Limits on payday lending get Senate panel approval

It's been debated in public and behind the scenes. Now, a proposal to place limits on payday and car title lenders has won approval in a Senate committee.

The Senate Business and Commerce Committee voted 5-1 on Thursday to send the bill by Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, to the full Senate. The legislation would close a loophole that allows payday lenders to operate outside of Texas regulations imposed on other financial institutions.

Often the lenders charge fees that reach 500 percent or more, and customers can end up rolling over their loans multiple times because they can't pay them off.

Davis' bill would limit fees, eliminate rollover fees and place customers on an installment payoff plan if they have rolled over the loan three times. Consumer and religious groups back the legislation.

"This is a tremendous victory for working-class Texans," Davis said in a prepared statement. But the measure could be doomed down the road.

Rep. Vicki Truitt, R-Keller, and chairwoman of the House Pensions, Investments and Financial Services Committee, has said she doesn't want to pass sweeping legislation that she says will put payday lenders out of business and cut off that credit to Texans who need it.

Truitt wants to address any problems with specific pieces of legislation she has filed.

Davis, meanwhile, doesn't like Truitt's bills. She says they don't do enough and has threatened to work against them if they reach the Senate.

So it seems to be a stalemate, for now.

Source: http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2011/04/limits-on-payday-lending-get-s.html

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What the Democrats Are So Afraid Of

All in all, it was one hell of a good week for fear. National Public Radio decapitated itself because a pasty-faced little charlatan — who, by all rights, should be shucking crawfish in a Louisiana prison farm — faked another tape, and an NPR executive got caught telling the truth about the Tea Party in such a way that would agitate anyone's chamomile. Since the Republicans in Congress once again have NPR in the crosshairs, the executive got fired and the CEO got tossed out a window.

But NPR was not alone in being scared out of its Dockers by legions of misinformed elderly people. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who has been a boring old senator since he was first elected by the Free Soil Party, bailed ingloriously on his stated opposition to the meat-ax budget that came out of the Republican House, largely because the toothless wolves had begun to howl back in Elkhart.

And let us not even discuss the ungainly gymnastics being performed at the moment by Orrin Hatch, who is apparently going to spend the next two years trying to convince his base that the several times he's made sense since 1966 were completely accidental.

And it's hard not to notice that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker decided to go Pinochet-like at least in part because his poll numbers were tanking and he didn't want to alienate the one group of voters who didn't think he was a buffoon...

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/fear-mongering-in-politics-5376802?src=rss

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Alfred Apps admits that the Liberals are raising taxes

More context for the Apps quote: “When Tories say we’re increasing taxes, damn right we are. We’re putting corporate taxes back up to where they were a year and a half ago, that’s it. [that's all]” This is from yesterday’s … Continue reading →

Source: http://www.stephentaylor.ca/2011/04/alfred-apps-admits-that-the-liberals-are-raising-taxes/

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Peter Fonda: The Son Also Rises

How can you�achieve� and succeed on your own,� growing up the�child�of one�of America’s�most admired�personalities? Peter Fonda, the only son of the late great actor Henry Fonda,�says�that’s something he’s�faced�since�the age of�4, when people who were total strangers began “laying an identity” on him as Henry Fonda’s son.
“My gift was what I learned from my father, without [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/dmagazine/frontburner/~3/tHhqF_AF1_Y/

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Q & A: AccessNow Takes on Democracy, The Internet, and The Middle East

The role of technology in recent Middle Eastern revolutions has been made pretty clear. Despite being thousands of miles away, Brett Solomon, Executive Director co-founder of Access Now, is at the epicenter of it this week. Access Now is an NGO committed to "the realization of human rights and democracy…[as] predicated on access to the internet," and this week, released and is attempting to 'digitally smuggle' a bombshell document into countries whose communication lines have been corrupted, as they're either severed with the rest of the Western World by their governments, or even worse, monitored backed by the threat of civic punishment and worse. And you think Twitter going down is a problem.

Entitled Protecting Your Security Online, the paper being released in both English and Arabic, could be one of the most vital pieces of information to the organic spread of democracy in the world. Why? It's a simple user's guide to circumventing surveillance and hindrance of digital communications by anti-democracy governments. This is why it could also find itself on the precipice of becoming the most banned, dangerous unclassified public document to posess in that region right now, let alone the world, today. Solomon, a young Australian-by-way-of-New-York, who spoke with us on Friday over a bad cell phone connection, would argue differently.

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/brett-solomon-interview-access-now-5456069?src=rss

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Glenn Beck ending TV show

Conservative Glenn Beck is ending his TV show on the Fox News Channel. �The New York Times reports: His departure was jointly announced in a statement on Wednesday by Fox and Mr. Beck?s company, Mercury Radio Arts. The joint statement did not specify an end date for Mr. Beck?s show, called ?Glenn Beck,? which has [...]

Source: http://cincinnati.com/blogs/politics/2011/04/06/glenn-beck-ending-tv-show/

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Paul Ryan and the New Politics of Sadism

"Compassionate conservatism" was a hell of a brand name. You have to give Karl Rove credit for that. It was a masterpiece of political marketing. Rhetorically, at least, it managed to bridge the great gap between what the Republican party was doing and the people to whom it was doing most of it. It even managed to enlist organized religion in what was said to be an attempt to ameliorate the social consequences of the policies that were central to the agenda that the Republicans were bringing to the nation. If people were going to be forced into soup lines, they were going to be really good soup lines. The worst instincts of our politics were going to be sanctified by the best instincts of our people. It was as though the Laffer Curve described the arc of a censer or the wave of a thurible and not the inevitable swing of a wrecking ball.

Of course, it was all a shuck. (According to his memoir, David Kuo was a Republican who actually bought it, until he got to the White House and, one day, was told by Rove to come up with "a fucking faith-based thing," which is not how Saint Francis would have put it.) Not only that, but it was a shuck that, like so many things in the Bush White House, including the president therein, was so screwed up in its execution that it inevitably became a punchline. Nobody was ever going to be able to say "compassionate conservative" again with a straight face. And now, the Republicans, and the conservative politics that have possessed their party, have decided that they don't even have to try.

We are in an age dominated on one side by the New Politics of Sadism. Hurtful policies are enacted, not because of any logical benefit they might bring, but specifically because they hurt people the Republicans want to hurt. The thoroughgoing abandonment of the notion of a political commonwealth, cheered on by degrees since the elevation of Ronald Reagan and whatever ideas people could cram into his empty head, has reached the point among American conservatives where it is now the kind of faith you find in the most unshakable of perversions. It manifests itself everywhere. It's expressed politely by people like that intolerable foof, David Brooks, who's never taken a position in his life that cost him so much as a dinner invitation. On the radio, and on cable news, it's expressed crudely by people who are far more honest about their contempt for their fellow citizens.

And the sadism is running now through the institutions of government....

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/paul-ryan-budget-plan-5519000?src=rss

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