I no longer owe my soul to the Malden Public Library, having returned the books that had become dramatically overdue in the midst of the latest nonsense. The loop of errands I was running allowed for the purchase of a Zagnut, which I continue to love in despite of Stan Freberg. It was gorgeous out and almost warm and I took a couple of pictures. I am trying to do more than just exist through my days.
It would never occur to me to rescue and restore vintage Coach bags and purses, but I like knowing someone else has chosen it as their art. Speaking of art, I just heard about the Peabody Essex Museum's Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone. Speaking of things I like knowing about, Jin Shengtan's "Thirty-Three Nice Things" is in fact pretty nice itself.
Current Music:Brigitte Calls Me Baby, "Slumber Party"
I think the exhaustion and aches are down to my COVID spring booster yesterday afternoon, but I am definitely planning to not ever Touch A Barbell For The First Time on vaccination day again. (Conveniently, this is an eminently achievable goal.)
SOME GOOD THINGS, though:
weekend spring date breakfast, which for me included cinnamon roll and hot chocolate, consumed while watching the goslings experiment with going into water. coot nest #1 had at least six Hatched Squeaking Babies in it (some of them adventurously exploring down the sides of the nest); coots #2 were still Enthroned. AND we saw a GOLDFINCH on the way down the hill!!!
braised chickpeas with courgette & pesto continue very good and fairly easy food. the whole I Am Flat meant we Acquired pre-made pesto, and this was an extremely good move. project Eat The Freezer Stash Of Tortilla continues apace also.
A has successfully disposed of our old front door, complete with doing all necessary talking to other humans about it. our front hall now contains only one (1) front door and it is in the door frame where it belongs.
got raspberries from the supermarket yesterday, as a vague approximation of The Custard Fish Of Civic Responsibility (from the one shop in Chinatown, on the way back from the sexual health clinic to the tube). am enjoying raspberries a v great deal.
all three flowers the big white orchid had produced are now in glorious bloom. (still need to work out how to make the tiny purple orchid happier, but.) flowers!
Modern food systems may look stable on the surface, but they are increasingly dependent on digital systems that can quietly become a major point of failure. Today, food must be “recognized” by databases and automated platforms to be transported, sold, or even released, meaning that if systems go down, food can effectively become unusable—even when it’s physically available.
In theirthird reporton the subject and second update of data, University of California researchers reach the same conclusions that have twice bedeviled the anti-wage hike sector of the restaurant industry:
California’s $20 an hour fast food minimum wage, instituted in 2024, did not reduce employment.
It led to only the most modest of price increases — barely noticeable to a consumer.
It significantly improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of California workers in many of the industry’s largest fast-food chains, with an average wage increase of more than 10%.
Those results have held steady across three years of work by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. They also align with aprevious studyon the California law conducted jointly by Harvard University’s Kennedy Center and UC San Francisco, as well as with long-established research showing that minimum wage increases generallydon’t affect employment numbersorpricesmuch.
That won’t end the debate over the wage law, which was established in 2023 and took effect two years ago this month. But the growing body of research suggests a much milder reality than the apocalyptic visions that some in the fast-food industry projected when the $20 figure — from a previous $16 an hour minimum — was initially approved.
“We have some entirely new data” in the report issued April 1, said Michael Reich, chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Berkeley institute. “The results, though, are pretty much the same as before.”
* * *
The wage law has beenthe subject of overheated rhetoric since it was first discussed, when opponents suggested that raising the floor for fast-food workers from $16 to $20 an hour would prompt employers to shed jobs, dramatically raise prices or both.
The Berkeley studies, beginning in 2024, have consistently found no such thing. In the most recent research, Reich and co-author Denis Sosinskiy concluded that the higher minimum has increased the average weekly wage for covered fast food workers by about 11%, but did not reduce employment. In terms of what we pay at the cash register, the report found that restaurant owners had increased their prices by only about 1.5% — or six cents on a $4 item.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs the fast food bill surrounded by fast food workers at the SEIU Local 721 in Los Angeles in Sept. 2023.
Those relatively benign findings suggest there was some initial confusion about what the wage law would actually do and whom it would affect. First, it’s applied only to the largest fast-food chains, those with more than 60 locations nationally. In California, that means that about 525,000 employees are potentially affected by the $20 minimum out of the roughly 750,000 who work at fast-food locations in the state.
Second, the effect of the wage was never going to be as severe as threatened, because a significant number of workers were already making well more than $16 an hour — and some chains, including In-N-Out Burger, routinely paid far more than that in order to attract talent and prevent turnover. Moreover, major population centers like Los Angeles and the Bay Area already have local minimum wages set well above $16. (San Francisco’s is $19.18 per hour, with the city of Los Angeles moving to $18.42 on July 1.)
In other words, actual wages didn’t go up 25% just because the minimum went from $16 to $20. The Berkeley study found that average wages in the state went up by less than half that.
The latest report compiles pay data from Glassdoor job postings and Square payroll data, while using a new data set from Advan Research, a company that aggregates cell phone locations — in this case, to determine the precise number of workers who enter a fast-food establishment each day. (Reich said only those who stayed at the store for more than four hours were presumed to be workers.) The Berkeley studies have consistently used Door Dash for price comparisons, since all significant fast-food companies participate.
So why did prices go up only 1.5%? Reich says it’s because labor costs account for only about 30% of most fast food businesses’ overall costs. Thus, an 11% average raise meant their overall costs went up only about 3%, half of which they passed on to the customer.
* * *
Industry-funded researchhas attempted to paint a grimmer picture of the wage law. Areportby one group last year blamed 10,700 fast food job losses in California on the $20 figure, though it began counting those losses almost 10 months before the new law took effect. The conservative Hoover Institution, meanwhile, had toretracta similar report after concluding that its author included data points that proved to be misinterpreted.
Asked for comment on the new UC Berkeley findings, the advocacy group Save Local Restaurants CA pointed to aUC Santa Cruz studythat found higher menu prices, fewer hours and benefits for workers and an accelerated move toward automation by fast-food store owners — the result, it said, of the higher minimum wage.
The report was based primarily on interviews with local Santa Cruz restaurants. Reich said the authors made “no attempt to validate their motivated responses with interviews with workers, a control group or objective government data. In other words, not at all informative, and not cited as such by any economists as far as I know.”
That won’t stop the rhetoric — and undoubtedly, some fast-food businesses or franchisees have struggled to compete under the new wage structure. The flip side, of course, is that hundreds of thousands of California workers have been able to move closer to an actual living wage thanks to the change.
In most of the state, $20 an hour still isn’t near enough, and the state government-appointed Fast Food Council has not approved a cost-of-living increase since the law’s inception.The MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates that a single adult with no dependents needs to earn $30.48 an hour to afford basic living costs in the state, and worker groups in Oakland and Alameda County are both engaged in battles to reach $30 an hour over the next few years, withLos Angelesinvolved in a more targeted push directed at tourism industry workers.
Still, the fast-food wage remains a significant achievement, one that, according to the Berkeley research, was pulled off without the serious side effects that its detractors foretold. That body of evidence continues to grow, while the wage’s beneficiaries continue to scrap for a decent living in the Golden State.
11. Would you like to try any new fanfic genres or tropes in 2018?
I don't think any of my potentially next fics are anything new in those two veins. The DS9 fic which might be next but 6th in the to-do list is a bit unusual but I wouldn't say it's different in terms of genre or trope.
Hi, welcome back to our Guardian drama Slo-Mo Rewatch, we're back in business! Watch half an episode a week, and then come and chat about it here in comments. Or you can just jump into the comments without rewatching, of course!
Here is the first half of episode 13. On to the second half!
Episode 13, from 21:44:
Summary: Chu Shuzhi has (needlessly) rescued Guo Changcheng from the Snake Tribe. Ying Chun tells Shen Wei that there's a Yashou traitor in play. Shen Wei enters the sonic lab to find Zhao Yunlan there instead of Tan Xiao. Zhao Yunlan confronts him about his secrets, but they're interrupted by Zhu Jiu, who takes Zhao Yunlan hostage. Shen Wei transforms into the Envoy and offers to take his place, but no dice. Ying Chun goes after Ya Qing, and they have a fraught confrontation. Zhu Jiu decides Zhao Yunlan to get into the SID for Tan Xiao, so Zheng Yi will give him the Hallows. Lin Jing and Da Qing are searching for Zheng Yi. Chu Shuzhi finds Zhu Jiu's lair, but no Zhu Jiu, and Shen Wei runs into him there.
At the SID, Zhao Yunlan enters with Zhu Jiu and Zheng Yi, and shoots Zhu Hong. Tan Xiao and Zheng Yi are reunited. Shen Wei arrives, confronts a hypnotised Zhao Yunlan, and is seemingly shot - but it's a fake-out because he realised Zhao Yunlan has been faking it. Zhao Yunlan shoots Zhu Jiu and reveals that he's been wearing anti-hypnosis earplugs.
Quote:
Shen Wei: "Were you pretending from the start?"
Zhao Yunlan: "Yep! How else would I have got you to disclose your identity?"
♥ ♥ ♥
Detail:
This is a half-episode with a lot of fabulous things going on in it, but my absolute favourite detail has always been the way Shen Wei, having realised that Zhao Yunlan isn't actually under the influence, easily and smoothly lets Zhao Yunlan know that he knows, without giving anything away to Zhu Jiu. All he says is, "You actually killed Zhu Hong," and Zhao Yunlan, who knows he did no such thing, knows. :D
Questions:
What is your favourite moment in this episode? Your favourite line? What do you think about Ya Qing's introduction? How gorgeous is her outfit? Do you ship her and Ying Chun? What does Chu Shuzhi think when Professor Shen turns up at Zhu Jiu's lair? How great is the Envoy reveal? Do you also go :D :D :D every time you watch that moment when Shen Wei rises and he and Zhao Yunlan turn towards the camera/Zhu Jiu? Any thoughts about how any of this compares to the novel?
(These are all just conversation starters - feel free to answer all, some, or none, and to say as much or as little as you like! You don't have to be keeping up with the rewatch to join in!)
Here is our schedule for the current batch of episodes - please do sign up to host a post if you can!
Today's to-do list, with a few items already checked off because I was going to post this earlier and forgot:
- fold laundry - put up hummingbird feeder - clean out dead plants from the porch garden and get the pots back in shape - reply to AO3 comments - put away winter decorations and get out the spring ones - pick up groceries - write 200 words on either Forsaken Road or broken beaten damned (I picked broken beaten damned but I might poke Forsaken Road later) - crosspost some fic from FFA and the PWKM
I had some feline help with the plants ("Springs, what's in your mouth? Give me that. GIVE ME THAT. No, you can't eat the chives. Leave the wasp ALONE."), so I anticipate summer gardening will be somewhat more exciting than it was when Prowl was content to nap under the chairs while I worked. I need to go get some more pots, because mine are in pretty sad shape after a decade of being left out in all weather, so I may need to add a quick trip to Lowe's on the way home to my to-do list, but we'll see how it goes.
EDIT: I finished! And made that trip to Lowe's and organized the shed while I was at it. A productive day.
My Wu Lei pictures collection has grown to over 1300 pictures now, and I still haven't finished The Long Ballad (which would be the next picspam), here's another one to tide us over: here are the pics in which he looks young (not too young *cough*) and sporty.
Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
This week, we’ve got a whole crop of frequent fliers. Ed Martin is here, still being a hot mess even as his role at the Department of Justice diminishes, Pam Bondi is trying to skip out on Congress, and MyPillow guy Mike Lindell … is being Mike Lindell. And of course, President Donald Trump is here too, because why let a week go by without asking the courts for treats?
Ed Martin takes executive privilege to new lows
Ed Martin, formerly the Interim U.S. attorney for Washington D.C., and also the former head of the Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group, has been a living breathing avatar of ethics violations fromDay 1. Now, he’s facingdisciplinary proceedings before the D.C. Bar because of his unhinged threats to Georgetown University Law School, where he threatened the school for not eradicating all its DEI efforts without ever explaining what the offending diversity might be, and went on to kinda sorta threaten the school’s nonprofit status.
But old Ed doesn’t believe the D.C. Bar has any right to tell him what to do, so he filed a derangednotice of removal demanding that his case be moved to federal court because—you guessed it, charges against Martin are actually an attack on the separation of powers and on the president himself.
Martin also offered 40separate defenses to explain why he shouldn’t be disciplined. Totally normal amount of defenses to plead and not at all evidence of an angry toddler who believes he’s untouchable.
It’s great to see that Martin continues to behave very coolly and rationally here, afterdemanding an ex parte meeting with multiple judges upon learning about the complaint during his brief, unsuccessful tenure as interim U.S. attorney, repeatedly insisting that the judges meet with him alone and that they open an investigation into the disciplinary counsel for the crime of investigating him.
Martin is a legendarily bad attorney, but even he knows that judges cannot and would not meet with him ex parte and ice out the other party, aka the disciplinary counsel. Since that didn’t work, he’s now trying to get things into federal court in the hope that his belief that he is one with the president will fly there.
Trump needs more treats from the courts, and this time it’s personal
Apparently, getting out from under a $500 million civil fraudjudgment isn’t enough for President Donald Trump. Poor Trump turned out his pockets before the New York Appellate Division and got a ruling that the fine imposed for his years-long habit of giving fraudulent financial statements to lenders and insurers to get more favorable terms was simply too unfair and violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Come. On.
After doing Trump a solid on that half a billion, the court did keep in place a ban on Trump and his large adult sons holding corporate leadership roles for three years, along with a ban on Trump or any of his infinite number of business entities from getting loans from any bank with a branch in New York state for that same three years.
But that’s simply untenable for President Deals. So, Trump isappealing the decision—yes, the one where he won a reprieve from a $500 million fine—to make those remaining conditions go away. Trump even had the gall to argue that New York Attorney General Letitia James had targeted him for “unconstitutional selective enforcement.”
We know what selective prosecution looks like, buddy, and it’s exactly what the DOJ is continuing totry to do to James.
DOJ is pretty sure the Constitution means ICE gets to use tear gas whenever it wants
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents have been attacking protesters in Portland for months, deploying tear gas, pepper balls, and a hodgepodge of other chemical munitions. The ACLU managed to get atemporary restraining order in February barring federal goons from using less-lethal weapons as retaliation against people who had the nerve to exercise their constitutional right to peacefully protest the government.
The administration then ran to the Ninth Circuit and got astay pending appeal, meaning that ICE gets to keep brutalizing protesters while the case proceeds. During oral arguments earlier this week, the DOJexplained that it is just too dangerous for heavily armed and ‘roided ICE thugs not to be able to deploy tear gas based on vibes, and that putting any restrictions on them “irreparably harms the government.”
It also apparently violates the Constitution if the government can’t deploy tear gas near an apartment complex, sending chemicals directly into the homes of people whose only crime is living close to wherever ICE is popping off.
Must have missed that part of our nation’s founding document.
Pam Bondi really doesn’t want to talk about the Epstein files
Pam Bondi may be out of a job, but the Justice Department she used to oversee is still doing her a solid.
Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Capitol Hill on Feb. 11.
The DOJ helpfully told the House Oversight Committee that, despite being subpoenaed, Bondi willnot be appearing to testify under oath about the Epstein files, because she is no longer attorney general.
This is nonsense, of course, a ridiculoushypertechnical argument that since the subpoena was issued to Bondi in her capacity as attorney general, it just disappears now that she isn’t.
It’s also a comically thin, cynical excuse given that the committee secured the testimony of former President Bill Clinton and his wife bythreatening to jail them if they didn’t comply. If an ex-president has to honor a congressional subpoena, surely an ex-attorney general does as well. Indeed, Bill Barr, also an ex-attorney general for Trump, already testified under oath after beingsubpoenaed.
You can’t dodge this forever, Pam.
Mike Lindell can’t stop losing
Mike Lindell, one of the weirdest yet most stalwart backers of Trump’s Big Lie, was not able to convince Trump appointee Judge Carl Nichols that he’s just too broke to pay the $56,369 he owes Smartmatic in sanctions for bringing frivolous legal claims against the voting machine company.
Nichols hadordered Lindell to pay up all the way back in January 2025, but Lindell claimed he had a “negative $18.7 million” net worth and couldn’t pay. But then Lindell decided it was a good idea tolaunch a campaign for governor in Minnesota, for which he hadraised $350,000 by February of this year. He then promptly spent $187,000 of that on scads of copies of his own book, a 2019 self-published memoir entitled “What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO,” saying it served as his campaign literature.
Nicholsnoted that Lindell continues to crowdsource funds to pay for his other legal bills, and therefore had sufficient funds to pay Smartmatic but just decided not to.
Lindell was ordered to pay the full $56,369 by April 7, which he mostcertainly did not do. Now he’s on the hook for civil contempt and a $500 penalty for each day until he pays in full. Better get to scamming your gubernatorial donors for some more cash, Mike—or sell a whole lot of pillows.
Our February releases included new admin tools for our Support and Policy & Abuse teams, as well as a bunch of challenge and collection fixes and a host of small updates and improvements. We also upgraded to Rails 8 and Elasticsearch 9!
Many thanks to first-time contributor Shel!
Credits
Coders: Bilka, Brian Austin, Danaël/Rever, FlyingFalcon, Hunter Ada Smith, james_, Jennifer He (DisappearEagle 无鸢), marcus8448, Richard Hajek, Scott, slavalamp, varram
Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, james_, sarken
[AO3-7231] – Updated the framework the Archive runs on to Rails 8.0.
0.9.458
On February 9, we introduced a way for our Support team to add information to the support form without disabling the form, and deployed a bunch of miscellaneous fixes and improvements.
[AO3-6983] – It was already possible for our Support team to temporarily close the support form and replace it with a message to users, e.g. about a known site-wide issue the development team was already working to solve. Additionally, they can now add a temporary message to the form without disabling the form entirely.
[AO3-3245] – Trying to open the posting form to add a work to a closed collection (only possible by manually typing in the appropriate URL) would lead to an error message that looked like the form had already been submitted. The URL now redirects to the collection with a more helpful error message.
[AO3-7246] – We added a “Parent” link to comments, so you can quickly jump to the specific comment that is being replied to.
[AO3-7260] – Passwords must now be between 8 and 72 characters long. (The previous minimum was 6 characters.)
[AO3-7274] – Comment previews for Policy & Abuse admins were previously truncated after the first 100 characters, and admins had to click on the preview to access the full comment. Now the preview includes the first 1,000 characters, which is much more useful.
[AO3-7279] – When a collection is set to “revealed” or “non-anonymous”, the collection is placed in a queue that runs when resources are available to change the status of potentially thousands of works. This means the moderator often has enough time to quickly change the setting back if a checkbox was ticked in error. We now make sure the process really only runs if the revealed or non-anonymous option is still wanted when the servers are ready to work through the queue.
[AO3-7240] – In our ongoing internationalization efforts, we prepared the text in the help pop-ups for Rating, Warning, and Fandom tags for translation.
Our February 17 deploy included various small fixes and updates.
[AO3-4031] – Draft works include a message at the top, warning the creator that unposted drafts will be automatically deleted after a certain time. If you had a draft with multiple chapters, this message would not be displayed! Now it appears everywhere it should.
[AO3-5367] – If someone bookmarked a mystery work, i.e. a work in an unrevealed collection, the bookmark would show up in bookmark searches that matched elements of the mystery work. Since we don’t want information about a mystery work to be guessable in this manner, we now make sure searching bookmarks doesn’t give away information about unrevealed works.
[AO3-5870] – A blockquote in a comment would awkwardly overlap with the commenter’s user icon, so we’ve taken steps to make sure it stays within its own boundaries.
[AO3-5963] – You can’t request an invite with an email address that is already used by an existing account. If an existing account updates their email address to one that’s waiting in the request queue, we now make sure that request is deleted.
[AO3-7206] – Downloads of a work in progress with only one chapter posted were missing that chapter’s title, summary, and notes, displaying only the information entered for the work as a whole. Now all data is present and accounted for!
[AO3-7254] – We’ve added a limit to how many times a specific comment can be reported to the Policy & Abuse team for review.
[AO3-7263] – Under certain circumstances, an admin would get a 500 error trying to access a user’s preferences page. Now they can access it even under those circumstances.
[AO3-7289] – When a user tried to create a skin with faulty CSS, the parser would just throw an error 500 instead of telling the user which part was stressing it out. It now helpfully points to the problem in the CSS code.
[AO3-7210] – The help pop-up that provides information about creating skins is now prepared for translation.
[AO3-6853], [AO3-7048] – Code clean-up and database performance improvements.
0.9.460
A bunch of gem updates went out on February 21.
[AO3-7036] – When reviewing comments held in moderation, to either approve or reject, there was no “Thread” link to get the URL for a specific comment, e.g. to report it to the Policy & Abuse team. Now there is!
[AO3-7278] – AO3 admins from the Open Doors team can now track invitations in the admin area.
[AO3-7236] – Prepared the text in a couple of skins-related help pop-ups for translation.
Welcome to the April edition of Pandemic Garden Club! Growing good things in strange times!
Anyone is welcome to comment with what they're growing right now, things they would like to try, problems they're encountering, and questions they have. Share resources, answer questions, shout encouragement.
In late March, a handful of Black faith leaders gathered on the steps of the Alabama State House to protest a bill that could allow the state to seize control of the police force in the capital of Montgomery.
Supporters of the Republican-sponsored proposal cast it as a response to Montgomery’s police officer shortage and public concern over unchecked crime.
Opponents called it a power grab aimed at a Democratic-led, majority-Black city, pushed by Montgomery’s white Republican state senator over the objections of the city’s mayor, police chief and its other state senator, a Black Democrat who represents a larger swath of the city.
“We’ve seen this before. This is nothing new,” Richard Williams, lead pastor of Metropolitan United Methodist Church in Montgomery, told reporters and others gathered for the news conference. The bill “empowers the state to remove elected Black officials from their operational control of the Montgomery Police Department.”
The following day, the Alabama Senate’s Republican supermajority shut down any debate on the bill and approved it. Kirk Hatcher, Montgomery’s Black state senator, and other Democrats were not allowed to speak on the Senate floor until after it passed. The measure now awaits a vote in the House.
Similar efforts have played out in recent years in other states — including Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee — as Republican lawmakers push for state takeovers of police departments and other municipal agencies in Democratic cities that often have significant Black populations.
Conservative lawmakers frame their proposals as necessary for improving public safety or financial accountability. Critics say the takeover efforts undermine democracy by overriding local control, exceeding the traditional bounds of state power while perpetuating racist stereotypes.
Many of the nation’s big citieswith the highest murder ratesare located in Republican-led states but are governed by Democrats — a dynamic that fuels tension between state and local leadership.
“It’s frustrating for the citizens of Montgomery whenever they’re the victims (of crime) and their neighbors are victims,” Alabama Republican state Sen. Will Barfoot, who represents a slice of Montgomery, told fellow legislators on the Senate floor in March. “You know that at the very least that it’s partially because Montgomery doesn’t have the law enforcement officers that they need.”
Barfoot did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment.
The Montgomery Police Department hasn’t publicly released its staffing figures. Barfoot said on the floor that while he hadn’t been able to get those numbers, he estimated the department has around 220-230 officers, which he said falls short of the roughly 400 it would need to be staffed effectively.
In Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe put the St. Louis police department under the control of a state-appointed board last year. Kansas City, Missouri, is the only other major city police department under state control. That arrangement dates from 1939, when the state assumed authority to combat corruption.
In 2023, Mississippi’s white Republican supermajority gave the state-run Capitol Police expanded jurisdiction over the state capital of Jackson, which has been called the “Blackest City in America,” and createdseparate appointed courtsfor the affluent, whiter parts of the city.
In Tennessee, state lawmakers are trying to createa state-controlled tourism boardto oversee millions in surplus cash generated by Nashville. It’s the latest in a line of moves by the Republican-controlled state legislature to exert more influence in Democratic-led Nashville, including over its metro council, airport authority, electrical utility, and even its sports authority.
“Society is collectively tolerating the loss of democracy in these limited pockets,” said Louise Seamster, a sociologist at the University of Iowa whose research has focused on politics and urban development. “They don’t understand it’s going to come for them eventually.”
Echoes of division
The state-local power struggle over the St. Louis police department dates to the eve of the Civil War. White secessionist leaders in Missouri took control of the St. Louis police to keep its officers from fighting against the Confederacy. Kansas City’s arrangement dates back to post-Civil War Reconstruction, when state lawmakers were trying to limit Black political influence and civil rights gains. Kansas City briefly regained control in 1932 before the state reasserted itself seven years later.
At the time of Reconstruction, the growth of Black governance was seen as a major threat to white political power at the local and state levels, Seamster said.
“All kinds of political arrangements, up to legalized and unsanctioned violence, were carried out to reset things to what white people in power thought was the norm, which was them in charge,” she said.
Fast-forward to the Obama era: In a 2012 ballot initiative, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved returning control of the St. Louis police department to the city.
But Republican state lawmakers tried in 2023 to repeal the measure, claiming St. Louis’ leaders at that timecouldn’t decrease crime on their own. The effort failed after a nine-hour Democratic filibuster.
GOP lawmakers got it passed in 2025 with the backing of Kehoe, who’d made the effort a priority of his first year in office. Hesaidstate control would give law enforcement the tools it needed to combat high crime rates.
Missouri Democrats, noting that crime rates were decreasing,calledthe measure racist; Black Democrats held the city’s major offices at the time.
St. Louis has one of the highest homicide rates in the nation, though police officials said their data shows the murder ratedropped to its lowest level in two decadesduring the first three months of 2025.
In Michigan, researchers found, financial stress alone didn’t explain municipal takeovers. Residents’ race and economic status, as well as a city’s reliance on state funding, were better predictors of state intervention, according to a2021 studyfrom University of Michigan researchers.
“Black communities show signs of being successful or having access to resources that might increase their autonomy or ability to develop,” said Seamster, who has studied city-state conflicts over resources. “Then it is often a trend where, formally or informally, white communities step in to take it back.”
In 2019, the Republican-led Georgia state legislaturetried to take over operationof the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, one of the busiest in the world, citing concerns over safety and corruption. Atlanta City Hall had been embroiled in a sprawling corruption scandal that eventually resulted in federal charges against multiple city staffers.
Then-Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms denounced the move as an“act of war”against the Democratic city, long a national hub of Black culture and business.
Many of the cities targeted for state intervention struggle with the kind of persistent poverty and structural disadvantages that contribute to higher crime rates.
Cities’ finances and power get siphoned away in myriad ways, Seamster said, from reduced state financial support or required power-sharing with a larger county, to more subtle changes, such as state decisions on how federal block grant funding is distributed that give cities less to work with.
Taking back power
Baltimoreregained control of its police departmentlast year after voters twice approved a ballot measure in the wake of a decade-long fight for local control. The police department had been under some form of state control since the Civil War.
Lifelong resident Ray Kelly became interested in the issue when a student in his community was arrested. He soon learned that to lobby for changes in the department, he’d have to leave Baltimore for the state capitol in Annapolis, nearly an hour’s drive south.
“Accountability starts at home, so the first place we naturally think we should go if we have an issue in our community is to our local representative,” he said, “and for 160 years the local representative had no authority, so it was like banging your head against the wall.”
Kelly is now executive director of the Citizens Policing Project, a nonprofit that was part of a coalition of Maryland organizations that worked for years to get the ballot initiative passed.
In the year since Baltimore gained control of its police, the Baltimore City Council has been holding regular public hearings on public safety.
They’re “packed,” Kelly said, adding that one hearing had such a huge turnout that both the hearing room and the overflow room were full, with even more residents standing outside to listen.
Kelly counts that as one visible and positive result of getting local control restored.
“The ultimate goal is to have local people be able to shape how the operations of the police department happen on a day-to-day basis, and not have to travel all the way to Annapolis to do it,” he said.
“People will be more involved as they learn we don’t have to write the state senator anymore, and we can just go to City Hall.”
Missteps and breathing room
Barfoot, the Alabama Republican state senator who represents a portion of Montgomery, told lawmakers he’s gotten more calls and messages about his bill proposing a takeover of the Montgomery police department than any other piece of legislation in his eight years in office.
Most of them have been supportive, he said.
Montgomery citizens, he said on the Senate floor, are “tired of turning on the news and hearing about the violence that we’ve had here in Montgomery. We’re tired of having the thefts that are occurring. We’re tired of having the robberies, the home invasions. And believe me, that is across Montgomery.”
He pointed to other large cities in Alabama that he said had a much higher number of officers per 1,000 residents than Montgomery, and criticized the city for going through five different police chiefs in the past seven years.
Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed and Hatcher say Barfoot never consulted them before introducing the bill. Barfoot acknowledged those “missteps” on the Senate floor, but said he’d since held a public hearing and said those leaders didn’t reach out to him, either. The current police chief spoke against the bill before lawmakers.
Montgomery leaders say the bill unfairly singles out their city. As written, it applies only to Montgomery and Huntsville, a Republican-led city. It would give law enforcement in those cities five years to have a certain number of police officers per resident before the state steps in.
After Huntsville leadership approached lawmakers with concerns about the bill, sponsors lowered the staffing requirements to 1.9 officers per 1,000 residents to give Huntsville some “breathing room,” Barfoottold local media. Huntsville now meets the requirements.
But Montgomery is about 150 officers short of the bill’s mandate, Barfoot estimated. If it doesn’t hire the required number of officers within five years, the state can take over and charge the city for filling those vacancies.
Williams, the Montgomery pastor, called that restitution clause a “financial weapon.”
After the Senate passed the bill, Hatcher chastised his Republican colleagues for withholding resources from people who need it and voting against public safety measures that law enforcement wants. An Alabama law enacted in 2022 allows gun owners to carry ahandgun without a permit, background check or safety training.
“What I’ve come to believe is that when everybody around you has everything they need, that’s the safest we will be,” Hatcher said. “When people have health care, when people have food, SNAP benefits, that’s the safest we’ll be.”
President Donald Trump spent the week terrifying the world flip-flopping on war crimes threats. In response, the GOP and Fox News rushed to cravenly play apologetics for the deranged orange tyrant.
If Trump wanted to make the case that there’s no reason for Congress to consider invoking the25th Amendment, he undermined it bigly during his press briefing on the Iran war.
Last year, Trumpturned the annual White House Easter Egg Roll into a cauldron of corporate sponsorships. And this time around, Trumpsubjected the children in attendance to his petty grievances.
Trump is being slammed from all sides for his latestTACO, in which he backed down from hishorrific threat of genocide in Iran and agreed to a ceasefire thatgives Iran more power than it had before the war began.
Illinois Gov.JB Pritzker was interviewed by civil rights activist Al Sharpton during the National Action Network Convention, where he reminded the audience that his opposition to Trump goes back to his first term.
For more video content, check out Daily Kos on YouTubehereandhere.
I've justed posted an extremely short review for this new Netflix show and thought I'd crosspost here.
TV
Since I’ve been travelling, I didn’t watch a lot. I did check out a new Taiwanese Netflix series though: Agent from Above. It’s about a Heavenly Agent (he's acting on behalf of the Third Heavenly Prince and gets missions via paper slips delivered by a bird) battling the forces of hell. Very entertaining, nicely shot and loveable characters. Strong found family tropes (humans and ghosts live together in an old “market” building.) The length was what actually made me check it out, it’s only 8 episodes long. I simply do not have the energy or time to invest in something long right now. Someone on Tumblr compared its vibe to 2010s Canadian series and I can sort of understand what they mean.
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sovay
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