The country’s biggest bank, and Charlotte’s own Overlord, Bank of America, has a special message for its customers who helped bail out their greedy, incompetent asses: Fuck You. The bank’s happy greeting comes in the form of a new $5 monthly fee for customers who use a BofA debit card. According to The New York Times, Wells Fargo and Chase are currently testing $3 debit card fees, and those charmers over at SunTrust also charge $5.

Here’s my one and only question: Since the big banks have made it abundantly clear how little they give a rip about their “valuable customers,” over and over and over again, and in so many ways, why does anyone still do business with them?

For a while after the bank bailouts, there was a movement asking Americans to “Move Your Money,” out of the banking behemoths and into smaller banks and credit unions. At our house, we moved our vast fortune (ahem) to a credit union, and believe me, it makes a difference. No sneaky crap crammed into your statements, and employees who act as if you’re a likable human being rather than just the latest pain in the butt to walk in off the streets. With these new debit card fees, the banking Overlords are practically begging you to move your money somewhere else. For crying out loud, take ‘em up on it.

In late July, the General Assembly passed one of the most extreme abortion laws in the country. Today, because of N.C. lawmakers’ zeal for kissing the religious right’s butt, that law’s constitutionality is being challenged in court by Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the ACLU.

The groups announced today that they will take their complaint about the so-called Women’s Right To Know law (we’ve taken to calling it the Churches’ Right To Punish Sluts law) to federal court. They contend that the law “violates the rights of health care providers and women seeking abortions.”

The new law requires doctors to force women to have an ultrasound, and requires doctors to describe the embryo or fetus in detail before a planned abortion, whether the woman wants to have an ultrasound or hear what the doctor has to say about it or not. See a copy of the lawsuit here.

Here’s wishing Planned Parenthood and friends good luck in ridding the state of such a repugnant, intrusive, condescending, insulting, and expensive (the woman has to pay for the ultrasound, naturally) law. The ill-considered legislation is an embarrassment to this state’s progressive reputation, in addition to being grotesquely unjust to women during a highly vulnerable part of their lives. How intrusive is the new law? Let us count the ways, excerpted from a previous Boomer With Attitude article:

Women in North Carolina who want an abortion — which, as we remind readers again, is a completely legal medical procedure — will have to jump through a series of very specific, government-mandated hoops, transparently designed to change the woman’s mind. She first has to hear a doctor's spiel about the fetus' probable gestational age and the medical risks of abortion. Then she must be told she could receive benefits for prenatal care, childbirth, and neonatal care if she carried the fetus to full term. The doctor also is obligated by this law to tell her that the father is responsible for assisting in the support of the child, and that she can keep the baby or place it for adoption if she wants to. (Gee, really? Who knew?) She must also be given a list of agencies that "offer alternatives to abortion," such as phony "crisis pregnancy centers," or CPCs, which are usually run by anti-abortion and/or religious groups — many of which have been caught giving women false information in order to keep them from having an abortion.

The state will also set up a website declaring that “The life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique living human being." Which is fine, except that those are theological/philosophical theories, not provable scientific facts. In other words, if you're a woman who has chosen to have an abortion in North Carolina, you are now legally bound to have the religious right's views spoon-fed to you, whether you want to hear them or not.

And that’s still not all. Here is the "intrusive government" coup de grace: A doctor must perform an ultrasound on the woman. The Big Brother-ish, oddly nightmarish language used to describe this required process reveals a lot about the people who rammed this bill through, as well as their contempt for the women patients.

" .... the physician, shall do each of the following:

"(1) Perform an obstetric ultrasound on the pregnant woman. [The price of the ultrasound will, of course, be added to the woman's bill.]
"(2) Provide a simultaneous explanation of what the ultrasound is depicting, which shall include the presence, location, and dimensions of the unborn child within the uterus and the number of unborn children depicted. The individual performing the ultrasound shall offer the pregnant woman the opportunity to hear the fetal heart tone. ...
"(3) Display the ultrasound images so that the pregnant woman may view them. [Doctors also have to fill out a government form designating whether the woman averts her eyes or not during the ultrasound — sorry, but that’s like something from Brave New World, or worse.]
"(4) Provide a medical description of the ultrasound images, which shall include the dimensions of the embryo or fetus and the presence of external members and internal organs, if present and viewable.
"(5) Obtain a written certification from the woman, before the abortion (!), that the requirements of this section have been complied with ..." And it goes on.

So this, dear readers, is how the GOP lawmakers and their religious right-wing backers interpret "trusting people to make their own informed decisions without government intervention" — with nine pages of robotic-sounding, legalese gobbledygook that plainly inserts the state into the most private areas of a woman's life.

If the courts don’t strike this law down, we’ll be very surprised.