U.S. House passes an actually-bipartisan amendment that would essentially roll back the Department of Justice's efforts to expand asset forfeiture. Allowing police to seize property from the accused, not the convicted, is obviously unconstitutional -- except to the politicians who prefer posturing about being "tough on crime" to actually solving problems. The Senate could still shoot it down -- as they just shot down a Rand Paul amendment that would have repealed the 2001 AUMF that three Presidents have now abused -- but it's still a step forward.
The incomparable Heather Digby Parton writes a long and thoughtful article (including excellent analysis of recent polls) wondering whether making a deal with President Trump on the debt limit was a "trap." Call me old-fashioned, but I think you can walk through a lot of traps if you stop playing 13-dimensional chess and just work for your constituents, though that seems to be a lot to ask of contemporary Democrats. Certainly one should cast a wary eye at Democrat efforts to "win back" Trump voters, the vast majority of whom were Romney voters, McCain voters, Bush voters, et cetera. The worst thing about the debt limit deal, as I've said, was that it cleared the board for Republicans this month, so they can exert more effort on odious tax "reform" and health care "reform" efforts.
Credit reporting corporation Equifax removes forced arbitration clause from the free credit monitoring service it set up in the wake of its now-notorious data breach, but not from its general Terms of Service. That means that Equifax could try to force you into an arbitration court if you have a dispute with them over this whole imbroglio (which means that even if you threw their own statement saying they wouldn't force arbitration on you back at them, you might be doing so before an arbitrator). So I'd be conservative and monitor your credit using an actually-free credit report via annualcreditreport.com. (Yes, that is a totally valid way of using the word "conservative," though I guess I can't blame you for doing a double-take.)
Adam Johnson at FAIR informs us that the six top US newspapers actually spent a little more time condemning anti-fascists than they did condemning fascists after Charlottesville. Even if I were generous, and assumed that the "liberal" media condemn anti-fascists because it doesn't actually take a lot of moral courage to condemn fascists, I still don't think the isolated incidents of violence from folks resisting fascists is more than half of this story. I think Nazi wannabes committing considerably more acts of violence against people they think should be wiped from the Earth is more than half the story, actually.
Ho hum, Martha Pskowski at TruthOut describes how Coca-Cola has been sucking the water out of the ground in an area of rural Southern Mexico. Conservatves ought to find a lot of these themes familiar -- like the city overtaking the farm and the extermination of local traditions -- but too many of today's "conservatives" simply repeat the words free market over and over again, possibly in an effort to position themselves for their next job as a corporate PR hack. Trouble is, Coca-Cola's water-draining arrangement probably violates Mexico's Constitution, which literally guarantees clean water to its citizens.
Finally, we've been hearing a lot lately about the "intra-Democratic divide," which is a vast improvement from our "liberal" media treating Barack Obama like he was Thee Most Liberal Liberal Imaginable, but too many folks treat "reaching out to working-class whites" or "keeping black and Latino voters" is an either-or. Mr. Marshall is right to suggest that racism is a "virus" that lies "dormant" but can be "activated" by the right set of conditions, but one of the conditions that helps activate that racism is a corporatist Democratic candidate who has nothing to offer other than not being a Republican. Give people the economic populism they crave and deserve, and racism won't be anywhere near as important.
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