I never claimed it wasn’t a lot of money. The point is that the state doesn’t get to keep the money, which is what the description of “wringing” money out of someone suggests to me.

You’re assuming zero defaults. If you loan $500 once at a 36% APR and it’s paid off in six months and then the next time you immediately reloan the funds at the same rate but the borrower defaults after two months, you’re out a lot more money than you ever collected in interest. “Because math,” dipshit.

I didn’t claim it wasn’t a lot of money for most people, let alone someone who hasn’t had a paying job for decades. I was disputing the characterization of “wringing” money out of him, which to me implies the state keeps the money like a penalty or something. I know it’s a hardship to put the money up even…

It’s bail, not a fine. He gets the money back if the charges are dropped or he appears at trial.

In the universe where these loans are (a) short term and (b) have a high default rate.

Right, the one-day-by-horse-to-the-county-seat rule really does explain county sizes in most US states, especially east of the Mississippi.

And that’s a map from 2010 too (source: http://www.incontext.indiana.edu/2013/may-jun/article3.asp) I’m pretty sure that 30 years ago the state would have been even less diverse.

Your “ETA” is irrelevant because statements made in legal proceedings are generally privileged with regard to defamation in the first place.

Hey, she got you to click on the headline, and that’s all that matters, baby!

You’re correct that the author in this instance didn’t need to use the word “allegedly” if she wrote the sentence in a completely different way than she actually did. As drafted, however (“a 47-year-old walked into a Denver-area Walmart and allegedly started shooting”), it needs qualifying language to avoid being…

Except all she did was prove how ignorant she is of the way defamation law works. The word “allegedly” wasn’t used in the Pat Tillman passage she quoted because, no matter how false it was, nothing defamatory was said.

Federal judges are not elected in the United States and quite a few states don’t have elected judges either.

The suspected shooter hasn’t been convicted of anything, so they need to say “allegedly” for defamation purposes.

Liberals ARE NOT GLEEFUL you fucking assholes.

Except that violent crime rates have dropped over the last 25 years even while the number of guns in circulation has increased dramatically.

If you could do that, you’d have the votes in Congress and on the Supreme Court to regulate guns directly. (There’s already a body of court decisions striking down laws that tried to get around the First Amendment by indirect economic regulations that were designed to make it more difficult to operate newspapers. It’s…

Except, of course, that smoking actually is a public health issue — even very light smokers suffer measurable negative health effects.  The vast majority of gun owners will never suffer any ill effects from owning a gun and the vast majority of people in the vicinity of someone carrying a gun will never suffer any ill…

I’m pretty sure most Hindus and Buddhists would dispute that they ever gave it up in the first place to need to “reclaim it” now....

It’s rather late to worry about “normalizing” someone 25 years after they left public office.

Yes, because it’s crazy to ask questions about whether a family member might be involved in having facilitated the rape of a fellow family member: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karla_Homolka