Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling: Is Thanos just goading the Avengers into impeaching him?
• Investigative reporter finds that Mississippi’s bipartisan prison reform that was hailed by so many isn’t doing so hot: Donald Trump praised the reform as a national model. The 2014 law was meant to save money by reducing the state’s prison population, bloated by, among other things, mandatory minimum sentences. The reform was to “send offenders to drug courts for treatment rather than to prison; provide ID cards to all offenders leaving prison to help them secure housing and jobs; offer training for offenders eligible for parole; and keep offenders guilty of technical probation violations from returning to prison.” But, writes Jerry Mitchell of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, all that has “faltered.” One reason: funding has been decreased in part to help deal with a revenue shortfall after corporate tax breaks were passed. As a consequence, there has been no investment in prisoner rehabilitation. Moreover, in 2014, the Corrections Department had 1,591 correctional officers, and it now has 772; it had 23 vocational education instructors and now has 15; it had three vocational counselors and now has two; and it had 319 probation officers, and now there are 257. And while the prison population peak of 23,000 had fallen below 19,000 after the law passed, it’s pushing 20,000 now.
• California Coastal Commission fines hotel builder $15.5 million for “bait and switch”: The builder, Sunshine Enterprises, obtained a permit to build in Santa Monica what it said would be 164 hotel rooms of affordable lodging at $164 a night. But the hotel charges $300 to $800 a night. "It's almost textbook environmental injustice," said Commissioner Mark Vargas. who added that the commission "should issue a decree [...] to knock the damn thing down."
• Design Bias: Medical Textbooks Overwhelmingly Use Pictures of Young White Men: Some textbooks are worse than others. At a ratio of 5:1, General Anatomy, 2nd ed., had the highest proportion of male to female bodies. Human Anatomy and Physiology, 9th ed. was the only textbook to have the same proportion of male and female bodies. Gray's Anatomy for Students—a condensed version of Gray's Anatomy, which was first published in 1858—has nearly three times more men as women. The researcher also found that 86 percent of females bodies depicted were white (compared to 76 percent of identifiably male bodies). The textbook editors also tended to have a penchant for slim bodies.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Oil and gas operators are spewing millions of tons of pollutants in Texas’ Permian Basin, and state and federal regulators do little to stop it: The 75,000 square miles of the basin in Texas and New Mexico is producing more than 4 million barrels of oil a day, mostly pried out of shale rock by means of hydraulic fracturing, fracking. In Sour Wind in West Texas: Air Pollution From Surging Oil and Gas Industry Exceeds Health Standards, the watchdog Environmental Integrity Project stated that "Residents of the Permian Basin are bearing a heavy burden when it comes to health impacts from air pollution."
• The aging of the U.S. labor force: A lot of Baby Boomers (now aged 55-73) who thought they could retire cannot, and some who did have returned to the labor force.
• DKos Contributing Editor Ian Reifowitz will launch his new book at a NYC event June 5: The book is The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump, and the event will take place at 7 PM at Barnes & Noble Union Square. The address is: 33 E 17th St.
• The Economic Policy Institute publishes the third in its series on the teacher shortage:
After accounting for education, experience, and other factors known to affect earnings, teachers’ weekly wages in 2018 were 21.4 percent lower than their non-teaching peers. In 1996 that weekly wage penalty was 6.3 percent. Our report identifies other indicators that teacher pay is too low and declining. For example, in the 2015–2016 school year, 59.0 percent of teachers took on additional paid work either in the school system or outside of it—up from 55.6 percent in the 2011–2012 school year. [...] Financial stress is greater for teachers in high-poverty schools. Relative to teachers in low-poverty schools, teachers in high-poverty schools are paid less ($53,300 vs. $58,900), receive a smaller amount from moonlighting ($4,000 vs. $4,300), and the moonlighting that they do is less likely to involve paid extracurricular or additional activities for the school system that generate extra pay but also help them grow professionally as teachers (data are for 2015–2016). Data suggest a relationship between low salaries and quitting. Teachers who ended up quitting before the 2012–2013 school year had lower base salaries ($50,800 vs. $53,300) and were more likely to be supplementing their base pay with work outside the school system in the year before they quit (18.4 percent vs. 16.3 percent).
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show:
Greg Dworkin rounds up (and critiques) the latest headlines on the subpoenas. NYT and Forbes combine to make Trump's business "skills" a laughingstock. Roberts takes the SCOTUS from calling balls and strikes, to calling time out.