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One of the lesser talked-about tragedies of the U.S. criminal justice system is how disruptive an arrest on even the most minor charges can be if someone doesn’t have the money to pay bail. A team of freshman representatives in the U.S. House are now seeking to change that, with the “No Money Bail Act of 2016.” Introduced Wednesday, the legislation would eliminate the use of money bail in the federal justice system, as well as encourage states to stop using money bail as a pretrial release condition by barring those that do from certain Department of Justice (DOJ) grants. 

“We cannot both be a nation that believes in freedom and equal justice under the law, yet at the same time, locks up thousands of people solely because they cannot afford bail,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), sponsor of the bail-reform bill, in a statement. “We cannot both be a nation that believes in the principle of innocent until proven guilty, yet incarcerate over 450,000 Americans who have not been convicted of a crime.”

“Many people decide to plead guilty purely to get out of jail because they cannot afford bail,” Lieu continued. “America should not be a country where freedom is based on income. We are better than this.”

According to DOJ’s Office for Access to Justice (ATJ), roughly 60 percent of the people in U.S. jails are pretrial defendants, up from 50 percent in 1996 and 40 percent in 1986.

“Bail, like many aspects of the criminal justice system, changed in the 1980s and 1990s in ways that policy makers only now see as deeply troubling,” said ATJ Director Lisa Foster in a speech earlier this month. Citing a 1965 University of Pennsylvania Law Review article titled “The Coming Constitutional Crisis in Bail,” Foster complained that we have known about this problem for more than 60 years and yet done little to nothing to remedy it. 

But Foster thinks the country is at a “tipping point” on bail reform, finally. “The Justice Department has been actively advocating bail reform in the states for many years,” she said.

Lieu’s co-sponsors on the No Money Bail Act are Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.), and Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona). Coleman said the current bail system has “debilitating costs for our communities and our budgets.” Lawrrence called it a “misuse of resources” and “a massive drain on valuable tax dollars.”

Some Americans have been held in jail “for days, weeks, months, and even years before their cases are heard,” said Lawrence. And “people stuck in jail while awaiting trial face far greater pressure to accept plea bargains. With each day they are denied bail, they face a greater risk of losing their jobs, custody of their children, and other rights that, ironically, can be later used against them in court.” 

According to ColorofChange.org director Rashad Robinson, black Americans face 35 percent higher bail than whites do when held on the same charges. Robinson noted that Sandra Bland and Kalief Browder both died in jail “because of their inability to afford bail.” 

The No Money Bail Act is endorsed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), The Pretrial Justice Institute, The Drug Policy Alliance, The Sentencing Project, The National Legal Aide & Defender Association, and the National Association of Pretrial Services Agencies (NAPSA). NAPSA head Penny Stinson said her association has long opposed the current bail system becayse “money bail inherently discriminates against the poor and removes the decision about actual release from custody from the court to profit-motivated entities.” It “has no place in an evidence-based pretrial system.” Jo-Ann Wallace of the National Legal Aide & Defender Association hopes the bill will emphasize “the critical place of bail reform within the broader criminal justice reform movement.”  

Skype co-founders are launching a drone delivery service in the U.K. called Starship Technologies soon. The drones are essentially cute six-wheeled robot grocery carts and can carry around 20 pounds of stuff. The semi-autonomous drones are wirelessly monitored by humans to resolve any navigation issues and to prevent attempts at interference or theft. The drones travel at 4 mph overland and would be positioned in urban areas to deliver packages within 5 to 30 minutes of being summoned.

The drones are locked and can only be opened by recipients who have the proper app on their phones. The app also allows customers to track the drones. The company claims that the drones will be 10 to 15 times cheaper than current cost of last mile delivery services, e.g., couriers.

Amazon has kindled a lot of excitement with its proposal for Air Prime delivery services using 55 pound unmanned aerial drones that can fly no higher than 400 feet and carry packages weighing under 5 pounds. It too promises deliveries within 30 minutes. “One day, seeing Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road,” predicts the company. Perhaps.

At least for the time being, ground drones likely to be much more useful since they will use less energy and can carry considerably more. They will also avoid the much of the regulatory hell that aerial drone delivery companies will have to navigate.

But ultimately, who needs deliveries when folks can print-out what they want at home?

Dan Savage is increasingly frustrated with those who want to continue to treat Hillary Clinton as though she’s the same politician as the woman who once vocally campaigned against gay marriage recognition when she was running for Senate.

Savage, who is openly supporting both Clinton and Bernie Sanders as potential candidates, blogged that he is tired of those who want to hold Clinton to a standard of past ideological purity that is honestly not very reasonable given the history involved:

A lot of progressives are slamming Hillary for her past position on marriage equality and the rather noxious comments she made back then—which, again, are similar to the rather noxious comments made by most Dems at the time, including Barack Obama (who said the exact same shit, in fewer words)—and … they hammer and hammer away at it. And you know what? Most of the people I see out there hammering away at this—most of them, not all of them—are straight. Oh, there are queer folks doing it too. But it’s mostly straight people and, man, are they losing their patience with queers who support Hillary. But straight or gay, here’s what I have to say to those who can’t understand why any gay person could possibly support Hillary over Bernie—or, like me, support Hillary and/or Bernie—when Bernie Always Had the Right Position On Marriage Equality and Hillary Used To Have the Wrong Position on Marriage Equality.

We’re taking motherfucking yes for a motherfucking answer.

Hillary Clinton’s support for marriage equality may be a political calculation. And you know what? We worked hard to change the math so that those political calculations would start adding up in our favor. So sincere change of heart or political calculation—either way—I will take it.

Savage is absolutely correct about the application of these weird purity tests when it comes to those who have come around to support gay issues. And they’re not confined to Clinton. Whenever a political figure or celebrity or other public figure of any political leaning has announced a change of position toward gay marriage or supporting other gay issues, there is frequently an odd undercurrent of resentment expressed because they did not hold the correct position all along. There was, for example, Caitlyn Jenner, who was heavily criticized following an interview with Ellen DeGeneres last September where she admitted that, despite now openly identifying as transgender, she actually opposed gay marriage until more recently. She says she’s on board now because she realizes that it’s important to the people who want access to it (which is how a conservative comes to accept gay marriage), but somehow that wasn’t enough of an endorsement for some folks.

Savage notes that this is not exactly the kind of attitude that encourages political transformation: “If pols who are currently on the wrong side of any of those issues see no benefit to changing their positions—if they see no political benefit—they’re going to be harder to persuade. Why should they come around on our issues, why should they switch sides or change their votes, if we’re going to go after them hammer and tongs for the positions they used to hold?”

But there’s a larger issue with Clinton that Savage isn’t addressing here: It’s not whether Clinton’s positions on gay issues are formed by political calculations now but rather whether they were formed by political calculations then, what that means for the promises she’s making now, and how the way she talks about gay issues can be placed contextually into criticisms of her overall honesty.

For example, was Clinton’s opposition to gay marriage a political calculation in the first place? Clinton insisted that 2013 that her position had “evolved,” just like President Obama’s. Statistician Nate Silver looked at the positions of other women from her demographic and political background and found that the vast, vast majority of them (potentially as high as 90 percent) were supporters of same-sex marriage recognition by 2008. Was Clinton an outlier back then? Or an opportunist?

Then there is the matter that she was caught out recently by leaders in the gay community attempting to mislead the public about why President Bill Clinton originally signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which forbid federal recognition of same-sex marriage even when legally recognized by individual states. She is now attempting to claim that the reason President Clinton signed the legislation was to “protect” gays from a possible constitutional amendment in the works to ban same-sex marriage. But there was no amendment being discussed at the time at all. It simply wasn’t true. Either the president actually opposed same-sex marriage recognition, or it was politically important for him to be on the record doing so.

As such, Clinton’s positions on gay issues have to be considered not just on their own, but with the other issues of honesty and transparency that seem to be a top problem for her candidacy. Her many issues with the private e-mail server to conduct government business as secretary of state highlight problems with her honesty and her reluctance to be open and forthright (and I’m being diplomatic). Just last night she said she’ll only release transcripts from her speeches to big banks if other candidates (including the Republicans) do, too.

Ignore the “Never read the comments!” web warning and read some of the replies to Savage. You’ll see that the issue driving some progressive voters away from Clinton is not that she recently “evolved” on gay issues, but rather whether even progressive voters trust what she says. She has put out a lengthy agenda on LGBT issues that endorses every single item progressive community leaders want to happen, but if you don’t see her as being honest, would you believe she’s going to actually push for any of these things? (Not that I personally support most of the items on the agenda, which make a federal matter out of many issues that should be handled privately.)

Since Savage supports both Sanders and Clinton, one may well ask why he is even frustrated about the situation. After all, it’s probably unlikely that Sanders’ primary voters are going to turn around and vote for the Republican candidate should he fail to get the nomination. Rather, that Clinton is getting criticism for the same change of position over which Obama was heavily praised is a potential warning sign that she may have problem getting out voters who ran to the polls for Obama. There is a group of people on the left looking for reasons not to vote for Clinton, and they could just stay home come November. Her history on gay issues is really more of a symptom of the dislike, not the root cause. You can’t take those issues out of the context of the other concerns about Clinton as a candidate and politician.

Hillary Clinton is a fair-weather friend to democracy, and a foe, as A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Hillary Clinton is a huge fan of democracy—just so long as it doesn’t get in her way.

HRC—Her Royal Clintonness—has not driven a car in two decades. Her list of speaking-engagement demands includes special pillows onstage and hummus and crudités offstage (crudités is a fancy word for veggies). She has been paid more than a half-million dollars for speaking to the swells at Goldman Sachs.

But that doesn’t mean she no longer cares about the little people! She does care. Deeply. We know this because she says so—and if there is anything Clinton is known for, it’s always telling the straight-up truth.

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