I like this question from South Florida Daily Blog:
Florida law requires concealed carry weapon permit holders to be U.S. citizens. Just like voting laws.
So I’m wondering what the reaction would be from the NRA and the Republican Party if the Democrat Party led a purge of CCW permit holders much like Governor Scott has led a purge of voting rolls. You know, review the information contained in State databases and send letters to those CCW holders whose citizenship status could not be verified.
Florida’s GOP war on (minority and Democratic) voters has two parts. First, there is the well-publicized effort to throw tens of thousands of legitimate voters off the rolls in ostensible pursuit of what may be only a handful of noncitizen voters at most.
The second, less-well-known effort, is a new set of Florida state rules that make it very difficult to register new voters, and create severe penalties for anyone who doesn’t precisely comply with them. These rules are so onerous that many groups that formerly routinely ran voter registration drives, like the League of Women Voters, stopped doing it because they found the new rules were impossible to comply with.
Now, thanks to a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters of Florida, Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and Rock the Vote, a federal judge in Tallahassee, no hotbed of liberalism, has issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of key parts of the voter-registration-suppression scheme:
The statute and rule impose a harsh and impractical 48-hour deadline for an organization to deliver applications to a voter registration office and effectively prohibit an organization from mailing applications in. And the statute and rule impose burdensome record-keeping and reporting requirements that serve little if any purpose, thus rendering them unconstitutional even to the extent they do not violate the [National Voting Rights Act].
This is good news, and on a quick read I found the opinion very persuasive, so I have high hopes that it would survive an appeal (although voting law is not my area, so I welcome other views).
A few days ago, UF announced it planned to kill its Computer Science department. Given the essential role of computers today, I took that to be a sort of Washington Monument Ploy — an attempt to show the legislature and the governor how bad the cuts to the state university system are biting — and I didn’t even bother blogging about it. Sure enough, University Of Florida Announces Plan To Save Computer Science Department.
What a surprise.
I do have to say, though, that the Florida legislature’s slash and burn approach to state education, while a disaster from almost every rational point of view (investment in human capital, civics, state prestige, to name only a few), likely will benefit the University of Miami. We are a private institution, and we’ll benefit as first new hires gravitate here, then as students do (when the tuition gap shrinks), and finally as existing faculty become increasingly easy to lure away to places where they do not count the pencils.
In the eyes of those who hate an effective public sector that’s probably a feature, not a bug, but I don’t think it is any cause for celebration.
Oh boy. This one will run and run.
A “mortgage” consists of two instruments: a promissory note, which is a IOU, and a lien against the property, which is referred to as a mortgage (in non-judicial foreclosure states, they are typically called a deed of trust and confer somewhat different rights, but we’ll put that aside for purposes of this discussion).
What appears to be happening on all too often in Florida is that when borrowers signed warranty deeds in lieu of foreclosure when they can no longer keep these homes, they often get only a satisfaction of mortgage, not a cancelled note. This is not what is supposed to happen. When a borrower deeds his property to the bank, the objective of the exercise is to cancel the debt.
There’s a lot more where that came from. Anyone involved in a foreclosure who doesn’t already know exactly what this is about should read it.
25 years ago, an attorney who did not demand the cancelled note in satisfaction of a mortgage would have been considered grossly negligent. And the risk is not theoretical. Professor Williams described how people were defrauded in the wake of the S&L crisis when notes that should have been cancelled got into the wrong hands. April Charney had just seen a case on a 2008 foreclosure where the ex parte order returned the original note to the plaintiff/servicer. The hapless borrower is now being sued by the private mortgage insurer.
— naked capitalism, Yet Another Mortgage Scam: Homeowners Not Getting Cancelled Notes After Foreclosures, Hit by Later Claims
I’m trying hard not to think about all the terrible things that Rick Scott and the Republican state legislature are doing to this state, but sometimes it’s impossible to avert one’s eyes. See the whole train wreck at Controversy over Scientology influence clouds future of Pinellas charter school.
Sample:
Some parents and former teachers at Life Force, which receives about $800,000 a year in public funding, say the Pinellas County charter school has become a Scientology recruiting post targeting children.
Opened to serve a low-income Clearwater neighborhood and advertising classes in computers and modern dance, Life Force had begun pushing Hubbard’s “study technology,” which critics call a Trojan horse Scientology uses to infiltrate public classrooms.
And while Life Force students and teachers worked in poorly stocked classrooms and teachers went unpaid, the bankrupt school funneled tens of thousands of dollars more to Islam’s business interests than she told the bankruptcy court she would charge.
Clearwater is on Florida’s west coast, not far from Tampa/St.Pete.
Spotted via Crooks & Liars, Charter School or Scientology Center? Education In Rick Scott’s Florida
Republicans at bay, Gingrich edition: “Winning Our Future | Blood Money”.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRz7LrQfIK4
Jotwell Blenderlaw