On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's march from Montgomery to Selma, Greg Palast describes the new frontier in suppressing minority votes. Long story short: "Interstate Crosscheck" purports to list voters who may have voted twice, but actually just lists voters with similar names across state lines -- voters more likely to be minorities (and vote Democrat) than other voters, what a coincidence -- and enables state officials to toss their voter registrations. State officials have been loath to release the lists, saying the names on it are under criminal investigation -- but note well how many of these "investigations" have even come to indictments. (Hint: more than negative-one, but less than one.)
Sens. Rubio (R-FL) and Lee (R-UT) have released a tax "reform" plan that, get your surprised face ready, would do the exact opposite of what it supposedly aims to do. Corporations don't invest in their physical plants or their workers not because they're being taxed at 35% -- the biggest corporations pay about a third of that, thanks to all the loopholes they buy from our representatives in Congress, and if we actually did tax them at 35% and close all the unearned loopholes they enjoy, they would actually spend more on their physical plants and their workers just to avoid paying taxes. Would it be piling on to note that their "simplified" two-bracket income tax system would raise taxes on lower-income workers and cut them for wealthy workers? No, it would not be piling on.
Robert Borosage provides "a sober look" at the jobs numbers from February. February saw nearly 300,000 jobs created and the official unemployment rate go down another tenth of a point, but worker wages are just now starting to go up a tick, and anyway "12 months of job creation over 200,000" and "five years of consecutive job growth" sound a lot less impressive when you recall the job losses in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, and you realized that a lot of these newly-created jobs pay less than the ones we lost.
Allstar Marketing Group, Inc. -- maker of such as-seen-on-TV staples as Snuggies and Magic Mesh door covers -- agrees to pay $8 million over the deceptions it perpetrated on its customers. Which were more convoluted than you might expect -- I'm sure "separate processing and handling fees" is old hat to most of us by now, but not allowing customers to bypass the buy-one-get-one-free process over the phone or the internet or even edit their own orders before placing them might be news to you.
By now you probably know the story of the Arkansas Tea Party state Rep who "rehomed" three children he and his wife had adopted, one of them to a man who subsequently raped her. At least two details are worth repeating: one, that "rehoming" is somehow legal in a lot of places, and two, that the Harris family feels very, very sorry -- for themselves. If, indeed, reactive attachment disorder took place, then you still must wonder why they were so unprepared for it that they handed off one of their adoptive children to a pederast.
Finally, Hillary Clinton has really stepped in it by conducting our government's business on her own email server while Secretary of State. If your best defense is that you want State to release all the emails you haven't lost or erased, and also other people do it, too, well, that's not a good sign. Her defense even has a scare number in it -- "55,000 pages of emails" may sound all big and bad, but if that comprised all the emails, she would have said so. Still, nobody who defended Tha Bush Mobb when they "lost" all those emails pertaining to their U.S. Attorney shenanigans has any reasonable claim to outrage now.
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