Carpenter and Mayfield

Big News: A preliminary vote to abolish the death penalty passed by a margin of 20-9 in the Utah State Senate. The bill will be considered and debated one more time in the Senate and will then move on to the Utah House of Representatives.

Today is a Day of Remembrance for the 120,000 Japanese Americans interned after Executive Order 9066, which was signed 72 years ago today. Illustration by Bernard Chang. Image courtesy of Nerds of Color: http://wp.me/p3MnPm-1ic

Congrats to Marty Stolar, the NLG, and the protestors! Keep taking 'em to the cleaners! Illegally Arrested RNC Protesters Finally Getting Paid nymag.com Both NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman and Martin Stolar, a National Lawyer's Guild attorney who represented some of the plaintiffs, said it was the biggest settlement they'd ever heard of in a mass-arrest case.

"It Was Time to Do More Than Protest": 1971 Burglars Who Exposed COINTELPRO Reveal Their Identities democracynow.org One of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War era has been solved. On March 8, 1971, a group of activists including a cabdriver, a day care director and two professors broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They stole every document

Time has its "Person of the Year." Amazon has its books of the year. Pretty Much Amazing has its mixtapes of the year. Buzzfeed has its insane-stories-from-Florida of the year. And Wonkblog, of course, has its graphs of the year. For 2013, we asked some of the year's most interesting, important and influential thinkers to name their favorite graph of the year and why they chose it. Here's Chris Hayes's. hayes graph There's a common conception, at least among liberals, that ...our criminal justice system has a deep racial bias embedded within it. But even people who hold that view will be pretty shocked by this data, compiled by the ACLU in a blockbuster report this year. Though black people and white people use marijuana at the same rate, black people are much much much more likely to be arrested for possessing it. In other words: our racist criminal justice system In One Chart. - Chris David Hayes is the host of MSNBC's primetime show, All In With Chris Hayes.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt theorizes that a person’s political identity is a reflection of his or her moral matrix. Take this quiz and find out what your morals say about you. Quiz: What Do Your Morals Say About Your Politics? billmoyers.com Test your attitudes on crime and punishment.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The growing gap between the richest Americans and everyone else isn't bad just for individuals. It's hurting the U.S. economy. So says a majority of more than three dozen economists surveyed last week by The Associated Press. Their concerns tap into a debate that's intensified as middle-class pay has stagnated while wealthier households have thrived.... A key source of the economists' concern: Higher pay and outsize stock market gains are flowing mainly to affluent Americans. Yet these households spend less of their money than do low- and middle-income consumers who make up most of the population but whose pay is barely rising.