Wanna read what you can of the FBI’s affidavit that sold Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on granting the FBI the first-ever search of a former president’s residence? Well, here it is. Enjoy.

Author’s Note: I know this one is longer than most. I did the best I could to cut as much fat as possible. It’s an important issue that deserves a full airing.

Yesterday, social media was all abuzz when Joe Biden announced his plan for student loan forgiveness. The upshot is that most borrowers can qualify for up to $10,000 in total forgiveness. There was a ton of rhetoric and a ton of snark yesterday on both sides. The crisis has three underlying causes.

College Costs have Exploded over the last 20 years

Nationally, the average cost for a public college was over 20,000 a year. That ballooned to over 30,000 for private colleges. The average cost in 2000 was just over 8000. I’m not good at math, but that’s close to a 150 percent increase over 20 years. That obviously is well beyond the rate of inflation for that time period.

Now, we could go into the whys this has happened, but if we dive down that rabbit hole we may never make it out. The question is one of responsibility. For instance, had I known that I was going to become a teacher I probably wouldn’t have gone to a private college. Students should choose an institution that’s as cost effective as possible. Yet, it cannot all be on them.

College Degrees aren’t worth what they used to be

One commenter yesterday made reference to “Mesoamerican Lesbian Studies”. Yeah, we all know it’s an exaggeration, but still we need to define our terms. As much as people might laugh at liberal arts degrees in general, they are not necessarily coming from a genuine place. Back in the 1960s and 1970s you could get a college degree in anything and still get a good job. That was less true in the 1980s and 1990s, but it is far more true than it is today. Somewhere along the way the rules of the game changed. It’s not students’ fault they changed. Sure, we can expect them to adapt, but they aren’t unique in getting liberal arts degrees that might not sync directly with the job market.

The issue is more acute for those without the means to pay for college or support at home. My wife and I can advise our daughter on college. We can coach her into choosing a major that makes sense. Some kids don’t have that at home. Buyer beware goes only so far.

The Nature of the Loans Themselves

Someone on social media showed their loan expenditures for their undergraduate and graduate degrees. The totals ended up being well over 150,000 with total monthly payments coming in at over 1000. That by itself is bad enough. Then you throw in the fact that those 1000 payments barely touched the principal at all. So, they are in effect stuck with those payments for the rest of their natural life.

Those of us that are older objected to the idea of forgiveness. They were responsible. They repaid their loans. It is not fair that the current generation is “too lazy” to take care of their own loans. Again, it’s not that simple. At some point we have to realize how ridiculous it is to pay twice as much as what was loaned to you because of the nature of the loan. Mortgages don’t work that way. Car loans don’t work that way. Why should student loans work that way?

Putting it all together

As I said in an earlier post, monies spent by the government are an investment of sorts. It is fair to ask whether that is the wisest way we could spend our tax dollars. I would argue for a measured approach that addresses these issues from multiple angles. The first question we should ask is how many kids are majoring in something we might consider frivolous? I imagine it is lower than people think. However, it wouldn’t be difficult to target certain careers and subsidize students studying those things. It wouldn’t be difficult to require graduates to work in certain fields for a fixed period of time in exchange for forgiving their loans. We already do that in limited circumstances.

Finally, we have to admit that college is just too damn expensive. We educate students in public schools for around 9000 a year. That includes people like me that are support staff. Colleges don’t have nearly as many of those. They aren’t serving students with severe disabilities in the same way we are. Yet, they cost more than twice as much. That money isn’t going to the professors. So, where is it going?

I messed up.  I accidentally trashed the Alex Jones page and Anna the Geek is going to try to find it for me.

Until then, here’s the latest interview.  It’s one of my favorites except that he looks tired.  He’s promised to sleep all weekend!

Heads up – Both Jones’ lawyers from Texas and Connecticut have a real hard day in Connecticut.

 

In case you were wondering about the bizarre relationship between TFG and Rudy Giuliani, and if you have you need to avail yourself of a free brain cleansing from Thelma which consists of a big stick, shear force, and your ability not to scream, and then enlighten yourself with this —

 

No.

Not a tunnel. Please, not a tunnel. Oh be still my synapsing neurons.

Yes, tunnel! Our friend Deb checked and here it is on the historic drawings of Mar a Lago.  Bottom, left, oh hell – there’s a tunnel to the beach.

I cannot, and I will not, even imagine what manner of crapola is (1) hidden there, (2) what was brought in through there, (3) if the FBI had a key to the tunnel, or (4) why that sucker doesn’t flood during high tide. But mostly I wonder if anybody could tell the difference between Rudy and the nocturnal bats who obviously live there.

Our friend Deb also did some art for us over at craiyon.com

 

Here on the Left Coast, we Californians love our initiative and referendum rights. In years past we’ve had some doozies to energize base voters that enhanced voter turnout.

Take Prop. 13. In 1978 California’s property owners gave themselves a break from punishing yearly property reassessment by limiting property reassessment only at the time of sale of the property, limiting the assessment rate to 1%, and allowing only a 1% adjustment per year. People liked that. It won in a landslide, and voter turnout in that off-year election was the largest in state history.

In advance of the 2016 election, California saw record voter registration among Millenial voters who signed up to vote for AUMA, the ballot measure to legalize recreational use of cannabis.

This year, we will see Prop. 1 on the November ballot. Prop 1 was placed on the ballot in reaction to the Roe v. Wade SCOTUS news leak last May. Prop. 1 will constitutionally protect abortion and contraception rights in California.

This is a guaranteed voter turnout booster that is bound to flip a few toss-up districts at least. Polls show California voters heavily favor a Yes vote in numbers that exceed 70%.

Ironically, had the May leak not occurred, it might have been too late to get Prop 1 on the ballot by the June 30th deadline as SCOTUS released the decision only 6 days before.

That’s going to be problematic for David Valadao (R) CD 22, Mike Garcia (R) CD 27 and Ken Calvert (R) CD 41. Toss-up districts all.

The late 1990s were difficult times for Democrats and progressives. It was soul searching time for me in those days. The president of the United States became only the second president to ever be impeached. There were numerous defenses for the president and his behavior. Most of those defenses were permutations of the same defense. Essentially they said that what a man (or woman) does in their personal life does not impact them in their professional life. As long as Bill Clinton was a good president from nine to five then what does matter that he isn’t a good man after those hours?

French president Jacques Chirac famously had multiple affairs. The joke was that he kept replacing each significant other with the same woman ten years younger. If the French people accepted him as their leader then we should have accepted Clinton as our leader. As we know, that argument won out. Except, it really didn’t win out. It helped Bush win the election over Al Gore. I ended up voting for Gore because he was a different man and an infinitely better one than Clinton. However, there were millions that punished him for the mistakes of his former boss.

We often have difficulty separating a message from the messenger. It’s one of the important things I point out when teaching Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. One of the steps he mentions before a direct action campaign is self-purification. It’s a challenging concept for students. Yet, it is absolutely crucial. Listening to someone like Newt Gingrich (at the time) prattle on about character is hilarious. However, it doesn’t mean the point is wrong.

If we have learned anything over the last seven or eight years it is that personal character is absolutely a big deal. We just endured a presidency of someone that has no character. We saw what happened. We saw how that spilled into everything. We saw the abject cruelty. We saw the inhumanity and indifference. We saw the lack of a fundamental understanding and empathy.

Whether this inhumanity is merely a reflection of the people that supported him or whether his inhumanity rubbed off on them is hard to parse. His grotesque existence brings forth any number of questions. However, the most important one is whether those that support him really reflect his inhumanity or if they support him simply because that inhumanity bothers us. Either is equally likely. One might ask what the difference is and I suppose it is a minor detail, but it tells me that in one case there are millions of sociopaths/psychopaths out there. In the other case, they have human empathy, sympathy, and concern in most situations, but just enjoy the political nihilism.

Humanity itself is a fragile thing. Everyone we encounter in our lives is flawed. Look at us in the perfect angle and we can be angels or demons. Both of things make us human. We are walking contradictions and so choosing any one to lead us can seem like an impossible task. The former guy may be human in the purest scientific sense, but lacks any redeeming human traits. Such a statement seems impossible and yet objectively true. There isn’t a positive human trait there. Some of us thought those things weren’t necessary to lead. They were absolutely wrong.