Books for the Horde: The New Jim Crow, Chapter One →

The New Jim Crow sounds like a great book. From Coates' review:

And despite claims of shrinking government and kicking the poor off the dole, mass incarceration effectively meant a new sprawling bureaucracy. Prisons, it turns out, are expensive. "The reality is that the government was not reducing the amount of money devoted to management of the urban poor,' Alexander writes. "It was radically altering what the funds would be used for. The dramatic shift toward punitiveness resulted in a massive reallocation for public resources. By 1996, the penal budget doubled the amount that had been allocated to AFDC or food stamps."

The FBI’s Facial Recognition Program →

 

The system is said to be only moderately effective — it will typically return 50 possible matches for an inquiry and operates to the level that there is an 85% chance that the correct identity will be on the list.  Still, that seems a vast improvement from the broader sea of identity matching problems.

Likely another instance of technology outstripping cultural understanding of its implications. The author includes a summary of applicable laws.

Running Scared →

An incredible story:

 

The “why” is easy to answer: Georgia has roughly 700,000 unregistered black voters. If Democrats could cut that number by less than a third—and bring nearly 200,000 likely Democrats to the polls—they would turn a red state purple, and land a major blow to the national Republican Party.

And it doesn't end there. There's a lot of pushback (if that's even an appropriate word) across several counties:

Under the old Voting Rights Act, Georgia officials had to clear voting changes with the Justice Department, and for good reason: The state had a long history of disenfranchisement, and “preclearance” was a way to pre-empt discrimination or prevent it entirely.

That changed with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder last year,which struck preclearance from the VRA. Now, along with other Southern states, Georgia was free to change its laws and procedures for voting. And it did. That year, in Augusta—which has a large black population—officials moved municipal electionsfrom their traditional November dates, a change with huge, negative effects on turnout. (For a case study, look to Ferguson, Missouri.)

 

‘Money-in-Politics’ Amendment Ignored →

What could be the biggest event of the year, uniting nearly all Americans, is largely out of the limelight:

 

The ignored debate is on a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution – the 28th in its history – that would empower Congress to restrict campaign financing and spending in an effort to rein in the deep-pocketed oligarchs who have been spending billions of dollars in recent years to influence electoral outcomes.
...
In 2012, just 32 donors gave more to Super PACs than 3.7 million average Americans who donated amounts under $200 to presidential candidates Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.