Surprise, surprise, our Administration's CFPB has proposed slashing Obama-era rules regulating payday lenders. After all, who is more popular than a lender who traps you in a cycle of debt with 300% interest rates? Upon hearing that "(t)he industry feared the new regulations would force many of them to close their doors," I wouldn't blame you for reacting, we can only hope! That might also be an appropriate reaction if I were to suggest that the courts are probably going to strike down this new rulemaking process, too. (Nobody give me the "but where else will poor people turn when they need money" spiel. The U.S. Postal Service could do the job, as it did until the late 1960s, if Congress had the political will to allow it.)
America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, informs us that "the so-called popular uprising" in Venezuela "is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor." I don't know that the white supremacist in the White House thinks of any Venezuelans as white, but Venezuelans who count Europeans as their ancestors sure do, and they also think of Mestizos as lesser human beings, if they think of them as human beings at all. One hopes the Mestizos rise up and beat back this coup, as they did in 2002.
Our Supreme Court issues another stay of Lousiana's infamous anti-abortion law, while Justice Kavanaugh -- the only Justice to write about the stay, which of course he opposed -- busies himself trying to find the loophole that'll let our Court strike down the Texas law and let the nearly-identical Louisiana law stand. "Louisiana's four doctors getting hospital admitting privileges" ain't it, not when our Court also struck down Texas's law because it required abortion clinics to be "mini-hospitals," but that might not matter if our Court is bent on causing jurisprudential mayhem.
House Republicans have taken to spreading hysteria about violent crimes by undocumented immigrants, though by their logic we could just as easily cherry-pick 16 anecdotes from 16 Congressional districts over a 19-year period describing crime-by-citizens and justify building a wall to keep Americans out of America. Why, Rebecca Solnit provides five examples of white men committing murder and plotting terror in America just from the last two weeks of January, which by House Republican logic means we should build a wall to keep white males out of America. Oh, did I mention 16 crimes over 19 fucking years? It's like Republicans are trying to see how badly they can do science.
Finally, South Carolina police lobbyist and asset forfeiture defender actually comes out and says that, without the ability to forcibly take property from folks before they've been convicted of a crime, "what's the incentive to go out and make a special effort?" I'm old enough to remember when saying such a thing out loud would make you afraid to face your friends and neighbors; not so now in our sick, immoral and decadent society, where folks confuse cynicism with knowledge and think they're better than everyone else because they're more jaded than everyone else.
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