AIFF 2013: One.For.Ten - DNA, The Instant Replay For The Justice System

The highlight of the film festival for me so far was Thursday night at Loussac Library.

The showing was the most innovative and powerful I've seen.

The film maker, Will Francome (and his colleagues), as he explained it, determined to take a cross country trip in the US to interview people who had been exonerated of capital offenses and been released from death row.

But they jumped onto Facebook and Twitter to include their audience in developing questions for the people they were going to interview.  They made their film, edited it quickly, and put it online for their FB and Twitter team to see within 24 hours.

And the 'showing' Thursday included a panel of three local leaders in the fight for justice for innocent people convicted of crime.  There were ten short interviews.  One or two were shown.  Then the audience was invited to ask questions or comment.  The panel commented.  Then the next couple of films were shown.

WOW!  The audience was included in making the films and in the showing.  This takes AIFF into new film territory - making the audience participants, not simply passive viewers of the films.  I know people will immediately, and legitimately respond that the festival has had Q&A with film makers from the beginning.

But this was more than that.  At One.For.Ten  the audience was involved from the beginning.  Live audience reaction was part of the film experience.

And if all that weren't enough, the topic - innocent people on death row - is as powerful as you can get.

Most of you missed this.  I didn't know what I was going to experience before I went.  But, you can see the ten films and join into the social media discussions.  The films are at the One.For.Ten website.

These stories are so compelling because they challenge the very basis of our justice system.  I had so many thoughts jumping through my head.

Clearly DNA can change the court's call, just as instant replay can change a sports call.  But saving an innocent man or woman wrongly convicted is far more significant than changing a referee's call.  But like instant replay, it's the kind of objective evidence, that breaks through most human error. (And I'm sure there are ways to incorrectly collect, test, and interpret DNA evidence.)

I asked about the reactions of prosecutors, and, unfortunately, the answers suggested they react badly.  They deny they were wrong.  And, as the blogger at What Do I Know?, I'm fascinated by how people 'know' what they 'know'.  And how they simply cannot see 'truths' that conflict with their own well being.  I know that prosecutors dismiss the claims of innocence of inmates.  Every inmate has found a way to believe he's innocent.  (And I believe that many extremely guilty folks believe they're innocent, making it harder for people who really are innocent.)  The irony is that while prosecutors can see these people deceive themselves, apparently they can't see it when they themselves fall for the same delusion.

So much to think about.  They discussed about ten different reasons/causes for people to be falsely convicted and each of the ten films is supposed to highlight one.  (Though most involve several.)  Some were;

• wrong eyewitnesses
• snitch testimony -  informants lying for their own benefit
• wrong expert witnesses
• racism
• prosecutorial misconduct
• perjury and false testimony
• false confession

It seems to me, short of banning the death sentence, anyone convicted without concrete evidence based on things like eyewitness testimony or snitch testimony and probably other conditions, should not be sentenced to anything more than life.

By the way, one for ten refers to stats that there is one exonerated convict for every ten executed.  

Did I tell you I liked this session? 

The Case That HD 5 Was Gerrymandered - Part 1

I'm dividing this into sections so it's easier to find the parts you want or need to read.

Introduction
 
This is the first of two posts on HD 5 in Fairbanks.  The title reflects the implied case that the plaintiffs are making against the Board.  The Plaintiffs argue that HD 5 has compactness problems.  They also want a different pairing of House District 5 to make a better Senate seat - one that would make more likely the election of a second Democratic Senator in the Fairbanks area.  They don't use the word gerrymandering, but, as I mention below, the constitutional standards tend to stand as proxies for the harder to prove gerrymandering.

In Part 1 here, I want to give background.  In Part 2 we'll look at maps and details of HD 5 and the related Senate districts.  Other districts in Matsu and Kenai and rural Alaska are challenged by the plaintiffs, but just looking at this one in close detail will be more than enough to understand what's going on and what's at stake.  And, I hope, help people be able to react to the eventual court decision with facts as well as partisan fervor. 

Purpose of the Post

To make this accessible to people not following this day-to-day.
This isn't that hard to understand, it's just that there are so many details, that keeping it all straight is difficult.  Plus, a lot of stuff is subjective and requires someone who has enough grasp on the facts and the standards to come to an informed conclusion.  For example both sides will talk about compactness and then one side will say moving these people from this district to another will cause a ripple effect.  The other side says, no, they can be put into another district easily.  It takes someone who has watched the map making to have a better sense of which claim is more accurate.

As someone who has been to nearly every Board meeting held in Anchorage and at most of the others via the phone or online, I know that this is complex and that there is more to this than can be presented in the facts.  In this post I'm going to present what the parties have said and also give you my sense of which side is more persuasive.  But I have no special powers and other people who were there a lot might come to different conclusions.

Scope of this Post

I'm focusing on Fairbanks HD 5.  I think I understand this a little better than the other points being challenged - Matsu and Kenai and some rural districts.  Looking at HD 5 will inevitably get us into neighboring districts - mainly 3 and 4 - and into Senate Seats B and C.  I'm hoping, though, that if people get into the details of HD 5, they can get a grasp of the competing standards, and why this is all so difficult to prove one way or the other.  But at least, when the judge's opinion comes down, you'll be able to follow it.  

Background - How We Got Here

1. The Redistricting Board submitted its latest redistricting plan July 14, 2013
2. The Riley plaintiffs - George Riley from Ester and Ron Dearborn from Goldstream, two liberal leaning communities near Fairbanks - challenged the plan.  They also challenged the original plans as well, challenges that ended with the Alaska Supreme Court
1. invalidating the first plan
2. requiring some changes to accept the second plan as an interim plan that was used in the 2012 elections, because there wasn't enough time for a complete new plan, and
3. determining the interim plan was unconstitutional and that the Board needed to make another plan for the 2014 election
3. The Board objected to the plaintiffs challenges
4. More briefs were filed with more details of the complaints.
5. The Board filed briefs to dismiss the complaints
6. The Alaska Democratic Party filed complaints.
7. North Star Fairbanks Borough filed an amicus brief.
8. The judge - Michael McConahy - can make summary judgments on some or all of these motions.  That means he can just decide who is right or wrong and issue an order.  Or he can say he needs more information and allow the two sides to make further arguments in court. My guess is that he may make a few summary judgments and then identify the points he needs to hear more on in court.  That court date is set for Dec. 9 - 16 in Fairbanks. 

You can see all these briefs at the Board's website.  In this post my focus will be on House District 5 to give you a sense of what the court has to decide.  But looking at 5 will mean also looking at the districts around it.  But there's lots there.  Here are the ones I'd start with:

Corrected Copy of Riley Plaintiff's Memorandum in Support of Motion for Summary*
Doc 296 - ARB's Response Part 1
Doct 296  ARB's Response Part 2
Doc 296  ARB's Response Part 3

*I can't find this one on the Board's list.  It was sent to me and I think it's a consolidation of previous motions.  It's long, but there aren't that many words on each page. 

Background - Redistricting and Gerrymandering

 These two words go together.  Redistricting is about redrawing the lines of the political districts (in Alaska's case since we only have one member of the US House, redistricting is only about the state house and senate).  How one draws the lines can have enormous impact on which party gets more members elected.  Gerrymandering is the term used to describe shaping districts to favor one party over the other.

It takes Wikipedia's entry on Redistricting only 253 words to start talking about gerrymandering.  At All About Redistricting's page What Is Redistricting? gerrymander is the 207th word.   My point is that most people who know anything about redistricting expect the party in power to take advantage of their power.  The only real question is can they make their maps so that they favor their side BUT also stay legal?

Both parties will claim, publicly, their innocence and exclaim the other party's guilt.  "We have done nothing but correct the gross abuse of the other party in the last redistricting."

ProPublica's Redistricting, A Devil's Dictionary identifies several of the typical gerrymandering ploys:

• Cracking: This technique splits a community into multiple districts to ensure it doesn't have significant sway with a candidate. . .
• Packing: When faced with too many unfriendly voters, it can also be a winning strategy to limit the damage by drawing them all into one district. The benefit for you is there are fewer of the voters you don't want in all the surrounding districts. When race is involved, redistricting pros call it bleaching.  . . .
• Hijacking: If there's an incumbent you don't like, you can make their re-election difficult by putting them in a district with another incumbent to contend with. . .
• Kidnapping: Most politicians have geographic political bases; places they came up in politics where they have supporters, political allies, donors and name recognition. But what if their home address ends up in a different district than their base? That can make re-election tough. . .

The ProPublica link gives more explanations and examples with maps.


This is like poker.  People keep as straight a face as they can while they make all sorts of claims.


The current partisan redistricting facts in Alaska are these: 

1.  The Alaska Supreme Court declared the process the Board went through last time to be unconstitutional.  The Board will tell you, and not incorrectly, that the Court found the process, not the product, unconstitutional.  But since the process was unconstitutional, the Court didn't look at each district's constitutionality.

2.  The Board has four Republicans and one Democrat.  The Democrat, Marie Greene, is the CEO of NANA Corporation, an Alaska Native Regional Corporation.  The Board  claims that all their decisions were unanimous and since they had a Democrat, it shows there was no partisanship.  I agree that almost all the decisions have been unanimous.  But my sense was that Marie Greene's main concern was to make sure that Alaska Natives were treated fairly.  She did not raise issues about other Democratic party concerns. 

3. The state Senate,  before redistricting, had a 10-10 split between Democrats and Republicans, with a bi-partisan coalition running the Senate.  After the 2012 election, which used the interim redistricting plan, the Senate had a 13-7 Republican majority.  Two Democratic Senators were redistricted into the same district in Fairbanks. (Note the ploy of Hijacking above.) Alaska's only Black legislator was given a far more conservative district than before (Cracking), and a Republican and Democratic Senator were put in the same district in Southeast Alaska.  There had to be a pairing of two incumbent Senators in SE, because of population decline. It could have been two Democrats, two Republicans, or one of each. 

4.  While the Chair of the Board declared, at the first Board meeting, that he had no instructions from the Governor (who appointed him) and had not even met with the Governor, the Chair of the Republican Party, Randy Ruedrich, was an active observer throughout the whole process.  The Executor Director of the Board had recently worked for Ruedrich as the Republican Victory Director in 2010.  I like the (now former) Executive Director and he was always fair and open with me.  And there is nothing illegal about these arrangements, but the Republican Party was able to share its opinions about the districts more easily than was the Democratic Party.

5.  The Board member who did most of the mapping of Fairbanks, Jim Holm, is a former Fairbanks legislator who was defeated by current Democratic representative Scott Kawasaki.  His original maps of Fairbanks turned out to have what was called by the Democrats "the Kawaski finger."  The house of S. Kawasaki was 'kidnapped' into another district by a small protrusion.  It turns out that the house belonged to Sonia, Scott's sister, but you can't convince the Democrats that it wasn't an attempt to put Scott into a totally different district.  The Board's attorney recently pointed out to me that the Court found, in the previous trial, the arguments of gerrymandering unpersuasive.  And I agree that the evidence presented probably wasn't enough to prove anything.  But being the one who does the maps where you lost your last election smells a bit like conflict of interest to me.

As a blogger, I'm more than conscious that raising these points will likely cause Republicans to declare my obvious bias.  But these are things I observed or heard about and to not mention them would also be bias. If readers are going to get a sense of what was happening I need to include them.  These points, by themselves prove nothing, but they do give the context for judging the outcome.   I also heard Democrats who said they would take the same liberties if they had been in power. 

I should also note that the Board’s rules, drafted by the Board’s attorney, Michael White,  say that gerrymandering is illegal, White has also said on a number of occasions, that no redistricting plan in modern times has been overturned because of political gerrymandering.   

The point is, unless a Board member says explicitly that they have gerrymandered, it’s hard to tell what was going on inside their heads. 

That’s why the process of redistricting is so controversial.  The Courts now use the more objective criteria of compactness, contiguity, etc.  as a proxy for gerrymandering.  They don’t call it gerrymandering, but if a district looks strange enough, it can be ruled not compact and thus unconstitutional.  No need to use the G word. 

So, the assumption by many, if not most, is that the Republicans are going to do their best to take advantage of their  4-1 majority on the Board to nudge the districts here and there to favor Republican candidates. 

And the Board members are going to deny this, because if they acknowledge gerrymandering, they would then have their plan thrown out.  So even if a Board were completely unbiased, there would be suspicion of gerrymandering.


And In The Board's Defense

I would also note that the Board meetings were all very accessible for anyone, like me, who had the time and was in Anchorage.  And most meetings, after the first few months, were accessible online or by phone. Most of the Board members and all of the staff were always willing to answer questions in detail during breaks and after meetings.   The Board had a difficult task before them balancing different criteria to map a huge state with a sparse population.    Strangely large districts are inevitable.  Compared to what's happened in some states, this Board has been transparent and did not get greedy.  I think some of the new districts also reflect the split within the Republican Party between the traditional leadership and the new Tea Party activists.  The court's decision is not going to be a slam dunk by any stretch of the imagination.  

The question the Court will have to address is whether the issues that the plaintiffs raise are violations of the Alaska constitution, or whether the anomalies they allege are simply the by-products of balancing many factors to map a huge state with a sparse and scattered population. 

Part 2 will look at the maps and the details of HD 5 and neighboring house and Senate districts to help folks understand what is happening and why.  

[UPDATE Nov. 15, 2013:  Part 2 is now up here.]


 

TSA Fast Lane, Arctic Prof Calls For Arctic Oil Moratorium; 34 Years In Prison On False Testimony - Back In LA

We're back to be with my mom in LA.  We were on the pre-screened list at the airport yesterday so we didn't have to take off our shoes, show our plastic bags, or take off our shoes.  The ADN had an article on this program last December.

TSA spokeswoman Lorie Dankers, up from Seattle for the occasion, said there are two ways for travelers to join the program. Five U.S. airlines are authorized by TSA to invite selected frequent flyers into PreCheck. Or a person can apply through one of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Trusted Traveler programs like Global Entry.
All five of the select airlines serve Anchorage: Alaska, Delta, American, United and U.S. Airways. Bobbie Egan, spokeswoman for Alaska Airlines, said a batch of invitations went out over the weekend by email. If you didn't get one, it won't do any good to call up the airline to complain, she said.
"We don't set the criteria -- the TSA sets the criteria for who's invited to participate," Egan said. "It's a TSA program solely."

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/12/04/2713439/tsa-opens-fast-lane-for-prescreened.html#storylink=cpy

I'm not sure what 'invite' means in this case.  No one told us until we got to the security line and they scanned our boarding pass and told us to go in that lane.  And it's the first time it happened.  Is there a little racial profiling mixed up in this?  Older white male and female?  I'm sure that didn't do any harm.  Or maybe NSA has told TSA that we haven't talked to any terrorists lately.  Who knows?

The LA Times has an interview today with Professor Sergei Medvedev, an Arctic specialist who is calling for an oil moratorium in the Arctic and who Putin called "a moron." [I'm sure Putin used a Russian word.  It would be interesting to know how it translates substantively and emotionally into English.]

"Political science professor Sergei Medvedev, a longtime lover and explorer of the Arctic, drew the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin when he recently called for international protection of the icy northern region in the face of economic development plans.
Last month, Putin called Medvedev, who teaches at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, "a moron."
The incident prompted a nationwide discussion of the Arctic and coincided with the arrest of 30 Greenpeace activists protesting a Russian oil drilling project in the region.
Medvedev, 46, who anchors popular television shows and studied and worked for 15 years in the West, spoke to The Times last month at the Architecture Museum in downtown Moscow."

LA Times story about man in prison for 34 years, convicted on eye witness testimony.  The witnesses sister has now testified that she told police back then that her sister was lying.  Finally it comes out and judge agrees he was falsely convicted.

Prosecutors had argued that about 12:30 p.m. on April 6, 1979, Register shot Jack Sasson five times in the carport of his West Los Angeles home. Sasson, 78, died three weeks later.
At trial, the physical evidence against Register was scant, court papers said. None of the seven fingerprints found on Sasson's car matched Register's. Police never recovered the murder weapon.
They did seize a pair of pinstriped pants from Register's closet, which had a speck of blood smaller than a pencil eraser. But it was of little value — the blood type, O, matched Sasson and Register.
Instead, the prosecution relied on eyewitness testimony, notably that of Brenda Anderson. Then 19, Anderson said she was at home when she heard gunfire, looked out the window and saw an African American man sprinting from the Sassons' carport, court papers said. She identified him as Register, though Register's girlfriend testified that he was with her at the time of the shooting.
Register was convicted and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. Each time he appeared before the parole board, he refused to admit guilt.
"It appears that the only reason that I have been consistently denied parole is because I have maintained my innocence," he once told the board, court papers said.
Register might have remained behind bars, his attorneys said, if not for a stroke of luck. In late 2011, another of Brenda Anderson's sisters, Sheila Vanderkam, found a website that locates convicted felons. "I typed in the name Kash Register out of curiosity," she said in a declaration, "and learned, to my horror, that Mr. Register was still in prison."

Another example of police and prosecutors apparently more interested in convicting somebody than convicting the right person.

I biked down to Venice Beach just before sunset.  

[Feedburner notes: This one seems to have taken about seven hours to be seen on blogrolls. I posted it at 7:28pm and the first hits from blogrolls came at 4:30am the next day.]

Snowden Chase Modern Day Version of OJ Televised Car Chase

[Think of this as a quick jump into the river of data flowing out over the internet.  A short swim.  Then we get out, dry off, and go about our business.]

There's a lot we don't know and jumping to firm conclusions on any side is clearly premature.  One's gut reactions are probably more related to one's basic belief system than to the actual facts at this point.  But, eventually, we'll know which first impressions proved to be more accurate.

My reaction is in the title - this reminds me of the OJ Simpson car chase coverage.  That one used helicopters to follow Simpson and the police through Los Angeles.  This one is using the internet and who knows what else to give us less direct and less verifiable information.  The OJ chase led to a trial that left White observers shaking their heads and Black observers smiling.  The later may not all have believed in OJ's innocence, but the fact that a Black defendant had been able to get out of a charge of murder of his White girlfriend showed that enough money to get a great attorney now worked for Blacks as well as Whites.  But it didn't end there and everyone seemed to hold to their pre-trial conclusions.  We'll see if that foreshadows what's going to happen here where the stakes are so much higher.  

I went to Twitter to see what was happening there.   Snowden isn't even in the top 10.  Here's what Tweeters think is important at this moment in time*:

Trends 

• #MagnaCarta
 Promoted

• Jim Carrey 

• Adams Morgan

• #Berlusconi

• #SCOTUS

• #questionsforteganandsara

• Deng

• #SB5

• #zimmermantrial

• Fed's Fisher

I searched Snowden (not the hashtag #Snowden.)  Tweets are rushing in.  Most seem sympathetic to Snowden.  Here are just two:

Nancy Kricorian ‏@nancykric4h"He who tells the truth must have one foot in the stirrup." - Armenian proverb #RunSnowdenRun

Occupy Wall Street ‏@OccupyWallStNYC6hIrony in the US getting upset about #Snowden going to Cuba to avoid the law, which is exactly why Bush put Guantanamo there. #RunSnowdenRun

I decided to look for the negative tweets and searched "Snowden traitor" (not the hashtag #snowdentraitor.) Here too it seems tweeters are pretty supportive of Snowden though if you wait a few minutes you get a stream of 'he's a traitor' tweets. From search for "snowden traitor":

Jonathan C ‏@jcpolitech15m

I initially thought Snowden was a whistle blower, but if he is sharing NSA secrets with China & Russia, then he is a traitor 

.POLITICO ‏@politico18 JunMichele Bachmann says Edward Snowden is ‘clearly’ a traitor: http://politi.co/16G31s5 GORKA DE ZAMACONA ‏@GORKAZP18 Jun@politico Traitors r those who swore 2 uphold & defend the constitution & trample it Those who warn U your rights being taken away R heroes
ExpandCSMonitor.com ‏@csmonitor17 JunDick Cheney calls Edward #Snowden a traitor, says fleeing to China suspicious, implies he may a spy for China: http://ow.ly/m6iv6 

The Atlantic Wire ‏@TheAtlanticWire2hThe growing consensus that #Snowden is a terrible traitor, or 'America's #1 fugitive' http://theatln.tc/14T7BmS 

But another tweet took me to newsguild (the newspaper guild, communications workers of America)

which has an online poll:

Snowden Survey

Thank you for taking our survey.*

results

*I had to vote to see the results.



I'm not sure what this all means, but the basic questions falling out are:

• Snowden's motives  - I don't see much about Snowden being motivated by money or any other reason to sell out his country.  Some say he's doing this for the attention.  Most say he's exposing the ugly side of America.  Some say he's helping China and Russia (and other countries with terrible free press records) to score points against the US.  It seems that most people writing think that he, at least, thinks he's doing this as a whistleblower, not as a spy.  
• Traitor/Spy - This charge seems to come more from the act and specific violations of the law and the contract he signed to keep information confidential than from belief that he has been paid to do this by some foreign government - the usual notion of a spy.  The idea is, he broke the law and is doing harm to America therefore he is a traitor.  Implied, I guess, is that he is just a mere cog in the process and therefore doesn't understand the big picture of why the surveillance needs to be done.
• Hero - There are a lot of folks (on Twitter) who see Snowden as part of the Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange tradition of whistleblowers who expose government's evil ways.  
• Just a troubled man - Beate Clever ‏@ArtClipsDesign
  22m
  Ex-CIA Chief: Snowden neither hero, nor traitor but very troubled young man http://fb.me/2Fblk6H8J 

Technology may give us access to more data faster, it doesn't make us wiser. It does give us more of a sense of what people are thinking and with that we can start to assemble the ways people are framing the situation and the questions that need more facts to help reach more justifiable conclusions. (Conclusions can include: "We don't have enough information to conclude.")


*  As I towel off and get back to other things, here's the Twitter Top 10 as I'm about to hit the publish button:

Trends 

• #MagnaCarta

 Promoted

• Jim Carrey

• #SCOTUS

• Adams Morgan

• #TWLHangout

• #LarryIsLove

• #smarTrike

• #SB5

• Andrew Gaugh

• Fed's Fisher

· Change

Just Let The Kids Do Their Thing, And We'll Be Fine

Every year the Museum hosts an art exhibit from the Anchorage School District.  I managed to get there on the last day.  When you look at the work these kids do, you know that we're in good hands in the future.  There were so many worthy works. Here are just a few.

I'm not sure what Heaven was thinking here, but this definitely says she's feeling and thinking about big issues. 






[Click on any image to enlarge it.]

The piece in the exhibit is just the right face of this box, but I knew that the detail wouldn't show up so I added some close-ups of the details. It is really quite amazing.

Here I've meshed three together - Ellie's frog (close-up, not the whole thing), Kynsey's octopus, and Cache's wolf and caribou.

Here's another one where I'd love to talk to the artist and ask how this portrait was conceived and what it all means.  It took me a bit before I saw the musical notes.  A really interesting piece.

Tristan Burgess Grade 10 - Zebra

A beautifully executed and interesting work.  Who are these men?  How did the artist come up with this?

I'm afraid I didn't do Katie's piece justice here.  The whole picture is in the lower right, then I've zoomed in on reflections in what we guessed were drops of water on the table.  Interesting piece.

 

There was just something about this large poster that spoke to me.

Hazel Marucut Grade 10 - Sirens of the Deep

I don't know why.  I guess it's the complicated simplicity of this piece and the slightly racy innocence. 

I know why I liked this one - I used to make similar doodles in class when I was bored.

They weren't quite together like this in the exhibit, but it seemed the right thing to do.  The tiger fish is by Brey Anna.  The rest you can see if you enlarge it.

Sarah Birdsall Grade 11 - Textured Hand

 And this one speaks for itself. 


My 14 year old companion at the exhibit saw one picture by a classmate.  We both agreed that in most cases, it was pretty easy to tell which ones were done by boys and which by girls.  But not all. 

Every Good Thing Attracts The Bad - Fake Blogger Endorsements

Blogs began with a certain level of honesty and innocence.  People listened to blogger recommendations because they were genuine.  And marketers noticed that and started asking bloggers to market their products.  I wrote about this phenomenon two years ago at some length and with links to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Today I got one that went beyond most of the others.  Not only do they want me to talk about their products, they'll even write the post for me, and reward me with a gift certificate.  I would note that when I looked into this in the past, I learned that bloggers who get paid for their recommendations but don't tell their readers, are breaking the law.  (See below for more details.)

So here's the email I got.  (If you sent me a private email in response to something you read on my blog, or because you're a friend, I would not post or share your email without notifying you first and seeing if you have any objections.  But this is an unsolicited email asking me to break the law for their benefit.  There are no reasons why I should keep their correspondence confidential.)

Hi

I work for XXXXXX and wanted to reach out to you. We came across your blog What Do I know? and thought you'd make a great person to work with for a mutually beneficial initiative we've started. We're looking to have a select group of bloggers like yourself pick out their favorite XXXXXXX products and then ideally mention them in a blog post. The product selection is quite varied so I'm sure you'll find something that fits perfectly with your blog. To make this really fast & easy, we've developed a tool that guides you through everything. It even helps generate a blog post title and the actual content once you've chosen your products. You can get started by visiting this url: http://XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (yes I'm sparing you the real url) It should only take a couple minutes, but we would like to offer you a XXXXXX.com gift certificate in exchange for your time if this sounds interesting to you. All the best, Axxxxxxxx

So I followed the link and I had to pick one category from a long list.  Things like holidays, animals, birthdays, trendy, religion, gaming, brands. . .  24 in all.  I picked political and went to step 2.  Pictures of the products.  You'll see they didn't check my blog too carefully.  Here's a screenshot of three of the products.

Mind you there were dozens of choices for political products but they were all anti-Obama.  T shirts, bumper stickers, baseball caps, etc.  I guess these are bargain basement now.

Then I went to the next step to see what the post they were going to give me would look like.

 Let's see, I think this promotion sucks.  It's unethical, illegal, and their politics are all wrong.  Oh wait, I'm not doing a post to push their products, I'm doing a post to warn other bloggers and consumers.

The post they had for me turned out to be very similar to the picture above.  There were three T shirts, but vertical, and with links to buy them.

There was no disclosure that the blogger was getting a gift certificate for posting this.  I don't know how much it was for.  I didn't go that far.

I did go back and check the religion category.  There were cards (Christian and Jewish), bumper stickers and stickers (Buddhist), and T-shirts (Muslim.)  The Jewish cards ranged from ok in a secular way to tacky to offensive. The Muslim T-shirts, I can't tell if any would be acceptable to a Muslim, but some were clearly offensive.


My Blogger Colleagues!  It's illegal to get paid to endorse products without disclosing that relationship to your readers.  This solicitation does not ask me to disclose, nor does it warn me that if I don't disclose I would be breaking the law.  (In the past I even had solicitations that offered to pay me more if I DIDN'T disclose.)


This is from the Federal Trade Commission website, dated June 2010.

"The revised Guides – issued after public comment and consumer research – reflect three basic truth-in-advertising principles:

• Endorsements must be truthful and not misleading;
• If the advertiser doesn’t have proof that the endorser’s experience represents what consumers will achieve by using the product, the ad must clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected results in the depicted circumstances; and
• If there’s a connection between the endorser and the marketer of the product that would affect how people evaluate the endorsement, it should be disclosed.

Since the FTC issued the revised Guides, advertisers, ad agencies, bloggers, and others have sent questions to endorsements@ftc.gov. Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.

About the Endorsement Guides

Are the FTC Endorsement Guides new?

The Guides aren’t new, but they’ve recently been updated. It’s always been the law that if an ad features an endorser who’s a relative or employee of the marketer – or if an endorser has been paid or given something of value to tout the marketer’s product – the ad is misleading unless the connection is made clear. The reason is obvious: Knowing about the connection is important information for anyone evaluating the endorsement. Say you’re planning a vacation. You do some research and find a glowing review on someone’s blog that a certain resort is the most luxurious place they’ve ever stayed. If you found out that the hotel had paid that blogger to say great things about it or that the blogger had stayed there for a week for free, it could affect how much weight you’d give the blogger’s endorsement."

There's a lot more questions and answers at the link. 


Remember the title of this post?  Every Good Thing Attracts The Bad.  In this case I'm giving the example that when blogs started they were new and fresh and honest and people listened to bloggers' endorsements because they were genuine.  And then the marketers moved in to exploit this new source of credibility and trust.

But this happens everywhere.  Legitimate organizations always attract the illegitimate who want to use their good name for their own gain.  We see this in every field, from religion to education and throughout the business world.  Knowing how to tell the genuine from the charlatan is a skill that has been useful since humans first became humans.  It's a skill I encourage on this blog a lot. 

"Like termites, they undermine the structure of any neighborhood in which they creep."

"If you turn on your television these days, you hear a lot of old white people talking about this 'real America,' some apple-pie, Bedford Falls [Jimmy Stewart's town in It's a Wonderful Life], Walt Disneyfied idea of a simpler country, a 'time of innocence' that we've lost.  They're right.  It's gone.  We destroyed it so we wouldn't have to share it with black people.  We gave up real neighborhoods in real cities so we could pay more to have 'protection' inside the regional profit silos of HomeServices of America.  We gutted Blue Hills, and now you have to go to Orlando to buy it back.  Only that's the big lie at the heart of the J.C. Nichols dream.  Desirable associations aren't something you can buy.  They're something you have to make." [p. 140]

Blue Hills had been one of those ideal middle class American neighborhoods, in Kansas City.  According to author Tanner Colby, Walt Disney grew up there.  It was, like other nearby communities the kind of place

"where families used to pass their evenings on the front porch and the neighbors would stop by to say hello." [p 75]

 But it was destroyed, according to Tanner, by housing developers, like J.C. Nichols.

"But Nichols's most important contribution to the way we live wasn't something he invented himself.  He just perfected it.  And the thing he perfected was the all-white neighborhood, hardwired with restrictive covenants that dictated not only the size and shape of the house but the color of the people who could live inside.  This idea, the racialization of space, would take root deep in the nation's consciousness, for both whites and blacks alike, becoming so entrenched that all the moral might of the civil right crusade was powerless to dislodge it.  In the South, Jim Crow was just the law.  In Kansas City, J.C. Nichols turned it into a product.  Then he packaged it, commodified it, and sold it.  Whiteness was no longer just an inflated social status.  Now it was worth cash money." [p.82]

Tanner, in his book, Some Of My Best Friends Are Black, traces how private housing forces, concerned about expanding black neighborhoods used practices, like blockbusting, to scare whites into selling their houses cheaply to developers, who then resold them to blacks.  They also sold houses to the fleeing whites in suburban housing developments that had covenants that included phrases like:

"None of said land may be conveyed to, used, owned, or occupied by negores as owners or tenants."[p. 91]

One J.C. Nichols innovation was to move this restriction from individual houses to whole developments.

". . .in 1909, J.C. Nichols broke ground on Sunset Hills and Country Side, the first of his developments laid out on land unencumbered by earlier deed restrictions.  Here, he attached the racial covenant, not to the deed for the lot, but to the plot for the entire subdivision.  Thus it became harder for one person to break."[p. 92]

Colby says Nichols was the celebrated leader in the development field, appointed to the National Capital Park and Planning Commission by President Calvin Coolidge and reappointed by Presidents Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Truman.  Hoover, Colby reports, was a dinner guest at Nichols' home. 


Colby then discusses Nichols' friends, a group of prominent developers from around the country who were the 'brain trust' of National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). 

"Not by coincidence in 1924 NAREB made racial discrimination official policy, updating its code of ethics to say, 'A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood members of any race or nationality . . . whose presence will clearly be detrimental to the property values of that neighborhood.  Like termites, they undermine the structure of any neighborhood in which they creep."

But government got drawn into the discrimination as well.  Colby tells us that Hoover created the Federal Home Loan Bank in 1932 to stimulate home building using government backed loans.  Roosevelt extended this program and then added the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA).

"J.C. Nichols was so intimately involved with the formation of the FHA that he was called to consult privately with FDR in the Oval Office.  When America's housing policy was drafted, whole chunks were lifted straight out of the Nichols Company handbook, practically word for word."

 He goes on to explain how using the Nichols Company handbook led to official government redlining:

"Through the HOLC (Home Owners' Loan Corporation) the federal government developed a four-tiered classification system for neighborhoods:

• high-end, all-white neighborhoods were given the highest rating;
• white working- and middle-class neighborhoods were given a secondary rating;
• Jewish and ethnically mixed areas were rated third; and the lowest possible rating was given to 
• black neighborhoods

 -regardless of the quality of the housing stock or the income of the inhabitants.  Then HOLC went through every block on every map of every city in America, giving each neighborhood a color-coded designation.  Black neighborhoods were coded red." [p.96]

This was supposedly a way to set up a metric for assigning the proper rate of interest.

". . . but black neighborhoods were not simply assigned higher interest rates. They were not assigned anything.  In a process that became known as redlining, the FHA cordoned off black neighborhoods and designated them wholly ineligible for federal subsidies and mortgages.  This was a policy based on nothing more than the say-so of the men who stood to profit from it." [p.97]

I'd read about the federal creation of redlining in Buzz Bissinger's  Pulitzer Prize winning A Prayer for the City.    So this wasn't new.  But Colby puts it into the context of Kansas City.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect was the perpetual discrimination clauses that are legally impossible to great rid of and continue to exist today. 

The early covenants expired in ten to twenty years, Colby writes.  In 1911, Nichols made them 25 years.   Then in 1913 he made them perpetual:

"He wrote all his property restrictions to be self-renewingevery twenty-five years unless a group of owners controlling the most street-facing footage opted to change those restrictions five years prior to the auto-renewal date.  It was the first use of self-perpetuating racial covenants anywhere in the country . . ."

Essentially, blacks couldn't get into these white suburbs (and the covenants were copied by most developers) and they couldn't get money to buy in black neighborhoods, which became more and more depressed.

If you live in a subdivision, you may actually find the clause.  While they may no longer be enforceable, getting them out of covenants may be difficult because of  Colby's work.  Here's a history of housing discrimination in Seattle.


I was a little skeptical of Colby's book when I picked it up at the library new book shelf.   But despite the lack of an index and a bibliography of the many works he says he consulted, Colby does a very good job of what he sets out to do:  find out why he doesn't have any black friends.  As a student of Birmingham, Alabama's premiere white school, Vestavia High when it had court ordered integration, Colby goes back to his old high school to peel back the layers to find out what had really been going on around him then, and reveal the underbelly of the 1960's civil rights movements, integration, and school busing.

He also has a section on Kansas City - where the quotes above are taken - and two more which I haven't read yet.  One on Madison Avenue and the other on churches.  These investigations were, he tells us in the preface, to understand why he didn't have any black friends.  His answer is that the US was structured in many ways to keep blacks and whites separate, even after Jim Crow laws ended.

Colby does something that is hard to do - he explains in very understandable terms, the power structures, private and public, that continue to enforce racial discrimination.  He finds some successes, but also serious problems, including the unanticipated consequences of forced school integration and housing policies intended to undo redlining.

When talking about race, there is always the problem of what 'racism' means.  Most people use it interchangeably with prejudice, but those who study the issue more closely, distinguish it as institutionally supported discrimination, rather than individual prejudice.

It's the institutionally supported discrimination - like redlining - that Colby does an excellent job of explaining.

But not only does a book like this explain what happened in the past (and have continuing effects), but it also should make people wonder what those people with access to power today are doing to make their lives more comfortable and profitable and at whose expense.