UPDATED: Secretary of Education? An Anti-Education Radical
UPDATED: Cheeto Jesus continues to fill the DC swamp with more alligators and snakes; today’s addition to the primordial soup? Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire who’s devoted decades and untold dollars in an effort to destroy public education. She’s one of those cynical “school choice” activists, which is code for privatizing all education through robbing public schools to issue “vouchers” for private schools. Privatizing education is along the same idiotic ideological lines of pretending that healthcare is “free market” when it’s anything but. I would liken appointing DeVos to the Department of Education to nominating Dennis Hastert to be principal of an elementary school. It just doesn’t get any worse than this.
And the hits just keep on coming. It’s become a bit of a drinking game for me where I imagine who the absolute worst candidate for this administration could be and then when it comes true, taking a drink. Come to think of it, I need to run to the local liquor store before it closes for the holiday.
UPDATE: Guess who happens to be DeVos’s brother? None other than Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, the “security” contractor that provided mercenaries in GWB’s invasion of Iraq, and whose employees engaged in a mass shooting in Iraq in 2007, killing 17. Several of his employees have been convicted of crimes from murder to manslaughter. Nice guys.
Prince was an early supporter of Cheeto Jesus, and has been a large contributor to hyper right wing PACs.
I am so glad that I have no descendants.
1And that I got a good public education when that was still possible.
I see these nominations & appointments as the reaction of a man with tiny, tiny hands trying to give detractors the biggest finger possible.
2Unfortunately, the effects of his abhorrent behavior won’t be apparent until you late to stop it, and his admirers won’t recognize them even then. The rest of us are just pretty much 5rewed. (Sorry, mama, but my nice person vocabulary has gotten pretty well destroyed, to.)
3Forget pay to play. It’s pay to destroy.
4School vouchers are a gift to the well off. In her Wiki bio she crows about the work done in FL. Yeah, right. I saw the damage. Here’s the deal: a voucher in FL was worth about $4,000. Cool, right? Until you go shopping for a private school. That was about $8,000 – $10,000. Now, how do low income people afford the difference? They can’t. And if the policy has no income caps, then it becomes a $4,000 gift certificate to well-off people who could afford the private school anyway. Another gift for the well-off on the backs of average taxpayers and public schools. It’s all a smoke screen folks. Don’t buy it.
5Oh… and the DeVos family is not well-loved in Orlando. They got some sweet deals off the backs of the taxpayers with the new arena for the Orlando Magic and other things but couldn’t find any money to contribute to the new performing arts center. Another case of we got ours, screw you. Hate those people. Google up Amway (their company) and read. Pretty bad.
6I have a theory. I think Trump is picking his cabinet based on the premise that the Electoral College really is the free agency it’s advertised as.
Got kids? Do you REALLY want THIS Secretary of Education?
Have a preexisting condition? Want Obamacare to stick around? Behold my Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Are you a lawyer from anywhere besides Louisiana, Alabama or Georgia? Want JEFF SESSIONS as your boss?
And the list goes on.
Give them sufficient incentive and enough will vote for Clinton to hit the 270 threshold. Then he can go back to playing golf 7 days a week instead of the paltry 3 or 4 he’d be confined to as president.
Oh please God, let me be right in this assessment.
7This is Trump being cool before he actually has the power. It’s going to be four years of FOIA, court appeals, ACLU and police ambushes, both ways.
8School vouchers are a way to get religion into the game. We will have cheep schools for our low income families. They will be church run to indoctrinate early into the fold. Maybe a little lacking in those pesky science classes .
9Look how well private prison have worked out…..
El Jefe, I’m with you, except that it’s going to take more than one drink to ease the pain each time. And I’d better set a large bottle aside for his announcement on the Secretary of the Interior, even if it’s not that Alaskan who flunked government.
10Cheeto Jesus says he wants to drain the swamp. By throwing in the alligators? Way to go.
11Vouchers are the accepted means of de-integrating the public schools and draining public funds to ensure they can’t succeed. Republicans have been trying to turn that law back for over 50 years. Now they have the power to do it, thanks to the Ignoramus-in-Chief.
12I’ve not seen the absolute worst threat to us all mentioned yet, to the whole effen Earth and every creature on it, brought to us all by these vermin.
They are going to gut the world’s most extensive, productive, and accurate source of scientific knowledge about our World (the only one we have), its’ atmosphere, terrain, and oceans.
While the article below delineates their plans for destroying NASA’s climate science work, they will be doing the same to NOAA, et al., which complements the scientific advances made by NASA. Research and progress that is literally the only thing that might avert a series of climatic disasters that will kill millions of every kind of creature, most of all our own species.
Is everybody now realizing that these people are the true enemies of all that is decent?
That our own candyassed Democrats have wasted -years- trying to play nice and “bipartisan” with those who should have been recognized as sworn enemies of our nation, and the world. And still the Pelosi’s, Shumer’s, and Obama enable them. As much as I despised Cheney-Bush, I can’t recall hoping that a new JWB or LHO would appear, I do now.
Has anybody considered that certain other nations might be beginning to consider a pre-emptive strike on behalf of those other 7 billion homo sapiens, some of whom might actually recognize the danger?
A good read from Jack London, written over a hundred years ago, and from a somewhat different perspective, but still with a possibly valid analogy-
“The_Unparalleled_Invasion”, from “The Strength of the Strong”. I’ll give the Wiki link (I’ve always perused the Sonoma Uni link that can be found there, for my JL fixes) :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unparalleled_Invasion
The ‘latest’ (stay tuned for more…) hideous action by Mr. Prez-Elect & Co.:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11/23/1603345/-Trump-to-scrap-all-NASA-climate-research
“In breaking news from The Guardian, President Elect Donald Trump, according to his senior NASA advisor, will eliminate all climate change research within the agency because it is “politicized science”.
Bob Walker, a Trump senior advisor, stated that the Earth Science Division will be stripped of all funding and it’ mission will be transferred to other agencies within the Federal government.”
13.
OK, that’s my chilling latest take on current politics, y’all have a nice Thanksgiving, I guarantee next years won’t be. We’re going to be with an expectant daughter mañana (latest grandbaby to be), the poor little booger in the oven is bound to have a tough time ahead…
Sandridge, I agree that Trump’s attack on climate science will be his longest-lasting disaster. Some article I read said that the effects would be felt for half a century. Oh, please– half a millennium would be too short a span.
He says the earth monitoring programs will be transferred to other departments. I guess it’s just too bad if they don’t have any satellites with which to conduct the monitoring.
14Richard and Betsy DeVos. Yipes! Google Mackinac Center, they now control this evil “think tank”. Their money is from Amway (can you say ponzi?).
15Dear me Rhea, is half a century all we’ve got left? At the rate we are going it wouldn’t surprise me!
16Could never, but never understand vouchers. They don’t even begin to cover the cost of an existing parochial school. Way back in the dark ages when I went to the local parish school after a stint in the public school across the street, the tuition was $75 for one kid and then decreased by a percentage for any siblings to the point where the percentages ran out and one or two kids got a free ride. When I sent my son to a parochial school that had a reknowned department for learning disabled kids, it was $600, which I paid on monthly. There was no way I could keep him there beyond two years, so it was back to public school. The system did have a campus devoted entirely to kids with learning disabilities and that is where he ended up and on the honor roll thanks to teachers trained to work with these kids. It takes the combined effort of both the kids and the parents to make this happen. My son was lucky. A large number of kids who need this kind of education are too often turned down. They end up quitting.
17Taxpayer money is for public schools. It’s that simple. If Betsy wants vouchers, she can easily donate. What she doesn’t get to do is turn over taxpayers funds to religious institutions or privatize the funds for public schools.
Betsy, you and your kids have their private schools. Pay your own damn tuition and if you so choose fund a few scholarships. Otherwise, go away.
18It would take an entire article to exhaust what is wrong with vouchers (Juanita?).
19The incoming gang of cocksplatters will keep ACLU attorneys busy with court challenges against the unconstitutional bills and executive actions they’ll hatch.
Please RBG, continue to take excellent care of your health. Sonia, Elena and Steve, keep up the fight. Tony, get your head out and make the correct decisions for the people of the US according to the Constitution of the US.
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