The Economic Policy Institute says today that “African Americans are better off in many ways” compared to 1968, but:

With respect to homeownership, unemployment, and incarceration, America has failed to deliver any progress for African Americans over the last five decades. In these areas, their situation has either failed to improve relative to whites or has worsened. In 2017 the black unemployment rate was 7.5 percent, up from 6.7 percent in 1968, and is still roughly twice the white unemployment rate. In 2015, the black homeownership rate was just over 40 percent, virtually unchanged since 1968, and trailing a full 30 points behind the white homeownership rate, which saw modest gains over the same period. And the share of African Americans in prison or jail almost tripled between 1968 and 2016 and is currently more than six times the white incarceration rate.

Homeownership rates have been flat for just about everyone, so it’s fair to say that blacks have seen no progress relative to whites on that front. But the other two items aren’t really right, and I hate to give in to the kind of defeatism that suggests not only that things are still bad for blacks, but that we haven’t even made any progress. Here’s the unemployment rate since 1972, when BLS started keeping separate statistics for blacks and whites:

Unemployment is cyclical, and if you cherry-pick any given pair of years you can make any point you want. But if you look at the entire series for the past few decades, there’s no question that blacks are making up ground. The trendline for whites has barely budged, while it’s gone down by about four points for blacks.

On the crime front, black incarceration rates continue to be a disgrace, but we are making progress. The best way to see this is to look at prison admissions rates. The Bureau of Justice Statistics was happy to show this to us in the past, but they’re hellbent on keeping it a secret lately. However, they slipped up in 2012, so we have at least one data point to compare to the past—and it’s way down from its peak in the late 80s. More recently, we have data for total incarceration rates, and it’s declining at a much faster rate than white imprisonment:

What’s more, arrest rates have also fallen dramatically for blacks. Since their peak in 1989, the arrest rate for blacks has fallen by 50 percent compared to 35 percent for whites:

The continuing racial gap in our justice system, our economic system, and our educational system is something that none of us should put up with. But it’s equally important to know that progress can be made, and the best evidence of this is that progress has been made.

Near the bottom of Upper Yosemite Fall, there’s a big tree right in front of the falling water. Marian noticed it and wanted me to take a picture. Naturally I took dozens of shots of “Marian’s tree,”¹ and then spent some time picking through them and agreeing with Marian on which was best.

But I said we got lucky with the light on our trip. The next morning was clear and brilliant, and I got a terrific view of the morning rainbow on Yosemite Falls. I was upwards of a mile away, unfortunately, but I still got a nice look. All the other pictures got tossed out, and this one rose to the top of the heap. Try that with your 8×10 view camera and your black-and-white glass plates, Ansel Adams!

¹I’m willing to bet that millions of people think of it as “their” tree, but no matter. For us, it’s Marian’s tree.

Here’s the same tree without the rainbow. This is a sharper picture since I was closer at the time. In fact, Marian and I were both waiting for the rainbow on this morning, and I took a whole bunch of pictures as we tried to convince ourselves that we were seeing a glint of yellow here or a slight bit of green there. But we weren’t. It was too cloudy.

Offered without comment:

Two years ago, a Black Lives Matter activist challenged Hillary Clinton about her use of the word superpredator in a 1996 speech. The next day Clinton said she regretted that: “I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.”

Did this kind of confrontation reduce black support for Clinton and contribute to her loss to Donald Trump? That’s impossible to say. However, Bob Somerby flags an interview on C-SPAN with Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the founders of BLM, that touches on this question:

Let me say this. The tactic of taking on the Democratic Party I think was very useful in that moment….But I think for folks across the country, including the Democratic Party, we didn’t believe he was going to win. And that actually is the factor here. We didn’t believe he was going to win, and so the time that people spent, the time that the Democratic Party spent—because I don’t want to blame our movement for the reason why Trump got in office; I know you’re not doing that, but some people might see it as such—they could have done a much better job at who they decided to run for president.

Apologies for the navel gazing, but this speaks to one of the things that I’m perpetually unsure about: just how valuable is it for young activists to understand recent history? In this case, the criticism of Clinton was way off base. She used the word once; there was no special racial valence involved; crime really was high and kids really were unusually remorseless in the early 90s; blacks themselves were among the leaders in the tough-on-crime movement of the 70s and 80s; and neither of the Clintons had anything to do with the growth of the carceral state, which long predated them. It’s not just that creating a rift that’s historically naive was pointless, it was also untrue. Whether this confrontation did a little damage or a lot, it shouldn’t have happened.

On the other hand, a constant awareness of the recent past is also a straitjacket. There are lots of things that it prevents me from saying or doing, and naturally I believe that it’s justified. After all, the recent past really did happen. But justified or not, it constrains me. To a certain extent, creating a passionate, vigorous movement depends on starting fresh and not caring about what the oldsters think. Just go out there and get noticed any way you can.

I’m sorry this incident happened to Hillary Clinton. At the same time, it was notice that things needed to change, even if a few people got hurt in the process. Does this mean that, on balance, it was the right thing to do? I still don’t know.

But there’s one thing I do know: if it happened because BLM figured the election was in the bag for Democrats, that was serious political malpractice. Even before Trump won the election, that was something no political movement should ever think. Hopefully we’ve all learned our lesson now.¹

¹Until there’s a new crop of young activists in 2044, of course, for whom Donald Trump is ancient history.

This is Donald Trump's most likely response to an active shooter nearby: "Gunfire? No, I don't hear any gunfire."Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

I know I’m the guy who says we should ignore the dumbest bits of Trump blather, but for chrissake. What a dick:

Trump rips Fla. Deputies for not going into school. “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) February 26, 2018

Sure he would. This is the same guy who avoided going to Vietnam with “bone spurs” and would barely leave his office in Trump Tower without his personal bodyguard around.

I wonder what cops think of this kind of stuff? Sure, they love Trump, but they also know just how scary an active shooter scene really is—and they know perfectly well that the loudest chest thumpers are the least likely to do anything when the chips are down. And Trump is the loudest chest thumper of all.

Erik Mcgregor/Pacific Press via ZUMA

Dreamers have gotten another reprieve:

The Supreme Court handed President Trump a significant defeat Monday, turning down the administration’s plea for a quick ruling on the president’s power to end special protections for so-called Dreamers. The court’s decision not to immediately hear the administration’s appeal could keep in place a legal shield for nearly 700,000 young immigrants for the rest of this year, and perhaps longer.

This removes a lot of Trump’s leverage: Democrats have no pressing reason to make a bad deal over DACA if they’ve got at least a year before it can be terminated. Why not wait until after the midterms and see what happens? That’s what Republicans did with Scalia’s Supreme Court seat after he died.

Republicans should have taken the DACA-for-border-security deal. It wouldn’t have hurt their position for a broader deal later on, and they would have gotten their wall. Now the Dreamers are still here and Republicans have nothing.

Jeff Malet/NC via ZUMA

Let’s recap the Republican proposals so far to reduce school gun massacres:

• Arm teachers with handguns.
• Turn our schools into hardened bunkers.
• Stun grenades in every classroom.
• More police officers patrolling the halls at all times.
• Deny guns to any teenager accused of mental problems by someone else.
• Loosen gun laws so that more people in public are armed.

Have I hit the high points? The insanity here is jaw dropping. I could at least respect an argument that says gun rights are so important that it’s worth protecting them even at the price of more mass slaughters. I wouldn’t especially agree, but it’s the kind of argument I might make in some free speech cases. This flat-out lunacy, however, is beyond belief. Do the NRA folks really believe this stuff? Or are they just getting so desperate that they’re willing to toss out anything that might muddy the waters?

Aude Guerrucci/DPA via ZUMA

From Jonathan Swan at Axios:

The president’s personal pilot is on the administration’s short list to head the Federal Aviation Administration. Trump has told a host of administration officials and associates that he wants John Dunkin — his longtime personal pilot, who flew him around the country on Trump Force One during the campaign — to helm the agency, which has a budget in the billions and which oversees all civil aviation in the United States.

….[A] source confirmed Trump recommended Dunkin and that he’s sat for an interview for the post. That source said he was impressive. “He’s on the list because he’s the president’s pilot, but if he gets the job it won’t be because he’s the president’s pilot,” the source said.

This would never occur to most of us. But once you hear about it, you instantly think, “Of course Trump wants his personal pilot to head the FAA. That’s the Trumpiest thing ever.”

Yesterday I showed off the results of my new camera vs. the old one on a few tests of lens quality. Today I’ve got the results of some of the focus tests.

Any camera can focus pretty well on a stationary object, but it’s a lot trickier to follow-focus a moving object. My old Lumix did pretty poorly on this score, but the new Sony allegedly does this very well. The handiest way I have of testing this is to go out and try to take burst mode shots of flying birds. And while I don’t like seagulls much, I’ll give them this: they aren’t lazy. They really fly around a lot, so it’s lucky they’ve taken up residence on our local lake. Yesterday morning I went out to track them in flight.

Overall, the Sony did very well under the circumstances—the “circumstances” being a photographer who has a hard time following birds around in the viewfinder and keeping them centered. Still, I did OK some of the time, and when I did the camera kept focus pretty well. For starters, here’s a Canada goose chasing another Canada goose:

I don’t know what that first one did, but the one in back sure seemed pissed. A few minutes later a little boy started tossing some bread into the water, and naturally everyone went nuts. Here’s one of the gulls on an attack path:

Oh yeah, that’s a gull who knows what he wants. A little later, a coot beat some gulls to a feast and they weren’t happy about it:

That poor little coot has a piece of bread as big as its head, but it needs to move fast if it wants to keep it. So did it? I don’t know. I was busy taking pictures and missed the end of this little maritime skirmish.

Eventually the bread was all gone, and so were the gulls:

Needless to say, I’m showing you the pictures that were in focus, not the ones that weren’t. Overall, though, an impressive number were in sharp focus—and even more will be when your humble photographer improves his tracking skills. That said, it appears that fast, accurate follow-focus is as good as advertised, and considerably better than I ever got with the Lumix. The Sony also has a very nice feature that allows you to define a shooting profile and then temporarily recall it at the push of a button. For shots like this, for example, I’d typically use burst mode, shutter priority, 1/1000th second shutter speed, and continuous focus. That’s a bunch of settings to change, but all I had to do was hold down a button, start shooting, and then release the button. Then I’m back to the settings I was using before. Very nice.

Trump campaign advisor Carter Page during a trip to Moscow in December 2016.Korotayev Artyom/TASS via ZUMA

A couple of weeks ago President Trump approved the release of the “Nunes memo,” which alleged FBI abuse of the FISA warrant process to get a wiretap approved on Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide. Remember that? Most people probably don’t, what with a news cycle that runs on a fruit-fly timescale these days. So now that everyone has (a) absorbed the allegations that the FBI is corrupt and (b) isn’t paying attention anymore, it’s time to release the Democratic rebuttal. And of course it will be heavily redacted, to make it really hard to read.

I’m busy with issues of crucial importance today, so I don’t have the time to spend properly on this. All part of the GOP plan! However, the full text of the Democratic memo is here. LA Times reporter Chris Megerian‏ summarizes the key points here.

The basic takeaway is that the Nunes memo was nonsense, but I think we all knew that already. Nonetheless, the damage has been done, and expertly so.