campaign (RDC) has found that other groups have a slight advantage over white men among the voters — and systematic disadvantages that have historically kept them off the ballot ...

Dan Canon: "ICE as it presently exists is an agency devoted almost solely to cruelly and wantonly breaking up families. The agency talks about, and treats, human beings like they’re animals."

Canon: "Abolish ICE and reform the immigration system from the ground up."

It’s Time to Abolish ICE, by Sean McElwee (The Nation)

A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights.

Dan Canon is running for Congress in Indiana’s ninth district this year. A career civil-rights lawyer, Canon filed one of the cases against gay-marriage bans that eventually became the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges, and he proudly wore a Notorious RBG shirt under his suit to the Supreme Court. He is currently representing individuals suing Donald Trump for inciting violence at his rallies.

Canon has also defended clients swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and fought a Kafkaesque deportation system that, at one point, wouldn’t even disclose the location of his client. Now Canon believes ICE should be abolished entirely.

“I don’t think a lot of people have any kind of direct experience with ICE, so they don’t really know what they do or what they’re about. If they did, they’d be appalled,” Canon told me. “ICE as it presently exists is an agency devoted almost solely to cruelly and wantonly breaking up families. The agency talks about, and treats, human beings like they’re animals. They scoop up people in their apartments or their workplaces and take them miles away from their spouses and children.”

(snip)

The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating. Though the party has moved left on core issues from reproductive rights to single-payer health care, it’s time for progressives to put forward a demand that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of authoritarianism.

White supremacy can no longer be the center of the immigration debate. Democrats have voted to fully fund ICE with limited fanfare, because in the American immigration discussion, the right-wing position is the center and the left has no voice. There has been disturbing word fatigue around “mass deportation,” and the threat of deportation is so often taken lightly that many have lost the ability to conceptualize what it means. Next to death, being stripped from your home, family, and community is the worst fate that can be inflicted on a human, as many societies practicing banishment have recognized. It’s time to rein in the greatest threat we face: an unaccountable strike force executing a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

An addendum:

Molly houses and the Buggery Act, not to neglect the sodomitical, befurbelowed denizens of Lad Lane.

From the Atlas Obscura link.

"In this climate, molly houses were an all-too-necessary place of refuge. Sometimes, these were houses, with a mixture of permanent lodgers and occasional visitors. Others were hosted in taverns. All had two things in common—they were sufficiently accessible that a stranger in the know could enter without too much hassle; and there was always plenty to drink."

Apart from being fascinating, uplifting and horrific, this article is a mighty effective vocabulary builder. Let's hope Shane is taking notes for a future installment of his excellent new words.

Molly houses have been scrubbed from the history books, but we can't know where we're going without knowing where we've been. It's a constant mind-boggler as to why humans spend so much precious time persecuting each other.

Live and let live, anyone?

How the 18th-Century Gay Bar Survived and Thrived in a Deadly Environment, by Natasha Frost (Atlas Obscura)

IN 1709, THE LONDON JOURNALIST Ned Ward published an account of a group he called “the Mollies Club.” Visible through the homophobic bile (he describes the members as a “Gang of Sodomitical Wretches”) is the clear image of a social club that sounds, most of all, like a really good time. Every evening of the week, Ward wrote, at a pub he would not mention by name, a group of men came together to gossip and tell stories, probably laughing like drains as they did so, and occasionally succumbing to “the Delights of the Bottle.”

In 18th and early-19th-century Britain, a “molly” was a commonly used term for men who today might identify as gay, bisexual or queer. Sometimes, this was a slur; sometimes, a more generally used noun, likely coming from mollis, the Latin for soft or effeminate. A whole molly underworld found its home in London, with molly houses, the clubs and bars where these men congregated, scattered across the city like stars in the night sky. Their locale gives some clue to the kind of raucousness and debauchery that went on within them—one was in the shadow of Newgate prison; another in the private rooms of a tavern called the Red Lion. They might be in a brandy shop, or among the theaters of Drury Lane. But wherever they were, in these places, dozens of men would congregate to meet one another for sex or for love, and even stage performances incorporating drag, “marriage” ceremonies, and other kinds of pageantry.

It’s hard to unpick exactly where molly houses came from, or when they became a phenomenon in their own right. In documents from the prior century, there is an abundance of references to, and accounts of, gay men in London’s theaters or at court. Less overtly referenced were gay brothels, which seem harder to place than their heterosexual equivalents. (The historian Rictor Norton suggests that streets once called Cock’s Lane and Lad Lane may lend a few clues.) Before the 18th century, historians Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan argue, sodomy was like any other sin, and its proponents like any other sinners, “engaged in a particular vice, like gamblers, drunks, adulterers, and the like” ...

"The negative consequences of car dependency."

Idea credit: Bluegill.

The conclusion first:

Car-centric towns are isolating, discriminatory, expensive, harmful to small businesses, and bad for public health. In contrast, walkable, human-oriented communities tend to be the happiest and healthiest and the most financially productive types of places to build and retain.

Let's focus on building places that cater to the needs of humans, not the needs of cars.

Another outstanding entry from Strong Towns.

THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF CAR DEPENDENCY, by Andrew Price (Strong Towns)

The majority of American towns and cities are built around the automobile. From multi-lane highways to vast paved parking lots, our communities have been shaped around a single mode of transportation over the last seventy years. While this may feel like progress, it has also harmed ourselves and our towns in ways that will be felt for generations.

Today I'm going talk about some of the negative consequences of car dependency and how a more walk-friendly, human-scaled development pattern would make us all better off. Specifically, I'm going to talk about them from the perspective of a town or suburb that has gone all-in on the auto-oriented pattern of development, where car travel and storage is prioritized over any other mode of transportation, and where the entire community is designed around car use.

Some of these negative consequences are:

Social isolation
Discrimination
Expense
Decline of small businesses
Effect on public health

Squalor-lining? After all, AT&T also doesn't landscape.

A reader asks: "Hmmm - why am I thinking about the central residential core of New Albany?"

AT&T hit with second complaint of discrimination against low-income neighborhoods, by Harper Neidig (The Hill)

A prominent civil rights attorney is accusing AT&T of discriminating against low-income minority communities within Detroit in a complaint filed with the Federal Communications Commission on Monday ...

... The Monday complaint alleges that AT&T is responsible for a “pattern of long-term, systematic failure to invest in the infrastructure required to provide equitable, mainstream Internet access to residents of the central city (compared to the suburbs) and to lower-income city neighborhoods.”

Asked for comment, an AT&T spokesman referred to a statement the company put out in response to the August complaint.

“We do not redline,” Joan Marsh, AT&T’s chief regulatory and external affairs officer, said in the statement. “Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is unparalleled. Our investment decisions are based on the cost of deployment and demand for our services and are of course fully compliant with the requirements of the Communications Act. We will vigorously defend the complaint filed today.”

We'll continue wondering why AT&T is such a slovenly big-biz presence downtown.

Why does City Hall tolerate AT&T's poorly landscaped corporate indifference opposite Breakwind at 510 E. Spring Street?

 ... I took a few snaps of the rubble in front of AT&T -- the scrawny bushes, tree stumps, exposed black plastic, rusty faded signs, random fence poles ... and in back, there are buckets of cigarette butts contributed by the women at St. Elizabeth fleeing their smoke-free campus, and in summer, lots of shimmering hot asphalt on all sides.

It's something to be proud of, AT&T. It makes the city look so much better. When I become dictator, remind me to nationalize the utility monopolies -- and can someone find me a nice wall for roll call?

Maybe ordinance enforcement doesn't apply to corporate monoliths?

(thanks B)

“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

The City of Louisville press release of February 14 includes a link to the redlining map.

City begins community conversation to combat redlining

 ... Local urban planner Joshua Poe has developed the interactive story map entitled “Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate.” This tool illustrates the ways that redlining has affected housing development, disinvestment and lending patterns in Louisville since the 1930s. By layering data sets such as vacant properties, building permits and property values, the map shows how the intentional redlining that was devised in the 1930s has had consequences that are evident still today.

Examples of conventional redlining that still exists today include refusal to provide delivery in certain areas, business loan denials regardless of credit-worthiness and refusal to write property insurance policies or dropping property owners from insurance coverage altogether.

Other forms of redlining, referred to as reverse redlining, also exist. Examples of reverse redlining include offering services low-income residents at higher prices, higher interest rates and excessive service fees or inferior products. This example may come in forms such as payday loans, cash advances, and expedited tax returns.

This story made it all the way to CityLab, but let it be duly noted that former New Albanian resident Poe's work on this topic goes back many years, as Jeff Gillenwater noted in this space in 2013.

Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

Friend and former neighbor Josh Poe is the sort of engaged and educated person who regularly challenges and improves upon my thinking; in short, the sort New Albany still tends to lose too often. He continues the good work here, reminding that certain community outcomes are the direct result of careful planning rather than random market occurrences, often for the most egregious of reasons. If you don't think it still happens and happens here, I invite you to check out the school district mapping in western New Albany sometime.

It's wonderful to see Josh's efforts bearing fruit. Will Greg Fischer's hyperbole translate into action? That's always the biggest question.

Louisville Confronts Its Redlining Past and Present, by Brentin Mock (CityLab)

A new online mapping project is aimed at dismantling the Kentucky city’s grim legacy of racial segregation.

 ... “When I started the research, I hoped that it would be used at the grassroots level, and I also hoped it would be used by planners,” says Joshua Poe, the urban planner who developed the project. “It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

On the website, users interact with a city map from 1937 that shows how the city was carved up for real estate investment purposes. Poe discovered a trove of documents in D.C.’s National Archives that show how lenders used race, class, and the number of immigrant families residing in an area to determine its value. Users can view these documents from the maps and also compare the city’s racial and class population distribution between 1937 and 2010.

Airbnb pushes back: "Bias and discrimination have no place on Airbnb, and we have zero tolerance for them."

On our recently concluded vacation, we spent six nights at two Airbnb properties, one in Vermont and the other in Massachusetts. Both of them were excellent.

I was aware of Airbnb's recent bad publicity with regard to discrimination, perhaps summarized by this paragraph from a New York Times story in June.

The long-simmering issue was inflamed last month when an Airbnb host in North Carolina made hateful, racist posts in canceling a booking by a black guest.

On the day we returned from the trip, the following e-mail appeared in my inbox.  Airbnb's CEO explains what's to be done about it. The full report is here (pdf).

---

Dear Airbnb community,

At the heart of our mission is the idea that people are fundamentally good and every community is a place where you can belong. We don’t say this because it sounds nice. It’s the goal that everyone at Airbnb works towards every day – because we’ve all seen how when we live together, we better understand each other.

Discrimination is the opposite of belonging, and its existence on our platform jeopardizes this core mission. Bias and discrimination have no place on Airbnb, and we have zero tolerance for them. Unfortunately, we have been slow to address these problems, and for this I am sorry. I take responsibility for any pain or frustration this has caused members of our community. We will not only make this right; we will work to set an example that other companies can follow.

In June, we asked Laura Murphy, the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington D.C. Legislative Office, to review every aspect of the Airbnb platform, and to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to fight bias and discrimination. Thanks to Laura’s leadership, today we’re releasing a report that outlines the results of that process. You can read the full report here, but I’d like to highlight four changes that will impact the way our platform works:

Airbnb Community Commitment

Beginning November 1, everyone who uses Airbnb must agree to a stronger, more detailed nondiscrimination policy. We aren’t just asking you to check a box associated with a long legal document. We’re asking everyone to agree to something we’re calling the Airbnb Community Commitment, which says:

We believe that no matter who you are, where you are from, or where you travel, you should be able to belong in the Airbnb community. By joining this community, you commit to treat all fellow members of this community, regardless of race, religion, national origin, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age, with respect, and without judgment or bias.

Open Doors

We’ll be implementing a new policy called Open Doors. Starting October 1st, if a Guest anywhere in the world feels like they have been discriminated against in violation of our policy – in trying to book a listing, having a booking canceled, or in any other interaction with a host – we will find that Guest a similar place to stay if one is available on Airbnb, or if not, we will find them an alternative accommodation elsewhere. This program will also apply retroactively to any Guest who reported discrimination prior to today. All of these Guests will be offered booking assistance for their next trip.

Instant Book

We’ll increase the availability of Instant Book, which allows our hosts to offer their homes to be booked immediately without their prior approval of a specific guest. Instant Book makes booking easier for everyone, and our goal is to have 1 million listings bookable via Instant Book by January 1st, 2017.

Anti-bias training

We are working with experts on bias, including Dr. Robert Livingston of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Dr. Peter Glick of Lawrence University, to make anti-bias training available to our community, and will be publicly acknowledging those who complete it.

These steps are just the beginning, not the end, of our efforts to combat bias and discrimination.

While we as a company have been slow on this issue, I am now asking you the community to help us lead the way forward. Every time you make someone else feel like they belong, that person feels accepted and safe to be themselves. While this may sound like a small act of kindness, we are a community of millions of people strong. Imagine what we can do together.

Brian Chesky
CEO, Co-founder

Southern Republicans imitate Indiana Republicans, or maybe vice-versa.

In an essay charting this year's “God, guns and gays” legislative sessions, as occurring down yonder in the defeated Confederacy, during which reactionary laws were enthusiastically embraced, only to illicit backlash from the very business and economic engines sustaining local economies, we're unfortunately reminded that when it comes to geography, the Mason-Dixon line has a weird curvature near the shores of Lake Michigan.

"Following a pattern established last year in Indiana."

Jeeebus, that hurts.

Southern Republicans: Going rogue (The Economist)

Republicans in the southern statehouses are angry—fundamentally, perhaps, about the waning of the values they are fighting for.

 ... On the face of it, much of this seems odd. Judging by the rhetoric of the Republican presidential contest, the country is going to the dogs; in parts of the South, the infrastructure is indeed crumbling. Yet the region’s politicians are concentrating on problems that, to put it mildly, are often less than pressing. Florida passed a law stopping clergy from being dragooned into conducting same-sex marriages, a threat already neutralised by America’s constitution. Predatory men infiltrating women’s toilets, the spectre raised in North Carolina and elsewhere, is a similarly apocryphal fear. Remarkably some southern governors have elevated such concerns above job-creation. Many in Georgia think Mr Deal should have followed suit: predicting that “religious liberty” will haunt next year’s session, too, Josh McKoon, a disappointed state senator, says that while “prosperity is an important value, so is individual freedom”.

What explains this eccentric turn? It is a reaction, most obviously, to last year’s Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, of the kind that often follows dramatic social change. Melton McLaurin, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, notes that this particular “rearguard action” resembles opposition to racial desegregation in emphasising the supposed endangerment of women and children. But many southern Republicans feel beleaguered by more than one ruling: they see Washington as at once insidiously liberal and hopelessly gridlocked. Religious-liberty bills and the like offer the consolation of decisive action (even if some are destined to be struck down), of a sort that, unlike new roads and bridges, requires no tax dollars ...

 ... Tension between urban liberals and their more conservative environs is an old story, given extra piquancy by the migration to some southern cities of sophisticated types from elsewhere in the country. Yet the role of demography in the South’s political convulsions runs deeper. As well as exemplifying the frictions between different levels of government and different strands of Republicanism (business-minded and religious), these flashpoints also illuminate a bigger clash: between the past and the future.

The South does it again -- wait, Indiana did it first. No matter: "The NBA Needs to Move the 2017 All-Star Game From Charlotte."

C'mon -- you know Grooms would have voted in favor if he lived in North Carolina.

The real world, from the only sportswriter who matters.

The NBA Needs to Move the 2017 All-Star Game From Charlotte. Now. (By Dave Zirin, The Nation)

... The 2017 NBA All-Star Game is due to be held in Charlotte, North Carolina. Silver should announce as soon as possible that this game needs to be moved unless the state legislature overturns its new law set to go in effect April 1 “blocking local governments from passing anti-discrimination rules to grant protections to gay and transgender people.”

The law was passed as a direct response to the City of Charlotte for passing an ordinance to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people from being discriminated against by businesses. Outrageously, the North Carolina legislature scheduled an extraordinary special session—the first time they have done so in 35 years—to annul the Charlotte ordinance before it went into effect. It’s remarkable how quickly lawmakers leap to actually do their jobs when the work involves stripping people of their rights. It is also stunning how all of the Dixie paeans to local control and states’ rights go out the window when it comes to issues such as these.

The law also bans students from using restrooms that correlate with their gender identity if it is not what is listed on their birth certificate. “Legislators have gone out of their way to stigmatize and marginalize transgender North Carolinians by pushing ugly and fundamentally untrue stereotypes that are based on fear and ignorance and not supported by the experiences of more than 200 cities with these protections,” Sarah Preston, acting executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, said in a statement.

This law empowers businesses across the state to put signs in their windows saying that they reserve the right to deny service to anyone whom they perceive to be part of the LGBT community. Think about that for a second: The law empowers right-wing small-business owners to legally discriminate based on their own “gaydar.”

Under the shadow of this legislation, the NBA really only has one recourse: It needs to move the 2017 All-Star Game and show the world that it is not going to “fall behind” on what is a very elemental issue of human rights and dignity. The NBA Players Association, led by the estimable Michele Roberts, should also call for Adam Silver to take this step.

Selected "Southern Indiana leaders talk LGBT protections bill."

Indiana is a lamentably lop-sided one-party state, but earlier this year when Governor Mike Pence's GOP triumphantly embraced the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, numerous sycophants from the usual corporate-weighted economic development cadre finally got the willies.

Now, for our entertainment, the same legislators who brought you the idiocy of RFRA will provide anti-discrimination laws to countermand it -- well, mostly. There'll have to be bigotry maintenance exceptions, you know.

Our local state representative broke ranks over RFRA, and accordingly, Ed Clere is quoted here.

State Senator Ron Grooms as yet touts the wonderfulness of RFRA, evidently as viewed from his residence on Fantasy Island, but fortunately, he is not interviewed here.

However, there is one paragraph in need of explanation.

(New Albany council person Greg) Phipps said he's happy to see New Albany's anti-discrimination ordinance working. Though the human right commission hasn't heard any cases, he said a couple of instances of alleged LGBT discrimination have been mentioned, but not acted upon.

It works, though it hasn't been used, and discrimination not brought before the HRC did't occur because there was no action.

In short, Gahanism in a nutshell: Fundamental change is imperative, so long as nothing fundamentally changes. 

Southern Indiana leaders talk LGBT protections bill, by Jerod Clapp (Clark County Today)

SOUTHERN INDIANA — A bill to include LGBT people in existing anti-discrimination laws is on the slate for the State Senate's upcoming legislative session.

The draft, written by Sen. Travis Holdman, R-Markle, comes after the state's heavily criticized passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act from last spring. The new bill grants protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trangender people.

Though some local government and business leaders see the proposal as a step in the right direction, they expressed concern over religious exemptions.

But the implications of the bill don't stop at the rights of LGBT people, but also what it could ultimately mean for the state's business environment and economy are also concerns among leaders.

NASH: "Are we the state of discrimination?"

Thanks to Matt for writing this. I'm skipping ahead to the conclusion for my pull, but read it all. Quite a few of us are asking these questions, but the real question is whether anyone is listening, amid what has become a one-party state.

NASH: Are we the state of discrimination?

... I have worked for a major corporate chain and a now I work for a mom and pop type shop with six employees. I cannot understand what would possess any business from turning down any type of business. I believe that ignorance and intolerance are the only basis for this legislation. Our state’s leaders are using religion as cover to shield them from laws that forbid discrimination. Is this how we want to be viewed by the rest of the world?

To the outside world Indiana may have the reputation of being a backwoods state. Outsiders might think of a “Hoosier” as someone that is culturally unsophisticated. I believe that legislation like the type that passed this week only solidifies this reputation. Indiana should be trying harder to shake the stigma of being a state the condones intolerance and should start standing up against bigotry.

Olbermann: "Sports (and its consumer -- you) are unavoidably, inescapably and permanently political."

Olbermann's not alone. On Saturday, Dave Zirin published his version of the same argument.

Why the NCAA Should Move the Final Four Out of Indiana, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

... If (NCAA President Mark) Emmert really wanted to make a statement, he’d move next week’s Final Four out of Indianapolis. Emmert could announce that they were moving the basketball semifinals and finals to Cincinnati, less than 100 miles from the locale, so anyone who had their plane tickets or driving plans set wouldn’t be egregiously inconvenienced. Play it at the University of Cincinnati—hell, play it at a Cincy YMCA—but just get it out of the clutches of Mike Pence.

As noted here, I view it as unlikely. But the reasoning is strong.

Just giving the farcical pharmacist a taste of his own bitter medicine.

It will burden my exercise of basic human decency, but I'll be civil ... until he tries to order a Miller Lite.

Krull: "What they know for sure that isn't so."

If Mark Twain really said the words reprinted on this meme, then "imbeciles who really mean it" works quite well, too.

Krull: What they know for sure that isn't so, by John Krull (TheStatehouseFile.com via the C-J)

INDIANAPOLIS – Long ago in an almost forgotten presidential primary debate, U.S. Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-South Carolina, delivered a classic line about Ronald Reagan.

It wasn't the things that the Gipper didn't know that created trouble, Hollings said

Rather, Hollings continued, it was the stuff that Reagan "knew for sure that just wasn't so" that was the problem.

I've thought about Hollings' jest as we approach the 2015 session of the Indiana General Assembly.

This session promises us proposals that will protect the "rights" of Christians to celebrate Christmas in public schools and on courthouse lawns and to refuse service to gay people because doing so will violate their religious principles.

Doubtless, we also will see Indiana Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, R-Fort Wayne, continue his efforts with other state legislators from around the country to rewrite the U.S. Constitution.

Driving these initiatives is the unshakable conviction that something is wrong with the moral workings of the universe and the law if social conservatives aren't allowed to use the power of government — to borrow former Republican U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock's revealing phrase — "to inflict" their "views on others."

"Property values weren’t magically determined by some invisible hand of the market, but by a concerted effort of people and policy to enforce racial segregation."

It's gotten to the point that when I see Joe Dunman's name on the IL mailing, I just click through to read whatever he's written, irrespective of the topic.

Dunman's current piece is a must read.

Joe Dunman: During white flight, lack of racial diversity was by design (Insider Louisville)

... The Bon Air area was a hit. People, including my grandparents with my infant father in tow, flocked in droves. More than 2,000 affordable homes were filled with upwardly mobile young families almost overnight. Between 1953 and 1960, the population boomed to 12,000 residents packed into just over 2 square miles.

Almost every single one of those residents was white — 99.9 percent, in fact. This wasn’t some accident of demography, though. The complete lack of racial diversity was by design — an outcome guaranteed by official and private housing policies in force at the time.

Back to the Ghetto: "Religiously conservative businesses" amid their own kind?

I recall the words of my hero Christopher Hitchens, even as I read about various legislative efforts (Arizona, Indiana) on the part of soon-to-be-extinct elderly white theocrats to sanction discrimination based on religious indoctrination:

"There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking."

First, the dawdling old white guys, cluelessly pandering.

Anderson Cooper Demolishes Arizona Politician Supporting Homophobic Bill, by Jack Mirkinson (The Huffington Post)

Then a journey into the "fully intended consequences" labyrinthe.

Arizona bill’s other outrage: Why anti-gay bigotry is just the beginning; Legalizing discrimination is horrible enough. But a sneaky pro-corporate provision in the bill will also shock you, by Emmett Rensin (Salon)

Of course, not excepting the propensity of theocratic fascists in Indiana to gaily hop aboard the discriminatory train.

Indiana official slows bill to allow some religious bias, by Tony Cook (IndyStar)

But let's also acknowledge a contrarian point-of-view, as offered with customary aplomb by RV:

From what I understand, the Arizona bill is a reaction to the New Mexico photographer who refused to work a gay commitment ceremony, & was subsequently sued for refusing. Should a gay caterer be forced to cater an event at Westboro baptist Church? Should a Muslim DJ be forced to spin records at a Satanist wedding? Should a Nation of Islam drycleaner be forced to clean Klan robes?

CART in the news (1): Environmental issues and civil rights abuses.

Actually, the asphalt expansion plan set forth by the oligarch apologists serving on the late, unlamented Bridges Junta discriminates not only against "poor minorities," but additionally burdens any resident of the metropolitan area seeking alternatives to the hegemony of the automobile.

Quixotic, or potential roadblock? Bridges project has begun, but still faces CART lawsuit, by Steve Kaufman (Insider Louisville)

 ... The complaint sites Section 601 of the civil rights law, which says, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

CART alleges that:

[by eliminating public transit from the alternatives under consideration], the defendants acted with deliberate indifference to the discriminatory impact of the [Louisville – Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project] and formulated a mega project that drained available federal funding . . . killing the affordable light rail transit project that had particular benefits for the protected class.

And “. . . defendants intentionally discriminated on the basis of race by adopting an unreasonable tolling plan that would disproportionately burden poor minorities for 46 years or more.”