DeVos

[Phoebe]

I am really struggling with the whole "try to respect other human beings who have false, stupid, damaging beliefs" thing right now, and one reason is that we have this DeVos nomination coming up for a vote. You already know my view that her nomination represents a deliberate effort to find the single person in all of these United States who already has been doing the greatest possible harm to public education, and then putting her in charge of public education. And she's 100% unqualified and a know-nothing. However, the real salt in the wound is that she outright lied - in addition to committing plagiarism, but who expects the Education secretary not to do that, really? - about things, like the performance of certain charter schools. I saw this before and assumed she was fudging numbers but that at least someone had provided numbers to fudge, as opposed to outright lying. Wrong. They used completely fabricated bullshit lie-telling numbers. For the Education secretary's answers to Congress. Because who cares if an Education person tells the truth or even gives two shits about the truth, as long as God's Calvinist Kingdom on earth is hastened?

So we are at this point where, honestly, I can't respect as a "fellow thinking mind" anyone who is okay with this. I don't really care about winning hearts and minds; I don't care about making people's hurt feefees better because they are uncomfortable with their own outright stupidity. People who voted for this were given endless warning of what was coming. They decided that they were okay with lies, because apparently Hillary was an even more mendacious person, clearly, and so they have now created a situation where lying is totally okay and can be done brazenly and without consequence at the highest levels of government, in public. Fuck all of these people for helping to destroy public education in America at all levels. Every single good thing that is happening in public education in my community - and I mean every single good thing - is happening because social liberals are putting their money where there mouth is and funding really important things. At every possible turn, Republicans are trying to slash and burn all of it with two hands. There is really no logical conclusion other than that Republicans hate education and are actively seeking to wreck it. Why? What is the purpose of this madness? And why are they okay with so much of the lying, all the time?

I have a serious moral problem with all of it and I'm not sure how to proceed with that. I believe in dialogue, in discussion, in having opponents of your ideas who can help improve them and, where necessary, make you change your mind. But this is no longer about that. You cannot have a discussion with people who lie and for whom lying is totally okay. You cannot change minds with people who just want to burn and destroy things willy nilly because they're so totally fucked up in the mind. I am not speaking to half my cousins at this point; I don't want to know them or deal with them anymore. They're actively supporting things that actively harm my family. My nephew is sick and goes to a shitty school and I honestly do not even want to call his parents to talk about it because I can't stand talking to them at this point. These outright racist idiots are the ones making it harder for their own son to get decent health care or a decent education. I was hoping going to church would help me deal with it and that has not happened.

[Mike]

You are using the word respect where I would have said understand.

Knowing the opposition does not mean approving of them.

[bralbovsky]

Good education does three things:
It makes you able to fend for yourself, so you don't have to be a wage slave.
It opens the world and other people's issues to you, so you aren't an egocentric, narcissist asshat.
It shows you the cycles of history, so you can make better decisions about how to avoid icebergs or dictators or famine.

There are a bunch of folks who want uncritical, narrow-minded, easily distracted proles to work in their dying factories and mines. Without these people, who have been taught that the only way to measure is in dollars (measuring importance, measuring brilliance, measuring how much respect another human deserves), folks get upset about safety, they get upset about the quality of their lives outside of work (they have lives outside of work???!!) they get upset about inequality and injustice and all the things they're not supposed to have time and attention for.

Also, it's the last big pile of money. Science has been co-opted, medicine, engineering, the military, the post office, space even, all privatized so that somebody (and we know his name, depending on the industry) can skim his percentage off the top before services are delivered. Does that make those services better? Does that make them more accountable? Lots of promises, not so many examples afterward. It does, uniformly, make them more expensive. Education is the last public service paid for by the public, run by local governments. In order to privatize it you either have to break it, or convincingly claim that it's broken and has to be taken over.

Besty's job is to break it, and for that, she's uniquely qualified.

[Phoebe]

[Cazmonster]

Last I heard, two Republican senators were crossing the line to vote against her.



One more and Pence can't swing the vote.

[Phoebe]

A lot of the most vulnerable ones have declared their intention to vote for her. You know Marco Rubio and Ben Sasse and Lindsey Graham and a few others want to hand Trump a defeat on something so badly they can taste it, but I'm not sure they're willing to earn the scrutiny they'll get for this vote. In a way the fact that all this pressure has been put on one person is making it far less likely that any one person will switch positions.

Anyway the Falcons are crushing the enemy so badly that I feel I can just go play Risk with my kids, so goodbye everyone, I'll try not to think about politics at all for three hours.

[DMDarcs]

i have lost all hope.

[akiva]

On the plus side, I believe I'm now qualified to be Surgeon General.

[Phoebe]

Everyone should start sending resumes and cover letters to the job openings in the Trump Organization for which they are uniquely unqualified. "My goal in life is to so utterly fuck up this golf course that nobody will ever be able to play a decent game of golf here again. I know absolutely nothing about golf and have never played it in my life, but I have played a lot of miniature golf and even own a chain of miniature golf courses. I donate the proceeds to the most reactionary candidates I can find." You're HIRED! Uh-oh, I think that's a stretch because you probably gain some actual putting skills during a round of miniature golf. So let's say that you own a company that grinds up sod.

[Phoebe]

Republican in Congress introduces bill to abolish whole Dept. of Education.

[akiva]

[Phoebe]

Did y'all see where the DoE Twitter (WTF world that news now involves Twitter accounts...) spat out some quote from W.E.B. DeBois, thus misspelling the name? Was this a hidden pro-life message, as some think, since the quote was about learning for life (actually quoting a much earlier famous quote in Latin, but I'd imagine that was lost on anyone involved here besides Du Bois himself)? Or was it a troll of DeVos herself, given the similarity to 'DeBois' and the fact that a subsequent tweet apologizing for the error also included a spelling/grammar error?

The only bright side of that debacle is that she can't just write checks to people now; she has to actually do a job in the public eye with a lot of people who deeply resent an utterly unqualified person attacking them.

[akiva]

[Zen]

The apology tweet said, "our deepest apologizes" instead of "our deepest apologies".

According to the DoEd, (I include the "d" because there's another department with an "E" that is under fire as well... Energy.) the tweets were composed by a veteran staffer and not DeVos, but it makes me wonder if it was an attempt by the veteran staffer to make her look bad, knowing that it would fall back on her, especially with the name similarity issue. So... Spelling error, or smear job by a political lifer who doesn't like the new administration? Hmmmm....

[Tahlvin]

Saw another tweet recently that spelled it "apologizes" instead of "apologies". It may have been a dig at the DoEd issue, but it was for something and from someone completely unrelated, so it would have been a very subtle dig. Or perhaps that's just a common misspelling of "apologies" thanks to auto-correct.

[Phoebe]

Did she really think gender policing the school bathrooms was a bad idea? Or is that her trying to ingratiate herself with moderates after a bruising confirmation, without having to prove she really does believe it? She has never before put her money where her mouth is on that issue, has she??? I thought she had actually put a lot of money into conversion therapy groups! Regardless, since she puts money everywhere else, I'll believe she supports the transgender students' rights when she donates to the cause. Hope my skepticism is unfounded.

[Cazmonster]

If she really believed in those rights, she should have quit her job when it came down to her, Sessions and Trump on the decision.

She cares more about the money she can make, obviously.

[Phoebe]

Well, I'm OK with living to fight another day, assuming it is true she got outvoted. But is it true? Maybe, for states' rights reasons. I cannot believe one leaps there suddenly after supporting conversion therapy support to the tune of hundreds of thousands of $$$. Oh Betsy, why is your heart mean inside after spending so much time walking with Jesus?

[Cazmonster]

Because my kids are autistic, I am worried to the point of distraction every day with what this woman plans. I fear that they will lose their amazing staff support. I fear that they'll get pushed to the wayside and then lost.

I am doing what I can for them. But this Nation that put men on the moon and supports billion-dollar war engines, this Nation that could be the beacon of the future, is being lead by people who don't care about children.

[Phoebe]

I am so sorry, I can understand being worried about this when she explicitly said that it should be up to the states and local districts, as if federal law guaranteeing certain protections for children with disabilities is not important (or, you know, real!). On the other hand, she'll have a hard time dismantling some of those protections single-handedly. The courts are not always going to help. What worries me is that she can dismantle what the Dept of Ed is doing and that alone will have significant impacts.