Month: June 2016

On the Superdelegate Canvass

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— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 7, 2016

Jake Tapper Wins with a Chinatown Reference

I was watching TV last night, and flipped over to Maddow and found her over the moon because some anonymous source told the AP that they had Canvassed the superdelegates, and Clinton had secured the nomination.

NBC officially called the nomination last night.

It turns out that being pissed off about this is something that both the Sanders campaign and Clinton campaigns can agree on.

Why the Sanders campaign would angry is self-evident.

For the Clinton campaign, it short circuited what they hoped to be a golden moment tonight.

As to the story, it smells:

Last night, the Associated Press — on a day when nobody voted — surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “superdelegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors, and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive superdelegates who said this.

Although the Sanders campaign rejected the validity of AP’s declaration — on the ground that the superdelegates do not vote until the convention and he intends to try to persuade them to vote for him — most major media outlets followed the projection and declared Clinton the winner.

One question that is raised by all of this is who made the call to the AP to get this ball rolling.

I can think of 3 possibilities:

  • Someone who is both completely incompetent and in a blind panic about the possibility of the aftermath of the last days of the primary, and a potentially contested convention that they did something mind buggeringly stupid. (I call this the Debbie Wasserman-Schultz hypothesis.)
  • Someone at the AP is a complete idiot, and convinced his similarly dim cow-orkers that this was a plan so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. (I call this the Baldrick hypothesis)
  • This is a ratf%$#ing from someone who wants to sow dissent between the Clinton and Sanders camps while diminishing whatever Clinton says today.  (I call this the Roger Stone hypothesis)

My money is on Baldrick.

    Linkage

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    How Germany and the US differ: nakedness, small talk, children’s freedom, etc.

    Ruck Falph

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    What a surprise, Ralph Nader’s PIRGs, which have been abusing and burning out idealistic college students for more than 40 years, hates the new overtime requirements, because it would force them to treat their employees fairly:

    Scott referred to this in his post yesterday, but PIRG’s statement opposing the new overtime rule is outrageous and entirely appropriate given its founding, history, and mode of operation. The argument itself is pure Lochner* (public interest indeed!)

    Doubling the minimum salary to $47,476 is especially unrealistic for non-profit, cause-oriented organizations. Organizations like ours rely on small donations from individuals to pay the bills. We can’t expect those individuals to double the amount they donate. Rather, to cover higher staffing costs forced upon us under the rule, we will be forced to hire fewer staff and limit the hours those staff can work – all while the well-funded special interests that we’re up against will simply spend more.

     The logic of the rule, as applied to non-profit, cause-oriented organizations, makes no sense. A person of means – in service of a cause to which they feel deeply committed – can volunteer to work for our organization for free for as many hours as they wish, but a person of lesser means – who is no less committed to the work we do – cannot agree to work for our organization for less than $47,476 without having their work hours strictly limited in order to keep our costs affordable. This raises First Amendment concerns.

    Yes, paying people overtime is a violation of their First Amendment rights! If this theoretical and entirely non-existent individual who wants to work for low wages specifically for PIRG and finds themselves limited to a mere 40 hours a week of this work, there are clearly no other outlets for their speech! Of course, this is complete garbage. Said individual could always donate the extra pay she made back to the organization, for instance.

     PIRG is an utter disaster of an organization. It identifies an always available source of labor–young people, usually college or immediate post-college students, who don’t have a good job lined up and want to do some good. That’s actually a good thing–I wish other left-leaning organizations could find a way to take idealistic people and put them to work doing some good. But all PIRG uses them for is door-to-door fundraising. PIRG has no interest in building organizing skills in these people, no interest in long-term movement building, no interest in helping these people advance to long-term investment in either the organization or larger progressive causes. You can work there for years and advance no further than supervising other fundraisers. All it does it burn out those idealistic people.

    ………

    None of this should be surprising because Ralph Nader, founder of PIRG, has always hated unions in his own shop.

    Ralph Nader, and his orgs, have been a horror show for a very long time before his campaign in 2000.

    *This refers to the Lochner Era, when the Supreme Court invalidated almost all forms of workplace and safety regulations, because of an imaginary “liberty of contract”.

    Insanity Is Defined as Doing the Same Thing over and over Again and Expecting Different Results

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    Barack Obama has decided that terrorizing the population of Yemen with drones, and allowing the House of Saud to indiscriminately bomb civilians is a successful antiterrorism strategy.

    The net effect has been to quadrupling the size of al Qaeda in Yemen:

    On September 10, 2014, President Obama gave a speech advocating for the same kind of approach to counterterrorism against ISIL his Administration had been using with Yemen (and Somalia).

    ………

    Today, the Soufan Group wrote up an alarming detail from the State Department Country Report on Terrorism for last year: AQAP has quadrupled in size since Obama’s speech.

    This is what happens you have a failed policy, and you stick with the conventional wisdom.

    It is a failure of intellect.

    It is a failure of imagination.

    It is an unalloyed failure.

    Some Chart Pr0n that Explains Why So the Voters are Pissed Off

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    This table shows it all. (click on the picture for a larger popup)

    Basically, it shows that the wealthy and powerful have become even more wealthy and powerful by stealing from the rest of us.

    Even if people don’t know the actual numbers, they know that our society has descended into a morass of, “Crony capitalism, pay-to-play politics, [and] special interests,” that have further enriched the rich and their pet politicians.

    It’s why populism on both sides of the political has been so popular lately.

    Mme. la Guillotine is looking increasingly attractive to a lot of people for this reason.

    H/t naked capitalism.

    Thanks Duncan.

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    Ever since the Reagan administration, the “Very Serious People” VSPs in Washington, DC have tried to find a way to cut/privatize Social Security.

    For the first time in recent political memory, expansion of Social Security has become a top of serious discussion, and the impetus for this came from one person, Duncan “Atrios” Black:

    In May 2012, ABC broke into its daytime coverage to show President Obama endorsing same-sex marriage, the culmination of years of activist work to take the idea from the radical fringe into the mainstream. We saw an economic version of that this week, and while none of the networks fired up their “Breaking News” graphics for it, the impact on society could be just as large, and the people who helped make it happen should be just as lauded.

     “It’s time we finally made Social Security more generous,” said the president in Elkhart, Indiana, to applause, “and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.” This was totally unexpected: We knew the Elkhart speech was about the economy, but we didn’t know Obama would concur with a rallying cry on the left for several years now: Expand Social Security.

     This movement crystallized from research into the looming retirement crisis. Too many Americans are headed into their golden years without nearly the kind of savings needed to maintain their standard of living. And their defined-benefit pensions have gradually transitioned into defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s, which have rewarded Wall Street with hidden and excessive fees while eating away at individual gains. The change also shifted market risks from employers onto employees, who must hope to avoid a drop in stocks as they hit retirement age.

     ………

     Despite all this, the initial impulse from the Obama administration was to use Social Security cuts as a bargaining chip in a larger deal with Republicans. Grand bargain talks from 2011 to 2013 repeatedly invoked a different way to calculate the consumer price index (known as “chained CPI”), which would have resulted in $1,000 less a year for the average 85-year-old. Obama put chained CPI in his fiscal year 2014 budget.

     Contrary to some after-the-fact snickering, this was a very credible threat, and it allowed Republicans to point to a Democratic president favoring entitlement cuts. Only the Tea Party’s unwillingness to consider anything resembling a compromise saved retirees from cuts.

     At first, liberal groups played defense on chained CPI, accustomed to mobilizing in opposition rather than staking out a bolder claim. But the expansion movement can really be traced back to one blogger: Duncan Black, popularly known as “Atrios,” who waged an initially lonely crusade in a series of 2012 columns in USA Today, explaining why the retirement crisis was coming and how expanding Social Security represented the cleanest solution.

    ………

     Lawmakers followed the rank and file consensus. Elizabeth Warren jumped aboard the Harkin bill in late 2013. A House bill quickly got dozens of co-sponsors. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who holds down the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, endorsed an expansion amendment. Bernie Sanders made it a campaign plank, one that Hillary Clinton eventually had to endorse, albeit in a more targeted fashion.

     Now President Obama, who started this all by embracing the opposite position years ago, has explicitly endorsed the expansion of Social Security. This victory is a great credit to Duncan Black and everyone who moved a minority opinion in the corridors of power in the Democratic Party into the mainstream.

    (emphasis mine)

    Obama was dragged kicking and screaming into this.  So is Hillary Clinton.

    He has seen cutting Social Security as a major legacy goal since he entered office in 2009: He thought could show himself reaching across the aisle if he could ground the proverbial “3rd rail” of American politics.

    Thankfully, he was foiled by the Teabaggers in Congress, just as Bill Clinton effort to privatize Social Security was foiled by Gingrich’s impeachment efforts in the late 1990s.

    Duncan Black has done this country a service by short-circuiting the efforts of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party to divert money from retirees unto the the pockets of the banksters.

    So Not Surprised

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    It turns out that our attempt to create a viable Iraqi military has largely failed:

    A 17-month U.S. effort to retrain and reunify Iraq’s regular army has failed to create a large number of effective Iraqi combat units or limit the power of sectarian militias, according to current and former U.S. military and civilian officials.

    Concern about the shortcomings of the American attempt to strengthen the Iraqi military comes as Iraqi government forces and Shi’ite militias have launched an offensive to retake the city of Falluja from Islamic State. Aid groups fear the campaign could spark a humanitarian catastrophe, as an estimated 50,000 Sunni civilians remain trapped in the besieged town.

    The continued weakness of regular Iraqi army units and reliance on Shi’ite militias, current and former U.S. military officials said, could impede Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s broader effort to defeat Islamic State and win the long-term support of Iraqi Sunnis. The sectarian divide between the majority Shi’ite and minority Sunni communities threatens to split the country for good.

    ………

    Retired U.S. Lieutenant General Mick Bednarek, who commanded the U.S. military training effort in Iraq from 2013 to 2015, said the Iraqi army has not improved dramatically in the past eight months. He blamed a variety of problems, from a lack of Iraqis wanting to join the military to the resistance of some lower-level Iraqi officers to sending units to American training.

    This is not a surprise.

    Iraq was always a country loosely stitched together by the diktat of the new colonial rulers of the region following the First World War, and the invasion knocked Humpty Dumpty off of that wall, and we cannot put him back together again.

    Peter Thiel’s America

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    There are a lot of people out there who support Peter Thiel using his billions to harass Gawker through the legal process because they and its founder and CEO Nick Denton are bad people who practice shallow gossip journalism.

    Well, this sort of action most often cuts against ordinary citizens who choose to raise their voices against the powerful as is shown in the case of the $30,000,000.00 lawsuit against activists in Uniontown, Alabam who have the temerity to object to Green Group Holdings and Howling Coyote’s poisoning their water by dumping of millions of pounds of toxic coal ash there:

    “We all should have the right to clean air and clean water.”

    Would you agree with that sentence? Would you say it yourself? It seems uncontroversial — something kids might be taught in school. Something any of us might say without blinking an eye. Unless, that is, you happened to say it in Uniontown, Alabama — an overwhelmingly Black and poor rural town in the heart of the South’s Black Belt. In Uniontown, it turns out that having the audacity to fight for your fundamental human rights — for instance, by saying the exact sentence above — can get you sued for $30 million in federal court by companies seeking to silence their critics.

    ………

    Fighting for justice in Uniontown means opposing the trains that roll into town carrying hazardous coal ash from 33 states to deposit it at the Arrowhead landfill — a dump bewilderingly located in a residential neighborhood, near wetlands, within this spacious county full of rolling fields and open space. It means worrying about the safety of that coal ash — the very same coal ash that catastrophically leaked out of a Tennessee facility in 2008 and destroyed the surrounding environment before it was hurriedly redirected to Uniontown.

    ………

    In the lawsuit, Green Group and Howling Coyote claim that by advocating against hazardous waste in their town, Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis have engaged in “defamation” that’s harmed them to the tune of a cool $30 million. But the only harm evident in this lawsuit is the gripping terror that average citizens — not scientists or paid policy wonks — feel after being sued for millions for speaking their truth in order to protect their community. Fortunately, the First Amendment protects a person’s right to do precisely what Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis have so bravely done.

    Think again about that sentence: We all should have the right to clean air and clean water. Would you say it if you knew a powerful corporation would sue you for (more than) everything you’ve got? No one should have to make that choice.

    The law in this case may focus on the First Amendment, but the story of Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis is one about racial justice. In Uniontown, racial justice means environmental justice. And the road to justice starts with voices calling out injustice. The ACLU is representing [6] Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis to make sure their voices are not silenced.

    This is exactly the same thing that Peter Thiel is doing.

    The only difference is that these companies are not attempting to claim that this is some sort of act of philanthropy, as the PayPal founder does.

    These are all SLAPP suits, and they are all profoundly corrupting and profoundly evil.

    Today In Idiocy

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    1,014 Miles Distance Might Explain the Coverage

    Over at Tablet Magazine,Yair Rosenberg wonders what sort of liberal antisemitism makes The New York Times condemn single sex hours at a Brooklyn swimming pool for Orthodox Jews, but say nothing at all about a similar program for Muslims in Minneapolis.

    Ummmm….Here is a clue: One happened in Minneapolis, the other in Brooklyn. Why would the New York Times would take more interest in one than the other?

    Perhaps because one is happening in New York, the Times home town and the other is happening a about 1,014 miles away as the crow flies?

    Mr. Rosenberg, were you dropped on your head as a youth?

    I Have an Irresistable Urge to Live in a Cave for the Next 5 Months

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    It appears that a low level Bernie Sanders staffer was doing advance work for a rally in California, and was looking at holding the event at an airport.

    It turns out that there was a sky diving concern there, and said staffer name dropped to get a chance at doing a tandem jump with the proprietor of NorCal Skydiving, Jimmy Haliday.

    This ended up with (I’m not joking here) international coverage about Bernie Sanders skydiving:

    Bernie Sanders will not be skydiving into a California rally, as was briefly, but widely speculated on Friday.

    Yet remarkably, it does seem that the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign team explored the idea of parachuting the 74-year-old candidate into the event.

    The unlikely rumor was widely shared on social media after a story in the Press Democrat, a local paper in northern California, suggested the Vermont senator might skydive at an evening rally hosted by a skydiving company at the Cloverdale Municipal airport, about 90 miles north of San Francisco.

    The campaign was swift to shoot down the rumor. “Ha I wouldn’t count on it,” Sanders spokeswoman Sarah Ford texted the Guardian when asked for confirmation.

    ………

    On Thursday, Halliday, whose business is renting out airport space to the campaign, even did a trial jump with a member of the Sanders team. “They tested me out … I kind of showed them what Bernie might expect.”

    It appears that the staffer who jumped with Halliday was a (possibly overzealous) member of the campaign’s “advance team”, which scouts locations and prepares for rallies. It is unclear if queries about the senator jumping out of an aircraft were sanctioned by his campaign headquarters.

    If you had any doubt, we are officially in the silly season, and it’s only going to get worse.

    I just want to get away from it all until the damn election is over?

    Anyone know of any AirBNB vacancies in Pyongyang?

    I’m sick of this crap.

    Your Daily Schadenfreude

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    Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos has just had her personal wealth recomputed by Fortune. Yesterday,   it was $4,500,000,000.00 today it is $0.00:

    Last year, Elizabeth Holmes topped the FORBES list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a net worth of $4.5 billion. Today, FORBES is lowering our estimate of her net worth to nothing. Theranos had no comment.

    Our estimate of Holmes’ wealth is based entirely on her 50% stake in Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003 with plans of revolutionizing the diagnostic test market. Theranos shares are not traded on any stock market; private investors purchased stakes in 2014 at a price that implied a $9 billion valuation for the company.

    Since then, Theranos has been hit with allegations that its tests are inaccurate and is being investigated by an alphabet soup of federal agencies. That, plus new information indicating Theranos’ annual revenues are less than $100 million, has led FORBES to come up with a new, lower estimate of Theranos’ value.

    FORBES spoke to a dozen venture capitalists, analysts and industry experts and concluded that a more realistic value for Theranos is $800 million, rather than $9 billion. That gives the company credit for its intellectual property and the $724 million that it has raised, according to VC Experts, a venture capital research firm. It also represents a generous multiple of the company’s sales, which FORBES learned about from a person familiar with Theranos’ finances.

    At such a low valuation, Holmes’ stake is essentially worth nothing. Theranos investors own preferred shares, which means they get paid back before Holmes, who owns common stock. According to VC Experts, investors in Theranos own a particular kind of preferred equity, called participating preferred shares, which take precedence to common stock in the event of a liquidation. FORBES is not aware of any plans to liquidate. If that were to happen, participating preferred investors would get their money back and more before Holmes gets a cent.

    We now know the difference between a typical Silicon Valley company and one that actually has to produce a real physical product:  The emperor’s new clothes are revealed far sooner for the companies who make actuall “stuff”.

    It appears that the medical testing industry does not lend itself to the “long con.”

    I So Hope that the Banksters Lose This One

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    Puerto Rico is in debt, and, as befitting their colonial status, they have very few options to renegotiate their debt. This is a fact of life for colonial societies: Debt peonage to your imperial masters.

    That being said, and audit of Puerto Rico’s debt seems to indicate that many of the debts were issued illegally, and so the contracts under which the debt was issued, and hence the debt itself, may be unenforceable:

    An audit report published on Thursday suggests that debt-laden Puerto Rico may be able to void some of its borrowing because politicians exceeded constitutional debt limits and their own authority. 

     The report, shared with MarketWatch, states that some of Puerto Rico’s debt may have been issued illegally, allowing the government to potentially declare the bonds invalid and courts to then decide that creditors’ claims are unenforceable. The scope of the audit report, issued by the island’s Public Credit Comprehensive Audit Commission, covers the two most recent full-faith-and-credit debt issues of the commonwealth: Puerto Rico’s 2014 $3.5 billion general-obligation bond offering and a $900 million issuance in 2015 of Tax Refund Anticipation Notes to a syndicate of banks led by J.P Morgan.

    Money for those debt payments is not in the commonwealth’s proposed budget, either. On Tuesday Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, sent a proposed 2016-17 budget to the island’s legislature that provides for only $209 million of the $ 1.4 billion of current debt-service cost. As García Padilla told reporters at a news conference: “This is simple: either we pay Wall Street or we pay Puerto Ricans. If the legislature decides we pay Wall Street more, well, each has his responsibility. I will continue defending Puerto Ricans. Money I send to Wall Street, I do not have to provide services here.”  

    ………

    The Puerto Rican constitution contains a balanced-budget clause that explicitly prohibits borrowing to finance operating deficits, but its politicians borrowed to cover deficit financing in its 2014 General Obligation Bond Offering, according to the commission’s initial review. The March 2014 General Obligation Bond states that the proceeds would be used in part to cover deficits that had accumulated and that were expected to occur in the year of the offering. The documents include a chart showing deficits financed with borrowing during the past and that were expected to recur.

    In addition, Puerto Rico did not inform bondholders that its constitution forbids it from using debt to finance deficits. That, the commission’s report says suggests “substantive” noncompliance with the letter of the constitution.

    The U.S. Supreme Court has said in the Litchfield v. Ballou case and, more recently, in litigation related to Detroit’s bankruptcy that borrowing above a debt ceiling may allow the issuer to declare debt invalid and, therefore, unpayable. Detroit went to court to invalidate $1.45 billion in certificates of participation, debt issued by two shell companies called “service corporations.” The parties settled before the case went to trial, but, while refusing two initial proposed settlements, the judge stated that Detroit’s argument had “substantial merit” and that the suit would have had a “reasonable likelihood of success.”

    I really hope that the people of Puerto Rico win, and the bond holders lose.

    This is Our Dystopian Future

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    Couldn’t adjust my air conditioning today because my thermostat was offline. The future is amazing! pic.twitter.com/hlMgaImAiz

    — Adam Driscoll (@adamdriscoll) May 31, 2016

    People in tech talk about the “Internet of Things” all the time.

    They think it will make our lives a paradise.

    I think that it will mean that the technology will be less reliabl.

    I am also not particularly keen on my regrigerator spying on me when I raid it at 1 in he morning. 

    I want to be alone with my fruit stuffed pasties, thank you very much.

    H/t naked capitalism.

    Well, This is a Fine F%$# You

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    The German Parliament just voted to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and Turkish President Erdogan’s head is exploding:

    The German Parliament overwhelmingly adopted a symbolic but fraught resolution on Thursday declaring the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 a genocide, escalating tensions with Turkey at a diplomatically delicate juncture.

    The Turkish government angrily denounced the vote as “null and void,” and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called his ambassador in Germany back to Ankara for consultations.

    “The way to close the dark pages of your own history is not by defaming the histories of other countries with irresponsible and baseless decisions,” Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, wrote on Twitter. In Ankara, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, “There is no shameful incident in our past that would make us bow our heads.”

    Germany needs Turkey’s help in following through on a deal with the European Union to manage the refugee crisis attributed in large part to the Syrian civil war. At the same time, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been under pressure not to be seen as caving to pressure from Ankara to compromise on Western values, particularly after a recent dust-up over freedom of speech set off by a German comedian’s satire that outraged Mr. Erdogan.

    ………

    Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its coalition partners supported the resolution, which was originally proposed for last year, to mark the centennial of the start of the killings. But it was repeatedly delayed, most recently in February, over concerns about angering Ankara.

    As the vote approached, debate intensified in Germany, which is home to an estimated three million people of Turkish descent, many of whom have dual citizenship. About 2,000 Turks demonstrated last weekend in Berlin, rallying to say that Parliament is not a court and therefore should not pass judgment.

    ………

    Her decision to do so, despite those objections, may have been influenced by an episode in March, when a German comic, Jan Böhmermann, lampooned Mr. Erdogan with a crude poem. Ms. Merkel initially criticized the verses, giving the impression — which she later said was a mistake — that she advocated restrictions on freedom of expression in Germany. Critics portrayed her as weak.

    Cem Ozdemir, the co-chairman of the opposition Greens and a driving force behind the resolution, accused Ms. Merkel of paying little heed to Turkey for most of her decade in power, until circumstances forced her to engage with Mr. Erdogan.

    On Thursday, Mr. Ozdemir said there was “never a favorable time to speak about something as dreadful as genocide.”

    Mr. Ozdemir read century-old statements by officials of the German Empire showing they knew that up to 90 percent of Armenians had been killed. “Working through the Shoah is the basis of democracy in Germany,” Mr. Ozdemir said, referring to the Holocaust. “This genocide is also waiting to be worked through.”

    There have been people fighting for this for decades.

    Merkel is not one of these people. She felt a political need to push this through because she is seen as kowtowing to an increasingly megalomaniacal and despotic Turkish leader.

    Still, this is a positive move, and hopefully we will see more of this.

    The Clintons Really Do Hate the Working Man

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    Yesterday in Cranford, NJ, Bill Clinton discussing Donald Trump’s surprising political success noted that “Non-college-educated Americans need to be brought along to the future.”

    I shouldn’t be surpriaed.  After 40 years in politics, demonizing the poor, diminishing labor unions, embracing the powerful, helping send decent middle class jobs to Mexico and China, I guess the fact that they hold the ordinary working American in disdain should have been obvious.

    The Clintons think that people who work on their feet, “need to be brought into the future.”

    They are avatars of the professional class in the Democratic Party, and smug condescension drips from them.

    The Secret Allure of the Sharing Economy

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    You can form a big company and create pseudo free agents who are free to be bigots:

    This is a story of an Airbnb experience I recently went through. I met this awesome lady Crissie in my Facebook group. Super nice lady, successful business owner, beautiful family, and they live in a small town in Idaho.

    Crissie would post these amazing videos of the land and the snow, and the mountains and trees, and I told her one day I would come visit.

    It‘s so absolutely beautiful there!

    ………

    I like my space when I travel, and thought it would be fun to find a cool cabin.

    ………

    Everything was set! As usual, I included a bit of info about myself on the Airbnb listing to put the host at ease

    ………

    First response: Dang! No luck, even though the dates were available all of a sudden, the host said she was going to use the place.

    ………

    No biggie, I’m really flexible. Crissie told me late June is good as well, so I rebooked for June.

    CANCELLED! Well damn. So it wasn’t really the dates—the host cancelled my new request and ignored all future messages.

    So I had a white friend book for my same dates, and all of a sudden her plans changed back. Approved immediately!

    There are some similar stories and links described at the article.

    I rather expect to find the same thing in all the similar apps.

    My guess is that a black man finds getting an Uber or Lyft just as hard as finding an old fashioned taxi.

    In fact, it might be harder, because there is no taxi commission collecting data on fares and origination and destination points.

    That’s why this sh%$ needs real regulation with teeth.